Customers and other strangers

If you operated Momma Mia's Meatballs, which feature do you think would give you the best advantage in the competition for customers?

• The best location?
• The best meatball recipe?
• The best prices?

Would any of the above matter if you didn't have any customers?  Or if you ill-served the ones who patronized you? Probably not. At least not for long. 

I was thinking about this following a hike this weekend in a local state park.  We were hungry after finishing our jaunt and were looking forward to a burger and beer at a historic tavern near the entrance to the park.

It was closed.

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon. 

In June. 

It wasn't closed because of an illness or malfunction.  Its posted hours noted that it didn't open until 4 pm on Saturdays. We took our appetites and our business elsewhere, as did others.

The little deli up the road, which didn't offer anything other than pre-packaged fare, was busy with others like us. Hungry customers. With money. 

As Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management once wrote:  "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."  You cannot do this successfully if you are not focused on satisfying their needs.

Can you believe your eyes?

So how was YOUR Black Friday/Small Business Saturday?  Oh, was there a holiday in there?  Sorry...hope you enjoyed your feast.  How many ways did you find to serve turkey leftovers?  Were you as glad to get back to business as I was? 

There seems to be as many opinions on the opening of the 2011 holiday selling season as there are pundits pontificating and organizations orating.  Sales were up 16% on Black Friday, or they were up 1.9% for the three-day weekend, or don't pay any attention to any of the data.

"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan once misspoke.  He also said, more aptly "trust, but verify."  There are plenty of examples of the dangers of focusing on the wrong thing, one of my favorites being the famous "monkey business" experiment. 

The bottom line is that the most pertinent data are yours:  your Key Performance Indicators, and how you use data to guide your business decisions.  KPI's can be a powerful decision-making tool, when combined with a proper business plan, and they need not be elaborate to be effective; in fact, just the opposite.

For smaller businesses especially, data are essential for being able to separate fact from fiction and to verify the existence of any of 800 lb gorillas sitting in our midst.