This is a tiny, but powerful Relevant Report today. I want to introduce you a grocery store called Natural Grocers/Vitamin Cottage. They have about 80 locations and have been in business for over 55 years. But what you will find significant is their store hours. They are open from 8:56 a.m. until 8:04 p/m/ weekdays.…
The world’s largest fast food chain, Subway, has 25,000 locations. With that kind of clout they figured they could go after more market share currently held by McDonald’s and Burger King. How and where did they start? They quickly identified that there was ton of business to be had in the “morning day part” i.e.,…
You want to advertise your business for the lowest cost, right? Your friends have told you, “You have to be on Facebook and Twitter…it’s all about social media, right?” OR…You stew about what customer are saying about you on Angie’s list or Yelp. Do the Social Media thing if you want…but I’d rather suggest you…
I am not a fan of people who say, “you gotta spend money to make money.” Which money? Marketing? Hiring? Employee lounge? If you can only pick one, the answer is “spend it on your customer experience!” Let me give you an example: Fidelity, the trillion-dollar financial firm, identified a problem with their phone system…
Even if you have a small mom-and-pop business you still have to ACT BIG. Here’s what I mean by that. I have a friend who owns a little frozen yogurt shop where we live outside of Denver. I was in getting a cup of chocolate brownie and cookie dough and I’m behind a woman who…
Here is a little quiz: Who do you think is the most underserved and most misunderstood customer? Times up! It’s women! Women are the new head of the household because they are the most powerful customers you will ever have…and I say this for only one reason. Women buy everything! Women comprise 83% of all…
What do you do if you have a bad reputation for service? How do you fix it? Sprint (the phone company) had YOUR problem. They used to have one of the very worst service reputations…and now they have one of the best. What did they do? It’s simple. They fixed the complaints the complaints customers…
Here’s a problem that probably keeps you up at night. What do you do about those people in your organization who aren’t productive? The ones who are just not pulling their own weight? I’ll pass along a profound tip I learned from Jack Welch – the former CEO of General Electric…which is incidentally the largest…
My advice today it exploit the power of the chocolate chip cookie! I went to a large hotel meeting and everyone was talking about the Doubletree Hotels Chocolate Chip cookie… if you’ve been there you know they give you two hot cookies when you check in. Creates amazing goodwill. So, the following week, I told…
I wrote a cookbook a long time ago titled, “Cook Like A Stud” 38 recipes that men can prepare in the garage with their own tools. Sounds dumb, right? It WAS dumb. It was silly and largely a joke. Yet it was a best seller and I appeared on a lot of TV shows demonstrating…