Tag Archives: core expertise

What You Can Learn From Janie’s Cakes: Focus On Quality

To start up a business successfully, you definitely need to be a risk taker.  It also helps if you have the nerves of a cat burglar and the daring of a trapeze artist.  But, in the end, you only need to do a few things well.  And you will need the concentration of an Indian fire walker to keep those things, and those things only, foremost in your mind and vision.

FOCUS on your core skill, service or product. Focus on quality. If you are making cakes, make the best ones.  I was looking a few days ago at Janie’s Cakes and I had to look no further than her list of ingredients to know she would make some of the best cakes available:

Farm Fresh Eggs = Farm Fresh Flavor

Others may use the term but at Janie’s Cakes we actually use farm fresh eggs in our cakes. In fact, Janie raises her own chickens (she has over 300 happy laying hens!) and collects the fresh eggs each morning to bake her cakes.

You can tell the difference. It’s a fact, pampered farm-raised chickens lay tastier eggs than their cooped-up commercial counterparts! Try one of our cakes and taste real farm freshness.

 Farm Fresh Eggs Part of the Recipe
Vanilla Flavoring vs. Pure Vanilla Extract

Because of the high price of real vanilla extract most bakers use cheaper artificial vanilla flavoring in their products.  Not at Janie’s Cakes. Janie uses only pure organic Madagascar vanilla extract from 100-year-old Nielsen-Massey® Vanillas.

Vanilla is just one more important example of how Janie will not compromise the quality of her pound cakes because of the high cost of an essential ingredient.

www.nielsenmassey.com

 Pure Vanilla Extract

Quality Flour = Quality Pound Cakes

The primary ingredient of any cake is flour. That’s why at Janie’s Cakes we use only the best unbleached flour available—King Arthur Special Flour®.

Established in 1790, King Arthur® Flour is America’s oldest flour company.  For over two centuries its products have remained free from chemical additives. It’s the only flour Janie will use in her pound cakes.

www.kingarthurflour.com

 Quality Flour in our Cakes

The list goes on, but you get the idea.  Any one who puts that much focus and effort into the ingredients…300 chickens laying eggs!…..you know that cake is going to be incredibly good!

If you write a blog, remember, “Content is King.”  You can attract a sizable audience by being known for the quality and thoughtfulness of your content.

And there’s another tip you can pick up from Janie.  She only sells 7 kinds of pound cakes and the sauces which are part of their ingredients.  She has, in fact, streamlined and simplified her product line and created a system.

You can do the same thing if you write a blog:

  • Set up your Google or other reader to bring information to you instead of having to go out and track it down
  • Write your first draft
  • Gather any, graphics or links that will bolster, deepen, add insight or punch to content
  • Give it a quick round of final revisions and edits. Sometimes the story changes as you write it. Go with the flow.
  • Push the content live and you’re done! On to the next post.

A couple of other areas to maintain your Indian-walker-like focus:

FOCUS on marketing your service or product. Think “blowing your own horn”.  Think “social media” and connecting with others and letting them in on a good thing….what you do and can do for them.

FOCUS on the numbers: they are like a treasure map which will show you the path to success.

And if you have a moment to spare, think about automating or outsourcing anything you don’t absolutely have to do yourself so you can focus on being the best in whatever field you’ve chosen.

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Business On The Net: The Morphing Imperative

Image representing eBay.com as depicted in Cru...

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AdvancingWomen.com

The cold hard truth is , when you start a business, on the Net or off, you never know what’s going to sell and what isn’t until the market tells you, so be prepared to listen.

In The Risk of Assuming the Market wants “A”, when it Really wants “B” – The Entrepreneurial Mind, Jeff Cornwall describes the process:

We enter the market with a plan in hand.  It is a plan that we may have agonized over for weeks, months, or even years.  We have done our research, created a carefully thought out marketing plan and operating plan that both help justify our financial forecasts.
And then a funny thing happens.  We assumed that the market wanted “A”.  But, if we listen carefully, we often find out that it really wants “B.”

