Motivation
Zig Ziglar's favorite word. One of mine as well.
Why do what we do? This past summer while back in Ohio, I bumped into a high school classmate. Not great friends, but we did cruise the boulevard on occasion. He retired from Timken in Canton, Ohio. We both were machinist. The biggest difference, I knew going into my junior year (the first of a two year program) that I would never work in a machine shop.
Notwithstanding the machine shop I helped acquired as a part of a LBO years later. I served as assistant to the president and integrated the data processing issues. Speaking of Timken, they sent us "The Letter" as it used to be called: implement EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or stop supplying components. We did. But I digress.
TPU (WWW.THROUGHPUT.US) is biz number ten.
Why?
Motivation. Frustration. Just because.
Because there are problems that I am well suited to solve. Perhaps uniquely so. Because of those "certain needs" that I spoke of in an earlier post. Because as Tim Pipher told me, "You can only play so many rounds of golf before its gets boring."
TPU is first and foremost a sales organization. As Zig is fond of saying, "Nothing happens until someone sells something!" Second, it is a consultancy. In 1989 I created micro/SKI to sell and service computer hardware. Why? No one was doing it the way that it should have been done. IMNSHO. But Dell was close. But in 1989, they still had a number of issues to sort out.
Strategy
Until you read and explore H. William Dettmer and his landmark book, Strategic Navigation, I would suggest that you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Look at your transactions for last month. What if you were to close just 20% more sales? What if on all those sales, including the extra 20%, your margins were improved by a mere 20%? One more "what if" — what if in the course of making those extra sales, with those extra margins, it took you 20% less time?
The key: Focus
If you are a business owner, headquartered and operating in the USA, and you would like to learn more, call me. Night or day.
Before your competition does.
-ski
P.S. Consider this challenge: Take Saturday off. Buy an Apple Mac Mini. The CRT you have for your PC will work fine. For now. Spend just 15 minutes playing around on the Mac. Question: When you finally looked up, how long had elapsed? If day has turned to night, may I suggest that you keep it?
P.P.S. Wondering what the Apple Mac Mini has to do with motivation? I wanted one. It is a cool product. So I was motivated to do the work necessary to afford one. I had been one of the first buyers of a Mac, back in 1984. But the corporate rat race had worn me down... in 2005 a project required I have a PC to run MS-Access. How boring. Un-Motivating. The Mac with built in open source tools (and the ability to install lots more, like SugarCRM) is fun. If you gotta work, make it as much fun as possible. Finally, my mini serves as a reminder that cool products are still possible. With the iPhone and new iPod touch (and the remote control I recently blogged about), Apple is "in" as they say. Are you motivated to make your company and its products cool? If not, quit. Go home. Get out of Dodge.
Or, find a way to make it cool.
Hire SKI.
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Jeff 'SKI' Kinsey, Jonah
ski@throughput.us
(330) 432-3533
Motivation :: What moves You?
