Archive for the ‘Business Philosophy’ Category

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Three Reasons to Say No a Smaller Project

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Dear Service Professional,

As we (hopefully) move away from the Great Recession you may be seeing inquiries, albeit tentative. They’re interested in your landscaping/consulting/tutoring services, but they don’t want to spend that much so they ask you if you can scale back your proposal.

Don’t do it.

I speak from previous experience. Actually, my previous experience has previous experience. In fact, I’m writing this blog post to remind my future self not to sell half a web design, half an internet marketing campaign, or half of a social media consult to anyone who asks.

It’s not that I’m a jerk. Let me rephrase that. It’s not because I’m a jerk. It’s because of this:

If you run your own business and you know what you’re doing then you have put in a lot of time and effort into creating an offering that works. Giving someone half of that project does neither of you any good. It’s not like a pizza that can be evenly split; it’s more like a half-cooked pizza that no one wants to eat.

Here’s why you want to say no:

  1. Your customer will be frustrated because “they spent all this money and they didn’t get what they expected.”
  2. You will be frustrated because you ended up putting in a lot more work than you agreed to. (It inevitably turns out that you can’t complete even a half-assed project in half the time, because you can’t halve the amount of time it takes to do proper project management, administrative tasks or billing. Nor can you halve the time it takes to deal with an upset customer; see point number one.)
  3. And perhaps most importantly: You can’t give only half the years of experience and knowledge you’re bringing to the project. (Can I get an “amen?”)

Chances are, you’ll get some push back if you tell them you can’t scale back your project. I often ask what would it be like if they offered their customers half a job? If that doesn’t work I ask them if they ever would drive just half a car? Wear half a pair of pants? Or get half an appendectomy?

If I get a smile, or at least a acknowledging grunt, I explain that I’m not looking for disappointed customers. I’ve been down this road before, and for us to do a job we’re proud of and the customer is happy with, it’s going to require our full effort.

It’s never easy to say no to a job, especially in these economic times. But if you stick to your guns you’ll get 1/3 to 1/2 of those jobs, and when you do a kick-ass job, they’ll tell their friends and associates the whole story, making it even easier to convince those people that they want you to put your full effort into that job.

Rich Brooks
Fully Engaged

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | 4 Comments »

Owning the Sales Process

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

I just had a great interaction at one of my favorite lunch places–Market Street Eats–with proprietor Colin Rankin. (So great, in fact, that I’m putting off paying work with a big deadline because I feel inspired to blog right now.) I always have a great talk with Colin, and it’s often about the pleasures and perils of running your own business. In fact, I got two, maybe three blog  posts (the others to follow) out of that one interaction.

I went in to ask him if I could put up a poster for Social Media FTW, a social media conference we’re putting on in Maine on 9/22. While we were putting it up a pretty blond woman walked in. (The fact that she’s pretty and blond have nothing to do with this, but I did notice it and I’m trying to paint you a picture here.) You could sense that this was her first time here, and being somewhere between lunch and dinner, it was pretty quiet. In other words, there was no line or other indications of how the ordering process might work.

She walked up to the counter and one of the new wait staff greeted her warmly and asked if she wanted to see a menu. Colin seemed unimpressed. I wondered why, after all, it was a friendly greeting. “I told those guys to go around the counter, show new customers the big board (where the wrap descriptions are), make some recommendations, hand her a take out menu, and ask questions. They think it’s crazy to spend that much time for a $7 wrap.”

“Ah,” I replied, “but it’s not a $7 wrap. It’s $7, once a week, 52 times a year for 10 years. Plus, she might tell her friends, too.”

“Yes, but you look at it that way because you own your own company,” Colin replied.

Colin went on to tell me about one of his first jobs, selling men’s suits. “‘Never let the customer get ahead of you in a sale,’ my boss would tell me. ‘The customer doesn’t know as much as you do, he doesn’t work here. Once he gets ahead of you in the sales process everything falls apart.‘”

We talked more about how at flyte we try not to just email clients their wireframes or designs, but rather walk them through what they’re looking at, explaining the flow, why we made the choices we did, and how this helps them with their goals. If we just post the wireframes then we’re letting the customer get ahead of us; we’re not owning the sales process. (Some people might argue that this isn’t part of the sales process, but I feel you’re always selling, whether in business or in personal interactions.)

