Listen to your CB - People are talking

Last weekend I participated in the Women's Art Festival. Throughout the day I had many people talk to me about the difficulty finding beach glass now a days with all the recycling and plastic. They also told me about all different sources of media talking about this.

I was completely unaware of any media covering anything about beach glass; and being a beach glass artist this is really important for me to know. I could be missing opportunities to be featured as an expert, showcase some of my rare pieces or even just be in the know when customers talk about the media story. So I may not have been successful in listening to my radio (in this case it was literally the radio, not just a metaphor, and some print) to catch the media stories, but at least I was listening to my CB and heard my customers talking about it.

Here's one of the stories one of the customers passed on to me from the Art Festival. It was in National Geographic Magazine.

PS - if you're wondering where the CB / Radio analogy comes from.. from our book Trucker Management.

Simple = Effective (The "duh" Factor)

Sometimes the most simple ideas are the ones that seem to elude us the most, but also prove to be the most effective.

I was in a parking garage in Ottawa this week, and saw an idea so simple in execution and so obvious in solving a problem, but yet is the only place I've ever seen it.

A common source of frustration, even comedy (thanks to a Seinfeld episode), is the notion of trying to remember where you parked your car when entering a large store or shopping mall. They have invented gadgets for our keychains to help us find our cars in crowded lots, and they have numbered and lettered lanes and aisles and levels of parking lots. Yet still we often seem resigned to the fact that this frustration is simply all part of the experience we face when entering such a parking lot or structure.

The one I was in the other day had a very simple wall-mounted dispenser beside the elevator of little paper cards pre-printed with the level, sector and side (east or west) of where you had just parked your car within this massive garage that spanned an entire city block. Those waiting with me for the elevator must have wondered a little about my sanity when I exclaimed "Duh! Of course!" out loud. But the idea, so simple, and so obvious once presented, struck me full on. How could this not be in EVERY parking garage in the world by now??

What aspects of doing business with you have people perhaps simply resigned themselves to enduring as an unavoidable part of the experience, that maybe, just maybe, such an easy solution exists for you to resolve this for them?