In business, we often strive to make all of our customers happy by being good at every feature or service we offer them. The problem is that being good at a lot of things makes it difficult to be great at any one thing. Why do we do this? We think we can excel in any one area when the reality is we are just good or average in all areas. Have you ever thought about trying to be bad at something you do so that you can grow your business and increase your market share?

What if I was a bank and decided to offer the lowest rates on deposits in all my markets? What if I did this, so I could be the best at customer service? I could stay open 7 days a week and as late at 8:00pm on weekdays. I would hire people based solely on attitude because hiring on both attitude and aptitude is too expensive. I would do this knowing that not having aptitude, your people couldn’t offer 20 plus types of checking accounts and highly complex financial instruments. Would you think my bank could even grow or see the stock price go up if I made those changes?

Well that is exactly what happened to Commerce Bank, which became the fastest growing retail bank in America. They saw their stock price go up 2000% in the 1990s. Commerce Bank made a key strategic decision to deal with a huge sticking point in the industry. They talked to consumers and learned one major concern was that banking hours sucked. They decided to open at 7:30am and not close until 8:00pm, and they kept the teller window open until midnight on Fridays. They also maintained full service hours on the weekends. While they did this, they sampled the marketplace to ensure they had the lowest deposit rates out there, and if they did not, they would lower them until they did.

Commerce Bank realized that in order to have the resources necessary to be really great at something, they needed to be bad at something else. Why? Because being good at everything takes resources, and to be great at something you need to redirect those resources to focus on the things that will make you great. Commerce Bank understood that they money they saved on low deposits gave them the money to fund their longer hours of operations. They discovered that to have the best customer service people and afford them, they needed to sacrifice on aptitude and reduce the complexity of their products, offering only limited financial products.

You can read more details from this example, along with others, in Frances Frei’s book “Uncommon Service.” It shares many examples of companies that sacrificed in one area to be great in another. This book is an important read for making strategic decisions that impact your features and benefits given the resources you have. They discuss creating an Internal Attribute Map to figure this out.

We haven’t done this yet at Efficience, but I am adding it to the agenda for our annual meeting. We need to discuss what we can take away, so we can prop up a key area that makes us stand out in the marketplace.

What you going to drop, reduce, or eliminate to make your offering or service excellent?

This week not only represents the start of the holiday season but also the coming together of family and friends. We all come together and sit in front of an amazing spread of food to celebrate how thankful we are for the sacrifices our forefathers made to journey so far and under such risky conditions in order to start a life in this new land, which was not so plentiful at times. They did this, so they could have a level of freedom that they were not experiencing in their home country.

They likely never envisioned how plentiful and varied the food in this new land would eventually become. Since it seems so natural for us to have all this food, we forget it wasn’t always this way. We sometimes lose sight of the potential for abundance all around us in all the areas of our lives. If we would just open up to the possibilities that other entrepreneurs and technology have harnessed, we could create vast abundance in our lives. We should be thankful for both what we currently have and also what we could potentially have. We have created this abundance, and we have so much more potential to do it over and over again.

I listened to Peter Diamandis speak at the EO Conference in Istanbul this September, and he shared stories of Abundance (also the name of his book and some of my blogs). His stories could make your jaw drop, especially when you consider their implications. We have the potential for abundant energy, food, water, education, computing, health care, and freedom. If you would like to know more about the potential of abundance, read Peter’s book or some of my blogs learn more about the abundance we have the capacity to be thankful for tomorrow.

I am thankful for the entrepreneur and that we live in a world filled with them. I am thankful they are passionate about something that drives them to put forth the effort to go out and create these new inventions. This allows us to live in abundance and gives us the potential for so much more.

Go make it happen, my entrepreneur friends, and show the world that a scarcity mindset is not necessary because we have the ability to live in a world that serves us all.

I have written before on finding your purpose and discovering why you do what you do. It is important to understand your “why” because it changes the way you communicate with your target audience in order to sell your products or services. Most of us communicate with others by discussing our features and benefits, which is the “how” and “what” of the work we do.

Discovering and sharing your “why” with your audience connects them in an emotional way that motivates the decision making process. In Simon Sinek’s TED video, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” he shares his discovery of the “why” and understanding why you do something and why your organization exists.

Simon says, “People don’t buy what you do . . . they buy why you do it.”

The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe. Simon uses Apple, the Wright Brothers, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to show examples of the power of WHY!

This is all grounded in biology. The human brain is broken into three major areas. The neo cortex corresponds with rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections correspond with our limbic brains, which are responsible for our feelings, such as trust and loyalty, as well as for all behavior and decision making. When we are communicating to the inside part of the limbic brain, we are talking to the area that resonates with our decision making ability.

This is done by stating what you believe. Instead of talking about all your benefits and features, tell them what you believe. Tell them your “why” of what you do. Those that you resonate with will look at you with their decision making limbic brain and will more likely choose to do business with you.

If you don’t know your “why” and are having a tough time figuring this out, there is a process that has been developed by my fellow EO Forum mate Ridgley Goldsborough that shares the WHY Marketing Formula. Watch his video here. This powerful approach can help you discover your “why.” Use this to connect with your target customers in such a way that business explodes.

Are you connecting with the “why” and the decision making part of the brain for your customers? How do you share your sales and marketing language? Do you share with benefits and features or with the “why” of who you are?

When I was in Istanbul, Turkey back in September, I heard Harvard lecturer and Good Think CEO Shawn Achor give his presentation focusing on research around happiness. This was fascinating, filled with humor, and centered on the power of happiness can spread and lead to more productive workers. Sharing this now seems very appropriate, given that half the voters out there are not very happy about the outcome of the election. I myself feel like capitalism has been pushed aside in favor of a bigger, more controlling government. I believe economic growth and jobs come from entrepreneurs, and big government only gets in their way, so this doesn’t motivate me to do a happy dance. So how can we all increase our happiness during challenging times?

Shawn has written a book called “The Happiness Advantage,” and it explains that our problems with happiness come from our thinking that we will be happy when we get to a certain outcome or level of success. Therefore, any victories or accomplishments get pushed down the road and delay happiness. The problem is that when we get there, the level of success is reset and increased. This leaves us with a feeling of not ever getting to that happy place, so what are we to do?

You can also click here to watch the video.

Our brains work better when we are positive and function less efficiently when we are neutral or negative. We also have increased intelligence and creativity when we are positive. As empathic beings, when we share a smile it is contagious the same way a frown or depression can be.

How do we become happier, and what can we do to increase happiness among those around us? Shawn shared 6 key areas on simple ways to change your happiness:

• Gratitude – write five things that you are grateful for each morning. This refocuses your brain and opens up your awareness to look for the happy things in life.
• Journaling – spend three minutes each day for thirty days writing about a positive experience. This has been shown to decrease doctor visits by 50%. You become more social, and your immune system improves.
• Simplifying vs Multitasking – do one thing at a time. This is what we are built to do. Multitasking increases stress, which eats away at every organ in our body.
• Utilizing Strengths – discover and focus on your strengths. This gives you high levels of energy and productivity with low levels of success.
• Exercising – work out. This is as powerful an antidepressant as the pills, and it releases dopamine in the brain, which cause positive and uplifting feelings.
• Meditation – relax and just watch your breath go in and out. It changes the way your brain structures itself and changes its electrical impulses. This allows a more balanced and positive feeling.

Shawn also discussed the activation energy that you use to get an activity to really kick in and become a habit. He wanted to play the guitar more but found that having to go into the closet and get it out deterred him. He reduced his activation energy (initial investment of energy necessary to accomplish a task) by placing the guitar in the middle of room. He then played for 28 out of 30 days.

What activity do you want to do to be happier? How are you going to reduce your activation energy and get it done?

Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing the change in the marketplace oversupply. If we are going to grow our companies, we need to figure out how to zero in on the right demand sectors. To do this, you first must figure out your demand profit pools. So, what are those? Demand profit pools are the areas of untapped demand that we as business owners may not be aware of because we haven’t dug deep enough.

In “How Companies Win,” Kash and Calhoun discuss this and cite an example of the dog food industry. This industry provided bags of food under standard segments based on large, medium, and small dogs. The food was then segmented under dry/bagged or wet/canned. There was very little vision and, as Kash says, “absolutely no proprietary insights.”

They finally looked at the demand landscape. This takes a look at everything ahead of you, such as valleys, rivers, towns, hills, and whatever else may be out there. The analysis is done with a variety of surveys, focus groups, market research, and other techniques that break down the demand pools by tastes, customer characteristics, lifestyles, needs, and desires. All these combined create the demand landscape.

After this type of analysis on the dog food industry, demand pools were broken up, not by breed or size, but in the relationship that owners had with their dogs. They were broken down by marketing the dog as a child, the dog as part of the family, the dog as an active partner, the dog as a pet, and the dog as a farm implement. As you might imagine, the dog as a child was the high profit center, and the dog as a farm implement was the low profit center. This awareness caused the pet food company to align their products with the right demand and create greater distinctions with each brand, so they avoided competing with themselves.

