BrandingBlog by Dave Young

This is age old advice in management circles.

Kinda funny how hard it is to do in practice. And it’s one of those topics where you look at business owners and managers and you think, “They really should take this advice.” I really want to talk about the “fire fast” but I’ll just touch briefly on the hire slow, because there are loads and loads of resources on how to hire people. Just remember that the worst thing you can do is hire the first person through the door that you think could probably learn to do the job.

The biggest pressure point on hiring somebody too fast is that often it’s the owner or manager that’s having to pick up the slack for not having someone there in the first place. So their goal is, “I need to get somebody in here so I don’t have to work as hard.” And yet, if you hire the first warm body that comes in the door, you can actually create bigger problems. Just Google “hire slow” and find some ways to hire better and hire more slowly and more deliberately. You’ll do a much better job of getting the right people in and you won’t have to fire as fast because you’ll have hired better.

The firing fast it’s really something that, if you’re not doing it, could really be a killer in your business. It can really damage things. Not only the way the customer perceives your business but the employees that work with them.

Just look at the different points of view.

From the manager: if you’re not firing fast, you’ve got somebody that’s just a drag on your time. You can’t get them to do what you want them to do. You can’t get them to do it well. You can’t get them to work well with other people.

From the co-workers’ point of view: keeping them is kind of a slap in the face because here you are paying this person that everybody knows shouldn’t be there, and you’re not paying as much attention to your good employees because the bad employee is taking up all your bandwidth. So the co-workers get upset.

You’re also damaging your reputation with your customers: we’ve talked about the Personal Experience Factor. A bad employee that is interacting with your customers is a recipe for disaster.

Finally the business owner perspective: it’s just a drain on profitability. You’re paying somebody that’s basically a cancer inside your organization.

The simple way to solve this is that if you want to improve morale, fire all the unhappy people.

That seems kind of glib and like it’s the punch line to a joke, but that’s really the core of it.

The unhappy people are going to fall into one of three camps. They’re either victims “Oh they just work us too hard, they expect too much of us.”

Or they’re non-believers. “Ah, I would never buy the car that we sell.” They don’t use your products. They don’t believe in the kinds of things that you’re doing in your business. So they’re just poisoning everybody. Again, they’re there for a paycheck.

Finally, the know-it-alls. These are the people that they’ve been around so long, “Oh, I’ll tell you why we can’t do it that way. You know, we tried that ten years ago, that’s not going to work.” That’s the know-it-all attitude. Those can sometimes be turned around, but usually they’re so set in their ways that they’re hard to turn around.

Last summer, a client of mine actually went through and got rid of the victims, the non-believers, and the know-it-alls. They got rid of all their unhappy people. They have three retail stores and they cleaned house of those people. Their sales for Christmas this year were up 24% over last year, unreal in a retail environment. I don’t know what the average was this year for Christmas versus the previous 12 months, but to be up 24% is pretty good. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to getting rid of the unhappy people. But the people that they kept sold a heck of a lot more, and their stores were just more fun to be around.

Your other employees will be so happy, so relieved to get rid of those victims, non-believers, and know-it-alls. They know those people have been dragging down the business.

Sometimes you may have to rely on co-workers. Meet with all of them, and they’ll all tell you who the victims, the non- believers, and the know-it-alls are. You won’t have too much trouble identifying the people that you need to let go if you ask all of your employees. The hard part about it is, from a manager or a business owner’s point of view, you want to be a caring boss. You want to be empathetic. You want to give people as many chances as they deserve. And I’m not saying don’t do that but, don’t do that. I am saying don’t do that!

Give them what they deserve, but don’t let them keep screwing up. You’re just messing up your business. You’re just destroying your reputation in the marketplace, with other employees, with your customers. You just can’t afford to do it. Fire fast. Hire slow. It’s been said a million times, but it’s never been more true and the beginning of the year is a good time to turn over a new leaf. Make that your New Year’s resolution. “We’re going to fire faster this year.”

Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link or the MP3 to someone who could benefit from the information.

BrandingBlog Soundbites are produced using the Shortcut Blogging method.

Recording this Podcast was a blast. I’ve been working with Michele Miller for 10 years now and being able to share conversations like this is exactly why I started podcasting.

What really made this one fun is that we were face-to-face instead of on Skype. We were both in Palm Springs to have an annual meeting with a client that we’ve worked with almost as long as we’ve been Wizard of Ads partners. This past year our retail client grew 28% over the previous year. That’s a big deal any way you look at it.

In this rambling conversation, we discuss trends in societal change, sports (was it baseball or football?), politics and New Year’s Resolutions, or the lack thereof. You’ll learn about Michele’s F.A.R.E. mantra and my own twist on it.

I hope you enjoy it. I think I managed to maintain my family friendly rating on iTunes. Somehow, turning on the recorder kept us both from flinging f-bombs around the room.

This picture was from her Wonderbranding Class at Wizard Academy on Halloween, 2007. Yes, she taught the class dressed like this.

I love talking to Raffy Pendery. You’ll like him too.

We chatted about 3 of his amazing creations. RealStatistics.com is an online graphing tool that lets you upload all of your business stats and helps you make sense of it all. If you need to keep your training ducks in a row, he’s also developed a platform called RethinkTraining.com for managing your company’s training materials while monitoring your trainees’ progress. Brilliant.

And, if you’re a local business that relies on brick & mortar sales, plus ecommerce, plus email marketing, plus putting your goods out there on Craigslist, all while keeping close tabs on what’s working and what’s not…his team co-developed GreySuitRetail.com. It’ll blow you away.

Raffy is truly one of the good guys on the internet. I met him when he was just starting to grow his empire. (This picture is a very young Raffy at Wizard Academy.)

At the end of the podcast, we talk a bit about Hana-Li, his very talented singer-songwriter wife. Check out Hana-Li on Facebook.

After a busy holiday season, it was nice to have a leisurely chat with my good friend, Craig Arthur.

Since this is the first episode for 2012, we mostly talked about his plans for the new year and his renewed commitment to blogging. He is using the free outlining process that I produced for Shortcut Blogging. If you’d like to try it, just go to www.shortcutblogging.com/outline.

It may not sound like it in the podcast, but I got pretty excited when he talked about doing more free workshops this year in Australia. I may have to weasel my way onto his stage somehow. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been down under and I’m missing it.

Read more about Craig’s activities by following him on his Wizard Chronicles blog, on Facebook and on Twitter.

Thanks for coming along in our podcast journey!

The photo is Craig peeking out his room’s speakeasy window at Engelbrecht House on the Wizard Academy Campus.

Irene Watson’s media empire focuses primarily on self-published authors who need reviews, publicity and coaching for making the most of the book creation and promotion experience.

Her site, Readerviews, offers a wealth of knowledge archived over years of helping authors. Her services are priced and sized just right for authors trying to break into a bigger pool of  exposure.

I first met Irene at Wizard Academy. She took the Blog and Web workshop from Paul Boomer and me several years ago.

I really had a good time catching up and learning about the many things she can do to help someone maximize the potential of their book.

I’ve been getting Adrian Van Zelfden’s “Tidbits in Time” emails for several years. He’s a huge history buff and he enjoys a historical almanac to the point that he started sending out a monthly missive to share his celebration of what happened when. He started by sending it to his friends. None of that opt-in stuff, just a “hey, you might enjoy this as much as I do” kind of spirit. And, when you get an email, any email, from the smartest CPA/Lawyer around, what do you do? You open it and read it.

For his friends who also happen to own businesses, he started putting a section at the end “For Business Owners Only.”

The December issue had a 12-page, single-spaced PDF attached to it full of Adrian’s best Year-End advice to business owners. As I skimmed and scanned it, I knew that this was information that would be helpful to a lot of my readers, so I got Adrian to join me for conversation and this podcast is the result.

