Last Saturday, I took a jacket to a tailor shop to get it repaired, because the stitching at the end of the sleeve was coming undone. When I got there, the seamstress took one look at it, said “This happens all of the time” and proceeded to repair it in about two minutes (she already had black thread on her machine). When I asked how much it cost, she told me $2. To me, $2 way undervalued the service she provided. If I had tried to repair it myself (and yes, I do know how t

A couple of years ago, I decided to stop going to most of the networking meetings I was attending. Why? Because service professionals are boring. Now don’t get me wrong, I like meeting new people, particularly if they are willing to share something about themselves or their passions. The problem is when people put their “professional” persona on, they become a much duller version of themselves. That makes them look more or less the same. And I admit I was guilty of this whe

Last weekend, I disassembled the platform that formerly went under our mattress. As I started taking it apart, I was surprised to find how little there was to support our mattress. However, this platform had lasted through two mattresses - a total of 15 years or more. If I had built one myself, I probably would have used 4-5 times as much material. That got me thinking about marketing... yes, I think about it a lot :) One of the things people get when they hire a skilled ma

In today’s marketplace, we have been trained by (unscrupulous) marketers to want fast, exciting results: “Lose 20 pounds in a week.” While great initial results are exciting, they often don’t work in the long run. It’s not much good to lose 20 pounds this week if you gain all of it and more back over the next week. While it is less exciting, it is a lot more satisfying to find something that is going to continue to work over time. The same can be true in marketing. A lot