7 Temptations Leaders Avoid Every Day

As I’ve been pitching myself and my services more often, I keep thinking about what I bring to the table when it comes to leadership. I’ve been telling people I specialize in 3 areas: Marketing | Leadership | Social Media. But the truth is, I feel I’m specialized in a lot more than that.

Great companies let their marketing bleed through their organizations and when I work with someone I want them to know that is my plan for their business. It’s a blend of all three ideas, and then some. I’m selling people on my philosophy. This makes me a sales person (already knew that) and a leader since I’m asking people to believe in me.

Even if that doesn’t make sense to you, I’ve compiled a list of some of the temptations leaders avoid since the subject has been on my mind. I hope you enjoy this, I hope you apply these (if you aren’t already), and I would love to hear what else leaders avoid so leave me a comment below!
temptations leaders avoid

Criticize Someone

The easiest thing to do in this world is criticize someone for their work. It takes guts to get off the bench and into the game. It takes nothing to sit on the sideline and say what that person should have done on the field from the comfort of a padded seat with a mouth full of proverbial popcorn.

Leaders put themselves out there on a stage to be judged by their every action. The great ones know when others are putting themselves out there as well. When they recognize it, they don’t criticize harshly, they praise boldly.

Walk on People 

Leaders are often looked up to in organizations whether they are in a position of power or not. When others look up to you, you have the power to lift them up or crush them simply by your body language.

Real leaders show others they care, even if those people can’t do anything for them. It’s easy to be a jerk, it’s hard to be kind. You may not have time to ask about how the family is doing every day, but things as simple remembering people’s names and being sincere go a long way.

Take the Credit

I love to see this scene in sports (mostly football) game press conferences: A slick reporter asks a star player about the previous win and how great he/she played, setting them up to take credit for the game themselves. No matter how many times this has happened, the great leaders don’t crack. They never take the bait!

what leaders do every day
When leaders receive praise they point the finger outward. Great leaders don’t take the credit for a victory/accomplishment/goal-achieved even if it fell mostly on their shoulders. They say how instrumental their team or their supporting cast was in making this happen. 

Deflect the Blame

Flash back to 4 seconds ago, similar scene: Now the same star player has lost a game and the same reporter asks them about why they lost, looking for a scapegoat and some controversy to print. Again, the seasoned leader takes the blame. They could have played the game of their life, but they’ll say something like, “It wasn’t enough,” or,  “It’s not about me.”

When leaders receive criticism, they point the finger inward. They don’t shift the blame to others, the ones that look up to them. They can handle the attacks and they can handle the judgement, it comes with the territory.

Think Small

Leaders have to be a bit off their rockers. Nobody wants to follow the quite, harmless person that never got out of their comfort zone. People want to follow the person that makes bold moves and achieves great things. Leaders push the envelope with their thinking, it’s rarely small.

Hold Others Back

When small people see that someone below them is doing something to better themselves, they break them down. Poor leadership will hold those around them back, in fear of losing their own position. They will stifle growth, they will criticize, they will humiliate, and they will attempt to “keep them in their place.”

Real leadership invests in it’s people, even after they’ve been surpassed. One of the men I looked up to most in my collegiate football career was Marvin McHellon. At one point in his career he was surpassed by an underclassman who took his starting position. Marvin didn’t whine, he didn’t quit, he didn’t make a scene. He humbly helped teach that younger player learn everything he knew so we could win as many games as possible.

Hold Themselves Back

Leaders realize that they are valuable to their people in some way, even if they don’t go around announcing it to everyone. So they know they cannot just sit back and rest on their laurels.

A leader that doesn’t get better with time and is not a leader, they are person in a position of power. A leader will push themselves to be better, to learn, and to grow.

What else do leaders avoid? I would love to hear your feedback and I would love to add to this list!

—

Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter

Have a great day & don’t forget to avoid these 7 Temptations!

The 1% Rule: How to Grow Your Business

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and I found myself repeating advice I heard on a podcast a while back. I cannot for the life of me remember who the person was, but the advice has stuck with me ever since.

