Getting What You Need?

By Pam Hadder

As a small kid living in northern Manitoba, our Childcraft Encyclopedia series was a vital part of play time. From those magical volumes, we not only learned about the outside world, we read stories and prose, and kept ourselves occupied with a wide variety of crafts and role play activities. (This was pre-Internet, of course, but not quite prehistoric!)

I remember an excercise in entrepreneurship that facinated me at age seven - you had to choose businesses to create a vital community. Would it be the bakeshop, a fruit stand, or a shoe repair shop - which was more important and in which order would you select them? I used to love imagining my ideal village where everything would be "just so!"

In recent weeks, I have had the opportunity to work in rural Manitoba, and it has been interesting to survey the types of enterprises that comprise small town business districts these days. I was pleased to find a local bakeshop with wonderful "fresh daily" goods that also sold homemade sandwiches and soup for take-out. But an ATV shop - how can you make a living in a tiny community by solely selling and servicing ATVs?

Our cityscape is equally interesting - you can't drive more than a couple of blocks without seeing all of the following: tattoo parlour, nail salon, yoga studio, and sushi take-out; oh, there's another tattoo place! And, those businesses weren't included in the Childcraft selections, by the way...

Something is definitely afoot - either what we need has dramatically changed since I was a little kid building my imaginary model community, or everyone eats Japanese three times weekly with fake nails, full tattoo sleeves; in the lotus pose. Many urban environments suffer from what is called "sprawl", and the result is a dilution of services like access to public transit, door-to-door mail delivery, and proximity to food retailers and other requirements for daily living. As a result, suburbanites rely on the use of motor vehicles in order to work, shop, and participate in community activities.

Rural people are accustomed to driving a distance for work, for activities and for shopping - consider how much additional time and effort each rural child spends justs to get to school five days a week! Nonetheless, many rural communities are seeking to diversify, keep up with the times and offer local alternatives to city bound pilgrimages - that's how the fried chicken/bus depot/post office/laudromat/small appliance repair centres come into being!

Services typically arise as a result of need - no matter if you live in a small hamlet or in the midst of a metropolis. It is interesting, however, that many of us move to urban centres for convenience - to access education, employment, health services and so on. But then we drive hundreds of kilometres per week, all within our "convenient" environment. It's a funny kind of progress if you think about it.

Q & A

By Pam Hadder

Question: what attributes assure business longevity?

Answer: QUALITY and ACCOUNTABILITY

Something to think about - when was the last time someone over-delivered on a promise? When was the last time that the quality of something you purchased actually exceeded your wildest expectations? Quality of both products and services, like true and abiding friendship, is a very rare and precious commodity!

Quality's bench mate is accountability - they are very different attributes, but they work in tandem and their areas of responsibility overlap and intertwine. Higher level quality is achieved when accountability is firmly engrained in a business structure, and accountability is more achievable/saleable where levels of premium quality are established and maintained.

Why is quality so important? Does quality really matter? Well, consider my Mother's Maytag washer from 1974... it did countless loads of laundry for a household of nine (yes, NINE!) - seven kids and two very busy parents! And that same appliance, without a single repair, is still in use today in my Mother's home. Granted, the demands upon Mom's miraculous Maytag have eased up in recent years, but my last washer held up for 13 years, with only a fraction of the demand upon it, and I thought that was pretty decent.

The message - we are being conditioned to accept GOOD ENOUGH versus true quality. And by accepting "good enough", we allow accountability to be eschewed. Can you see quality and accountability's downward spiral - a slow waltz to oblivion while The Good Enough Band drones its melody of mediocrity?

Perhaps the current mix of green initiatives and global financial blundering will propel quality and accountability back to the main stage, where we can once again enjoy products and services with enduring value. If you think about it, quality and accountability also mean less waste, less gunk in the landfills, and let's face it - less stress too!

The bright side - here are a few recent personal WOW moments, where someone or something really over-delivered:

• Boyd Autobody - specifically Kendra at the Nairn Avenue, Winnipeg location; here is an individual that is a solid gold employee. Kendra has the magic mix of intelligence, good judgment, knowledge and what I crudely call, giving a %&@#! Car repairs are never fun, but Kendra will serve you efficiently and the repairs will be immaculate. (Hey, you are welcome - and make sure you are nice to Kendra...)



• iPhone - those 1200+ Apple techies make a wonderful, intuitive, brilliant device; in the words of MC Hammer, you just "can't touch this!" Some of the apps are also mind-blowing: Google Earth, Star Walk and Backyard Birds are three personal favs.



• My Revlon Curling Iron - from high school, it's Mattel pink and screams 1980s spiral curls and Valley Girls! This fast-heating little appliance still creates radical curls, and may just give my Mom's 74 Maytag a run for the money - time will tell!