I want to tell you a story about leverage – that force that we use to change our lives.
Two brothers left Ireland bound with hope to America in the 1880s. They landed in Virginia; one brother went south, the other one up into the Appalachian Mountains in southern Virginia. Continue reading To Get Motivated Get Leverage And Thank Your Ancestors »
I was surfing the net and found a woman who owns a coffee shop being interviewed on TV. She felt the city didn’t do enough for business. Why? She said she has to pay a parking meter every two hours for her personal vehicle. She said she’s supposed to move it every two hours but is trying to get away with not doing it.
‘It’s not a lot of fun. I’ve accrued a lot of parking tickets,’ she said.’It’s not a real business-friendly town. I was hoping they could at least issue a permit for us or something. I’d be happy to pay it.’”
What was most interesting to me was that she didn’t see that she was taking parking from her own customers. Any mall has designated employee parking away from doors. They know customers don’t like to have to walk.
Downtown businesses – before complaining about parking and that the “city should do something about it,” consider how you and your own employees might be making all of it worse. When you signed your lease the parking was the same so don’t blame the city, blame selfish owners wanting special treatment when that is what they should be providing to their customers.
There is a new report on MSNBC today Main Street’s Sour Loans Sour courtesy of the Associated Press that says, “the government last year was left holding a record $2.1 billion in write offs for small-business loans they had guaranteed. There were over 2500 restaurant charge-offs making it the largest number of defaulted loans. More than 150 of those loans were made by Quizno’s franchisees worth nearly $15.5 million.” It also highlights the difference between the banks that were “too big to fail” to the mom and pops not making it now. Maybe what worked before doesn’t work anymore.
Instead of saying, “Where’s our handout,” where are the stories of people who realized they have to change or die?
I get there’s a lot of pain out there. I understand business for many is down. But when are you going to do something about it?
You have to radically change your business if you are not making it and want to survive.
I had lunch last week with Roger Leithead, the former CEO of Arrow shirts who told me a story about how Arrow survived the Great Depression. A bit of back-story.
The Arrow shirt concept came about in the 1800’s because men only wore white dress shirts and they all went to work in a suit. Even the blacksmith would work in that white shirt. Well this one guy was a singer and his wife didn’t like him coming home and changing into a clean shirt just to go out – especially since they only bathed on Saturday nights. The idea of a detachable collar and cuffs made it easy to look presentable without all that washing.
This is the way Arrow built an empire of over 450 warehouses across the US filled with detachable collars and cuffs. It was a recipe for success: find out what the customer wanted and then give it to them.
A competitor, the Manhattan shirt company, had a shirt you could buy with an attached collar and cuffs but it was built like a tent with yards of fabric to tuck in. Also, the sleeve length was a 37. That’s why guys wore armbands, so their sleeves wouldn’t reach over their fingers – like you see in barbershop quartets. At the time that was based on need, not looks.
Sales were dropping off and the Arrow CEO saw the trend was changing to a complete shirt. He announced to his board of directors in 1930, “We will never get there doing what we’re doing now.” That’s when something truly remarkable happened.
He went downstairs and gave instructions to open the doors of their main warehouse on River Street in Troy, New York, which bordered on the Hudson River. “Clear out the warehouse.” Using pitchforks, the warehouse men threw all of the existing collars and cuffs into the river.
Forget the environmental consequences of such an act of over 1 million dozen collars and cuffs floating down the Hudson. He threw out their entire inventory in order to make the changes needed.
They came up with 64 combinations of neck and sleeve lengths so that Arrow shirt fit you properly, not like a sack. They changed from natural ocean pearl buttons that broke easily, to plastic and invented Sanfordizing, which meant a shirt wouldn’t shrink. They again became the leader in men’s shirts because of the CEO realizing they had to change or die.
You think it’s tough to compete now? Imagine going into a retailer in the Depression telling them they needed all this inventory to serve their customers; where three models could capture the market, now they needed 64.
