111: Make the Right Business Decisions for Maximum Success with Donald Mazzella

Robert Plank: Our guest today is Donald P. Mazella. Donald P. Mazella is a political and lifestyle expert who's been seen on MSNBC, Bloomberg, and in the Wall Street Journal. He is the COO of Information Strategies Inc, a company that helps business managers improve profits. He currently oversees a prints and internet publication network centered around Small Business Digest, with more than 3.2 million opt-in small business readers and healthcare industry stakeholders.

Cool. Donald, I'm Robert. Nice to meet you.

Donald Mazzella: Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Robert Plank: No problem. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about what you do?

Donald Mazzella: Basically, right now we've just put together a book, 97 Experts on How to Grow a Small Business, which will appear in September. We're expanding. Small Business Digest has been around since 2000. It's had it's ups and downs. Right now it's in expansion mode. We've been helping small business managers, as you say, add profits. Ultimately, how you do that covers 3 main areas: You grow your business, you grow your profit line, or you sell your business. It ironic, in today's world a majority of small business owners above the age of 50 wil tell you all they want to do is get out. Exit strategies are now becoming very important.

Robert Plank: That's what you do, compared to everyone else? You're all about the exit strategy?

Donald Mazzella: We tell our audience in our stories. I should also say, most of our stories come from other entrepreneurs, or from stakeholders in the area. We've had Marcus Lemonis on the program, JD Powers, John Scully. We generally look for the people who've been successful and ask them how they've been successful, how they exited. We try to get them to provide 1 or 2 nuggets of information that our audience can use, whether it's on our radio program, whether it's in our newsletters, or in our e-zine, or now in the book. We just try to get them to talk to our audience because who knows better how to do things than people who have done it. Interestingly enough, sometimes we get someone who failed because sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. When things don't go the right way, and they have to readjust and change direction. Could you talk about an example from your book? One of these big failures that jumps out at you?

Donald Mazzella: Can I talk a success strategy because it happens to come to mind because everybody has a business card, but as one of our experts said, "You're business card should be one of your most effective marketing tools." She goes into detail. She actually has a test that's included in the book on what your business card can do, and how to do it. For instance, your name of your company. It should be immediately recognizable, or distinctive. If it can be both, it's great. That's one. Now to give you one about failure. 53% of all the people we've talked to over the years, we've kept a running tally, have told us the biggest single factore in failure is financing, not having enough financing. That's number 1. Ironically, number 2, and which is reason we labeled the book recalculation, is the fact that the industry was changing, they didn't realize it. I thought that was fairly interesting. Then the 3rd reason they said for failure was the fact they picked the wrong people. Those are the 3 major reasons for failure.

It's consistent throughout the book, and through the years we've been on the air. If you asked them, "What's the success?" They'll tell you, Number 1, they picked the right people. Number 2, they happened to have the right service or product at the right time. Number 3, which I found interesting, a lot of them said luck. They happened to do it right.

Robert Plank: Luck in terms of they put out enough things, they had enough projects going, that one thing ended up taking off, right?

Donald Mazzella: Yeah, correct. I always use the story ... Are you familiar that the man who created Xerox was going to Rochester in a snowstorm, and he got a taxi-driver. Since they were making slow progress he told him what he was doing. The taxi-driver said, "Well, my sister and I want to invest." They invested a then unheard of sum of $25,000.00. They became multi-millionaires, if not billionaires, because of that. What is that? Luck? Listening to the right person? I always use that story because I consider it luck when you hear something and act on it, or when you hit a situation and act on it.

Robert Plank: Decisiveness.

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Cool. I like books like that. I like stuff like the Chicken Soup kind of books, where you can just get different perspectives, or different ideas. I really like stuff, for example, they can grow rich or they've just taken all the sum total of every one of success and failures, and drew some conclusions that are the common threads, from all these people from different eras in time, different ages, different industries, all that good stuff.

Donald Mazzella: I hate to disagree with the host, but I disagree in one way. All of these books, that's one of the reasons why we wrote this book, they distill it down to simple procedures. I believe in small business, or any business, are made up of a series of decisions, no one of which alone can topple you. If you look at Kodak, on the big side, or for that matter, Yahoo. Yahoo had the world, and what happened? It sold the world for $4 billion. I think life and small business is a series of decisions, one leading into the other, one leading in to it. That's why if you read the Chicken Soup for the Soul books on happiness etc ... I happen to have read them all because I was involved in a court case involving Chicken Soup. It's a formula to it. At the end it's like a formula you had for tomato soup. It fills you for a while, but leaves you strangely unsatisfied.

