Entrepreneurial News®

Tricare For Life

OK, I’ve had my second complaint from a medical professional about reaching these guys on the phone.

They don’t have email that I’m aware of listed on their site.

I’m stuck with them for medical and dental coverage, as a retired Navy officer. I’m used to running stuff professionally, and I can see serious problems with the Life side.

It has few signs of LIfe.

One reason they’re so cheap is that they don’t pay claims. And it takes even a medical profession multiple calls on the phone to get a decision on refilling a prescription early.

And the medical professionals can’t send them an email.

Let’s tri and do better, guys and gals. We’re stuck with you.

When they were located on the West Coast, service was pretty good. But it’s gone to hell now that you’re on the East Coast.

Pun intended.

Could also be that David McIntyre isn’t running Tricare for Life, any longer, too.

Change in leadership changes the organization.  Go find a new one, guys.

The DEI Con

I’ve written in this blog what a con job the whole Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry is, and now Bill Cunningham on his Sunday radio show, had a guest who said exactly that.

In fact, I borrowed the title from the guest, whose name I didn’t get, just because it does represent to me, and my small business clients, the con job that this DEI industry is trying to perpetuate.

My average consulting client has about 20 employees. The biggest one has 500 or so. Normally they hire for competency, not according to any arbitrary mix of ethnicity, equity or inclusiveness. Here in Arizona, we have a higher-than-normal concentration of Hispanics, so they tend to be a higher-than-normal percentage of the workforce. Elsewhere in the US, other ethnicities are higher in representation.

A client just hired a new Director of Service, a guy who had worked for him before. Did he consider gender or DEI in the decision? Nope. Just competency.  He knew the guy’s work was excellent, so he hired him on the spot. He did consult me, which is always flattering, and I greenlighted the hire.

The point of it all is that small and medium sized business, who employs the majority of Americans,  doesn’t really consider DEI in it’s hiring decisions. Mostly just competency. DEI is probably considered to some extent, but it’s far from being the only factor.

The federal policy makers should consider that when setting workforce policy. Or just ignore national policy and let the states do it.

The T-Mobile Shuck and Jive

I recently bought a new I-Phone at T-Mobile and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

It wasn’t pleasant because what I thought I agreed to didn’t get reflected in the first bill. The future charges weren’t reflected in the agreement, either.

T-Mobile should have explained that the first direct deposit deduction would be higher because of a conversion charge, and the bill in second and succeeding months would be what I agreed to.

BTW, the sales rep didn’t have me sign that I agreed to anything spelled out in the contract, which is in my mind a major problem, because I could legally void the whole deal.

When I ran national telemarketing for MCI, we prided ourselves in transparency, and it paid dividends in customers actually calling our lines wanting to switch.

I could probably take this contract and agreement problem to the Arizona Consumer Complaints Division, and get the whole deal thrown out, but a nice young lady named Savanah at my local T-Mobile store did a good job of explaining what the contract said.

And I like my new iPhone.

BTW, Apple, it’s my fourth I-Phone.

So, T-Mobile needs to do some training of salespeople in their stores, to get more transparency in their transactions. And rewrite some of their language to indicate what the succeeding months will be after the first month, so there are no surprises.

They might lose some transactions, but they’ll gain customer loyalty. And they’ll save customer sales reps time, because they won’t have to explain what’s going on after customers are surprised.

 

Ferrari, Entrepreneur

The whole family went to see the move ‘Ferrari’ on opening day, and it was quite good.

I lived in Italy around the time the movie covers and worked at Ford during the negotiations between Ford and Ferrari, so I have an interest in the subject.

I think Ferrari was accurately portrayed, with all of his flaws, but all Italian married men used to have mistresses; it’s part of the national psyche.

What wasn’t brought out much was that after Ferrari retired from racing himself, in the late 1920’s he opened a machine shop, specializing in racing parts. And it was apparently successful. During the Facist years in Italy, running a business wasn’t the easiest thing to do.

And, once Ferrari’s business was successful, he organized Scuderia Ferrari, which is the Ferrari race them which continues to this day. And he was a successful team owner, even breaking even, apparently.