If you’d simply like to get to know Adrian, you could bail out after 15 minutes or so when we start to get our hands dirty in the numbers.

If you’d like a copy of his checklist, go to Adrian Van Zelfden’s Facebook Page, Tidbits in Time and click on the “Join My List” link in the left column. He’s also given me permission to send it out, so if you join my list you’ll also get a copy. A third option is to go to vanzelfden.com and shoot him an email. You’ll get a good sense of his dry humor if you google the latin phrase in the header of that page.

So…how good is he?

In 30 years of helping clients with taxes and going with them to countless IRS audits, he’s often walked out with the IRS owing his clients money. More importantly, he’s never lost a dime of his client’s money in an audit. That is, his record is perfect. He’s never had a worse outcome than having the IRS say, “Yep, this tax return is just fine. No changes.” Damn. That’s good.

I like doing interviews that get me a bit out of my comfort zone. Finances, taxes, government…you get the idea. For an example, if you haven’t listened to my interview with Pamela Yellen, you missed out on her surefire way to grow your cash without exposing yourself to risk. And now, I hope you enjoy Adrian and that you find his timely advice worthwhile as you seek to keep more of that hard-earned money for yourself while staying out of trouble with the IRS.

Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog Soundbites, with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler, hello Dave.

Dave: Hi Adam

Adam: Dave, today were sitting down talking about measuring radio effectiveness on a website.

Dave: That seems like a crazy idea, doesn’t it?

You’re running radio ads, and you’re trying to figure out if they’re working. One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is their desire for instant gratification. You want to know today whether those ads are working.

And actually measuring them on your website is one way to tell if they’re working today. You don’t really know when somebody’s need for your product or service popped into their mind. You don’t know what the driving factor was that made them decide that “hey, it’s time to call the HVAC Company,” or whatever your business provides.

But your website can give you a general idea of how well your unaided recall is working, and the way to do it is to identify those visitors as you’re looking at the sources of traffic on your website. Use a product like Google Analytics, which is free. If you don’t have it on your website, if you don’t have any kind of analytics, put Google Analytics on, or have your webmaster do it. It’s free, and it’s powerful, and it can answer some really interesting questions for you.

You can divide your traffic up several different ways. First, look at organic search results, meaning how many people are searching for you and what words are they typing into the search engine to find you? Then there is direct traffic. These are visitors that are coming directly to your domain.

So, if I said, “check me out at shortcutblogging.com, and then somebody goes and clicks on their address bar and types shortcutblogging.com in there, they’re going to go direct to my website. They are not going to show up as an organic search with some kind of a keyword in Google. But it is going to be tracked. Google is going to say “Hey, here’s a visitor that went directly to the domain.”

But you could also go to Google and just type in the word “shortcutblogging” and search for me that way. Or you could type shortcutblogging.com into a search engine and get there that way. Any of those three ways and I’m going to know that you probably heard an ad somewhere or somebody told you about me, and that’s how you ended up on my website…because you searched for me by name.

Very few of us are going to search for a business by name, if we’ve never heard of them. So, if you’re an HVAC company in St. Louis, Missouri, and someone types in “air conditioner repair” in St. Louis, Missouri, it’s probably not the result of your radio ad, right? Because they’re not looking for you by name, they’re looking for anybody that can help them. Does that make sense?

So, as you divide up that traffic, just look at the keywords. If you’re Adam’s Air Conditioning in St. Louis, Missouri, then you look at anyone who typed in the word, “Adam” and air conditioning. They probably heard your radio ad, or they saw your newspaper ad, or their neighbor uses you, or whatever. But they knew about you, before they went to Google.

Somehow they heard of you. And if the only way that anybody’s talking about you is through paid ads, on the radio, or in the newspaper, or anywhere else, that’s an indication that those ads are working. If people are searching for you by name, and they have no other reason to, it’s a result of your ads. Have faith that that’s what’s happening. And if nobody’s searching for you by name, you probably don’t have a very effective schedule or a very effective message.

