I am having a chipmunk problem. The furry little creature has been tearing up my flower beds, tunneling under my front porch and making holes all over my yard. He digs up flower bulbs and eats them, leaving gaping holes and has been shoveling dirt all over my sidewalks. I thought I could ignore the problem and the chipmunk would eventually leave. I thought he would have his fill of flower bulbs and I would replant them this fall. However, it just doesn’t work that way with chipmunks. Each night I come home and clean up the mess he makes. Every day he goes about digging again and makes another mess.

I decided enough was enough, so I announced to my neighbors that I was going to buy a rat trap. I wanted them to have fair warning so they could keep their pets, who meander into my yard at times, away from my trap. It appears that everyone has an opinion about chipmunks, traps and dead rodents. One neighbor agreed that the chipmunks were a real nuisance and that I should do something. However, she thought they were rather cute. She was in favor of capturing the chipmunks and sending them far away, like dropping them off in another neighborhood to be someone else’s problem. The neighbor on the other side of me thought the critter needed to be eradicated. In his mind, there is no good chipmunk unless he is a dead chipmunk. Besides, capturing and transporting wild animals, he tells me, is illegal unless you have a permit to do so. Not wanting to go through this lengthy permit process for such a little rodent, I opted for a lethal trap. I went to the local farm supply store and bought a trap. The guy behind me in the checkout line was interested in what I was trying to catch. When I told him it was a chipmunk, he offered me best of luck. "Hard to catch, them varmints!” he told me. "Quicker than lightning!”

So I set up my trap and baited it with sunflower seeds. I thought that if the chipmunk were eating flower bulbs, some other kind of flower seeds would work. They did not. The chipmunk ignored the trap. Next I tried peanut butter. It worked. I knew it had when I received a phone call from my son during the middle of my work day to tell me that he had found a dead chipmunk in my trap. He wanted to know what to do with it. I suggested he have a chipmunk funeral and bury it in the backyard.

What does a chipmunk problem have to do with business? Like my first inkling, many businesses know they have a problem, but they think that ignoring it will make it go away. Actually ignoring it will make it worse. A problem ignored in business becomes the normal way of doing business before long. To solve a problem, you have to take action. Let’s say your problem is slow sales. You will never be able to increase your sales by keeping the same pace. You need to change what you are doing, create a plan of action and get to it. Next, it is common to get advice from others when solving a problem in your business, but who are you going to turn to for that advice? My one neighbor had good intentions, but a bad plan when she suggested I try to trap and release the chipmunk. Some plans are just like that – they are made with theories of good intentions, but they are impractical. Make sure when you are creating a sales plan, you are being practical about it. That includes defining your target market and setting goals that will stretch you, but can also be attained. But making plans and setting goals is really only a first step. I have to entice people to buy from me. That is where marketing comes into play. When I finally had my trap, I had to figure out how to lure the chipmunk. It wasn’t good enough just to buy the trap, I had to bait it with the right food. My logic in trying sunflower seeds I thought was well founded, but it did not work. I had the right equipment, just the wrong lure. Just because you have a product or a service doesn’t mean people will buy from you. You have to draw them in. It is the job of marketing to make this happen.

After the chipmunk was dead and buried, my problem was solved, right? It appears that where there is one chipmunk, there are many. So I am diligently going about trapping and burying chipmunks in my yard this summer. And so goes business. You have to stay on top of the problems.