Grooming Business School: #4. Business Intelligence

GT Grooming Trailers was born of original thought and our unique style of design, marketing, and service is what makes GT the maverick and envy of the conversion industry. The ambit of GT’s style is clear throughout this blog as well; hence the writing of articles void of gimmicky language that saturates this business. Here’s one more way GT is different:

Many of our customers are intrigued by one of our other companies. It’s a company that specializes in Competitive / Business Intelligence.

First, Business Intelligence (BI) is the legal collection of actionable information that can affect a company’s plans, decisions, and operations. Our company not only respects the legal line, but maintains a high moral line of behavior as well. As good people know, legal and moral are not synonymous.

BI is mostly useful for fortune 1,000 companies. However, small tricks can help the small business - businesses like mobile pet grooming. The BI process can help the mobile groomer in many ways.

• Mobile groomers try to figure out how to price their services.

• Mobile groomers tend to receive phone calls from “customers” who are really other groomers trying to gather intelligence.

• Mobile groomers need to figure out how to enter a competitor’s territory.

• Groomers need to know the deficiencies of the competition’s products and services.

• Examples are endless.

This is just a sample of some small tricks and warnings for the small business.

I suggest being honest and identify yourself when you shop your competition. Seasoned groomers can sense if you are a consumer or a competitor. Fostering honest communications with your competition usually helps small businesses because you can refer business to each other. If your preference is to remain anonymous, make sure to use a disposable cell phone.

Don’t email a competitor unless you don’t mind giving away your identity. It is possible to hide your IP by routing it through China, Romania, or a different country that will not share information. A BI expert can help you do that. It is possible for a BI company to identify nearly all incoming emails.

Do you have a website? The number of license plates that I see advertised on websites is staggering. If you have an image of your automobile on your website, make sure to doctor the plate. Once a competitor has your license plate number, it is simple to obtain information about you. Within minutes, a BI professional will have your name, aliases, phone numbers, names of your family members, addresses, driving history with DUIs, all court records, criminal history, business licenses, vehicle registrations, marital records, tax liens, real estate involvements, possibly even where your tattoos are (seriously) etc. This information can be obtained for your business as well simply because you advertised your license plate on your website. Sure, anyone can look at your plate in person, but why make it so easy?

Shred your trash. Trust that there are people who make a living gathering BI by rummaging through garbage. A colleague of ours makes over a million dollars every year analyzing business leaders’ household garbage. Your business secrets, if “thrown away” are available to anyone. In addition, shredding your trash can help prevent identity theft. Shredding companies charge as little as 5 cents per pound to shred your documents at your home or office.

Do you have employees? Your information flow could be flowing right out the doors. Your mobile groomers in the field can easily be followed. If that happens, your entire clientele is at risk of being aggressively marketed by your competition.

Don’t lie on public forums. You might have heard lately about a high profile CEO getting in a lot of trouble for pretending to be a happy customer on an Internet forum. This tactic is actually used frequently by naive businesspeople and an experienced investigator can figure it out. Not only is there linguistic analysis to support suspicion, but IPs can easily be trapped. Often, industry insiders who have no allegiance to protecting your identity operate the forums. I’ve been able to identify people like this even in the mobile grooming industry - it’s everywhere.

Bait your competitor into emailing you. Once you have identified your competitor’s IP, you can literally watch their activity on your own website. Being able to do this gives you invaluable information because you can see what interests your competitor the most. If your website is designed with all of your information split into several pages, you can see if your competitor is more obsessed with your “pricing page,” your “services page,” or your “territory” page. Other insights you can find by watching your competitor on your website is how much time they spend on each page, how they found your site, what site were they visiting before yours, etc.

Business legitimacy. Perhaps you want to see if a mobile grooming conversion company is a legitimate business. The BI process routinely inspects business licenses and SEC filings.

No computer is safe. All it takes is one minute for someone to download a program that will instantly send them an exact copy of emails, chats, and instant messages.

No hotel room is safe. Combine the previous bullet with this premise, and you could unwittingly be leaving your entire business up for grabs. A lot of groomers attend trade shows but the fact is that trade shows are the #1 resource for BI in almost EVERY industry. The only people who “talk” more than IT guys are those who are “excited and pumped up” at trade shows! There isn’t a hotel room in the world that a sleazy BI professional cannot easily get into to find your computer (password protection helps, but doesn’t really exist). Therefore, always inform the hotel management that additional keys to the room are not to be made without identification, and the maids ARE NOT to provide access to the room for anyone.

Other “hot spots” for BI: Ad agencies, Associations, Memberships, Chat rooms, Database firms, Government agencies, Industry analysts, Industry authors, Trash collectors, Job applicants, Lobbyists, Press releases, Reporters, Politicians, SEC filings, Suppliers, Industry veterans, and Vendors.

Understanding BI isn’t as worthwhile to the small business as it is with a fortune 1,000, however the tricks can help in some circumstances. It can be a fun line of work, but I love coming back to GT Grooming Trailers to build physical products that actually change people’s lives and help them make lots of money. Where BI really only helps businesses, GT helps people!