Alpha Dogs is a book written by Donna Fenm published by Collins, New York, 2005. If you know the publication Inc, the magazine for small and medium sizes business, Ms. Fenn writes at the magazine. The chapter headings are Seduce your customers; Convert your employees into true believers; Transform with technology; Stake a hometown claim; Innovate the mundane; Market your brand; Build a village; and Embrace reinvention. You will need to do all of them.

Market your brand – the reality is the smaller your company, the easier it is to market your brand. However as people deal with you and wish to continue, your brand will grow and at some point there will be a discussion about you and your brand integrity. The reason is as a small company you dealt with specialty stores and that appealed to a group of customers, as you grow you move up to the bigger box stores, you are now the big guy. The only method to stay authentic is to constantly remind yourself of your core values and make decisions within that context. It may take longer, it maybe harder to pull off, but remaining true to what your core values are, means the people who are attracted to your brand continue to buy and those who wish to work for you will stay with the company will stay longer. The example in the book is a bakery company called Dancing Deer. They started with the speciality stores, customers loved their cookies. People at the chain stores said, we would like to sell some items here. Dancing Deer found a solution that works – an exclusive product for the chain store. When they expanded, they could have gone to a nondescript factory in the suburbs but choose to stay within the roots in the city – they stayed in downtown Boston and moved to a renovated old fish processing plant. The owner, Trish Karter, noted a number of times it would have been easy to cut corners, but that would have compromised brand integrity and the company’s ability to differentiate itself in the future.

Build a Village – no one exists in business alone. It is easier if you have a large support system or network to help, encourage, send ideas, gain new business, work on projects, meet people. Every business belongs to more than one group – your industry group, the local business association – whether it is Chamber of Commerce or Board of Trade. Some of the times you belong to gain ideas, other times it is to find out who is a good person to do something which you are not particularly good at. During the recession many companies cut back on the number of people in the office, but work still needed to be done – it was contracted out. How do you get on the lists? fill out the request for proposals (RFP)? and everything else that needs to be done when you win the RFP? Your network helps you. The easiest and hardest method is choose your network carefully, set rules and be prepared to drop someone, even if you like them, if they break the rules (this is generally the hard part). In the book the example was a public relations group called PRConsultants Inc – an alliance of 34 independent public relations firms. They do there own thing on a regional basis, but when a client wants a bigger reach up to national or international, the firms work together to satisfy the clients. The tips include make sure everyone knows the rules of engagement from the outset. When dealing with a client one point of contact per vendor – the network co-ordinates.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, at this level it should be easy to see what kind of network the company has and how well it markets it brand. In North America with the cold temperatures, many dividend paying power companies had customers lose power. What did they do? what was their responses? No one planned for outages but good companies are good companies no matter the circumstances. If they performed badly, people will be looking for alternatives and there is always something in the marketplace.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions