Did you catch last night’s premiere of the new season of Mad Men (or is it still waiting in your DVR)? Surely this season will have plenty of business lessons for us. Check out this roundup of lessons about small business that we learned from last season (way back in 2012).
Startup Success
The agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce was started as a leap of faith, and it has steadily grown into a successful business that has become competition for some of the top agencies. Here’s what the success of this fictional business can tell you about achieving success in your small business.
You Must Believe in Your Business: Don Draper and his partners took a big chance when they designed to have themselves fired so they could start a competing ad agency. They poured their personal fortunes into the success of the business, and they worked hard to recruit clients through their network of contacts and former clients.
Read more: http://www.e-junkie.info/2012/07/5-lessons-from-mad-men-to-help-your.html
Take Charge
I like to take any educational value I can get from content that I consume and as I got caught up on all four seasons of Mad Men on Netflix, I began to see some lessons that would be useful for business owners from the series:
- Don’t depend on one customer for all or your major part of your business: In the episode the newly formed company which is a small business faces the loss of the client “Lucky Strike” brings home the horror of a business losing their biggest customer. Ideally the best strategy could be to continue to get more new customers so that your entire business is not dependent on one customer.
- Read more: http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/04/5-small-business-lessons-mad-men.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmallBusinessTrends+%28Small+Business+Trends%29
Harness Technology
Most of us who work in an office have noticed something else on Mad Men. It’s the technology. Or lack of it. You don’t see those big, black phones anymore. Or those IBM typewriters. A copy machine was newfangled. If Don Draper, the firm’s creative director, was suddenly transported to today’s office, he would be shocked by how much of the technology he used every day in the ’60s … is no longer used at all.
Would the same happen to a business owner from today if he was also transported ahead 50 years? Absolutely. In fact, try five years. Because in just that short amount of time, a lot of the technology we’re using today won’t be around as much. So if you’re thinking of investing in something new, you may want to stop and consider a few technologies that are changing right before our eyes.
Read more: http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2012/03/21/technologys-changed-mad-men-yours/
