Had a great experience this morning at the gym. I’m a new member of Golds and the morning gal met me at the door and said “Hi Tom”. I was totally blown away. This is only the 3rd time I had been there and she didn’t even scan my key card yet this morning. So she learned my name after only 2 visits. That’s just awesome customer service. You always get further when you greet people by their first name. I love that at Festival Foods. They look at the name on the receipt if you are paying with credit or ATM cards.
Such a great skill calling people by their first names… LOVE IT!
Last week I talked about looking at the core and focusing on what you do best. Well mrstommytrc and I looked at our family and started to re-focus on what is important. We talked about our time and what we felt was spending good time and not spending good time. Open communication and family focus just rocks!
Last weekend, I went on a daddy daughter date with Madeline just to talk, or in my case listen. What was important to her needs to be important to me. Boys, family, college…all need to be important. The communication that is set up between Madeline and I is so important. As a part time dad, it’s so important to talk to your children and know where they are in life.
When will it end? Companies sending out product after product, making a small tweak and the releasing a new version. Division after division of the same crap!! In this day and age of HUGE companies collapsing under their own weight, when will they learn? Why don’t they focus on their core products?
How many different models of Dell laptops are there? Sony, HP? Hundreds! Before the collapse of GM, how many different divisions did they have? They ditched Oldsmobile, Pontiac, SAAB, Hummer, and Saturn to focus on their core. Apple in the early 1990’s up the return of Steve Jobs had many different lines, PowerMac, Performa with numbers like the 8150, 7100, 6105 etc. Once Steve came back he put his foot down and nixed all that. Do you know how many laptop lines Apple has now? Apple has 2, MacBook, Air and MacBook Pro. The largest company in the world, at last look, really only has 7 major product lines, iPhone, iPad, Mac Mini, Macbook, iMac, Mac Pro and iPod. That’s it. Well there is the Apple TV also, does that count?
What does this type of efficiency get them? Better distribution, saved support calls to name a few. Maybe we should take a look internally and see if we are focusing on the core.
The core being family. Are you focusing on what’s important? Think about it!
How many times do you hear that someone “hates this” or “dislikes that” and it doesn’t come off in the nicest tone? This week dear Emma came home to tell me that she had dinner at Sarah’s. I knew they were having fish and knew she might not like that. Instead of saying she hated it or really disliked it, she said “Dad, that fish was not my style!” How awesome is that? I love the tone that she took.
Can you imagine if hate was stricken from the book and we replaced it with “Not My Style?” Think about it.