My friend is a former teammate and someone that has great potential, he’s just not sure how to get to his destination. I found myself mentoring him with words of encouragement. 

We talked about his dream to have his own sport-specific training company. Natural questions arose like, “When do you take your certification tests?” and “What have you done since we last talked about this?” and “Do you have any current clients?”

We covered a lot of ground over a brief lunch, but I want to share the most important piece of advice I gave him. Today we’ll discuss The 1% Rule of how to grow your business regardless of your industry.

End Game (first)

paying retail
We need to know where we’re going if we’re ever going to get there. My buddy wants to have a sport specific training company that allows him to work with high school and collegiate level athletes to train them for speed and agility, allowing him to open the door for his ministry to young men. He knows where he wants to go.

Great start!

This is something I’ve talked about before when I reference goal setting, if we don’t set goals we’ll never achieve them (check out some of the older posts about goal setting, goal achieving, and sticking to your goals). I told him that it’s great that he knows where he wants to go. But what has he done to get there?

His answer was “not much” which he eventually changed to “nothing” after a little poking and prodding. I told him that wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, but if he really wanted this dream to come true he had to start somewhere. He had to get moving and get 1% on the way to his goal!

Starting Small (last)

Sometimes we look at enormous goals like writing a book, running a marathon, or building a company and we become paralyzed by the magnanimity of it. After we know where we want to go with our business (or our goals in general) we can break them down into small segments, it doesn’t have to be as daunting of a task as it looks.

After we have our end goal it is time to take the big picture and break it down into smaller, more achievable segments. For some, this is very clear cut and we know exactly what we need to do. If you want to start a website your first step will probably be buying domain name. If you are in the physical space and you need clients, you probably want to start prospecting as soon as possible.

Whenever we break these massive goals down, we are able to think about them in terms of percentages complete. 100% being finished or maybe if we’re in the middle of them, they’re 50% complete. Either way, it helps us measure where we are in relation to the end goal.

The first rung on this ladder is 1. The second is 2. The third is 3. Yes, this seems simple, and it is. But remember, simple isn’t always easy! We cannot achieve 2% if we never achieve 1%. I advised my friend to identify his 1% and achieve it as fast as possible.

If we can equate 1 day to 1%, we’ll be way more than 100% to our goals by the time a year has passed. The beauty of this theory is that there are 365 days in a year. We all have the same amount of hours in a day and days in a year, what we do with them is what separates us.

Every Day (middle)

That’s great Mike, but I already have a business. So what?

Are you working towards your end goal by at least 1% each day? Are you knocking off those little segments of your end goal that you chunked off when you started? Or are you just running around like a chicken with your head cut off reacting to perceived fires in the workplace?

I know I’ve been caught up in vanity metrics, wasting time, and overall spinning my wheels. But I have also had those days when I know I moved closer to my goals.

Staying focused on the bigger picture and knocking off 1% every day is the only way to long-term success. We have all heard about success hacks and shortcuts. But those are the exceptions, not rules. Plus, I guarantee there are backstories much more lengthy than the press ever hears when it comes to these companies and their growth.

1% Realized

As we left lunch, I repeated myself and reminded my friend to find that 1% today and get started as soon as he could. As soon as I left I drove past CSU where we played football together and saw another former teammate of ours that is in the exact industry my buddy wants to enter. He was one of the people we talked about over lunch, someone my friend should reach out to.

I immediately texted him and told him to swing by the school and reconnect. Minutes later I got a text back, he’d already achieved that 1% for the day. Momentum has to start somewhere, he just needed a little push to get going. It wasn’t rocket science, he just need to take that first step.

—

What do you want to accomplish that seems too massive to take in? Leave me a comment below about what your 1% looks like, I’d love to hear from you!

Have a great week!

—

Want posts sent directly to your email?

Fill out the simple form below and check your email to confirm!

How to Write 100 Blog Posts of Unique Content

Today’s post marks my 100th post on this blog. I haven’t been counting down to this moment, it has just sort of popped up on me. But when I noticed the blog post ticker at 98 I began to think how I arrived here and why.

I’ve touched on goals and consistently reaching them in the past, but today I want to talk about how to write 100 blog posts of unique content. The lessons are more than applicable to other areas of our lives, just replace writing with your own muse.

1.) Have a Purpose

If this blog had just been a hobby, I would have quit or only written a fraction of the posts I have today. If my writing didn’t have a purpose I couldn’t have made it happen. It’s nearly impossible to stay committed to something you don’t believe in.

As I’ve said before, the purpose of my blog is two-fold: A.) To practice writing so I don’t look like a fool when my book comes out late next year & B.) To build my audience for the book release. If nobody knows I write, who’s ever going to want to read my book besides some close friends and my family?

Those were my initial motivations, what I didn’t count on was the therapeutic value my writing has produced. Some days I feel like I haven’t had a complete day if I didn’t make a post. Needless to say, my writing will continue far past my book release, it’s a part of me now.

2.) Commit To Your Purpose

How to Write 100 Blog Posts of Unique Content Once I decided why I was going to start writing, I made a personal commitment. I told myself that every weekday I was going to write. So when I wake up in the morning, there is no question of, “Well I wonder what I should do today?” in my mind. I already decided what I was going to do today, long ago.

That seems very simple, and it is. But summoning the willpower to do it is not easy. I wrote down what I wanted to do on my bathroom mirror “write every day” and I remind myself with a weekly whiteboard log in my room that has an “X” or a blank spot for each day of the week I write or don’t. I hate to see blank spots, and they rarely happen.

You can have all the extrinsic motivations and happy-go-lucky motivational quotes around you, but if you don’t decide that this is important, you’ll never follow through with it. You need intrinsic motivation before extrinsic motivation can ever take hold. 

3.) Make it important

I heard a while back that if you want to find out what someone deems important, look at where they spend their time and money. I would go even further and say look at their morning routine.

If someone gets up and they study the bible, they put weight on their personal time with God. If someone gets up to workout, they put weight on their personal health. If it’s early morning work a second degree, they put weight in their education.

Some people argue that they are night owls, and that’s great. But you never know what’s going to happen at the end of the day, your morning is your time. This is when I write, this is when I get the most important things done so that no matter how the rest of my day goes, at least I read and wrote.

4.) Sacrifice

Not many great things comes without sacrifice. It might be time, it might be money, it might be a relationship. But ultimately, something will have to be exchanged to commit to your goals.

Mine was time and other projects. As I mentioned a few weeks back, I have had to tell a few people that I cannot work with them (which usually elicits a weird response since I don’t have a 9-5 job). I have to tell them I have other commitments, my writing being one of them I’m not ready to give up.

5.) Set Limits

Don’t let your commitments consume you. This is the polar opposite of what I just said, I realize that. But we have to strike a balance or we’re going to end of sacrificing everything for this commitment, not just a couple things.

I do my best to cap my writing at an hour and half every day. Sometimes it goes longer if I have a lot to say or had little sleep the night before and it’s hard to concentrate. And sometimes, like today, my fingers cannot keep up with my brain. But after about and hour and half I have to start peeling myself away to get moving with the rest of my day. I cannot let this consume me, I have to stay balanced. 

100 blog posts is a mile stone to me and I’m glad you’re along for the journey! This has been a path to self discovery and I’ve been able to open more doors than I realized through my writing.

What is something you have committed to doing every day or every week for a long period of time? How have you stayed committed to it and what have you had to sacrifice? 

—

I would love to hear more from you about ongoing commitments like my blog here. Leave me a comment or chat with me on Twitter.

Have a great weekend!

—

If you enjoyed this post, please sign up to receive my emails on the right hand side bar. You will receive my posts via email so you can keep track of them and catch up when you have the time. It’s not spam and you won’t be added to any other lists besides mine.

—

The 4 Evolutionary Stages of Marketing

I’m sure you’ve seen the posts on social media with these “year in review” sites/apps out there. They compile your past 12 months worth of pictures and put them into an 80’s style montage to remind people about why you are awesome. There was “flipgram” for Instagram right around the end of the year and now there’s one for Facebook.

