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Analysis Paralysis

We are sometimes our own worst enemies, the obstacles to our own success. We self-sabotage without even realizing it when we think we’re just being thorough. In the process of decision-making, be it in life or business, we can fall victim to something called analysis paralysis. What is that? You…
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Stay on Offense

We’re in the middle of the NFL playoffs, so the timing seems appropriate to talk about the importance of offense. Not football offense, of course, but business. And like a playoff, your business is playing for the right to play again next week. Win or go home. Succeed or go…
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Transforming Problems Into Opportunities

You hope all of your customer interactions go smoothly and with little trouble. You’ve wisely trained your employees, tested them, and retrained them again and again to develop a consistent customer experience, one that is unimpeded by needless bureaucracy, surprises, or other nuisances. And you use customer feedback tools, including…
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Prioritize People Over Processes

Procedures, processes, workflows. They’re an important part of designing how your business operates, from how customers make purchases, to how your support staff handles problems. At The Brandt Group, we often advocate for something like our GUEST model, which stands for Greet-Understand-Explain-Secure-Thank; this model describes a process for making sure…
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Lessons from the Fall of Blockbuster Video

One of the great business anecdotes regarding the perils of shortsightedness is the fall of Blockbuster Video, especially in light of how that company had multiple opportunities to buy Netflix but declined to do so. Of course, we all know today that Netflix is a behemoth in the world of…
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Survivorship Bias

Can a business get away with only using feedback surveys rather than investing the time and resources into a fully featured mystery shopping program? The temptation is understandable, since a manager might think he can just put a few questions into an online form and pass a hyperlink out to…
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The Sunk-Cost Fallacy

A common saying is that hindsight is 20/20, that it’s far easier to judge a decision in retrospect than it is before the outcome is known. We all make choices in our personal lives and in business without knowing all of the details; sometimes we decide with incomplete or even…
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Use the 80/20 Rule to Guide Your Business

The 80/20 Rule is traditionally known as the Pareto Principle, named for Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923). Pareto discovered a recurring phenomenon that appeared in many aspects of life, from land ownership to broader economics: put simply, this principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of effort. This…
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From Vision to Fruition

Every business owner should have a vision for what his or her company should ideally be. That vision should include expectations like offering a superior customer experience with high-quality products and services. But how do you do this? Think of your vision as a goal, what you hope your business…
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