Did you know today is Global Running Day? Unless you are a runner or someone close to a runner, probably not. And that’s a really important principle to understand when you think about your business.

My son and I are runners. Early morning runners actually. Five days a week,  between 5 am and 6 am, we get up and run (hence the goofy reflective vests).

And, since we’re runners, we know about Global Running Day (the first Wednesday in June each year). And since we know, if you know us, you know too.

How does this apply to your business? When something is familiar to us, something as familiar as our business, we begin to think everyone knows about it and likes it as much as we do. After all, how could they not know about the wonderful products and services we supply that change peoples lives for the better?

Then, the inevitable happens. We talk to a friend (or worse yet, a relative) who purchased a product or service that we provide from one of our competitors. How could this happen? And it happens all the time.

I had a full-time consulting job in a different industry during the beginning of our dry cleaning pick up and delivery service.  My boss did dry cleaning virtually every week. But she never used our service.  She knew me, knew my family, cared about us, and even knew about our service but she never used us. Why?

I can only guess but it is an educated one. I think perhaps she unconsciously didn’t want the business to do too well because she knew I’d leave and go to the dry cleaning service full time (and I did).

You see, people do or don’t do business with people for a number of different reasons that are all their own. But, and here’s where Global Running Day applies, they will almost always do business with people they feel are like them. And they’ll know about businesses that are in their opinion “like them” because we’re always on the lookout for something that says, “Hey, that’s just like me!”

Better still, once people find something “just like them” they’ll tell all their friends who are “just like them.” But only if you ask them to do so. (By the way, if you’re one of our clients, please let your friends an colleagues know about our service, they’ll thank you for it and we will too!)

So yes, today is Global Running Day and now you know, for better or worse. But you also know how something that may or may not matter to you can become something very important to your circle. It only needs to be important to someone like you and soon it will be known by you too.