Category: Mindset

I practice speaking through a local Toastmasters club. Our club has dwindled through the pandemic. To help build it back, I volunteered to take on the role of VP of Public Relations. Last Saturday, I ran a special event to try and build membership.

It started with an idea to write an article for a local paper about our club president receiving a special service award. The benefit of this is that someone else (the paper) would be promoting our club to every house in the neighborhoods in our area.

That meant we had to give our president an award and I thought that we could amplify the impact of that by using the award as a pretext to activate past members. “Would you come and honor our president?” was the message that our VP of Membership reached out to these people about.

I’m starting this week by putting out fires.

We have a client that complained about a project. I haven’t investigated the details yet, but some of it was clearly our fault and some of it was likely their fault.

Another unpleasant task on my plate is that I have to confront a different client and maybe fire them. They are a wonderful person in charge of a wonderful organization, but they’re difficult to work with. The result of being difficult to work with has been that they’ve destroyed most of our profit margin on the work completed.

It’s annoying to have to look into these situations because it takes me off course from driving towards the objectives that will impact the entire business.

Alexander the Great wasn’t as great as people give him credit for. His father had paved the way for his “greatness” by conquering most of Greece and building a sophisticated military. Alexander took the reins of a chariot that was already in motion.

Similarly, the Persian emperor Darius “The Great,” didn’t build his Persian empire but won it by assassinating the monarch and assuming power with the support of a few nobles. Like Alexander, he took something already established and used it to conquer even more countries.

My sister-in-law works at a family-controlled commercial construction company that will cross a billion dollars in revenue in the next two years. The wealthy CEO is the grandson of the founder and assumed control of a company that was already making hundreds of millions of dollars.

I enjoy hiking with other business geeks. On one of these hikes, my friend John shared a marketing test he had run on social media. He wanted to see what people responded to. So he posted a bunch of ads for his agency sharing a variety of information:

• Case study style posts
• Thought leadership insight
• Interesting data
• A post where he bragged about fake vanity metrics

The last one was just for fun, but that was the one that had the highest engagement.

As entrepreneurs, we’re all familiar with the “right things.” These are the common recommendations that get passed around as the way to get ahead. I followed a lot of this advice for years and little of it made a positive difference.

The reason we didn’t grow gangbusters from applying all those great ideas was because context matters.

We have a big challenge in our one year vision of doubling our service customers. Our current customer base took five years to develop, and we’re halfway through the year.

A good vision clearly establishes how the world is different, but it doesn’t tell you how to get there. What you’re left with are riddles to solve. Like: how to do in six months what it took you five years to do?

Riddles like this prompt you to think differently about growth.

Four years ago I began the process of repositioning our agency. I spent nine months and around $12,000 doing research. The result of that was that I decided to reposition to focus on the association industry.

I created a new brand, Resurgent, and built up the marketing for it. After two years of work, we hadn’t landed a single client.

I did a retrospective on all the marketing tactics and channels I had tried. Over two years, I had executed a lot:

• Paid social campaigns
• 2 different speeches delivered multiple times across the US and Canada
• 2 e-books
• A virtual and physical lead magnet
• An email list
• A web app
• Mulitple times exhibiting
• Video interviews
• Strategic partner development.

The most I had achieved was a single proposal that wasn’t accepted.

At a barbecue, I walked through all the things I had tried to one of my entrepreneur friends. After listening to my list, he asked, “How long are you going to keep trying to make this work?”