That’s how I do it for clients and I’ve got some clients with 60-70% of their traffic to their website is coming in by someone searching for them by name either by knowing their domain, by knowing the entire name of their business, or just some piece of it. I count all of those as success for the offline media campaign.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog’s SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young.  For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link, or the mp3 to some one who can benefit from the information. Thank you again for listening BrandingBlog Soundbites with Dave Young.

Sometimes I’m a bit intimidated to talk to Jeff Sexton. It’s kind of like going back to high school and having an intellectual chat with your old English teacher…or in this case, an Olde English teacher.

He’s been doing an awful lot of Magical Thinking lately. One of the more interesting examples involves tiger penis. Yep.

In addition to discussing feline phalluses (phalli?) I also got him to talk about how a business owner can use Magical Thinking to improve marketing, merchandising and the customer experience. That’s the practical application of Magical Thinking. Of course, if it’s phalli you want, go check out this guy.

One more thing….if you enjoy this podcast and get it on iTunes, it would be so cool if you could give it a rating and a comment. Thanks!

Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner, Dave Young from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler. Hello, Dave.

Dave: Hi, Adam.

Adam: Today, we’re talking about Personal Experience Factor: the Approach. What do you mean?

Dave: Well, Personal Experience Factor, Adam, is the term that we use in the Advertising Performance Equation that relates to the actual experience that you’re delivering to a customer if you’re a brick and mortar retailer. If you don’t understand the advertising performance equation, you might not be familiar with this concept.

But, what we hold in this equation is that the actual in-store experience has a great deal of effect on how effectively your advertising dollars are being spent. It seems like a disconnect to most people because they think, “Oh, well the advertising should just be bringing people in the door.”

The real issue is the dollars that you’re spending on ads, if you’re doing it right, should have a long-term, lasting effect. It’s true, the dollars that you’re spending in advertising are responsible, in many cases, for getting people in the door the first time. Right? My first visit to your store may be as the result of your advertising. It could also be the result of a referral or a recommendation from a friend.

Whatever it is that got me in your door the first time, it worked, right? I came in the door, I crossed your threshold the first time, and I’m there. All right. So, what gets me in the second time?

It’s the experience that I had the first time!

Adam: Right, exactly. When you walk in that door, that feeling you get and the experience, that will keep you coming back.

Dave: Exactly. So, if they drop the ball there, what happens is they miss out on one of the most powerful things that they can do in advertising, which is to generate a feedback loop of referral business. If you get people in the door and you give them a good experience, you ignite this little fire that says, “Hey, when I go out and somebody needs your product, I’m going to recommend you because I had a good experience there.”

That’s the kind of a feedback loop that feeds back into share of voice and share of mind, which are other parts of the Advertising Performance Equation. We’ll talk about that another time.

When I talk about the Personal Experience Factor and the approach, we could do a weekly podcast and never talk about anything besides Personal Experience Factor if we want to talk about all the different things that make up someone’s experience in your store. We could talk about hiring, we could talk about merchandising, and decor, and design, and product mixes and pricing, and all those things that happen inside the doors.

What I wanted to do in this episode was just drill down on what I call the approach. That is to look at your business through the eyes of someone that’s approaching it for the first time. So, I’m not even in the door yet. I’m a block away. Can I see it? Is your sign readable? Is your location decent?

As I get closer and closer, is your paint peeling, or does it look good? Are your windows clean, or are they dirty and smudgy? Is the sidewalk swept off or is it covered in dust and gravel? Those kinds of issues all have to do with the approach, and it’s that whole concept of “you only have one chance to make a first impression.”

You need to start with Personal Experience Factor by taking a step away from your business and looking at it from a distance.

I like to use the metaphor of an airliner coming in for a landing at an airport. They have to be able to see that runway from a long ways off. That’s why runways are all marked consistently. If you’re a pilot, you know a runway when you see it. If you’re landing at night, the lights have to be just right. Everything has to work just right. This is before we ever get to the gate, right?

