Life’s too short to…

I’m sure you’ve heard that hundreds of times – maybe a bumper sticker or quick comment about the quality (or lack of quality) of a beverage.  “Life’s too short to drink bad beer!”.

If you think about it, it’s a pretty deep thought (maybe not Jack Handey deep, but thought provoking).  I was meeting with someone last week and they had an interesting business related take on it:

Life’s too short to work with people you don’t like.

What a great (and powerful) way to point out the values that are really important to you.  Imagine a small but pointed list of rules that you followed because life is too short not to follow them.  So with that in find, I brainstormed a potential list for you to start with – some of them are mine, some of them came when I did a finish the sentence exercise with a couple of my Peer Group Advisory Boards – let me know what I missed:

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I had a great opportunity to speak on a distinguished panel last week for a Business and Economic Summit put on by the New Landings Job Club here in Kansas City (and before you ask, I don’t know why I was on the distinguished panel either…). 

This wasn’t just any panel discussion, not only were there 10 9+1 sharp panelists – there were 400+ in attendance and focused for 2+ hours!

The purpose of the discussion was to talk about what’s going on in Kansas city with jobs, the economy and what job seekers should be doing and looking for as they work to get into their next opportunity.

There was a lot of great discussion (it was primarily a Q&A format) and I believe the job seekers got a lot of great ideas and good advice…what was interesting to me was how much of that great information and advice also applied to business owners.

We talked about the importance of stalking (done the right way), relationships, professionalism…lots of great points – here are the highlights that I took away:

(photo by Jesse757)

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  photo by jsorbieus

Can generosity – giving stuff away, helping others really help you win at business?

This came up the other day during a workshop I was doing on Guerrilla Marketing – one of the characteristics of a successful Guerrilla Marketer is Generosity (contact me if you’d like to get an evaluation for all 16 characteristics).

I was talking about the importance of generosity when it comes to business and marketing success in front of 25 people and one of them interrupted and said quite brusquely:

“I totally disagree with the generosity point – I’ve given free things away for years and I’ve never…ever…gotten any business out of it!”

Nothing’s more fun than having a heckler when you’re giving a presentation!    However to be fair, I know lots of people who disagree with giving things away or helping others out when it comes to business. 

A big part of my approach with Aspire since I started over 3 years ago is a focus on the concept of generosity, paying it forward, karma, etc.  Not just as a philosophical idea, but because it’s good business!  However the heckling did get me to thinking about WHY this concept of generosity is important.  I came up with seven practical reasons you would want to develop a give first, give more approach with your business.

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photo by kennymatic

Marketing for small business owners has gotten a lot harder in the last 20 years.  Way back when, if you wanted to generate some sales, you could pull together an ad, let people know what you were selling and you stood a good chance of selling more stuff.  These days there’s way too much noise out there for poor marketing to drive any sort of results.  You have to know your target market, but even more importantly you have to know the problem you’re solving or the outcome you’re delivering.

Marketing can be a complex process – you need to understand the demographics and the psychographics of your target market. You need to have an insight into their mindset and why they buy, what drives them to spend money. You need a clear call to action. You need your message conveyed in a medium that your target market is likely to read.

In fact there are a lot of reasons why your marketing isn’t working. However the most likely reason your marketing isn’t working is because your message isn’t resonating with your target market – they don’t care!

Which of these statements is more appealing to you?

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   photo by cloudsoup

Looking for business success?  Here’s some great advice:

- Stick to your strengths…do what you’re really good at.

- Work hard every single day.

- Find partners that get you and work closely with them.

- Be polite and give great service to your customers.

Now this isn’t just any great advice, this is backed up by some amazing statistics – you might have seen an earlier post on Why Businesses Fail with the kind of depressing statistic that more than half of all business start-ups fail within the first 5 years.

However there’s a group that lives by the advice above and their failure rate is about 5% after 5 years!

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