B283 Customer Service

Entrepreneur Journal

Journal

This week’s topic of study was on customer service. Some thoughts on customer service. First, appreciate your customers. They are your life blood, they provide a living for you and your family. Gratitude is a very noble yet humbling attribute. If you keep gratitude for your customers foremost in your mind you will probably treat them very well at every interaction. Become prideful and selfish and you will take your customers for granted. When you do this your customers can and probably will sense a lack of gratitude and that they are unappreciated. Second, live the golden rule. If you were a customer of your business, how would you want to be treated? Put yourself in their shoes. Try to view your company from their perspective. David Neeleman from JetBlue was able to put himself in the customers position and “focus on what matters.” “Putting money in the right places that really mattered to people,” is one way to make customers feel like they matter. In the end, do your customers have “the (insert company name here) experience? That something unique and special that makes people proud to be your customers.

 “$100 Challenge” Progress

This week I completed the design and printing of the labels and posters for William’s Water. Because of Halloween, I lost my youth sales force for a Saturday launch. We will start off with some evening sales next week. 

B283 Marketing Week

Brandon Flowers Concert with Beautiful Daughter Julia

Entrepreneur Journal

Journal

Another week with information overload. So much great information on marketing. I appreciated the basics taught in the Harvard Manage Mentor assignment. These essentials are very important and applicable in an established organization. Their definition explains it clearly, “Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individuals' and companies' goals.” For small business creation, innovation, and creativity, I found the fastcompany.com article “In Praise of the Purple Cow” by Seth Godin to be creative and entertaining. I loved the example of the smart elevator created by the Schindler Elevator Corporation. Thinking up these types of solutions that lead to commercial success is something that excites me. I realize I do these types of things in my current career as a water district manager. One of the innovative, money-saving ideas I have come up with is a way to perform water main line replacement using our core employees and temp workers instead of contracting with an outside pipeline contractor. This plan will save the district two million dollars over the next ten years. It’s my experience that a key to successful marketing or market creativity is a keen analytical mind that can envision things from many different angles.

 “$100 Challenge” Progress

This week I did the elevator pitch for William’s Water. It helped solidify my plans and goals. I think this will help going forward. It will also be a way to get additional donations as I talk to people about what I am doing. I have my marketing materials prepared and am going to launch sales next week. I just need to coordinate schedules with my employees.

B283 Week 4 Entrepreneur Journal

 

 An Updated Picture of the Huff Family

Entrepreneur Journal

Journal

In a business class last semester we participated in a business simulation, Capsim. I really enjoyed it and our team won the competition round. One of the things the instructor kept reminding us was that in business (and especially this simulation), debt was good. We were actually deducted points if or debt to equity ratios were too low. He even mentioned that it goes against everything we’ve learned in the gospel about debt. But, in business, there is a proper role for it.

Testimony of tithing. I really appreciated the gospel perspective to funding and business as presented in the variety of material in this week’s lesson. I really liked the little nuance in Elder Faust’s story about his grandfather paying his tithing of hay during the Great Depression. I don’t know if very many people caught that Elder Faust mentioned that the taxes were delinquent on the farm. At least his grandfather had his priorities straight, first the Lord, then his family, then the money grubbing government. I especially have felt the sentiments of on of his congregation when Elder Faust was a bishop who said, “Bishop, this is a full tithe and a little bit more, because that’s the way we have been blessed.” I have an unshakeable testimony of the blessings of tithing because I have seen the Lord bless and keep our family in our home and provide for our needs in good times and in bad. I know this is a blessing of provident living and living the law of the tithe.

 “$100 Challenge” Progress

This week I completed and submitted my funding summary plan for the $100 challenge. While putting together the one page business plan last week and thinking about the goal for my salespeople, I realized that I might run out of water bottles with just the two cases I had already bought. So, on Wed. I picked up two more cases from Costco. It wouldn’t do to give them a goal they could not achieve because they didn’t have enough product!