These programs are genius! The creators have done a great job of building the marketing INTO their product. Most people think about their business in compartments. Accounting | Product Development | Marketing | Sales | Customer Service | etc. Nothing overlaps and nothing intertwines. Today we’ll talk about how that way of thinking is outdated and inefficient with the 4 evolutionary stages of marketing.

Stage 1

The first stage of this progression started when someone would make a product or come up with a service. It was just them and maybe an apprentice, say making shoes. At first, think way back, you had to tell people what you were doing.

This was the original word of mouth marketing. You went around telling people that you were a shoemaker, and if they knew you, they would come buy shoes from you. If they didn’t, but someone said you had great shoes, they might try you out and you would have the opportunity to earn their trust.

Stage 2

Then there came sales people. Hired guns that would travel and push your shoes for you. Everyone had to be sales people in the early days, but someone figured out that they didn’t have to do all the selling (an introvert) and someone else figured out that they could capitalize on the other guy’s product (an extrovert) for a fee.

There was always that word of mouth that would get you business, but it was too slow for some. Traveling sales people that went from store to store (B2B) or door to door (B2C) were a much faster avenue to higher revenues than waiting for those word of mouth promotions to spread.

I believe this is where the entrepreneurs began to get lazy. They didn’t have to earn as much business through word of mouth because the sales people were pushing their products faster than before. They didn’t have to make as high of a quality product or service, their main avenue for gaining business shifted from word of mouth to sales people.

Stage 3

Then came mass marketing and mass media. Sales people could reach more people one-on-one than the entrepreneur going off of word of mouth, adding customers faster and at higher numbers since that was their specialty. But mass marketing created the multiplication effect, addition was for losers.

And here, the products and services fell off even more. The larger the advertising program, the lower the quality needed to be. After all, there are only certain amounts of funds for an entire company, right?

Now there were still companies that employed sales people, and of course if the product was good word of mouth still helped spread the product. But companies and entrepreneurs now focused on their marketing, and less on their products.

http://pickadirection.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/your-marketing-sucks.jpg

The 4 Evolutionary Stages of Marketing

Stage 4

Here we’ve come full circle and the companies that I listed in the beginning have figured out how to leverage the numbers of mass (& social) media, but built in the word of mouth marketing INTO their product. It’s like a super product!

When we use these products, the result is a marketing message (aka “word of mouth”) that is sent across our social media profiles, a built in ad. What happens next? Well I watched the videos, I don’t know about you…

Another example of this is exactly how social media platforms were built. When something like MySpace came out, you couldn’t use it unless you had a profile. So you get a profile, then you interact with your friends and then you tell someone else about it. The marketing was built right into the product, genius!

 

Incorporation

I agree that every successful company has some sort of well thought out marketing strategy incorporated in their business model. But the best ones don’t compartmentalize all the facets of their business, they let their marketing bleed through the company. It comes out of every inch of what they do.

It starts with a great product or service, if your product or service sucks, your marketing is only going to get you so far. You’ll get a first wave of customers, but no repeats and no referrals.

If you’re like me, you don’t care to have the next Facebook, you just want to have a successful business (if you are an entrepreneur). So it starts when you look at your product, how can you incorporate your marketing into your product?

I talked about my mom earlier this week, and her marketing is built right into her product: she works 14 hour days in a gym with 60+ clients a week. Do you think the other people in the gym don’t notice that??? If you come at 7:00 AM she’s there, if you come at 7:00 PM she’s there, and she always has clients so she’s obviously doing something right.

When I was in the furniture business there was a referral component built right into the sale, asking for referrals before the person even left the building. The motto was “8 out of 10 people we see are return customers or referrals” and that wasn’t too far fetched.

How do you incorporate marketing into your business?

If you don’t, where CAN you incorporate it?

Don’t be compartmentalized, break open the boxes of your business and let your marketing bleed through into everything you do!

— 

Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear your thoughts on marketing.

Have a great day!

—

Want posts sent directly to your email?

Fill out the simple form below and check your email to confirm!