What if you could find the answers to the questions Kash and Calhoun propose in their book?

• Find the high-profit consumers who can raise your margins and revenues
• Understand current, latent, and emerging demand
• Determine which channels are growing and which channels are slowing
• Assess where your competitors are strong and where they are weakest
• Understand the media habits of your most important consumers
• Identify the best potential opportunities for innovation
• Build a financial model for resource allocation to drive faster growth
• Develop insights about the demand of your most profitable customers

Having these answers is the way to deal the increasing oversupply economy that we now have and to create the demand that is needed to grow your business. What are you doing to dig deeper?

Last week, I said we would discuss how to zero in and better handle the demand economy, and we will also look at how to make your offering target the demand that you want to create. We will actually do that next week, so we can first understand how we have transitioned into an economy of oversupply. Let’s review why economic demand has changed. In the book “How Companies Win,” Kash and Calhoun describe four phases of transitions moving from a supply based economy to a demand based one.

The first phase involved market equilibrium, which lasted from 1947 to 1990. After World War II, places that had avoided destruction kicked into a level of prosperity that last for decades. Other areas took longer to adjust but entered the industrial and information economy over time, continuing to create demand as we became more global. With the advent of many different supply chain management approaches and thinkers like Edwards Deming, we continued to lower cost and improve the supply as more demand was created. These good times stayed in balance for a long time . . . until they didn’t.

The period of oversupply started in 1991 and continued through 2007. An aging population in the developed world, the end of the Cold War, and globalization created this phase. This generated a significantly large number of companies adding their offerings to those of the multitude of businesses already out there. The internet popped up during this period, which also created a medium to communicate and share knowledge. This brought many more companies to the table. Productivity increased. Then, the first bubble hit during the early 2000s and was followed by more, which led to the true slowdown in demand.

The demand contraction of the Great Recession hit during 2008. This created a global slowdown not seen since the Depression. The housing market was decimated, and unemployment shot up, continuing a reduction in demand that has lasted to present day. This was followed by stimulus, increasing the debt. To solve this problem, the government will need to spend less and possibly raise taxes, which will likely lead to even less demand.

We now have a Demand Driven Economy. A hypercompetitive business environment characterizes this fourth area, and it will continue into the future. This flat demand will put a crunch on profits and drive a lot of businesses to disappear.

The companies that have a better understanding of the demand situation will be able to position themselves for a demand offering that will drive more business. More on that next week.

Looking at what has been happening in the world with the slow economy, you would think it all has to do with a bad recession or political activity that is less than favorable to the business world. Look a little deeper, and you will see things are changing. We should be aware of all that is going on for the sake of positioning our businesses for the most potential possible.

I believe, as a leader of a company and the one responsible for putting us in the path of future waves of opportunity, my purpose is to read and learn as much as possible. To achieve this, I participate in the EO University Conferences, attend the Verne Harnish Fortune Conference, and read a large number of books every year. This exposes me to people, speakers, and ideas that help me contemplate what the future may look like.

Back in the early 2000s, I came across a book called “The New Law of Demand and Supply” by Rick Kash that was sent to me by the Williams Inference Center, and I have been reading a book more recently called “How Companies Win” also by Kash and David Calhoun. The first book put some interesting thoughts in my head, but I didn’t see really the power of this thinking until the great recession hit us. Why? Because it took the significant decline in business to magnify how the Demand and Supply forces have changed.

In the past, we had huge demand from those who wanted everything businesses could throw at them. For decades, we could grow revenue by adding more offerings and streamlining supply. We globalized the supply chain, reducing costs by making products in China or India or even just down the street if that was most efficient. We were able to buy so many things as our living standards increased and the costs decreasing. We accumulated so much!

Now, things have changed. The demand is simply not there. We have excessive supply from where we increased it so much in the previous decades to meet the high demand, but this terrible economy has taken away our buying power. We now see an economy that has vast oversupply but not enough customers to support the businesses that are out there trying to provide that product or service. This is the new world in which we are living, so decision makers need to know how to deal with this in order to generate growth in their business.

For those that zone out when you hear “supply and demand” due to the brain trauma you received in Econ 101, let me say it another way. In the past, we desired lots of things (lots of demand) and the business world struggled to make all we wanted and to provide at affordable prices (not enough supply). Now, we have this huge amount of goods (over supply) that companies are trying to sell and not enough people with the desire or resources to buy them (lacking in demand).

