When you fixate on one client, it makes it less likely that you sell them, or anyone.  When I’ve believed that one client was going to be my meal ticket, the end-all, be all it’s rarely worked out that way. Instead, it becomes rougher than it should be.

Selling to an audience of one is tough, because eventually they pick up on the clues. If you want something, and are less than candid on it, you reveal things in the nonverbal communication. The lack of candor undermines the relationship.  Fixating on one client means that you lose power to them.

That’s why it’s better to be catholic about who you sell to.  Broadly speaking, there are dozens of people I’d be happy to work with.  Broadly speaking, I know that I’ll grow my business with or without any particular deal. I am getting the at bats.  I close one in 3.  (1/3 I reject, 1/3 I would like but don’t get, and 1/3 I would like.)

When we get fixated on people, it’s tougher.  The percentage doesn’t change much, but you lose dignity unless it’s done with earnestness and the verve and moxie of a romantic suitor.

On Sunday Mornings, and even sometimes on Saturday Mornings, my dad would make pancakes. It was a nice treat, I got it just about every weekend, and when I realized it was the weekend, I would be excited in advance.  I’d usually wake up an hour or so before my parents did.  On Saturdays, I’d watch Superfriends or some tripe on TV, and then, eventually, Dad would come down.  On Sundays, the television fare for a child wasn’t particularly good, so I’d play with my Star Wars figures, or I’d wait.

“Want pancakes, Chrisser?”  I was, at that time, never happy about being called Chrisser.  Rhymed with Pisser, a word I knew and used by the tender age of about 8.

I remember a couple of times feeling lottery-lucky when I got pancakes two days in a row.  He’d put applesauce in them sometimes, and Dad was contemptuous of the Bisquick recipe.   No, he did it himself.  Didn’t take any extra time, and you had pancakes with substance. I remember our house always felt cold in the mornings.  I had a brown robe, and some Empire Strikes Back PJs.  That would put me at 7 or 8.

Mom worked second shift. it seemed every other weekend.  I looked forward to the weekends when Mom didn’t work.  It usually meant that we’d get to go somewhere.  (When I was about 14, it seems that mom couldn’t spend enough time at work, but that’s the way it always is with 14 year olds).

Dad got up first. I remember watching Sunday Morning with Walter Chronkite.  It usually ended with something fairly reflective, footage of hummingbirds or streams or whatever.  I looked forward to that.  Sometimes Dad would put on Crossfire after, or at least that’s how I remember it.  Our black and white TV occupied a variety of positions in our kitchen.

I got pancakes one at a time, as they came off the skillet.  I didn’t need any butter, they were lightly fried with a tiny bit of butter.  Sometimes they’d be crispy on top and almost liquid in the center.  They always had more texture than what you get at Denny’s or just about any place other than iHop.

One morning, I was awake and Dad had cooked the first pancake.  He had a cast iron skillet.  That meant that the first one was always a crap-shoot, unless you were really sure that the skillet was hot.  He would often as not simply preemptively pitch it. I was aghast at that! It might be terrible, but even so, the waste of an almost good pancake was a travesty.

The pancake feast would linger on for a while, Dad would feed me a pancake, cook one for himself, and eat them until the batter was gone. I usually had a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice.

Towards the end of the Sunday routine, on days she worked, Mom would come down the stairs and make tea.  Until I was probably about 8, I wanted to sit in her lap at some point.  She’d have a Lenders bagel, or Rye Crisp with cracker barrel cheese.  She was always happy to see me.  There was a recurring struggle in our house.  Mom was convinced that, left to his own devices, Dad would take a really hot pan and immerse it in cold water, causing it to warp.  More than once, a reminder to let the pan cool would be met with a fairly testy “I know, I know,” or something like it.

One morning I remember waiting for my pancake.  I hoped that Dad would remember on his own to warm up the syrup.  Often he did, and that detail made me feel really happy and loved.  On days he didn’t, I was more disappointed than I should be.  I would sit in agony if he hadn’t started heating the syrup.  I wonder why it never occurred to me to ask….

