Ralph Mroz

For all the talk of “putting the customer first” these days, many, if not most, companies really don’t.

(Actually, the right priorities for any company are the ones delineated by Bill Hewlett- the founder of Hewlett and Packard.  They are: 1) profit, 2) customers, 3) employees.  The reason for this ordering is that the higher priorities are necessary for the lower ones to exist.  Nonetheless, focusing on customers is a generally good thing.)

If companies really cared about customers then their top management – let alone the managers of individual operations, would be spending time with them.  This is one reason that we say that CEOs need to spend 30% of their time with customers — not selling, but understanding their customers’ business.  And if the top management of many retail operations really shopped at them like the rest of us do – not looking for ways to pat themselves on the back, but in the frame of mind of busy people who just want to...

This is my first inspirational post – fair warning!

I have recently spent way too much  time noodling around the world of economy pens and pencils, and the blogs that are devoted to them.  You know, the pens and pencils that are stocked in your office supplies cabinet.   (There’s not a blog for everything, there’s a bunch of them!  Also, there are specialty retailers aplenty to serve any — any — interest!)  As a result, I now have dozens of different types and brands (many non-U.S) of individual woodcase pencils, low-cost mechanical pencils, and inexpensive office-type pens on my desk…dozens of each, that is.

No, I do not have OCD.

You think you’re in a viciously competitive business?  Try adding a half-percent to your market share in the woodcase pencil business where the high-end items sell for 8 cents at retail, and no one gives a hoot about what brand they use.

But here’s the amazing, uplifting thing: almost all of these products...

Been working on a couple client projects lately that required analyzing and straightening out sales data, and it brought to mind something that is often missing when management looks at sales.  Mitch and I (and others at CMG) come originally out of the computer industry (Mitch from semiconductors, me from systems), and we always knew that sales numbers weren’t the most important measure of…well, what sales numbers really meant.  Huh?  We knew that this period’s sales weren’t as important as the number of “design wins” we has made that period, because design wins meant that our products would now be sold with every unit that our customer had designed them into.  For example: getting your CPU designed into the next generation of iPhone meant almost no sales this period, but lots down the line.

Most companies have a similar measure, an analogous sub-set of raw sales data, that they out to be looking at when they review sales every quarter, and decide on incentive schemes for...

I recently wrote about how actions have consequences, and that your present business prospects have much to do with your past actions or lack thereof.  In short: good times always end, and when they do it gets very hard for the unprepared.  The best way to prepare is to do those things in the good times that will cause your customers to want to buy from you–and not some other also hurting competitor–in the tough times.  You do this mostly by taking care of your customers in the good times, even if it means spending some resources on doing it that could instead be used then for some temporary growth or profit.

Did I mention that good times always end?  Getting through inevitable recessions intact is worth a lot of short-lived but fleeting growth or profit.