Profitability Channel

2007 Internet statistics have been released and it was a real surprise - at least to me.

There were roughly 1.32 billion internet users in 2007 worldwide. Three continents had 83% of those users: North America, Europe and Asia. Actually not in that order. That's what surprised me.

Hands down winner? Asia with 39% or 510 million users. Europe came in second with 26% or 348 million. The United States and Canada combined had 18% or 238 million users. Sheesh, I can't believe that.

Wow what a great opportunity! What do you have available online that could be interesting to 1.096 billion people? A slender 1% would be roughly 10,000,000. How do you get to those users? I don't know but I am going to find out.

No not that! Haggling. Everyone is doing it and retailers are quietly telling their employees it's okay.

I cannot stand the word haggling as it begins with a slur. Still, a rose is a rose is a rose and so bargaining or negotiating over a hammer or a rug or a blouse is no different. Still it all seems so, well, unseemly.

I think it's the retail that bothers me. People negotiate prices all the time in the business to business world. How do we decide if it's right for us? Do you stick to your price no matter what? Or are you so flexible that every customer or client gets something different? Have you ever had to think "cash flow" rather than "profit"?

I struggle with it. When I had a manufacturing company I had direct costs and overhead. That's really simple. My customers understood the wildly swinging metals market and so changes in pricing were accepted as a matter of fact.

Now that I deal in information delivery it's a waaaay different ballgame. I have felt uncomfortable and alone and out of sorts. Still, it's exciting to do what I do and has put me in the middle of lots of unbelievably smart and talented people I would not have met otherwise.

Would I be in the midst of that if I could just lowball price and bring on members who didn't fit the profile of those who could best benefit from our service? No. So I am feeling lucky.

As for those Prada shoes I am lusting after? I'll let you know when I can say I am feeling brave.

This is what popped up into my head when I read a story in the paper today that home defibrillators don't save lives like ones in airplanes and malls.

Of course the first thing I thought was they were not as good as commercial ones because of the price needed to make them reasonable to home owners. No. Then I thought maybe it was due to lack of training. No. Too difficult for an (presumably) older person to lift or position correctly. No. The person stayed at home too long before asking for help. No.

They don't work as well because more than 50% of the people at home are alone when a cardiac event strikes. As good as they are it takes two people to make a defibrillator save a life.

Ever been in a situation where saving your company is your life? In business it's growth or death so if you're not moving up you're moving down. Sometimes what you need is another person to change the outcome.

Twice in the last twenty-four hours I have spoken to people who decided they needed to get help expanding their businesses. Both had put it off and both were a little frightened about the responsibility of paying someone.

I don't blame them. Skipping a paycheck might be the only answer for an entrepreneur but it's not part of the deal for employees. It will be comforting to know that you've chosen to give your company life with more than just you holding up one end.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to talk on Profitability Channel about one of my favorite topics. I love working with business owners that really want to take their businesses forward and accomplish much greater results.

Every business goes through an evolutionary process that begins with the startup and ends with a synergistic business that produces income for the owners even though they may be drinking martinis on a beach somewhere. A critical stage in that process is positioning the business for significant growth. This brings me to my topic. "Four Powerful Principals to Grow Your Business".

I'll be discussing the areas you need to address to be ready to grow. We all know the double edged sword that rapid growth can be for a company. If the infrastructure isn't ready to handle the traffic the business can hit a brick wall. So make sure you tune in if your plan calls for significantly increased results and we'll talk about the things to address to enable your company to make that leap forward.

Join me on Monday, April 7, 2008 at 10 AM Eastern time on BizBuzz to find out how to safely grow your business.

I don't bother to stop my 17 year old daughter's complaints by telling her she sounds like a broken record. She's never heard one. Zap is something you do to food in a microwave not read in a comic book. The X and Y generations do not "early adopt" technology. That would assume they believe others won't.

I started to think about this while trying to come up with 52 every day business terms. Shoestring was one of those words and I realized that kid's shoes often don't use them any more. In fact I walked through all the shoe areas at a local department store and confirmed what I feared. We don't use shoestrings that much anymore. Even shoes that look like they have them don't. They're fake. Another great term that will go the way of cassette, ledger and mainframe.

So in five to ten years talking about marketing on a shoestring will be met with blank stares and require a lot more explanation. Really, that's a good thing. We should be forced to change our vocabulary and make sure we understand the terms we use so casually. It keeps us fresh and sharp.

