Dirty and Ugly

For years we have been recycling cell phones for hundreds of wireless carriers and non profits. We have seen everything and have a smorgasbord of funny units on our wall fame so this article recently published in PC World was a good read.

Get into gear

This is better than good advise that Seth Godin has given us. As a medium sized business owner you look for creative motivational tools everyday to grow your business and to make yourself and your employees prosper. You coach and coach every day but changing some of the elementary ways you began business and where and how you grow tomorrow is needed and the suggestions below are perfect to break it up:

-Buy a competitor
-Sell to a competitor
-Publish your best work for free online
-Close your worst-performing locations
Open a new branch in a high-traffic location
-Hire the best salesperson away from the competition
-Join the competition
-Host a conference for your competitors
-Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales
-Start a blog
-While looking for a job, spend 40 hours a week volunteering and freelancing for good causes
-Go on tour and visit your best customers in person
-Answer the customer service line for a day
-Let the most junior person in the organization run things for a day
-Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
-Call former employees and ask for advice
-Move to Thailand
-Listen to audio books in your car instead of the radio
-Sell your cash cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing
-Find more products for your existing customers to buy
-Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry
-Quit your job
-Move your operations to another city
-Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and everyone wears a bathrobe over their clothes
-Open your offices only four hours a day
-Open your offices 24 hours a day for a week
-Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of p&l or deadlines) and cancel it, no -appeals
-Go for a walk during lunch
-Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs
-Go offline for longer than you thought possible
-Write five thank you notes every day
-Stop sending spam
-Do your work somewhere else. Set up your chiropractic table at the mall
-Have everyone at work switch offices
-Give your most valuable possessions to a stranger
-Start a company scrapbook and take daily notes
-Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization
-Buy some art
-Make some art.
-Do the work.