If you run your own business, or if your on the sales team (and we’re all on the sales team, BTW), you’re sure to run into a wide variety of customers. Some will know exactly what they want, some will only think they know what they want, and some will have no idea at all and look to you to help them out. The first group is rare; it’s more likely your customer thinks they’re in the first group but are actually in the second group.

If you sense that they are in the first group you can feel free to just take their order and be done. If they’re in one of the other groups, however, you’re going to need to put the focus not on your solution, but on their problems. Their problem could be anything from needing a web site that will generate leads to navigating a wide variety of sandwich choices in a new restaurant. Once you know their problems, and their goals, then you can help them find the solution that will work for them.

I don’t feel Colin was really upset with his staff, but he feels that whatever you learn selling wraps you can take with you anywhere, and I agree.

BTW, Market Street Eats rocks, the wait staff is spectacular, and if you’re anywhere near Portland, Maine, you should stop in there for a wrap. I recommend the Red Rooster, and when they ask if you’d like pickles, just say “yes.”

Rich Brooks
I Am What I Eat

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | 1 Comment »

Email Communications: Sending Difficult Emails

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Yesterday’s blog post on The Power of Positive Language got a few official and unofficial retweets, and generated some comments on Twitter. It reminded me of a couple of especially difficult emails that I’ve had to send over the years. Sometimes it’s difficult to decide if a phone call or an email is the best way to hash out a disagreement. An email seems distant–maybe even cowardly–but at the same time it allows you to get all of your points across.

Of course, that begs the question: do you want to get all your points across? Doesn’t Steven Covey teach us to Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood? If you send out an email detailing how right you are and how wrong the other person is, you’ve pretty much locked in the adversarial positions for the both of you. At that point there’s no chance of a win-win outcome.

Still, if you’ve got no other options than to send out a difficult email (and you know what I’m talking about), take these steps before hitting send:

  • Take a deep breath. If it’s really difficult, take ten, or a walk around the block, or a good night’s sleep.
  • Start with a greeting, no matter how difficult the conversation’s going to be. “Howdy!” or “Hope this finds you well” or whatever sounds natural to you isn’t going to undermine the purpose of your message.
  • Rework any negative sentences so they say the same thing in a positive way. It may be that this relationship is still salvageable.
  • If you have multiple points on why you’re right and they’re wrong, delete and paste them into another document. I say this for two reasons: first, no one likes to be beaten over the head with the fact they’re in the wrong. It paints them into a corner and all they can do is come out swinging. Give them an opportunity to save face. Secondly, it may turn out that you’re not entirely right, either. In other words, don’t play all of your cards on the first pass. If you list all ten reasons why you’re in the right, and they come back with just one or two reasons why they’re right, they’ve pretty much trumped your ten reasons with their two.

Hopefully these emails will be few and far between, and you’ll be able to nip any problems in the bud, avoiding difficult emails and conversations. (Don’t difficult conversations get more difficult the longer they fester?)

Rich Brooks
You Know I’m Right

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The Power of Positive Language

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

FloatingAbout eight plus years ago I got a piece of unsolicited child-rearing advice: always use positive language when talking to children. Don’t say, “stop jumping on the couch!” Instead, say “couches are for sitting.” Now, I’d like to say that I’ve taken that to heart, but when you see footprints all over the couches and cushions and throw pills all over the floor it’s hard not to yell. (Sorry, kids!)

But forget parenting: it’s actually in business where we all need to put positive language to work. I find myself rewriting emails all the time–especially difficult emails–to improve the overall vibe of the message I’m trying to convey.