Robert Plank: Okay. What you're saying is that these Chicken Soup kind of books, there's not really much behind it, but what you have in this recalculating book is everyone has their own story and you can draw your own conclusions, but there's some real lessons behind it, then?

Donald Mazzella: I wish I could have said it as succinctly as you did. I'm not denigrating these. These books, I wish I had a Chicken Soup franchise. You and I could retire easily on it. That's what I believe. I believe that small business leaders, or managers, face decisions every day, some large, some small. The worst part about it is they usually don't have anybody to talk to to help them make that decision. That's the difference. You can have an overall philosophy. If you're a gambler, sometimes gamblers all have a system. At some point you have to make a decision that's outside of these peramiters. That, to me, is what separates many successful small businesses. It's one of the questions I ask our people when I assign a story. I ask the reporter, have you asked what they consider the decision that made or break them? If they haven't asked them I have them go back. It's amazing, people say, "You know, I never thougth of it that way. Let me go and look at it." Then they say that, and say, "But, if I hadn't of made that decision I would have had to do that." We're meeting a little bit, but that's how I feel about it.

Robert Plank: You're saying it's like the butterfly effect in a lot of ways then, right? Like, some small decision that you had to make, and it's a good reason that you did make it so long ago, led to this whole path of all these other things.

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely. In the case of Kodak, what decisions they made? They were not going after the digital camera marketplace. I mean, that was a big decision. Kodak holds all of the patents on digital photography, or did, and then sold them off. Company up the street ... Just had an article cross my desk today: Where do you put your second store? Oftentime people think about the first store. They don't think as much about the second store. They say, "Gee, that's a good location, a lot of traffic, etc." Yes, but the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood are not. Those are the kind of decisions that once you're committed to that area, then you have to do a lot of other decisions in order to make it work. Maybe sometimes you can make it work. There are other times when no matter what you do you're ending up with a poor location. Am I making myself clear on that point?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Could you impact that a little bit? Could you tell me about in your book, someone's decision, one where no decision was the right decision, I guess you're saying?

Donald Mazzella: Oh, yeah. That's a really good question. The answer, in our book, we talk about how you make a decision, and not make a decision. I'm going to look at the list of contributors, got a hundred of them, see which one probably ... Oh. The one that comes to mind, they're talking about a lot of companies, over 50% of companies still do not use social media. As one of our contributors points out, "The decision not to do social media has ramifications far beyond." One example, if you're not using social media, if you're not signing up people for your newsletter, if you're not doing the thousand things that are required, the perception of your customer is going to change. The problem all of these big box stores, Talbots, everybody else is having ... Ironically, as you know, Walmart is now thinking of buying Jet.com because it recognized that not having a social presence that is respected, and used by the consumers, is hurting it's brick and mortor business. Walmart is doing what many big companies do. They're going out and buying the expertise. That's the case. As Bob Haymon points out, the one single non-decision that he has seen, that's really hurt, has been the smaller companies not embracing social media.

Robert Plank: With all this decisions, and especially things like that, like some old-school company or some huge company they might hear, "We should do this," or "We should do that." How do you sort that out from all the noise? How do you know if this thing that comes across you, and you think, okay, I need to have social media, how do you know if that's a real thing that you need to be going after? How do you know if that's something that you should just ignore, and focus on something more important?

Donald Mazzella: That's a good question. I wish I had a simplified answer. We divide the book into 5 parts: Leadership, Marketing, Operations, Technology, Human Capital, and Finance. In doing so, we did it because we found that the average small business owner uses a combination of them every day. Depending on the company, and depending on the individual, they go in various orders. There are some people who are technically trained that operations and technology is, they make the decisions based on that 1st, and then 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Someone else, a marketer, does it in a reverse, marketing first and then the others. In order to make any decision you have to make the one column, a right column and left column, and decide after that ... Most people do it mentally, I don't know about you, but I do it. When they finally put it all together, they then look at it, and say, "Ah, this is my decision. This is why I'm going forward." In the end, it's usually based on the bias of the individual, which we talk about in the book.

