Why Every Business Owner Needs Clones

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By Carl Weiss

Say what you will, cloning is alive, well and thriving.  Everything from a sheep (Dolly) to an Indian buffalo (Mahima), to a well-to-do couple’s deceased Labrador Retriever (Sir Lancelot), have been successfully cloned.  One outspoken Harvard geneticist has even claimed that scientists could clone a Neanderthal if they had an “extremely adventurous surrogate mother.”  While scientifically possible, thus far human cloning has remained the stuff of science fiction.  Worst still is the fact that even the mere mention of it brings a firestorm of controversy, with everyone from the scientific establishment to the religious right weighing in on why this is a bad idea.  But putting ethics aside, how many business owners would jump at the chance of having a carbon copy of themselves to help around the office? 

Send in the Clones

Face it, one of the hardest parts of the hiring process is training new employees.  Even once trained, most employees can never attain the same level of competence, motivation and enthusiasm that the boss does.  That’s why most companies spend mountains of time and money training and retraining staffers.  But what if the founder or owner of a business could climb inside a Xerox machine, press a button and spawn one or more clones of him or herself.  When one considers the increased productivity and profitability that would result, do you think they would fret over the ethics of the process?  I for one can think of several prominent billionaires who would leap at the chance.

The problem is that notwithstanding the video below, this technology is not yet available.  But that doesn’t mean that the fundamental motivating factors are not of paramount importance to every business owner and manager on the planet.  Let’s face it, there are never enough hours in a day to accomplish all the tasks we need to get done.  Add to this the fact that the most expensive and limited commodity to the boss is their time.  It doesn’t matter how capable and motivated you are, there are only so many appointments and texts and conference calls that can be performed in any given day.  Add to this the fact that as the boss a percentage of your time is spent dealing not with prospects and clients, but babysitting your staff and putting out the fires that crop up on a regular basis in every business.

But what if there was a mechanism or technology that would allow any business person the opportunity to be in two or more places at the same time.  Plus, what if this same technology could take some of the burden off your back when it comes to training or retraining new hires and existing employees.  Would that put a smile on your face?

The ABC’s of Automation

When most people think of automation they think of robots.  What they don’t realize is that the Internet offers a number of ways to automate tasks that are repetitive .  Take training, for example.  For the most part educating employees about products, services and sales tools is one of those pig-in-a-rut tasks that is repeated at most businesses ad nauseum.  The answer to this situation is to clone the task via video.  Why repeat the same process over and over when you can do the job once, record it and hand it out to employees, prospects and clients like Christmas cookies.  Yes Virginia, you need to train your clients and prospects to buy more products and services.  Whereas in days gone by you would need to create and ship a DVD, today you can email a YouTube or employ a QR code to deliver the lesson.  Mission accomplished.

In today’s content-rich online environment, generating a database that you can send a monthly newsletter to at the push of a button isn’t just good business, it makes good sense since it automates and multiplies your efforts at the click of a mouse.  (It’s also another place to embed those videos.)  Companies today need to stay lean and mean.  So instead of becoming top heavy by taking on more and more employees, you can create a legion of clones using such things as blogs, videos, podcasts, and social posts that will work 24/7 to do your bidding.  As an added bonus, these clones not only have the ability to reach out and touch thousands on prospects and clients, but producing and optimizing them works to help move you up on the search engine’s food chain, since all search engines love content.

Fire up the Factory

What’s not to like about clones?  They never get tired, don’t call in sick and they never ask for a raise.  When you want them to travel to distant points on the globe, they won’t whine about flying coach.  When they get in front of a prospect, they are always daisy fresh and can produce the perfect pitch every time.  So, if you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, stop hiring, start cloning and send your top gun in on every pitch.  You’ll thank me later.  All of you.

Carl Weiss is president of W Squared Media Group, a firm that specializes in getting the most out of technology.  You can find him and his cloning machine at http://wsquaredmediagroup.com.  You can also listen to his weekly Working the Web to Win radio show every Tuesday at 4pm Eastern on Blog Talk Radio.  He also owns and operates Jacksonville Video...or is it one of his clones?