Slow Down…or Stop?
July 21, 2010
You’d like my Uncle Lou. He’s 87 years old, intelligent, funny, and one of the best storytellers I know. In another era, he’d probably have been a professional speaker.
He’s also the last surviving member of his generation in my family, since we lost both my mother and my aunt (Lou’s wife) in the last eight months. So naturally, I try to visit him whenever I can, an event that always brings a huge smile to his face.
As always, he shares stories of the old days when he and my father (his fraternal twin) used to get into all sorts of mischief growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s and 30s. Of course, I’ve heard most of these stories at one time or another, but it’s still enormous fun to hear them again, and, specifically, to hear him tell them.
This time, though, he shared a story I’d never heard before. It seems he had been pulled over for running a stop sign some time back in 1965. Okay, he didn’t actually run the stop sign, it was more like a “rolling stop.”
In any case, he got pulled over. The officer approached the car, and asked my uncle if he realized he had run the stop sign. My uncle responded, “But I did slow down…”
At this point, the officer pulled out his “billy club” and began rapidly hitting his other hand with it. As he did this, he said to my uncle, “Imagine that’s your head I’m hitting. Do you want me to slow down…or stop?”
My uncle got the message and got away with a warning.
Sometimes, like a stop sign on the road, life sends you signals. You can ignore them, you can slow down, or you can stop and really consider what these messages are telling you. You may not get in an accident or get pulled over, but ignoring these signs often cause dire consequences.
So Who Needs Customers Anyway?
July 21, 2010
There’s a conversation that takes place far too often with attendees in my live programs. It goes something like this:
Me: What is the purpose of a customer?
Them: To get the sale.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that it’s quite the opposite: the purpose of the sale is to get the customer!
Most people follow a very rudimentary business plan: find a prospect, call the prospect, get the sale, move on to the next one. This sounds curiously like the instructions on the back of the shampoo bottle: wet hair, lather, rinse, repeat.
And it completely ignores one of the most important marketing principles we teach: lifetime value. In fact, when we do the lifetime-value exercise in our live programs, people are frequently shocked by the actual value a single customer, client, or member can bring to their businesses – value well in excess of the initial purchase – sometimes orders of magnitude higher!
So make sure you understand what your customers are worth over your entire expected relationship with them, and do everything you can to maintain a relationship that will let you benefit from this relationship while still delivering outstanding value to them.
I’m A Lucky Guy!
July 21, 2010
By David Lawrence, Pangea River Rafting
Michael J. Fox wrote a book entitled, Lucky Guy. I’ve got to say that if you wrote a book about my life right now, you couldn’t pick a better title. I’m one extremely “lucky guy!” Ten years ago I got into the professional recreation business (yes, it’s actually a “real” career opportunity) as a freshly minted college graduate with an English Literature degree and a burning desire to see the West.
For a native son of Virginia, the West meant the Rocky Mountains. When a friend called and asked if I wanted to take a job at a resort in Washington State, my first question was, “Does Washington have mountains like the Rocky Mountains?” Not only did it have big mountains and massive, glaciated volcanoes, the state offered a firsthand degree in outdoor recreation.
Washington is where I got my whitewater rafting start, on the Methow River. The waters of the Methow led me to the Spokane River where I worked as a guide. Those waters led me to Montana and the Clark Fork River, where my wife, Brooke, and I own and operate our own rafting company, Pangaea River Rafting.
I’m one lucky guy because I spend my summers as a raft guide in Montana and my winters in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State as a cross-country ski instructor. Making that kind of lifestyle work as a single twenty-three-year-old was pretty easy when you live on a tight budget. But how do you make a nomadic, recreation-based lifestyle work in your thirties, married, with one child, with hopes of having a couple more, and wanting to own your own house, actually two, one in each state?
The answer is pretty easy: you learn what business you’re really in. At the America Outdoors trade show last year in Reno, NV, I heard Ron Rosenberg present his Outrageous Marketing strategies. I learned from Ron that my business isn’t rafting and skiing; it isn’t even entertainment and teaching – it’s marketing and customer service. The customer service part we got in spades, but the marketing…
I joined Ron’s Inner Circle, read his newsletters, listened to his audio CD’s , reviewed the manuals and supplemental materials, and completed all of the requirements from Ron’s incredible new “Business Self-Defense™ Program.” And I became this weirdly voracious student of marketing!
Because of this, our sales at Pangaea River Rafting increased 15% in one summer. But what’s more amazing, we did this despite losing a whole month of revenue because the rivers were too high to raft! And on top of that, we, like everyone else that summer were battling outrageous fuel costs and operational expenditures. I would have been ecstatic just to duplicate the previous season’s totals, but we blew those numbers away by 15%!
I came back to the America Outdoors show this year because I wanted to see Ron and I was able to schedule a one-on-one meeting with him to review my web site. That one-on-one time with him discussing various marketing strategies was worth the fuel costs to drive to Knoxville, Tennessee; it was worth the cost of registering to attend the show; and it was worth all of the membership fees and educational resources I purchased. Because all of this will offer me a return of more than 10 times their value.
