Wow, yesterday’s post “It’s Time To Raise Your Prices – Even Though Everyone Will Tell You Not To” got a lot of attention; just like when I first raised this issue during an interview. This is the follow-up to both…

In a recent New York Times article, JC Penney shared that they previously would mark up their goods 4 times cost and then relied on almost 600 promotions per year to sell it. Clearly that didn’t work (did it ever?)

No one knows the price you pay but you.  When you selectively raise the price of your most popular items to add to your bottom line – you’ll be able to continue to be in business. When you don’t, you end up gone.

Many owners or managers have never taken a course on pricing, so they tend to mark up their products less than they should. I met a guy at a recent speech who sheepishly admitted he purchased an item at $20, and priced it at $25.

Your merchandise should be marked up enough extra to make your business profitable. That used to be double or keystone.

You also have to consider the value you provide to the customer and charge what you think the market could afford, not necessarily what you personally would pay because you know what the item cost you.

There is a hidden risk to increasing your prices and it doesn’t come from consumers…

It’s from your disgruntled staff. The polite ones who don’t say anything to your face but tell customers behind your back, “We just had to raise prices.” They might even inform customers where they can get it for cheaper.  Or even worse, “I buy all my stuff from Amazon, it’s cheaper.”

Don’t think that could be your staff?

Think again.

5 Steps to Increase Your Prices

1. Educate your employees on what costs make up your pricing structure. Point out their salaries and benefits. Point out shipping costs. Point out as much as you can to show costs are going up and why you have to raise prices.  Reveal there’s no magic genie that makes up the difference.  (It helps if you don’t drive the newest model BMW to work each day. Just sayin’…)

2. Do a category report.  Look for the category leaders.  They are most able to move your profitability.

3. Do an item report. Look for the faster moving items you can selectively raise your prices on. When I was with the coffee franchise, we increased bagels instead of the entire bakery department. Not because bagel costs alone had risen, but they were the best-sellers and could most help balance increased costs for the business, not the item.

4. Decide how much you want to raise your costs. You could raise items under $10 by a dollar and no one would probably notice.  Once they cross from $9.99 over $10 though, people notice so be careful with that price point.  Likewise the $19.99 crossing into $20 and all the $x9 ($29, $39, etc.) crossing into the next level.  Psychologically customers “pause” if they really want to spend over $20, $50 or $100.

5. Monitor your sales. If you’ve done your selective price increases right, everything will continue moving upwards and your profitability will move up as well. Remember, you don’t want to spend more just because you made more.

Two Choices In Timing Your Price Increases

Aggressively raising prices

If you’ve ever worked in a larger retailer, price changes were almost a daily routine. You would physically remove the tags from the products and re-price them to the new retail. This was done because the retailer understood when they went back to the vendor they would have to pay more so they wanted to proactively price their existing merchandise to help pay for the new.  This “float” between what they previously paid and what they would pay in the future, helped make them profitable.

Passively raising prices

If you’ve only owned your own shop, you may only change prices when you get a new order in.  The thought being it is too much work to change them and it “wouldn’t be fair” as that wasn’t the price you purchased the items for previously.  But managing your price increases is as important as managing your clearance items – you want to maximize profitability as easily and simply as possible. Being more aggressive with raising your prices – especially now that it is often simply updating a shelf tag and computer database – is being a smart retailer.

In conclusion

You might have one or two customers say something if they regularly purchase an item from you, for example coffee. If so, simply say in a sign or in person something to the effect, “Have you noticed the increase in gas? That has increased many of our costs and forced us to increase our prices. Thanks for shopping with us.”

Many retailers can discount their way to the poorhouse fairly easily. Discounting doesn’t take much thought…

To be a smart merchant, you have to know why you must raise your prices and selectively increase them to continue to provide your customers with choices.

What say you? Is your category of stores as a whole underpriced right now? Is it because they are afraid of the discounters or online sites?  Would your employees support a price increase? Please enter your comments below.

About Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor

Companies from some of the very largest, to some of the smallest, from luxury brands to startups, from franchises to regional chains contact me as a retail consultant because they are looking for results to the hard challenges facing their business. An owner may have read one of my books, seen my videos, seen me on TV, heard me speak or read this blog to get a taste of my people-focused philosophy and my methods.

While every client and project is different, the ability to enlist me as a retail consultant who has a fresh set of eyes to look at the challenges you are facing results in a focused, effective and creative path to profitable sales.  No matter what your size, let’s see how I can help you.

Really?

They’ve stopped putting gas in their cars, supersizing their “value meals” and foregoing makeup?

Of course not.

Are they asking for “What’s on sale” or for the “deal?”

Yes.

Does that mean you can’t raise your prices?

No.

Look, most businesses held the line on price increases over the past few years hoping they could hold onto customers. That went for dealers, distributors, manufacturers and retailers.

But those same people are now realizing the economy has gotten better, so they are looking to recoup the losses they had previously absorbed. That’s why inflation is coming – from everywhere.

Yet there is this, in my opinion, misguided presumption that price transparency is what it is all about. That customers “know what you paid for an item” and know that low prices are the only way you can compete. The customer is now the “pricing expert.”

Baloney.

Price doesn’t make something a great value, people do.

Underpricing to try and persuade people to shop with you doesn’t work as a business model. Sure you can buy market share but someone somewhere is footing the bill – the owner or the stockholders.

When I rhetorically asked my audience recently how much their mark-up was, a woman shouted back, “You mean what it should be or what I have to make it in order for it to move?”

Let’s face it, ask customers what they want to pay and they’ll say nothing. They want the choice steak, cooked to perfection, cut, put on the fork and pre-chewed so all they have to do is swallow – and all just for the privilege of feeding them.

OK that might have gone too far, but you get my point…

Many people feel items are “grossly marked up.” Yet the markup between what the retailer pays the manufacturer or distributor covers all the costs of having a brick and mortar store where customers can shop and leaves the shop owner only 3-4 cents profit on the dollar.

Labor costs have gone up because as the economy has gotten better, the best employees are looking for more money. Material costs have increased along with a host of other fees and costs.

If you as a retailer don’t increase your prices enough to be profitable, you’ll be gone.

Don’t care if you try to get a cash mob to love you, your sign is plastered with “buy local” or the rest. If you can’t be profitable, you won’t be around.

You don’t get stars in your crown for incurring more debt because customers pressured you to lower prices. You have to lower your debt and you can only do that if you are making more profit, not less.

If you are doing everything in your power to provide an exceptional experience to everyone you meet, if your customers willingly drive past your competitors to shop with you, if you do extra things for no charge but you still aren’t making money…what are you waiting for?

Don’t take your knowledge and passion out of your pricing or you’ll be reduced to an out of business sign.

Tomorrow: Raise your prices. Here’s how…

What do you think? Are you ready to raise your prices? Why or why not? Please comment below

As long as they are given real responsibilities with a mentor, teenagers are able to mitigate the effects of the onset of puberty at a younger age and go on to become successful adults.

I interviewed Scott Reed, who has owned his successful Chick-Fil-A franchise for 23 years in Marietta, GA for this post. His restaurant is known across town for its immaculate interior and manicured exterior.  Scott’s outlook about who he hires and where he focuses his training time provides clues for any retailer working with teenagers.

Scott Reed

Here are seven things you must do to develop and train teenage employees gleaned from that interview with Scott:

Filter

Scott: You’ve got to have a mission that is a filter for your decisions. I had a terrible one before, so I’m guilty of this. My vision used to be something like: ‘My business plan is to serve the community and please the customers and keep it clean and serve the food and blah, blah, blah.”

But who wouldn’t want that, right? It’s a restaurant. That’s not really a filter. Now I look at a potential teenage employee and ask, “Would I want them to work with my daughter?” That’s a filter.