There is so much supply for what you are offering, so it is tough to grow business. Can you see this in your business environment?

Supply has vastly outpaced the demand in the economy right now, and the global economy has become unbalanced. We need to grasp this new reality that in order to get customers to want our offerings, we need to zero in on exactly what they are demanding. We will focus on this in next week’s blog.

The world is changing quickly. Many times we find ourselves looking up from whatever we were doing and wondering, “Where did that come from? Why are people doing it that way? How does everyone seem to know about this except me?” In the world of the internet, we all stay connected at all times and all locations, so when changes occur, they are downloaded and spread in real time. Some of us simply choose to see it on our own time frame.

Look around when you walk into a restaurant, when you’re waiting in line, when you’re sitting around the airport or subway station. You’ll notice that everyone is staring at a phone. This scene is so profound that we might be mistaken for a scene from “The Walking Dead” if our faces weren’t fully intact.

The point is that change is here, and more change is coming. Are you on board, or has the train left the station? At Efficience, we are doing educational sessions to provide awareness of these changes and how you can benefit from change.

IDC and Appcelerator conducted a survey of app developers. INC discussed this in an article and noted, “Developers are highlighting a cautionary note that all businesses should pay attention to: Mobile has the power to reshape entire industries and these changes will be swift.” They continue, “It is not enough to port elements of your existing business model over to mobile. Staying competitive in the era of mobility requires fundamentally re-envisioning traditional business models through a mobile-first lens.”

Using a mobile app opens up stratospheric opportunities for business when you consider the strategy behind this connection. At Efficience, we are doing this by building strategies for companies that will help them use features such as push notifications to make customers aware of discounted services or prices in real time to drive more people to you. This is particularly helpful to do when you are having slow traffic and want to increase revenue for the fix cost you are already incurring.

What if you are a restaurant and you want to get new customers? If you get your current customers to download your app, you can send out a notification saying, “Bring in a couple of your best friends that haven’t eaten here before and get a free meal!” The possibilities are endless and will evolve as location based technology grows. By connecting and sharing knowledge, push notification specials, announcements of special events, and updated photos, you make your good customers even better and drive them and their friends to do more business with you.

Does your current advertising and marketing connect you to customers and drive the opportunities for more revenue as well as mobile apps?

I am writing this week’s blog on Friday, October 5, which has great significance for me. My partner of 20 years back in my investment days was born on this day, along with my lifelong best friend Ronald Poles. It is also one year from the day that Steve Jobs passed away. Verne Harnish reminded me of this in his blog, and he shared this video put out by Apple. It is a nice tribute and a great reminder of what he and Apple have done for our everyday lives.

Steve Jobs is an icon of our time. In this country, we all love the story of the underdog or a great comeback story! That is the story of Steve Jobs. The board of the company that he started himself removed him, but then they asked him to return when things went bad, and he turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet.

I also find it interesting that a man who demanded so much from his people and was considered so difficult to work with managed to accomplish so much. Walter Isaacson discusses the details in his book about Steve Jobs. Jobs pushed his people further than they thought they could go. I remember this saying I came across many years ago: When you look back over your life, the people that you will remember the most outside of your immediate loved ones are the ones that got the most out of you.

If I think back, that is true for me. The teachers and the coaches that pushed me to do more than I thought I could do are the ones that stand out in my mind. Jobs was that type of person. Even though I am sure many people got frustrated with him, those same people remember going to the next level because they were around someone that pushed to get the most out of them.

Steve Jobs also focused on one key priority and spent three hours a day on that issue. He considered this to be vital to moving forward and creating successful products. He also had lunch most days with Jonathan Ive, his chief designer. During this time, they discussed the areas Steve thought mattered most and decided how to move forward with those ideas to create the great experiences we have today with Apple products. Adam Lashinsky outlined this in his book “Inside Apple.”

That type of time takes a lot of energy to get the “Flywheel” spinning, as discussed by Jim Collins. And what a Flywheel and legacy Steve has created! It still pushes out “gee-whiz” products that will have people standing in line for hours just so they can be one of the first to buy them.

I know I could definitely be more focused in my efforts. How much focus and effort are you putting on the most important areas of your company and your life?

I have returned home from my EO adventure in Istanbul, Turkey. What an amazing time with 800 entrepreneurs from 91 EO chapters in 39 countries around the world! We heard many interesting speakers, including the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who sent a recorded message for us. He told us about their country’s openness to trade and commerce. They are the fastest growing G-20 nation at 8.5%.