Hardly a day passes when I don’t hear from someone telling me that they’d like to start a business but have no idea how to go about it. I have to assume that they have done no investigating on their own. Had they looked, they would find an abundance of useful information. Besides books, seminars and teleclasses, the Internet is loaded. But there’s an even bigger source of information and unless you’re a hermit living in the woods and eating roots and berries, you’re in touch with it all day, every day.
Even if you aren’t a big consumer, you can hardly function without encountering all sorts of businesses and all sorts of people in charge of operating those businesses. Some of the most valuable things you can learn about running a business can come from paying attention to the role models around us. As a customer, what delights you? What makes you grit your teeth?
Just this morning, I made three phone calls to different businesses and each experience was unique. The first was to my oral surgeon with a question about a problem I was having with my recent surgery. The woman answering the phone excused herself to consult with a surgical assistant and promptly returned with an answer–and some additional encouragement.
The second was to my publisher to order more books. Unfortunately, the young man on the phone seemed totally lacking in people skills. I assume he got the details of my order entered properly in the computer, but he certainly didn’t make any effort to make me feel that my call mattered to him. Guess they hadn’t pointed out to him that authors pay his salary.
Then there was the third call, the one that reminded me of everything I hate about large companies and their automated phone systems. I needed to order checks and wanted to get the same ones I’d been using. I called the company’s 800 number and had to wade through several different departments, each pitching another product to add to my order.
When I eventually reached a live person, our transaction was loaded with more upselling. After she had located my account in the computer, I told her I wanted to order two boxes of the same style. She figured up the total and when I expressed surprise at the amount she said, “Well, you haven’t ordered for two years so the prices have gone up.” Then she assured me that she could save me some money if I doubled my order to four boxes. I declined. When I finally hung up the phone, I felt like I’d just walked through a maze.
In my Las Vegas seminars, I include an exercise that involves sending small teams of participants to different hotels on the first night of our event. Their assignment is to study the hotel as if they were an anthropologist, making a scientific study of the customs and attitudes of the business. Who is the hotel’s ideal customer? How do they communicate who they want as their customer? How does the staff treat those customers? What are their different profit centers?
The teams report back the next morning and they always have stories to tell about what they’ve discovered. I suggest that they make it a habit to assume the role of entrepreneurial anthropologist as they go about their their normal lives, noticing what they like, what they’d like to incorporate in their own businesses, what they wish to avoid. I highly recommend it as part of your own joyfully jobless curriculum.
This month, I’ll be sharing stories about businesses big and small that have added pleasure to my life as a client or customer–and a few who have added pain. Of course, these examples will be filtered through my own personal preferences, but I’ll do my best to keep my anthropologist’s hat on and tell these stories in the hope that we’ll all learn a little more about building a better business simply by paying attention.
That “check out the hotel”exercise was one of my FAVORITES when I attended your seminar in Vegas in…2005! I remember that my team’s assignment was the Palms. What FUN!…We couldn’t find a cab, so we actually hitched a ride to the hotel! NO fear at all!
What I took from that then, and that I STILL do today is whenever I meet a small biz owner I always ask “How’s business?” it almost always leads to interesting conversations about their products, their customers and their view of the world.