The Briarhurst is considered a jewel of fine dining in the Colorado Springs area:

Only a few minutes drive west of Colorado Springs, The Briarhurst Manor is located in the tiny valley of Manitou Springs. The stately Victorian Manor House was built in 1876 by the founder of Manitou Springs, Dr. William Bell, of London England.

The finely grained pink sandstone Tudor Manor displays the architecture and landscaping of an English Country House, complete with the bubbling Fountain Creek passing through the estate and offers an unrivaled view of Pikes Peak. The Briarhurst Manor is listed on the National Historic Registry in Washington, D.C. Today you can visit a true glimpse of the old west at this beautifully preserved fairytale mansion.

We always get buy one, get one coupons for our anniversary and birthday’s and this year we decided to take advantage of the offer for my birthday.

The food is always a superb selection of Colorado native dishes and they include a small sampler of some unique creation before the meal to whet your appetite and include a small serving of sherbet between the salad and main course. If you want to spend your life savings on a bottle of wine, this is the place to do it.

On this visit we noticed a couple of little things that took the restaurant down a notch in our eyes.

• The black table cloth they put over the white table cloth had a couple of food spots on it. Whoever cleared the table had brushed off the crumbs instead of changing the cloth.
• Our server had a few too many piercings (tongue, nose, multiple ear). If this was McDonald’s, I could understand this laxity in the dress code but at one of the finest restaurants you should expect that your servers will be clean-cut, normal people who don’t distract from your meal with their tongue studs.
• The  bread came with three different butters, one of which had edible flowers in it. My wife asked the server what kind of flowers they were and the server promised to check but never gave us the answer.

These really aren’t show-stopping complaints and if we had been at a lower quality restaurant, I wouldn’t have even noticed. But we were at one of the premier restaurants in the city and our expectations were higher.

Keep this in mind as you improve your business. You want to be the best in your niche but if being the best includes an implied guarantee of quality, your whole operation has to be on board with the level you set. Having varying levels of quality in your business creates uncertainty for your customers which results in discomfort and wariness. They will start thinking “If they are cutting corners here, where else are they cutting corners?”. You have to have consistency or you will disappoint and disappointed customers will find other places to do business.

A store contacted me last week about purchasing the inventory of a closing store at steep discounts. The owner wanted to know if the offer was really a good deal. Here is what I recommended for her but it applies to just about any situation that involves “great deals”.

1) delete everything from this spreasheet that you don’t want and  don’t think you could sell or return to vendors within a year.
2) delete everything for which you already have ample stock
3) delete everything that is damaged in some way
4) repeat 1-3 again with brutal honesty

If the total value is still over the asking price and you can afford to drop that kind of cash at this time of year, go for it.

You always have to remember that a good deal is only a good deal if it is a good deal FOR YOU. 50% off dog food isn’t a good deal for me because I don’t own a dog.

On Monday when we went shopping we stopped at Chick-fil-A for lunch and I was amazed by how much the restaurant sets itself apart from other fast food chains. I’m not talking about the “Eat more chikin” cows, I’m talking about the much smaller things that put together set Chick-fil-A on a level above all the burger joints.

Here’s what I noticed:

• The restaurant has plenty of high chairs. With seven kids under the age of nine, we always need at least two and sometimes three high chairs. Finding enough is usually a challenge.
• Every table had live carnation and baby’s breath center pieces. You can’t even find live flowers at most regular restaurants. I would never expect it at a fast food place.
• When we sat down, an employee brought plastic place mats that stick to the table for each of the kids. When my wife said that our youngest daughter (10 months) would probably try to eat it, the employee disinfected her section of the table just to make sure it was clean enough. The plastic mats are a great idea - it helps contain the kid’s mess and is easy to clean up afterward. It also gives clean-conscious parents a little peace knowing that their kids’ food at least has the chance to stay on a clean surface.
• The employees working at the counter call the customers “guests”. I’m sure some of you are saying “How superficial” but I would rather be called a guest than “Next!”.
• From the previous point, there are actually employees who go around to tables asking how everything is and providing drink refills. This certainly makes me feel more like a “guest” than in other fast food places.
• The employees are clean-cut and smile.
• They are closed on Sunday. In this consumerist era it’s almost impossible to find places that close any day of the week because you have to get EVERY LAST DOLLAR YOU CAN regardless of religious convictions.

