Kentucky Fried Technology Business...

If you've been following the business news in the last few weeks, you would have come across the story about the armed guards moving Colonel Sanders' secret recipe around.

But do you know how this secret recipe even got started? It's an amazing story with a list of incredible lesson for all entrepreneurs including and especially, in my humble opinion, technology business owners.

Here's the story really quick:
The Colonel had a restaurant that did well but decided he needed to sell when a new highway was going to bypass his area and significantly reduce traffic to his location. He closed up shop and took his secret recipe along with his social security check on a road trip.

His idea was to challenge places that sold chicken to its restaurant customers by saying" my chicken is better than yours and I can prove it". Basically it was a cook-off challenge. Whenever the owner was convinced the Colonel had better chicken than his, the entrepreneur Colonel would offer them a franchise for his recipe and the deal was to pay him 5 cents per chicken.

Well, after a little over 1000 challenges he had no takers on the franchise. Finally he came across a bar owner that agreed his chicken was better and wanted the franchise but only under 1 condition. He said that although good, he needed to sell more beer than food so the chicken had to be saltier. He added the salt himself and said it was now the best chicken he ever ate and was sure it would make him more money as well as justify the 5 cent per chicken fee.

It's important to note that the Colonel also tried the salt induced recipe and he hated it. Probably because he hadn't ingested salt in 30 years. But he was smart enough to go with the flow because that's what the customer wanted. The rest is history.

By the way, I just let you in on a big secret. That 11th spice is what the old chicken buckets used to be talking about when they said "When Colonel Sanders added the 11th spice, he instantly knew it was the best chicken he'd ever had." Funny but true. Now we need to crack the code on the other 10 and get rich. :-)

Anyway, take a lesson from the good Colonel on how to run your engineering, IT, computer services or other technology business. Namely these:

1. Sometimes to really see a new business take off or get to the next level of an existing business, you need to be willing to CHANGE SOMETHING in your business.

2. You may love what you have to offer your customers and clients but you need to listen a bit more to them to really give them exactly what they want. It could mean a huge difference to them and to how well your business profits.

3. Adding "salt" to a bad recipe does nothing. So knowing you are doing everything correctly for every aspect of running your business is the key for tweaks to work. The recipe for success is good processes and systems so little adjustments can make a huge impact and huge adjustments are not needed.

4. If you have good processes/systems to start with, then persistence will pay off in spades.

So go out there and be the Colonel in your technology business.

To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach