Bill Sherman (who should have started blogging long back) has finally started blogging at Aha-Moments. But he didn’t stop there. He now has a neat video on making smarter connections.
The theme resonates well with me and thought you all will enjoy it. On a related topic, you can also download a free copy of my eBook “Lasting Relationships” (PDF, 20 pages)
Imagine you are running a restaurant. Won’t it be nice to have your customers take a copy of your menu with them. It’s like a walking advertisement.
What would make someone pick up a menu and take it home?
Here is one answer:
Create compelling content targeted at your regular customers. Pack so much information in them that they want to take it home and read it. Make it so compelling that they will share it with their friends.
That’s what you see at Bucks Woodside. The menu is almost like a nicely created newsletter with relevant information to target audience (technology professionals, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists etc.)
You feel compelled to pick up that newsletter (sorry menu) and spread the message.
Now the real question:
What can you do in your business that will make it a “no-brainer” for your customers to spread your message.
The question I asked thought leaders and my very smart friends is:
What is ONE question that you wish someone had asked you when you were young? And, Why?
I will be posting answers (which will be Quoughts) one by one.This one is from Brian Solis
Brian Solis is Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR agency in Silicon Valley. Solis blogs at PR2.0, bub.blicio.us, WebProNews, and regularly contributes PR and tech insight to industry publications. Solis is co-founder of the Social Media Club, is an original member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup, and also is a contributor to the Social Media Collective and ConversationalMedia.org.
Brian’s Quought
If someone asked you if you knew that the love of your life would eventually leave you because you placed greater emphasis on your career, what would you do differently?
I finished reading Howard Mann’s neat little book called “Your Business Brickyard“. Simply put, Howard’s book urges us to look at the basics of our business and succeed. I asked a few questions to Howard about his book and here is the interview.
First, about the Author: Howard Mann
Howard Mann is the president of TBB Partners Inc., a leading strategy, design and communications consultancy based in New York, and a founder of Sideshow Digital, an award-winning interactive agency.
Prior to founding TBB Partners in 2001, Mann was the President of a premier customs broker and international freight forwarder with six U.S. offices and a network of over 35 agents worldwide.
Mann works with a select group of entrepreneurs, business owners and executive teams. His highly focused workshops, dubbed “a day in the brickyard,” help executive teams take the first step in unlocking the true potential of their organizations. Then TBB’s aggressive execution using their design, innovation and communication skills make sure those findings turn into actions that impact the bottom line.
Now, the interview:
RS: Why the title “Your Business Brickyard”
HM: The concept comes from a football practice drill I read about when my College’s team, 20 + years ago, lost a game they should have won because they got caught up in all kinds of fancy moves and forgot that you have to catch the ball first. The coach made them toss a brick back and forth to each other so they focused on the very basics of catching. He called the drill “The Brickyard.”
The story came back to me when I found myself running a business in the late 90’s that needed a lot of help. Basically, business was very, very bad. I thought the best plan of attack was to invest in technology to match my competitors, try to gran on to the latest marketing fad,etc… Then I remembered that image of catching a brick and started focusing on the basics first. It gave me the sense of control over the business that I needed, got me to focus on our clients instead of our competitors and helped me appreciate what was great about our company vs what was wrong with it.
Business owners focus a lot of their time trying to find that elusive “secret sauce” or trying to play catch up/”me too” with their competition. Over time it pushes away the reasons you got into business in the first play and what you should be celebrating about your business is lost. When that happens, it is time to get back to your Business Brickyard.
RS: Do you find that businesses are really missing the basics?
HM: Maybe not missing them, but they get lost along the way. In the early days of any business you had control over everything so you could make sure it was all handled well. For so many people running a business then becomes that circus act where the performer is spinning a row of plates on thin sticks. They have to keep moving from plate to plate giving each one a little spin to keep them all spinning. The problem is that it never ends and little progress is made. You wind up spending all your time just keeping the plates going.