  • “We can’t move forward without a work agreement” becomes “We can start as soon as we receive your work agreement!”
  • “That’s impossible without scrapping everything we’ve done so far” becomes “That can be done, but we’ll need to take a few steps back and re-scope the project and timeline…will that work for you?”
  • “Once you approve the storyboards it becomes a lot more expensive to make changes to the programming” becomes “Let’s make sure you’re OK with the storyboards now, because it’s a lot easier (read: cheaper) to make changes to storyboards than complex database programming.”
  • “We can’t launch your web site without final payment” becomes “Once we receive the final payment we can launch your site, blog about it, and start making you money!”

To some people this may not seem like a big deal, but in my experience (and sadly, I’m getting more experience every day) it changes the entire tenor of a conversation.

Rich Brooks
Mr. Sunshine! :-D

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Copywriting | 4 Comments »

How to Price Your Services: Are You Charging Enough?

Monday, July 19th, 2010

When I was in college I ran a typing service. This was back when most people wrote rough drafts in longhand and typed the final drafts onto a computer…which usually required a walk down to the computer lab on campus.

I charged $1.50 a page which was pretty much beer money. I was an English major and most of the papers I typed were for business majors. The writing was atrocious: run on sentences, poor grammar, spelling errors, the works.

As I typed up the papers I would invariably fix some of the mistakes I saw…at least the most egregious ones. I know a number of business majors got better grades by hiring me to type their papers.

This was my mistake: in underestimating the value of my “value-added” work. If I could travel back in time I’d still offer $1.50 per page…as is. If you wanted your punctuation and grammar fixed that would be $2 a page. For $3 a page I’d tighten up your language, improve your grade, and you’d get into a better business school. (I’m not sure if that broke the college honor pledge, but until I get a working time machine I’ll table that concern. In fact, if I did get a working time machine, I’m not sure doubling my typing fees would be the most effective way for me to pay off the lease on my time machine.)

In any case, admission to a better business school is well worth the extra $1.50/page.

We often undervalue what we have to offer, or don’t include a value-add option. Instead, we commodicize our offerings. There were plenty of other competing typing services from other Skidmore students, and I was charging just about the same fee. Although fixing grammar mistakes seemed effortless to me, it was obviously difficult for many of my customers, and had value for them.

What added value can you include in your services, and what value does it hold for your customers?

Rich Brooks
60 Words a Minute Man

Photo credit: Orange Acid

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | No Comments »

8 Tips for Working Successfully with Your Wife or Husband: Marriage and the Workplace

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

When people find out that my wife Cybele works with me they often wonder how we do it. To be honest, before Cybele came to work at flyte, I wondered if we could do it.

First off, we’re not “that couple” that can spend all of our time together. We’re very respectful of each other’s personal time and life outside our marriage. Tuesday nights are “girls night out” and Thursdays belong to the guys. Even on vacations we have “down time” where we read or spend time by ourselves, and I’ve been known to say, “can we talk about this later? I’m in the middle of a big boss battle and the zombies are swarming.”

So when Cybele was feeling burnt out at her previous job and I was looking for someone to step in and help out with the accounting and project management, we started talking about whether Cybele could work with–and for–me. We decided to take the plunge, but first set up some ground rules and other rules we developed over time.

I’m not promising that this will work for you and your husband or wife, but it’s been a few years and I speak for both of us when I say our marriage is better than ever. This is in part because by working at flyte Cybele can work less hours than her previous job required, which means she now does almost all the family shopping, does drop off and pick up for school and camp 80% of the time, and pretty much runs the household. This relieves a lot of the stress we had before when we were both jockeying for 50 – 60 hours of work a week while laundry, chores and stress built up at home.

