Listen as Kait shares a little Christmas Spirit with us!

Emmanuelle

Baby It’s Cold Outside with Tom Carassco…

Not a darned thing to do with internet marketing and everything to do with personal and professional heroism…

What Really Happened on Flight 1549

My mention of Marcus Buckingham in a previous post got me thinking of his latest focus, the strengths movement. In, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Buckingham admonishes us to focus on enhancing our strengths rather than merely eliminating our weaknesses.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I think this is critical advice and crucial to our ability to thrive and profit as small or not-so-small business owners. But what about all the stuff we’re not good at but that still needs doing? It may be okay to ignore your weaknesses in a large organization with lots of strengths available to buttress your weakness but if you’re a small business you probably don’t have the option.

My advice? Outsource! The big guys have been doing it for years so why don’t we? The internet in particular affords us any number of reasonably priced avenues for outsourcing….

We can find …

• copywriters, graphic designers and legal advice at Elance.com
• software and website designers at RentACoder.com
• bookkeepers and marketing assistants through the International Virtual Assistants Association
• business planning and telemarketing through Guru.com

These are just 4 resources, numerous others exist to provide you the capabilities and competencies that you lack but which maybe critical to your business success. I’ve used several including Elance and RentACoder and have been well satisfied with strong results at extremely competitive prices. So if your business is suffering due to your weakness, be strong and click through to one of these or similar resources. Your business health and prosperity may well depend upon it.

Time magazine (June 16, 2008) has an interesting article about a fast food restaurant in Russia which, in the last 10 years, has grown to be the 4th largest fast food chain in the country and the only home-grown entry on the list. The chain is called Teremok and they’ve grown by focusing on blinis – the traditional Russian thin pancakes (think crepes). They serve them with everything from butter to smoked herring and caviar.

What captured my attention in the article was the founder’s, Mikhail Goncharov, approach to problem solving. The article states:

…All of it is learning by doing. “When I see a problem, ” Goncharov says, “we buy books on the topic, then we read, then we decide.”

Wow, how simple can you get and, by following this approach, Teremok has grown to $110 million in revenue (including a huge increase of $47 million over last year). So here’s the methodology – 1. Identify the problem –> 2. Search for solutions –> 3. Investigate the solution –> 4. Decide on a course of action and –> 5. Implement the solution.

With 400,000 books published last year and millions (billions?) of blog postings on every topic imaginable, you think that you might be able to find the answer to the problems you face in your business.

Why do I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz after the wicked witch was turned into a puddle? Because AOL, long bleeding subscribers from their paid services, has turned to an advertiser supported model and is now offering e-mail and content for free to all.

So if you, like I, were paying AOL — in addition to your high speed Internet provider — merely to have access to your AOL email account then rejoice cuz ding-dong the wicked witch is dead! To cancel your AOL account but keep your email service call 1-800-984-6207. You may be faced with a long wait but if it saves you $25 a month, then hey, it’s a good deal.

Don’t worry, if you still need dial-up occasionally, AOL offers a $4.95 plan that gives you 10 hours of dial-up a month. And AOL is still offering their dial-up access and broadband access plans to those who need them.

Why is AOL doing this? Because they’ve lost 10 million subscribers in the last 4 years. At that rate, they’d be out of business by the end of the decade if they didn’t do something like this. They had already freed (most) of their content now they were taking the next step by acknowleding that a captive audience ain’t necessarily a good thing particularly when you’re making them pay double for what they can get for free. It’s a good decision and, if they’re smart, it will pay off for them in the long run.

Lessons for marketers? A customer who does business with you because s/he wants to is a heckuva lot more valuable than who who does business with you because s/he has no choice.