There is no question we, as a nation, are in the economic mess we are because of greed.  There is enough blame to go around for everyone.  It was the banks.  It was the mortgage companies who lent money to people who couldn’t afford to pay their mortgage.  It was unscrupulous appraisers who appraised houses that were not worth what they were being sold for.  It was the government for not monitoring more effectively the situation.  It was the people buying houses with wants bigger than their ability to pay for it.

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, January 3-4, 2009, on the Opinion page published an editorial entitled, Blame Television for the Bubble, by Jim Sollisch.  Mr. Sollisch pointed out one other guilty culprit contributing to economic meltdown:  “House Hunters” on the HGTV cable network.

For many people “House Hunters” is in itself a guilty pleasure just to watch it every night.  And I must admit that “House Hunters” is one of the favorite programs to watch in our household.  It’s interesting to see how people live in other parts of the country.  What the architecture of the house is, interior and exterior.  How people furnish the houses.  Figuring out what motivates people to buy the house they do.  Then we ask ourselves would we want to live in any of these houses featured in the various episodes.

But as the article in the WSJ pointed out, many of the people on “House Hunters” buying houses are never satisfied.  They always say things like: ‘The house isn’t big enough.’  ‘The back yard isn’t big enough to put a pool in.’  ‘What no granite counter tops?!’  ‘No double sinks in the bathrooms?!’  ‘And those kitchen appliances will have to be upgraded to stainless steel.’  ‘Can’t live with those kitchen cabinets either.’  And on and on and on…

Now there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice house or nice anything, for that matter.  It’s a human trait that we all have.  And everyone deserves to live in a nice place.  But over the last several years people have lost reality with what a comfortable lifestyle is.

Let’s look at this from a business perspective.

Aside from the fact “House Hunters” and all of HGTV essentially promotes remodeling your home and having the best of everything in your home which is great for the housing industry…

There are business people who have also lost reality.  The large company profits experienced in recent years are just not there now for most businesses.  Just as the people who are buying houses today may have to accept less than they want, business people are going to have to get back to the basics of running a solid business, eliminating the excess and learning how to improve the sales and marketing of their goods and services.  This difficult economic time we are going through will unfortunately eliminate the weak businesses and the strong will only become stronger.

Don’t let greed get in the way of how you run your business.  Do what any sports team does when they have a losing season.  Get back to the basics of running a good solid business.  Any winning sports team has a great coach and management team leading the way to victory.  Make sure you, the CEO, company president or business owner, do the same with your company in order to have a winning business year.