And his long-suffering wife, who managed his occasionally chaotic finances, backed him with her personal guarantee when he decided (based on market demand) to expand from producing 100 cars a year to 400 a year. He got a bank loan of $500,000 (at least as portrayed in the film) to do it.

Ferrari car roduction these days is many times the 400 they had in the movie, and the company now employs 4500 people and is again independent of any car companies.

So, like most entrepreneurs, Ferrari was in hock up to his eyeballs, but he found the money to have a nice villa for his mistress, as well as his Modena home. A bit unusual, but not by Italian standards.

But he was an entrepreneurial success, no?

Customer Service Follies

Customer service seems to be taking a turn for the worse, except in small businesses.

Worse yet, initial contact would make you think it’s not bad. Lots of numerical options, friendly voices.

But there’s a bad side: you can’t in some cases get out of the loop.

ATT sounds good, but the last number you hit to change carriers doesn’t work. When they get the switch notice from Cox, they call again, sweetness and light. Why not do it right the first time?

Century Link, of course, is bad to the bone. Our landline is up maybe 80 % of the time, and they can’t or won’t fix it. So, we’re moving our entire account to Cox.

Cox isn’t entirely clean, either. After accepting the account, worth about $225 a month, they want a deposit from a person with an 840 credit score. Go figure.

And Equifax won’t release the credit report without four factor authentication which doesn’t work for some reason.

The good news is that small business isn’t falling for these trends.

So, What’s AI Good For?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since about 2020, but has really hit prominence only in the last six months or so, with the introduction and use of Chat/GPT.

And, Elon Musk is introducting his version, called x.ai.

You may be wondering how you can use this new tool. Courtesy of our colleague Kelli Waxman, who pulled these ideas from Chat/GPT, here are some possible uses:

  1. Data Analysis. Lots of information is stored, and can be analyzed, to develop marketing programs, for example.
  2. Customer personalization. You can tailor website experiences to persons. such as recommending personalized products or services.
  3. Customer support personalization. You can see this now, in chatbots, but frankly they’re not very good. Big area for improvement.
  4. Pricing optimization. Prices can be adjusted locally, based on data you glean from local databases, but you have to be careful in asking Chat/GPT a question that will give you what you want.
  5. AI can automate a lot of repetitive tasks, such as customer lookups.
  6. Use of AI can, at least for a while provide a competitive advantage, by making your company quicker to respond to customer wishes.
  7. Automation of sales and marketing lead generation; we have used this for Solutions Forum and, so far, it hasn’t been cost effective. But we may not be crafting optimal marketing pieces or lists.

And, there’s more out there, I’m sure.

Doctors, Heal Thyselves

Most medical practices need to do a better job of patient care.

I recently had a situation where my GP made a diagnosis but wanted a confirming diagnosis from a gastroenterologist.

So, my GP sent a request to my gastroenterologist, Arizona Digestive Services. They originally said they’d set up a telemedicine appointment, but after two days, failed to do so.

Arizona Digestive Services then referred me to another gastroenterology practice, who did call, but said they couldn’t treat me until January, since I was a patient of Az Digestive Services until then.

So, I remain with my original problem, with no solution. My dear wife came up with a solution, which we’ve adopted for the time being.

I’ve never heard of such an arrangement, and I hope that the State of Arizona regulatory authorities will look into it.

Or, someone at the two gastro practices should display a bit of entrepreneurial initiative and reach out to solve the problem.

I’m not holding my breath.

 

Don’t Burn Yourself Out, Or Let Your Employees Burn Out

This topic of burnout came up during one of our Solutions Forum meetings, and we think it’s important enough to cover in Entrepreneurial News.

All of the entrepreneurs in our groups are experiencing burnout at the moment, which is why we covered it, and we’re still covering it to see if our solutions worked.

We think the signs of burnout are:

  1. Not wanting to lead your company, or in some case, have anything to do with your company. And not wanting to turn over decision making and operations to someone else.
  2. Not wanting to make the occasionally tough decisions that need to be made.
  3. Not caring about your employees.
  4. Not noticing when your employees are experiencing burnout (their symptoms might be the same as yours).
  5. Not wanting to even investigate the origins of burnout in yourself and your employees.