  1. Know who’s the boss. Here’s our rule: I’m the boss at work, Cybele’s the boss at home. That doesn’t mean we don’t respect each other’s opinions, and that we can’t be swayed in our decisions. It just means that if there is a disagreement (and we’re both pretty pig-headed strong-willed personalities) that I get the final decision at work, and Cybele gets it at home.
  2. Hire with good reason. I wasn’t hiring Cybele just because she’s hot. When it comes to business acumen and education, she can run circles around me. She has an MBA and worked for years in a bank. The closest I ever came to a business class in college was typing other people’s Business 101 papers for beer money.
  3. Have compatible strengths. Cybele is detail oriented. I’m a big picture person. (This is what lazy people with no follow through always say about themselves, by the way.) She knows how to be tough when the situation calls for it, while I worry too much whether people will like me. (Paging Michael Scott.) However, I’m usually better at seeing the other person’s side in a conflict and finding a compromise that works. When we work together we usually find the right balance in dealing with clients, employees and vendors.
  4. Don’t bring work home with you…or do. I often hear from couples who work together that they never bring work home with them or never talk about work over the dinner table, or after 7pm, or during sex. If those lines-in-the-sand work for you, that’s great. Personally, Cybele and I love talking about work, clients and marketing strategies whether in the office, or at home, or on vacation. The only rule we have is if one person doesn’t want to talk about work right then, the other person backs off. Having rules about when to leave the office behind is important, but make rules that work with your lifestyle, not someone else’s.
  5. Prep your co-workers. Before Cybele started I knew there might be some weirdness with my co-workers at flyte. I know that I’d be a little bit on edge if suddenly the boss’s spouse came to work. Would he/she be expected to work as hard? Could we come to the boss if we had trouble with the spouse? Would my promotion be blocked by the hiring of the spouse? I talked a little with my co-workers about what Cybele’s role would be and what it wouldn’t be. I probably could have done a little better job on this looking back on it, but it seemed to all work out. (As far as I know. As the boss, you’re always concerned that people don’t tell you everything, but hopefully I reduced some anxiety that my co-workers may have felt.)
  6. Don’t fight in public. Early on when Cybele was at flyte I asked her to give me a off-the-cuff estimate on some work. She wanted to go back to her office and spend some time on it, but I pushed her to give me a quickie estimate. After a little more back-and-forth she started yelling at me. I asked her to close the door and I told her, “there’s no yelling at flyte. I know at your last job it was expected that you would have to yell to get someone to change their mind, but that’s not the vibe here. Plus, if people see us fighting in the office, it will destroy morale because everyone will think the company’s falling apart.” I also apologized for putting her in such an uncomfortable position and gave her the opportunity to go work on the estimate back in her office. As far as I can remember, that was the only time anyone raised their voice at another co-worker in our office.
  7. Put some space between you. This may be a rule that doesn’t apply for your business, but at flyte Cybele and I are about as far away from each other as possible without hanging one of our desks out the window. In fact, there are many days that we don’t see each other much more than before she worked at flyte. That definitely helps us from getting on each other’s nerves too much.
  8. Be willing to fire your spouse. Before we started working together we made a rule: if this didn’t work out I’d help Cybele get a job somewhere else. I knew how smart, capable and talented she was, but we were both nervous about how we would work together, and how it would be spending all day together in the office then all night together at home. We decided up front that our marriage and our family were more important than the company. If we saw that working together was destroying our home life, she’d quit or I’d fire her. Period.

I can’t promise that by following these rules your working and living relationship with your spouse with be all milk & honey, but they worked for us. If you have any tips on working with (or for) your spouse, we’d love to hear them. You may also want to check out To Love, Honor and Report To, by Meg Cadoux Hershberg in Inc. magazine about what it’s like to work for your spouse with a slightly different ending.

Rich Brooks
aka Mr. Cybele Brooks

Photo Credit: Jeff Belmonte

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | 4 Comments »

Photographic Evidence That Focus Groups Don’t Work

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

If you haven’t seen them yet, here’s what 18 months, 40 focus groups and God only knows how many millions of Euros will get you in terms of Olympic Mascots:

The Eyes Have It

I can’t tell which one is Wenlock and which one is Mandeville…is Wenlock the one with the angry eye or the one that appears to have bladder control problems?

Forget focus groups, forget design by committee. It’s time to trust your gut and come up with something remarkable, not remarkably lame or remarkably safe.

Rich Brooks
My Gut is My Co-Pilot

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Posted in Business Philosophy | 1 Comment »

Avoiding Customer Frustration: Clear Communications

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Last week I was traveling on business and stayed at a hotel in Montpelier, VT. I got my key card and headed up to my room with my bags.

