Monthly Archives: May 2008

don’t sell bad cantaloupe

one of the hardest things to do — if not the hardest — is to tell someone you don’t want their money.

in the business world, it’s important to realize that your prospects for money now can hurt your prospects for money later. investors know this. you don’t sell stock when the market is on an up-swing. your $20 a share stock can turn into an $80 investment. but when it comes to selling services, there’s not much indication of a trend. this is what drives leaders to rash decisions.

you also wouldn’t sell stocks when they’re at rock bottom. i learned a valuable lesson when i was young (young-er anyway!) about the value of honesty and how client satisfaction changes everything. i sold produce for 5 years and in that time span, the most important sales were the sales where i didn’t sell anything.

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dress for success (or, be the peacock)

when i say dress for success, i don’t mean your actual dress, necessarily. certainly it’s rather good practice to be the best dressed person you’ll see today. and i always remember something a classmate wrote in an 8th grade yearbook – “no matter what you do or where you go, always look good and smell great.”

that alone would be excellent advice, but i’m talking about a different kind of dressing up. i’m talking about dressing up your business.

people perceive certain things, whether it be right or wrong, when they look at your company. it’s natural — life likes good looking things! there have been studies that show the peacock owes its livelihood to looking good. scientists clipped the brightly colored feathers from male peacocks, and left other males alone as a control group. those without their feathers clipped saw much greater rates of mating with the females in the group. throwing evolutionary caution to the wind, the lady peacocks choose brightly colored males because the more feathers they have, the more viral the male appears to be. during the mating season, other brightly colored birds like the many variations of parrots and parakeets, will sit on the highest branches in the sun so that their feathers are more visible and appear more brightly colored than their rival males.

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