I’m not a big St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan, but as the National League team in my home state and relatives (including my son) that are fans I have at least a passing interest in the team.

*side note – one of my favorite baseball memories is witnessing the 1985 World Series as a college Freshman in Columbia Missouri, halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis.  The campus was crazy during the whole series…

Anyway, I brought the Cardinals up because of the latest update in the Rick Ankiel saga (it should be made into a TV movie).

For those of you that don’t know who Rick Ankiel is, he was the real life version of ‘Wild Thing’ (from Major League – Wild Thing, you make my heart sing, you walk everything!)

The hard-throwing lefty won 11 games and struck out 194 in 175 innings as a 20-year-old rookie in 2000 and was a surprise pick to start the Cardinals’ postseason opener that season against Atlanta. But he became the first major league pitcher to throw five wild pitches in one inning since 1890.

Ankiel threw nine wild pitches in four innings during the 2000 playoffs and never really was the same after that.

Nine wild pitches in 4 innings…that’s amazing.  Ankiel burned bright (albeit for a very short time) and then presumably faded away like so many other players do in the big leagues (for example, most of the Royals roster from the last 3 years…). 

But his story wasn’t over.  yahoo.com/mlb/news-Ankiel  After fighting injuries and failure as a pitcher, he switched to an outfield position in 2005 and returned to the Major Leagues today – 6 years after blowing up (in a bad way).  He hit a home run in his 3rd at bat…after hitting 32 home runs in the minors this year.  He’s a power hitting outfielder.

Rick Ankiel reinvented himself.  That’s an amazing turn-around and pretty inspirational.

So what does this have to do with your business?  According to SBA statistics, about 56% of businesses fail within the first 4 years of existence (Greg Balanko-Dickson does a great job of clarifying this confusing statistic Here).  Are you at risk of falling into that category?  Obviously completely reinventing your business is pretty unlikely, but it’s not a stretch to think that you could reinvent parts of your business that aren’t working and make a significant positive difference in your success as an outcome.
In E-Myth-Mastery Michael Gerber talks about the process of improvement and the essential skill of Innovation.  World Class companies are constantly improving and innovating aspects of their business that are lagging or holding them back.

In other words, World Class businesses are reinventing parts of their business all the time.  Here’s a quick summary of the process of improvement:

1. Select the aspect of your business you wish to improve.
2. Determine what your current process is for that aspect.  If you don’t have a current process, create one.
3. Quantify the effectiveness of the current process.
4. Analyze the process for assumed weak points and change 1 of those weak points (but only 1).
5. Test the updated process.
6. Quantify the results of your test.
7. If the results are positive, implement the new process and start all over with some other aspect.  If they aren’t an improvement, the go back to step 4 and change another of the assumed weak points and repeat.

Obviously this is much easier said than done, but if you approach it with this kind of rigor, you can reinvent your business, one aspect at a time.

It may not be as dramatic as the Rick Ankiel story, but it’s a lot more likely to succeed and keep you moving forward (which is the whole point…).

What aspect of your business could you reinvent?  As a starting point, could you identify the 1 or 2 biggest things that are slowing you down or holding you back?

Go get ‘em Wild Thing!

Shawn Kinkade – Aspire Business Development

You started your business with some kind of dream, some sort of plan. Maybe you imagined what it would look like in 3 years, 5 years or even 10 years out. (as an unrelated side note, 10 years is a really long time – think about all of the things that have changed in the last 10 years. In Kansas City 10 years ago, the Royals were really bad…okay maybe some things don’t change, but a lot of things do. The point is, anything is possible in 10 years).

So you had a vision for your business. How’s that working out for you? If you’re like a lot of people (myself included) you may have written some things down but odds are you’ve haven’t looked at it in quite a while, assuming you could even find it. That’s too bad – maybe it’s time to change that.

My advice would be to make the effort to dig it out and spend some time and energy to update it. It’s a difficult exercise, but there are a lot of good reasons why it’s well worth your time. Here are a few reasons why reviewing, updating and publishing/sharing your vision is important:

1. Does your Vision still make sense? Odds are it probably does, but if you think about how significantly the world, you and your customers have changed in the last 2 or 3 years, it’s worth considering.
2. Are you on the right path? A vision is your roadmap that lays out how your business is going to meet your needs. You could be making all kinds of movement, but is it really getting you to where you want to go?
3. Is everyone else on the same page? Initially the vision is really for your benefit. The act of getting it down on paper, refining and thinking it through it are excellent ways to crystallize and cement your thoughts. However once you’ve done the hard strategic deep thinking, one of the main reasons to have (and use) your vision is to make sure your employees, partners, vendors and customers know what you’re all about and that you’re all rowing in the same direction.
4. Are you congruent? Your vision is your foundation, your cornerstone (pick your own favorite building metaphor here…). It should be the basis for your brand, your communications, how you treat your employees, your customers. If it all ties together and everyone understands it, suddenly a lot of things become a lot easier. You have a company culture that people can instinctively pick up and predict how things should work.

Maybe it’s time to get excited about your business again. Dusting off that old vision might be just the ticket for remembering why you started down this path in the first place and help you re-energize and get focused.

So what about you – do you have an updated Vision? Have you shared it with the right people? Is it driving your marketing message?

Let me know, I’d be interested to hear from you.

Shawn Kinkade – Aspire Business Development

Unfortunately most small businesses find it very difficult to differentiate themselves in a way that’s obvious from the consumer’s point of view and they’re left to compete (primarily) on Price.

I thought about this because I saw an interesting article on Costco (nytimes.com/2005/07/17/business/yourmoney/17costco) that I found on the 37 Signals Blog (http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/505-5-business-lessons-from-costco).

Although I’m not a customer at Costco, I did shop at their primary competition, Sam’s Club, this weekend and the first thing I think of when I think of the category is…low price.  Well that and really large jars of mayonnaise and cereal boxes that won’t fit in our car.

Both are large warehouse shopping clubs that give their customers great deals on merchandise, but as the article covers pretty clearly, Costco isn’t really differentiating themselves on price, they’re differentiating themselves on delivering what their customers want.  It’s a subtle difference, since one of the things their customers want are great prices, but it’s much larger than that.

By investing in happy employees (to the tune of a 42% payroll premium over Sam’s Club), Costco is making a serious investment that people make a difference and if you treat customers and employees right, they’ll treat you right.  The market apparently agrees since Costco is up 10% in the last 12 months compared to a 5% decline at Wal-Mart.

So how does this apply to the typical small business?  Well for starters, if you’re competing solely on price and you don’t have the scale of Wal-mart, you’re in trouble.  Actually, even if you do have the scale of Wal-mart, you might be in trouble.

Find something about you or your business that stands out, that makes you different.  Build on that difference (assuming it’s valuable to your customers).  Become the luggage maker that gives free insurance on every purchase (free_insurance_with_every_suitcase).   Or the Dentist that offers Spa treatments to patients as they wait (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,79719,00.html )

It’s not easy and it will take some creativity, but it’s certainly better than the alternative – a long slide down eroding margins…!

Maybe I should join Costco, they seem to have some pretty cool stuff.

So what about you – what could you do to differentiate?  Share your ideas about being different and if you’ve heard of some novel approaches.