Education vs. Experience

There is a debate that rages throughout the halls of academia and the business world. The debate is not new, nor can it easily be settled. You see, it revolves around whether experience is superior to education and visa-versa.  You can imagine that the experience side of the argument doesn’t get very much support in academia. So, most of the debate occurs within the boardrooms of businesses all over.

Let’s face it, education is expensive. The average cost for a private university is roughly $39,000 a year. Multiply that out by 4 and you just paid almost $160,000 for your bachelor’s degree. Granted there are ways to make this less expensive, but even in those cases you will end up spending roughly $40k to $60,000 for your bachelor’s. That is a difficult pill to swallow for someone thinking about coming out of college and not being able to find a decent job right away.

 I attended a financial seminar about 10 months ago from a guy who wrote a book on the cost of college. As he was doing his research, he discovered that the average student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in very average subjects like communications were leaving college owing on an average $180,000. This is because everything is charged, and the students don’t pay attention to what they are spending.  They just swipe their student card and go. This blind spending creates a problem for these students coming out of college, in that they are cash broke and unable to maintain a lifestyle that allows them to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

It’s no wonder why the “give me my schooling for free” crowd seems to be getting louder. They see the writing on the wall, and they don’t want to be held responsible for their poor choices. This is a topic for another article, and I had better stop there or this will become a very lengthy treatise on the entitled mindset of today’s young society.

So, as many individuals who are unable to afford higher education beyond High School look at their options, many are opting out of pursuing a degree. They are going right to work trying to make something out of their lives. They gain tons of experience and can do their jobs with great effectiveness.

Sounds good right? These people are good at what they do. They are loyal to their employers. They have years of hands on experience over their counterpart just coming out of college. So, what seems to be the problem? Where’s this debate that I mentioned?

The debate lies in what happens to these non-college educated peers over their college educated counterparts. Many times, they are passed over for a promotion to allow someone with a degree to take the position. How is this justified in the eyes of these employers? Simply put, a degree to many employers is a sign that you can take orders and follow a prescribed regiment to accomplish a task, or in other words, you can jump through hoops and bark like a dog to come out on top. I know, that was a little harsh, but the truth hurts, so get over it.

In my businesses I’ve always placed experience over education. I view it as the best educator. A text book can only take you so far, and lecture and demonstration can only prepare you for a very finite list of experiences. While on the other hand, experience is a real hands-on education. The employee is learning and gaining a deep understanding of the needs of the organization and the area in which they work. This education is priceless and should never be dismissed as being less important than the education received at college.

As a financial advisor I would rather hire a person that I felt that I could train and teach to my specifications, rather than try to fix the errors instilled by a professor teaching out of a text book. Life is organic and changes rapidly. It takes someone with life experience to be just as fluid and empathetic. I am a very particular person when it comes to how I do business and what I expect from my employees, and I’ve found that experience serves me better when it comes to hiring.

That’s not the case in all things. When it comes to a doctor, I would rather have an educated person practice his trade rather than someone who grew up with an interest in medicine and practiced on others. Education has its place in society. I just believe that it is disingenuous to make a blanket statement that education is always paramount to anything else and trumps experience.

So, in conclusion; education is important, and experience is important. Society should never tell a person that they have no empirical value to society, but rather that worth is based on knowledge regardless of where you acquired that knowledge.

The Truth About Low Hanging Fruit: What I learned as a seven year old working in an orchard.

When I was between seven and eight years old my father was reeling from a recent job loss. We had moved from Wyoming to Washington and were trying our best to get back on our feet. My Grandfather, my dad’s dad had passed away during our move; so that was adding to his difficulty in getting things really going.

It was during this time that my Grandmother suggested that my brother and I join them in the Cherry Orchards to pick cherries to earn money. My mother had grown up in a migrant worker family and at this time they were still in this line of work. So, with no better alternative my older brother and I woke up early in the morning (the sooner you get to the orchard the more cherries you pick and the more money you make) and began our labors to help support the family. 

I remember the work was hard. I was small and didn’t like ladders much because I was prone to accidents, so I stayed down low for most of the morning picking the fruit that was down at the bottom. The low hanging fruit if you will. Since this is the easiest fruit to get, everybody was picking the lower fruit, and I soon realized that if I was going to be successful, I was going to have to climb the ladder and go for the higher fruit, which appeared to be more desirable. I got into the tree and spent the entire day traversing the branches and filled bucket after bucket of cherries. Everybody else stayed on the outside and low, while I, being small, went as high as I could and did so from within the tree. The buckets were heavy for a small kid, and at the end of the day I was tired, but I had been successful. I earned the respect of my grandmother that day.