Maintaining and Improving Daily Operations (not as boring as it sounds)

As I’m am becoming responsible for more and more websites I am realizing how much time is needed for maintenance. I am not used to this since my previous life was more about forging ahead and forgetting the problems. They figure themselves out anyways, right?
But now this is my show, and I am seeing the importance of looking around at the current situation and asking myself, “If I don’t address this now, what are the potential long-term effects it can have?”
Today we’ll talk about maintaining and improving daily operations. There are opportunities to grow our business right under our noses if we just stop to take a whiff of what’s going on internally.

WordPress Updates

If you’ve run a website you know what I’m talking about, especially a WordPress site. When creating a website and installing WordPress through the hosting package, I am basically installing a template that I am familiar with so I can build the site faster and easier (for me at least).
But WordPress (which is technically a company called Automattic) operates in a very unique way, I talked about it after I read The Year Without Pants. They make updates to their software on a constant basis. They don’t need to tell people about it, they don’t need to make announcements about it, they just do it.
Once they make the improvements and changes on the back end of their software, we (WordPress users) get a little notification that we need to update the site. We get these notifications anywhere from WordPress as well as all the plugins that we install on the site as well. These update notifications can happen anywhere from once a day to once a week, depending on how many plugins are installed.

With Improvements Comes Measurements

When these changes are made via WordPress on the back end of a website, sometimes nothing happens to the aesthetics and the user will never know. Other times, the entire format of the site gets shifted and something has to be done to correct it.
Since this is technology we’re talking about, nothing ever goes completely according to plan, there are always hiccups. So anytime I update my site, I always do a backup of all software. If something happens and I lose all my information when updating the site, I am covered and I can just re-install the files without starting from scratch.
So anytime I need to update my site it takes time to backup, then do the updates, and then I need to go and check to see what changes have been made on the back end as well as the front end. And in the worst case scenario, major “improvements” create more work for me to correct back to the way I designed them.

Lean Manufacturing

In the world of lean manufacturing, there are constant improvements being made. The beauty of the Kaizen philosophy (which literally means “improvement” or “change for the best”) is continuous improvement. This applies to lean manufacturing processes as well as lean startup principles I talked about yesterday.
If a company believes in Kaizen, they make constant improvements (not just change for change’s sake – very different) to their systems. They see an opportunity for change, they make a quick decision about it to test out the change, if it works they keep it, if it doesn’t they move on. Since they’re constantly testing, they are constantly monitoring and doing maintenance. 
In most companies this is more along the lines of what it looks like: talk about change, and then have meetings about change, and then change the change, then implement half of the intended change, resulting in very little improvement to the process. And then the final step is to complain about the change that didn’t improve anything.
If you are going to maintain your business, make it purposeful! If your company resembles the latter of these, question the process. Why are we making these changes? Why are we doing this maintenance? What are we looking to improve/get out of this process?
If you (or someone in your organization) cannot answer that question, it’s probably a waste of time. I know for the websites I’m operating, when I do maintenance on them, I am keeping the sites running fast and looking for ways to improve the UX (user experience) on the front end of the site.

A Fresh Perspective

What I enjoy about updating my site is the way I am forced to look at it from a different perspective. As I said before, I come from a background of the “forge ahead, we’ll fix it later/never” mentality. This is totally different, and it challenges me.
Once per two weeks-ish I have to stop, take a deep breath, analyze what changes I’ve made and carve out an hour (or more) to look at my work. Do I like the new plugins? Is that page necessary? What can I do about this weird looking side bar? Is my site running too slow?
When I stop to analyze the site, I am analyzing the business so I can make improvements to it. This is an invaluable lesson that many businesses do not implement.
It may sound odd, but I’m glad I’ve had to slow down to do maintenance on my site. Too often we, as business people, get hung up on the daily work that we forget to improve what we have. Or we only look for opportunities externally, like new clients, instead of looking for ways to improve relations with current clients and cut costs internally.

What sort of maintenance do you perform on your business? Is it a routine or do you look to improve your business while maintaining it?

—
Leave me a comment below or chat with me on Twitter about how your business maintains and/or improves its operations, I’d love to hear from you.
Have a great day!

