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Examine and present your true skills and talents.

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In the 1990s I occasionally wrote for RIDER, a motorcycle-touring magazine. At that time, in a story called “Cabin Fever,” I described a February afternoon motorcycle ride along Colorado State Highway 31, a Rocky Mountain foothills road that parallels Carter Lake, 30 miles south of my then home in Fort Collins. I was riding my road bike, an 800-lb. Honda Gold Wing.

The day began with sunshine, but, by afternoon, high-velocity winds were whipping the foothills. “Hurricane-force winds,” the Rocky Mountain News later reported, “reaching 90 miles per hour.” Although dry, the Carter Lake roadway was speckled with road salt and sand, remnants from an earlier snow. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

“Suddenly an awesome gust of wind-driven sand ambushed me, slammed – whack! – like a volley from shotguns 10-ft. away. It raked and blinded me and peppered the bike. I blinked, cursed, braked and downshifted … could hardly see. ‘Stay off the sand, stay –’ That abominable wind became unbelievably stronger, it congealed, tore at my jacket, pushed me and the bike hard right, toward the guard rail. I tried to bring it back, but the tires were on sand-glazed pavement, and the front one slid – Wham! – lightning quick, I was into the guardrail and down, suddenly, dizzily, lying on the roadside.”

“Hey, you all right?”

Two guys in a blue Chevy pickup helped me pull my Gold Wing from under the guardrail. We examined it. A marker light dangled by a wire; the left mirror was gone, but, overall, the bike was okay. I could ride it home.

“Lucky,” the Chevy driver said, rubbing sand from his eyes.

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Read me often, and know that luck intrigues me. Some seem to have more of it than others do, although, I’ve noticed, most luck is self-made.

Before the Carter Lake fall, for example, I had sensed the danger and reduced my speed, to help cut the damage. And, because I had previously equipped the bike with chrome-plated crash guards, the Wing’s extended valve covers were undamaged. Also, I was wearing standard motorcycle gear – boots, jacket, helmet and gloves.

Thus, preplanning – good gear – and quick action had helped save my butt. Consequently, the luck the Chevy pickup guys witnessed had resulted more from my own pre-crisis planning than anything else.

Nonetheless, you can’t walk across this planet too long before noticing that some have an easier – or harder – time in life than others. See it like a perpetual headwind, or tailwind, depending upon your luck.

Making luck
In 1993, Steve Ells, founder and CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill opened, a small, storefront grill, in Denver. Although he’d worked in the business, it was his first restaurant. Today, Ells owns and operates 573 company-owned Chipotle restaurants that employ 15,000 people nationwide.

Ells, a University of Colorado art-history major and Culinary Institute of America graduate, brags he never attended a business course. The Institute’s website, however, claims it prepares students for such activities. Its curriculum includes leadership training for such positions as executive chef, restaurateur and foodservice director.

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Business classes, in my mind.

As a model of successful entrepreneurship, Chipotle is today’s front running study. Its mission statement says it produces “food with integrity” and a February 2007, Time magazine report said some of Chipotle’s ingredients are natural foods.

Time adds that Ells doesn’t see himself as a “suit.” He wore jeans and a T-shirt to their interview.

Money analysts label Chipotle as a “lifestyle” restaurant. Its billboard and radio ads aim at a specific (“Cool”) target market; the restaurant’s open-kitchen ambience leads buyers to assume the food is healthy and nutritious; and the clerks wrap customers’ tacos and burritos – the only menu items – in plain, aluminum foil, which bestows a home-kitchen/Greenpeace look.

Is the food healthy? Sure. Chipotle’s regular, chicken burrito contains rice, beans, meat, cheese, sour cream, salsa and more. Healthy ingredients, yes, but there’s more. Alone, Chipotle’s plain, flour tortilla yields 330 calories, which is more than two, 12-oz. bottles of Budweiser. This whopping tortilla helps Chipotle’s regular, chicken burrito exceed 1,000 calories, two-thirds the daily recommended count for many women, slightly under half for me.

Comparably, McDonald’s double, quarter-pounder with cheese rates 740. A healthy burrito, perhaps, but it isn’t a weight-watchers lunch.

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How did Ells – a man who has never studied business and sells high-price, high-calorie Mexican food at a time when America is attempting to reduce its calorie count – get the tailwind that pushed his business to gain revenues of $882.9 million in 2006?