Before the wheels touch down, everything has to look good. Then, when you do touchdown – if you’ve ever landed at JFK, I landed at JFK one time and the flight attendant, I think this was on JetBlue Airlines, the flight attendant said, “Well, as you can tell by the potholes in the runway, welcome to JFK.” That’s the experience you get when you land at JFK. It’s not a great one, but you know you’re there. So, we haven’t even got to the gate yet.

You need to make sure that the approach…that everything is clear, marked, easy to find, welcoming… parking is ample, spacious. The parking lot’s not full of cigarette butts and soda cups. It’s paying attention to those details from the outside in. If, as a business owner, you’ve become blind to those things, which often happens. Adam, what happens is we walk in those doors every single day. The first time you notice some paint peeling you go, “Oh, yeah. Someday I’m going to have to repaint this building.” You forget about it, and pretty soon it just becomes invisible to you. But, the person that’s coming in for the very first time notices those things.

So, what I like to recommend is that as a business owner, find somebody else’s eyes to look at it. If you don’t have a way to ask real customers about it, then get somebody. Probably a spouse isn’t the best, because a spouse is going to be suffering from the same “inside the bottle” view that you do.

Get a friend or a friend’s spouse and say, “Hey, I need you to come to the store and I need you to stop a block or two out. As soon as you know you can see the place, stop and take a few notes. What could we do better? How could our sign be better? What do you see? What do you notice? Then get a little closer, maybe half a block away. Then, as you get within shouting distance, same thing. Make notes about what you see on the sidewalk, what you see in the door, all those things.”

So, everything from the outside to the threshold is the approach. If you can get somebody to take some notes and make some suggestions, you’ll probably find half a dozen things that you can do to improve the approach and not spend a whole lot of money. Guess what? It’s going to make your ad budget work better. It will make your radio ads work better, it will make your newspaper ads work better because it will help you from short-circuiting that feedback loop that is generated by word-of-mouth and referrals. All these little things just add up to something big.

Adam: Right, and especially in person. People are going to hear about a negative comment tenfold over a good experience.

Dave: Absolutely. We’re all more inclined to repeat something bad that happened to us than something good. So, you’ve got to just eliminate any possibility of someone having a bad experience, even if it’s something as seemingly insignificant as dirty windows in your storefront.

Now, if you have a service company, if you’re an HVAC company or a roofing company, and you’ve got vehicles out around town and nobody comes to your location much, pay attention the same way. Can I read the signs on your van from a block away, from a half block away?

I had a client who had some of those wraps, basically, on the sides of his van windows. They were in a color that if the sun was at the wrong angle, you really couldn’t tell that it had anything on it at all. So, that’s a problem. Make sure that it’s high contrast, high visibility. People need to see that. People need to know that you’re pros and that you are what you say you are in your ads. There you are, there’s your van, and it looks good. It makes a difference, it really does.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads Partner, Dave Young. For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast by sending the link or the MP3 to someone who could benefit from the information.

Thank you again for listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Dave Young.

This is Mistake #9 of the 12 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising, as presented in On Your Market.

Adam: Welcome once again to BrandingBlog SoundBites with Wizard of Ads partner Dave Young, from BrandingBlog.com. I’m Adam Lefler. Hello Dave.

Dave: Hi, how you doing Adam?

Adam: Doing well, how about yourself?

Dave: Great, thanks.

Adam: All right. The last time we were still on the biggest mistakes of the twelve. And we’re on number nine now. Great Production that Misses the Mark. What is number nine, Dave?

Dave: Well, great productions that misses the mark. You know we’ve all seen ads, and we go wow, that was really cool, that was really funny, humorous, whatever. But, what was it trying to get me to do, what product was it representing?

