Saturday, May 14, 2005
Business Lessons from My Daughter’s Graduation—What You Do for Others
It’s humbling when your children surpass you. One of the events my wife, son and I attended at my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute was an awards ceremony she said we really didn’t need to attend.
“I think I’m getting an award,” she said, “but it’s no big deal. It’s just a little research award for the project I did last year. Everybody who does a research project gets one.” She made it seem like a glorified term paper.
Despite Becca downplaying the award, we went to the ceremony. I mean, why travel halfway across the country for your kid and then miss seeing her get an award?
This was no let’s-give-everyone-an-award-to-boost-their-self-esteem type of award ceremony, though. Most of the awards went to faculty members for significant accomplishments in research or mentoring. Out of the entire ceremony, only five awards went to students.
My jaw dropped when they announced her award and described her project. She had developed statistical models for assessing patients. This system could more accurately predict a successful course of treatment for mental health patients. The professor presenting the award went on to say that Becca’s evaluation system was being adopted by mental health facilities along the entire East Coast. Glorified term paper indeed!
It’s humbling to see your child surpass you in achievements. At her age, I was making a hurried application to grad school—more to extend my time in the familiar environment of college than to improve my value in the work world. Her, she’s finding ways for mental health professionals to treat their patients more successfully.
But as humbling as it is, it’s far more gratifying. Seeing your child achieve, you can’t help but feel you’ve done something right. And in giving them an environment where they could follow their dreams and excel in them, I feel like my wife, Joanne, and I have added far more to the world than by anything else we could have done.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t claim we’ve been perfect parents. I, especially, have messed up far more than I would have liked. But somehow we’ve helped our six kids turn out very well.
This brings me to the business lesson in this brag session: focus on what you leave behind in your business more than on what you can get out of it. You’ll accomplish a lot more than you ever imagined you would.
Joanne and I could have focused on raising our children to make us look good. We could have pushed them to fulfill our dreams. Or we could have smothered them with protection and never let them venture beyond the safety of what was familiar to us. In any of those ways, we probably would have messed them up big-time.
But we chose to let each of them develop their own dreams and take their own risks. As a result, all six of our children face life with passion and curiosity. And they excel in ways that constantly surprise us.
In the same way, you can go into business to make a buck for yourself. You can use your business to rip people off by giving them as little for their money as you can get away with. You can choose to offer safe, generic products in the hope that vast numbers of people will buy without you having to put any effort into trying to solve their needs.
Or you can focus on helping specific groups of people to find solutions to their problems. You can find people who have a passion and help them develop that passion with the solutions you provide. And just like Joanne and I, you’ll be surprised not only to succeed, but with how much more far-reaching of success you’ve accomplished.
It’s humbling when your children surpass you. One of the events my wife, son and I attended at my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute was an awards ceremony she said we really didn’t need to attend.
“I think I’m getting an award,” she said, “but it’s no big deal. It’s just a little research award for the project I did last year. Everybody who does a research project gets one.” She made it seem like a glorified term paper.
Despite Becca downplaying the award, we went to the ceremony. I mean, why travel halfway across the country for your kid and then miss seeing her get an award?
This was no let’s-give-everyone-an-award-to-boost-their-self-esteem type of award ceremony, though. Most of the awards went to faculty members for significant accomplishments in research or mentoring. Out of the entire ceremony, only five awards went to students.
My jaw dropped when they announced her award and described her project. She had developed statistical models for assessing patients. This system could more accurately predict a successful course of treatment for mental health patients. The professor presenting the award went on to say that Becca’s evaluation system was being adopted by mental health facilities along the entire East Coast. Glorified term paper indeed!
It’s humbling to see your child surpass you in achievements. At her age, I was making a hurried application to grad school—more to extend my time in the familiar environment of college than to improve my value in the work world. Her, she’s finding ways for mental health professionals to treat their patients more successfully.
But as humbling as it is, it’s far more gratifying. Seeing your child achieve, you can’t help but feel you’ve done something right. And in giving them an environment where they could follow their dreams and excel in them, I feel like my wife, Joanne, and I have added far more to the world than by anything else we could have done.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t claim we’ve been perfect parents. I, especially, have messed up far more than I would have liked. But somehow we’ve helped our six kids turn out very well.
