When is a nonprofit organization all about profit? When it’s a brand new “first of its kind in the U.S.” referral network just waiting to help you start a new or grow an existing small business.

In December, 180 business, political and community leaders gathered at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s Town Square to help introduce KCSourceLink to small business owners and aspiring small business owners in the greater Kansas City region.

KCSourceLink was founded through a partnership of the Kauffman Foundation, the Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. It is a referral network consisting of approximately 140 not-for-profit organizations that provide services to grow small businesses in the Kansas City metro area.

KCSourceLink member organizations include small business development groups, government entities, loan programs, Chambers of Commerce, community development organizations, technical or legal assistance providers, organizations specializing in helping women or various ethnic minorities, and much more.

Best of all, the services of KCSourceLink and its member organizations are free.

Hector Barreto, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, called KCSourceLink a “a cutting-edge operation,” in his keynote address at the opening ceremony. U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, who also spoke at the event, noted that KCSourceLink is the “first network of its kind in the nation.”

KCSourceLink’s director, Maria Meyers, noted that there are already 126,000 small businesses in the Kansas City region. And, there are 82,000 people out there thinking about starting a business in this area. Clearly, there is a need for the services that KCSourceLink and its member organizations can provide.

So, how does it work?

There are several ways that you can contact KCSourceLink. If you want to talk to someone live, call the KCSourceLink hotline from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday at (816) 235-6500, or toll-free at (866) 870-6500. Someone will be available to research and answer your resource questions.

You can visit KCSourceLink on the Internet at www.kcsourcelink.com. The site includes answers to recently asked questions (including one on how to open a bed and breakfast in Wyandotte County), a resource library (including a tip sheet on how to do business with the Unified Government), and a resource directory of information and services available throughout the Kansas City region.

Perhaps the best feature of the KCSourceLink web page is the “Resource Navigator.” The Resource Navigator is an interactive tool that asks a few questions about you, your business, and your business needs, and then gives you contact information for the organizations that can best help you.

Customer service is one of the few products—maybe the only one—that is produced one at a time, on the spot… -T. Scott Gross

Furthermore, “it’s customized for each individual customer. And what’s really scary is it can’t be returned for credit. Or maybe even scarier, when it comes to delivering the customer service product, it is rarely practical for the boss to supervise each and every delivery.”

No wonder that Gross, author of Why Service Stinks...and Exactly What to Do About It,” concludes that “every employee, no matter his or her job status, has the power, if not the authority, to totally tick off your best customer...and you can’t stop it.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t try. According to Gross, if you did, you would find that “great customer service is a significant business advantage.”

How significant? Gross surveyed 10,000 customers across the United States, and found that all but one out of every ten people are willing to drive out of their way for better service.

Furthermore, more than half of those are willing to drive a significant distance, anywhere from ten to twenty miles out of their way for good service. As Gross puts it, “great customer service can easily erase the handicap of a poor location!”

Good customer service can also help overcome a limited advertising budget. Everyone has heard the adage that one disgruntled customer will tell a minimum of seven people about their bad experience. The survey by Gross shows that 97% of customers who get exceptionally good service are also likely to tell others about it.

So, how do you cultivate great customer service at your business? Among the suggestions offered by Gross:

• Sample Your Service

Gross asks, “Would hotel housekeepers turn room thermostats to subzero if just once they checked into a room and discovered that it was cold enough to hang fresh meat?

If employees felt the effects of their actions, perhaps customers would not receive the treatment Gross did at one restaurant. After asking the waiter to please turn off the ceiling fan directly over their table, Gross and his party were told, “We like to leave the fans on. It makes it cooler in the kitchen.”

• Learn to Listen

Gross gives the example of a server who gives poor service, but still gets a good tip. “What is the lesson learned? Any service is good service. Now let’s say a server gives poor service, and the customer leaves neither tip nor explanation. The lesson learned: Some customers are cheap!”

