James R. Dickey

Do you have competitors in your business?

Do they have web sites?

Would you like to know automatically when they change the way they sell their products?

Would you like to know automatically when they announce new products or specials?

Google has just made that much easier. If you use Google Reader, they can now create a feed from any web page – not just blogs that provide feeds. That means that simply by putting the URL of your competitors in the “add a subscription” box, you can instantly have Google keeping an eye on your competition for you – 24 hours/day.

Full details straight from Google here.

In 2009 127,000 packages of Girl Scout cookies were donated to our troops via “Project Troop to Troop”. Troops frequently report that care packages like this are especially valued treats for them.

These cookies are distributed to our service men and woman at home and abroad, as well as Veteran Organizations and wounded soldiers.

The Girl Scouts suggest that you consider at least a case of 12 packages of cookies for our service personnel. They will pick out and send the most popular cookies so you don’t have to worry about which flavor to pick, and the case will be delivered at no extra charge.

A receipt for the full tax-deductible amount of $42.00 per case is available for “Project Troop to Troop” cookies. Half cases of 6 packages are also available for $21.00, with all the same benefits.

Can the Girl Scouts and our troops count you in? If so, please email me at jd at avendi.com and I’ll provide you with the mailing address. The deadline for orders is 1/30/2010. The girls, the troops and I greatly appreciate your help.

Of course if you’d like a box or two for yourself at $3.50 each, that’d be perfectly fine as well!

Frequently asked questions about Girl Scout cookie sales.

If you would like to donate blood to the American Red Cross in memorial to the almost 3,000 men, women and children who were killed on U.S. soil on 9/11/01 and will be in or near Flower Mound, Texas this Saturday, September 12, please complete the form below so that we can make sure there are enough supplies and staff available to handle the volume.

The drive will be held at Valley Creek Church at 5800 Long Prairie Road, Flower Mound, TX 75028 from 8am to noon.

We know times are tough, so we’re not asking for money, but we are asking for a donation that could literally save one or more peoples’ lives. Please help if you can.

As business leaders we have to understand that our business is writing a story every day, in every interaction with the customer. Is your business writing the story you want?

In the last year my family has had two starkly different experiences with local retailers. The most recent was yesterday, and as I recounted the story to a friend of mine, I realized that all of our businesses are constantly writing stories. Stories that our customers will tell, one way or another. Write a meaningful enough story for a customer and she’ll write it large – on Facebook, Twitter, ePinions, Amazon reviews and more – and that’s both a fantastic opportunity and a warning for those who aren’t thinking about how the story reads.

Story 1:
For those who have never experienced it, Braum’s ice cream is great. They own their own cows on their own farms and ship it in their own trucks to their own stores. I’ve been a fan since my teens, and my wife and I grew to value their milk enough to make an extra trip out of our way to get it. Great story, right? That’s exactly how I used to tell it and it was. Here’s how it ends now:

It’s in the middle of last summer, which in Texas means the temperature is north of 100 degrees fahrenheit. I’m going to visit a friend, which means the closest Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Store is only a mile out of my way instead of several miles out, so I stop by and buy two gallons (enough to last us a week or so).

Well, I don’t get home for hours and the heat has had its way with the milk. The next day my wife goes back to Braum’s – several miles each way past several grocery stores – and explains what happens. They flatly refuse to do anything other than let her buy two more gallons of milk. She thanks them, leaves, stops at one of our many grocery stores closer to home and buys two gallons of milk.

We’ve never been to a Braum’s since, but whenever the subject comes up it always makes for a good story, so we share our “2 gallon” experience. Sure, it wasn’t their fault we didn’t go straight home with their milk and they didn’t owe us the $7 or whatever it was. What they missed, though, was the opportunity for us to share a fantastic story instead of one where we felt they failed to meet us even part way or in any way recognize that we were loyal, life-long customers.

Story 2:
On the other hand, there was yesterday. We have company coming for dinner and my wife is making her fabulous ribs. We have two guests, so true to form she buys 10 racks of ribs. Somehow only 9 of them make it into the refrigerator and the other spends 24 hours in the car. I take it back to our neighborhood Kroger, explain what happens, and they cheerfully offer to exchange it with our choice of other rack of ribs. They’re not even sweating whether or not there’s a price difference, and they know full well it wasn’t their fault the ribs spent the night in our car. Of course I pick the smallest rack and refuse their ridiculously generous offer to refund me the difference in price between the one I brought back and the one I picked out. That too is a story I’ll be sharing for years, and one that’ll make it easy to favor Kroger over the slightly closer, newer other grocery store in our neighborhood.

What kind of stories are your people making it possible for your customers to share? Are they the stories that help your business grow, or are you saving a few dollars and killing your golden geese, forgoing years of hundreds of dollars of revenue per year?

An interesting thing happened today. I upgraded the software on a laptop. It’s worth noting because while we have 4 laptops in the household (one each on OS X, Vista, XP and 2000), I can’t remember the last time I ever did that.

On Windows it was just too hard and too expensive. An upgrade was easily $99 for the OS software alone, and inevitably needed more ram and more hard drive space and by the time I looked at upgrading all of that, the time involved, and the likelihood of some software incompatibility, it was literally cheaper and easier to buy a new laptop.

Not today. Today I installed Apple’s Snow Leopard OS upgrade on the 4-year-old MacBook Pro that I use as my primary machine. It took less than 1 hour (during which none of my attention was needed).

Everything works perfectly, and faster. Kudos to Apple for proving that even in the high tech world not everything needs to have a short life cycle if it’s well designed and well built.