The best part, while I was at the America Outdoors conference and attending Ron’s program, he personally presented me with my Black Belt in Business Self-Defense™.
Brooke and I aren’t anywhere near our financial goals, but every day we get closer to making our outdoor lifestyle more financially viable. I know I’m a lucky guy, and I’m also a hard working student of marketing with a great teacher.
Brooke and I want to meet more of Ron’s Inner Circle Members. Just go to this special web page and tell us your story. There’s a special offer waiting there for you…20% off any rafting adventure and a free waterproof camera! (http://www.leaveboringbehind.com/ron.htm)
While you’re there, tell us how you met Ron, a funny joke, or whatever “floats your boat.” We’d love to meet more of Ron’s clients who are pushing the marketing boundaries of their businesses.
How to Grow Your Business with a Book!
July 21, 2010
In This Month’s Business Self-Defense® Inner Circle CD:
Adam Witty, Advantage Media Group
How to Grow Your Business with a Book!
This month we’re talking with Adam Witty, founder and CEO of Advantage Media Group and he’ll tell us nine ways to grow your business by publishing a book. He is a leading author-centric publisher, innovative marketer, and business builder. He is also author of 21 Ways to Build Your Business with a Book. For a free 30-minute consultation on your options for writing your own book, go to www.AMGBook.com. Plus, you’ll also discover:
* How to build brand recognition and equity for your firm
* How to write your entire book in less than a week!
* The pro’s and con’s of self-publishing, traditional publishing, and print-on-demand publishing and which model is best for you.
Not a member? Find out how to get your free gift – over $559.88 of recession-proof, money-making strategies at www.businessselfdefenseoffer.com!
Gold Coaching Webinars and Teleseminars
July 21, 2010
August 11 (Wednesday) 2-3 pm EDT Monthly Webinar:
The Secret to Connecting with Your Market
The more you can personalize your message, the better your results will be. But this goes far beyond segmenting your database and using merge fields in your e-mails. In this live webinar, we’ll discuss the concept of “affinity” and why it’s essential to everything you do in your marketing.
August 25 (Wednesday) 2-3 pm EDT
Q & A Open Critique Webinar:
Get answers to your most pressing questions and get your web sites and marketing materials reviewed in this interactive session.
Specific call-in and webinar details will be sent by e-mail and fax a week before each event.
If you want to join our Business Self-Defense Gold Coaching Program to enable you to attend these programs, e-mail us at info@qualitytalk.com. Read more
Nothing Happens ‘Till Someone Takes Action
June 30, 2010
We had our Swimming Boot Camp class on Monday this week, and it was a tough one. A 400-yard warm-up, 300 yards of the “pull buoy” (a small flotation device you put between your knees so you’re only using your arms), four 125-yard “snakes” (swimming to the other end of the pool, then going under the lane divider to swim back in the next lane – this simulates actual race conditions for a triathlon with a pool swim), eight 25-yard sprints, and then a 100-yard cool down.
I wasn’t the fastest person in the pool by any means, but I wasn’t the slowest either – and I was able to do the whole thing.
And that’s the most important thing about this story. Because, as some of you know, the first time I attempted to actually swim laps in a pool, I got to the other end of the pool, turned around, and about halfway back to the other side, I was gasping for breath. I don’t mean I had to stop for a second, I mean I was completely winded – after only 75 yards of swimming!
It certainly wasn’t a matter of fitness – I’m in pretty good shape. It wasn’t a matter of endurance – I can bike 100 miles. It was simply a matter of technique – I had to learn to swim properly.
Now visualization is a good tool, but you can’t “visualize” something and get the same results that come from deliberate and focused effort, any more than you can “visualize” a new car and one appears in your driveway without actually going out and earning the money it takes to buy the car.
The bottom line is that despite your best intentions and best-laid plans, nothing is going to happen until you take action on these plans.
Make sure you do something every day – no matter how small – that helps you achieve your goals. When it comes to achieving success, taking action really is a “sink-or-swim” decision.
Inner Circle Secrets Revealed
June 30, 2010
In This Month’s Business Self-Defense®Inner Circle Newsletter:
How Do I Get a Testimonial for a New Product?
We all know that testimonials are among the most powerful of all marketing tools. It’s tough enough to get current customers, clients, and members to give you a good testimonial, but what do you do when you have a new product or service that no one had seen yet? You’ll find out in this month’s Inner Circle Newsletter.
Plus, you’ll also discover:
• What you can learn about marketing from a wedding toast
• Why it’s so hard to hire good people – even in a bad economy
• Direct marketing so simple even a dog can understand it!
Not a member? Find out how to get your free gift – over $559.88 of recession-proof, money-making strategies at www.businessselfdefenseoffer.com!
Everything Is Dynamic
June 30, 2010
There’s an old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same. And while I understand the sentiment behind the saying, I have to take exception with it, because in reality, nothing ever stays the same.
Time marches on, and with it, we continue to see advances in technology, medicine, and social attitudes, although there’s a debate whether changes in social attitudes are truly “advances.”