How to Validate Your Business Idea

When starting a business, there are many ways to get going. Some people start off doing something for fun and people offer to pay them for their work. Other’s set out to start a business, as Trav and I did with Epic Day. Many people ask, “Is there a way to guarantee success when starting a business?”

The short answer is NO. But there are ways to hedge your bets so you have a better chance of success. Today we’ll talk about how to validate your business idea before you waste too much time.

Starting Lean with an MVP

Have you ever read a book and thought, ‘this person just put perfect words to that exact thing in my life?’ Well that’s how I felt after I read The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses for the first time.

I learned plenty from the book, but when Eric Ries talked about an MVP (Minimally Viable  Product) I thought to myself how many times I’d just tried things to see if they worked with basic preparation. Instead of talking about things and planning them for weeks, I’d go run an experiment and see what the results were.

An MVP is a product or service that is the most basic version of your vision. It doesn’t include fancy bells & whistles, it performs the basics of your perceived solution to a customer’s perceived problem(s).

The purpose of an MVP is to put something in front of a customer to see if they will pay you for it or not. It is also meant to save you, the entrepreneur, time and money from building products nobody is willing to pay for. After you get their feedback early on, you can improve it instead of guessing at what consumers want for from behind closed doors.

My Version

Travis knows this all too well. For the months that we worked together on Epic Day, I was constantly the one that wanted to push hard and put ideas/products out there before they had been polished clean.

I still utilize this method today. In fact, I used it last week. Two weeks ago I pitched someone on my services to help them rebuild their website. This is something I’ve done before and have helped a number of people with on the side, but have never been paid for.

Since I have done this before I knew most of what he would need, but I wanted to give him more than just the basics. I wasn’t sure what his full intentions were for his website, so I did my best to guess. I sent this prospect what I would want if I were in his shoes.

Turns out I was wrong, he didn’t want everything I sent him. He countered back, as all smart entrepreneurs do, and we negotiated a fair package for both of us. He gets a new site, I’ve got a new client, we both win. AND I don’t have to do a bunch of additional work that I won’t get paid for.

Had I spent weeks working on my own website first, then coming up with specific packages at specific prices, then setting up time-frames, then…. I would have wasted a ton of time. I just pitched what I thought would be a good fit, and then I listened to what the customer said.

Yes, listening is still very important!how to validate your business idea

The next time I pitch someone on my services, I’ll take what I learned from this experience and apply it to the next. I’ll still try to sell some more of my services and show my value, but I’ll put emphasis on different areas that we talked about when renegotiating the contract to better serve the next potential customer. This is known as the ‘Build-Measure-Learn’ feedback loop, something I learned from Mr. Ries.

Validation

So now that I know what someone in this customers shoes are looking for, I can begin to tailor my new website (pickadirectionmarketing.com – not live yet) to offer services and packages that someone like him would be interested in.

It goes against the grain to sell something, then build it. But that’s how validated learning works. This is extremely hard for big companies that are run by policies and guidelines to accomplish. But since I’m one man and I’m just starting on this journey, I can pivot all I want.

Other forms of validation look similar to this:

Let’s say I have a friend that is a software developer. They want to make some custom software for my barstool business. I tell them what I want then they tell me the capabilities and give me a price. After I pay for it, then they start building it for me based off of the afore mentioned capabilities.

If they’re any sort of businessperson they will make improvements to it once I get their MVP and I should be offered a discount for being their guinea pig. But after it’s all said and done, I have a custom piece of software and they now know what people in the barstool business need. They can begin pushing it to other barstool companies.

Have you ever built an MVP? What was is it, and did you learn from it?

—

Chat with me on Twitter or leave a comment below with your thoughts on MVP’s and validating your business ideas.

Have a great day!pickadirection.com

—

Sign up for Posts via Email below

Don’t Build on Rented Land: How to Secure Your Business’s Future

Have you ever wondered why some businesses just shut down and disappear? Maybe they moved, but you’re not sure why. Or maybe they closed down for a while then re-opened somewhere else. Katie & I saw one of her friends that had a story about closing down her Fresh Mexican restaurant this past week.