Every business person knows the feeling but too many have resigned themselves that it is just the nature of the beast. What I learned, from mistakes and successes, is that the best way to break the cycle is to get back to the very basics of what you do and figure out how you can do them perfectly.
Just read a few blogs for a week or so and you will find an array of rants about companies that frustrate their customers and the market by doing the basics poorly. The Airlines are always a good target. Cell phone carriers are also a good example. The cell phone companies are working on phones that will make you breakfast but calls get cut off when you are sitting at your desk not moving. The basic purpose of a cell phone is to make a call reliably. If you don’t get that right first you miss out on delivering that fundamental promise. We are all so used to getting poor service that we try to focus on something else. But if you had a cell phone that never got disconnected that would be huge. If you could call a customer service line and not wait on hold that would be huge. You would love those companies for getting those basics right. I think that idea has been lost under the sirens of innovation, outsourcing and the like.
RS: And what about purpose? You seem to put a lot of importance on that.
HM: For me, Purpose is the first basic you need to focus on as it the first thing that gets lost as businesses grow and become more complex. Everyone is focused on marketing and taglines. But a purpose is different. It is a simple, and human, statement that talks about why you do what you do and states what the business stands for.
Southwest Airlines has a purpose that could be simply stated as “We take people from point A to point B at the lowest cost possible.” Simple enough and yet nobody has been able to copy it. They can’t because their purpose is connected to their culture and that is unique to the collection of people that are Southwest. Same planes, same airports but a totally different experience.
So the other important part about finding your purpose is that it honors the people working in the business as much as it does the aspirations of the business. When you find your purpose it will be something that people will want to work for. It will give them a sense of purpose. People think about purpose and think it is too “touchy feely” and all they want to focus on is a marketing message that will be a magic bullet. Done right, a purpose will be far more powerful than any tagline you can come up with and it will endure.
Taglines are a block to going deeper to find a meaningful purpose. Someone once told me that taglines are like candy and I totally agree. They are fun to come up with and there are plenty of them. The problem with most marketing message and taglines is that they are trying to portray something that the business thinks people want vs expressing something that the business already is. How many taglines do you hear where you know the employees of the company use it as a punchline? How many do you hear where you just laugh? I see the AT&T tagline “Your world delivered” and I have no idea what AT&T is selling. That could be a tagline for UPS or FedEx as much as it is for AT&T. What does AT&T stand for as a company? What are they about that I can believe in? They spend tens of millions a year on marketing and advertising and I have no idea why I should love them as a Company. If I knew what purpose AT&T was trying to serve other than beating Verizon and hitting their quarterly numbers I may care about them. Think of the companies that you love and I’ll bet you have a good sense of what they stand for and what their personality is. That comes from having a real sense of purpose.
RS: There is a theme about business needing to be fun to run that carries through the book. Why the focus on fun?
HM: Well, I guess you could say that is MY purpose. Running my old business took every bit of life out of me. Wanting it to be more, spinning those plates and trying to match competitors nearly killed the business and did not do good things to me. But business is supposed to be fun and I forgot that (or nobody ever tells you that).
When I say fun I am not talking about everyone playing Foosball and kicking balloons around the office. The actual day of doing business should be fun! I forgot that and only realized it after the fact. Had I made it fun the result would not have been worse but it probably would have been better.
Owning a business and working alongside people to do some good is an amazing thing. You have to be excited about it and that has been lost. When you get back to the basics, are working with a sense of purpose (With people that share that purpose), forget about your competitors and focus on building relationships instead of booking orders then business becomes fun. While I was going through that whirlwind of turning around my business I also learned 20 years of business lessons in 3. I felt it would be worthwhile to find a way to help business owners never have to go through what I went through. That is what drives me because our work completely re-imagines a business to what the business owner dreams it should (And not what we think it should be). The basics are where we start and then we add on the sexy bits of innovation, design and smart marketing to bring it to life. That’s fun.
RS: As you are out speaking to business people, what concerns them the most?
HM: In my talks, I spend some time talking about the importance of paying fast and getting paid faster. I was surprised how much of an impact that concept has. I get more questions around that topic than any other and, from stories people tell me after the talks, getting paid is a major source of worry and stress.
There is no simple solution but the first things I tell people is that they are not a bank (unless of course they are). If they are not a bank then they need to figure out why people are treating them like one. When you get paid faster then you are paying people you can use your capital to take action during tough times, not become trapped by a bank lending you money and spend a lot less energy chasing people for money. My Father used to tell me that there is actually ony 1 dollar in the world and we are all just passing it to each other so we have to wait our turn. It feels like that sometimes. Most transactions boil down to a client/customer paying you for something. Their part of the deal is to pay. Of course, you have to deliver on your promise as well. Ironically it comes back to the basics. Digging deeper with clients I often find that people focus very little on getting paid. They are often slow at sending invoices out and do very little to collect them until they are 30+ days old. Changing those base operational procedures makes a big difference. Now, the other side of that is you should pay people as quickly as possible. If not, you are passing that stress on to people you buy from and you make yourself less valuable. The other side of that is if you don’t think it is important to pay quickly then why should people pay you quickly. You get what you give etc. The balance is to get paid a little faster than you get paid.
RS: Any specific results from clients that have reconnected to their Business Brickyard?
HM: The most recent example was a client that had been focusing a lot of resources on beefing up their technology solutions. They felt they needed to do so to keep pace with their much larger competitors. So the challenge was to figure out what their basics should be. We put together a dinner with their top clients and asks them why they used their services. Why, out of all the choices they could have made, did they choose our client and why do they stay with them. Not a single one said technology. Talk about an eye opener! What they talked about was personal service, never getting stuck in voice mail and everything that my client was great at but either took for granted or were not focusing on it. That feedback allowed them to redirect their energies on ways to enhance their level of personal service and, in the process, they found their purpose and separated themselves from their competitors. Seems simple but it takes getting that outside perspective to see a new approach. On a bottom line level they grew sales 30-50% in the following year.
RS: Lastly, why did you decide to give away the book for free?
HM: The point of the book was to make it a short, concise keepsake that would allow you to remember the concepts after you finish the book. The point is to spread the ideas in the book not to make money from it. It is my hope that the basic concepts in the book helps a business owner reconnect to their purpose and fall in love with their business again. The best way to do that is let people who want to read it on their computers get it that way and share it with anyone they want to. Some people will still want the hard copy keepsake and that is great too.
I was in a meeting with a client that had read my book a month ago and the conversation started getting focused on their competitors and the owner stopped everyone and said “We should not be talking about what our competitors are doing.” That made the process of writing the book totally worth it.
The question I asked thought leaders and my very smart friends is:
What is ONE question that you wish someone had asked you when you were young? And, Why?
I will be posting answers (which will be Quoughts) one by one.This one is from Michael Weissman
Michael Weissman, is founder and president of Fresh Perspectives, the leading value reinforcement marketing company. He is also co-author of The Paradox of Excellence, How Great Performance Can Kill Your Business which reached as high as 24th on Amazon’s business book list and is being translated into 7 languages. As a business leader, Michael has created nearly $700 million in new revenue growth, launched over 30 successful products and has helped his companies win awards for product excellence, brands, promotions and web design. An international keynote speaker and sought-after consultant to high tech giants such as Apple, Adobe, HP and others, Michael has trained thousands to build stronger brands, create products customers love and still deliver the numbers Wall Street demands.
The question I asked thought leaders and my very smart friends is:
What is ONE question that you wish someone had asked you when you were young? And, Why?
