Entrepreneurial News®

Tim Cook’s Oops

Fox News has been playing Hilary Vaughn’s attempt to get a short comment from Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.

IMHO, Cook’s refusal to talk to her is a major public relations OOP.

Tim resolutely ignores her, which is his first mistake. As a favored rep for Fox News, she’s highly influential, and asks good, not ‘gotcha’ questions. So, talk to her.

Hilary probably wanted to ask about the cessation of the Air Drop program in China, which is a highly effective method for the Chinese rioters to communicate. Second mistake. There are probably a lot of Apple customers among the rioters, who want to use Air Drop.

Apple probably stopped Air Drop in China to avoid angering the Chinese government, who might toss Apple out of China.

But, Tim, if that happens, you say, ‘We’re with the people of China and we’re turning Air Drop back on.’ There are lot more customers beyond the Chinese government. The government isn’t too popular with the people at the moment. So, the turn on is a calculated risk worth taking.

If the Chinese government threatens to ban the sale of Apple products, you say ‘We’ll find a way to get Apple products into the hands of our loyal customers.’ Can you spell ‘black market’?

The moral of this story is put and keep your customers first.

Tim blew the chance to score a major public relations victory for Apple. No guts, no air medal, Tim.

Bravo, Shell!

Saw an ad for Shell, the big Anglo-Dutch energy producer, announcing that they were going to be building electric vehicle charging stations in their US gas stations, which I’m sure will be welcome news to the folks who drive electric vehicles.

They don’t have many locations yet; the example shown is in Fulham Road, which I believe is in the Atlanta, Georgia suburbs. The chargers are located where Shell has fast food operations, so the pitch is that you can get your car at least partially charged while having a burger.

Shell has plans to put at least one charger in each of its gas stations. A classic case of serving the customer in whatever he/she wants to buy.

Note to Shell: I have a former client who owns five Shell stations in Arizona, so if I can help with the rollout in Arizona, I’d be pleased to do it.

So, Bravo Shell for thinking of all its customer energy needs.

People, People, People

Some wags have said that businesses would run better without people to gum up the works.

Many techies have spent many hours on projects to either eliminate people or reduce them.

However, businesses who have top quality people and treat them well perform better.

We have some courses on people in our revised curriculum of the American School of Entrepreneurship, and we expect them to sell well. As soon as we get the website done, we’ll post them. The content is done, but not in all cases recorded.

But, in the short run, there are some steps you as the owner can take to improve effectiveness:

  1. If you have ‘quiet quitters’ somewhere in your organization, have your supervisors or you pull them aside and find out why they’re not motivated.
  2. Go through all your personnel and decide who’s cutting it and who isn’t. You should have standards (Key Personnel Indicators) for each of your positions. Talk to the subpar performers to see if you can improve their performance.
  3. Take a look at the training you give supervisory personnel, by talking to the people they supervise. Maybe you don’t have any formal supervisory training. We have this in the works. It’s mostly common sense, but you’d be surprised at how much this is ignored.
  4. While you’re reviewing personnel, do a 360 anonymous survey of what they think of the company, where it’s going, and even you. You might be surprised.
  5. Do some ‘Ask Me Anything’ Friday afternoon roundtables. Again, useful information should be gleaned.
  6. Pass out some awards for superior performance. Don’t just dwell on the negative.

As I review what I’ve written, I like it. So, we’ll probably record it for the School.

Maintaining Your Company Culture Through Tough Times

This was the title of an op-ed that appeared in the October 21-27 issue of the Phoenix Business Journal, and written by Greg Wells, Chief People Officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield Arizona.

Greg’s article is good, but it missed a couple of salient points in maintaining your company culture through tough times.

  1. If your company culture is strong, it will be fine through tough times, although the CEO might have to do more work to reassure the people. As Greg says, there is more emphasis on transparency.
  2. If you had to go to a hybrid remote/in office work environment during COVID, that might have permanently altered your company culture, because there wasn’t as much social interaction between employees. On the flip side, one of our clients actually found their culture improved by the split of the workforce, because there was less social interaction. Another client found that, after COVID was supposedly over, they got all their people together on a Friday afternoon, only to have some of them come down with COVID.
  3. Tough times are probably a good time for you, as the President or CEO, to take a look at your culture and assess what’s good and bad about it.  For example, you might want to weed out your Quiet Quitters.

Sort Out Your Quiet Quitters

Mike Rowe was just on Stuart Varney’s show on Fox, talking about the Quiet Quitters, and it was his opinion that they should be fired, because your staff wants to work more hours, and could absorb the workload of the Quiet Quitters.

I don’t disagree with Mike, but he overlooked one key factor to be considered before firing them: your investment in hiring and training them.

So, we’d say have a quiet conversation with the people you think are Quiet Quitters and see if there’s something to you can do to motivate them to do either more work or better work. Remember, it’s not necessarily money that they want, but instead might be something like different working hours, working from home, freedom to set one’s schedule, etc.

An interesting sidebar to this question is another point Mike brought up: the decline in the national labor participation rate, caused by people who just don’t want to work. In fairness, maybe they’re working on their entrepreneurial dream, in which case they should call us, because we’ll give them a free hour of consulting to see if their dream makes sense.

Dumb Customer Service Number 27

We haven’t written anyone up recently for dumb customer service, but that just changed.

