Many companies think they understand the concept of positioning, but when it comes time to execute on their positioning strategy they find the results to be lacking. And I think that’s because they violate the number one rule of having an effective position.
You have to be willing to turn some people off. You have to be willing to step out on a ledge and say “I’m sorry, we don’t do that.”
Unfortunately, a lot of companies (and freelancers) seem unwilling to do that, particularly in the tech and design communities. They’ll reach for any opportunity they can get, whether or not they have an ability to execute on it.
Even though the economy is in poor shape, chasing money in areas outside your expertise is often a recipe for bad things – you do a mediocre (or terrible) job on it, and it takes you away from what you’re best at.
It’s tempting to be known as a graphic designer or programmer or consultant or whatever.
But I think it’d be better to focus and leave a lot of money on the table. Become the best display advertising designer in the world. Or logo designer. Or environmental designer. Or “peat moss packaging” designer.
Become known for that – charge a premium for being the best. Pursue only the projects that you’ll knock out of the park consistently. And send any other requests for work to your network of people who are the best at what they do, taking a small cut for sending them the work.
You’ll be walking away from lower margin, higher risk projects and taking a much smaller piece of the pie on work you refer out. But you’ll build goodwill with your partners (and your prospects), receive some revenue without losing your focus on what you do best, and will likely find the favor returned.
Be willing to say “I don’t do that.”
The new rules of business may be real, but they haven’t replaced the old rules entirely. Here are 5 easy ways to take your career to the next level by learning from your elders.
March 17th, 2009 ~ View Comments ~ Business
Reading through old notebooks this weekend, I stumbled on some notes from my old mentor. Notes about how to do business – how to carry oneself, how to set priorities, etc.
I roll in young, tech-savvy circles, and I’ve noticed that a lot of those things my mentor told me about business aren’t present in folks my age (myself included). In the hurry to put everything online, I worry that we’ve abandoned some of the old-school ways of doing business in the interest of progress.
Below are some of the things my mentor told me – most of them might sound obvious at first, but I’d challenge you to seriously consider whether you do these things consistently.
Show up on time
A lot of folks my age schedule meetings or appointments, only to show up late (or not at all, leaving a voicemail at the last second.) Respect other people’s time and attention by showing up when you say you will.
Do what you say you’ll do
It’s shocking how often people make commitments lightly, without considering their other demands (I’d definitely put myself in this category unfortunately.)
Don’t skip out on commitments you’ve made, don’t leave people in a jam, don’t come up with excuses for why you didn’t do something. Just do it, or don’t commit in the first place.
Work hard
A lot of folks my age work hard, as long as it’s something they think is “fun.” But the second their interest wanes, they decide to procrastinate, or try to get out of doing what they promised they’d do. And in the interest of “Four Hour Work Weeking” everything, they’ve tried to come up with clever ways of getting out of doing stuff.
We’re created to work. The natural state of man is to build, create, organize, do. When it’s time to rest, by all means rest. But when you’re supposed to be working, work as hard as you can.
Say please and thank you
One of my big problems with traditional networking has always been the ungratefulness of it all. People ask for something immediately, often rudely, and very often without having a genuine relationship in place first. And rarely, if ever, do you receive a thank you.
In the history of my company (to my knowledge, but I know most of what happens), there have been exactly two people who’ve sent a hand-written thank you card after a job interview. Both of them got the job. One of them became the Creative Director a year later :)
Saying please and thank you pay tremendous dividends in your professional career.
Dress the part
I get a hard time when I go into the office these days, because I tend to try and dress it up a bit. Part of that might be because I work from home most of the time and wear sweatpants and my “John Tesh rules” headband.
But part of it is because dressing up makes people think of you differently. It demonstrates that you respect them, that their opinion is important to you, that you took the time to actually get out an iron and clean your slobby self up before meeting with them.
It may sound superficial, but people really do treat you differently when you dress like someone who belongs at the conference table vs. the poker table.
How many of these things do you do (honestly?) What areas might it make sense to work on? What other rules from the old school do you think would be helpful to remember?
One of the more interesting (but little known) things about Christian theology is the concept of the devil. Most people think of him as this dude in red tights, with a pointy tail and horns and a beard. And a pitchfork. Like an evil ballerina who farms.
But actually the devil is immensely beautiful. Like Brad Pitt times a billion. Or me, times ten.
