What could they possible use as a compelling headline to an ad or for the banner of their web site? A company like this would probably rely on the old, “20% off this weekend only.” Now they’re a commodity that no one remembers except for a minute or two while they read the ad. But nothing sticks to the mind of their audience, and nothing differentiates them from every other store with a discount message.

Take a look at your web site, or better yet, have someone outside your business look at your web site. Ask them what stands out as your specialty. If they say something like “You sell cars.” or “You sell hot tubs.”, you’re too broad. Ask them to review your latest ad.

You can sell a wide variety of things or offer a wide variety of services. We’re talking about a focus on your message. Consider Zappos.com. They started out selling shoes and now sell watches, housewares, jewelry, clothing and backpacks. How did they grow from $0 to a billion dollars in just 9 years? Because they had a laser focus on their differentiator: service. Service has always been core to their brand and it is what every aspect of their company is centered around. Look at their web site. Their tag line below the logo is “Powered by service”. Their 800# is on every page. “Free shipping both ways” is on almost every page. “365 day returns” is plastered throughout the site. And examples of their service are legendary. Zappos is not a company that simply has “service” written on their corporate mission statement and utters the word a few times around the conference table. They live it, and they have grown because customers know it to be who they are. It’s their message.

So, if you don’t have something that differentiates you, discover it or create it. A unique aspect of your product or service is necessary in order to prevent you from becoming a commodity competing on price. And unless you’re Walmart, it’s not a good direction. I almost hesitate to mention Zappos because most companies believe that their great service is what differentiates them. But, in most cases, they mean simply that they call people back and they’re very helpful, and that they’re courteous, etc. A Zappos customer service rep once sent flowers to a customer’s relative’s funeral. Another helped a customer order pizza when they were in a strange town. This is truly is a differentiator.

One great place to look for your differentiator is to ask your customers. “If you had to choose just one aspect of our product/service that you think is outstanding, what is it?” Ask a few then see what common elements pop up. Resist the temptation to rely on your own belief about what is outstanding about you or your offering. We’re all too close to our own product to know the best answer.

So, once you either know or eventually discover your differentiator, you must integrate it into your marketing. That’s the payoff.

I recently spoke with a great martial arts master who owns a martial arts school. He is very clear on his differentiator, which is an outstanding one. But if you look at his web site, you’ll never find it. On the web, he’s a Taekwondo school promoting what is typically promoted by other Taekwondo schools.

The differentiator for this martial arts school owner is his adherence to traditional principles of teaching martial arts. While most other schools might allow their students to reach black belt within a very short time and do so with a less strenuous effort in order to provide short-term gratification, he requires his students to fully integrate the mind, body and spirit into their martial arts skills. This takes more time and is harder work for his students. When I asked him if there is a market out there for harder work for a longer payoff, he said “absolutely”. So, now we’re on to something!

A message must now be created that will attract those people who are his target: Blackbelts who lack confidence in their self-defense abilities, A-type personalities who feel that there’s something weak about their current martial arts training, and people looking for a more well-rounded experience in martial arts. In other words, his customers don’t want McDonalds. They want a great meal and are willing to wait at the table until it’s fully prepared.

Consider how much easier it is to create a compelling message to promote a specific differentiator as opposed to a wide general offering. I much prefer the assignment of promoting “Taekwondo for tough guys” to “Martial arts the whole family can enjoy”.

Armed with a strong, narrow message, consistency is the key. Put it front and center on your web site, make it a headline for your ads, write about it in your blog and highlight it in your promotional materials. This is how you develop a brand that sticks to the mind of your market and attract the type of customers from whom you will grow.

Writing It and Not Living It
I see many businesses that take the time to craft a painstakingly detailed mission statement and then hang it in a beautiful frame in the lobby and promote it on their website and of course include it in the company handbook and that’s it. There is no systematic application of that mission statement with respect to the way in which the company runs their business.

What people fail to realize, is that a mission statement is only as powerful as the actions taken to execute the values espoused in that statement and the consistency with which the company continually lives those values. If a company and its leaders do not live that mission statement, then neither will the employees. If the leader does not consciously live that mission statement and incorporate it into every action or decision that is made in the company, then it becomes impotent
and has no power what so ever.

A great company that exemplifies this is Ben and Jerry’s. See their mission statement and the corresponding initiatives that have evolved from that mission statement.

Ben & Jerry’s Mission Statement:
“To make, distribute & sell the finest quality all natural ice cream & euphoric concoctions with a continued commitment to incorporating wholesome, natural ingredients and promoting business practices that respect the earth and the environment.”

How They Live Their Mission Statement:
• By definition, the manufacturing of products creates waste. We strive to minimize our negative impact on the environment.
• The growing of food is overly reliant on the use of toxic chemicals and other methods that are unsustainable. We support sustainable and safe methods of food production that reduce environmental degradation, maintain the productivity of the land over time, and support the economic viability of family farms and rural communities.

In running this successful $200 million plus business, Ben and Jerry’s has (and I imagine will continue) to make significant business decisions that will have an important impact on their bottom line in alignment with their corporate mission statement. They are staying true to their roots and living their mission statement. As you can see, this formula has paid off well for them since opening their first location in 1977.

Reader Survey: How many entrepreneurs can honestly say that they truly walk the talk and live their mission statement?

If you have a question for the Maniacal Marketer, please send it to cregan@maniacalmarketer.com.

Christine Regan is the president of Redlake, Inc, www.redlake.tv, a marketing and sales agency in New York.

© Intellectual Asset Management, LLC 2006

What I have come to learn and respect about these unique creatures is their tremendous adaptability. No matter what the scenario ants will do whatever is necessary to ensure survival of the colony. Some ants during an attack from an enemy will actually implode, spraying a toxic substance upon the enemy and thereby sacrificing its life in protection of the colony.

Just to give you some interesting factoids:
• Ants can carry 20-50 times their own body weight depending upon the type of ant
• Ants are the most socially complex animals know to exist and operate on a caste system that has a precise division of duties amongst the colony
• Army Ant raids are highly organized and executed in a systematic order rotating 123 degrees after every raid to ensure that they are invading a territory that will be full of prey
• Army ants are experts in the art of war with the ability to traverse great distances with thousands of ants and attack prey many times larger than themselves
• Successful colonies can live up to 100 years

As I commonly do with anything that I learn, I immediately began trying to draw parallels to business. I kept asking myself, how could this be useful in business? I could not stop thinking about how strong, agile and competitive, a company could be, if it could somehow learn how to embrace what I have termed Antology.

How large could you grow your business if you could align every single person to a single vision and have your work force screaming along making productivity and profitability gains from 20 to 50%?

What kinds of sales gains could you achieve, if your sales strategy were so targeted that you were systematically attacking your prospects in a detailed execution so as not to miss a single potential customer in your sales blitz? What could you accomplish in your business if you could inspire such loyalty in your work force, so that they would gladly sacrifice nights and weekends to ensure the
company’s’ survival and ultimate success? How would you like to see your business flourishing for over 100 years?

Let’s see some parallels we can draw from these outstanding little creatures called ants.
Small but Mighty The reason that ants are able to carry anywhere from 20-50 times their body weight is due to the fact that they have a small body mass. This body mass is a benefit, because it allows the ant to use the majority of its muscles for lifting things rather than using them to support their own body. Humans, by contrast have a much larger body mass and therefore a tremendous amount of their muscle activity must go towards ‘moving the body’ which inhibits their capacity to lift heavy
things.

So, what is the correlation to business? The correlation is that a large organization by its nature is going to be bureaucratic and will require a lot of ‘muscle’ or human capital just to keep it moving. And by ‘moving’ I don’t mean any ‘heavy lifting’ or ‘innovative solutions’ by moving, I just mean to keep the status quo.

