Lessons From the Desert

My wife got me a new book for Christmas- The Secret Knowledge of Water, by southwestern explorer and writer Craig Childs.  (A friend, Lynn Blackburn, highly recommended the book, and after hearing him read a few passages from it, I decided I had to get it.)  I cannot recommend this book enough to lovers of the Southwestern US!  His style is poetic and earthy at the same time, and you can almost feel the loneliness and ancient mystery of the Sonoran desert (and other sites in Arizona).

Childs writes this chilling line in the introduction:  “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning.”

Most people get the first option; few understand the second.  But the fact is, every year, Arizona has brief but furious rains and the washes (gulleys), which are normally dry, quickly fill with raging flood water and can become lethal to anyone unlucky enough to be in a wash when a flash flood comes galloping down upon them like a thundering herd of wild stallions.  (Another of his books, The Desert Cries, recounts a summer in Arizona where over 20 people died in such flash floods, including a hiking party caught by a killer flash flood in the awesome Antelope Canyon, in our state’s northeast corner).

But what many people don’t realize is that the desert holds a surprising amount of drinkable water (even though you may need to filter it and treat it with purification tablets) if you know where to look for it. Read more…

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us!

Like Pogo, the famous swamp creature of Walt Kelley’s comic strip of the same name, we may have met the enemy and found that he is us!

I was watching a report last week on The Fox News Channel (yeah, I’m one of THEM) about the bowling industry in America– or rather, what USED to be the bowling industry in America. At one time, almost all of the bowling equipment sold in the US (balls, pins, machines, shoes, uniforms, bowling alley furniture, etc.) was made by either AMF or Brunswick.  But when NAFTA was passed in the 1990’s, the factories went to Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor market.  Why?

Because American bowlers were demanding cheaper and cheaper gear, and it could not be produced in the States with our higher standard of living (and attending wage base).  So the Mexicans celebrated as they inherited hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of factories, development, and expertise.  There were fiestas down south as plants closed up north, and several small US towns hat depended on AMF and Brunswick were decimated. Read more…

Just in Case You Think You’re Normal

It’s been a while since I last posted to my blog.  The end of 2009 was hectic!  First, my desktop computer hard drive decided to start decomposing on me, so I had to scramble and get a new desktop (and wow, what a machine!  1 Terabyte HDD, the newest Intel chip, so fast that when I enter data, I get the answer YESTERDAY!  Thanks to Chris Long at Computer Troubleshooters in Phoenix for putting it together for me.)

I then decided it was time to go ahead and get a new laptop as well, so I got the latest Lenovo Think Pad.  The thing is so fast and powerful, it can launch and guide a rocket to Alpha Centauri!

Both have Windows 7 (in my opinion, a VAST improvement over XP and a huge improvement over Vista).  However, there is no upgrade path from XP to W7 (there is from Vista to W7), so I had to install all my software again, etc, and that took a few weeks.

Anyway, I’m back for the year, and ready to go.

So here’s my first blog post for 2010.  You ready for this?

When you were a little kid, did you ever wonder if you were “normal” compared to your classmates?  Maybe some were taller than you—a lot taller.  Or smarter. Or better looking.  Or better athletes. Most kids, at some point, wonder how they compare to everyone else. It’s normal. Read more…

What Would Peter Do?

My recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) had a cover that really caught my eye.  This year (2009) is the centennial year of the birth of management guru Peter Drucker (who passed away in 2005).  In my mind, Mr. Drucker is one of the heroes of business, along with men like W. Edwards Deming (the American who introduced total quality control or TQM to the Japanese after World War II because Detroit wanted nothing to do with it) and Thomas Watson (the founder of IBM). Read more…

The Sorry State of Financial Savvy Today

While reading a recent issue of The Harvard Business Review, I came across an article titled “Are Your People Financially Literate?” by Karen Berman and Joe Knight (October 2009, page 28). The title woke my curiosity since I am an advocate of business people knowing the financial ropes as well as they can. The article was stunning. The research at their web site (http://www.financedog.com/blogs/18) showed that only 38% of those they have tested made a passing score. (Even I did poorly on the six-question sample test the site offers as a teaser to buy their services.) Read more…

Paying Sales Pros (Part 3 of 3)

The seasoned veteran sales professional is a person who has been selling residential and light commercial HVAC systems for several years. He or she has a good grasp of sales skills as evidenced by a closing rate of 65% or higher.  (Some I know hit 90%, and not on price!)

They are masters of the subtle question and know how to elicit strong emotional drivers from their clients and harness their solution to those drivers so sales are (to a casual observer) very easy. (But they fully understand how complex and difficult selling at such a high level is!)

Such professionals often have the ability Read more…

Territory Manager Field Guide Coming Soon!

I am excited to announce this on my web page!

I am putting the finishing touches on a manuscript for a book I am tentatively calling “The Territory Manager’s Field Guide.” This practical book will contain 30 chapters that contain helpful tips on how to run a successful territory. The information has been drawn from my own experience as a pace-setting territory manager as well as leading territory managers from around the country I have met in workshops over the years.

This will be a large work– the manuscript in Word 2007 is about 600 pages long! It will also come with a CD-ROM with PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, and other useful tools to help a territory manager be the best he or she can be.

I have already begun talks with my publisher and hope to be able to make a formal announcement and take pre-publishing orders by the end of the year.

Come back to my web page from time to time to get updates and release announcements.

Paying Young Sales Professionals (Part 2 of 3)

Sales people who have survived their first year (and I use the term “survived” with purpose) will probably go on to become decent sales people. Some of them will even become great (but not that many—maybe 6%).

So how do we pay sales people who are no longer rookies but not yet at that level of experience and skill that the truly great sales people attain?

Clearly, a level of pay that is above that of a first-year rookie is appropriate, provided the sales person is producing at a rate that is better than a rookie. (For convenience, let’s call this sales person an apprentice. They have graduated from pure rookie-dom, but are not yet at the level of a journeyman.)

Read more…

Paying Rookie Comfort Consultants

The other day, I received an email from a territory manager in the Midwest who I have known for almost 20 years. He is one of the sharpest men I know in this business, and he wrote to warmly discuss how my blog posts have been helpful to him and his dealers. I am grateful for that! But he also suggested a topic that has lead to this series of posts—how do you pay sales people, especially beginners?

In the LIBRARY section of this web page, you can download an article titled “Pricing For Commissions.” I explain in that article (click here to download a copy) how to set your pricing to recover commissions so your company nets out the profit you want. But I do not explain in that article how to pay sales professionals in the first place.

Let this first article of a series of 3 lay some groundwork. Read more…

Got Biz Plan?

I am not a big advocate of written business plans— at least, not those 10-chapter MBA thesis projects that a Harvard B-school graduate student would write.  Those tomes are fine for getting a loan or impressing an imbecile to buy shares in your venture, but they are not much use to a small business person for the day to day running of a struggling business.

But I am a proponent of a written business plan for any small business.  It’s just that it needs to be short (no more than 10 pages) and as wordless as possible.  Which is why I have become a fan of Michael D. Ames, a professor of business at California State University (Fullerton). He wrote a paper titled “Rethinking The Business Plan Paradigm” (you can download a PDF copy here. Read more…