For those who read this blog closely, you recall the recent book review of Jim Collins’ bestselling book, Good to Great. The book was the result of five years of university-level study by some 21 researchers, drilled down into one volume.  Good to Great was a scientific approach, not a collection of opinions.  The book has potentially strong implications for our industry.  Let me pick one of the ideas from it, compare it to one from Charlie “Tremendous” Jones and show you how a manufactured housing company can use these ideas to grow their business and steadily rise to the level where they will “Dominate your Local Market.“

The Dominate Your Local Market topic was the hit seminar at the Louisville Manufactured Housing Show.  Says who?  Attendees like you, and industry notable George F Allen, who had this to say on his recent blog:

“Tony Kovach and his team of marketing specialists, introduced the day’s largest audience, of more than 60 LLCommunity owners/operators, to the exciting new world of online marketing, of new and resale homes, via web site design, blogging, social networks, and much much more.”

The truth is that everything we do at MHMSM.com is team work, drawn from real world experiences.  These experiences often dovetail with the work of authors like Collins, Zig Ziglar, Tim Connor and Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.

For those of you who are not reading Bob Stovall’s incredible blog every week, you are cheating yourself!  Bob quietly wowed the audience in Louisville.  No fire works that go off in your hand, blowing it off; rather, just practical wisdom that works.

But the point is that thinker/authors such as Dr Stephen Covey – with his perennial powerhouse book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People – these thinkers point the way to our success, no matter what the economy is doing!  You can and will learn – if you wish – how to dominate your local market by applying ideas that will drive business for you and your business, while others around you wonder, ‘what the heck did those guys do that suddenly made them the leader in this market?’

By the way, MHAO’s Deanna Fields and MHMSM are tentatively planning to do the Louisville hit, Dominate your Local Market Seminar in Tulsa!  Please mark your calendars and plan to come, April 29th, to the 2011 Great Southwest Home Show in Tulsa.

Against this backdrop, what is a BHAG?  What is SIB-KIS?

These are proven concepts, the first from Jim Collins’s book, the second from Charlie “Tremendous” Jones’s classic book.

BHAG is short for a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

SIB-KIS is an acronym for See It Big – Keep it Simple.

A BHAG or a SIB-KIS is an idea so powerful that it motivates your whole team.  Please do not think that having a BHAG or a SIB-KIS concept by itself will revolutionize your business; that is like smoking a pipe with wacky weed inside it and believing whatever you dream up.  A day dream is as different from a BHAG as imagining a building is from the actual building!  A building takes planning, work, effort, resources and expenditures of all types.  A dream is only a dream, until you put the planning, work, effort, resources and expenditures into it.

The classic example of a BHAG is President John F. Kennedy’s stated goal in the early 1960s to put a man on the moon before the end of that decade.  At the time, it was almost a wildly amazing idea, the stuff of H.G. Wells and sci-fi writers!  But it fired the imagination, and ‘We the People’ did, in fact, put a man on the moon before the close of that decade.

Your BHAG might be to dominate your state or local market in sales, to have the most respected housing center, to make manufactured homes respected and accepted in your market, to set a sales record 3x higher than your location has ever done.  Goals like that have consequential impacts:  it will put more people in homes, more sales people earning more commissions; it might  pay off your home mortgage in a year, allow you to buy a Mercedes for cash.

SIB-KIS is similar to a BHAG.  You envision a simple process that allows you to accomplish your goal.  See it Big, Keep It Simple. Sound systems are what set winners and also-rans apart!  A good marketing and sales training program may be the ticket for you to accomplish your BHAG.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that

likes to make easy things difficult.

–        Warren Buffett

What are the simple things we should remember?

• In our industry, we sell affordable housing!
• In every industry, customer satisfaction should be a key driver!
• Manufactured homes today represent quality, safety, durability and appeal.

When we provide a positive, customer-friendly experience, we can attract more buyers, sell more homes and the cycle of referrals can begin in earnest.

We can’t cover in depth all the secrets of success in a single article or blog post, but we can certainly suggest enough ideas that will get the forward-thinking Manufactured Housing professional thirsting and hungering for more.

Please come and see all the great homes, attend all the informative seminars, try your hand at winning prizes, networking at the great industry mixer and see the many SOLUTIONS that are to be found at the 2011 Great Southwest Home Show! We hope to see you in Tulsa, at the World’s Largest Indoor Manufactured Housing Show at the Quik-Trip Center!   # #