If we live to be about 80, we only get 4,000 sundays in our lives.  As children between 3 and 13 we only get 500 or so.  It seems like a lot, but each day is precious. We won’t have another like it.   I worry that I’m not doing enough to make Ruby and Jack feel beloved.  I worry that I’m letting work, testiness and other things mount and get to us.

We’ve gotten a lot of leads from all over the place.  Often, a new contact comes to our site and starts a message with:

“We have a product that’s identical to _______, we need you to make a video that’s very similar by the end of next month.”

While I call everyone back, I’m always leery of dealing with this sort of person. They are signaling some sort of myopic selfishness.  A false urgency.  An unpleasantness and a demanding personality. I never give them price breaks, and I don’t make any concessions.  I’m happy to let them think I’m a bad salesperson that “blew an easy sale.”  That’s fine.

People that presume we’ll take everyone that works with us, that we’re so hungry that we’ll price compete generally waste my time. If we happen to close the sale- and it’s been this way for everything I’ve sold from mortgages to movies, it’ll be an antagonistic process.

Because, the truth is, life is short.  Dealing with an agonizing customer for $15,000 or whatever it winds up being isn’t worth it.  It’s not worth it to deal with assholes without having the upper hand.  It’s exhausting to have to always be on guard and it’s particularly tedious when your customers say things like “I bet you’re excited because you got to make a sale.”

Assuming that the person won’t want to do business with you is a better way to start. Even when it’s not right, the reflex reaction is “oh yes we will.”  You don’t feel bossed around by someone so you don’t react negatively. Being that “Type A” rarely gets you much.

There are lots of things I don’t understand.

I was not in the amazing business.  I was a Toshiba computer that you buy from Best Buy.  Nobody is emotionally connected to that, there’s no magic involved.

First – how can you sustain being mediocre?  How can you live in a way where you’re currently in a mediocre business that’s measurement is units, not “Awesomes?”

How can you be in a business that’s not shooting to be the best in its market? I can see a local Realtor wanting to be the best in a tightly defined market (their contacts, their rotary club).

How can you not realize that every job that exists today is 3 years from complete obsolescence?

How can you make something that’s just OK? Intentionally? 

If you’re not in pursuit of being the best on the planet, to transcend your limitations and push for something more, the cognitive dissonance will wreck you.  You’ll burn out, you’ll have testy discussions and you’ll wreck yourself.  Pursuing excellence is exciting.

[Note: This is part 2 of a planned 4 part series on my move, etc. confessions <--for more.]

I didn’t want to sell infoproducts. Lame, usually.  Sometimes worse.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t good stuff out there. A precious few are worth it.

99.5%, at minimum are a waste of money.

Because I said it before: you either can’t be stopped or can’t be helped.

I didn’t have the stomach or heart for it.  I coasted in school, and I didn’t believe that I had the knowledge to impart on people (however, I’m wickedly efficient at producing a mediocre result with next to no effort).

I didn’t want to coach, because telling grown up Realtors “this is Facebook,” couldn’t possibly have a shelf life.  That was beyond obvious, and we didn’t need an Extra Normal to tell us that.

So, when Chris Pearson dropped Thesis it was like a godsend.  I could get a talented designer to whip up a few nice ways of doing things.  I was able to make make some modifications to their photoshop files, and sell websites.

Thesis was a fantastic start, a framework and a community in one package. You had a ton of options for typography, column widths and the rest of it.  For 2008 or 2009 when it dropped, it was spectacularly good.

One of the best things was that Thesis respected designers.  That means that clients could make changes but it was hard to break it.

The road had been paved before me. Infomarketers, the National Association of Realtors and Business week pitched people on blogging.  Everyone – from a plumber to a lawyer wanted a blog.

My work was done, more or less.  IT was easy to close people.  Active Rain had gathered them up and made it easy enough to find new folks.  It even published their phone numbers.

I made this video, put it on a page. Wrote/distributed some inflammatory posts.

The sales part. “$800 gets you a  custom WordPress site and a year’s worth of hosting”.

Most people understood. It wasn’t an unlimited everything site, but it was functional and useful.  I supplemented it with training calls that were basically a way to consolidate support requests.  I learned a little, and I helped some people.

