The case study guide for "Building Beauty" with Mike Neary of Oregon Log Homes in Sisters, Oregon as seen on Small Business School, the series on PBS member stations.

The Case Study Guide

updated: May 2007

view prior episode

It's not about you

Think Like A Customer

We know. You started a business so you could do the thing you love. That's fine. However, you can't grow a strong, long-lived company if you have such weird ideas that there aren't enough people like you to sell to. John Wargo said the problem most small business owners have is we think everyone is like us. Surprise! In some cases, almost no one is like us.

We've already written here about asking your customers lots of questions and that is the key to you learning how to think like your customers. However, we have met enough business owners who don't do this and who can't seem to give up the, "it's all about me" mindset. Thus, we want to take this idea a bit deeper. We insist that that if you want to grow, you have to forget about you.

WATCH TELEVISION THAT TEACHES

Key Ideas of this episode



	1.		Be Bold

	2.		Make It Perfect

	3.		Listen To Customers

	4.		Budget For Marketing

	5.		Be Visible

	6.		Think Like A Customer

	7.		Win An Award

	8.		Say Yes

	9.		Let Others Take Over

	10.		Teach What Repeats

	11.		Automate Art

	12.		Sell A Dream

Sounds like a Mom telling her teenager that she has to stop being so selfish and think about the feelings of others.

Topic for Discussion: Does our ability to grow a business correlate with our personal maturity?

Answer: Of course. You have to be the person customers are willing to give money to and you have to be the person employees want to work for.

We believe it is most difficult for anyone suffering from what psychologists call, "arrested development" to build a strong business. The dictionaries all agree that arrested development is "an abnormal state in which development has stopped prematurely." The synonyms most often are fixation, infantile fixation, and regression. People who are stuck in childhood or adolescence are self-centered and unattractive to strangers. Usually only their family puts up with them.

Why bother to understand this? Because your business growth could be stuck because you could be stuck. If you feel the company must swirl around you because, after all, you invented the business, you will never maximize the business' potential. You may be able to fool a few customers some of the time, but we guarantee that you won't be able to fool smart, talented employees.

Business owners who start a company from nothing and grow it to live over the long haul learn how to be better people than they would doing anything else with their lives. Michael Novak, the theologian in residence at the American Enterprise Institute, said on one of our programs, "Building your own business teaches a set of virtues which you just won't learn any other way. It teaches you to live with failure, because there's going to be lots of failures. It teaches you to do very difficult things." We say that one of those difficult things we all have to learn is how to put the customers at the center of our businesses thereby removing ourselves.

You think about it: Do you think if you took a month leave from the company that it would work better or worse while you are away? Have you ever had a 360 Degree Feedback Review conducted in your company?

go to this transcript...

The Small Business Index of Learning Companies
Click here to be listed and linked from within this site.