Stupid Fish!

A bunch of us were hanging out last night, talking about some business stuff and we ended up on the subject of fishing.

Now before you get all riled up, let me preface this with the caveat that I am not a fisherman. I love eating fish, mind you. But I’m willing to pay a premium for someone else to catch it.

Actually I may even come out a head in the deal. My overhead is a whole lot smaller because I don’t have to buy a boat, bait, fishing poles, fuel, beer, and whatever else goes into it to get my fish.

But I digress.

Actually none of us there last night were into fishing, if you know what I mean. There was one guy who likes to fish on occasion. But we didn’t have any passionate (or highly experienced) fisher-folk present.

However one of the guys there was reading up on fishing because he heard there might be some business applications that he might want to apply. So he found a book by some expert fisherman and here are some of the things that he shared with us. I thought you might find them interesting too, especially when you think about these points in terms of your potential customer base for whatever you happen to be offering.

Fish are mainly focused on food and shelter – Their needs are simple and focused. If we figure out what our ideal customers want and need, then focus on it – we will be much more likely to catch more fish.

Fish don’t like light (it hurts their eyes because they don’t have eyelids) so they hang out in dark places – Sometimes they aren’t easy to find. And it is easier to fish in the open water. But we will have more success if we go to those places where our ideal customers are rather than hoping they somehow come to us.

You get the edge if you fish in a stocked pond – While this might sound like one of those, “Duh!” statements, it might be worth some time to think about different locations, groups, or pools where you might find a higher concentration of your ideal customers.

The more you learn about the specific habits of a species of fish, the easier it is to catch them – Research, research, research. The more completely you can wrap your mind around who your ideal customer is, what they like, what their needs are, where they frequent, what they are willing to spend – you name it – the better your chances of catching more fish.

When you don’t catch fish, it’s 1 of 2 reasons: wrong place or wrong presentation – Ooch! This one hurts. So the bottom line is this: If we aren’t getting the catch we want we need to rethink what we are doing. Are we looking in the right ponds? Is there something about our presentation that is driving them off or keeping them from taking the bait? Some good dispassionate analysis here on our part can really pay off.

We came up with a few more things, but I’ll save them for the next post.

At some point during the evening I blurted out “Stupid Fish!” and we all laughed. While it’s true fish aren’t very smart, they are somewhat predictable. If we learn their habits and their ways we will definitely become more successful with our own fishing.

And that is what SuccessCREEations is all about – helping us all to increase our catch.

Enjoy!