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Commitments & Mental Energy

February 26, 2023 /

More than a decade ago, I set in a friend’s office, on a sea trunk, coding twelve hours a day for three days in order to meet a Monday deadline. I had subcontracted some work to him and he had dropped the ball. I was helping him get caught up so that we could meet my commitment to the client. My back was injured at the time and the long hours on the sea trunk made it ache. I showed up early and left late and was exhausted at the end of it. It sucked.

What I noticed about the experience was that as the days passed, we both got less and less effective. And then the following week, I didn’t get much done at all because I was running on empty.

A few years ago, I took a month long sabbatical in Japan. I turned my email off and disconnected. When I returned, I was a dynamo and made eight weeks of progress in four.

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Marketing Cannot Create Demand

February 22, 2023 /

I recently saw an ad trying to drum up workers for Amazon warehouses. The headline on the ad said, “Work close to home.” I thought to myself, “There is an advertising agency laboring to polish a turd.” The ad’s reasoning was that the primary benefit that Amazon can offer workers is that it might be in their neighborhood. The subtext is, “Work like a dog, for peanuts, in a job with no future, but the commute is short.”

A common story around growth is that you just need marketing to get the word out. While not entirely false, it’s not true either.

Marketing cannot create demand. It can only amplify it.

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The People On Your Next Ship

February 21, 2023 /

I read Stephen Covey’s book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, when I was a teenager. One of the habits that I return to again and again is to, “begin with the end in mind.” This perspective puts a lens over activity that encourages selection. It improves our ability to make decisions that support intentional change.

There are many ways this habit supports business growth, but to focus on a single example, do you know who should be on your team? Not for today, but for tomorrow. At your next stage of growth, what are the functions, roles, and people?

We tend to react to the environment and problem solve current situations. You hire or contract a sales role to drum up more business because your team is under capacity.

This isn’t inherently wrong, but you’re dependent on environmental cues that will shape your business. They will determine the shape, size, and kind of business you run.

It’s like only sailing in the direction of the wind.

But if you know where you’re going, you can make choices to bring sailors onboard that will aid in navigating to your desired destination.

Featured image is Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort packet-boat from Rotterdam becalmed, 1818. By JMW Turner. Used under public domain.

Critical Weakness

February 20, 2023 /

I write a lot about applying strengths. Our unique capabilities give us advantages over competitors. But nature has a way of balancing the scales. Often what makes us exceptional is also what makes us vulnerable.

As a simple example, when you position a business you develop a unique capability in getting customers from a certain market. But it comes with an accompanying cost of losing customers in other markets.

Strengths walk hand-in-hand with weaknesses.

The trick is to manage the context so that strengths are effective and weaknesses don’t matter.

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Heroic Feats

February 19, 2023 /

My mum and I are trying to attend a writers workshop together sometime this summer. Because there are so many writers applying to these workshops, you have to compete to attend (“juried in.”) I spent all Friday writing fiction to meet a submission deadline and my mum sent me a message Saturday that she had done the same. She said that she didn’t know if we’d get in, but just the process of editing and revising her writing sample had engendered growth. Even though it was tiring, stressful, and a hassle.

What we work on in business often comes with challenges. Good goals are challenging, people are challenging, shifts in the market are challenging.

However, there’s a higher form of challenges. These call forth our best in the form of new capability.

To give an example, last January I was heading out on vacation just as everyone was leaping into the work of the new year. I set a challenge of getting six weeks of objectives completed in the four days before I left and without grinding day and night.

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The Threshold

February 15, 2023 /

On Sunday, I hit a wall with my six week objectives. I need to get a LinkedIn campaign going to warm up a cold email list. When I set the goal to do this, I had intended to promote content in the form of an article (boosting a post to this cold audience.) What I realized on Sunday was that I needed to promote an asset to the list instead.

This meant I had to write and design an ad for some sort of offer that I would create. That meant that the finish line on my six week objectives were further away than I had planned. I had two days to engage a designer, plan, and promote something. And I needed to integrate this work with all the other commitments I have on my plate.

“Well, that’s not realistic,” I thought, “I may need to set this aside and say that new information made it impossible for the deadline.”

This is very reasonable.

It’s also a predictable threshold you encounter when you set any goal that’s going to stretch you.

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What a Pimply Faced Teen Could Teach You

February 14, 2023 /

“Lots of people have grey hairs they don’t want and this service would enable them to get touch ups the same time as their haircut,” a teenage girl told me. I’ve plenty of grey hairs and I wanted to crack a joke, but just nodded. The girl was dressed in a business jacket and a conservative skirt and we sat across a table in a wide ballroom at a Holiday Inn. As a judge, I’d been instructed to offer little feedback or questions other than the two that were given to me. The teenager was one of twenty that I judged yesterday as part of the state competition for DECA.

DECA is a vocational training organization that prepares high school students to work in business. It’s a co-curricular class where students learn business concepts as part of school and then compete at events like the one I was a judge at. “It’s really a cult,” a mother helping at the conference told me, “The kids get really into it.” I was there because I care about education and business and the opportunity presented itself through the local Rotary.

I judged entrepreneurship. The teens were given business cases where they had to argue a proposal to me, their business partner. One of the cases was expanding a product or service line for a mobile hair cutting business. Hence, the dye for my unsightly grey hairs. In addition to dye as a service line extension, students proposed make-up, pedicures, manicures, wardrobe consulting, and even facial massages.

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What Do You Want?

February 12, 2023 /

I once had dinner with another agency owner in a restaurant in Philadelphia. At one very low point in his career, he was homeless and sleeping on a bench with his laptop in his backpack. No one knew. Not his clients. Not his friends or family.

Now, he’s very successful with an award winning agency in a highly defensible position.

His advice to me over dinner, was to figure out what you want and write it down. He said he wrote what he wanted down years ago as an exercise. What he wrote down, he’s now living.

Writing things down has a way of making things concrete. Success stops being an amorphous state always drifting in front of you and starts being something attainable.

Most business owners want to grow. It’s often a magic key in our minds. It’s not an end in itself, but is supposed to open the door to something we don’t have today. It’s a proxy for something we haven’t defined.

Beyond serving all those base lizard brain needs, your need to be loved, to belong, to be safe… What do you actually want?

It’s a good question.

Constraints Haiku

February 9, 2023 /

“If only I had:”
We whine about our constraints
Then magic unfolds

Featured image is a print from Yoshitoshi’s Hundred Aspects of the Moon. Bashō meets two farmers celebrating the mid-autumn moon festival. The haiku reads: “Since the crescent moon, I have been waiting for tonight.”

How To Grow as a Person

February 8, 2023 /

A year ago, I was hanging out in a tiny fishing village on the Pacific coast of Baja and spending a lot of time thinking about how to grow.

I noticed that as an individual, writing was a powerful tool that employed some of my unique strengths. I decided to be more intentional with my writing and practice it on a regular basis. Those realizations led to this blog.

Today, I’m setting aside business writing to focus on a short story that I’ve been working on. The creative side of my writing doesn’t advance my understanding or perspective, but it does bring me joy.

This year, a big personal goal is to attend a writing workshop with my Mum- also a writer with lots of published work. One of the deadlines for a workshop is next Friday and I’m halfway through my short story submission and still need to edit it. So today, business writing steps aside.

Awareness. Practice. Connection. Deadlines and selection.

No featured image today. Essentialism.