He was one of God’s greatest accomplishments. He was smarter, more creative, more charming than we can imagine. And even after the fall, his outward beauty never diminished. Nor did his creativity, intellect or charm.
It’s a difficult thing to wrap our minds around, that the personification of evil would be contained in a thing of beauty and brilliance. And yet when you think about the concept of temptation, it makes sense. If you really did live in a world where you were being silently opposed, prodded, tempted to do things that weren’t in your best interest… you’d probably trip up a lot less if your tempter was an ugly dude with a snarl, wearing tights with mustard stains going down the front.
I think one of the points of that story is that a lot of the things we think are good can be very bad for us. Hard work can be good. Hard work that leaves your family lonely and your life out of balance is not. Money can be good. Money as an end to itself, or used to buy another BMW when there are families living in tents outside the city, less so. Beauty can be good. Beauty that is used as a tool to manipulate, or as a basis for exclusion, not good.
C.S. Lewis talks about how one of the best ways to tell people a lie is with the truth. And while we live in a world of broken economies, broken families and broken lives, it’s hard to find the culprits, the ones who cause all the pain. That’s because the culprits aren’t wearing red tights and holding pitchforks. It’s actually pretty hard to find people who are overtly evil and ugly and mean. Most of the bad stuff that happens in the world is the result of lies masked with the truth.
Our markets lie in ruin and global commerce is threatened because while hard work and innovation are good… unmitigated, perpetual growth and expansion are ultimately destructive and unsustainable.
Because we think beauty and nice things are good, we create and consume as much as we can, willfully ignoring the consequences on our planet’s resources and on the gross inequity between us and our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world.
Because we believe in the importance of the self, we ruin countless relationships and marriages because we refuse to compromise or truly put the other person’s needs before our own.
Because we want families to be safe, we train our children to avoid people that don’t look like them, perpetuating cycles of racism, sexism and classism (which is particularly egregious because, according to spell check, “classism” isn’t even a word.)
When we look into our own lives, it might make sense for us to examine how things that we might have once thought of as good (or that others might still consider good) could be harming us or those we love.
It might make sense to consider whether our workaholic tendencies are a good thing if our relationships are suffering.
It might makes sense to examine whether our desire for more requires that other have less.
It might make sense to think about whether hard work drive are always good, considering they might be driving us in a direction that is ultimately destructive.
It might make sense to think about whether our love for country masks us to the injustice and pain others feel at the hands of our military or economic systems.
But to do so will take work, because it’s very likely the worst part of ourselves isn’t wearing red tights. It’s probably hidden in plain view, inside something beautiful but ultimately deadly.
In my second podcast, discover why I think the easiest, possibly most powerful way to position yourself or your company in the marketplace is to focus obsessively on what ticks people off.
Special thanks to The Autumn Film for jazzing it up with the tunes – you can download four free songs from their most recent album at http://theautumnfilm.com/share, and you can follow them on Twitter.
Transcript of “Don’t tick people off
Today, I want to discuss why I think not ticking people off represents a tremendous secret for being successful in business, marketing, sales, and your career.
There are literally thousands of books about marketing, career development, how to be successful in business. It seems like everyone is searching for a way to get others excited about what they have to offer. While I wouldn’t claim to be marketing guru, I do think that I’ve managed to cobble together a simple rule that has served me very well and that is simply to not tick people off.
It sounds ridiculous, but it is amazing how few people really understand this, and how few companies understand this either. Almost no one focuses on it with intent.
If you ignore what upsets people, all the other work is meaningless
To show you what I mean, I’d like to tell you a story about a restaurant.
Imagine someone wants to start a restaurant, and they go to the effort of learning how to cook, how to manage a restaurant, how to get the licenses they need. They spend weeks trying to find the right location, and once they do they spend thousands installing the ovens and freezers, the wood stoves, the wine cellars. They hire a chef, they make a menu, they find wait staff, hostesses, and busboys. They get the place inspected. They get a yellow page ad, radio ads, and a website.
And they finally open the doors and people start to come in. And what is the experience the customers have?
