Lessons from J.C. Penney
By · CommentsEarlier this week, J.C. Penney announced that it was going to undergo a major overhaul in the way it does business and communicates with its customers. As we watch this change unfold and wait for customer reactions, here are some of the more positive things business owners can pull from the strategy.
Simplify, Simplify Simplify
This is the best part of the strategy, even though the J.C. Penney strategy is really not simple. They have a three tags system: red for everyday low prices, white for monthly value and a blue tag for the cheapest price. What is simple is creating a normal price tag with the everyday low prices, showcasing the monthly value in a sales display and simply letting the customer see for themselves that the monthly value merchandise is the cheapest. The customers are going to continue to comparison shop. They don’t really need you to do it for them. The lesson in this is don’t complicate the simple strategy, if you say it’s easy then it should be easy.
Communicate Changes
3 Benefits of Having an Irresistible Website
By · CommentsHaving a website that is irresistible can make a huge difference for you and your business. In fact, I would even say that it’s vital for your website to be absolutely irresistible, and without that your site is not going to be as effective as it’s meant to be.
So why does your website need to be irresistible? Here are 3 benefits that you will see when you have an irresistible website:
1. Attract Your Ideal Customers
Having an irresistible website will help you to attract customers. And get this, it will not just help you to attract ANY customers, but will attract your ideal customers, those people that you MOST want to work with you or have buy from you.
In fact, your goal with your website should be to specifically make it irresistible to that specific target market that you want to do business with. When you focus on what will be irresistible to them, what they will be attracted to, and what kind of information or solutions they are specifically looking for, you end up with a website that speaks directly to them and makes them want to find out more.
Women, Leadership, Self-Care, and BLUE MONDAY
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You wake up Monday morning, pour yourself a glass of orange juice, and get breakfast ready for your clan.
Off to the office, you battle the traffic, thinking about how to tell your rebel employee that there have been complaints about his behavior.
You dread the meeting and yet know it can’t wait.
Pulling into the parking lot you feel a wave of frustration, seeing that someone has parked in your reserved spot and the rain is now coming down in buckets. Glad there is an umbrella on the back seat, you make a run for it hugging folders from last night’s homework close to your chest.
The demands for your time never stop.
By noon, it feels like this Monday has been a month long and you start to wonder what it’s all about, why you work so hard and why there are so many demands on you that just don’t stop. Then you take a deep breath and realize,
“Ah, this is called BLUE MONDAY”.
This Monday, at the end of January, has been dubbed the most depressing day of the year, and you’re in the thick of it!
Thank You Ma’am
By · CommentsLast night I read a wonderful article in Entrepreneur about giving praise to your staff. It was wonderfully written, but I thought the article was missing the most important element of praising your staff-sincerity. So with that in mind I wanted to highlight the reasons why sincerity should be included in your praise package.
A sincere thank you is a million times better than a well-crafted one.
I agree that there are certain guidelines you should follow for keeping a thank you short and sweet, but ultimately if it isn’t sincere it isn’t going to make a difference. The key to a great thank you is acknowledging that an employee saved your behind and really came through for the company, the structure of the thank you is not as important as the spirit of it.
Be relevant
Many times a thank you is off the mark because this may have been the only positive light for the employee; in that case you shouldn’t try to make their situation look better. Say thank you for what they have done now, don’t try to create a trail of good deeds if there isn’t one. Let this one incident serve as positive reinforcement. Be sincere.
I talk a lot about how to be irresistible online, to attract your ideal customers and make more money. But the fact is that most of us really don’t feel very irresistible, and it can feel like a big stretch to imagine ourselves actually being irresistible to potential customers.
If you don’t feel irresistible inside and out, then it’s going to be difficult to figure out how to be irresistible online. Because even your online presence and marketing has to start with YOU. And if you’re not feeling it, the people who come in contact with you are going to pick up on that.
Harness the power of your imagination to start feeling irresistible.
Imagine for a moment that you were irresistible. Close your eyes and picture what that would look like. How would you act? How would you look? How would other people respond to you, and how would you respond to them?
Now think about how you will feel when you are irresistible. What does your body feel like? What emotions do you feel? Do you feel strong and powerful? Or maybe you feel relaxed and sensual? Describe and feel those emotions right now as you imagine you being irresistible.