I was concerned about my IPhone 7 giving out, since it’s 5 years old, so I went down to my local T-Mobile store to buy an IPhone SE, which has longer battery life, my major complaint with the 7.

Nice young lady named Angie cleaned out the charging port of the 7, which fixed the charging problems and inputted my order for the SE for $220 cash.

(My wife bought an SE from ATT for $200 a couple of months ago)

Angie said you’ll get the contract tomorrow electronically, and if it’s as we agreed, electronically sign it and email it back.

I’m not sure what happened to the old practice of writing the contract up in the shop, printing it out and signing it on the spot. Maybe some high pressure sales types got in the way of customer service.

Been known to happen.

So I gave Angie a good faith deposit on the phone.

This morning, the contract arrives and it’s for $400, with the $180 amortized as a promotional discount over 24 months. No mention of cash.

When I called TMobile, to fix the misunderstanding, they tried to walk away from the deal I’d verbally committed to, giving me the gobbledegook arrangement outlined above. And said that the $400 price was in line with competition. I bet.

I was born at 3 pm, but not yesterday.

So I unwound the deal and checked with my credit card, and T-Mobile hadn’t even put the charge through.

So, T-Mobile, you’re dumb and dumber. And you’ve probably lost a loyal customer over this nonsense when I get ready to replace my trusty IPhone.

Don’t Chintz on Your Promotions

My wife and I like Habit Burger, and when I saw a coupon for a free Habit burger on the side of our takeout bag, I was interested.

But, upon reading the coupon, which required online logging in and purchase of a drink, it would take me more time to do these tasks than the coupon is worth. And that excludes the gas to get to the restaurant, which is about five miles away.

So, it’s not a deal at all.

The point is, if you’re going to do a promotion which is supposed to build sales, don’t put conditions on it that would impede the sales you’re trying to build.

If you want to reward people for being good customers (which we are), just give ’em a burger, no preconditions.

Most customers are gratified that they are being rewarded.

The Value of Values

Some time back, there was a post in Inc. about the value of values.

The early part of the article said ‘values are everything’, and you should have them even before you start your company.

All well and good, but values can change or get modified.

For example, when I and a partner bought my family company, it was run like a feudal patrimony…don’t stick your head up and object to anything going on. In return, the company takes care of you.

That value set wasn’t our value set. Because we had incurred a large obligation to buy the company, we had to grow, and rapidly, and make more money, because we wouldn’t make the monthly debt payments if we didn’t.

However, we continued the value of ethical behavior. We didn’t condone one employee diving into a truck to find out where a competitor’s shipment was going, but then we didn’t fire him, either. We did counsel him about the ethics of doing what he’d done.

As the article says, we had to hire a bunch of new employees that shared our values: Hard work, going the extra mile for customers, product and service innovation, to name a few.

So, examine what your company values are, and determine if your company is living up to them or maybe you need to change them or your people to get in line with your values.

They’re Here, Now What?

Some while ago, I wrote a post in this space that we shouldn’t get all spooled up about the illegals workers let into the country, because we needed the workers, and most of the illegals looked like they’re quite capable of working.

So, here they are. Arizona and Texas have borne the effects of the influx, but both states have been fairly adroit about shipping illegals that they catch off to other areas.

The economy has cooled somewhat since my earlier post, and there might not be the jobs that there once were, but I think that there are still about 4 million jobs out there, so we should be able to digest the folks that are here.

I’m not seeing them in a Scottsdale hotel I know housed some of them under contract with the Feds or the State, and I don’t see them camped in large parking lots or on the streets of Phoenix or Scottsdale.

It seems to me that we s a country might as well get on with putting the illegals into the pipeline for green cards and citizenship, as long as they appear to be productive citizens. If criminals screw up and get arrested, we can deport them.

The Biden Bozos screwed up, but we’re apparently making lemonade from the lemons.

There’s still an I-9 program for employers, so those employing the illegals can do it legally.

The states all presumably have labor departments that keep track of employees, so they can add more to their rolls as they register in the various states. We know that they’re not all in Texas, Arizona or Florida.

Eventually, probably next year, if the Republicans are to be believed, we will get a Republican House and Senate that can get the border back under control, finishing the wall to get the flow of migrants back under control.

The Federal Department of Labor could do something useful and try to figure out how many workers we might need in the economy. They did it before, so the processes are in place.

Tune Up Your Website for the Recession

This was a topic in one of our recent Solutions Forum meetings, because it was apparent that one of the attendees hadn’t really looked at his website in some time.

One of my cohorts in the consulting game, Reva Lekovsky, just posted a Tweet to this effect for Europeans, but tuning up your website applies equally well for America.

Do it even if you’re reluctant to spend the money. If you do website promotion correctly, it pays for itself many times over. One of our clients found us on a website that was well done when we had it done, but we haven’t touched it for two or three years.

Our tune up normally involves looking at your search terms on the back of your website, and especially your local search terms, such as ‘Scottsdale hair and nail salon’.

Do you have your latest products and services in the search terms?

Do you have your local or national competitors listed in your search terms? You can question the ethics of doing this listing, but I’m telling you that it works.

Are you using local search terms? Odds are you’re not, because most website developers don’t know to include them.

Do you have videos? Google still loves videos of products of services in use. Even if you shot them with your cell phone.