"Only Dead Fish Go with the Flow."

Posted on September 5, 2009 by John F. Dini

That quote, by Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, is one of the best I’ve heard in a while. While she wasn’t commenting on entrepreneurs at the time, she hit the nail on the head regarding small business success.

There are times when you have to go with the flow. Small businesses don’t have the resources to battle upstream all the time. Like Salmon, you jump an obstacle, then rest. You push for a sales goal, then rest. You make an uncomfortable termination or focus on a critical hire, then rest.

The resting part is normal, but if you rest too long you start floating back downstream. Losing ground in the water, so to speak. Then you have to make up yardage, with the added frustration of facing the same obstacles and seeing the same scenery as before.

We often think of these rest periods as the reward for our accomplishment. The problem with that approach, at least for many entrepreneurs, is that they don’t put parameters around the reward. It winds up lasting for as long as they can stretch it. Then they begin swimming again when they realize that they’ve floated too far downstream.

What I’m describing is the typical reactive mode of an entrepreneur. Get the adrenalin up for the challenge, then wait until circumstances dictate that you need the adrenalin again. That’s how you sink into perpetual firefighting mode, going from crisis to crisis with little progress other than merely undoing the latest problem. It’s why so many small businesses are stuck at a level of competence and comfort. Swimming only when you have to isn’t progress, it’s just fighting not to lose ground.

The next time you feel that sense of accomplishment for surmounting a difficult obstacle, ask yourself what you are going to do with your rest/reward time. Use it to think, to plan how to avoid that obstacle in the future. Use it to plan your next challenge, instead of waiting for that challenge to float down to you.

Most importantly, set a time limit on how long you will wait until starting on the next goal. Taking control of your rest periods will go a long way towards freeing you from the adrenalin/crisis mode.

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The Buck Stops Here

Posted on August 31, 2009 by John F. Dini

This isn’t a political blog, but I’m cursed (or blessed) to see everything in terms of business. The current administration in the Oval Office isn’t my favorite from a policy standpoint, but it is the tell-tale clues of a leadership gap that concern me the most.

President Obama is the CEO of the Executive Branch of government. As such he acts much like any other CEO, albeit with incredible reach and power. He names his top managers, sets priorities, and develops the vision that he wants his organization to follow.

So the CEO says plainly that he doesn’t perceive something to be in the organization’s best interest (pursuing CIA activities at Guantanamo), that he has higher priorities (getting a health care bill passed) and that he expects his team to pull together to accomplish his vision.

One top exec, Attorney General Eric Holder, claims that the CEO told him that he could make independent decisions, and therefore he is going to do as he damn well pleases, whether or not it serves the interests of the boss, the organization, or the shareholders.

As the CEO, what should you do? Demand his resignation? Castigate him for going off the reservation? Fire him outright? One thing you plainly, obviously have to do is make certain the rest of the management team understands beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are setting the agenda, and they are expected to follow it.

Yet the President behaves as if there is some virtue in refusing to lead. I look at this and realize that no lifetime employee, no one that has received a paycheck every week, every month of his career, can possible understand “The buck stops here” remotely as well as a failed owner of a haberdashery store in Missouri.

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Tough Times Call for Tough Tactics

Posted on August 24, 2009 by John F. Dini

My motto for this recession, quoted previously in this space, is “You don’t have to outrun the bear.”

As the recession lingers, and the slow, jobless recovery trickles in with a whimper, my clients are finding it both tiresome and challenging to build business. I am coaching a number of them on some tough tactics, which I used myself in the mid 70’s when the economy was similar to today’s.

It’s called “Making sure the other guy gets caught by the bear.” and it goes like this.

Start talking to your vendors, all of them, about how tough it it to collect in this environment. Ask them openly if they are having any problems collecting from people like you. Not all of them will begin complaining about their slow-pay clients, but some will. Some of their slow-pay customers are your competitors.