Taken on their own, each of these points isn’t that significant. But when you put them all together they clearly say that Chick-fil-A is NOT your typical fast food chain.

So what little things do you do or should you be doing to set your store apart from the typical dusty, boring, out-of-date Catholic store? What tells your customers that your store is better than other stores and worth shopping at? If you can’t think of anything, your store is the one that will eventually get left behind while someone else builds a store that distinguishes itself in the little things.

This post reminded me about something I have been meaning to write about for several weeks. Rush Limbaugh just renewed his contract for his radio program and is getting an “obscene” $440,000,000 for the new contract.

I have heard the words obscene and excessive thrown around a lot in regards to his and other celebrities’ salaries and think that a couple of points need to be made to put this in perspective.

First, this isn’t a socialist country where wages are regulated to keep everyone on the same level. Democrats would like to move in that direction by taxing the “rich” so they can fund social welfare programs for the “poor”. But all in all, we live in a country where people are free to ask for as much as they want for a salary and as long as someone is willing to pay them, get what they ask for.

Second, the only people I hear talking about Rush’s “obscene” salary are those who make less money. I don’t hear any football players, Tiger Woods or George Strait complaining about Rush’s salary. What it really comes down to is simple envy.

The other problem with this mentality is the unspoken notion that “Somebody should DO something about this!” I mean, if it isn’t fair for someone to make so much money, isn’t it for the best that the government passes a law to keep things fair? If you think that is far fetched, just listen to the congressional hearings every time the oil companies are dragged in. Or better yet, listen to our presidential candidates talk about windfall taxes or the loony notion presented by Cynthia McKinney that the oil industry should be nationalized. Businesses don’t seem terribly bothered when this happens because it is the oil companies and they are in the unfortunate position of being needed and vilified at the same time. Just remember that if the government can seize oil company assets because the profits are “obscene” they have a precedent for seizing assets and can much more easily come up with reasons in the future. What if the government decides that your Catholic store is making too much money when compared to other religious stores in the area? If they can seize profits already, why not pass a law to make things fair by seizing your profits and giving them to another store or better yet, to your local Homosexual and Lesbian group that seems to be underfunded?

There are very few times where government interference in business matters is a good thing. Just remember that next time you think that someone is making too much money, because it won’t be long before the bar for “too much” gets lowered to include you.

After the rush for First Communion / Confirmation / Easter season ends, your store inevitably faces a business slow down heading into June and July. If you usually treat this as a time to kick back and hope that your Spring earnings will carry you through the summer, it’s time to change that now!

Summer should be a time for you to work ON your business instead of IN your business. You know, focus on planning and improvement instead of the day-to-day of paying bills and ringing up sales. Here are some suggestions for Summer planning:

• Look at your bestsellers from the previous Christmas. What were they? Did you sell out?  Did you have more demand than supply? Do you need to update prices?
• Look at the list you created last Christmas of items / product lines that you didn’t carry. If you didn’t make a list last year, get in the habit now of keeping track of things people ask for that you don’t have. It will help you notice them as you look through vendor catalogs. If you can find them and carry them this year, it will also improve your sales.
• Go through your list of ways you gather customer contact information. If you don’t have a list, start one. Figure out how you are going to take advantage of the upcoming Christmas season to greatly expand your list of contacts. If you can get email addresses, all the better because sending email newsletters is almost free.
• Look at the marketing you did last Christmas. What worked? Do you have any way of telling what worked? If you don’t, make a plan for keeping track of every sale source. If the hundred dollars a month you spend on yellow page ads isn’t bringing in business, why are you spending $100 a month?
• Clean up your store. It is amazing how quickly a store can get in a rut. Years can pass before you know it and your shelves are dusty, the posters in your window are faded and customers get into a habit of skipping sections of your store because they “already know what’s there”.  Move things around. Replace burned out and dying lights. Fix your fixtures. Sort your bookshelves.
• Set goals for the second half of the year. How many pastors are you going to try and meet? What organizations are you part of that will let you promote your business? How many times are you going to contact local shoppers?

