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The mayor of a small town once wrote to Benjamin Franklin asking for a donation so the town could buy a bell for its town square. Franklin sent money with a note suggesting they forego the bell in favor of buying books for the town library. It is at the library we might find an answer to why so few succeed and why most fail - at anything, at everything.

Help! -I can't Get Out 0f The Box I Put Myself In!"

The fast food industry got the idea for drive-in windows from banks. I guess there was a McDonald's executive sitting at the bank drive-through one day who thought, "I don't think we can fit the milkshakes in these tubes, but..." Netjets, the leader in fractional jet ownership, now owned by Warren Buffet, owes its birth to the vacation timeshare industry. The microwave in your kitchen was not originally intended to go there; its original manufacturer, Litton, believed no consumer would buy it and built them only for restaurants. When was the last time you heard of Litton? What does this tell you?

That successful businesses live or die by cross-industry 'borrowing' of ideas, that inspiration more often comes from outside the box than from within. Ordinary businesses stay ordinary, their owners eking out only ordinary incomes - and working too hard for them - as long as those owners foolishly and stubbornly, mentally stay in their own tiny backyard. Breakthroughs come from bringing fresh ideas, found outside one's own business, in and applying them in new ways. You choose to limit or expand your income by the way you reject or embrace ideas found far afield from your present modus operandi and industry norms.

In my relentless search for I don't know what, I found an article in the December 1, 2008 edition of Nation's Restaurant News, the trade journal of the restaurant industry, headlined: "Operators Bank On Profit And Loss Scrutiny To Stay Afloat." It made me laugh out loud. The article states that "maximizing the profit and loss statement has become a mantra for restaurant operators during the current economic downturn."

This is then presented as some sort of horrific torture imposed on the owners by a vicious economy. What is not said, but should be, is that maximizing profit shouldn't be paid attention to only after dire economic conditions occur, to be given temporary priority, only until 'things get better.' It's supposed to be what anybody responsible for operating a business does everyday. Including what's then described in the article: ferreting out and cutting wasteful spending, controlling labor and administrative costs; creating products, offers and price propositions customers really want. Any business owner complaining about having to attend to these priorities because of a recession is a moron, and any trade-journal writer taking them seriously is dumber than a sandbox.

Odds are, your business lost a lot of customers last year. There are holes in your bucket. And odds are, you can't say for sure how many you lost, who you lost, why you lost them or where they went and are now. If you do nothing different, I can send you this same fax next year too. A great way to make more money is to stop losing customers, beginning with the next one you are about to lose.

One of my earliest mentors had his office walls adorned top to bottom, side to side, with big, handwritten signs intended as cautions to others as well as reminders for himself. If you've ever been in a direct sales environment, you've probably seen such a place. Two of the biggest signs read "Thumb-Suckers Not Welcome Here" and "You Can Hire Spellers For Minimum Wage".