That’s the critical juncture at which we have to not only listen to the market but act on what it tells us. In many cases, it may just require moving the spotlight from one corner of your display window to another, showcasing a different aspect of what you’ve proven you can do and for which you are recognized. The trick is to look very carefully at what your expertise really is and move in that direction, not away from it.
From the beginning, many successful web sites continued to morph their business models, searching for and migrating to just the right combo of ingredients to continue approaching success. Savvy web businesses who’ve adopted a process of continuous change thrive and prosper, keeping a step ahead of either the slow erosion of changing markets and business models or the savage and tornado-like devastation that sweeps periodically through the Net and elsewhere .

Google started with search and had to have a light bulb moment to connect it with advertising and roar on to commercial success. Ebay.com’s auction site was so successful, it took over Paypal.com, not a big leap since it was already supplying much of Paypal’s revenue through its transactions.  It merely moved from making money off being in the middle of one type of transaction to another.  Amazon.com started selling books moved into lawn chairs, jewelry books, groceries, and hundreds of other items, then stepped up to a new, possibly transformative model by developing and offering Kindle, it’s ebook reader which allows you to get a book with the click of a button.

An example of somewhat more extreme and for many years continuous morphing is that of Beyond.com. A business to consumer software site, Beyond.com in the late nineties, had already spent $125 million on a TV ad campaign to familiarize consumers with its software. When the business to consumer model seemed to flounder all across the Net, Beyond.com decided to ditch the model and move towards business to business. The question was how?

The answer for Beyond.com, provides a road map as to how a dot com which is either floundering, stalled, or stuck in the wrong business model, can become unstuck and get moving down the road again. Beyond.com took their dilemma to branding experts Barbara Zenz and Stephanie Paulson of The Stephenz Group  currently ranked as/ the number one advertising agency in Silicon Valley The course they recommended to Beyond.com management consisted of four essential steps:
1. “Assess the company’s business model and understand where it is today. What is the vision and focus of the company?
2. Look at the brand it has already established…..and translate that into the appropriate message for a new market: the business customer.
3. Assess the audience. What are the business objectives and sales goals?
4. Then build the communications strategy.”

Beyond.com decided to leverage its existing knowledge and experience of selling online by targeting CEOs and executives of manufacturing companies who wanted an online presence to sell their products but didn’t want to undergo a long learning curve developing their storefronts. Instead of selling software, Beyond.com now used direct mail to sell their expertise to manufacturers touting the logic of outsourcing to “e-Stores by Beyond.com”. The pitch to businesses was “Why reinvent the wheel? Let Beyond.com build and manage your eStore for you.”
Beyond.com’s morphing continued.  They went on to become what they describe as the world’s largest network of niche career communities, powering thousands of job sites, apparently with success.
Beyond.com recognized, at their core, they were essentially a technology and networking platform. They chose to sell their expertise and the use of their platform to different communities, first those who wanted store fronts, second, those who wanted job boards.
Of course, no direction is guaranteed to be the correct one or to prove profitable. The simple answer to “How to keep up in a demanding and continuously evolving environment ?” is that a business has to look deep inside itself, to know and understand its own culture and capabilities and decide for itself which business model it will be capable of fulfilling and which will bring it success. And, if one model doesn’t work, a business must try to conserve its cash to be able to reach for another. As ITT’s late, great manager, Harold Geneen, used to say: ” Once you understand a business problem, you must keep trying until you find a solution. If you try 47 times and fail 47 times, you must try the 48th time, and if necessary, the 49th and 50th time. You have no choice but to succeed.”
The other lesson to bear in mind, in these expensive Net times, the most critical and succinct business advice of all: “Never run out of cash”. If you do, they take you out of the game and then there is no further opportunity for change, and no possible redemption, except as a phoenix rising from the ashes, as a new business altogether, which is the ultimate change.

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