The CEO then had marketing come up with the “Arrow Shirt Man.” Splashy ads in the best magazines touted how well an Arrow shirt fit. It created a need for the women who purchased their husbands’ shirts to go into retailers and ask for that “Arrow Shirt.” Retailers had no choice but to carry them and the rest is history.
When I speak across the country I hear many people quick to tell the story of how business is off, but they themselves are reluctant to change. It might be like going to the emphysema ward of a hospital seeing people smoking while they’re under their oxygen tents. The will to change can seem too much even when what you’re doing is killing you.
If things aren’t going your way, what radical change do you need to do to ensure your success? Are things bad enough to change? Do you have the guts to throw out what you’ve been doing and start over?
Many businesses didn’t make a profit in the past when the money was easy – don’t blame the banks, Obama or someone else. It is your responsibility to make a profit. If you can’t, that’s capitalism.
And no, there is no level playing field – Wal-Mart will always be able to undercut your price, Starbucks will always be able to get a better location, etc.
My message to small businesses today? It’s not whine and cry but change or die. The choice is yours, but the time to act is now!
Learn the essentials of getting a retail business back in shape here
I opened last week’s New York magazine to an ad for chocolate dipped bacon. That’s when I first started noticing pork.
Next, I kept seeing tweets containing the words “swine flu” on Twitter, then the major news sites, and finally TV. This deadly killer was engulfing Mexico – spreading like wildfire – the mother of all killers – like the great flu pandemic. A London paper lead with a headline that it could kill up to 120m people. The hysteria seemed to grow by the minute.
Just before I got on a plane last Wednesday, I witnessed four young women exiting the previous flight from Washington wearing face masks. We were yet again being yanked by the media.
Hysteria. Panic. Fear.
I understand those topics cause people to tune in, click or chat. But I’m mad. Mad that our mindsets are being so susceptible to this crap. Retailers putting up sanitizing solution at all counters, people hawking surgical masks, entire school districts closing.
Ever since 9/11, the news media has engorged on “what if” and “worse since” descriptions. First it was terrorists, then Wall St, credit markets, home sales, jobs, now public health.
What bothers me so much about this may be personal. I grew up the son of a white civil rights leader; a lone voice for justice. My dad marched with King, organized marches and helped draw up integration laws.
It felt during the 60′s that my white dad cared more for blacks than he did for his own sons. “The cause” was a fourth brother in the room. And the favorite at that.
The future was dark for him but for very real reasons. He had aroused the ire of the John Birch society and others trying to block equality for all.
One day, I picked up the mail to find a postcard written in red ink to “take your nigger-lover family back south or die.”
I’m working on a biography of those days called, “I Have A Scream” sharing my journey to understanding, but the overriding thing I learned from my dad was fear. Someone truly could kill us; it wasn’t a “what if.” We had the threats on the phone, in person, in the mail.
As a result, I grew up fearing the world. I walked with my head down towards the sidewalk. I was quiet. Strangers wanted to harm us. Possibilities and hope were something foreign to me.
And while an event happened in my life where I realized the future was indeed bright, it took many years to try and undo the damage of all that fear. I cover the event in the book but that’s not the point of this post.
Every time I see the “well-meaning” coverage saying, “there’s something even worse, still to come,” it brings me back to my childhood. And I get mad.
How many kids, teenagers and adults are feeding on this news and fearing the future like I did? Not from a real threat or evidence it is personally affecting them, but it is from people hypothesizing death that is making them afraid. Afraid of the future. Afraid of possibilities. Afraid of life.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Sure your grandmother can have alzheimer’s, your sister can be a drug addict, your daughter can be in a messy divorce. But you are counting on you to keep it together. You can’t afford the luxury of staying trapped like some sheep in a pen.
Recently we discovered that swine flu is really just the flu. Oh and Mexico isn’t as bad as they hyped this past week. Read the Saturday NYT article by Liz Robbins entitled, Outbreak in Mexico May Be Smaller Than Feared.
We cannot give power over our future to fear. Otherwise, we end up looking to our feet instead of the stars.
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