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``Bag the Elephant! How to Win & Keep Big Customers,'' by Steve Kaplan (Bard Press, 208 pages, $19.95)
Jumbo profits are out there for small- and medium-sized businesses that are committed to catching and working elephants, author Steve Kaplan writes of his pachyderm pursuit.
In ``Bag the Elephant!'' Kaplan, who has owned businesses that made megabucks off mammoth corporations, sees attracting and holding onto big-business customers as the only one of three basic business paths that can lead to lasting prosperity.
Kaplan calls that path the "Bag the Elephant Track." The other two are:
The Trail of the Snail is where businesses get caught in a rut and eke out minuscule growth every year because of fear of change or financial strain that makes it impossible to take risks.
The Arc of the Shooting Star is where a business scores a major breakthrough, becomes euphoric about its success, neglects operations and then loses its clients because it can't meet their changing needs and demands.
The author admits that there are snail-trail businesses that are able to get by and pay their bills, just like there are shooting-star businesses that are able to reignite after a flameout.
"But neither of these paths promises you a good chance of surviving and thriving over the long haul. You're more likely to end up among the tens of thousands of businesses in the U.S. that quietly fizzle or spectacularly flame out every year," Kaplan writes.
The Austin, Texas-based advertising agency GSD&M earns high marks from Kaplan for elephant bagging.
Kaplan says six University of Texas graduates formed that company in 1971 and made it their business to seek to do business with big companies.
GSD&M's first elephant was Southwest Airlines. The agency bagged Southwest in 1981 by pitching the idea of "flying for peanuts." The agency and the airline have been allied since, with GSD&M creating the elephant's share of Southwest's advertising.
"With the kick-start provided by this first big client, GSD&M becomes the third-largest advertising agency in the United States ($1.5 billion annual revenue) by signing other clients, such as Sam Walton's revolutionary Wal-Mart, as well as DreamWorks, the PGA Tour, MasterCard, AARP, Charles Schwab, and the U.S. Olympic Committee," Kaplan writes.
The author's first elephant was Procter & Gamble. In bagging the consumer-products beast, Kaplan tells how to sell products and services to corporate behemoths. He distills his experience into a practical regimen for discovering the people one needs to contact and cultivate within the organization, when to call them, what to say and how to arrange and make the most of meetings with them.
Learning to think like your prospective elephant and see things from its point of view, Kaplan says, is crucial to dealing with it successfully.
"Getting your mind right means not just you, as head of your business or as a crackerjack lone-wolf salesperson. It means everyone in your business - every person who will be engaged in hunting your Elephant, every executive, manager, accountant, service representative, delivery person, mechanic, creative writer, and board member your Elephant might come in contact with," Kaplan writes.
Kaplan does point out the downside of bagging elephants: When one of the fickle beasts leaves, it can leave the company with a large loss.
The slick appearance of ``Bag the Elephant!'' including its catchy visuals and multicolored type, identifies it as an advertising mechanism for Kaplan's The Difference Maker Inc., a consulting firm that provides assistance to large companies and small.
Beyond that, ``Bag the Elephant!'' is a well-written, cleverly presented guidebook that conveys valuable information to entrepreneurs on running and growing a business. The section on negotiating with a larger corporation is particularly well done; it would stand alone as a negotiating handbook.
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(c) 2005, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
