Your company is like a human body. It’s run by the hart, steered by the brain, it needs oxigen to flow through it. A lot of elements need to come together to make it work. And it produces crap. What? Yes sir, C-R-A-P.
Now don’t worry, we all produce crap. It’s just a side effect of running a business, and selling products. Believe me; I produce crap all the time, along with producing good ideas.
But here’s comes the problem: When you’ve been digesting al the details of your business for a while, and thoroughly master of all parts of it, you might start to think it’s an easy thing to do. You might start to think everybody can do the things you do. You even might start to think you there’s not enough nutrition in your products to make it sell. So you start looking for other things you can use. Things that give more volume to what you’re doing.
And here comes in the crap.
Crap doesn’t have a lot nutrition (quality) but it can offer quit some quantity. Crap can be recognized in brochures, websites, commercials, logo’s and talks. Crap doesn’t sound like ” I like doing this, and I do it really well”. Crap likes to sound like “We have developed a unique high-tech management system for utilizing task-specific operations. This system has been approved for certificate A100-x45 and B23-0988 version 2.01.2 and has won A Self Made Up Award For Best Excellence.”
Crap logo’s include, planets, flames, swooshes, and are not named NASA, are not highly flamable nor have given athletes the gear to win.
Crap also appears in images. Usually the images have a significant amount of ‘gloss’ in it. It can be a very shiny smile on a plastic person, sun-flares coming from the north or a product that has more glimmers than there were lamps in the photo-shoot. But you know: things that shine hard, are just meant to blind you.
Company that sell themselves this way are run by what I call Crapitalism.
Crapitalism is the art of producing crap and making it sell. And believe me, it can be sold. There are markets build around selling crap. You can make good money out of crap. But it makes you smell.
Another issue: crap doesn’t feed your company. An elephant may eat it’s own crap in case of extreme hunger, but believe me: he doesn’t eat the crap that comes from eating his crap. So it doesn’t bring you that much further.
Still: do not panic. Getting caught in Crapitalism happens to most of us entrepreneurs at some moment in their existence. You just have to recognize it and take action.
To take out the crap, you have to look at your company as a human body again. Like I mentioned, its run by the heart. Start listening to it.
The heart doesn’t produce crap. The heart has a clear and steady beat that has been there since day one. The heart is what got it all going. Go back to that point; what got you going in the first place? It probably wasn’t ‘selling crap’. Most likely you just loved doing a certain thing really much. Weather it was producing smart products, solving problems, just having fun or something like it. It almost certainly involved ‘helping people’ - because when you don’t help people with anything, then why would they need you in the first place?
Sit down and have a rest. Now, write down how your company helps people, or with what. Write it down in the most simple way you can think of. ‘We build good cars’, ‘We make tasty ice cream’ or ‘We help people get organized’. Really try to track down the essence of it and leave out the rest.
Next, think about the people that you’ve been helping more than once, people that keep coming back to your company to get what they need. Do they come for the products? The service? Or the people? The thing (or things) they come for is what probably makes your company stand out against its competitors.
While the heart is what makes your company tick, the brain is what makes your company stick. The brain of your company is the strategy, the smartness, the reasoning behind the passion. There are likely a few things to write down about this too.
Write down the way you work and interact like this and you will probably end up with about 4 to 6 short sentences. You don’t need much more.
There. Now you’re ready to get rid of Crapitalism.
When you want to do it right, it will mean reconsidering all of your communication. Text, images, brochure, website, even your company-logo might be needing some ‘decrapitilisation’. But believe me, getting your head out of the crap and start working from the heart again can be quite refreshing.