They always had tons of customers, even on slow nights. Their food was always on point. Their prices weren’t outrageous, important being it was so close to College of Charleston. And their trivia nights were something amazing, a packed house at least once a week! Despite all the positive accolades, they shut their doors last week.

The Explanation

Yo Burrito (the Fresh Mexican joint) closed because their lease was not renewed when their building was sold. They did not own the real estate they built their business on and they were at the mercy of the new landlords that bought the property. They had no intention to renew their lease when they bought the building, who is Yo Burrito to them?

As many good people in the world as there are, there’s still plenty that don’t give a rip about us and our budding/thriving/struggling businesses. The only way we can secure our own long-term success is to build our businesses on land that we own. If we own the land, our success or failure is dependent on us, nobody else.

The Bad Examples

Yo Burrito obviously built their business on rented property, leasing their building from someone. But what if we don’t have brick and mortar businesses? The same rules apply, don’t build on rented land.

Facebook has gone through some major changes recently and a lot of businesses suffered from them because they were building on rented land. That rented land was the Facebook platform. We all have some business that comes to mind right now that used to have a great Facebook presence in our newsfeed. What has happened to them?

The furniture company had the same problem when we originally had someone build our website. Someone else did all the work for us, they have the hosting packages and they ranked us pretty well. To this day the site has only undergone minor changes since it was created because ABG doesn’t own the land that website was built on. If they do anything they’ll have to start from scratch and lose years of traction they’ve built up. Is it worth it?

The Good Examples

I grew up in an entrepreneurial household where my mom & my step-father both owned their own businesses. My mom is a personal trainer and my step-dad installs interior glass and mirrors.

About 10 years ago my step-dad, along with my step-brother, purchased a plot of land so they could build a shop and run their businesses out of. Today, they still own the property and don’t have to worry about a landlord coming to charge them more rent or terminate their lease out of the blue.

My mom is a personal trainer, which is a bit more tricky when it comes to real estate. She doesn’t do house calls and she doesn’t own her own studio. BUT she also doesn’t work for the gym. She is one of the few personal trainers (in the country) that is allowed to work in the gym and just pay a fee to train there.

Her value comes in the one-on-one interactions with clients, it doesn’t matter is she’s in ABC gym or XYZ gym. Her people will come with her if she decides to leave (which has happened before) and the gym knows that, hence the reason she’s given a different set of rules than any joe schmoe that wants to train in that gym.

The Solution

Rented land is anything we don’t own, anything we can’t change, and anything that has the opportunity to kill our business if it’s taken away. Facebook (& all other social media) are all rented land.

You, nor I, have the power to affect what Facebook does. So if they get a wild hair and want to change how they operate, we have to live with it. We can complain and blog about it as much as we want, but just like the landlords to Yo Burrito, they don’t care. 

Free blogs and forums (like Reddit) are all rented land as well. They are great tools to use, and they can really help our businesses. But we need to be ready to pivot and change if/when their rules change and we are no longer the benefactors of their business. We also need to hedge our bets by building our own platforms (email lists, websites, community, etc.) up so our customers won’t evaporate if that rented land goes away.

Look to build your business on land you own whether it’s your own website (that you own & have registered with hosting), your email list, or your physical brick and mortar store. When we own the land, we can make the rules. And when we own the land, we’re the only ones that can say if we have to close our doors. 

Have you built your business on rented land and had the rug pulled from underneath you? How did you recover, I’d love to hear your stories.

—

Chat with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear more about your opinions on rented land and how to secure your business’s future.

Have a great week!

Corporate Communication Concepts: Technology Helps

Email is dying on the vine. I don’t know that it will ever go away, but it is on it’s way out. I’m sure some people said the same thing about fax machines a few years back, but look at how they still linger around. As social media becomes more and more ingrained in our society, our communication is becoming more social as well.

Today I’m going to explore some corporate communication concepts and scenarios that I’ve experienced. As more and other forms of communication arise, we need to know how to incorporate them into our businesses. Remember, speed and agility are good thing in business and technology can help us improve in both of those areas.