We’ve gone from writing letters to each other in my parent’s generation to sending e-mails in my generation, and now our kids simply text everything to each other. I recently saw four middle-school-aged girls walking alongside each other at the mall, cell phones in hand, and it seemed as if they were actually texting each other!
Some advances, though, are clearly beneficial. For example, my 87-year-old uncle – still in reasonably good shape mentally and physically – is alive today because of a heart procedure that had been performed on him about eight years ago. When he asked his doctors why they hadn’t done this procedure ten years earlier when he was first diagnosed with heart problems, they said that the procedure they were going to perform on my uncle wasn’t even on the radar screen ten years before.
This was unfortunate, of course, because my father – this uncle’s fraternal twin – had already passed away from a heart attack at the relatively young age of 54.
Similarly, my own experience with state-of-the-art medicine occurred five years ago, when a karate injury made it necessary for me to have a nearly six-hour surgery to repair both a torn ACL and PCL.
The procedure involved removing the middle third of the patellar tendon from each knee and using these to replace the torn ligaments (ACL and PCL refer to the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments.) In case you missed that, they were using tendons to replace ligaments.
And the amazing thing about it was that about three months after the surgery, the tendons actually transformed into ligaments – as if they’d been ligaments right from the start!
When I asked the doctor about how this worked, he said they weren’t actually sure, but that I was very lucky, because even five years prior to this, the procedure wasn’t even science fiction!
Everything around us changes at an incredibly fast pace. The people who survive and benefit from the changes are the ones who can see them coming and best anticipate how to utilize this knowledge to their best advantage.
What changes are waiting for you just over the horizon?
It’s the Little Things That Make a Difference
June 17, 2010
On our trip to Puerto Rico earlier this year, we had a great experience I wanted to share with you.
We had just arrived at our hotel in the Condado neighborhood after having gotten up very early to catch our flight. We arrived at the airport around 11:00 a.m., picked up our car, and got to the hotel around noon. We were very hungry by then, so we unpacked quickly and asked at the front desk for a good local place we could walk to for lunch.
The front-desk clerk pointed across the street and said that they all went to Cafe del Angel when they wanted to pick up some food. That was good enough for us!
We ordered a couple of bottles of Medalla (the local beer) and a few combination plates. The food was great, and we asked the waiter, Javier, to explain some of the traditional dishes we had on the plate.
He had been working in the restaurant industry for 20 years, and was quick to recommend some of his favorite restaurants in Old San Juan, including some he had worked at personally.
When we got the bill and gave him our credit card, he went to process the payment, and then came back to ask for our ID. Fearing that Citibank, with all good intentions, had frozen the account because of charges made outside the mainland US, we asked if there was a problem.
There wasn’t; he had just forgotten about a new policy the banks in Puerto Rico had just initiated that required an ID with all credit-card transactions. He mentioned a time when he saw another waiter in a different restaurant announce loudly that the guest’s credit card had been declined, causing major embarrassment to the cardholder.
In contrast, he told us that he preferred to lean in and whisper news like that so that only the cardholder could hear the bad news.
We chatted a bit more with Javier about things to do and places to see. He was a wealth of knowledge, and an absolute delight to talk to.
Needless to say, he got a very good tip.
In most businesses and interactions, it’s the little things that make a difference, and that people remember. A shuttle driver who’s upbeat and pleasant. A customer-service representative who really seems to care about your problem. A waiter who shares his knowledge of the area with enthusiasm.
Does your team pay attention to the little things?
Bundle Up!
June 17, 2010
It’s tough to stand out when everyone else sells what you do. You need to have something that sets you apart from your competition, and if it can’t be the actual products you sell, then maybe it can be the way you offer those products.
For example, some self-storage facilities offer climate-controlled units, and pickup and delivery of items for businesses. So how about bundling these services, adding something extra, and positioning it as something other than the sum of the parts. Something like this to a restaurant with outdoor seating…
At Bob’s Self Storage, we’re the outdoor dining storage specialists! When it gets too cold for your customers to take advantage of your outdoor seating, just let us know a week in advance. We’ll show up with our 24′ truck, pack up your outdoor tables and chairs, and bring them to our facility for storage.
Then we’ll unload them, wash them top to bottom, and store them for the winter in our custom climate-controlled units. When Spring comes, just give us a heads-up, and we’ll pull the tables and chairs out of storage, give them another cleaning, bring them to your restaurant, and even set them up for you!
It’s all part of our “White-Glove Restaurant Storage Program,” and it’s only available at Bob’s Self Storage!
In reality, the storage facility is not offering anything more than a competitor could offer, but by identifying a specific market niche, identifying the services they might need, and bundling them into a package specifically targeted to that audience, they’ll get a much better response when they offer the package.
As a bonus, because this appears to be something designed especially for that industry, they’ll also be able to justify a higher rate for the main component – the self-storage unit itself – than they would have otherwise.
What can you bundle in your business that can add value to your customers, members, or clients? This is truly a case of the “whole being more than the sum of the parts!”