More Than One Customer

Scott: I have two sets of customers. I have the customers who come in, who buy our chicken and help me pay my bills, and I love them.  My second customers are my employees; they’re my customers too! I need to make them love working here so that they will make the first customers really happy.

That’s why I spend 80% of my time with my leadership team of about ten people. The ripple effect of my time with them is that they have that same kind of impact on the people  they coach too.

Competition Is Good

Scott: We are competitive when it comes to the hours, and that means we’re just like a sports team. The person who comes to practice, and who is the best player will play the most. Coming to practice is just their availability.

And it’s not availability of quantity; it’s availability of quality. If you help me on a busy night when we have a football game across the street, and then you want other hours that are helpful to you, you’re going to get them.

Expectations From Day One

They hear it directly from me, “This is the way it works, we’re not trying to be fair.” One young lady looked at me like, I can’t believe you all aren’t trying to be fair. I said, “You are in the band, right? She said, “Yeah.”

I said, “What chair are you?” She said, “First chair.” I said, “Would it be fair that you would be rotating first chair each week or each month. That would be fair, right?” She said, “No, I worked hard to get first chair.”  I followed up with, “That’s exactly the way it goes here, too, I don’t hire people who I think are going to fail. If I hire you, I believe you will not be on the bench. I don’t need bench warmers; I need people who can play.”

I have to have very high expectations along with a high relationship or it’s not a win-win for both us – it’s just a Kumbaya place, right?

Good Attracts Good

Scott: If you can ever get a group of people, that’s a good group of people, you’ll attract good people. The problem is sometimes you have a spot available, and three people available to hire. So, you pick the best of the three, even you know they’re not great.

That way, you’ll continuously attract mediocre people.

You have to be able to stick through the tough times and make the right hires and then just piece by piece improve your team. The worst person’s got to go, and you’re going to replace them. That person won’t just be a little better, hopefully they will be at the top of the crop.

I look at an applicant and say, “Will they help me be the top 20% of restaurants?” Not, “Will they fill a spot because I need somebody?’ It’s hard to move out of it when you’re not doing that well because you’re really going to have to be intentional and when those good people come, you’re going to have to really spend a lot of time with them because they’re going to look around and go, ‘This is not great. This is not awesome.’”

It may not be an awesome place, but you’ve got to keep pouring it into them while you get more people and say, “Hey, you’re doing great. You’re the one I was looking for. I’m going to get more people like you. Don’t worry. Hang in there with me. I know things aren’t like they should be, but we’re going to make this right, and you’re part of my plan to help make it right.

You have to give them a great vision and say, “This is what we’re about. We’ll help you grow. We’ll help you develop yourself. Whether you stay here forever or not, this is going to be a big experience for you, and you’re going to be really glad you’re here.”

You can get people to work for you if you have that.

People love to be a part of something excellent because they’re frustrated when it’s not.

The Pause Button

Scott: It all falls on leadership, not only are you developing yourself, but are you developing the people who work with you.

A lot of times when you have a business, the meetings all tend to be tactical. It’s all: this issue came up and we need to do it this way. That’s important, don’t get me wrong, but if you don’t have any percentage of time where you’re going, “Hey, I believe in you all and I think you all are capable. We’re going to watch a tape together. We’re going to go do this together and help develop ourselves to be better leaders. If you don’t have that going on in your business, then how are you going to get better?

You have to push the pause button.

Money Is Third

I don’t really concentrate on the money. Certainly, I’m tracking performance where it has to do with costs and those kinds of things. I want to know how we perform, but really that’s not my main focus. I’m more focused on the experience for the customer and the experience for the employee because if those two things are working well, then you can tweak the money a little bit.

You can charge a little bit more if you need to because people are willing to pay for a better experience. They’re willing to pay and work a little harder for things that are important to them, and they are willing to work hard when they know you care

That’s when you have it, when it’s all clicking.

If you get to lead people who care about what they do, young people who can make a difference in others’ lives, that’s fun. It’s a lot more fun than selling chicken. I feel like if I’m going to do that well, the chicken sort of sells itself.