Besides, marketing on a shoestring almost never works.

The New York Times reported today the deaths of two notable bloggers and the illness of another. Since this may be a correlation not a cause no one is saying that blogging can be dangerous to your health...yet.

It's not the blogging itself. The theory is the deceased worked themselves to death trying to keep their blogs current with all the information on the internet. You have got to be kidding me.

Every business owner knows you can never get all the information. Waiting for information causes paralysis which can be worse than death. (It can be a substitute for action. I actually had an employee who said he could not make a decision unless he had 100% information. It made him very busy and yet completely unproductive.) The internet has made information available 24/7 and there is certainly lots of it. That's the good news. The bad news is it changes very frequently so you can do a lot of second guessing. That'll drive you crazy too.

Decisions have to be made with the best information available at the time. Tweaking and correcting and modifying are all a part of being flexible enough to work with new information as it comes along.

Entrepreneurship sometimes involves hard decisions. There isn't enough information in the world to get around that.

There is nothing more painful than looking back and saying "All the signs were there. Why didn't I see them?" And nothing more wasteful.

My daughter received a diagnosis over the weekend that was devastating. I spent many hours saying to myself and others "Oh, remember that time" or "No wonder she did that" or blah blah blah.

The next day a client representative informed me that the results we received were for another girl named Ashley and that my daughter had not actually been tested at all for this particular malady.

So much for seeing the signs.

I started thinking about that from a business owner's perspective. Looking forward we need to use the Black Swan perspective. Think about and write down every single event that might occur in your business even ones you cannot imagine happening. This would indicate you plan to succeed even in the face of extreme difficulty. By the way this is particularly applicable in family businesses where emotions can override common sense.

Looking back is an application of False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear that you may have received (or caused) irreparable harm because you weren't paying attention. Fear that others on your staff are not reliable. Fear that what you have worked so hard for will be duplicated and used for another company's benefit.

Living in fear makes for bad decision making. Understand that you can't know everything, trust everyone or prevent every cataclysmic event. You sure aren't going to be able to work through and learn from these events as they occur when you are only looking backwards.

The last decision that anyone wants to make is deciding the best way top say "I blew it." Politicians have found solace in the non-apologetic phrase: "mistakes were made". (An idiom that political commentator William Schneider suggested was in the "past exonerative" tense.) But when facing a board of directors, partners, stakeholders or employees - not to mention the nice folks at the IRS, SEC or other such agencies - rhetorical sleight of hand is a flaccid strategy. My guests for a two part series done exclusively for Profitability Channel know a thing or two about classic business blunders: How to prevent them from happening, identifying them before they become fatal and even overcoming the damage they leave behind.

Lloyd Whitaker and David Crumpton through their firm "Newleaf Corporation" are seasoned experts who for the past 20 years have been recognized as being among the top turnaround and workout experts in the business. With clients like Bank of America, CitiCorp Credit Services, Inc., Interstate/Johnson Lane, Inc., the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission and many more they are the triage specialists of the business world. In this series they share their ten critical lessons for business survival.

These shows are anything but academic; these veterans have a wealth of real-world examples and offer equally practical, street-wise advice that will make you a sharper competitor in a world where identifying the threats can be the most critical lesson for business survival. Don't miss "Mistakes Were Made...Ten Critical Lessons for Business Survival".

Only on Profitability Channel.

Anybody who knows me is sometimes annoyed by my "gifts". I can spot spelling errors on papers Law & Order detectives are scanning. I am a nutcase about grammar and truly believe there is a time and place to use "lay and lie" and I work hard to end sentences with anything but prepositions. I take pride in editing, editing, editing until a sentence or paragraph sounds exactly right. Pride does indeed goeth before a fall as I learned to my chagrin today.

Rob Hill is our Advisor Talk host. He's smart as a whip and as you can tell from his blog a pretty darned good communicator. He submitted this blog with the title Mistakes Were Made. What he didn't bargain for was being tagged as the mistake maker. Fortunately Rob also has a great sense of humor and we had a good laugh.

Moral of the Story: If I had spoken the title it would have sounded like "Mistakes Were Made. By Rob Hill". That's what I heard in my head. But you can't hear me and have to rely only on the words. Be so so careful when you're writing a letter, an email, an employee review especially when you're in a hurry. One careless sentence can cause a lot of unintended misunderstanding.