Category: Letters from Lisa

Sure Champ® has experienced significant growth during the past six years. What has driven this success? Supporting young people involved with livestock. I know you are wriggling your nose right now, and thinking this lady is nuts. While whether I am nuts or not is debatable, my response is not. We may believe helping young people doesn’t grow sales or pay bills. However, an investment in youth is an investment in our future. And, making an investment in the future doesn’t always pay off right before your eyes or even in your lifetime. The pay off may be after you are long gone.

BioZyme®, under the leadership of Bob Norton, started supporting youth involved with livestock in 2007 when it became the title sponsor of both the Junior National Hereford Expo and the National Junior Angus Show. Why? Bob believes helping youth matters.

As I was working on this letter, Bob asked what I was doing and when
I told him my topic, he said, “It’s pretty simple to answer that. Livestock families are unique and special and extremely important to the welfare of our community, the state and the country.”

Young people involved in livestock learn from the show ring and the pasture:

How to respect others.
How to receive criticism and how to ask the right questions to improve.
How to work hard and push just a little bit longer.
How to evaluate livestock and to defend themselves verbally in front of a judge.
How one small tweak can be the difference between a win or a loss.

That sounds like the perfect applicant for every position we have at BioZyme. On a broader scale, without this type of a workforce in our future, our country will never reach its full potential.
If you are still asking why we do this, let me reiterate that these young people are our future. More importantly, they are agriculture’s future. For them, the livestock experience matters. And making kids feel like they matter, well… that matters to us.

’P’ for price

Pricing is one of the four P’s of the marketing mix, the pillars that support and sustain your business. The first is Product; the second is Place (distribution); the third is Promotion and the fourth is Price. All four of these factors must be implemented before you can succeed in business.

I am going to focus on price, which some people consider an afterthought to the other three. But, I argue price is the most important factor, and it’s critical to your business that you get it right. Remember price is the only element in the marketing mix that produces revenue; all other elements represent costs.

Without proper pricing, your gross margin will suffer and that will translate into less profit than you deserve and ultimately limited cash flow. Limited cash flow will eventually impact the sustainability of the business.

One trap that is easy to fall into is thinking that the price must be as low as possible to get any traction with sales. This just isn’t true. We routinely survey our end-user customers to see what matters to them in their purchasing decisions. What they say about price and its importance will surprise you. The following is a list of the top 10 factors to provide proof and understanding of the definition of value, or in other words, why you don’t need to assume your prices need to be kept to the lowest number possible to close the sale.

1. Product makes a difference in animal’s health & performance.
2. Product is easy to feed.
3. Product is consistent in quality.
4. Knowledge of product by sales personnel.
5. Reliability of product supply.
6. Personnel respond quickly to requests.
7. Ease of contacting the right person for help.
8. Product is packaged in useful quantities.
9. Problems are resolved quickly.
10. Ease of doing business.

So, instead of worrying about keeping prices low, worry about the items highlighted in yellow. Focus your energy on educating, having inventory, responding quickly and making doing business with you easy. If this is your focus, you can use value based pricing, which means believing that you can sell at our suggested retail price plus the freight to get the product to you. No smirking without giving it a try.

To end, I’ll quote Lawrence Steinmetz who wrote a book on sales called “How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors.” “The first thing you have to understand is the selling price is a function of your ability to sell and nothing else. What’s the difference between an $8,000 Rolex and a $40 Seiko watch? The Seiko is a better time piece. It’s far more accurate. The difference is your ability to sell.”

Being innovative or doing things a little differently than everyone else – enough to create differentiation – involves risk. It means openly sharing ideas, even ideas that are undeveloped, half-baked and a long way from being concrete. Innovation means not worrying if an idea is not fully formed or regarded by others as irrelevant, or going against the stream. It means it is fine to suggest something truly disruptive.

Status, turf and fear of embarrassment can lead to hesitation, so when you want people in your organization to give their ideas, you must create safety for them. It’s not enough to give your team a venue to share ideas if the atmosphere is pervaded by rules, rigid structure and unspoken judgment. This is true around products, processes, advertising or any area of the business. Instead, do the following things:

1) Challenge, Don’t Dictate

Ask questions and begin conversations, but don’t dictate a path or force a solution. Like General George Patton said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

2) Question, Don’t Reject Outright

Always draw out as many ideas as you can. Don’t reject an idea immediately because you might reject another idea that hasn’t even surfaced yet. Ask why or how to further the idea. The original idea might not be a keeper, but after asking questions, you might find the next great idea. Remember the words of Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling: “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.”

3) Maintain Curiosity

Be passionate about finding the right solution or idea. Don’t take breaks, check email, leave the room or take phone calls during the idea discussion. Keep the momentum of these discussions rolling, and remember, sometimes the best discussions happen outside of the office.

4) Be Optimistic, Believe

Innovation isn’t always an overnight process, so it’s important to keep spirits up, cheer, thank and support. Belief is a powerful risk buster. Believe in the idea once in place enough for it to be a no brainer for success.