They have to sit in a chair waiting for a table for a half hour or hour, or more. They finally get seated at a cramped table looking at the bathroom or the kitchen. They wait another 15 minutes for the waiter, who finally arrives with some cold, stale bread and hard, cold butter. As they’re eating, their water isn’t refilled. When they finish their plate, it is immediately taken from them, even though their companions are still working on their meals. They wait a long time to get the check, and when they do get it they discover there was a mandatory gratuity added because they had five people.
At the end of that meal, it doesn’t matter that the restaurant owner did all the work to get them in the door. Their experience is a poor one. And even if that restaurant survives, I would argue that it is just surviving. They’re never going to become what they could have become, because they didn’t focus their attention on not ticking people off.
There are consistent things that tick people off in any industry
This probably just sounds like a bunch of cliches about poor restaurant service thrown together. But that’s exactly my point – it’s a cliche because it is so common. Most restaurant owners don’t make it a passion of theirs to not tick people off – and neither do folks who own companies in most industries. In most businesses, we know similar cliches.
What ticks people off about mechanics? They try to convince you that you need that expensive repair that you don’t need.
What about a doctor’s office? You have an appointment, but you still have to site there for 45 minutes.
What about airplanes? Used car salesman? Attorneys? Dentists?
In any industry, there are likely things, that are consistent, that tick people off. And most business owners pay absolutely no attention to them. The same is often true for people working in a company.
What ticks people off about a tech guy? They act like you’re stupid whenever you ask a question, because they’re the only ones who know how to fix tech issues.
What ticks people off about salespeople? They embellish the truth, or outright lie, in order to close a deal and get their commission, and then hope that the company can live up to the promises they make.
What about managers? They’re disconnected, they don’t understand the real issues of the company, they’re too busy writing reports and sitting in meetings, and ignore the issues you’re dealing with.
And the crazy thing is that all of these people spent their entire lives to get where they’re at. They went to college, maybe got a graduate degree, worked their way up the ladder… and yet most people don’t consider them great at what they do. And the reason is likely because they tick people off.
Why not ticking people off is such a huge opportunity
I hope you understand what I mean, and why I think it’s exciting. I think if you learn to focus on this, it represents a huge secret for getting ahead in business, or in your career.
To illustrate how this can change the way you do things in a dramatic way, let’s play a quick game of “what if?”
What if you went to a restaurant that did focus on what ticks people off? What if you went there and they sat you down immediately, even if you didn’t have a reservation? What if they thought about the placement of every table and what it would be like to sit there, making sure that no seat was too hot or too cold, had a nice view of outside or of other people? What if they greeted you promptly? What if you had warm bread brought to your table immediately, that felt like it was right out of the oven, along with soft butter that was easy to spread? What if they put an old wine bottle full of water on the table so you could fill your water up yourself whenever you wanted? What if they had beautiful, clean bathrooms? What if they didn’t take your plate until you were done, and let you stay as long as you wanted, but then gave you your check promptly when you were ready to settle up?
In other words, what if they went through every single cliche they could think of about what ticks people off about going to a restaurant, and then systematically (meaning they developed a consistent, reliable system) developed processes that alleviated those pain points?
What would happen if there was no wait at a doctor’s office?
What if a mechanic didn’t just try to sell you stuff you didn’t need but gave you real options? What if they told you that yeah, your air filter’s dirty, but honestly you can wait 6 months before you really need to do anything about it? How refreshing would that be?
What if in your company, your salespeople worked hand in hand with your team and only pitched work when they were confident the company could deliver it on time and on budget, in an exceptional way?
What if your IT folks were actually helpful and proactive? What if they weren’t condescending, but actually went around and gave you pointers or have lunch and learns about how to user your machines more effectively?
What if a manager in your company spent one day each month doing the dirty work in the business? Or spent the day in the department talking about your frustrations and really looking for ways to alleviate them?
Lenscrafters knew what ticked people off, and built a business around it
This isn’t just philosophical – there are smart companies that actually did this.
Lenscrafters built their entire company around alleviating what ticks people off. At the time, when you had to get your eyeglasses fixed, you had to wait. You had to make an appointment, get your eyes checked, go back to look at frames and pick out the styles you wanted, back and forth over and over again. And they thought, “what if you didn’t have to spend weeks going around borderline blind, getting into traffic accidents? What if you could get your lenses in about an hour?”
And so they figured out how to do that – and at first they had no idea. But they knew if they could figure that out, they’d solve a problem that ticks thousands of people off all the time. So they moved the lab to the store – the figured out it was silly to have the lab somewhere else. And they put the store inside a shopping mall, so you could do some shopping during lunch and didn’t have to wait inside the store.
It sounds obvious now, but no one thought aggressively about this at the time. Lenscrafters developed a system around solving a simple problem and turned it into a multimillion dollar business.
Unfortunately there are so few companies that get this. If you were able to develop a reputation for being able to solve the consistent, most obvious problems that upset people in your industry, I would argue that you’d never be out of a job, and you’d never be out of customers.
Four easy steps to not tick people off
When people ask me what they should do to position their companies or how they should focus their personal careers, the first thing I ask them is “what ticks people off about doing business with someone like you?” I think there are 4 steps to doing something like this:
- Figure out what ticks people off in your industry
- Figure out how to avoid it, through a deliberate process of innovation and quantification of results.
- Once you know how to solve the problem, develop and document a system that lets anyone in your company do it consistently, every single time.
- Use this as your point of differentiation, communicating how you solve the problem in a clear, compelling way.
In my mind, the easiest way to develop a position in your company or your career is to focus on this simple question, and to follow the four steps above to make it happen.
I’ve been wanting to podcast for a while, but life has always seemed to get in the way. I decided this year would be the year where I’d give it a try, so I picked up a Blue Snowball microphone, made myself comfortable with GarageBand and started recording.
The result is a discussion about your Personal Image, a concept I first wrote about five years ago when I created my (suddenly timely, equally obscure) book A Bright Red Package. With so many people out of work, looking for work, etc. I decided it might be a good time to dust off the material and see if any of it was still relevant. Turns it it was.
So put on your headphones and take a listen. If you have feedback on how to improve it (make it shorter, make it funnier, never do it again, etc.) please let me know. I’m looking forward to exploring this with you!
If you want to subscribe to the podcast and get future episodes, click here.
In the midst of all the food and the parades and the football, Thanksgiving is about realizing how great we have it. It’s a realization we desperately need.
November 26th, 2008 ~ View Comments ~ Personal
Being unsatisfied is like a drug.
It gives you something to push towards. Or many things. Or some vague nothingness that nonetheless drives you forward.
When things go great, when something is accomplished or a gift given, it’s often almost anti-climactic – the attainment is often less gratifying than the desire that preceded it.
But being unsatisfied isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a reason why some of the world’s more “successful” people are also the most lonely, the most unsettled. The habit of being unsatisfied becomes so entrenched that long after getting everything they originally set their eyes on, they still feel underwhelmed, like something is missing.
I would argue that what we really need is contentment. Gratitude. A thankful heart.
A thankful heart is what allows you to decide that four cars is enough. Or that one car is. Or (gasp) that public transit is fine.
A thankful heart is what reminds you that another 80 hour work week in the name of providing for your family is silly given that your family already has food, shelter, the ability to see a doctor. Contentment is what compels you to turn the Blackberry off and enjoy an evening or a weekend with your wife and kids who are well fed but desperately miss their dad.
A thankful heart is what helps someone realize that they have enough. That the highest and best use for their resources might not be themselves, but rather people who weren’t given the skills and the intelligence and the discipline and the luck that they were.
Of course the world will never tell us this. We are all bombarded by thousands of messages telling us that we should never be satisfied. Planned obsolescence tells us that the iPhone we were given a year ago is rubbish and desperately needs to be replaced. Advertisements tell us that the key to our happiness is an SUV, some body spray and a television set that can also order you dinner.
It’s even infected religion – the refrain from pulpits is that there is a hole in your heart, a piece of you is missing, and that the answer is God. And that once you’re on the team, you will have a life of abundance, generally measured in dollars. Greed and discontent, hiding behind a dude with a Bible, white teeth and a fake tan.
Problem is the Bible doesn’t say that. Quite the opposite – the people who took God seriously were fed to lions, thrown into fire, crucified, stoned to death, beaten, thrown in jail, exiled or beheaded. The people who wanted to be a part of the movement were told to quit striving for what the world strives for and to be immensely grateful for what they had, to the point that the natural expression of their joy was to share all they had with others.
Abundance never meant money, status or power. Abundance was first and foremost an inward heart of gratitude, and a life of peaceful joy.