Luck. Along with money (McDonald’s) and a carefully crafted image. In 1997, McDonald’s hamburgers, wanting, at that time, to expand into non-hamburger restaurant field, invested in Chipotle Mexican Grill’s chain of 14 restaurants. Under the Big Mac leadership, Chipotle’s province, by 2005, had increased to 480 restaurants.

In October, 2006, McDonald’s reversed. It now said it wanted to focus on its hamburger brand and, with a Class B common stock swap, divested itself of Chipotle. Ells – lucky or smart – kept controlling interest.

Competitors and luck
A sly competitor recently ambushed a friend’s small business, and, although competition is common, the new competitor exasperatingly duplicates many of my friend’s business moves, like Hyundai does Honda. This copycatting has incensed my friend. He checks on the new company’s website daily to witness, again, its duplications of his marketing strategies, and then angrily fumes.

In a sense, however, my pal deserves this crisis, because, when he created his business plan, he didn’t include barriers that would block, or at least, forestall, any competition. Therefore, because he didn’t plan for this crisis, he’s created his own bad luck.

Further, he’s an expert in the field, but doesn’t brand himself. My good-natured and likable buddy also lacks PR skills. He produces a good, useable product, but doesn’t market it strongly. Nor does he work on creating a strong, business image.

Can you see the bad-luck headwind forming?

Creating image
Elf Design owner Erin Ferree (www.elf-design.com) is a brand-identity and marketing-design strategist who specializes in identity plans for small businesses; she helps her clients discover their brand differentiators, which is something my friend needs.

Additionally, Erin creates and emails a marketing/branding newsletter that offers useful and logical information, something that’s oft missing from the marketing/design realm. She also produces associated books. She’s obviously passionate about her task – helping small business owners surpass their competition.

To make a brand stand out, she says, stop looking at the competition. Marketing a business by studying the competition fails, because it’s reactionary. Instead, she advises business owners to examine and present their true skills and talents.

Erin says competition, because it’s always present and extensive, is tough for small businesses to combat. She categorizes competitor types:
• Direct – those nearby, who produce the same products or services;
• Worldwide – those who produce, and ship, the same products or services from elsewhere;
• Similar – those who provide similar services or products nearby or elsewhere (a flat-panel LED screen, for example, in lieu of a digitally printed sign).

To this, she assigns the business owners the task of monitoring the competition – what the competition is doing, how it’s marketing and what’s on its website – general snooping, in other words. Do this (and price shopping) to some extent, but curb your enthusiasm, and don’t get upset.

Correctly, Erin says marketing and making sales is a frustrating process for most small-business owners. Most, she says, merely want to earn a profit by creating a product or performing a service. To stand out, she says, small-business owners should design their marketing materials to define the brand and business.

Erin obviously believes many small-business owners have unclear goals. She says owners should analyze their business goals and products. To help, she presents these four simplistic, but complex questions:
• Who you are?
• What you do?
• What makes you different?
• Who can you best help?

Once answered, business owners can then create materials that display these definitions, and make their work notable. She says they help motivate clients to walk through the door.

It’s about quality products and service – but a business has to have the image to back up their offers. Toyota builds good cars, sure, but they build better showrooms.

In their book, Marketing to the Mind, writers Richard C. Maddock and Richard L. Fulton say the motivational side of the human mind is also the visual, emotional and passionate side. “In consumer behavior,” they write, “it [the motivational side] is the one that makes the initial, and final, spending decision.” They recommend advertising to both the right and left sides of the brain.

To simplify, I’ll condense their theory to this: The brain’s left side holds long-term memory; thus, it responds to repeat ads. The right, emotional side, prefers ads that entertain and motivate – eye-catching artwork, for example.

Advertising works. Image portrayal affects people’s decision-making processes. Strong and effective advertising images (signs and logos, for example) affect people’s buying decisions. Image also affects how we deal with one another – and how we respond to people.

This theory also explains why my column photo, above, shows me wearing a suit and tie. After 13 years of having an “in-the-trenches,” Ernie Pyle-type image, you’re now seeing how I appear when seated in a downtown Cincinnati photo studio.

In case you’re not into suit-and-tie images, rest assured. Underneath the finery, I’m wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

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