Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (28 page)

Most presentations (and I’ve seen a lot) are absolutely horrible. They’re not horrible because they weren’t designed by a professional; they’re horrible because they are delivered by someone who is hiding what they came to say. The new trend of tweaking your slides with expensive graphic design doesn’t solve this problem; it makes it worse. Give me an earnest amateur any day, please.

One secret of being a large financial institution is that you can take huge risks because you’re too big to fail. If you hit craps and lose it all, don’t worry, because you’ll get bailed out.

One secret of “small is the new big” thinking is that you won’t fail and you can’t fail and you don’t need to worry about a bailout. Not because you’re small in head count or assets, but because you act small.

A small-acting bank would never have invested in tens of thousands of loans that they hadn’t looked at. And a small-acting start-up wouldn’t hire dozens of people before they had a business model—and then have to lay off a third of them just because their VC firm showed them a scary PowerPoint presentation.

I’ve always been frightened by big-firm accounting. The sort of financial legerdemain in which skilled accountants work hard to make the numbers look the way the CEO wants, instead of making them clear. Cash accounting run on a simple bookkeeping system is the small way to do it, even if your company is huge. That’s because sooner or later, management has to know what’s actually happening as opposed to what they can pretend is happening.

Big-thinking companies lose customers all the time because big-thinking companies isolate the decision makers from the outside world. Angry customers who are leaving don’t get heard; that news is heard by the poor schlub reading a script at the call center. Ninety percent of the angry customer mail that people forward to me (I have enough for a
lifetime, thanks) is angry because the (former) customer is tired of being ignored.

If you act small and think big, you are too small to fail. You won’t need a bailout because your business makes sense each and every day. You won’t need a bailout because your flat organization (no matter how large it is) knows about problems long before they’re too big to deal with.

The media and the tech blogs glamorize businesses that act big. They write about the big checks VCs hand out and they lionize the organizations that make a splash. The untold story is in the organizations that are close to the customer, close to the product, and close to each other. Acting small always pays off.

(Thanks to Howard for the phrase that inspired this post.)

Every day, you do a hundred or a thousand jobs, some of which are occasionally handled by specialists. You make a sales call or give a presentation or answer the phone; you design a slide or create a simple spreadsheet. You get the idea.

When you are busy being a jack-of-all-trades, you’re competing against professionals. The recipient of your work doesn’t care that you are also capable of doing other things. All she wants is the best she can get.

I’ll define a professional as a specialist who does industry-standard work for hire. A professional presenter, for example, could give a presentation on anything, not just on the topic you’re passionate about.

When you compete with professionals, you have a problem because, generally speaking, they’re better at what they do than you are.

I think there are four valid ways to think your way out of this situation:

1. Hire a professional.
   
2. Be as good as a professional.
   
3. Realize that professional-quality work is not required or available, and merely come close.
   
4. Do work that a professional wouldn’t dare do, and use this as an advantage.
   

The first option requires time and money you might not have, and I’m assuming that’s why you didn’t do it in the first place.

The second option is smart, particularly if you do the work often and the quality matters. Slide design and selling are two examples that come to mind here. The first step to getting good is admitting that you aren’t (yet). Invest the time and become a pro if it’s important.

The third option is worth investigation, but it’s what you’ve probably already decided without putting words to it. Is the assumption really true? Does your customer/client/employee
actually believe
that they haven’t been shortchanged by your amateur performance? Is it costing you in ways you’re not measuring because you’re willfully ignoring the consequences? Think of all the sub-pro experiences you’ve had as a customer, instances when someone was pretending to be a chef or a bartender or a computer jock but came up short. Were you delighted?

The fourth option is really exciting. From personal YouTube videos to particularly poignant and honest presentations or direct and true sales pitches, the humility, freshness, and transparency that come with an honest performance might actually be better than what a professional could do. Harvey Milk was an amateur politician, not a pro. If you’re the only person on earth who could have done what you just did, then you’re a proud amateur.

You can’t skate by when you refuse to mimic a professional. You must connect in a personal, lasting way that matters. That’s difficult, but the professionals have no chance to compete with you.

Be an amateur on purpose, not because you have to.

The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk taking, or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint.

When we sprint, all the internal dialogue falls away and we just go as fast as we possibly can. When you’re sprinting, you don’t feel that
sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run.

You can’t sprint forever. That’s what makes it sprinting. The brevity of the event is a key part of why it works.

“Quick, you have thirty minutes to come up with ten business ideas.”

“Hurry, we need to write a new script for our commercial … we have fifteen minutes.”

My first huge project was launching a major brand of science-fiction computer adventure games (Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, etc.). I stopped going to business school classes in order to do the launch.

One day, right after a red-eye flight, the president of the company told me that the company had canceled the project. They didn’t have enough resources to launch all the products we had, our progress was too slow, and the packaging wasn’t ready yet.