Wrap-up

When you hear how good employees are so hard to find, how customers are more demanding and how fast-food jobs aren’t worth anything, I hope you’ll balance that with this picture of Scott.  Small business owners like him are the ones making a difference in the world because they are focused on people over product. Especially when they realize they have two customers and make it a place they’d want their daughter to work.

What say you?

She has found puberty is kicking in earlier and earlier, and that teenagers are taking on adult roles later and later.

She says in part, “In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence.

But you’d do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood, where you would have experienced the impact of your inevitable failures and learned from them.”

When the motivational juice of puberty arrived, you’d be ready to go after the real rewards, in the world outside, with new intensity and exuberance, but you’d also have learned the skill and control to do it effectively and reasonably safely.

She goes on to say that even the basic skills kids would have learned while supervised by an adult regarding cooking, care-giving, and the accompanying jobs like baby-sitting and having a paper route have disappeared.

Consider her statement that for “most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27.”

Failure to Launch

Researchers now know that experience shapes the brain, and they are finding teenagers’ brains haven’t been properly instructed and exercised.

Kids today are plenty smart but because they have been raised by a generation of parents providing instant gratification for their every want and need, their connection to life experience in the outside world isn’t there. For example….

• They might have a lot of sexual education but still get pregnant.
• They might know all the driving rules but still get in accidents.
• They might know all about the chemical properties of food, but that doesn’t help them make a souffle.

Kids today don’t know mediocre from excellent, because this generation has been raised to believe that as long as they do the work – they should get an A. Or got a trophy if they joined a team.

The more we’ve taken vocational education out of schools, the more crippled teenagers have become as adults.

Mentorship, so common in human evolution, simply isn’t being used to show these young minds the ropes.

When we take today’s youth and put them to work in retail we need to realize we need to instill the training they missed as children to make them successful employees.

What it will take

We need to show them the difference between mediocre and excellent and what it takes to stay there.

What we need to hire are kids who are trainable and then reward their ability with supervision that goes beyond simple task management.

If we are call on them to multi-task, we need to train them to be excellent multi-taskers. Your training is only successful if you remember you have to train them in the basic skills they missed before we can train them on more advanced skills and – just as importantly – before they are left on their own.

Again, we have many smart young adults, but research is showing they haven’t had the right experiences to shape their brains for success as adults. That’s up to us, now more than ever.

As long as retailers can give challenging real-life experiences with a degree of protection that comes from engaged supervisors, we can give these young people a path to success, not just a part-time job.

You’ll meet one such business owner in tomorrow’s blog.

Does this change your perception of teenagers on your staff or in your house? What do you think retailers must change in order to make younger employees successful?

Don’t care if you already have a Verizon account. Don’t care if you use a Blackberry. Don’t care if you own stock in Microsoft.

And the higher the price of the items you sell, the stupider you are if you don’t get it NOW. Ok, I’m a bit opinionated on these. Stay with me…

Forget all of the other bells and whistles. You have the ability in the palm of your hand to make a personal introduction, followup or product video in minutes using the iMovie app. Easily, professionally and you can email them right away.

Here are four I just created.

One for a nursery talking about their fresh tomatoes for the day:

iPhone4 Example for a Farm Stand with Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor®

One for a Buick Dealer following up for a customer:

iPhone4 Example For Buick by Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor®

One for any salesperson who has to followup after speaking on the phone:

iPhone4 Example Following Up with Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor®

Last one for a landscaper or professional Gardener talking to a client about a problem;

iPhone4 Example Landscaper / Gardener with Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor®

Do you see how impressive this looks? How immediate? How out of the ordinary, knock your socks off fantastic this is?

I’ve done testimonial videos for years with my Flip camera. Yes it was convenient but NOTHING like this. I can add titles, transitions and music quickly and easily.

Imagine the look on your customer’s face when it is you talking to them directly right in front of their home before you go back to the office?