There is a lot to be said about “low hanging fruit” in the world of business. Those ripe customers just sitting there waiting for you to come by like a knight on a white stallion to give them what they want. They want what you have, and you are ready to give it to them. You don’t have to try much just reach up and the customer just lands there at your desk/counter/table/etc. Is there a problem with this? No, not really. Ready customers, willing and anxious to purchase is a good thing. You owe it to your business to take advantage of their willingness to purchase your good or service. It is the logical thing to do. But there is a point where it becomes unwise to go after low hanging fruit.

When your primary focus is going after this particular segment of your market base, you will eventually run out of business. Just like the fruit on a tree becomes sparse when everybody is picking at it, you have competition (if you don’t you are my hero), and they are going after the same ready customer that you want and need for your business. You never know when these customers are going to stop being so readily available, but they eventually do. I would venture to declare that there is no industry in existence that consists 100% of ready-to-purchase customers, or low hanging fruit.

You must be willing to do the hard work along with the easy work to ensure a long-running and viable enterprise. Meaning, that while you go after those ready-to-purchase customers, you are simultaneously marketing to those who are not yet aware that they need your service or goods, or those who will need it soon. A full and complete branding strategy must be established in order to be truly competitive.

Success based on strategies that focus on immediate ROI such as those ready-to-purchase customers will eventually run out of steam and produce lower and lower returns, and if you’re not careful you will strategize yourself out of business especially if your competition is aware of the need to have a more diverse approach to marketing.

This runs even more true when you focus on a niche market in a broader market segment. If your competition is effective at not only servicing the needs of the niche, but the broader market in general they will eventually win the race to that customer. Take Wal-Mart for example, they offer such a variety of products and services that customers go there for the convenience of getting what they want in one location without having to jump around from place to place. Although it is true that there are customers willing to go from place to place to avoid Wal-Mart in its entirety, those individuals are few and far between. If you are going to service a niche market you must be willing to do the necessary leg work to constantly put yourself in front of the potential customer and lead as the subject matter leader, or you will be left in the dust.

I recently had the experience provided to me of working with a dental company that focuses primarily on dental implants and nothing else. The principal doctor who started the company believes that he has a brand that is known by the market and that customers should be knocking on his door constantly for dental implant surgery. The problem is that he doesn’t have a widely know brand. His “brand” as he calls it is known by the low hanging fruit that he focused on and nobody else. When I met him, I recognized this, and in my proposal, I established a plan that would pull him out of obscurity and help him develop top of mind recollection within his very niche market. 

I came on board and began creating a marketing strategy that would effectively do this. I developed a multi-tiered approach to separate him from his competition and establish him as the subject matter leader. He waivered and hesitated for over two weeks to decide or move forward. Finally, he requested that I create alternative plans, so I did, and he chose one. The plan was not as robust as it should have been. It had been stripped down to accommodate his lack of understanding and unwillingness to meet with me to discuss how everything fit together.

In the three months that I was working with him; I changed the plan three times trying to accommodate his lack of initiative and ability to decide at crucial moments. He wanted the phone to ring off the hook, and I would explain that I was trying to create a long-term effect and not a short-term flash in the pan solution. He demanded all digital advertising stop and that he be returned to a print marketing strategy because that is what worked for him in the past. I tried using an analogy of picking fruit and how at some point you must climb the ladder, which was completely lost on him. I created a print marketing plan for him which he “accepted” but refused to decide on what to spend or what to offer as an incentive to get the call to come in.

Needless to say, I am no longer assisting him with his marketing strategies. He refused to provide a viable incentive to get patients to call in because he was used to them just calling from his ads. He refused to see that since last year his call volume has been steadily decreasing. He refused to see the writing on the wall that if he didn’t change his approach, that he would be out of business within a matter of a few years.

The low hanging fruit of the business world dries up. Businesses that are proactive, rather than reactive in their marketing will position themselves to capture business and smash their competition. It is imperative that those individuals upon whom the responsibility for marketing rests develop viable long-term goals along with their short-term goals with which they create strong messaging that communicates to the heart and mind of the ready-to-purchase customer and the customer who might not be aware that they currently or will shortly need the product or service that is offered.

Business owners must establish a mindset that not everybody needs or think that they need their product or service. And with that realization create the message that communicates the reason why they do need it or will need it. Especially when they operate within a niche market, like for example, dental implant dentistry.

NewLine Consulting Services is here to help you if you have questions or would like to have help in developing your strategies and plans. We will review what you have and help you establish a plan that will grow your business. 

Regardless of what you do, stay the course. Build a brand, cultivate your market and harvest the whole tree and not just the easy stuff. If you do this you will experience steady and prolonged growth, and you will outlive the competition because they will be gleaning the scraps that you leave them.