The Strength of Community based Business

I decided to rename this post add some comments and republish. The only way that we are going to become a fair and caring society is by embedding businesses back into our communities and making them accountable to us the customer. Big business has become global and lost its way. The profits don’t stay in the communities where they were generated and this removes a community good. The time has come to boycott big business and support community businesses where the owners live in the community they serve.

The original post was about Quaker Business practices:

Look at the Quakers - they were excellent business people that never lied, never stole; they cared for their employees and the community which gave them the wealth. They never took more money out than they put back in.
Anita Roddick

In a previous post I talked about big business greed and how it will look in the light of history. In this post I want to give an ethical counterpoint to big business greed. The Quakers live simple lives and have been honest business folk for hundreds of years. The key point in their business practice (besides honesty) is their attitude to the communities in which they have their businesses. They see the community as a supportive matrix for business where you have good stewardship and never take more money out of than you put in. That is they are net community contributors.

This is a far cry from the big corporates who display contempt for the communities that sustain them. They reap where they have not sown and take out far more money than they put in. Long term this is unsustainable.

Small business is what has made America great. We had community based businesses that stayed open for generations and made an honest living for their owners and a positive contribution within the constraints of the community. Eventually this is the model we will have to return to if we are to survive. Note: If small businesses in the USA payed as little taxes as the tax evading corporations we would be bankrupt.

Unbridled profits, like unbridled horses pose a danger to an honest way of business.

Be honest, support your community and prosper.

DK

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Who is your Customer?

To be successful in business you need to be able to answer the question, "Who is my customer"?

Why is this important?

Customer identification is important for the following reasons:

1. It helps you to match your product/service to a targeted audience

2. It allows you to focus your marketing efforts

3. It saves you time and the pain of dealing with tire kickers

We only have so much time available every day and we need to apply it to best effect. Having a targeted customer group saves time and makes your advertising efficient. Your messages can be written with your customer group in mind. This allows you to move from a scattered shotgun to an accurate rifle shot approach.

I market to people who want to start their own online business. I sell evergreen products that I know have high numbers of repeat sales which help me build residual income. The lists I use and my advertising efforts are all focused on this demographic. If you have hungry people they will want to eat the food you serve up. If someone is happy with a day job working for a boss then they won't be hungry for marketing that accentuates the benefits of working for yourself (e.g. How may takers would you have for selling a dinner package to people coming out of a buffet?).

Know your customer, meet their hunger and prosper!

Ciao

DK

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Yunus on Social Business and Poverty

“Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

The current situation where big business rapes and pillages the environment and pauperises the majority of the world's population is immoral and unsustainable. Remember history, "they will come after you with their pitchforks".

The luxury aspired to and enjoyed by a small oligarchy is obscene and their lack of concern for others is monumental. I would prefer to have less so that others can live with dignity.

Social Business shows us the dignified way where business is embedded as part of, not an overlord, the society it operates in. Profits are necessary, obscene profits especially when derived from legal tax avoidance are anathema to me and a growing number of people who wonder about the sustainability of current big business.

Sadly I'm not sure that we will ever get to a state of no poverty but it is a fine aspiration.

DK

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Driving Your Blog Presence

In a recent blogpost Mahesh Mohan shares three interesting points from an Infographic by Business 2 Community.

They are as follows:

1. 80% of daily blog visits are new.
2. Blogs that post daily get 5 times more traffic than those that post weekly or less.
3. Once you accumulate 51 posts, blog traffic increases by 53%, goes up by 3 times after 100 posts and by 4.5 times after 200 posts.

These are mind blowing statistics.

If you are using blogs to drive your web presence and marketing then these 3 facts will help you.

Mohan also shares that evergreen posts of high quality get enduring exposure. He pruned a number of his old posts and retained only 157 evergreen posts and his stats stayed unchanged. The lesson is that quality drives quantity.

Happy blogging

DK

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Experience not Theory Drives Business

You cannot run a business, or anything else, on a theory.
Harold S. Geneen

As Geneen points out theory per se is not able to drive a business. It may inform the business person in his/her thinking but it is experience that is the true business engine.

If you want to improve then try new things, make more mistakes and clamber up the experience curve.

Business is an applied science rather than a theoretical one.

DK

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The Secret to Accurately Predicting your Future

Today's quote is related to future success. It is increasingly difficult to predict the future based on the past, but Peter Drucker has the answer:

“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
― Peter F. Drucker

Following others will not help you here. You have to forge your own future. This is what entrepreneurs do. They create their own reality. You won't find them looking for success in increasingly crowded market spaces, but instead they are creating new spaces where they have first mover advantage.

Be a leader not a follower.

I can recommend a fantastic book on this by Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, called From Zero to One.

Good luck with your business pursuits.

Regards

DK

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Controversy in Silicon Valley

Mark Z from Facebook is making waves again after blocking drag queens in SFO from using Facebook as they won't use their real names. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very thoughtful article on this titled Silicon Valley’s Empathy Problem by Ian P Beacock. The quote below taken from the article is illuminating:

Empathy doesn’t seem to be a very popular tool among Silicon Valley’s leading digital dreamers. To its great credit, the tech industry promises to improve the world. Yet it’s hard not to notice its passion for issues that look like problems only to people who look like Silicon Valley itself: overwhelmingly white, male, young, educated, and affluent.

Inequality soars, and the world unravels, but from Silicon Valley we’re presented with apps and services designed to save us from those most heinous of tasks: parking, doing laundry, and (gasp) buying groceries. If solipsism is the conceptual motor of the industry, it should be no surprise that we read with some regularity about tone-deaf Google Glass wearers or start-up whiz kids, unable to imagine why their actions could possibly alarm others.

To be fair, coding workshops and computer-science classes don’t ask budding developers to imagine the lives of others and see the world for the complex, uncertain place it really is. That’s what the humanities are for.

When I teach students about the First World War or Berlin’s Golden Twenties, I’m challenging them to suspend their assumptions and step outside themselves to make sense of a foreign world. Novels make similar demands. Art historians help us see that the world can be expressed and perceived in a million different ways. In other words, the humanities encourage the use of empathy as a way of thinking and solving problems.

The liberal arts get short shrift in Silicon Valley—why fill out your college degree when you could be dropping out and diving into programming languages on a Thiel Fellowship? The humanities don’t necessarily trump coding literacy. But the insights of both will be essential if this age of mobile technology is going to live up to its promise and create a world we all want to live in.

Technology without a human face is dangerous and when Silicon Valley is so skewed by the demographics of its innovators there is a real need for some balance. For myself a background in the humanities, science and technology has been very enlightening and beneficial.

Have a great day and a profitable week and read a good book :)

DK

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