Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (6 page)

Connect people who are proximate geographically.

We all know that newspapers are tanking. Yet news, it appears, is on the rise. This paradox is an opportunity. Who is connecting the 10,000 people in your little community/suburb/town/ZIP code to each other? One person who spends all day at school board meetings, breaking stories about a dumping scandal, profiling a local businessperson or teacher? If you did that, and built an audience of thousands by RSS and email, do you think you’d have any trouble selling out the monthly
cocktail party/mixers? Any trouble finding sponsors among local businesses for a media property that actually and truly reaches everyone?

Connect organizations spending money with ways to save money.

During the last recession, plenty of entrepreneurs scored by selling businesses on doing a phone bill audit. They took 30% of the first year’s savings and did the work for free. Today, there are countless ways that businesses can save money by using technology and outsourcing, but few take full advantage. You can train them to do this and keep a share of the savings.

Connect like-minded people into a movement.

We’ve seen plenty of headstrong bootstrapped entrepreneurs turn a blog into the cornerstone of a multimillion-dollar empire. The secret: they don’t write their blog for everyone. Instead, they use the blog as the center connecting point for a niche, and then go from there. It’s easy to list the tech successes, but there are literally 10,000 other niches just waiting for someone to connect them.

Connect people buying with people who are selling.

Sure, you know how to use Craigslist and eBay to buy and sell, but most people don’t. How about finding people in your town with junk that needs removing, items that need selling, odd jobs that need filling, and then, for a fee, solve their problems, using your laptop and these existing networks? Imagine the power, to pick just one example, of building an email alert list of 500 garage-sale bargain hunters. Every time you email them, they show up. Now, you can walk into any home in any town and guarantee the biggest garage sale success they’ve ever seen, and you have the photos to prove it. As long as you protect the list and do for your subscribers, not to them, this asset increases in value.

The best time to do any of these projects was five years ago, so that today you’d be earning thousands of dollars a week. Too late. The second best time to start: now.

What should not-so-busy real estate brokers do?

Why not start a local newspaper?

Here’s how I would do it. Assume you’ve got six people in your office. Each person needs to do two things each day:

• Interview a local business, a local student, or a local political activist. You can do it by phone, it can be very short, and it might take you ten minutes.
  
• Get 20 households to “subscribe” by giving you their email addresses and asking for a free subscription. You can use direct contact or flyers or speeches to get your list.
  

Twice a week, send out the “newspaper” by email. After one week, it will have more than 500 subscribers and contain more than 20 interesting short articles or quotes about people in the neighborhood. Within a month (if it’s any good), every single person in town who matters will be reading it and forwarding it along to others.

It will cost you nothing. It will become your gift to the community. And it will be a long-lasting asset that belongs to you, not to the competition. (And yes, you can do this if you’re a plumber or a chiropractor. And yes, you can do this if “local” isn’t geographic for you, but vertical.)

Own your ZIP code.
The next frontier is local, and this is a great way to start.

Doing goal-setting with friends and colleagues is always motivating and invigorating for me. You hear things ranging from “I want to help this village get out of poverty” to “I want to double our market share” or “I want to be financially independent.”

What you rarely hear is, “I don’t want to fail,” “I don’t want to look stupid,” or “I don’t want to make any mistakes.”

The problem is that those goals are really common, and when they’re left unsaid, they dominate. If your goal is not to be called on in class, that’s a largely achievable goal, right?

Think about how often your goal at a conference or a meeting or in a project is “don’t screw up!” or “don’t make a fool of yourself and say the
wrong thing.” These are very easy goals to achieve, of course. Just do as little as possible. The problem is that they sabotage your real goals, the achievement ones.

It’s not stupid to have a stated goal of starting several ventures that will fail, or asking three stupid questions a week, or posting a blog post that the world disagrees with. If you don’t have goals like this, how exactly are you going to luck into being remarkable?

As you consider marketing yourself for your next gig, consider the difference between process and content.

Content is domain knowledge. People you know or skills you’ve developed. Playing the piano or writing copy about furniture sales. A Rolodex of movers in a given industry, or your ability to compute stress ratios in your head.

Domain knowledge is important, but it’s (often) easily learnable.

Process, on the other hand, refers to the emotional-intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities, etc. This stuff is insanely valuable and hard to learn. Unfortunately, it’s usually overlooked by headhunters and HR folks, partly because it’s hard to accredit or check off in a database.

Venture capitalists like hiring second- or third-time entrepreneurs because they understand process, not because they can do a spreadsheet.

As the world changes ever faster, as industries shrink and others grow, this process ability becomes priceless. Figure out which sort of process you’re world-class at and get even better at it. Then, learn the domain—that’s what the Internet is for.

One of the reasons that super-talented people become entrepreneurs is that they can put their process expertise to work in a world that often undervalues it.

The telephone destroyed the telegraph.

Here’s why people liked the telegraph: it was universal, inexpensive, and asynchronous and it left a paper trail.

The telephone offered not one of these four attributes. It was far from universal, and if someone didn’t have a phone, you couldn’t call them. It was expensive, even before someone called you. It was synchronous—if you weren’t home, no call got made or received. And of course, there was no paper trail.