This brings me to the business lesson in this brag session: focus on what you leave behind in your business more than on what you can get out of it. You’ll accomplish a lot more than you ever imagined you would.
Joanne and I could have focused on raising our children to make us look good. We could have pushed them to fulfill our dreams. Or we could have smothered them with protection and never let them venture beyond the safety of what was familiar to us. In any of those ways, we probably would have messed them up big-time.
But we chose to let each of them develop their own dreams and take their own risks. As a result, all six of our children face life with passion and curiosity. And they excel in ways that constantly surprise us.
In the same way, you can go into business to make a buck for yourself. You can use your business to rip people off by giving them as little for their money as you can get away with. You can choose to offer safe, generic products in the hope that vast numbers of people will buy without you having to put any effort into trying to solve their needs.
Or you can focus on helping specific groups of people to find solutions to their problems. You can find people who have a passion and help them develop that passion with the solutions you provide. And just like Joanne and I, you’ll be surprised not only to succeed, but with how much more far-reaching of success you’ve accomplished.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Business Lessons from My Daughter’s Graduation—Just Get It Started
For my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute, I worked with a manufacturer to create a truly memorable graduation present available nowhere else. It was something I felt could also sell well to other graduates and other schools, so I hoped to show it to buyers at the campus gift shop and such.
Unfortunately, other priorities didn’t give me a chance to get everything perfectly in place for a sales presentation. I didn’t get pricing fully worked out with the manufacturer. I didn’t work out a sales pitch. Hey, I didn’t even know how to put together a successful sales pitch.
I had a lot of confidence in the product, but nothing to back me up. I was on my own, without the usual crutches of gathering lots and lots of information on some new endeavor before taking the first step.
I could easily have put the idea aside as a missed opportunity and hope that—someday—I could come back, perfectly prepared. But I winged it instead.
I went to various buyers on campus with an unpolished, amateurish presentation and an offer to send pricing and specifications when I got home. None of the buyers had any reason to mistake me for a professional salesman.
But my gut was right about this being a product that was good enough to sell itself. I came home with interest from multiple buyers, contact information for four other potential outlets if the first two don’t pan out and—oh, yes—contact information and a personal recommendation from one buyer to present my product to a national buyer that supplies over 500 college bookstores across the US.
My natural inclination—and the natural inclination for many small business owners—is to wait until I get everything perfect before I make a move. Get every last detail worked out, every last problem solved, and every last risk de-risk-ified. Only in an environment where we feel that every chance of failure has been eliminated do we feel safe enough to take even the smallest risk.
Where would my product be, though, if I had taken that approach? No buyers eagerly awaiting my pricing, no contact info that could lead to over 500 more retailers. I’d be stuck back at the beginning with nothing more than a promising idea and a long list of tasks I felt obligated to do before even starting.
Which position would you rather be in? You can always work on making it perfect once you have it started. But if you never get it started, there’s nothing to perfect. The most important step isn’t to get things perfect; it’s to get them started.
For my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute, I worked with a manufacturer to create a truly memorable graduation present available nowhere else. It was something I felt could also sell well to other graduates and other schools, so I hoped to show it to buyers at the campus gift shop and such.
Unfortunately, other priorities didn’t give me a chance to get everything perfectly in place for a sales presentation. I didn’t get pricing fully worked out with the manufacturer. I didn’t work out a sales pitch. Hey, I didn’t even know how to put together a successful sales pitch.
I had a lot of confidence in the product, but nothing to back me up. I was on my own, without the usual crutches of gathering lots and lots of information on some new endeavor before taking the first step.
I could easily have put the idea aside as a missed opportunity and hope that—someday—I could come back, perfectly prepared. But I winged it instead.
I went to various buyers on campus with an unpolished, amateurish presentation and an offer to send pricing and specifications when I got home. None of the buyers had any reason to mistake me for a professional salesman.
But my gut was right about this being a product that was good enough to sell itself. I came home with interest from multiple buyers, contact information for four other potential outlets if the first two don’t pan out and—oh, yes—contact information and a personal recommendation from one buyer to present my product to a national buyer that supplies over 500 college bookstores across the US.
My natural inclination—and the natural inclination for many small business owners—is to wait until I get everything perfect before I make a move. Get every last detail worked out, every last problem solved, and every last risk de-risk-ified. Only in an environment where we feel that every chance of failure has been eliminated do we feel safe enough to take even the smallest risk.
Where would my product be, though, if I had taken that approach? No buyers eagerly awaiting my pricing, no contact info that could lead to over 500 more retailers. I’d be stuck back at the beginning with nothing more than a promising idea and a long list of tasks I felt obligated to do before even starting.
Which position would you rather be in? You can always work on making it perfect once you have it started. But if you never get it started, there’s nothing to perfect. The most important step isn’t to get things perfect; it’s to get them started.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Business Lessons from My Daughter’s Graduation—Do Your Visitors’ Thinking for Them
On our first day in town for my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute, my wife and I took her and our son, Ben, out for lunch. Becca recommended a restaurant she felt we’d like.
When we walked in, though, I wondered if we were in the right place. Other than a few tables in the corner, it looked like a grocery store with aisles of display racks filled with imported and specialty foods.
If Becca hadn’t been there, I would have figured we were in the wrong place and left. But she guided us around, pointing out a sushi bar in one corner, a deli in the back, juice bars and coffee shops scattered around the store.
“OK,” I thought, “so it’s not a just a grocery store; it’s also a food court.” So I looked for the typical order lines and cashiers I’m used to seeing in food courts. Again, I was perplexed. None of them seemed to have a way to pay for your order.
Becca flitted around, guiding one of us to one place and another to another place. She’d leave us—baffled—at the spot she felt suited our tastes best. Each of us wondered, “OK, what do I do next?”
I almost gave up on the whole adventure when we finally corralled her to answer our questions. Turns out, the restaurant was designed to be unlike any restaurant anyone expected. The owners wanted it to come across like a grocery store. And they wanted it to work differently than a typical food court.
By making it, to all appearances, like a grocery store when you picked up your food and ate it right there, they had become an adventure spot for students at the two colleges in this small town.
Their traffic came entirely from its cachet as a cool restaurant/grocery-store-where-you-could-do-things-that-would-get-you-arrested-if-you-did-them-in-a-real-grocery-store.
You paid by—get this—taking your empty food containers to the checkout line, paying for what had been in them, and then throwing the empty containers into a garbage bag instead of into a grocery bag. It was perfect for an adventurous college crowd, eager to experience new things, but new customers definitely needed a guide to show them how it worked.
My frustration in exploring this restaurant got me thinking how much it was like a lot of underperforming websites. You enter the site and nothing clearly identifies it as being what you thought it would be. If visitors don’t immediately go elsewhere, they look for signs of what they’re looking for, but don’t see anything that leads them where they want to go. And when uncertainties pop up, there’s no ready answer in front of them.
People react to uncertainty on websites the same way I reacted to the unexpected concept of that restaurant. They want to find something familiar to latch onto; they want to be reassured that they’ll find what they’re looking for. That’s not to say that being different is bad. It just means that you have to guide your visitors all the more thoroughly to ensure they can find their way through your site comfortably.
Does your website clearly identify what it’s about? If not, you’re sending them out the door to search elsewhere. Does your site lead your visitors clearly to what they’re looking for? If they get lost, you’ve lost any sales they might make as well. And does your site anticipate the questions and concerns your visitors are likely to have and present them with clear answers? If not, you’re virtually guaranteed to have them hold off on any purchases.
Clever concepts are fine and even an excellent way to generate traffic when your concepts match your audience. But you never want your visitors to stumble their way through the unfamiliar on their own. Just like we needed my daughter to guide us through what turned out to be an innovative and fun dining experience, you need to make sure that your website reassures, guides, and answers your visitors all the way through from entering your site to finding what they were looking for.
Jeff
On our first day in town for my daughter Becca’s graduation from Virginia Military Institute, my wife and I took her and our son, Ben, out for lunch. Becca recommended a restaurant she felt we’d like.
When we walked in, though, I wondered if we were in the right place. Other than a few tables in the corner, it looked like a grocery store with aisles of display racks filled with imported and specialty foods.
If Becca hadn’t been there, I would have figured we were in the wrong place and left. But she guided us around, pointing out a sushi bar in one corner, a deli in the back, juice bars and coffee shops scattered around the store.
“OK,” I thought, “so it’s not a just a grocery store; it’s also a food court.” So I looked for the typical order lines and cashiers I’m used to seeing in food courts. Again, I was perplexed. None of them seemed to have a way to pay for your order.
Becca flitted around, guiding one of us to one place and another to another place. She’d leave us—baffled—at the spot she felt suited our tastes best. Each of us wondered, “OK, what do I do next?”
I almost gave up on the whole adventure when we finally corralled her to answer our questions. Turns out, the restaurant was designed to be unlike any restaurant anyone expected. The owners wanted it to come across like a grocery store. And they wanted it to work differently than a typical food court.
By making it, to all appearances, like a grocery store when you picked up your food and ate it right there, they had become an adventure spot for students at the two colleges in this small town.
Their traffic came entirely from its cachet as a cool restaurant/grocery-store-where-you-could-do-things-that-would-get-you-arrested-if-you-did-them-in-a-real-grocery-store.
You paid by—get this—taking your empty food containers to the checkout line, paying for what had been in them, and then throwing the empty containers into a garbage bag instead of into a grocery bag. It was perfect for an adventurous college crowd, eager to experience new things, but new customers definitely needed a guide to show them how it worked.
My frustration in exploring this restaurant got me thinking how much it was like a lot of underperforming websites. You enter the site and nothing clearly identifies it as being what you thought it would be. If visitors don’t immediately go elsewhere, they look for signs of what they’re looking for, but don’t see anything that leads them where they want to go. And when uncertainties pop up, there’s no ready answer in front of them.
People react to uncertainty on websites the same way I reacted to the unexpected concept of that restaurant. They want to find something familiar to latch onto; they want to be reassured that they’ll find what they’re looking for. That’s not to say that being different is bad. It just means that you have to guide your visitors all the more thoroughly to ensure they can find their way through your site comfortably.
Does your website clearly identify what it’s about? If not, you’re sending them out the door to search elsewhere. Does your site lead your visitors clearly to what they’re looking for? If they get lost, you’ve lost any sales they might make as well. And does your site anticipate the questions and concerns your visitors are likely to have and present them with clear answers? If not, you’re virtually guaranteed to have them hold off on any purchases.
Clever concepts are fine and even an excellent way to generate traffic when your concepts match your audience. But you never want your visitors to stumble their way through the unfamiliar on their own. Just like we needed my daughter to guide us through what turned out to be an innovative and fun dining experience, you need to make sure that your website reassures, guides, and answers your visitors all the way through from entering your site to finding what they were looking for.
Jeff
Away from computers - Yikes!
This will be the last you'll see a blog from me until next Thursday. I'm off tomorrow for my daughter, Becca's, graduation from Virginia Military Institute. We fly down tomorrow, spend four days with the many events that are part of graduation at that tradition-rich institution, and then drive Becca's car back to Minnesota.
(Note: Upon our return, I added thoughts I had while away and backdated them to the applicable dates of our trip.)
It should be quite an experience! Granted, I'm nervous being away from the business that long. I may be able to sneak an occasional peek at my e-mail and eBay to remain aware of any time-critical developments. But with so much of what I feel I need to do being on computer, I feel a little naked going without.
Most of my time will be spent with family but, as I always do on trips, I'll take some non-computer work along to work on during whatever down time I have. This will be a little different than usual, though.
Usually, I've taken stuff to study or notes for articles to write. Then I've come home and been so swamped with what I had left behind (and what additional work I had generated for myself by writing more articles that I needed to type onto the computer), that the work I did got pushed off to the side.
So this trip I make myself no promise to write x number of new articles or review x number of ebooks. I want this to be a trip in which I break that mold. I want this to be a trip in which I refresh myself instead of heightening my pace even more.
So the work I plan for my down moments is more vision-type work—reassessing where the business has gone so far and if it's truly going where I want it to go. I want to look at it and see if it's taking me in the direction that I've been realizing more and more that my heart wants to go.
