A reminder about shabbiness

“Look.”

My wife is pointing at the Christmas tree stand in our carport.

(Backstory: I set the thing out there in late December so I could put it in the attic. And, well...it’s now MID-MAY!)

It's a painful reminder of one of life’s deepest truths…

Everything slowly gets shabby.

This law is immutable, like gravity.

It has no exceptions.

We see proof of it everywhere. Cluttered carports. Smudged windows. Peeling paint. Dinged-up cars. Weedy flowerbeds. Shaggy hair.

The scientific term for this tendency toward disorder is entropy.

And it's not just a physical phenomenon.

Entropy is what’s happening when your schedule becomes unmanageable, when the fancy restaurant starts getting 3-star reviews, when the morale of a team begins to dip.

But here’s what's really scary…

Entropy doesn’t stop with things getting shabby. It also affects our ability to NOTICE the shabbiness!

And it's that—NOT seeing the disorder—that can cause the most trouble.

With that in mind, here are 10 places you might want to check your business for entropy:

  1. Outdated information on your website or business card (e.g., disconnected phone numbers, defunct email addresses, discontinued service offerings, etc.)

  2. Inconsistent business hours posted across different platforms (e.g., your Google listing says you’re open, but your door sign says “Closed”)

  3. A blog (or social media account) that hasn’t been updated since the Obama administration

  4. A loosey-goosey customer journey that leaves prospects and buyers guessing about what to expect next

  5. An uptick in "overdue" notices from vendors and suppliers

  6. Slow response times (or non-responses) to customer inquiries on your social media platforms

  7. Broken links or 404 errors on key product/service pages of your website

  8. A failure to acknowledge or respond to online reviews, especially negative ones, in a timely fashion

  9. An inconsistent brand voice across different customer touchpoints (e.g., your emails are formal but your social posts are casual and light-hearted)

  10. A retail/office space that’s messy (Do you maybe have a Christmas tree stand still sitting in your lobby?)

It's a sobering fact of life (and business):

Everything slowly gets shabby.

In light of that, take some time to check your products, processes, and services for signs of slippage.

Len Woods