If you've read much of what I've written, you know I grew up helping my old man remodel homes. Dad got 100 percent of his business from referrals and from a three-line ad that ran in the "South County Journal" for almost 30 years.
Every time a local factory shut down, the following week's Journal would have 50 new ads for "home remodeling" services. And every time that factory started back up, 49 of those ads would disappear, and dozens of ticked-off people would call Dad to clean up the messes those guys left behind.
Phil Hamilton is a business consultant located in Austin, Texas. Phil is one of the country's top five experts on business valuation -- he can tell you EXACTLY what your company is worth if you need to know.
Thousands of CPAs dotted around the country throw "business valuation" on their list of services, as though understanding how to read a spreadsheet qualifies them as experts in Phil's field. And the result is tens of thousands of unsuspecting business owners getting screwed when they settle their divorces, divide their businesses or buy/sell their companies.
John Usedom is president of a highly specialized marketing firm located in Chicago, and an expert at getting people to spend their discretionary income. If you run a tablecloth restaurant, bike shop, hair salon, or so forth, John's customer loyalty program can typically double your repeat-business percentage and get your repeat customers to visit twice as often. (Nothing like success squared!)
Yet untold numbers of retail business owners are working 90+ hours a week and barely surviving, because they don't know what John knows -- that the quality of their products, the ambience of their stores, the experiences they deliver and the prices they charge are not enough to win the loyalty of customers spending their "extra money," because these customers expect to get all of that already.
Vic Mattison is president of an Internet service provider/software-development company located in St. Louis -- a one-stop shop for all things Internet-based (bandwidth, websites, e-mail, backups, custom software applications that run across the net, etc.). As you may imagine, Vic's company is full of high-tech expertise. Yet if you call to ask a question, place an order or report a problem, not only will an actual human being answer the phone, he or she will speak plain English as well.
Or you could try one of Vic's competitors. But I've bought and sold a lot of technology in my day, and trained a lot of people who sell it as well. I can promise you that a call to most technology providers, big or small, will either place you in voice-mail purgatory or get you a propeller-head who can't speak a five-word sentence without using 12 acronyms. And none of the decision-makers at these companies seem to understand the impact this lack of communication has on their bottom lines.
So what do these situations have in common?
Clint Eastwood, that's what.
It was Clint Eastwood playing Harry Callahan in "Magnum Force" who coined the phrase "A man's got to know his limitations."
I'm not complaining about having to compete with people who are doing whatever it takes to put food on their tables. I'm not upset that experts in one field claim to have expertise in another, just because they understand one piece of the overall puzzle. I'm all for the entrepreneur who works 90 hours a week doing everything from sweeping the floors to writing his or her own contracts -- God knows I've been there. And some of my best friends are propeller-heads (I just can't understand them).
What I am telling you is that, if you want to achieve all of your goals, join the ranks of the professionals who understand their limitations, not the ranks of those who ignore them, because the price you'll pay for ignoring your limitations is happy customers -- you'll have none.
You build a business by leveraging your strengths. You avoid failure by acknowledging your limitations.
You keep your customers happy and achieve your goals by doing both.
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Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association
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