I will be posting answers (which will be Quoughts) one by one.This one is from Stuart Scott
Stuart Malcolm Scott, CEO and Chief Conversation Starter at Guinnen MacRath, is an architect of business transformation. He teaches, writes, and coaches on the subject of creating powerful conversations to shape change in organizations. During the last twenty years, he has worked with companies on five continents to redesign their business processes, leadership models, and organizational communication patterns.
Scott graduated from Northwestern University in 1977 with a degree in music. He promptly fell through a rabbit hole and found himself in the software business, where he spent years learning everything the hard way. When he realized that doing things the hard way is standard operating procedure in many businesses, he became a student – and later a skilled practitioner – of business process improvement.
He credits much of his effectiveness as a business transformation leader to Virginia Satir, a 20th century pioneer in the field of family therapy. Satir’s models of human interaction give change leaders powerful tools for bringing out the best in people and the organizations they work in. In 2006 Stuart was elected to the board of directors of Avanta, The Virginia Satir Network.
Stuart’s Quought
What do you stand for?
Stuart’s reason for that Quought
A stand is like a platform we create so that others can stand with us. We all stand for something, in the eyes of others. What they think we stand for is what they see when they see us coming. If we are not clear what we stand for, then others won’t be clear either. So they will make up their own stories of who we are.
I stand for the power of conversation to shape our lives. I stand for creating powerful conversations that connect people to each other.
I didn’t know what I stood for when I was younger. Looking back, I can see that at various times I stood for looking good at any cost; for being right at any cost; for making sure others knew how smart I was. Of course, I never admitted to myself or others that this was what was most important to me. I know now, though, that people saw my stands anyway.
I didn’t know what I stood for, what was most important to me. It was if I hoped that someday something would show up that would be worth dedicating myself to. It was as if I was standing on a corner, waiting for a worthy stand to show up and catch my eye.
Except there’s no department store where we can shop for what we stand for. The only way to acquire a stand is to create one, to declare it. I stand for what I say we stand for.
Lots of people no what they stand against. I find more power in creating a stand for something.
A stand is powerful when it attracts others to share it. When we stand for ourselves, we don’t move others to stand with us, and we stand alone. When we stand for others, they stand with us, and we create the power of many working as one.
Dee Hock (founder and former CEO of Visa International) says it best
“The problem is never how to get new innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it”
The question I asked thought leaders and my very smart friends is:
What is ONE question that you wish someone had asked you when you were young? And, Why?
I will be posting answers (which will be Quoughts) one by one.This one is from Erika Andersen
Since 1980, Erika Andersen has developed a reputation for creating learning and change processes and programs uniquely tailored to her clients’ challenges, goals, and culture. She and her colleagues at Proteus International offer practical methods and skills for individuals, teams, and companies to clarify and then achieve their hoped-for-future.
Much of her recent work has focused on organizational visioning and strategy, executive coaching, and management and leadership development. In these capacities she has served as consultant and advisor to the CEOs and top executives of a number of corporations, including MTV Networks, Hewitt Associates, Turner Broadcasting, Molson Coors Brewing, NBC Universal, Union Square Hospitality Group, and Comcast Corporation.
Erika’s Quought:
The question I wish someone had asked me, and one that I ask other people very often, is “So, relative to this challenge you’re facing – what’s your hoped-for future?”
Erika’s reason for the choice of this Quought:
I find (and would have found) this question so valuable because it redirects your attention to envisioning the reality you want to create yourself. Once you’re clear on where you really want to be, you’re much more likely to be able to focus on those core directional efforts that will best move you toward that desired outcome!
Since you only get to live once, it may be worth watching who you are following…
The Follower
John believed in his leader and followed him everywhere. John was not alone. There were other followers too. It was a long and exciting journey. Unfortunately the destination was not pretty. The leader was shocked but moved on. The price John had to pay for that journey – his career!
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Note:
1. A mini saga is a story told in exactly 50 words. Not 49 or 51 but exactly 50.
Howard Mann is the president of TBB Partners Inc., a leading strategy, design and communications consultancy based in New York, and a founder of 
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