Mine Your Own Business

Healthy Heart Advice

If you are like me (and probably 90% of America) you probably ate a little too much over the Thanksgiving holiday. A little overeating is hard to avoid from now until January, but there are some food choices that can help limit the damage to you waistline. A recent article gives 10 foods suggestions from a registered dietician that can help keep your cholesterol and saturated fat levels within healthy limits.

Some of the foods mentioned are ones that I had never considered before such as crispbread, mangos, and avocados so be sure to read the whole article for all the healthy benefits from each one of them. Sure you're probably going to go to a lot of parties and family gatherings in the next month or so, but if you follow some of these food tips whenever possible, it may help to control your weight. An added bonus is these  foods have many overall nutritional benefits that may be difficult to get in other foods. They would also be excellent choices in January and throughout 2011.

Make a Customer Feel Special

Today's post will be a little different than most of our posts, since we usually link to another article. Today we are going to start out with a quote and give two examples of making customers feel special. Here's the quote:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

--Maya Angelou,
American writer

Now for two examples of putting this quote into practice.

“I was in a Cricket telephone store with my brother last week.  He was getting a new cell phone when his old one got lost when it fell out of his pocket on the bus.  He didn’t mention this to the store owner until after he had paid for the new phone.  The store owner reached over to a display rack, took down a plastic cell phone holster and told him that maybe that would help.  No charge.  A very inexpensive way to make a customer feel special.” 

Bill Hinderer

I was on vacation in Florida for the last two weeks and one restaurant we have visited almost every year for the past fourteen years is Johny Leverock's Seafood House in Placida Florida. The food and service is always excellent, it has a great view of a marina, and it is locally owned. We were in a fairly large group of family and friends when we visited them one evening for dinner, but there was a very large group that arrived just before us and the service was slower than usual.

Here is how the waitress made our group feel special. She brought us two free appetizers after taking our orders, without us even requesting them. The two orders of crab cakes were excellent (we'd never tried them there before) and it made the wait much more tolerable. She turned what could have been hungry and cranky customers into very satisfied customers and our friends who had never eaten there were very impressed.

So do you have an example of ways some business has made you feel special or perhaps something you have used in your business to salvage a bad situation or make a customer feel special?

New Year Advice

Since this is a blog for small business, the title would suggest that this posting would be advice for your small business. Actually this posting is about some new research on reducing the severity of a hangover for anyone who indulges too much this evening when celebrating New Year's Eve.

The researchers took 95 healthy heavy drinkers aged 21 to 33 and during two overnight sessions had them drink to inebriation. One group drank vodka, one drank bourbon, and one drank a placebo beverage. The following morning the participants were asked to rate their hangover and the bourbon drinkers were always the most hungover. You can get all the details on the research by reading the article at HealthDay, as well as some advice on what to do if you do overindulge a little bit and a link to get even more information.