How does your cookie crumble?
Written by Tom Richard | | tom@tomrichard.comBring a dish to share. When my wife and I hear those five words, we think cookies. Easy to bake, easy to transport, and easy to clean up afterwards, a plate of cookies can be a wonderful addition to any holiday potluck.
You place your plate of cookies next to a seemingly identical set of cookies, and your heart sinks as you secretly hope that your cookies will be eaten amidst the cookie-competition on the countertop.
Throughout the evening, you keep an eye on the cookie section of the countertop to monitor the success of your cookies. Your plate remains virtually untouched while the cookies next to it are nearly gone.
Confused, you start to evaluate why people are choosing the competition over your cookies. You look at the plates; they are virtually the same. You look at the cookies on the plate; they both look tasty. You decide you need to try out the competition, so you grab one and take a bite.
As you chomp up the other guy’s cookie, you admit it’s pretty good, but you mentally defend your own cookie as you parse the differences in your head. At the end of the evening, you’re stuck with a plate full of uneaten cookies and unimportant questions floating through your head.
To fully understand why people would choose another person’s cookie over your own, you do need to ask questions; you need to look at all of the ingredients and efforts that went into your cookies to truly understand why you’re stuck with an uneaten plate of cookies.
Perhaps it was the fact that you did not follow the recipe closely enough when you were mixing up the cookie batter. Recipes are important, not only for baking cookies, but in creating anything that people desire.
Why do recipes exist? Recipes exist to make sure we pay attention to the details. Without a recipe, we freestyle. Without a recipe, we let our moods, feelings, and tastes to influence the amounts of ingredients we bake into our creations. We are feeling chocolately, so we add more chocolate. We are feeling healthy, so we skimp on the butter. The end result is a creation with unknown results.
Recipes go beyond the ingredients your creation calls for, they also tell you what order to add your ingredients, what temperature to bake your ingredients, and what time to take your ingredients out of the oven.
When you freestyle, you succumb to the temptation to mix everything together at the same time and to bake your cookies at a higher temperature to speed up the process. The result of your efficiency is an untasty cookie that nobody wants.
Businesspeople that approach sales and marketing with a deliberate recipe reach a point where profits and growth become predictable. They know that their cookies are mighty tasty; they know that their cookies, when placed on a full countertop of competitive options, will be gobbled up with haste.
Everything matters. Your recipe for growth takes more than just looks, more than just taste, and more than just proper placement – it takes everything blended together with deliberate precision. This deliberate precision is your recipe for a wonderful experience, a well-received product, and a value-adding proposition.
Yes, it may seem that in this economy there are fewer takers out there for your cookies, but people are still eating cookies everyday – you just need to bake up a tastier cookie.
If you are not sure what your recipe is, then you can rest assured that you do not have one (and that nobody is following it). Where do you start? You start by reverse engineering your previous successes, then you add a heaping portion of research. Mix your experience with your research until you see a consistent texture, bake for one week, let stand for one day, serve with a smile, and enjoy.
To see the recipes that Tom Richard recommends go to www.boltfromtheblue.com and enter the word CRUMBLES in the blueprint box.