Sure I could get hung up with a few clipped words or a few transitions. But the door has opened for anyone to quickly and easily make youself standout.

How could you use it in your business? Think about it and put in the comments below please.

Oh yeah, and don’t worry about your competition finding out, they’ll still be hung-up on the cost of the data plan as you steal their customers right and left!

For more ways to make your business standout, check my new book from Wiley & Sons, The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business.

This is an excerpt from my new book, The Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business (Wiley & Sons)

Since many owners or managers have never taken a course on pricing or they “feel bad about charging too much,” they tend to mark up less than necessary, what I call “welfare pricing.”

As a customer, we love it when you price too low but as the merchant, your apathy towards what you need that widget to produce – profits – is killing you!

Your merchandise should be marked up enough to make the business profitable. An item has value if it is worth the price a customer is willing to pay. Here’s an example.

There’s a deli truck in the park by my house that sells soda for 50 cents. I figure that the vendor can get a six-pack for a buck at the local big-box. She might be telling herself she’s getting three times cost; but what would a customer pay for the convenience? A vending machine would charge at least $1. But she gives you a cup and ice. Would that be worth $1.25? I think so.

Sometimes you have to consider the value you provide to the customer and charge what you think the market could afford, not what you personally would pay.

You also have to consider breakage, spoilage, or other items out of your control before you set a price.

For example, a baker who has to bake a dozen rolls at a time might know they typically only sell seven of a certain roll every day.  So they factor in that five might remain, and price the seven to make the profit of all twelve.  It’s therefore a bonus if they sell out occasionally.

And how do all the coupon programs factor in?  If you price too low to begin with, you often are selling the item for less than it cost to buy and ship to you when discounts are applied.

Any Accounting 101 student can tell you that the profit earned by the average business is only one to three cents on the dollar. This fact flies in the face of a common perception that small business owners are raking in the dough.

So realize when you’re considering giving $10 off an item that you have to sell at least $300 more just to earn back that $10 in profit.

When you analyze discounts, you find that — like a sugary cola drink — they give you an added boost when you’re tired. But like that sugary cola drink, the high is temporary and you eventually crash.  Discounting does nothing for your (or your company’s) long-term health.

Coupled with a broken pricing strategy, is it any wonder so many owners have to dump money into the business rather than taking it out?

Click here to learn more or purchase the book.

The Census of Agriculture is conducted by the National Agriculture Statistics Service of the USDA every 5 years and is where I got these figures.  As Joe Friday would say on Dragnet, “just the facts ma’am:”

*63% of VA farms are not profitable. There are a total of 47,000 farms in VA in 2007-farm operators reporting a net loss: 29,616.

*95% of all farms in VA gross less than $250,000 in sales which is the volume necessary to support a “farming family of four above the poverty line.”

*86% of farms gross less than $40,000, the level of sales commonly described as “small farms.”

* Most farms are very small and getting smaller. About three-quarters of the farms in VA in 2007 are less than the average size (171 acres…down from 181 in 2002)

From another USDA publication we find, “Operators of new farms were more likely to be engaged in occupations other than farming and to derive income from non-farm sources.”

From the comments of attendees after my presentations in the last several years and from news stories,  it appears a lot of business owners are in the same boat as Virginia farmers.  Many are small and getting smaller, unable to make a profit and unable to support a family so owners take on other jobs to support their family business.

Of course kids don’t want to pick up a family business making $40,000 a year! Would you? They are looking for prosperity, for profits, for the good life – not a job pulling in less than a Starbucks manager.

The classic way of building wealth has been to find a need ahead of time and then fill it – that is innovation. Think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs creating the personal computer industry. Look at Jeff Bezos at Amazon seeing the future of Internet retailing or eBay’s Pierre Omidyar’s prescient view of customers trading online. But the race to build a better mousetrap has stagnated with the recession.

Entrepreneurs around the world are trying to decide what’s the next “big thing” because nothing on the horizon is that innovative.

