Three numbers you should know: the cost of customer acquisition, cost of customer retention, and value of a customer. Also, know the difference between your average cost/value and your customer-specific cost/value. Average cost/value is useful for planning and projecting. But for management and strategy, you’ll want to know customer-specific cost […]
Phil
172 posts
Alien Skin Software is not a normal company. Sure, we like money. Send us as much as you want. But our most important goal is to enjoy our lives. Since we spend way the hell too much time working, we try to find ways to make work fun.– Alien Skin […]
Gather enough data and do enough analysis to make a good decision. Then decide. Then act. There are many famed quotes on the theme of “how much is enough”: Lore has it that someone once asked Abraham Lincoln, “How long should a man’s legs be?” and that he answered “Long […]
“See what you can do with real data?” One of my clients’ other advisors said that to my client right after I’d presented some analysis of his marketspace. In the previous year, another marketing consultant had spent a lot of my client’s time (and money) on branding analysis. But he […]
[Donald Trump] understood a famous axiom: If you owe the bank $1 million and can’t pay, you’re in trouble, but if you owe the bank $1 billion and can’t pay, the bank’s in trouble. The moment that captured his strategy perfectly came when Trump’s CFO received an $800,000 quarterly insurance […]
Hired to replace Robert Dynes in the aftermath of a management meltdown in which UC administrators flouted, circumvented and violated university policies governing pay and perks, the 63-year-old [Mark] Yudof knows his mission when he officially takes over next month.”I’ve really got to get the trains running on time (at […]
Your staff is well-aware that you are imperfect. So are your customers. So stop trying to perpetuate the idea that you don’t make mistakes. Nobody thinks that about you. And stop trying to be perfect. You’re not going to pull it off. Instead, figure out how good you need to […]