An Intranet

Towards the end of 2012, I recognized the need for improved communication within the furniture company and I made a push to set up an intranet. No I didn’t spell that wrong, an intranet is an internal system of communication that is not shared with the outside world. Scot Berkun does a great job in The Year Without Pants outlining how WordPress used blogs for their internal communication systems.

One of the great leaders in the organization, Dennis Reed, and I came up with a google site that housed stock photos, pricing documents, and availability reports that could be accessed anytime. These were normally items I would have to send out to people via email, but that was taking up too much time and it seemed wasteful to me. Instead of one person distributing 1 document to 50+ emails, why not put that single document in the same place every day and update it as soon as it was ready? Hence, the ABG intranet was born.

Now I didn’t expect this to catch on like wild-fire, I knew it would take six months to a year for everyone to fully grasp the concept. But if the company as a whole could embrace technology, we would have had a huge upper hand within the industry. There are multi-million dollar companies that operate off of pen, paper, & a single fax machine in the furniture industry. Imagine if technology was embraced and what that could do for the business???

corporate communication concepts

GetLua

In the beginning of 2013 we met with a company called Lua about using their technology to improve our communication. Lua provides users the ability to call and direct message (their form of email) people in their own private network through a mobile app. The key to their software was accountability, everyone can always see if & when you open your messages, ensuring that everyone is on top of their work at all times.

We had just expanded from one location to three in Charleston and it was my duty to make the three stores cohesive in all ways. One of our biggest challenges in that scenario was logistics. We were dealing with physical products, not something that is email-able. The products need to go from the main warehouse to the ancillary stores, from store to consumers, and occasionally from store-to-store.

We met with Lua to improve our delivery system, and determine if they were a good fit for us. If they were, we would consider using them with the entire company to replace the afore described intranet. In this particular scenario, it could have been a good fit had our system been further developed.

When we met with the guys from Lua, our system was still maturing and we hadn’t seen what sort of snags would actually come up. Ultimately, we weren’t in a position to purchase their technology at that time. Even though it wasn’t a huge investment, it would have raised the cost of the delivery system and we didn’t have a budget set out for it.

The biggest “win” for me was that we were actively looking to replace the ABG intranet, which was soon to run out of capacity and needed an aesthetic facelift in the worst way. It was a step in the right direction, even though we did not use it, we were seeing what was available in the world.

funny communication pic

Google Hangouts

The intranet was simple in the beginning, an MVP if you will, but it did everything we needed and more. I saw this as an eventual place where personal success stories would be shared as well as tactics and forums for discussion/help.

People did not catch on to it like that, and it’s quite possible that I did not do my job as a leader to promote it that way. When I recognized this fact, I came to the conclusion that cohesiveness needed to happen in some other way. Enter the Google Hangout.

I talked about Google Hangouts (think Google’s version of Skype) when I spoke of Epic Day, but this was actually my first interaction with them. I began using Google Hangouts each week to talk about marketing & recruiting tactics. I held them at the same time each week and anyone that could join me that was interested, I was showing up no matter what.

It was around this time that the deterioration of my opinion was sinking in and my departure was just around the corner. I never finished my work improving the corporate communication at the furniture company, but I knew (& still do) that store to store communication is the key to the growth of that business. It can’t come from one source, the lines of communication have to be open across the board if real growth is going to take hold.

Conclusion

If you see an opportunity for improved communication, implement it. Don’t wait, don’t second guess yourself, do it and see the magic unfold. By the time you weigh the pros and cons, you will be left in the dust by your competitors.

I outlined some of the lessons I learned from Epic Day earlier this year and one was our need for more communication despite g-chats, hangouts, emails, and monthly get-togethers. If we had better communication, Trav and I both agreed we could have ended up somewhere completely different than we did. I can only watch from a distance with the furniture company, but I sure hope they embrace technology to improve their corporate communication.

Where is your opportunity?

What sort of technology does you company use to communicate?

 

How can you leverage technology to improve communication within your organization? 

—

Chat with me on Twitter or leave me a comment below, I’d love to hear where your company can improve their corporate communication concepts!

Have a great weekend!