Chinese Food for Thought

Posted by Tony

December 11, 2007

I just finished lunch. I found a new Chinese food place that it a 15 minute drive from our office, but it is the closest, good Chinese food place around here. For those who don’t know, our offices are next to the local airport. Cool if you like planes (I do) bad if you like good food.

So, I am eating in the lunchroom with my wife (new baby boy sleeping in his car seat) and I reach over to grab my fortune cookie. I unwrap the cookie and prepare to deliver a funny rendition of my fortune to my wife ending with “…in my pants.”

Usually these forays into comedy are concluded with me giggling and her rolling her eyes, but such is married life.

I read my fortune; “You never suffer from a money problem, you always suffer from an idea problem … in my pants” Yeah, she didn’t laugh.

I thought that this was quite possibly the lamest fortune that I have ever read. I packed up our trash and headed out to the dumpster in our warehouse and really thought about the fortune.

I have had money problems. I have been broke. I have been the scavenging in the neighbor’s garden for vegetables to eat kind of broke. It is never when I am starving that I think, “Wow, I need a really great idea to make money”. It is usually an all-encompassing need to find food that occupies my mind. It is only when I am flush with cash that I think “I need a great idea to invest this money into.”

But the cookie was right. Ideas are the real key to prosperity. Ideas are the key to prosperity in your personal life as well as for businesses and credit unions.

When businesses and credit unions fall on hard times, the knee-jerk reaction is to cut the marketing budget. We will cut marketing, advertising, sales and bonuses. This seems like the right move to make as it usually means that you don’t have to fire anyone the week before Christmas (which would suck). But step back and look at the bigger problem.

The reason you are broke is because you don’t have enough income coming in. If I need to make more money and I am flush with cash, I hire more sales people. This makes complete sense. No one would dispute this. But why would we say I need more income, but I have no money so I will fire the sales staff? Who is going to bring in more money then? Who will have the big ideas?

Think about your business development team, marketing team, sales team as the legs of your organization. Without your legs, you might still get to your destination, but it will be slow going and very hard. If one leg doesn’t work so well, get a crutch or hop on one leg – it is still faster than crawling.

I know this flies in the face of “Common Sense” but if I had to fire everyone at the agency today – the sales and marketing team would be the last to be cut. They generate 100% of new income.

So, I know this sounds like me trying to cover my butt (being in marketing and all that) but this goes out to the credit unions that have internal marketing departments as well. Tread lightly on the marketing budget. When you cut marketing and sales – you cut income.

Take it from the wisdom of the cookie. Don’t suffer from idea problems.