Years back, I picked up the name/tag “Managing by Wandering Around” from Tom Peters and realized that is pretty much how I conducted my typical day.   His commentary did raise my awareness and subsequently, I did try to make sure that I spent time with and wherever my folks were working.  To perfectly honest though I generally did this around 2-3:00 in the afternoon.  That just happens to be my low period of the day when desk work was impossible and I needed to get pumped up.  A cup of java just would not cut it; I was already drinking about three quarts a day back then.

My staff quickly understood that I wasn’t looking over anyone’s shoulder.  I was there to do a managers number one job:  find out what is getting in their way to performing at their best and fixing it.  The payback was immense.

During the Hudson Valley Business Edge conference at the Holiday Inn in Fishkill, NY my job as consultant to the principles and as a generally interested party, was Chief Kibitzer and problem solver.  While wandering around over the course of the day I had the pleasure of watching a real practitioner of the art of MBWA, the Catering Manager.  For a smallish event, it was complex from the house point of view.  A ballroom with multiple setups and reconfigures including meals and keynotes, four breakout rooms to be serviced, coordination with the A/V staff and videographers and stills photographer.  It all had to be setup at 7:30 am and was in use until we all retired to the bar for hors d’oeuvre at 5:30 pm.  Rich was everywhere, all day.

I took a minute of his time around 4:00 to compliment him and remarked about how he used that old technique so well.  His response was classic.  “If you want them to follow you, you need to be there.  He then held up his hand, which had a power cord in it saying, “You also need to make their job easy for them.”    Another classic example; rather then send one of the young people to play gopher, he did it himself so they could do what they needed to do.  With that, I realized this is what I had observed all day.

What’s the take away from all of this?  Just a reminder that MBWA still works, you can’t lead from the rear and leaders are more effective than mangers.

People that I work with hear this from me a lot because it is true.   I have trouble reducing complex ideas and concepts to memorable sound bytes, my copy writing is weak and I don’t see what graphics people see.  A good example of the latter was a time when I asked my marketing advisor to look at a Power Point deck that I was going to use with an Angel.  He suggested a couple of word tweaks and then a slide came up that had a graphic on it.  John said, “Move that three pixels right.”

He’s the expert so I fumble around freehand dragging it around until he says stop.  I was amazed because I could not tell that it moved but I could see that the slide was a whole lot move effective.  How do they do that?

If you want to “Feed the Marketing Mouth” and you are a small business with limited funds, you will want to do some of the work yourself. But, please don’t try to do it all unless you are one of “them“.  We both know that you will try and that is smart up to the point that you really need professional advice or service.  Learn as much as you can in order to do sound professional work yourself and save the money for the important marketing pieces or for the finish work.   Where can you easily learn some of these techniques?  Time for a shameless plug.

If you are anywhere near the lower Hudson Valley in NY, there is a B2B conference in Fishkill on June 11 that is perfect.  (BTW, it is only an hour out of NYC.)  There are 20 one-hour workshops available, nine on marketing alone.  You can see the full list at Business Edge 2009.

Do you want to improve your copy writing skills, sign up for Jack Appleman’s workshop, having trouble getting the right stuff from your creative pros, spend an hour with Kurt Griffith.

Branding is a misunderstood concept but award winning guru, John Lonczak will show you how even tiny businesses can use and benefit.

You can write a press release and get it run if you spend an hour with Managing Editor of the Hudson Valley Business Journal, Debbie Kwiatoski.

Where else in this area, can you spend a day learning things to improve your business, have two real meals, and spend 12 hours one on one networking?  (It really is twelve hours because so many folks hang around afterwards for Hors d’oeudvre and cocktails.)  The presenters are not there to sell and will provide people in their workshops with at least three immediately actionable things you can do without spending more money.   They are there to impress you with their knowledge and talent though.  This is a steal of a deal at  $99 on line registration.  Use my initials JFH as the Coupon code and save another $10.

“Just because you run your business from the kitchen table doesn’t mean that it has to look like you did it at the kitchen table.”
Mindy Kole, The Marketing Department

Since we all want full disclosure I need to tell you that I am an advisor to the people that have set up and are running Business Edge.  I told you that it was a shameless plug.

While visiting one of my clients, I stopped by a neighboring, non-competing business to speak to the owner.  He has been a real ally of my clients’ and is a very talented experienced business person.  Further, he has recruited himself into a mentor/advisor role for these folks.

We were talking about my client’s stop and go approach to marketing and he said, “You have to get them to understand that the business must feed the marketing mouth first.”  I was speechless for a few minutes because this was such a simple statement but it tells the whole story in just a few words.  If you read this blog, you will have realized that I like simple clean concepts and here was one for the record.

Make sure that you have a budget and plan for marketing your business and before you take salary or pay non-essential bills, get that money into your marketing program.  It is a very straight-line, linear equation, no marketing, no sales, no profit, no money for Momma.  In the EAP course, we spend a lot of time working on marketing plans, demographics, target markets and tools to reach out and these things are the background work.  Once the plan is tuned up, execute.  Use those “first in” dollars to do it.

I can guarantee that every successful business out there takes this basic approach.  The other, less than stellar performers will trade off marketing dollars for perceived “safety” money.

About a month ago I bought a net book, one of those light weight 10 inch screen mini-laptops.   Specifically, an ASUS EeePC 1000.  I use an old IBM Thinkpad that probably weighs 8 pounds, just to run but not create PowerPoint presentations.  It needs a new battery, has a 533 MHz processor and is 11 years old.  All I wanted was something to save a little weight, run fast enough that a browser would work well and occasionally tweak a presentation on the fly.

Home run!  Under $400, WinXP which is nice and stable for a MS OS, OpenOffice installed which handles the MS office suite tasks beautifully, Firefox browser, WiFi and Bluetooth equipped so I can interact with the LAN at home and transfer things to/from my PDA and phone. It runs about 7 hours on battery and weighs under three pounds.

Is this a great product and an example of great design?  Not really.  But it is exactly what I needed to accomplish the work that I do when not in the home office.  There I have a 24” monitor, 3.3 MHz processor tower with a RAID disk configuration.  This is the workhorse.  And just to make sure that is stays that way, it is running Win2k for stability and UNIX like feel.

What is the point of this tech stuff?  As a businessperson, you need to conserve cash and capital wherever possible without compromising your primary business objectives.  As a start up, you will need file cabinets, desk(s), shelves or kitchen equipment for a restaurant.  Before you go out and spend a lot, think about used stuff.  Always build your value equation around cash conservation and “the need to feed the marketing mouth”.