Draught Excluder Sales Boom In Big Freeze

As my mother said to me when I was a little boy and down in the dumps, 'When one door closes, another one opens.' Actually she said, 'When one door closes, another one slams in  your face' but then she always had a good dose of Yorkshire cynicism.
Here's another saying my mother favoured: 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'. Good business advice. It's true that when things go wrong, there is usually an opportunity you hadn't noticed before because you were too busy with things going right. But a shrewd business person will prepare for the bad days. When I was a clothing retailer, I sold t-shirts on hot days and lined jackets when it was cold, wide brimmed hats when it was sunny and wellington boots when it rained.

These last few days our shop in Winchester has suffered from the Big Freeze and everybody not venturing out onto the slippery roads and pavements. On the other hand our Your Life Your Style website has been doing a roaring trade in Dora Designs animal draught excluders. So much so that our total turnover is actually well up on the same time last year.
'Every cloud has a silver lining' as my mother no doubt would have said.

The Stock Of The New

We’re all excited by something new. Would the New Testament have caught on if it had been called “The Old Testament Part 2- this time it’s peaceful”?

In our shop, we are constantly looking for new lines and new ranges from existing suppliers to keep our regular customers interested. It's fascinating how even the best sellers start to flag after a while, as the Star becomes the Cash Cow and then declines into Dog status on the classic Boston Matrix marketing tool.

So we'll be off to various trade fairs over the next few months in search the next Stars.

Are Capitalist Managers Secret Soviets?

I always read Simon Caulkin's management column in The Observer. He has stimulating things to say on, for example, the importance of decentralisation and customer focus.
Yesterday he wrote about the attachment by free market managers to Soviet-style central planning. This means they are unable to learn from the outside world. In the course of the article, he recalled a quote GE's former CEO, Jack Welch, which I ratrher liked: With their faces toward the CEO and their arses towards the customer, what would they learn from?