But, if a server gives poor service and receives a poor tip along with a comment card spelling out why, a lesson in customer service can be learned. “Great managers give detailed feedback regularly and create systems that help employees do more than simply hear customers—they help them listen!”

• Check Out the Other Guys

Gross maintains that one of the best ways to encourage employees to think like a customer is to let them become customers of your competition. “If it’s difficult sometimes to criticize yourself, it’s easy to take a poke at the other guy.”

“Take your crew to the competition...it’s nothing more than human nature at work to find things wrong with the other guy. The good news is that the exercise makes it much easier to see the two-by-four in your own eye once you’ve discovered that the competition has a speck of dust in theirs.”

• Hire Contemporaries

Customer contemporaries, that is. “It makes great sense to hire contemporaries of your customers. It takes someone who knows plumbing to sell plumbing to plumbers, just as surely as one fashionista can recognize another.”

Gross points out that Southwest Airlines takes the concept even further by inviting frequent-flier customers to assist with interviewing future flight attendants. “The theory is that customers should know best which candidate has the potential to wow another customer.”

For more tips, check out Why Service Stinks by T. Scott Gross.
 

The drive for growth has been fundamental to businesses for centuries... No business that has failed to grow has ever been able to maintain excellence over time. -Chris Zook

Growth. It’s essential to life, and according to Chris Zook, author of Beyond the Core, it’s essential to business as well.

“If businesses have a primal urge, it is the need for profitable growth.” According to Zook, growth is:

• the source of value creation to shareholders

• the gravitational pull that attracts and retains the best people

• the life force of the organization

• the fuel to outpace your competitors

“Yet,” Zook says, “something has changed the game fundamentally, increasing the pressures to find growth more than ever before, and raising to new levels the penalties for failure.”

Zook conducted a study and found that, of the twenty-five most costly business disasters from 1997 t o 2002, “in 75 percent of the cases, the root cause, or a major contributing factor, was a failed growth strategy whose unrealized goal was to move profitably into new, adjacent areas surrounding a core business.”

At the same time, Zook contends, “many of the great success stories of value creation or turnaround in the 1990s were cases of bold, new moves that successfully pushed out the business boundaries beyond the core.”

As an example of these two contrasts, Zook looks at the history of two super stores. “In 2002, Wal-Mart became the largest company in the Fortune 500...while Kmart drifted into bankruptcy.”

According to Zook, “The history of Wal-Mart is one of methodical movement into adjacencies such as Sam’s Club, and electronics, and Mexico one by one.”

Meanwhile, “the history of Kmart is strewn with adjacency expansions gone wrong, from books (Walden) to sporting goods (Sports Authority) and even to a chain of department stores in Czechoslovakia.”

Star-spangled Men: America’s Ten Worst Presidents by Nathan Miller

It was too early for Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush to be considered for Nathan Miller’s 1998 book. No such luck, however, for Carter, Nixon, and Kennedy.

In his enlightening and often amusing study, Miller examines the presidencies of ten men and includes two “dishonorable” mentions. He offers solid background and reasons why these men are the ten worst presidents in American history.  The good news is, the country recovered from all of them. The bad news: we didn’t see them coming.

In descending order, from merely poor to wretchedly horrible,  Miller lists Jimmy Carter, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Harrison, Calvin Coolidge, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, and Richard Nixon. The two most overrated presidents are Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy.

Calvin Coolidge was president during one of the most prosperous periods in United States History. “Americans wanted nothing done during the twenties, and Coolidge did it.”

Jimmy Carter’s misfortune was to come into the job an absolute unknown. “He is the closest the American people ever came to picking a name out of the phone book and giving him the job.”

Although Kennedy has become an icon in America’s memory, Miller reveals he had the heart of a hawk in international policies.  His extra marital affairs were about to explode in the press,  his character questioned by the journalists he had made his co-conspirators.

Eminently readable and fast paced, Miller’s work will have readers reevaluating what they learned in history class.