Wise Peaceful Fox

The way I attempt to analyze every little facet and activity of my business is either the thing that makes me more effective than my competition or the thing that makes me a bit crazy, or perhaps a bit of both.  Either way, one thing I've worked on the most is which activities turn into increased sales or profits (or both), and give those more attention than others. That said, I've needed to be smart about finding my points of diminishing returns so I don't become wasteful with my time, or put off things that need to be done that maybe don't pay out as well as other activities.  So I spent a lot of time on my business planning for 2013-2014, an activity that probably doesn't translate to bigger sales and profits today, but should for the rest of the year.  It's easy to blow off planning - "we're too busy running the day to day."  When I think about all the planning I did in my corporate life that was rendered obsolete a few weeks later when th...

Developing a sustainable competitive advantage is one of the most difficult things to do in business.  A great idea that isn't easily copied or that you can do so much better than anyone else that no customer would want to switch doesn't come along very often.  I've decided that I'll be switching cable companies every 2 years unless one could come up with a compelling reason for me to stay.  But I have to admit that Verizon has made cancelling so uncomfortable that I might reconsider switching again. A month after cancelling, I hadn't received anything to send back our set top boxes (which they told me would come within a few weeks), and then I received a new invoice for another month's service.  I called customer service again, waited on hold for 1 hour 45 minutes (thank goodness for speaker phone) and the new rep told me that the original rep should have told me I couldn't cancel my service on the same day I ported my phone number from Veriz...

Figuratively, of course.  For several months, my online business was running as smoothly as I ever could have imagined.  Sales were exceeding expectations, gross margin was strong, and inventory turns were solid.  It was almost too easy.  Then the inevitable happened. Sales dropped by 17% from the previous months, weekly sell-through dropped by almost 33%.  I felt like I hadn't changed anything, but all of a sudden the wheels were coming off the bus.  It was like getting punched in the nose, but it inspired me to dive even deeper into the metrics to get to the bottom of what was going on. I started to keep track of my inventory's age and weekly retail value more closely.  When my overall sales were strong, I didn't pay as much attention to problem items that needed price adjustment.  I realized that too high of a percentage of my sales were tied to too few SKUs, so I needed to expand my offering.   I now have a better understanding of th...

In 1997, around 8 months after I started dating the woman who would later become my wife, we went to see U2 at Three Rivers Stadium here in Pittsburgh.  I had free tickets from my music industry job and was feeling like this was a fairly cool date.  And then on the way out of the parking lot, I made one wrong turn that took me into a traffic jam and would take well over an hour to escape.  Having to get up super early for her teaching job,  I could sense she was getting annoyed and it was enough to make me vow this sort of thing wouldn't happen again if I could help it.  We went out to fun things like concerts, plays, comedy shows and sporting events a lot, and now I became obsessed with knowing the best places to park to get in and out easily, not pay an arm and a leg, and not walk miles and miles.  I tried out new places when out with other friends, asked as many people as I could for advice, and soon I could name just about every lot and garage in the ...