In a simple way, that’s really what we’re talking about, is an ad that you go “wow, that was really cool”, and you can’t name the product. You can’t remember anything. It just made you laugh; it was interesting it was well done. Right? So sometimes, that seems to be the bar that advertiser reach for, and then they scratch their heads and wonder, why their ad budgets’ not working, very well. Does that make sense?

Adam: Yeah, it certainly does. It’s one thing to get people talking. It’s another thing to have them remembering what they’re talking about.

Dave: Exactly, so there’s this story from 1967. Are you familiar with who Stan Freberg is?

Adam: I’ve heard the name.

Dave: He was a big radio guy, he’s the guy who started in the ‘80’s with the concept of radio is the theater of the mind. So, some people might remember, I mean radio stations all over the country, used to play this industry promotional ad about turning lake Michigan into a giant lake of hot chocolate. And the Air Force, flying over dropping marshmallows in, and you know, all of this stuff.

So his point was, that using radio, you can do things that you couldn’t actually do in physical reality. You can create things, and you can do it on a really low budget. If you wanted to make a TV commercial, like that you just couldn’t do it. Nobody could afford to do that. And that was before the days of, CGI. So still that was a problem. And Stan Freberg’s a very creative guy, as far as doing these campaigns that are just kind of over the top.

And in 1967, this is one of his deals. Pacific Airlines, which was a little commuter airline, on the west coast. They hired Stan Freberg, to design an unorthodox campaign. What he suggested was that Pacific Airlines, poke fun at the one thing airlines never mention, which is fear of flying.

So, at Freberg’s direction, Pacific Airlines placed full-page ads in newspapers. And this is verbatim, the copy that was in these ads. It said, “Hey there, you with the sweat in your palms. It’s about time an airline faced up to something. Most people are scared witless of flying, deep down inside, every time that big plane, lifts off that runway, you wonder if this is it, right? You want to know something fellow? So does the pilot, deep down inside.”

I mean can you imagine reading that, and going, oh, my gosh. I don’t think, well I would hope that pilots, don’t have that feeling, deep down inside, right? That’s what they’re known for, is their confidence. And that’s not the message you want to convey to the public, about your pilots, or your airline, so. He didn’t end there; this was a campaign that they took all the way, through to the customer experience, inside the airplane. So he also arranged for flight attendants, to hand out survival kits, which had rabbit’s feet in them.

And they passed out the book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” And when the plane touched down, the flight attendants were supposed to shout, “We made it, how about that!” The airline went under, two months after the campaign started. So, it was a really, clever, creative campaign. Well executed, well done, and it killed the business. And it only took them two months to do it. They were deeply committed to their creativity, to their message, but it was absolutely the wrong message. It was well executed, it was a well-produced plan and it ended up giving people no confidence whatsoever in the company.

So that airline went under in 1967. Stan Freberg, I think he’s even still around. So the point there is it’s ultimately the business owner’s responsibility to make sure that the message, the core values, even if you have a consultant, or an agency…that those core values are being communicated, in a way which meets the customer’s felt need. Not just accomplishing something that’s clever, funny, and creative, and different.

So your goals, instead of being clever, funny, creative, and different, should be informative, believable, memorable, and persuasive. Those are the things that you should be after. So, when we talk about Great Production that Misses the Mark, that’s what we’re talking about. You can go over the top, and make really cool sounding, really cool reading, funky messages, but convince people, to do the exact thing that you don’t want them to do, which is, not do business with you.

Adam: Right, it only took a few months to totally miss the mark, and a company, went right out of business.

Dave: Yeah, so you’ve got to be careful with that. You’ve got to make sure that the messages are targeted in the right direction. So, that’s the biggest mistake number nine. Great Production that Misses the Mark.

Adam: You’ve been listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites, with Wizard Of Ads partner Dave Young. For more information, you can visit Dave Young’s BrandingBlog.com. Please feel free to share this podcast, by sending the link or the mp3 with someone, who can benefit from the information.

Thank you again for listening to BrandingBlog SoundBites, with Dave Young.

This podcast and blog post were created using the ShortcutBlogging method.