The VitaFerm^® HEAT mineral is a perfect example of how using these steps work. I asked the team in April 2014 to help create ways we could reduce our summer sales slump. After many ideas were discussed in great detail and noise volume for more than two days (that’s a long time for me not to check email ☺), we decided to create a mineral focused on helping with summer heat instead of summer grass. The nutrition team went to work to create a research-based mineral that would lower heat stress, control flies and help cattle deal with the challenges of fescue. After some testing, the product was ready to go and hit the market in the summer of 2014. At the end of the summer we had sold 26 tons – not exactly enough to get us out of our summer sales slump. However, we remained optimistic and worked harder in 2015 to believe this innovative idea was an opportunity. We sold 437 tons. Now, that’s enough to reduce any slump!

P.S. If you haven’t checked into the VitaFerm HEAT and HEAT 3G mineral,
I would encourage you to do so. Seventeen times growth in one year is every business’ dream.

Passion is defined as a strong feeling of enthusiasm or excitement for something. 

Whenever I think about passion, I immediately think of my family’s Westie, Lucy. She has a passion – actually an obsession – for tennis balls. She will fetch a typical 2.5-inch tennis ball until she is physically not able to move or you have gone crazy throwing it for her. She will fetch it out of water, a cactus or a basket. Even when the ball ends up in a place where things won’t go well, she finds it and brings it back. She perseveres. This obsession doesn’t stop with a 9-inch tennis ball. Remember, she is a Westie (9 – 11 inches tall). She responds to this ball like a cutting horse with a calf. You move the ball right, she goes right. You move the ball left, she goes left. It’s truly hard to throw it past her. She can move it through an entire 4,000-square-foot house going around, through or over any obstacle and ALWAYS bring it back to you.

In business, they say you cannot teach the intangible
quality that separates average business people from
inspiring leaders . . . they are obsessed with what they do. Lucy would agree. She would tell you the things you are passionate about won’t leave you alone. They’re the ideas, hopes and possibilities your mind naturally gravitates to, the things you would focus your time and attention on for no other reason than that doing them feels right.

So what is your tennis ball? This same question came from a terrific commencement speech given at MIT last year by Dropbox founder Drew Houston. Houston explained, “The most successful people are obsessed with solving something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball.” To increase your chances of happiness and success, Houston said, you must “find your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.”

So this month, find that thing that pulls you and let it drive your work. If your work is your tennis ball – it won’t be work; instead you will have to force
yourself to go to bed because you will be chasing it without even realizing
the time on the clock.

I know it is the smart way to do everything, but I am not nearly as efficient as I want to be. Why? When 70 to 80 percent of your day is spent doing work about work (multiple meetings, endless emails, etc.) instead of doing actual work, that’s a problem. I have that problem. I love that problem, but I do have it. Isn’t the first requirement of change to acknowledge you have a problem?

Despite its difficulty in life, efficiency in business is imperative to keep pace in an increasingly competitive world. Sooner or later, any company operating inefficiently will be out of business. Being efficient in business means making choices that benefit one sector of a business without taking from another. Knowing the steps to take and the tools to use to make your business more efficient will help you get the best results at the least possible cost.

Here are some tips to help your business work more efficiently, cut costs, improve customer satisfaction and stay ahead of the competition:

• Deliver anytime, anywhere information access to employees (you too). To stay productive on the move, you and your employees need to be able to reach the people and information they need—anywhere, anytime.

• Make it easy to work together. Smooth collaboration between employees, partners, suppliers and customers is a sure-fire way to boost efficiency while also reducing costs.

• Streamline customer communications. Delivering fast, knowledgeable service is the best way to keep customers satisfied.

• Reduce unproductive travel time. All too often, time spent on the road is time lost. Use travel time to get work done using technology if you have the right tools. The money invested in these tools is well spent.

To me this list of business efficiencies seems challenging, but not impossible. 

So let’s get back to personal efficiency since that is more difficult, at least for me.
I recently read a Robin Sharma article, that was just what I needed, entitled
“21 Tips to Become the Most Productive Person You Know.” Of course it is not as easy as it sounds, but here are the five points that I found most interesting:

Sell your TV. You’re just watching other people get successful versus doing the things that will get you to your dreams.

Say goodbye to the energy vampires in your life (the negative souls who steal your enthusiasm).

Run routines. When I studied the creative lives of massively productive people like Stephen King, John Grisham and Thomas Edison, I discovered they follow strict daily routines. (i.e., when they would get up, when they would start work, when they would exercise and when they would relax).
Peak productivity’s not about luck. It’s about devotion. 

Don’t say yes to every request. Most of us have a deep need to be liked. That translates into us saying yes to everything – which is the end of your elite productivity.

Be a contrarian. Why buy your groceries at the time the store is busiest? Why go to movies on the most popular nights? Why hit the gym when the gym’s completely full? Do things at off-peak hours.

Let’s work together to get more efficient – you hold me accountable, and I will do the same for you. Go get big things done this year!