There are probably more signs, but the ones above should get you thinking.

There aren’t apparently a lot of ideas on how to cure burnout. Probably because most owners don’t want to admit that they’re burned out, which they think is a sign of weakness.

Here are some of the ideas on curing burnout that we’ve uncovered:

  1. Take some time off, preferably about a week or more, turn over decision making to your #2, and don’t think about the business. In the short term, go have a sandwich in your favorite spot and spend all afternoon there.
  2. While you’re taking time off, spend some time with your wife/partner/significant other, and don’t talk business. Focus on them.
  3. Take your kids to Disneyland (seriously) or some other theme park, or multiple theme parks. Don’t even think about the business. The business will call you if something serious (like a fire or flood) has happened.
  4. If you have a hobby, go do that for a week or so. At Ford, racing cars was my form of coping with burnout, but my boss, the President of Ford Credit, wasn’t too fond of the idea. Jim Farley would probably let me continue racing.
  5. Don’t get wasted just ‘to let off steam’. Yes, steam gets let off, but there might be adverse consequences, such as a DUI. Fortunately, there’s Uber and Lyft. Nothing good ever happens in a bar after 1 am.

So, there are our burnout signs and methods of coping. They’re certainly not exclusive, so we’d like to hear from you readers.

Don’t Dig a Hole

Loren Feldman of 21 Hats has presented me with another topic: What do you do after you lose a couple of large clients in a row?

The first thing is don’t get down on yourself.

The second thing is analyzing why things went wrong and you got fired.

You lost them for a reason, possibly a not very good reason, but you need to do some soul searching.

  1. Were your fees too high in relation to performance? If so, what could have been done to improve performance? Did the assignment generate more in profits (or will it) than its cost? Does the client understand this?
  2. Were you a good fit in the client’s culture? Did you work well with the people in the company that you were supposed to?
  3. How receptive was management to what changes you were proposing?
  4. Did you do an ‘after action’ debrief with the client to find out why they fired you?

There are probably more questions that could be asked, but it’s key to get back up on the horse and ride. Don’t fall in the pity well and not recover.

You might have to make changes in your outlook for example, when I started marketing consulting, I did lose  two large clients in a row. One for financial reasons, one because the CEO was difficult to work with and had underestimated how much capital he needed to launch.

I determined several things:

  1. Broaden my consulting focus towards smaller companies;
  2. Don’t do startups, which may not take your advice and may be underfunded;
  3. Broaden my consulting services to, in my case, owner consulting, which because the major focus of my practice for 20 years and was more successful than the marketing consulting, because I was able to pioneer a market in Phoenix, rather than be an entrant in a already crowded market.

So, go out and have a margarita for lunch and think about what happened, why it happened  and what positive things it portends.

Accentuate the positive.

Dodging WalMart

Loren Feldman made the point that business owners are burning out trying to compete with WalMart.

Might be right.

You don’t want to pick a fight with the WalMart big dog, or possibly the Target big dog, either.

If anything, and we have a pending project to do this, use WalMart as a benchmark for products and services because, as large as they are, they’re pretty nimble. And then we reverse engineer.

So, we say develop products and services that WalMart (or Target for that matter) doesn’t carry. In the process, you get unique offerings that will stand out from WM, and even the rest of your competitors.

For example, we have a client who has a water-saving hose nozzle under development, which won’t be found at WalMart unless they approach him with an offer (I’ve seen it happen) at reasonable price points. In his case, we might dodge big dog Ace Hardware, too, although they’re pretty easy to deal with.

We plan to use internet and social media to publicize the nozzle (the domain is already registered) and a prototype GoDaddy site is parked with GD. I plan to personally test it, given the size of my water bills.

So, if you have a product idea, use WalMart for reverse engineering and a competitive survey of what’s out there,

Do a focus group over lunch at a restaurant and invite some people you know who might be interested.

But don’t panic over a little incoming, gang.