I find that what really interests me in this business venture are the things inside people that affect whether customers buy or walk away, and whether business owners succeed or short-circuit themselves.
Admittedly, the only place I've really dealt with any of that is in the bonus tips I send out when someone signs up for my newsletter. But I need to follow that more; that's what drives me right now.
So what work I do on this trip will be to revisit my goals and make sure they—and the direction of my site—reflect the leading of my heart.
I with that, I bid you well until a week from now.
Jeff
This will be the last you'll see a blog from me until next Thursday. I'm off tomorrow for my daughter, Becca's, graduation from Virginia Military Institute. We fly down tomorrow, spend four days with the many events that are part of graduation at that tradition-rich institution, and then drive Becca's car back to Minnesota.
(Note: Upon our return, I added thoughts I had while away and backdated them to the applicable dates of our trip.)
It should be quite an experience! Granted, I'm nervous being away from the business that long. I may be able to sneak an occasional peek at my e-mail and eBay to remain aware of any time-critical developments. But with so much of what I feel I need to do being on computer, I feel a little naked going without.
Most of my time will be spent with family but, as I always do on trips, I'll take some non-computer work along to work on during whatever down time I have. This will be a little different than usual, though.
Usually, I've taken stuff to study or notes for articles to write. Then I've come home and been so swamped with what I had left behind (and what additional work I had generated for myself by writing more articles that I needed to type onto the computer), that the work I did got pushed off to the side.
So this trip I make myself no promise to write x number of new articles or review x number of ebooks. I want this to be a trip in which I break that mold. I want this to be a trip in which I refresh myself instead of heightening my pace even more.
So the work I plan for my down moments is more vision-type work—reassessing where the business has gone so far and if it's truly going where I want it to go. I want to look at it and see if it's taking me in the direction that I've been realizing more and more that my heart wants to go.
I find that what really interests me in this business venture are the things inside people that affect whether customers buy or walk away, and whether business owners succeed or short-circuit themselves.
Admittedly, the only place I've really dealt with any of that is in the bonus tips I send out when someone signs up for my newsletter. But I need to follow that more; that's what drives me right now.
So what work I do on this trip will be to revisit my goals and make sure they—and the direction of my site—reflect the leading of my heart.
I with that, I bid you well until a week from now.
Jeff
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Relief
My day today revolved not so much around work as around the potential of not working. Fortunately, though, it ended well.
I've had back pain since last Thursday that has gotten increasingly severe. My wife, Joanne, finally ignored my male posturing and called the doctor, who raised the spectre of sending me to the hospital just two days before we were set to fly out East for our daughter's graduation. OK, they got my attention. I agreed to have it checked out.
Fortunately, it was nothing that remotely required hospitalization and I've noticed some improvement already with ice packs, special exercises and medication. It still looks like I'll be pretty uncomfortable during the trip, but at least I'll be going.
Now if I can just get some relief on the work I need to get done before leaving. Both the work for my client and work for my site could keep me fully occupied full time from now until then. I'll get done what I get done and that's all I can do.
But I got one project for One Stop done today and that's a load off my mind.
Now to get some relief of another kind and see if my back is improved enough to allow me some sleep tonight.
Jeff
My day today revolved not so much around work as around the potential of not working. Fortunately, though, it ended well.
I've had back pain since last Thursday that has gotten increasingly severe. My wife, Joanne, finally ignored my male posturing and called the doctor, who raised the spectre of sending me to the hospital just two days before we were set to fly out East for our daughter's graduation. OK, they got my attention. I agreed to have it checked out.
Fortunately, it was nothing that remotely required hospitalization and I've noticed some improvement already with ice packs, special exercises and medication. It still looks like I'll be pretty uncomfortable during the trip, but at least I'll be going.
Now if I can just get some relief on the work I need to get done before leaving. Both the work for my client and work for my site could keep me fully occupied full time from now until then. I'll get done what I get done and that's all I can do.
But I got one project for One Stop done today and that's a load off my mind.
Now to get some relief of another kind and see if my back is improved enough to allow me some sleep tonight.