I slid the key card into the lock and pulled it out. No dice, the door stayed locked. I tried again. Nothing. I used the other key card. Still nothing. So, I lugged my luggage (hey, is that where that word comes from?) back down the small elevator. The desk attendant told me there had been problems with some of the keys and apologized, then made me some fresh cards.

He also told me that if I had any further problems there was a call button by the elevator so I wouldn’t have to come back down again. I grabbed my stuff and went back up to my room and used the new key. Nothing. Ditto for the second key. I tried both keys several more times, making sure that it wasn’t me.

I trudged back to the elevator and pressed the call button. The desk attendant answered, and I told him I still couldn’t get in. He told me someone would be up…shortly, and hung up.

Shortly. What did that mean? Was he hopping over the desk, skeleton key in hand to help me out? Or did 20 people just come in and demand his attention and he would get to me when he could?

I sat there, in the overly-warm hotel hallway, watching as the daylight–and my opportunity for a bike ride–slip away. The doors finally opened, but it was only another guest. After over 5 minutes (this was a hotel of probably under 100 rooms on a quiet Monday evening) I finally buzzed again.

“Front desk.”

“Yes, was someone coming up to help me get into my room?”

“Yes, we’ll be up there shortly.”

Shortly! The bane of my existence.

“OK, because I’m still waiting here.”

“We’ll be up shortly.”

The front desk attendant arrived a couple minutes later. We walked down the hall together and he asked for one of my cards. He put it in and…nothing. Then he put it in again and sloooooowly pulled it out, with a slight pressure upwards as he removed it.

Click. The door unlocked. Then he gave me this look that said, “you couldn’t figure that out on your own?” Then he said out loud, “you need to pull it out slowly and lift up as you do.” Thanks, that would have been really helpful information when you first handed me my key card.

Lesson Learned: Don’t let your customers wonder. Because of poor communication, I wasn’t really sure what I should do. Should I just wait there? If so, for how long? Should I go down and see them at the front desk, or did that make me seem too aggressive? The longer I waited in that hallway, the more irritated I became because I wasn’t sure what my role was.

Not knowing what’s expected of you as the customer is an incredibly frustrating experience, especially if you don’t know if the next move is yours or the vendor’s. The more uncertainty there is, the more dissatisfaction the customer feels.

Take a look at your own process; is there a point (or two) in which there’s often customer confusion? If so, what can you do to fix that? Is there a place where communication goes down a black hole, like the call button near the elevator?

Bonus Lesson: Don’t make your customer feel stupid. I don’t travel a lot, but I have enough experience to work a key card. If your key card needs a ninja move and a flick of the wrist to work, you should a) fix the locks, or b) give people a heads up that sometimes the locks are finicky.

Rich Brooks
Travelin’ Man

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | 4 Comments »

Three Questions That Will Determine Your Future

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I was listening to Daniel Pink’s book The Whole New Mind as I drove out of Maine towards Vermont for the first leg of the “Social Media Traveling Road Show” I’m part of through Sustainable Forest Futures. (The name is unofficial and used only by me.)

I had gotten a copy of attendees’ company bios; wood-industry companies that ranged from sustainable harvest organizations to wood turners to  furniture makers. Many if not most of them faced the same challenges: competition from abroad, competition from composites and adapting to new technology were often mentioned.

Compared to the other speakers on my panel and throughout the day, I wasn’t very experienced in the wood industry. However, I’m in an industry that has severe competition from abroad (what has cheaper shipping costs than a web site?) as well as plenty of free software packages, allowing small businesses to get a web site up and running without any help from a trained professional, like the kind I’ve hired over the years.

In the immortal words of William Jefferson Clinton: I feel your pain.

Pink’s book talks a lot about how the future may belong to right-brained people, and echoes the sentiment of what a lot of popular business books are saying these days…at least the ones I’m reading. In fact, this quote got me to rewind, record it onto my iPhone, and then transcribe it to my blog as soon as I got a chance:

Your future will depend on your answers to three questions. In this new era, each of us must look carefully at what we do and ask ourselves:

  1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
  2. Can a computer do it faster?
  3. Am I offering something that offers the non-material, transcendent desires of an abundant age?