Largely, though I was indifferent to my clients, late paying my vendors and about 3 beats behind.  I kept things afloat through hustle, but I had the Groupon problem ((1)).

I’m telling you this because it’s a fact. I’m not beating myself up or feeling any particular bad way.

I’m telling you this because I believe this: when someone has made a living or a business, it’s a duty to only do your best for them.  There may be times when your best isn’t good enough.  But not doing your best is not the option.

I sold a lot of these sites because others had stoked demand.  I was riding a wave I saw coming, and I was one of the first with my surfboard.  Via Tim, I had some clients that were always ready to buy.  And, I’m a hustler, and I’m good at doing novel things to get customers.

Here’s the problem.  I alluded to it in the last post.

Nice People Don’t All Have To Blog

Remember: 2007-2009 were tough years. The economy, the whole of it was different then.  People had expectations that each year would be a little nicer than the one before it.

People either can’t be stopped, or they won’t be helped.

There’s not a ton of middle ground.  I had, largely, the people in the latter category.  Well meaning, earnest people with rotary club businesses.  Friendly people that cared about helping.  People that were just hayseed hicks that didn’t know any better.

They had no business blogging.  Not because they weren’t great people, but because they had nothing to say. They wouldn’t do the work that it took to create original thought or commentary on their industries.  They’d follow instructions, and regurgitate nonsense in a step-by-step manner.

They didn’t gravitate towards connecting online.

My dad was a community college comp teacher.  Somehow, without meaning to, I made myself into one.  I was editing crap posts about crap businesses.  Indeed it was a great time to buy – or sell- a home.  Or to plan your 401k.  Or whatever.

I had a couple hundred sales made, and they were all writing obvious crap.

I didn’t want to do the Derek Halpern style teaching, nor did I want to spend the time to execute on that level.

So, I did the best I could and was profoundly lucky that my clients were mostly nice people.

Your Blog Will Not Fix Adult Failure Spiral

Most of them. A few people – were in a bad spot.  Problems come with being in a bad spot.

A lot of my clients – because of my price point – were at the end of their rope.  They scrounged $800 of blood money, of next month’s light bill to pay me.

The blog was to be a hail mary.  People believed that with just a few hours of work one time, they’d have an eruption of prestige and traffic.  Arbitrage.  That off the shelf products would yield prestige and more.

They were failing because the had become addicts, th ey had caused problems for themselves((2)).  A blog wasn’t going to fix it. Nor was any type of info-marketing tool. They believed themselves to have been victims of cruel fate.  Nothing could help.

There is not a single trick, hack or kludge.   There is no magic bullet.

They weren’t appropriate customers.  But, who was I to blow against the wind?  I started seeing the signals and giving people stronger and stronger warnings.  That didn’t help my sales efforts.

I was in a deeply flawed business- that’s a fact, and I didn’t want to do what it took to fix it. I didn’t have the patience.  At the core of my being, I’m a hunter. I can’t chain myself to a desk and force myself to be something I’m not.

I started preemptively refunding people that were a teensy bit testy.  That didn’t help.

I wasn’t good enough to get to serve higher end companies, and it is way harder to claw out $800 at a time – when only $300 or so was profit – than it was to do it in another way.

I was not going to – ever – fix the world or have the business.  Mediocrity is contagion, and I was broke and scared most of the time.  I couldn’t see past the next morphine hit to figure out what to do next.

.:.

There are lots of things I don’t understand.

I was not in the amazing business.  I was a Toshiba computer that you buy from Best Buy.  Nobody is emotionally connected to that, there’s no magic involved.

First – how can you sustain being mediocre?  How can you live in a way where you’re currently in a mediocre business that’s measurement is units, not “Awesomes?”

How can you be in a business that’s not shooting to be the best in its market? I can see a local Realtor wanting to be the best in a tightly defined market (their contacts, their rotary club).

How can you not realize that every job that exists today is 3 years from complete obsolescence?

How can you make something that’s just OK? Intentionally? 