Robert Plank: You have the book broken down into these 5 sections. Is what you're saying that someone could look at your book, and they could narrow down if they want to focus just on to marketing, or just on finance? They could narrow down which section. They could read one of these stories from one of these experts, and then if they decide that, "Okay, that's my weak spot. My weak spot is I need better marketing," then they could make a list of pros and cons, and decide if that is something that they should do or not.

Donald Mazzella: You said it better than me again. You're good at it. The answer is yes. Within that sales and marketing section there are how-to articles on how to do it. If you decide you want social media, for instance, there's 3 or 4 stories of contributions on social media from some of the top names. Operations, the intersting thing about operations is, as I'm sure you're aware, it's a lot easier to start a company today than it was 5 years ago. Most of the heavy lifting, you don't have to create a financial package, it's available. You don't have to create an inventory management system. You can all tie it into your e-commerce site, so that you have an instant inventory, instant distribution, etc. the world has changed radically. As someone said, I wish I'd said it, is, "All you have to do is come up with the idea and the product. The rest is available via technology." I really think that's the case.

Robert Plank: I think so too. It's a lot more civilized. Like you said, even 5, 10, years ago, if someone were to start a business, even just to have a cash register, a point of sale machine, would have been thousands of dollars. They would have had to get a merchant account, or get some custom coding. Now, there's the little paypal little doohickey. Now there's a stripe little thing that just plugs into any iPad. It seems a lot more civilized, and a lot more streamlined. A really exciting time. I really like your idea for this book just because you hear all these stories, even something that might not directly relate to someone's business. There's like Kodak, or Xerox. I can read some story. It's almost like I'm just reading it for entertainment, but then I might see some similarities, or some differences with like my business or their business. Just because my marketing, studying, student brain is turned off, and I'm just reading some other business story just for fun, I can pick up little nuggets just because, I don't know, I was in a better mode, if that makes sense?

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely. I agree.

Robert Plank: Cool. I don't want to keep you too long. As we're winding down this call, could you share with us what you see out of all these stories, out of all these business' successes and failures and decisions? Out of all this stuff, what would you say is the number 1 mistake you see everyone making these days?

Donald Mazzella: Poor choice in personnel.

Robert Plank: Cool. Poor choice in personnel. They're not sure, at all, where to begin. They're not sure, at all, where the problem is, where to correct that. You're saying that's the common weak spot for everybody?

Donald Mazzella: That, and obviously make sure you have enough financing. If you think you need 50,000, you probably need 100,000. If you need 5,000, you need 10,000. That is the thing. Be prepared to work hard. Many people think that owning a small business is easy. It's a 24 by 7 requirement. It's interesting, as you know, the sons and daughters of small business owners do not want to go into the business because they grew up knowing that their parents, and usually the 2, devoted more time to the business than to them. Though very interesting, there are more businesses available for sale today than at any time in the last 10 years. The main reason, people will tell you, "We have no one to give it to."

Robert Plank: Aw, man, it's sad, but also a big opportunity for the right people who want to pick up those businesses.

Donald Mazzella: Yes, but there's also opportunity. It's interesting, what we complain about immigrants, but immigrants are the ones that seem to want to take the chance more and more. Most Dunkin Donuts are Pakistani owned. A lot of dry cleaning stores are Greek owned here in New Jersey. It's really a funny thing how they ... Foreign born are wanting to take the chance that our own children don't seem to want to take.

Robert Plank: It's interesting how it's evolved that way, but if they're willing to fill that slot, then more power to them.

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Great. I really like the idea of your book. I really like the things that you have to say. Could you tell us where people can find that book, and maybe even anything else you have to offer?

Donald Mazzella: It will be available September 15th, on Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. Our publisher is BrickTowerPress.com. It will be available there. There's also a e-reader available. All of that will be available September 15th.

Robert Plank: The book is called Recalculating? Is that right?

Donald Mazzella: Recaculating, 97 Experts Driving Small Business Success.

Robert Plank: Awesome. September 15th, Recaculating, Donald Mazzella. I can't wait to read a copy for myself.

Donald Mazzella: I'm glad. I hope I peaked the audiences interest.

Robert Plank: Yep. I like everything you have to say, great insights. I can't wait. Recalculating, and I'll check it out as soon as it's out.

Donald Mazzella: Have a good day.