Sometimes, small nimble companies can accomplish things better, faster and more efficiently than their larger counterparts because they don’t have so much ‘mass’ to move around. One such example of this is a company called SpaceQuest, www.spacequest.com. SpaceQuest is a spacecraft components and engineering company focused on small satellites. With their business model SpaceQuest can provide components at a price that their larger counterparts can’t
and won’t match. Small does not mean weak or unproductive, sometimes, as in Antology, small can be an edge.

Delineated Division of Duties
The complex social structure of an ant colony is highly delineated. Each ant has their specific duty; ants that tend to larvae, ants that clean out the refuse from the nest, soldier ants that go out and hunt for food or engineer ants that build and extend the highly complex tunnels. Each with their own job is highly specialized. If there is anything to learn from these astounding creatures, it would be to model their mastery of the concept of division of labor.

One of the most common mistakes that I see in small business is the lack of an organization chart with a clearly defined division of duties. What typically happens is several duties that should logically all be handled by the same person, get divided up among two partners and etc. For example there is no official CFO who monitors all of the finances for the company and as such things fall through the cracks and financial management is not as sound as it should be. The results are that cashflow may suffer as accounts payable and receivable are not efficiently managed. A clearly defined
division of duties amongst all staff members is critical to ensure an optimized work flow.

Systematic Sales Strike Force
Army Ants execute foraging raids that take place during a phase referred to as the ‘stationary phase’ which is a 20 day period during which the ant pupae develop. During this time the army ants move into an area and kill every viable form of prey and then move onto another ‘kill zone’ 123 degrees away. The raids fan out in a circular direction and rotate over and over again moving 123 degrees after each kill for the next 20 days.

I immediately started thinking about how effective a sales blitz would be if you were to plan an ‘attack’ upon your unsuspecting sales prospects in such a coordinated manner. If you were to map out your sales territories and coordinate your direct mail, telemarketing, promotional events and advertising in a highly organized and systematic manner, such as the army ants do in their foraging raids to enable your sales hunt to be as bountiful as possible. How much specificity
do you have in your sales effort to ensure that you are hitting every prospect within your territory?

According to the small business administration 600,000 new businesses are started each year. What systems have you put into place to ensure that your sales database is constantly being nourished with fresh prey from this new pool?

Laser Vision & 100 Year Legacy
“Put a hundred army ants on a flat surface and they will walk around in never decreasing circles until they die from exhaustion. But a colony of a million army ants is a sophisticated ‘super-organism.’ The colony carries out its legendary raids and can even keep nest temperatures constant to within a degree. An army ant colony seems endowed with an intelligence far beyond that of any individual ant.” says Nigel Franks, author of the article “Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence,” American Scientist.

The lesson here is that a group of people without an aligning mission and organized structure of duties is just a mass of individuals running around in circles trying to keep busy. If you want your business to achieve greatness, to have lasting success 100 years from now and achieve double digit profitability and productivity gains, than you must embrace Antology. You must organize a group of highly dedicated individuals and enflame them with a passion for your business and your vision. You must then have the discipline to create a delineated plan of the division of duties with in
your army, so that at the end of the day you have a single fighting force marching to a clearly defined kill zone!

Many people assume that the maximum they can save in a 401(k) retirement plan is $15,000. It is true that this is the 2006 maximum for employee deferrals (plus an extra $5,000 for those age 50 or older.) As many of you may know, 401(k) plans are most often used by owners to attract and retain talent, since it allows employees a way to save their own money through a 401(k) deferral. Some employers decide to add a match in order to be more attractive to employees.

However, in most plan designs, owners are treated as just another employee with respect to what they can save for themselves. Owners need to know that that there are ways to give themselves the maximum savings amount allowed, without having to also give it to every employee.

