In a nutshell, ERP stands for Resource enterprise planning. It’s a big nasty corporate word for “all the stuff that runs your business”, so combine that with the web and you’ve got a “run all the parts of your business on the web” system. It’s really quite simple, just think of all the things you do to keep your business running, things like accounting, a rolodex on the desk full of customer names, a calendar in your phone, the software that connects to your machines… now put those into a centralized system on the web, one that you can get to from anywhere, and whalla, an online ERP. Here’s some more reading…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning

Bottom of the 9th, 2 down, 2 strikes, and that kid looked scared. Everyone in the WORLD was getting ready to brush their teeth (or looking for their keys). I don’t know what happened inside his head, but the tripple he hit to send the game into extra innings set the place on fire.

The Rangers countered with more great baseball, and the Cardinals found themselves working hard to keep up with a (better?) team. Again, in the 10th, 2 down, 2 stikes, and another clutch hit saved the day.

Finally, when David Freese hit the home run that put the Cardinals in a celebratory 10-9 frenzy, everyone was thinking: “How did this happen?”.

I Think there are 3 great business lessons here:

1: Don’t get down just because you’ve had a bad day/quarter/year (pitch/inning/game), today doesn’t define your company! Don’t let the experts and statistics define you. As bad as this time period is, your glorious moment might be on the horizon!

2: Use extreme pressure and stress as fuel to make big things happen. Let the stress focus you, fire you up, and motivate you towards great decisions. Your big moments are usually the ones when you are outside your comfort zone.

3: Don’t expect rewards until you’ve been through hell. Anything worth having is really, really hard to get. The Cardinals trailed for most of the game. Apple struggled in Microsoft’s shadow for a decade. The shadow of adversity makes us crave the light of success.

What does it take to run a successful business? The short answer is that almost every type of personality has run a successful business, but let’s not end there. It seems that there must be a certain set of personality traits that set the real leaders apart from the rest. In his recent book, Great by choice, Jim Collins  asserts (with 10 years of studying entrepreneurs that not only succeeded, but 10x passed their competition) that really, really successful entrepreneurs had at least 3 traits in common. Here they are:

1. Productive paranoia: They were all scared to death of being surpassed or beaten. They channeled this fear into bouts of incredible productivity.
2. Empirical creativity: They try stuff, find creative solutions, and think outside the box. It’s not that they’re brilliant, or genius status, they just don’t mind doing things different.
3. Unwavering discipline: They have the balls to stay on track, despite outside influences.

This isn’t the “if I have these traits then I’ll be successful” list, this is simply what the great ones had in common. This list goes on top of the obvious ones everyone always talks about. Among the common ones:

1. Ability to sell your product. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business.
2. Ability to take hard blows, deflect discouragement, and put one foot in front of the other, even when it is hard.
3. Organizational skills, you have to know how to choose from good, better, and best.
4. A supportive family, or no family at all.
5. A decent work ethic. A company doesn’t build itself, and if it’s yours, you’ve got a lot of work to do.
6. Some sort of external motivation: are you in it for your family, your faith, or some cause? There needs to be a factor greater than the business itself at work.

The new way to market is a much better one for everybody: Add value to your customer FOR FREE, then give them the opportunity to pay you for something else. Let’s look at an example of two competing lawn care companies:

Company A spends $5,000 on mailers (that talk all about the company and a promotion), and send it out to a whole city. They then take $5,000 to pay a phone marketing company to make a bunch of calls. The results are that 90% of the mailers don’t even get looked at, and only 10% of the remaining convert to sales. The rest of it goes to a landfill and everyone who saw the flyer makes a mental note to ignore that logo in the future. Same goes with the calls, except rather than making a mental note, I am pissed as hell that someone interrupted my dinner to talk about lawn care.

Company B understands the new way of marketing. They take the $10,000 and invest $5,000 into cookies (or some other insanely awesome and off the wall gift), that the mowers give to each family when they get done mowing the lawn. They then take $500 and create a witty home made youtube video. Check this out: http://youtu.be/LJP1DphOWPs, it’s hilarious! This guy was on Jay Leno, you can’t buy that for $500! They take another $500 and create a series of how to videos, and post them on youtube and facebook. They take the remaining $4,000 and create 1,000 really nice (something you’d be surprised to get in the mail) lawn reference guides and mail them to targeted neighborhoods. They’d be hard to throw away and there wouldn’t be a single ad in the book. The company info would be an afterthought, in small letters, not the focus.

What is the resulting difference in the image of company A verses company B at the end of $10,000? Company A has a few lucky customers who found them in the mail. Period. Customer B has a bunch of customers who love the online helps, a bunch who love the book, a bunch who love the cookies, and a bunch who have a famous lawn mower with over 6,000,000 hits on youtube. “My lawn care guys are those cookie guys on youtube”, or whatever… Who helped humanity more? Who helped their business more? Who made more money? Who had more fun? Get it?

In short:

• Stop bugging people
• Start adding value to people for FREE
• Help people
• People will talk and remember you

Albert Pujols, plays 1st base and hits. That’s it? Yearly salary: around $16,000,000

I recently talked to a friend of mine who has a small wood shop. He said, “I think I am trying to do too much, be too much to too many people. I have all these machines, and they’re rarely all being used. I’m having a hard time paying my overhead, what should I do?”.

What is your motive in your work? Is it to just please whoever with whatever? If so, just keep it up, great charity work. For most business owners, they’re in it to make money. Take a minute to think about what people are willing to pay you money for. What is it that you (your company) really does that justifies a transaction? What are you better than everyone else at? What makes you excited? What things do you do grudgingly? What parts of your offering are boring or commodity based?

I prodded my friend with these questions. Turns out, he is the best at finishing wood, a complete master. He has a ton of experience and loves every minute of it. He knows everything about it. He’s excited when it comes time to finish his product. He hates building the doors, hates building the boxes, and hates answering the phones, and only does these things so that he can finish products. He feels like other people do them so much better than he. He mentioned that when he competes against bigger shops with more automated equipment, he generally looses unless the customer is looking for a particularly artistic finish (like the ones he loves to do). I asked him how much of his time is dedicated to his passion, the thing that he is the best at. He told me about 10%.

If we’re honest with ourselves here, we see that only 10% of the time my friend is really optimizing his profit, and even liking what he does. The rest of the time he is muddling around at the bottom of the barrel, not utilizing his strengths, competing against better players. That’s a problem. Especially when you consider that 80% of his overhead is related to the 90% that he hates.

What about this, I asked him.  Eliminate 80% of your overhead (stress), stop doing what you suck at, and focus on what and where you really make the money and are indispensable. You’ve now got 80% more cashflow, and 90% more time. You can outsource just about everything now days. Dedicate those two giant numbers to your passion, in reverse order. First put 90% of you time to finishing, and as needed, you can use the 80% to grow. Now this raises some very touchy questions: If you ONLY did what you were really good at, would you still have a business? Before you answer, get creative. Still no? Can you say, split the time and do like 50/50? That’s a start. If yes, what are you waiting for? You don’t see your doctor taking out the garbage or making appointments because he has this one figured out.

In short:

• Be skilled (the best) at something
• Know where you really make money
• Eliminate (outsource) as much of the other crap as you can
• Dive in and love it