In the post-apocalyptic setting of The Walking Dead , zombies are everywhere preying on surviving humans for food. The Wikipedia article describes them as “…mindless shells driven solely by instinct”.

Did you realize that small businesses can become just like those zombies. The following four symptoms could mean that your business is  literally the walking D.E.A.D.

D – Directionless

Is your strategy missing or abandoned? Is your business is just doing the same thing year after year in spite of market signals and internal metrics telling you that’s not working?  Are you neglecting to act on customer feedback? Are you learning about your customers or market as the result of learning from experiments?

If any of these questions sound like the reality of your business then  you are directionless.

The market is moving around you, its going in a direction.  Your customers are being afforded more options, they are moving in a direction. Unless you have direction you can’t move, learn, adapt or advance as a business.  And if you don’t  advance you will be left behind, customers will migrate to your competitors.

E – Exhausted

The normal battles of small business fatigue the fittest among us. However, when the normal skirmishes are punctuated by more catastrophic events such as big sales declines, layoffs, product launch failures and the like, it can leave your team exhausted.

When you repeatedly expend large physical, mental and emotional efforts with no payoff, reward, progress or recovery it decimates your strength, will and energy. Exhaustion amplifies negative momentum, making it that much harder to begin new things or attack old problems.

A – Apathetic

Exhaustion leads to apathy. You are so tired you just don’t care. Apathetic employees are more likely to make mistakes, miss opportunities and ignore customers. Apathetic leaders will ignore issues, frustrate employees and abdicate their responsibilities.

Apathy invites bad customer experiences, neglected processes and procedures, lower morale and lower revenue and profit.

When customers sense apathy in an organization they will stampede for the exits and be easily seduced by your more caring competitors.

D – Distracted

Customer complaints are up 32%, yet you are picking out new chairs for the conference room. Sales for last month were down 18% following a 4 month trends, yet you are insisting on changing the fonts in your brochures. Your biggest account just cancelled, yet you want to attend a seminar on how color affects the mood in the office.   Are you more focused on choosing the new pens to hand out at conferences than you are focused on the fact that your marketing signups are down 31% year over year?

These are not contrived examples, they are real. I have seen them.

Distraction will always result in solving the wrong problem, missing the point, and ultimately missing key market or customer signals. Distraction can be deadly for a business.

You’re not dead yet

In The Walking Dead, the objective is to survive by killing the zombies.

However, if your business is D.E.A.D. you don’t need to kill it.

There are ways you can revive a D.E.A.D. small business. Look for those in the next post.