About Movie

The incredible stupidity, cheapskatedness, laziness of business owners is most visible in their consistent bizarre behavior regarding present customers vs. new customers or prospects in their small business marketing.

They are loathe to spend money and time on the people who have already proven they will patronize them and, in fact, do patronize them. But always willing to pour time and money into chasing the next new customer. They are in ardent, sweaty, drooling lust for the next new conquest, completely uninterested in the already conquered.

There are many reasons for this far too numerous to analyze here. They range from perverse human nature to economic ignorance to boredom to foolish belief in customer loyalty and on and on and on. The car dealer spends $50,000.00 a week on newspaper, radio and TV ads to bring in new customers but God forbid he spend a couple hundred bucks on a mailing or a couple thousand bucks on a party for his present car owners.

It's hard to find any business where this combination of stupidity, cheapskatedness and laziness is as magnified as the car business. It is a very good thing everybody buys cars, because in pretty much any other business, most dealers and almost all the salespeople'd starve, deservedly.

But on different levels, the same nitwit behavior pervades most businesses. My dry cleaner advertises like a banshee in Val-Pak and local papers; not once in the 3 years I've spent no less than $150 a month have I gotten a piece of mail, and to add insult, the coupons say: for new customers only.

The dry cleaner is fortunate I hate the thought of trying to find another competent dry cleaner so much. The dealer I bought my last car from, not so fortunate.

If you want to start 'mind capture' somewhere, start with the top 50% or 40% or 30% of your customers. Make sure what they are talking about EVERY week of their life is YOU. Then move on to doing the same in a target prospect group. Or your industry or community. It is reportedly quite difficult to get ghosts to up and leave a haunted house. Movies like 'Beetlejuice' and 'Ghostbusters' come to mind.

Well, most people have haunted houses all their own. Populated with the ghosts of whatever they heard their parents say about money at the top of the stairs, ghosts of past unsuccessful or unpleasant experiences, ghosts of things tried but once and ruled out forever, ghosts of ancient arguments and disagreements, ghosts of industry norms and business practices created for a 1950 world.

A popular theme for the daytime 'Maury Povich Show' is a parade of women who were really, really ugly, flat-chested, buck-toothed, fat, pimply and shy and put upon in school, who have now lost a zillion pounds, gotten breast implants, complexion cleared up, contact lenses or laser eye surgery in place of bottle-pop glasses, teeth straightened, hair poofed, who bring to the show the boy or girl grown to man or woman they haven't seen since 7th grade, who treated them badly, to appear in front of and demand a groveling apology.

Some of these made-over bombshells are strippers, others in less exotic occupations. All have carried their humiliations and resentment against another schoolkid around with them for 15, 20 years, haunted by the ghost of junior high past.

We ALL do this in one way or another; we are ALL haunted by some ghosts; ALL eager to show the neighbor, schoolkid, peer, mouthy brother-in-law, etc. we turned out the winner, they were wrong. I suppose that's unavoidable. I know no one totally above all this, me included. I'm not even sure this is ALL bad.

Taking satisfaction in rubbing a harsh critic's nose in your success is a form of pleasurable celebration. But being relentlessly, daily hounded by such a ghost, not helpful.

As with ghosts in a real haunted house, it is damnably hard to get our ghosts to move out of our psyche.

Psycho-Cybernetics is really all about that, and for myself, I've done an enormous amount of work with it, and still do, to evict as many ghosts as I'm able, keep the others in check.

A lot of ghosts get in the way of success.