Hopefully, this list will help you treat Summer as a great time to strengthen your business instead of a time to sit back, or worse, wait in dispair for the end of Summer.

As a pet peeve of mine, I can’t stand the use of the term “Dark Ages” since it falsely stereotypes one of the most intellectually, architecturally and artistically important epochs in history, but this post from Business is Personal contains several questions that you as a business owner need to ask yourself now and every year. I’m sure the reference wasn’t intentional.

Is your business stuck in that old world?

Has your business model changed in the last 5 years?

Has your business model been put out to pasture in the last 5 years?

Some examples to get your attention:

• 5 years ago, iTunes was a joke in a RIAA board room, much less at Best Buy, Amazon and Wal-Mart. Today, it sells more retail music (In any format, on any medium) than any store of any kind.
• 5 years ago, Skype was a joke in an AT&T board room. Today, it’s not unusual to see 11 to 12 million people using it simultaneously. It was valuable enough that eBay bought it for $2.6 Billion. Let me remind you that people who have a $3 billion in spare cash are not the types to just waste it on fast women, fast horses and fast cars.

…
So, with those things under your belt…

• 5 years ago, did you get new clients the same way you do now?
• 5 years ago, did you communicate with clients the same way you do now?

5 years ago, what else was the same in your business as it is now?

If you aren’t constantly moving your business forward through the use of technology and knowledge, your business is going to fall behind and eventually fail because someone else isn’t going to sit around and hope technology stagnates along with his business.

Read the whole post.

One of the things that distinguishes a mediocre business from one that shines in fulfilling customer expectations is the ability to predict and prepare for trends in the market.

I have stated before that your goal in whatever niche your business is in is to be the authoritative source for your customers. If you are, your customers will think of you first when they have questions about a product or about general concerns in your industry. For example, I used to own a 1973 Ford Mustang. I know that there is only one place in town to take a Mustang if you want work done on it right - Mustang Paradise. For a paradise, it’s really a dive: A run-down storefront in an industrial area next to the dog track filled with cast-off Mustang parts that looks anything like paradise. The thing is, these guys know their stuff. The cars that come out of there are beautiful. You go there if you want Mustang work because these guys actually know how to tune a carburetor and set the timing on a car with a distributor cap.

You want to be the Mustang Paradise of your industry - at least in knowledge. Don’t imitate their presentation. So how do you do that?

First, you have to know what industry you are in. “Oh, come on, that’s too obvious,” you say. Is it really? We sell Catholic stuff so we are in the Catholic goods industry. But that’s not all we are in. There are several ways to sell a product - on-line, retail, wholesale, import, electronic downloads, etc. You can’t just end with the product and assume you have the whole picture. You have to stay on top of trends in retail, sales and marketing if you want your business to grow.

Second, you have to care about the industry you are in. If you aren’t going to be passionate about the things you sell (services or physical products), it is very unlikely that you are going to go the extra mile to watch industry trends. People who are at a job just to have a job are very unlikely to come up with ways to make the company better or to spot trends that the company should do something about. If you could care less about your product, it’s time to start looking for a new line of work.

Third, you have to have knowledge of your industry. If you run a car repair shop but haven’t spent time getting good and grimy changing oil filters and dismantling engines, how are you going to know when something is a real trend / good product or just a bunch of hype? There is a story frequently told that when Federal Treasury Officers go through counterfeit training, they never look at counterfeit bills. All they do is learn every minutia about what makes a bill authentic. If you have a firm grasp on what is right, you can spot something wrong even if you can’t point to the specific thing that makes it wrong. You almost develop an extra sense.