These three questions will mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who gets left behind. Individuals and organizations that focus their efforts on doing what oversea knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, computers can’t do faster, as well as on meeting the aesthetic, emotional and spiritual demands of a prosperous time, will thrive. Those who ignore these three questions will struggle.

It’s no secret that the last year or so has been difficult for a lot of people and a lot of industries. Some things will get better: housing, the economy. Some things won’t: competition from abroad, faster computers that will commodicize more of our workload.

You need to take a look at what you’re doing, and what your company is producing. If it’s too easy to outsource that work or give it to a computer, you’re going to need to change your game plan.

Ask yourself: what can you offer that an overseas competitor or a faster computer can’t?

Rich Brooks
Thinking Small Business

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | 5 Comments »

Can You Work With Clients Who Compete With Each Other?

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

If you provide products or services, do you ever feel compelled to turn down work because a new prospect is in competition with a current client? Does the physical distance between the two companies matter? Does it matter what you’re offering them? Does it matter if they may offer similar products and services but to different groups?

These questions had been bubbling to the top here at flyte for quite some time, and just recently a couple of situations made us take stock of how we handle these situations. I talked to our current clients in these situations and asked them how they felt. Neither was thrilled with the idea that I would be working with their competitors, but neither wanted to stymie my ability to do work and thrive in this economy.

Previously, I had one client who didn’t want us to work with anyone else in their industry in Maine (which is tough), and on the other side of the spectrum, I have clients who want us to have experience in their industry, even if it means we’re helping their competition.

As I often do, I threw the question to my contacts and others on LinkedIn: How do you handle working with clients who compete against each other?

I got some amazing answers from a wide variety of people. Here are some of my favorite quotes, but I do recommend that if you’ve been struggling with this, that you check out the entire thread:

There is no inherent conflict in providing SEO consulting for competitors that I can see. The only time that I would worry about a conflict in a vertical is if you use proprietary information or confidential information about one client to help another. –William Thomas

My gut tells me that their competition is not really your problem. You treat each client with equal respect and offer equal service and it’s really none of their business who you do business with. A client should have no right to tell you who you can and cannot do business with, so I say no to the premium since you should have the right to do business with whomever you choose. –Steve Clifton

Because Blue Moon is a small firm, we’ve avoided the issue by giving ALL clients exclusives: as long as we’re working with an organization, we won’t work with any competing organizations in that market. This helps us set ourselves apart from larger firms – and keeps life interesting! –Alex Hayes

My view is that there isn’t any conflict because you’re not using inside knowledge to help the other. The seo, smm and website process is similar no matter who the client is. The advantage to you in working with several clients in one industry is a better understanding of how it works, identifying keywords etc. If you ask enough questions,dig deep enough (which Im sure you do) you’ll find one area that is unique for each client that you can leverage and build on for their marketing. –Stacie Chalmers

We have a unique situation where we offer email marketing software (private label and public) to business and ad agencies. We don’t do any exclusives, but we obviously don’t share trade secrets. We simply feel we offer a service that companies can use, even if they’re in competition with each other. –Josh Nason

The non-compete is always a difficult call because while it does limit business growth, it can also result in undo/unwarranted client paranoia. Charging a premium — or fee for category exclusivity — is an option but also opens you up to greater fee scrutiny. –Chris Kast

What is the cost to your business of the exclusivity? that’s probably of no concern to your client, however, but an issue for you as business owner. –Lynnelle Wilson

Initially, you have to ask yourself if the two clients are vying for the same consumer in the same markets. If the services/products are the same, but the consumers are different, then I don’t see any conflict. If, however, both clients are trying to attract the same consumers, in the same market, with the same products/services, then you have a potential conflict. –Dave Wood

I encourage clients to think of competitors as someone to work with rather than against.  –Rhonda Hess

There really doesn’t seem to be one right answer, and the type of service you offer definitely figures into how you view this situation. What’s your take on this? How do you handle similar situations in your own business?

Rich Brooks
Small Business Owner

Photo credit: Matti Mattila

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Posted in Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business | 7 Comments »

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