Keeping it Cheap For Your Small Business
When I was first approached by Business On The Mound, they asked me to write a weekly blog about different ways to save or make money. I understand why they would do this: in our circle, I'm kind of worldly famous for being, for lack of a better term, cheap. I'm the guy who keeps his thermostat at 60; goes to events just for the free food; complains about not getting half off his $2 drink (it was happy after al!)...you get the point. But in the recent months, I've changed a little bit. I've opened my eyes to all the different costs that amass us, and it's not just dollars and cents. There are a million articles out there that will tell you what you need to do, so this article is going to tell you to not do anything. Just stop. And listen!
Listening is an art form that seems to have fallen off the wayward. Why do I need to listen to customers when I can have a computer tell me exactly what they want? As great as technology is, and by all means I love technology, the information given to us by our PC's are generally based on assumptions. And you know what they say about assumptions:
as sump tion -noun: something taken for granted; a supposition.
Even the most objective of people make incorrect assumptions all the time. Let's take a reverie back to the early Nineties when Nike was grabbing all of the nation's headlines with their latest scandal. Nike was exploiting Vietnamese workers by having the laborers work in sweatshops for only dollar or two a day. The philanthropic individuals of the United States, in good faith, found this act atrocious and demanded these factories be shut down. They assumed the corporate giants were abusing these poor workers by forcing them to work in unsatisfactory conditions for unsatisfactory wages. Well, consider this excerpt from Kristof and WuDunn's "Two Cheers for Sweatshops:"
She is paid $2 a day for a nine-hour shift, six days a week. On several occasions, needles have gone through her hands, and managers have bandaged her up so that she could go back to work.
"How terrible," we murmured sympathetically.
Mongkol looked up, puzzled. "It's good pay," he said. "I hope she can keep that job. There's all this talk about factories closing now, and she said there are rumors that her factory might close. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't know what she world do then."
If the protesters got there way and closed the factories, everybody would lose. The factory workers would lose their jobs, Nike would incur costs of relocation and re-training, and the market would have more expensive shoes.
Even in the most seemingly obvious of situations, it pays hefty dividends to sit down with the stake-holders of the situation and learn about every side, and this holds true in business, too. Before you start performing a task for client with the best intentions in mind, make sure you sit down with them and really hammer out the details. I recall a story I heard that a project was estimated based on the requirements definition and sold to the client for $5,000, without ever speaking with the client. The bidder assumed the system should have taken a week to build; that is until they spoke to the client. Long story short (and $250,000 later), the company came to the realization that they should have spoken with the client first.
I understand that planning is tedious and boring, and I know that time is money (I'm the cheap one), but remember this: the cost of failure will always outweigh quick success.
If you have any questions or need advice on getting a consultant please email us at questions@businessonthemound.com.
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