ON GROWTH. YOUR BANK ACCOUNT VS. YOUR BODY?

Growth is always seen as a positive attribute until it reaches your own body. If I tell you, for example, I will grow your wallet or your bank account by a few thousand dollars,  this is seen as a good proposal. But if I tell you, grow your body bigger by 20%, this is seen as a negative proposal. Wallet fatter ok, waist line fatter, not OK. So what gives?

The difference, in short, is in the infrastructure.  You cannot build a Dodge Ram size vehicle on a Mini Cooper vehicle chassis. But if you do, you will overload and maybe break that Mini chassis. The same concept applies in the case of your body, since the infrastructure  (your chassis / skeleton / backbone) is “fixed”, any additional growth (beyond normal BMI) is seen as negative since such growth will strain your body and its organs (engine/heart overload, also auxiliary/organs overload). The only way adding pounds to your body will be seen as positive is when you can scale up your skeleton; add 1 foot of skeletal structure along your height, hypothetically, and add a few pounds, no problem whatsoever.

In the process of growing a business, operators forget to scale up their business quickly.  Your business grows by 50%, then you don’t keep the same business skeleton, you will need to hire more people, invest in new facilities,  or else you will strain your resources, and your best workers will leave you (or fail on you,  similar to body kidney failure with overload.)

When you get a bigger family, you will need to scale up; bigger home, hire maid service, etc. Absent that,  the system will not be sustainable, unhappiness ensues.

The lesson learnt; good growth is accompanied with commensurate infrastructural growth. This may seem like common sense, but it is most frequently ignored because of the immediate added cost to scale up the infrastructure.  The long-term cost of not adding it quickly is much higher.

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ON SYNTHESIS AND ANALYSIS.

So which comes first? As young kids, we use Lego bricks to build structures and ideas- some designs of sorts. This is synthesis. Once you have the first completed structure,  you can do some analysis, then decide to reiterate on the design to improve it. Synthesis takes place again – as new ideas are synthesized / compounded. Your first Lego car design had no wheels, the 2nd one did as you discovered the first car didn’t roll. Synthesis first. Engineering is all about this continuous process of synthesis-analysis-synthesis. God does not need to do any of this, he creates things perfect, at first go – no iterative synthesis. We, on the other hand, err every step of the way. So synthesis is our way of saying we cannot see the optimal design right away, we have to work hard to understand things. All those corporate departments of research and development, analysis groups, etc are an acknowlegment of how little we know a priori.

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On Sales Leverage

Many companies and shops are open for business everyday and do not have a leverage product in their product mix. For example, a shop may have 10 products yielding 10% each. Say you’re selling scarves at $5 each, yielding a net profit of $2; in a day, you will need to sell 50 pieces to make $100 in profit (maybe you even have to deal with 50 customers!) Instead, you could identify 1 product yielding $50 in profit per transaction (like a suit or leather jacket), so in a day, you need to sell 2 products to lock in $100 in profit. Compare this to dealing with 30 to 50 customers selling low leverage products. Many companies struggle because they do not have leverage products, or if they do have them, they fail to promote them well. Look around at your business or shop, identify those high value leverage products (high profit density items) and market them well. Happy Selling!

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Spotlight Position: An Important Lesson in Sales

There’s a visual you always need to remember when you sell a product. It is a spotlight. The spotlight should be focused on the prospect  (the buyer), and not on you the seller. If you hear yourself saying: we have the best products, we outsell the competition, we, we, we.. then you should know you’re having the spotlight on you the seller. This is annoying to the buyer, the buyer wants the spotlight on her, ask her the questions to uncover her needs, then offer your solutions. Many sellers who receive solution-selling training continue to waste a lot of time leaving the spotlight on the seller. Make your buyer feel like a queen, and the best advice to the seller is to check your ego at the door as you walk into your meeting.

solution selling

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