A Leadership Perspective
By · CommentsI had a new experience as a juror this week and as we were deliberating one of my fellow jurors made a poignant statement. He quoted the Blackstone ratio and said ‘it is better than 10 guilty persons escape, than one innocent suffer’. Bringing those experiences back to the office made me think about how we lead our staff; some use leadership as a punitive advantage and others use it as a method to force the hands of our employees. By doing that we are being our most ineffectual selves, our staff is our most valuable resource. The Blackstone ratio could give us the framework to be more effective leaders and here’s how.
Your staff is right until they are wrong
Now this is not an invitation to let your staff run amuck, but it is an invitation to give your staff the benefit of the doubt until you have the necessary details to make an educated decision about challenging situations. We all know that staff can and will lie, but that should not be a deterrent to treating them fairly and getting the facts of the situation.
Your analysis should involve only the relevant factors
A common mistake that start-up entrepreneurs make with their online presence is trying to save money by doing it all themselves and not hiring a website designer. While this may save money in the short term, in the end you usually end up with a design that you don’t really love, and a site that doesn’t really make money for you and your business.
One of the best investments you can make in your business it to hire a professional website designer to help you get your online presence off on the right foot. The benefits to working with an expert designer are numerous. Here are just a few:
1. Save Oodles of Time
Setting up a brand new website and social media presence takes time. And if you aren’t familiar with the process, or aren’t quite sure what you’re doing, it takes even MORE time. This can quickly suck up hours, days or even weeks of your precious time.
Wouldn’t it be better to spend that time running your business, making sales, connecting with customers? Hire a designer and leave all that time-consuming work to them. Not only will it mean that YOU don’t have to do it, but since this is what they do all the time, they’ll be able to finish it MUCH faster than you would doing it on your own.
Did you know that 99% of the employers in the United States are small businesses? Did you know that the number of women-owned businesses in the United States increased by 20% from 2002 to 2011?
In other words, women small business owners are playing an incredibly important part in job creation in the United States as more and more women take control of their own careers, start their own businesses, and create jobs for more people.
A new infographic from BOLT Insurance Agency offers a visual representation of how women small business owners are impacting job creation in the United States. Using information from the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy and the Center for Women’s Business Research, Infographic World designed the infographic shown below.
Take a look and learn more about how women-owned small businesses are affecting job creation (23 million new jobs), economic impact ($3 trillion), and more.
Via: Bolt Insurance
When Being GUTSY Starts Young
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I recently spoke at a women’s networking group and asked the bright and creative professionals to think about the earliest time they could remember when they spoke out for themselves.
To jog their memories, I told a story about unfairness when a boy in my elementary school class was yelled at when I was the one “sneaking” in front of him in line. (You can read the whole story on the “About Sylvia” page of www.sylvialafair.com.)
Another great example. This gal was an assistant in an after school gymnastics class. The teacher was absent for three weeks due to illness and she led the class alone. At some point, she felt she should be paid, assistant or not, she was the one doing all the work.
She was encouraged to go to the head of the program and state her case. She did. And they agreed to pay her.
She was twelve years old!
This is a perfect example of GUTSY at a young age.
Think about the messages of success or failure you were given when you stood up to say what you wanted and needed. Were you, like this extremely vibrant woman, heard and acknowledged? Or, like some of the other stories, were you told to lower your head and be quiet?
You Never Know What Impacts
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I was having an amazing conversation with my grown daughter who is a free spirit. She is a film maker and raw food chef who has a ton of friends and opinions about, well, just about everything.
Here’s what was fascinating.
When she was little, way before You Tube, she loved to listen to songs and stories by Marlo Thomas from the album “Free to Be You and Me”. She went on to talk about other parts of her life, looking at what it means to be a woman, a leader, a creative human who yearned for adventure and depth.
Back to Marlo and songs from a revolution to give children the freedom to choose what their lives would include. My daughter, Mikayla, told me how she would listen to the story of Princess Atalanta and how hearing this well over one hundred times, informed her to be free to be.
The story in a nutshell: a king thought it was time for his daughter to marry. He decided to have a race where all the males in town could compete and the winner would have the princess for his wife. EXCEPT…Atalanta was no ordinary princess of her times, she was from the new breed, a GUTSY GAL who would make her own choices.