How is this possible? What about those discrimination tests that must be passed in order to maintain the tax qualified status of the plan? What about those laws that say you can’t favor the highly paid employees?

There is no doubt about it, the body of law that governs retirement plans is vast and complex, but as in life, education is a beautiful thing. Not to get too mired down in details, suffice it to say that there are two things to consider; the plan document itself (which details your allocations and such) and your actual plan investments. Most people end up using whatever plan document is provided to them by the 401(k) provider. What most people do not realize is that they do not have to use the plan document that is provided with their chosen investments.

It is possible to make separate decisions with respect to who takes care of your money, and who takes care of your plan design and contribution strategy. What happens most often is the institution or individual that is overseeing the selection and management of the investments presents a document to you and says “sign here and we will get started.”

“The challenge is a plan document can be part of the solution or part of the problem in allowing owners to keep more of the contribution legally,” says Lori Gordon CEO of MandMarblestone Group www.mand.com. Unfortunately, the vast majority of plan documents are part of the problem. They are developed and written in order to make the administration of the plan and the required governmental reporting easy for the financial institution to perform. Smart idea for the
institutions since it makes their life easier, but not necessarily in the owner’s best interest.

For most of us, the value of our businesses represents a huge component of our retirement planning. Unfortunately, many business owners operate under the assumption that the eventual sale of their business is their retirement plan. This is a big mistake. The market can change, the value of a business can tank for reasons beyond your control. Business owners need
a separate retirement plan option that they can fund now, so they can play later!

If you think back to the gilded age of this country’s growth you can see many examples of Master Artisan’s work. Take a walk through any historical home and see lots of examples; a hand carved mahogany fireplace, hand painted murals or hand blown glass collectibles. In the gilded age, a sophisticated buyer might wait months for a finished piece from a well known craftsmen.

Today, however, being an artist is not enough. That is because today, there is nothing like the power of NOW. In today’s market, you must be both a creative genius and master technician – meaning that you can deliver exceptional work in a fast turnaround time.

Given that time and convenience are major factors that directly influence a buyer in their purchasing decisions, it is important that whatever your chosen field of endeavor may be – that you truly are both a master artisan and expert technician.

For example, you can have an incredibly creative web designer that people are dying to have build their website, but if that designer is working from a Gilded Age mentality: “It’s a work of art and it will be done when it is done” they won’t have many customers. Both B2B and B2C customers have lofty ambitions when hiring a vendor for any reason. In general, they want a work of art, at a discount price and delivered within a few hours or days.

When I use the term ‘artisan’ I use that liberally in the sense that there is an art and science to any position whether you are a lawyer, accountant, creative director, designer, architect, salesmen, etc. The idea is that you want to make sure that you work consistently month-after-month, year-after-year expanding your skills and abilities in both the art and science of your business.

To help expand your creative ability in your job maybe you need to find a completely unrelated outlet that will enable you to open up, connect with yourself and allow your mind to dance. For some that may mean picking up your old guitar, taking a painting class or taking pen to paper. The challenging part of strengthening one’s creative side is that it is not nearly as straight forward as strengthening the science. One can easily take an advanced course, attend a seminar or read several books to become a better technician.

The inimitable Leonardo D’Avinci was a professed renaissance man who was most notably known as an artist, but he was also a scientist and mathematician among other things. He strongly believed that his painting strengthened his abilities as a scientist and vice versa. Allowing his mind to leave one realm completely to enter another made it stronger when it would return again later.

The key is that if you make incremental improvements in each of these areas over time your creativity will flourish and your projects will be done more efficiently and effectively. This in turn, will be reflected in your sales and profitability.

Creativity will allow you to charge a premium and efficiency will enable you to maximize your profits.

If you have a question for the Maniacal Marketer, please send it to cregan@maniacalmarketer.com.

Christine Regan is the president of Redlake, Inc, www.redlake.tv, a marketing and sales agency in New York.