Jeff
Monday, May 09, 2005
Playing detective
The last two weeks have shown quite a spurt of sales for my client, so I got to play detective today. I haven't gotten to do that much lately, as Mark has pulled me away from a lot of the tracking and analysis I had done into more of a just-the-most-crucial-tasks as he heads into his traditional slow time. But the sudden explosion convinced him to have me to pull out my ClickTracks and figure out why the first week of May has surpassed the sales from the entire month of May 2004 already.
Don't you love problems where you're trying to figure out things are going surprisingly well? I found that one set of keywords that we never had been able to get much traction for has finally worked its way into high enough rankings to be visible—and is going absolutely berzerk.
I'd been targetting it for better optimization (along with a number of other pages) for a couple of months now, and it's finally worked its way into the top 20. This month I'll see if I can get it into the top ten.
It's funny. I had almost given up on that one. I knew the sales potential was always there, but getting it the visibility it needed was the problem. It simply didn't seem to have enough related keywords on the rest of the site to give it the boost it needed. But now it's showing signs of doing what we hoped it would.
The goal now becomes to do the same with some of the other pages that have yet to fulfill their potential and to keep this one visible.
Jeff
The last two weeks have shown quite a spurt of sales for my client, so I got to play detective today. I haven't gotten to do that much lately, as Mark has pulled me away from a lot of the tracking and analysis I had done into more of a just-the-most-crucial-tasks as he heads into his traditional slow time. But the sudden explosion convinced him to have me to pull out my ClickTracks and figure out why the first week of May has surpassed the sales from the entire month of May 2004 already.
Don't you love problems where you're trying to figure out things are going surprisingly well? I found that one set of keywords that we never had been able to get much traction for has finally worked its way into high enough rankings to be visible—and is going absolutely berzerk.
I'd been targetting it for better optimization (along with a number of other pages) for a couple of months now, and it's finally worked its way into the top 20. This month I'll see if I can get it into the top ten.
It's funny. I had almost given up on that one. I knew the sales potential was always there, but getting it the visibility it needed was the problem. It simply didn't seem to have enough related keywords on the rest of the site to give it the boost it needed. But now it's showing signs of doing what we hoped it would.
The goal now becomes to do the same with some of the other pages that have yet to fulfill their potential and to keep this one visible.
Jeff
Mother's Day
Today was a day for honoring the woman I'm proud to have as my wife and as the mother of our six children.
Here's to you, Joanne! You've always been my special lady!
Jeff
Today was a day for honoring the woman I'm proud to have as my wife and as the mother of our six children.
Here's to you, Joanne! You've always been my special lady!
Jeff
Sunday, May 08, 2005
A day of surprises
Today was a day for a couple of surprises. I got the new content up for One Stop (no, that wasn't surprising) and then started looking at which articles I had available that would work well for syndicating. I went the Open Directory Project to see how much work I'd need to do before I would have an extensive enough site to stand a chance of getting accepted.
To my surprise, the first couple of sites I checked were comparable to One Stop, if not actually less extensive. I noticed that they tended to be a little more clean in design than One Stop, but that's something I can easily change. But it tells me that I'm a lot closer to being ready to submit to the directories than I thought.
Second pleasant surprise was that my son decided to treat the whole family to a movie—Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A clever and inventive film that we all enjoyed. And I'm sure that the boys are already hunting for an MP3 of the hilarious title song, "Thanks for All the Fish," to download.
All in all, a pleasant day.
Jeff
Today was a day for a couple of surprises. I got the new content up for One Stop (no, that wasn't surprising) and then started looking at which articles I had available that would work well for syndicating. I went the Open Directory Project to see how much work I'd need to do before I would have an extensive enough site to stand a chance of getting accepted.
To my surprise, the first couple of sites I checked were comparable to One Stop, if not actually less extensive. I noticed that they tended to be a little more clean in design than One Stop, but that's something I can easily change. But it tells me that I'm a lot closer to being ready to submit to the directories than I thought.
Second pleasant surprise was that my son decided to treat the whole family to a movie—Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A clever and inventive film that we all enjoyed. And I'm sure that the boys are already hunting for an MP3 of the hilarious title song, "Thanks for All the Fish," to download.
All in all, a pleasant day.
Jeff
© 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Jeff Baas, One Stop Web Support
