Greetings Flooring Dealers!
Many of you know that I’m an avid fisherman, both fly fishing and spin fishing. I have a long-time client that has given me access to her and her husband’s 300 acre ranch, which has a 25 acre bass pond (small lake, really). My kids learned to fish there, and I’ve taken a lot of other kids, nieces, nephews, etc. The lake is rarely fished, so it’s full of bass and bluegill that are eager to take a lure. If my kids or their friends go two minutes without a bite, they start to get impatient. More than half an hour without a bite and they’re sometimes ready to go home. It’s the perfect place to introduce kids to fishing because the action is usually fast and predictable. (Access to that lake has been a real blessing. Just goes to show you…the great things that can happen when you develop actual relationships with your clients.)
In real life, fishing is usually much tougher than that. In fact, when someone finds out that I get up at 4:00 in the morning, in mid-January, when it’s so cold that ice forms on your fishing rod, all to pursue fish, I’m sometimes accused of being a little mentally unstable. I wouldn’t disagree. But I regularly catch a lot of fish.
To consistently catch fish year ‘round requires a deep knowledge of your local fishing area, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to outsmart these piscatorial quarry, to get up at completely unreasonable hours, to travel for hours, to constantly be willing to change tactics. (And a little psychological unbalance doesn’t hurt, either.) Record holders for the largest brown trout caught in California regularly cite their reason for success being, in large part, a commitment to get on the water before anyone else, and stay after everyone else has left, and do it in any weather. Rain or shine.
I agree.
So what’s the lesson? Well, for years getting flooring customers was a little like fishing on that bass pond. The action was fast and predictable. Now that that’s changing, most dealers are getting impatient, discouraged, scared; and some—like the kids I take fishing—want to pack it up.
They delay taking action and instead “wait” and “hope” for the economy to get “back to normal.”
They keep using the same “bait” to attract customers, even when it’s clear that the bait they are using stopped being effective long ago. They are unwilling to change tactics.
They refuse to try different “fishing holes.”
They are unwilling to do WHATEVER it takes—be it something uncomfortable or unusual—to find the fish.
They are unwilling to do try different tactics to catch the fish once they are found.
BIG QUESTION: When it comes to surviving and prospering in the Emerging New Economy, is your behavior more like the impatient, easily discouraged “rookie” fisherman, or more like the champion Brown Trout hunter?
To Tons Of Customers!
Jim Augustus Armstrong is The “Coach”
Jim Augustus Armstrong is the President of Flooring Success Systems, a program that equips dealers to double their profits, cut their work hours in half and beat the boxes! Many dealers have totally transformed their businesses and their lives for the better after joining Flooring Success Systems.
See what real, live dealers are saying!