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Dumb Things Small Businesses Do #6: IngratitudeNovember 26

So instead of the obligatory Thanksgiving post where we talk about gratitude (don’t get me wrong, I think gratitude is awesome), I’m going to assume you know enough to stop for a second and remember how much amazing stuff is in your life. How many fantastic people, how much material abundance (even when it doesn’t feel that way), how much freedom.

Instead, today we’re going to talk about a dumb mistake that lots of businesses make. Big businesses are actually dumber than small ones on this topic, but if you think I was going to pass up the chance to use this photo, you’re nuts.

Anyway, most big businesses are too inflexible to turn this around. But you’re small and maneuverable, which is why you’re going to clean up.

The Easiest Way to Make Money

Even in the midst of all this financial panic and freefall, there is a nice big pot of delicious money sitting on the table for you.

No painful mountains to climb, no spiteful deities to appease, no hefty entrance fee to pay.

That pot of money is held by the customers who already trust you and know that you’re cool. They would

How to Survive the End of the WorldNovember 19

A six-mile wide chunk of cosmic trash came screaming toward us faster than a missile. In 10 minutes, the face of the earth changed forever.

No one could have seen it coming, telescopes being short in supply at the end of the Cretaceous period (and T-rexes not being very good at fiddling with the focus knobs).

The year that followed was literally hellish. The Gulf of Mexico vaporized nearly instantly. A rain of molten debris set off forest fires that engulfed half the earth’s wooded areas. Uncontrolled swarms of insects hatched to feast on the corpses of the 76% of the earth’s species that had suddenly become extinct. And a cloud of soot and space dust created a night that lasted for six straight months.

(Thank you, PBS. Have I ever mentioned my love of nature programs? Heroes and Lost have nothing on this.)

Sound familiar?

Is there maybe a teeny tiny little part of you that thinks this is a pretty good metaphor for the cascading crashes we’re seeing right now in the economy?

Who survives the unsurvivable?

So what made it? Some birds, a lot of bugs, a few weird lo

Dumb Things Small Businesses Do #5: The Worst NumberNovember 14

Primordial marketing guru Dan Kennedy likes to say that “One is the worst number in business.” I agree with this, and I’ll take it a little farther.

If there’s an important “one” in your business, you don’t have a business. You have a project that may or may not continue to make money.

Especially in times of rapid change and uncertainty, “one” is the enemy.

There’s no stability in one. Which does a better job of keeping its tires on the ground–a unicycle, a bicycle, or an 18-wheeler?

Don’t wobble around by trying to balance your business on a critical “one,” or even a “two” or “three.”

One strategy for lead generation

If you exclusively use Google AdWords or SEO to find new business, what happens when Google changes its algorithms overnight?

You can ask the thousands of businesses that went under the last time they did it. It’s called a Google Slap, and it comes with no warning and no apologies.

If you only use direct mail, what happens when we get another anthrax scare? Same answer as above. No one opens envelopes from people they don’t know, and you get no new business

Dumb Things Small Businesses Do #4: Thinking It’s About YouNovember 11

Remember my hapless entrepreneur from last week? He dug himself a giant scary financial hole because he was so in love with his vision of his product that he didn’t bother to get any feedback from actual customers.

In fact, he tended to think of his customers as an annoying necessity. They kept calling with their stupid support questions, keeping him from spending his time adding features no one had asked for.

They didn’t read the brochures he sent them. They didn’t use his Web page the way he thought they should. They didn’t order the product as soon as a salesperson called. The salespeople had to keep walking stupid prospects through all these dopey objections they had.

His prospects and customers were just incredibly inconvenient to his vision of what the company ought to be.

How do you feel when you’re treated as an inconvenience?

Ever been treated this way by a business? I have, probably hundreds of times. It never fails to make my blood boil.

Dumb Things Small Businesses Do #3: Getting Upside DownNovember 5

A few years ago, I did some consulting for a business owner. We were throwing around some ideas for PR and word of mouth marketing. (I didn’t end up working with him, for a variety of reasons.)

He was dead sure he was creating the next Amazon. He’d built his product from scratch. He had some experience in the same business as his customers, and he believed he knew all of their needs inside and out.

Things were humming along reasonably well, but the business wasn’t the colossus he thought it deserved to be. So he took out a second mortgage on his house. He put another $40 or $50 grand on his credit cards. Then he borrowed some more money from a group of private investors.

He moved out of his basement and into a real office. He printed 10,000 four-color glossy brochures. He brought on a staff of salespeople to make cold calls.

He was glowingly confident all through this saga. After all, his product was groundbreaking. It was magnificent. It was his baby. With all this support, there was no way it wasn’t going to be a monster hit.

Alas, it turned out not, in fact, to be a monster hit.

He didn’t lose the business or his house, whic