Stop the Stupid Stuff In Your Business

We are living in a world of change. Shift happens! Competition comes from all over the world, which means that many American businesses are in trouble.

Many decisions are being made that are contrary to both good business sense and building customer loyalty.

Most organizations' marketing is usually an exercise in figuring out what to do to get current or potential customers to spend more dollars with them.

I'm suggesting that instead of thinking about what to do, figure out what to stop doing. In other words, stop doing the "stupid stuff."

Not doing the stupid stuff means finding out what prevents customers from spending money with you and making sure that that action or reaction never happens again.

Here's an example of what I call "stupid stuff." Some airlines now want to charge customers who want to speak to a live agent.

That's stupid stuff in two ways. First, they've chosen to penalize customers who want to continue getting what they've always gotten - one-on-one attention. Worse, they've done it by saying they will charge more for this previously standard level of service. How many customers will they lose because of this decision? I know of at least one.

There are more subtle, but no less damaging, stupid things businesses need to stop doing.

Take, for example, the new Wheaties boxes. General Mills recently introduced Wheaties boxes with photos of the U.S. Olympic gold medalists. One was missing: Paul Hamm. Why?

This was General Mills' response to my inquiry:

"Selecting a Wheaties Champion has never been an easy task, especially when we have witnessed so many outstanding performances by so many championship athletes. But it simply isn't possible to honor every champion on the Wheaties box."

So they leave off the first U.S. man to win the Olympics all-around gymnastics championship in one of the sport's greatest comebacks? His return from a disastrous fall to a near-perfect high-bar routine won near-universal praise and, for most of us, defined the word "champion."

But there was controversy. As most of you know, a South Korean gymnast claimed that a scoring error cost him the gold and appealed to the Court of Arbitration for sport. The court recently ruled that Hamm can keep the gold medal.

Even though the medal was disputed, it was not because of anything Hamm did or did not do. Still, General Mills decided to do the "safe" thing. But by being safe and leaving out Hamm, Wheaties is alienating the millions of customers who see him not as controversial, but as a hero, and losing customers in the process. Now that's "stupid stuff."

So start stopping! Stop saying "No" and start using the word "Yes." Stop charging for services that most of us think are free.

Find out what exasperates, discourages, hassles or confuses your customers and stop it.

Bad for One, Good for Other

In common term, liquidations means dissolution; diminish a process or a procedure from its action. Generally, this connotation goes to a body of an organization or a company. The company must be liquidated due to several things, namely a vacuum condition. This condition makes the company unable to obtain its target of budgeting or out of overhead limit which will end up in bankruptcy. Other reason may say that the organization has gone far from the objective vision and mission; it is not on the way of its function. There are more reasons of liquidation that is not enough to talk here.
Due to this liquidations or before they go bankrupt, these company and organization still have to consider on the budget for reducing their staffs. This sounds so ironic; the company could not hold on any longer, on the other hand they still have to pay for the staffs. However, the point is that how they could pay for the staffs since no more financial supports?
Assets and facilities are the object to use as the payment; of course not in the way of real items that becomes the payment term. A lot of companies and organizations on bankruptcy process are selling their inventories for sale. It is, again, ironic but it is not something to be sorry; there have been law and policy that oblige them to do as it is an obligation. Apparently, to sell the used items is not something easy to do. These companies and organizations will some of the time refer to some kinds of business service that accommodates the items. No wonder if there are a lot of warehouses and stores running on this kind of service will gladly buy these liquidated items. These places have always been in service on accepting used things and reselling them.
Big warehouses seem to have bigger chance in getting these used items since more space they have to accommodate, and big capital for the purchase. They receive the items not only from one or two liquidated companies, and they don’t put the items just like a so-called warehouse. Quite many of these warehouses appear like stores or even mini markets. With certain naming for the business names, these warehouses resell things based on the name taken. They also have a good arrangement of places and partitions for certain item products or functions. The partitions include clothing and fashion, accessories, electronics, stationeries, office utilities and equipments, general merchandise, toys, home & kitchen, shoes, tools, computers, peripherals, even daily products and food though not so many because they don’t last long.
Analyzing the way of those warehouses do their business, it is apparently interesting. They get items cheaply and could resell them with higher price. What a good deed!