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

The list of examples is long (YouTube vs. television, Web vs. newspapers, Nike vs. sneakers). Your turn.

Do you deserve the luck you’ve been handed? The place you were born, the education you were given, the job you’ve got? Do you deserve your tribe, your customer base, your brand?

Not at all. “Deserve” is such a loaded word. Most of us don’t deserve the great opportunities we have, or the lucky breaks that got us here.

The question shouldn’t be “Do you deserve it?” I think it should be “What are you going to do with it now that you’ve got it?”

A lot of corporations have seen dramatic decreases in revenue and have cut back projects as well. In many cases, these cutbacks were accompanied by layoffs, and so everyone who’s left is working far harder.

But in other organizations, and for a lot of freelancers, there’s more time than work. In other words, slack time.

Assume for a moment that you don’t have money to develop and launch something new. So, what are you going to do with the slack?

What can you build over the next year that will take time now and pay off later? How can you invest the slack to build a marketing asset that you’ll own forever?

May I offer two suggestions:

If you’re a glass blower without a job, you can’t do much glass blowing. But if you’re a digital marketer between gigs, you can do a lot of digital marketing. Build a tribe for your favorite nonprofit and make it a case study for an entire industry.

If you were as serious about these two endeavors as you are about doing your job (eight hours a day on a slow day), imagine how much more powerful and in demand you’ll be a year from now.

Beats the alternative, by far.

This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing.

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you.

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they
love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don’t love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can market only to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.

The timing means that the idea of a “launch” and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backward from what you actually need.

Three years from now, this advice will be so common as to be boring. Today, it’s almost certainly the opposite of what you’re doing.

You might not be as permanently stuck in a rut as you think. The rut you’re in isn’t permanent, nor is it perfect. There are certainly less-perfect ruts, but there may be better ones as well. The certain thing is that you can change everything.

1. Buy a competitor.
   
2. Sell to a competitor.
   
3. Publish your best work for free online.
   
4. Close your worst-performing locations.
   
5. Open a new branch in a high-traffic location.
   
6. Hire the best salesperson away from the competition.
   
7. Join the competition.
   
8. Host a conference for your competitors.
   
9. Connect your best customers and organize a tribe.
   
10. Fire the 80% of your customers that account for 20% of your sales.
    
11. Start a blog.
    
12. Start a digital bootstrap business on the weekends.
    
13. While looking for a job, spend 40 hours a week volunteering and freelancing for good causes.
    
14. Go on tour and visit your best customers in person.
    
15. Answer the customer service line for a day.
    
16. Learn to be a killer presenter.
    
17. Let the most junior person in the organization run things for a day.
    
18. Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site.
    
19. Call former employees and ask for advice.
    
20. Move to Thailand.
    
21. Listen to audiobooks, instead of the radio, in your car.
    
22. Sell your cash-cow division to the competition and invest everything in the new thing.
    
23. Find more products for your existing customers to buy.
    
24. Become a gadfly and tell the truth about your industry.
    
25. Quit your job.
    
26. Move your operations to another city.
    
27. Become a vegan.
    
28. Have all meetings in a room with no chairs, and have everyone wear a bathrobe over their clothes.
    
29. Open your offices only four hours a day.
    
30. Open your offices 24 hours a day for a week.
    
31. Find every project that is near the danger zone (in terms of P&L or deadlines) and cancel it; no appeals.
    
32. Go for a walk during lunch.
    
33. Get an RSS reader and read a lot more blogs.
    
34. Go offline for longer than you thought possible.
    
35. Write five thank-you notes every day.
    
36. Stop sending spam.
    
37. Do your work somewhere else. Set up your chiropractic table at the mall.
    
38. Have everyone at work switch offices.
    
39. Give your most valuable possessions to a stranger.
    
40. Go see live music.
    
41. Start a company scrapbook and take daily notes.
    
42. Hire a firm to make a documentary about your organization.
    
43. Buy some art.
    
44. Make some art.
    
45. Do the work.
    

Fewer college grads have jobs than at any other time in recent memory—a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers annual student survey said that 20% of 2009 college graduates who applied for a job actually have one. So, what should the unfortunate 80% do?

How about a postgraduate year doing some combination of the following (not just one, how about all):

• Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a nonprofit.
  
• Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP,
  and
  SQL. Not a little, but to the point of mastery. [Clarification: I know you can’t become a master programmer of all these in a year. I used the word “mastery” to distinguish it from “familiarity,” which is what you get from one of those
  Dummies-
  type books. I would hope you could write code that solves problems, works, and is reasonably clear, not that you could program well enough to work for Joel Spolsky. Sorry if I ruffled feathers.]
  
• Volunteer to coach or assistant coach a kids’ sports team.
  
• Start, run, and grow an online community.
  
• Give a speech a week to local organizations.
  
• Write a regular newsletter or blog about an industry you care about.
  
• Learn a foreign language fluently.
  
• Write three detailed business plans for projects in the industry you care about.
  
• Self-publish a book.
  
• Run a marathon.