People Watching

If you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve never been ‘people watching’, then start up blog strongly recommends a session. For a lot of reasons it’s a cool thing all entrepreneurs should do. For one, all our revered entrepreneurs are champion trend spotters. And they spot these trends a long time before they are reported in the Sunday newspaper lift outs.

What’s next?

Go some where busy, go somewhere where there are zillions of transactions, go somewhere sans commerce, go where families hang out, go somewhere singles hangout, look for the subgroups, watch people looking at shelves in stores – guess their decision process, see if this process is the same for all or different for all, see what they wear, see how they move, how did they get there, where are they from, bring a notepad with you and write down ideas, go places you’ve never been before…. Watch people, guess their motivations, view their life in action and then we’ll be the ones gaining life experience…. Just go and watch.

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The funny thing about our world is that we are all in it every day, but very few of us are actually paying any attention to it. Step off the stage and become the director. Make it a habit to pay attention to what is going on in our world.

As entrepreneurs and marketers we are lucky. We can do our homework everywhere we go, and our start ups are the key beneficiaries.

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Message for the time poor

Here’s the only two snippets of advice which matter for the time poor. Forget all other advice which you have heard.  Especially, the long winded advice for time saving practices, which quite frankly the irony is not lost on me.

Advice snippet no: 1 – Never double handle any task. Touch it once. Do it once.

Advice snippet no: 2 – Cut stuff out of your schedule. Do less stuff, and learn to say no.

Do these two things and life will be better. That is all.

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Quirky Christmas Business Facts

Here’s some Quirky Business Christmas facts for a bit of fun:

  • The story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was written in 1939 for a store promotion by an advertising employee of the department store Montgomery Ward.
  • The modern image of Santa Claus (big red suit) was developed by Coca Cola for promotional purposes
  • More than 30 million ‘real’ (dead?) Christmas trees are sold in the USA each Christmas
  • Boxing day (practiced in Commonwealth Countries) was originally when citizens give gifts to the less fortunate members of society. Now they run to department store sales to buy big screen TV’s.
  • In 1951 Former US president Ronald Regan encouraged people to give Chesterfield Cigarettes to friends for Christmas. I wonder what he gave his enemies?
  • The first commercial Christmas Cards were commissioned in 1843 during the Victorian Era by Sir Henry Cole in London.
  • The best selling Christmas toy in 1959 was Mattel’s Barbie, the same year that the doll launched into market.
  • According to the Harvard Crimson around 80 percent of non-Christians are actively participating in what some view as an explicitly and exclusively Christian holiday.
  • In 1982 the Cabbage Patch kids was the best selling Christmas toy.  By 1984 the Coleco toy company had sold over $ billion worth of said dolls not adjusted for inflation!
  • Only 1 out of 3 Christmas cards have a religious message.
  • During the Christmas buying season, Visa cards are used an average of 5,340 times every minute in the United States alone.

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Add your quirky Christmas business facts to the comments!

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How to grow

There are really only 2 ways to grow which do not involve simply getting more customers in the same product. And they are as follows:

1. Existing products, new geography
2. Existing customers, product extensions

For some reason the natural instinct of most people on business is to take the second option. Which always results on increased complexity, and only sometimes results on increased profits.

We are better off to take the first growth option. Expanding what we already do on a new market, geography, or even usage occassion. Yellow Pages have just done this with their ‘car edition’ as can be seem in the photo below.

But I can’t help but think they’d be better off with a local iPhone app or a software app for In car GPS devices. Seems as though they are somewhat stuck in their old world.

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Revenue

One of our jobs in business is this:

“Make it as easy as possible for people to give us their money”

It’s already hard enough to convince people to buy our product or service, so why some businesses minimize payment options is beyond me.

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photo by Mike Monteiro

Cash only, just doesn’t cut it these days. Regardless if we are on line, business to business or in retail, minimizing the payment options has this simple repercussion: It minimizes revenue.

Live example is a café in Melbourne called ‘Journal’. I had a company breakfast there and they wouldn’t accept my credit card. They even had the audacity to say ‘Who doesn’t carry cash on them?’ Answer: plenty of people. That’s fine. I’m never going there again and they missed out on around $100 this week.

Startups ought make it easy to collect revenue.

Steve – founder rentoid.com

Theatre & customization – Active feet

I was recently enthralled by the in store theatre of local Melbourne sports shoe retailer Active Feet. In fact it was much more than theatre. It was service, theatre and attitude. The store is owned and run by podiatrists.

We walked in the store and the first thing the store assistant did was introduce himself, and ask if we’d been in the store before. When we gave the ‘yes’ response and name, he asked to be excused for a few moments and went out the back to check the computer. Upon his return the assistant asked how the flat feet were going, how the particular joggers purchased worked out, and even how boot camp was going. It wasn’t contrived, but I could sense in the tone of voice and body language that this guy cared. I could sense it. All humans can, we can sense people who are faking it.

After this we moved onto the walking machine to assess the feet with some pretty impressive podiatry tools. He then went onto recommend some shoes to try based on the treadmill assessment and a mutual discussion. All of which can be seen in some action shots below.

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How many companies have things like databases and valuable customer information that just sits on a computer somewhere and never gets reviewed, let alone used to great value for a returning customer.

Startup lesson: If we are going to collect information for our customers, then maybe we should use it, and not only use it but customize it.

Oh, we bought the shoes there.

Steve – founder rentoid.com

The design of society

Modern society is fixed. Not to prevent the strong from winning, but to prevent the weak from losing.

The entire economy is rigged to protect its weakest link, just like a convoy of ships must sail at the speed of the slowest ship so that they all may remain in formation.

I’d love to claim the above wisdom, but it comes from Earl Nightingale more than 50 years ago. You can listen to his wisdom by clicking here.

And it again proves that all the knowledge we need is out there. It always has been, having the discipline to use it is the hard part.

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Steve – founder rentoid.com