Fourth, you have to know where to find news about your industry. Are there trade journals? Is there a newspaper either entirely devoted to your niche or at least one that has a section about your niche? Are there websites and blogs that track your industry? Finding blogs in your niche is a goldmine of information because these people are passionate about your product and provide you with tons of free information about industry trends.

Fifth, you have to know where to find information about the products you sell. These can frequently be the same sources as where you find industry trends but they may not completely overlap. There are many magazines and newspapers that do product reviews that don’t cover trends in an industry. They just happen to have someone on staff who likes to give opinions about products. This is an area where you have to do a little background research to make sure that the publication is trustworthy as a source for product hype. For example, take reviews of Catholic products in secular newspapers with a grain of salt. These reviews are typically by people who don’t have a very good grasp on true Catholicism but have a very concrete (and wrong) idea of what they think/wish Catholicism is.

Sixth, you have to either be or find someone who can pull all these different threads of information into a workable action plan for your business. Spotting a trend and failing to act on it is a good way to lose credibility with your customers. When they storm your business looking for a new product that is all over the news and you can’t provide it or don’t have the information necessary to answer their questions, they will look elsewhere for that authoritative source and you will have lost their business.

Here is an example of how Aquinas and More tries to stay on top of the Catholic retail / web industry.

First, define your industry. We are primarily an on-line Catholic store that sells direct to consumers. We also have a retail location, sell Church supplies and sell wholesale and offer a website storefront program for other Catholic stores.

Second, passion. I have been selling Catholic stuff for seven years now and planning for it for longer than that. Our family has always been passionate about Catholicism and about authentic Catholicism in particular. We have several bookcases full of Catholic titles in our home and have subscribed to some Catholic publication non-stop for the last twelve years.

Third, knowledge of the industry. We have been selling Catholic stuff for seven years. During that time we have learned plenty about what sells, when to sell it and who to buy from. This isn’t just some gut feeling. We actually track sales by category and season so we can say that, yes, Christmas cards started selling in October last year even though we weren’t promoting them. This year, guess what we started putting on the website and promoting at the beginning of October? The effect? A 280% increase in Christmas card sales in October.

Fourth, where to find industry trends. In our market, there are a couple of useful trade journals - Catholic Marketing Network and Christian Retailing. There are also several ecommerce journals that have some useful information including Practical Ecommerce and Website Magazine. Because we program our website in ColdFusion, I also subscribe to the Fusion Authority magazine. If you subscribe to these publications, you would have known five years ago that the Christian retail market was going soft and that the stores were consolidating and shifting from books to gifts to compensate. You would also have learned that the Internet is taking a large chunk of business from Christian stores that don’t have their own web presence. I also read the Colorado Springs Business Journal to see what is going on here locally.

Fifth, where to find out about new products. This list could get very long because you really need to watch all different forms of media (radio, television, newspapers, magazines and websites to see what people are talking about. A short list for the Catholic retail world:

• Television - EWTN
• Radio - Your local Catholic station.
• Newspapers
  • National Catholic Register (not Reporter)
  • The Wanderer
  • Our Sunday Visitor
  • Your local diocesan paper
• Magazines
  • Faith and Family Magazine
  • Catholic World Report
  • Homiletic and Pastoral Review
  • This Rock
  • Inside the Vatican
  • Lay Witness
  • St. Anthony Messenger (carefully)
• Websites
  • Amy Welborn
  • New Liturgical Movement
  • Happy Catholic
  • People of the Book
  • Decent Films
  • There are many more places to find Catholic product reviews as well.

Sixth, finding someone to pull it all together. We have been fortunate in finding a staff that is always on the lookout for new things and have been able to stay on top of some, if not all of the trends that have come down the pike in the last few years. I recommend that part of your job application form should include a section asking an applicant what Catholic publications he reads and what Catholic websites he visits.

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