© Intellectual Asset Management, LLC 2005

As a cadet at West Point one of the earliest lessons taught is that at a certain point in their training, there are only 4 possible answers that they may give to a superior:

Yes, Sir/Maam
No, Sir/Maam
I don’t understand, Sir/Maam
No Excuse, Sir/Maam

What is so important about this exercise and experience is that it engrains in the cadet/soldier that there is no time to waste coming up with a lengthy back story as to why you could not accomplish something. The philosophy is that you focus 100% of you time and effort figuring out a way to successfully achieve the task at hand, period.

To many, it may seem overly rigid or unrealistic, but the idea is that the “Long Gray Line’ has and will continue to train its cadets and future soldiers with a no holds bar – no excuse mentality and philosophy.

More business owners could benefit from adapting such a mentality. It does not mean that mistakes won’t happen; it just prepares the organization better for when things go wrong.

Countless hours and days are wasted in corporate America by subordinates and/or senior management spinning their brains to come up with the logical, rational and believable excuse as to why something can’t or won’t get accomplished.

By creating a culture in which total 100% accountability is the status quo, an organization can insulate itself somewhat from this ‘cover my butt’ mentality.

The environment that a business creates for its employees is so important because it lays the foundation for everything that is to come. If an organization is enlightened enough and strong enough to integrate this type of ethical conduct into the fabric of the company, in which every person is truly accountable, the reality is, that you can create a much more productive company and one in which individuals police themselves. They understand this code and know that if they
are to be successful, absolute adherence to this code is essential. (Reader survey: Have any readers found that there were times when you drew upon your military experience in solving a complex problem in corporate America?)

If you have a question for the Maniacal Marketer, please send it to cregan@maniacalmarketer.com.

Christine Regan is the president of Redlake, Inc, www.redlake.tv, a marketing and sales agency in New York.

© Intellectual Asset Management, LLC 2005

Branding reaches far beyond the limits of one’s collateral materials. A company’s branding is reflected in every single action that the company takes, from the way the receptionist answers the phone, to the way in which the employees carry themselves in public, to the customer service that your firm provides. A company’s branding is revealed and evaluated at every single interaction that it has with its consumers.

Given the importance of branding, business owners need to realize that it should be considered in every business decision that the company makes. Who and what your brand is about should guide your business investments. If the essence of your brand is about speed, such as Domino’s Pizza – you need to invest in technologies or equipment that is going to allow your company to be faster than your competition. If your brand is about luxury – you better have the finest quality paper for your
brochures and best food at your restaurants or products in your spa.

The challenge, is that today’s consumers are more savvy and cynical than in any point in history. In addition, the global environment in which we now operate has created a climate in which consumer expectations are extremely high. And, each year that bar is raised as savvy businesses find new ways to cater to today’s time-strapped consumers. History has shown that the average American is willing to pay a premium for convenience, as they value their time much more than ever
before.

The power of a strong brand in this environment is that it can have a dramatic impact on your financial bottom-line. The direct benefits of a strong brand include:

• Strong branding builds name recognition and ultimately builds brand equity. If you want a lesson in brand equity look at: Apple, Coca-Cola, IBM.
• Brand strength and differentiation influences the buying decision of consumers. Step up, stand out and steal market share.
• Sound, effective branding creates trust and a personal connection among its users
• A strong brand can command a premium price for your service. As many industries become
commoditized, a strong agile brand can outmaneuver this trend.
• Branding will help you build “mind share” and “heart share.”
• A sound branding strategy communicates a strong, singular message.
• A strong brand helps you sell the intangible values that surround your service.

Reader Survey: How many business owners take into consideration their brand management when making important business decisions? How has that paid off?

If you have a question for the Maniacal Marketer, please send it to cregan@maniacalmarketer.com.

Christine Regan is the president of Redlake, Inc, www.redlake.tv, a marketing and sales agency in New York.

© Intellectual Asset Management, LLC 2005