I went to my office and spent the next 20 hours rewriting every word of text, redesigning every package, rebuilding every schedule, and inventing a new promotional strategy. It was probably six weeks of work for a motivated committee, and I did it in one swoop. Like lifting a car off an infant, it was impossible, and I have no recollection at all of the project now.

The board reconsidered and the project was back on again. I didn’t get scared until
after
the sprint. You can’t sprint every day, but it’s probably a good idea to sprint regularly.

If you want to grow, you need new customers. And if you want new customers, you need three things:

1. A group of possible customers you can identify and reach.
   
2. A group with a problem they want to solve, using your solution.
   
3. A group with the desire and ability to spend money to solve that problem.
   

You’d be amazed at how often new businesses or new ventures have
none of these. The first one is critical, because if you don’t have permission, or knowledge, or word of mouth, you’re invisible.

The Zune didn’t have #2.

A service aimed at creating videos for best-selling authors doesn’t have #1.

And a counseling service helping people cut back on Big Mac consumption doesn’t have #3.

The first mistake marketers make is that they want more. More customers, more noise, more ads, more shelf space, more customers, more customers, more customers …

Almost all of their actions are driven by the search for more customers.

The reason this is a mistake is simple: it’s expensive. Attracting a new customer costs far more than keeping an old one happy. Not only that, but an old customer is far more likely to bring you new people via word of mouth than is someone who isn’t even a customer yet.

Which is why share of wallet makes so much more sense than share of market. How much does each of your existing customers buy from you? Do they count on you for all the things they buy in this market, or just some? Does Toyota sell me every car my family drives? Does Chubb get to insure every single thing I own? Usually not, because marketers are so focused on more that they forget to take great care of what they’ve got.

Hugh MacLeod, gifted cartoonist and profane marketing blogger, is now making his living selling limited-edition artwork based on his cartoons. He’s a brilliant marketer, of course, so he’s not focused on more. He’s focused on share of wallet. On selling his dedicated fans a remarkable souvenir that they can keep and display.

So, what’s the problem? Share of wall. Unlike with records or shoes, it’s hard to buy a lot of art. Pretty soon, you’ve got no place left to put it, do you? Share of wallet turns into share of wall and you can’t grow any more.

That’s why you need to be realistic about how much share of wallet
you can honestly expect, and why job one is delighting existing customers so much that they can’t help but tell their friends. Preferably friends with very big houses.

Clay taught me a good lesson about making things happen with your brand.

Envision the events that might happen to a brand (shelf space at Walmart, an appearance on
Oprah
, a bestseller, worldwide recognition, a new edition, worldwide rights, chosen by the Queen, whatever) as a series of dominos.

It turns out that if you start with all of them at once, you’ll fail.

And if you start with the big one, you’ll fail.

But if you line up all the dominos one by one, in the right order, you may just have enough energy to push over the first one. That one, of course, adds momentum so that when you crash into the second one, that one goes, too. All the way to the Queen.

Wait!

Isn’t this obvious? Sure it is. So why is it so often ignored?

Brands get stuck constantly. And they always get stuck circling the big domino. They try to launch worldwide and beat Google. They try to get an endorsement from the Prince of Denmark. They try to break out with a feature on a major blog. They try to act like Coca-Cola from the first day. And they try and they try and they try until they get so frustrated, they quit.

A few brands pick out tiny dominos instead. And topple them. And they do it again. They do it so often they create noise, momentum and, most important, a sense of inevitability. That’s how you win.

You’ve probably seen it. The fishmonger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don’t clean up as often, so of course, business
declines and then they have even less money … Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that’s out of business.

The doctor has fewer patients, so he doesn’t invest as much in training or staff, and so some other patients choose to leave, which means that there are even fewer patients …

The newspaper has fewer advertisers, so the publisher can’t invest as much in running stories, so people stop reading the paper, which means that advertisers have less reason to advertise, which leaves less money for stories …

As Tom Peters says, “You can’t shrink your way to greatness,” and yet that’s what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don’t. This isn’t a dip, it’s a cul-de-sac. It’s over.

Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum. Instead of squandering it in a long, slow death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.

Change is a bear, but it’s better than death.

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s Candy Shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the “work” part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, “I’m going to post this.” If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

“Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time” is a strategy. Using email, Twitter, or RSS, along with sending newsletters, sponsoring contests, and providing a
human voice—these are all tactics.
In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy,
and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.

The next time you find yourself spending eight hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.

Business Development
is a mysterious title for a little-discussed function or department in most larger companies. It’s also a great way for an entrepreneur or small business to have fun, create value, and make money.

Good business development allows businesses to profit by doing something that is tangential to their core mission. Sometimes the profit is so good, it becomes part of their core mission; other times it supports the brand, and sometimes it just makes money. And often it’s a little guy who can be flexible enough to make things happen.