While in many ways people back then had it harder than we do, in one way our lives are much more difficult. We live in a part of the world that experiences unprecedented affluence. We literally have everything at our fingertips. We work hard, strive for excellence, are consistently driven to achieve, to attain, to accomplish. We are the wealthiest people who have ever lived. And we’re miserable.
The reason there’s such a gap between the rich and the poor today is because we’re unsatisfied. We’re in the top 1% of the world in wealth but we’re too busy looking up at the .01% to see the 99% below us.
Because we want more. We cling to everything we have and covet what little we don’t. Many of us never even pause to consider that no generation has ever had it this good.
We’re addicted to dissatisfaction.
This Thanksgiving, I’m trying to really think about how ridiculously lucky I am. Trying to step back and realize that there are more important things than stock options or wealth preservation. That my life is, by any reasonable standard, pretty amazing. And I’m hoping to carry that sense of contentment with me into the rest of the year.
It won’t be easy – the media doesn’t want me to be content, many of the people I know (if they’re honest) don’t either. But once you realize that dissatisfaction is a hunger that can never be satiated, the only logical response is to do whatever it takes to learn to be thankful. To quick cold turkey.
Happy Thanksgiving.
In all of the fuss about the economic downturn (and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t obsessed with talking about what’s going on these days), I worry that I’m missing out on a chance to do something worthwhile, unusually impactful.
October 31st, 2008 ~ View Comments ~ Christianity
There’s an opportunity right now, and I fear I will let the opportunity completely pass it by.
2 billion people in the world live on less than $2 per day. 1.8 million children die each year because they don’t have clean drinking water.
And I sit at a fancy dinner with my friends, polishing off the second bottle of wine, lamenting the fact that my 401k has lost 25% of it’s worth this year. I fret because I might have to put off purchasing a new suit or a cinema display.
I’m inconvenienced by the economic downturn, while millions of people around the world are getting destroyed.
Argentina went through a period of hyperinflation not too long ago that took out 80% of the country’s wealth and virtually wiped out the middle class. When my wife and I were there this past March we saw the lingering effects – thousands of families bringing large white bins into town on trains, picking up cardboard that’s been left on the streets to sell for tiny amounts of money. People that used to have jobs, that worked hard, had their entire lives torn apart by an economic tsunami.
We would spend hours over dinner talking about how crazy it was that these people would have to bring themselves down to that level in order to survive, while their neighbors (ex-coworkers? ex-friends?) would walk right by them with their fancy clothes to the club. Ignoring them entirely. Thinking to themselves “well, that’s how life works. Glad it’s not me.”
We couldn’t understand it – it wasn’t like watching a kid in Africa on some DVD. It wasn’t far away – it was right in front of them. And they ignored it.
We were disgusted. And then we ordered another bottle of wine and talked about how great our $20 steak was.
There’s an opportunity in all of this. I’m fairly certain that we’re heading towards a major economic disaster – that the worst is yet to come. I think that picture of Buenos Aires isn’t too far from what our world could be like in the next 10 years.
And assuming I survive it without joining the ranks of those devastated, I have a choice. I can cling ever tighter to my money, and sit in my house thinking smugly about how I was just more talented or luckier than those fools outside…
Or I can soften my heart. I can remember that more than just about anything else, my God’s heart was for the poor, the broken, the disenfranchised.
The church has a long, rich history of coming to its senses during times of crisis, but I’m concerned that we are no longer a people who know our history, who know about our God’s heart for “the least of these”, who really believe that the purpose of all the wealth they’ve amassed over the last 40 years was their own consumption.
I’m praying that a nation of Christians who for decades have become drunk on excess finally see the incredible disparity between them and their neighbors (which for the first time in history includes people from the other side of the world). I’m praying they wake up and see that the three cars and the McMansions and the spas and the Prada bags have done nothing but blind them to the incredible pain in the world.
I’m praying that we figure out that one of the reasons this generation is so disenfranchised with the church is that it seems more concerned with building a bigger sanctuary or electing a President that won’t raise their taxes than it is practicing the same spirit of radical love that the God they follow appears to deem so important.
The upheaval of the last few months can be that catalyst. It has the potential to be a wakeup call. And we can either complain about how our nest egg has shrunk, or we can confront the reality that all around us people who previously had very little now have nothing.
It’s an opportunity I pray that I take advantage of, that my church takes advantage of.
