If yours is like most businesses, you work hard to acquire new customers and then hold on to them once you’ve got them. So why on earth would you ever wonder if you should fire a customer whose business has been hard-earned?
There are lots of...
The finance team and the sales team are usually thought of as two totally separate entities with little crossover between them. The finance team members are the “number crunchers” and the sales team members are the “rain makers.” They live in separate worlds, the thinking...
So far, this has been a very good year for the U.S. economy, with solid GDP growth and strength in many other economic indicators, including business and consumer confidence. Many business owners and CEOs are responding to the robust economy by making business investments designed...
“If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” While the origin of this saying is in dispute — it’s generally attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 19th century, but a quote from him saying exactly this...
In many ways, retail businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy. Despite the rise of e-commerce over the past decade or so, millions of Americans still do their shopping at good old-fashioned retail stores — whether locally owned “mom-and-pop” businesses or national and big-box...
Cutting-edge companies today are taking the old saying “the customer is always right” and putting a new twist on it. Instead of blindly stating that customers are always right in every possible situation, these companies instead are creating and adopting a customer-centric culture. In this kind of culture, all...
There are two main approaches your business can take when it comes to segmenting markets: You can either go deep or go wide. Going wide is sometimes referred to as a horizontal segmentation strategy, while going deep is sometimes referred to as a vertical segmentation strategy. An example of...
We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” It is often quoted when discussing the importance of diversifying an investment portfolio so it isn’t vulnerable to wild price fluctuations by just one or a handful of stocks. This saying is also appropriate when it...
Almost all Los Angeles and Southern California business owners and entrepreneurs have at least one thing in common: they have lost a customer at some point in time. As much as businesses hate losing customers, 100 percent customer retention is pretty much impossible for most firms. Whether through their...
In today’s fast-changing business world, new technologies can render businesses and entire industries obsolete practically overnight. This makes it critical that Los Angeles and Southern California business owners and entrepreneurs develop strategies for dealing with rapid change. This includes planning for how their companies will compete not just today, but...