In a world where everything from insurance to banking, from real estate to Wall Street seems to have been built as a house of cards, how will we build wealth? The days of expecting a 20% return on anything from our houses to stock may be way in the future.

Stop looking across the fence America!  The opportunity is right here, right now, with your family business.

American family businesses must get back to basics and get smarter about becoming profitable. The endless promotions of low-price and discounting that has eroded the businessman’s reason to invest in America has got to be reversed.

That may mean you need to get outside help with technology, modern management practices of how to get a decent ROI on your investment of time or taking a financial class at your community college.  But it is up to the older generation to fix their businesses if they want to attract the young.

It hurts when I hear people say they don’t take a salary from their family business. That means they have all of the problems but none of the financial rewards. The reason kids don’t want to be a part of most family businesses is because they see all of the work and none of the benefits.  It’s like they’d always have the baby in dirty diapers, never the child going off to college.

The opportunity has dried up in many segments of the economy – the grass isn’t any greener in New York or Seattle than in your community.

You want your family business to provide something for your kids?  Make sure they see the upside – profits, not the downside.

Learn how to make your business more profitable.

© Bob Phibbs 2009

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

Forget the easy, over-hyped digs about his personal life. At the heart of why he was such an icon was the work. It was dazzling, fun, top-of-his game. During my speeches, I often play the Jackson 5′s “I Want You Back,” after a break. One time a woman said to me as it started, “I can’t believe you are playing something by Michael Jackson.” Another woman jumped in before I could respond, “Why wouldn’t he? I love his music!” Exactly. It was about the work, not the personality.

For your business and employees, it isn’t about what a nice guy you or your crew are.  It’s about the work.

I’m constantly amazed after a speech when people come up and tell me they’ve had someone on payroll for five, six, eight years and they aren’t cutting it. “But they’re so nice.”  It’s about the work.

Forget the personal traits. Heck, I had a guy who I had nothing in common with, the only reason we continued to work together is he got the sales. At full price. To 70% of the people he spoke to. With a smile and a repeat base we were all jealous of. Because of that, we could talk about business, how to do the sale better, what the next trend would be, how to close a hard sale. That’s what consumed his mind when he was on the clock.

He had moved out from Arkansas to southern California. He couldn’t find construction work and was sleeping in a gal’s back office at night; one step up from when he was sleeping on the street. He had used that address on my application.  He’d shower at the YMCA and walk to the mall.  He’d do his laundry at the local laundromat – he never looked out of place. He did this for about a month until he could afford an apartment.  I never knew until much later, he was strictly business.  It could have been easy to take his hard-luck story and make excuses if he hadn’t been able to sell. Could that be your crew?

My message today, in the wake of such an icon as Michael Jackson passing is to remember the work. His work; leave the personality out of it.  Is your employees’ performance memorable? Is yours?

Instead of addressing the fact they were not apparently very profitable businesses and prioritizing what they needed to do to survive, they chose to waste a month of time suing to stay with a company about to close all of its plants for a minimum of three months.  Be careful what you wish for.  What if they had remained open with sagging demand and old products?

A few years ago a southern California deli called me in for a consultation. Sales were slipping, they’d invested thousands in a renovation and the owners were worried. After we got a cup of coffee and sat down in one of the booths the owner took a sip and started to speak. I figured he would be asking where to look first or a spreadsheet would be bought out to show details of the sales collapse. He began, “We’ve contacted our attorney with a cease and desist order for a similar concept stealing our ‘look.’” I couldn’t believe my ears.

The owner went on at length to say how they were stealing his logo and concept and how he was prepared to fight them in court.  Meanwhile, I had to keep bringing him back to reality – he was losing money with this concept he wanted to protect so badly.

Like some wronged hero in an action movie, sometimes small business owners or managers get so personally vested at being wronged that they lose sight of their priorities. Many times that is because it is easier to get worked up about someone else than taking responsiblity to change.

The lesson? Keep your eyes on the big picture, don’t get caught up in the vendettas with vendors or competitors.