Category: Mindset

I’m having a rough day. An early morning tornado transported my house to Oz and I’ve been fending off flying monkeys.

I’m waaaay off course from what I intended.

You know what I’m talking about.

Here’s the advice I give busy people I work with:

Do what you can, where you are.

Today, I’m swallowing my own medicine. I committed to writing a blog post when I’m working. This is what I can do today. See you tomorrow.

Featured image is “The Wicked Witch of the West melts,” from the William Wallace Denslow. Illustration in the first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Used under Public Domain

Have you ever sat on a mattress and had something roll to you? Your body creates a gravity well on the mattress and pulls objects to you.

A similar effect occurs when we engage our attention onto a focused point. If it’s a problem, solutions begin to appear. If it’s a question, answers begin to bubble up. I call this, “putting your thumb down.” As in pushing your thumb into the mattress.

What is the limit of your current capacity or capability?

It’s a challenging question. If I asked you, “What are the obstacles limiting your business’s growth?” You would know immediately.

But where the line is that demarks what is possible for the business today is harder to identify. Standing on that line, you can’t help but think about the frontier beyond it.

“What would it take to…”

• Increase customers beyond x
• Grow profit higher than y
• Boost throughput above z

In the shadows beyond that limit is a future version of your business.

The question is valuable because it provides hints on how you might grow. It prompts you to try and fill in the blank about what might increase customers beyond x.

Today, the limit is the highest you can reach. Tomorrow, it will be the ground that you stood upon.

Featured image is of dragons beyond the edge of the world on the Psalter world map, a 14th century metaphorical map of Christianity. Used under public domain.

I spent the first month of 2022 working from a remote fishing village in the middle of the Baja peninsula. A couple sand covered streets over from our beach house was a baseball diamond for the high school kids. It was backed by a concrete wall with a slogan painted on it, “hard work equals success.”

It was a belief that I was familiar with as a high school student. That effort oriented thinking served me well when I was in the Marines and as an aspiring martial artist.

But it’s not true.

Growing up on my parents’ farm, we irrigated using handlines: sections of hollow metal pipe topped with a sprinkler. These sections were connected into lines with around 30 pipes that stretched from one end of the field to the other. Every morning and evening, they had to be moved fifty feet over to the next position to ensure the whole field got water.

A couple of years ago, I was in a mastermind with another entrepreneur who specialized in lead gen and sales. He had just launched a website for selling his expertise as a consultant. The website was sharp, but what most impressed me was his inquiry flow. It seamlessly transitioned from a video pitch to a slide in form with conditional logic for the fields.

More recently, I had a conversation with a consultant around the sophistication of different types of industries. He held enterprise software and insurance as two industries that were excellent at selling. As an example, he talked about the intricate marketing automation that powered follow-ups and segmented customers.

Sophistication is a kind of magic. All the wonderful technological advances that we use day-to-day are inscrutable. It’s natural to infer that if something is convoluted that it must also be powerful.

As it relates to growth, it’s easy to think that you can buy or build your way to growth by tacking on sophistication.

You look outside your business for opportunities and see complex solutions and reason that they must be a magical difference.

The antidote to this fallacy is Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

John Gall

Effective video pitches and conditional forms started as sales conversations. Effective marketing automation started as a manual system derived from managing sales conversations.

Though we want to buy or build around challenges without surmounting them our real opportunity is to face our simple, and often hard, problems.

What is working in your business? This is your opportunity to optimize to a higher functioning, perhaps even sophisticated, level.

Where are the problems in your business? This is your ground for innovation.

Featured image is “The Self Operating Napkin” by Rube Goldberg. Originally published in Collier’s, September 26 1931. Used under Public Domain.

“In 2021, I learned more deeply what the SuperFriend Model needs to succeed, some of which we had and some of which we didn’t. It needs a network supply that exceeds the pipeline demand. It needs someone whose job it is to continue to grow the network. It needs a steady supply of work. It needs laser focus on a niche. It needs ways to support and engage the people in the network. It needs a mechanism to train people in what it means to work like a SuperFriend. It needs a large and steady amount of working capital…As many of those things become less available—especially capital—the SuperFriend Model becomes more and more difficult to sustain.”

Dan mall

The above was written by Dan Mall, as part of a year end review of his agency SuperFriendly. The review is a deep dive on why 2021 was their worst year to date and why he was stopping his efforts to scale his agency. It’s worth a read even if you don’t run an agency as an example of how to reflect on business.

Dan has been working this business model for 10 years. His lessons from a difficult year are not complex:

• Business focus
• Steady supply of work (pipeline demand)
• Accessible & capable workforce (network)
• Strong people systems
• Good capital reserves (good being relative to costs)

I’m registering for a college class as a 41 year old senior. I haven’t decided what yet, but it will be something in the humanities.

A couple of days ago, I had a call with a consultant who specializes in helping agencies like mine make strategic pivots. We talked about the research I’m completing on agency channels. Like me, he sees a lot of agencies that don’t appear to be operated with much skill, but that are doing quite well in spite of this seeming deficiency.

“Luck is a big factor, ” he said, “especially with agencies.”

There are plenty of people who get lucky. If you’re around long enough, you’ll be one of them.

Clients love it when I get on a call with them. I bring a lot of experience, training, and unique perspective to problems. Team members like it when I get involved too. These same attributes make projects easier. Because of this, there will always be pressure for me to get involved in operations.

I’m not special. For smaller agencies like mine, it’s common for the president to provide this sort of value.

In all businesses, there are squeaky wheels. As in, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” These are situations that draw attention.

Often they’re important things. I love our clients and our team. They’re both critical components of the business.

Last Friday, I evaluated our last six week cycle and looked at pay-per-click objectives for click through rates and leads. They were significantly improved over our initial campaigns (~50-100%). This was even though we had a brand new ad, landing page, and service proposition that hadn’t been optimized.

It was both measurable growth and validation of the thinking I’ve done on innovation.

It felt good.

Growth requires investment over time in an uncertain environment. The emotional experience of that is difficult. You’re in the mud, slinging it out, day after day. Your attention is splintered between responding to threats and trying to find a path to that next level.

Beyond the utility of learning, it’s important to track progress as a bulwark against your emotional experience of uncertainty.

Most entrepreneurs don’t put much stock in emotions. But what I noticed on Friday, when I felt good, was that I was re-energized to work on the next set of obstacles.

It takes emotional energy to grow. It’s important that both you and your team can see that you’re making an impact. Exposing progress reinforces motivation and greases the track for momentum.

Feature image is of Sisyphus by Titian (1548). Sisyphus was punished by Hades for cheating death. He was required to spend eternity carrying a boulder to the top of a hill every day where it would roll to the bottom. Used under public domain.

A friend of mine, Don, ran into one of his business heroes having a drink by himself at a bar. The hero was the CEO of a famous investment firm. Don struck up a conversation and they started talking about business. At the time, Don was still early in his entrepreneurial career and, after he finished his fan boy spiel, they got around to talking about his goals and strategies.

Don began to explain the obstacles he anticipated and the CEO interrupted him and said, “You need to use the Fukow method.”

“Phuquow?” Don asked, “Is that Vietnamese?”