Now, hire a temporary or part-time college kid to put on the phones. There are plenty out there. Have them call every target customer you can identify who doesn’t currently do business with you. Say they are conducting a one question survey, and want to know whom they buy your products or services from.

Again, not all will tell you, but if you just ask that one question, and do it pleasantly, many will because it takes less time than getting your telemarketer off the phone

Now match up the lists. How many target customers are doing business with the slow pay/no pay competitor? Those are the ones you want to give a “killer” deal to. And I mean killer. Your purpose now is to take as much of the remaining business away from your weak competitor as possible. He is on the ropes. It’s time for a knock-out punch.

What? Not Marquis of Queensbury you say? Un-American?


Let your sympathies and your compassion be
always with the under dog in the fight–this is magnanimity; but bet on the
other one–this is business.

Mark Twain, a Biography

Your job is to protect your family, your company and your employees, in that order. I’m not sure where protecting your competitor comes in, but it’s way down the list.


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‘A Recovery Only a Statistician Can Love’

Posted on August 17, 2009 by John F. Dini
This editorial, from the The Washington Post talks about some of the same things I am concerned about going into 2010. While we will get some positive GDP numbers, perhaps as soon as this quarter, it won’t feel much like a recovery for most folks.
Essentially, if you don’t have a job now, you might still not have one a year from now. A depressing though to be sure, but what does it mean to a small business owner?
First, if you’ve let the company slip out of the black, get back in it now. I had another former client call me the other day. He said he was bleeding red ink, but “couldn’t” cut any more positions because all 20 employees were critical. He just needed some new financing to bridge the gap, and continue taking good care of his remaining customers.
He called again the next day. His financing was turned down (surprise!) and his largest customer told him they were reducing his services by 50%. He asked that I review his resume, since it had been decades since he had been job hunting.

If you are in the black, even by a smidgen, you can stay in business indefinitely. If you are in the red, even by a minuscule amount, you have started a countdown clock on the life of your company, and you don’t know how much time is left on it.
If you aren’t profitable you aren’t really in business. The company I am discussing had fallen from $5.7 million to $4 million, a 30% drop. Yes, that is painful and extremely difficult to deal with, but they had been at $4 million before…on their way up! Back then they thought it was great!
Now they are going out of business because they can’t figure out how to operate at an “unsustainable” level.
Don’t let control of your business slide out of your grasp. Sit down today and look at scenarios for 75%, 50% and even less revenue than you have today. Who stays and who goes at each level? What products or services might you have to jettison?
Most importantly, what is the actual level at which you cannot make money? That’s the level at which you close the company, before your savings and sanity follow it down the drain.
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Cabin Fever

Posted on August 16, 2009 by John F. Dini

My mom lives in New Jersey. Around February or March of every year she gets cabin fever. Too many cold and miserable days spent indoors, and she starts climbing the walls.

It’s August in San Antonio, and we are in cabin fever mode. With over 50 days exceeding 100 degrees, I’ve just stopped any outdoor activity until the weather breaks. I’m climbing the walls, but it’s too darn hot to do anything outside without air conditioning.

My clients are suffering from a business version of cabin fever. They are tired of hearing customers put off purchasing decisions, employees asking when they will start getting raises again, and the other nagging pains that go with a recession.

This is the longest economic contraction for any business owner under 45 years old or so. It seems like it’s going to last forever. Attitudes stink, and everyone is grouchy.

Discover Financial Services just ran a survey about the outlook for the next year, and 57% of business owners said things would be worse. Intuit (the QuickBooks people) did the same, and over 50% of their customers said that things would be this bad for at least another 2 years. The National Federation of Independent businesses NFIB, says that fewer than 5% of their members think it is time to expand. We all have cabin fever.

Things are bad, but they won’t be this way forever. The economy is like the weather. We can complain about it, but we can’t do anything but deal with it.

Sooner or later we’ll get that first warm day of Spring, that first cool breeze of Autumn, or that first week where we can’t get orders out fast enough. Then we’ll quickly forget cabin fever…until the next time.

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