If you’re not in pursuit of being the best on the planet, to transcend your limitations and push for something more, the cognitive dissonance will wreck you.  You’ll burn out, you’ll have testy discussions and you’ll wreck yourself.  Pursuing excellence is exciting.

—

((1)) The groupon problem is where you have to sell the future to pay for the past and you’re always a beat behind and doing volume without profitable.  Read here for details.

((2)) Money Drunk, Money Sober by Julia Cameron is a fantastic book for this issue.

I used to love GTD.  Do, delegate, defer, drop.  Lists.  @someday/maybe.  43 Folders.

I still respect it. There is something to be said about being deliberate about your tasks.

But I quit it.  My life is vastly, vastly better.  Because I’m free.

The end product of GTD is itself a problem. Instead of spending time doing important stuff, you become a slave to your lists. It’s on the list, do it.  Even though there’s the “Drop” release valve, you don’t want to “drop” things because hey, you’re not a quitter, are you?

Systems make the man.  Except they don’t, not at all.

They make the man imprison himself with trivial tasks  Being able to focus on what matters isn’t going to be possible if you have a list that bosses you around.

While you’re putting things on a list, it’s likely enough that you’ll put more things on your list.  Inertia. You’ve got list-building momentum. So you put something that has no real relevance, and isn’t part of what you want to do. Because hey, you’re building a list.

Then you   have to deal with the mental overhead and guilt of having a barely relevant item on your to do list.  Do you drop it? Do you need to do it?  Why are there 18 things on this list?  I’ll never get done.

What you need to be doing is reading, writing and getting better.  But that doesn’t happen. Because the endless list of trivia beacons.

What GTD doesn’t acknowledge well is that the really important stuff gets done. Automatically.  You get your contracts and pitches out, because they matter.  You can wait on the TPS report.

We think that we’re cheating when we drop things, so we do stuff that doesn’t matter.  We make our own work. GTD has a severe activity bias. Activity and productivity are different things. Being productive is more than just a long list of things to do.

I remember this time last year.

I was haggling websites with Realtors and Mortgage people that I was basically contemptuous of. (Why I allowed contempt to enter my thinking is a whole other character defect, but I digress).  Everything was life and death.  At $600-1000 a pop, I was haggling all of them, trying to do them, and trying to make things happen a step at a time.

I had too many projects – by far- to do any of them well.  Try doing 20 websites at $789 as an average ticket.  That’s 20 server deployments, 20 themes, 40 designs, 100+ revisions, 140 emails, and probably 3-4 refunds (and I deserved more).

You’re always busy, you never have time to think. Every dime is blood money.

That’s the low end. Lots of volume. Opportunities for mistakes. Not enough money to do anything because it relies on selling LOADS of itself to be profitable.

You can enter a race to the low end, or you can ignore it.

I’ve been actively getting away from GTD lately.  I respect the ethos, but what it does is that it forces you into doing something that was important some time ago.  You may have more information now than you did 2 weeks ago when you set and scheduled projects.

I may be pursing goals that are obsolete, and the simple act of managing the goals that were once important makes for a tough time. I stopped pursuing this months ago, and I’m down to one list that I keep and glance at every so often.   (It’s in Evernote and I like the way that you can hit CMD-OPT-N and have a new note and then dismiss it with CMD-W.)  I process occasionally.

I like Brad Feld’s idea:

After the call, my dad asked “how do you keep track of all this stuff?” It was asked in a loving way with a glint of humor and amazement. I responded simply “I don’t – I just let it wash over me.”

That’s more or less right. I’ll get into how I do things soon.  Wash over me. Let it happen, knock it out, let it be, let it go.

.:.

The issue has been quality.  I won’t  put out schlock under the Simplifilm name.

I’ve been a bit paralyzed at what to do next, so stuff doesn’t get done as fast as it should.

Not long ago, I decided to redo our placeholder website. Jason and I ground it out in a few days.  What happened was that we iterated in public, and during a 3-4 day period, our site looked pretty ugly.

Didn’t matter a bit.  We put it on a new design theme that we liked, and had the changes made. Now that it’s going, it’s rocking, and we’re getting more leads – by far – than we ever have.

That lesson freed me to understand that I’m going to be improving things.  Getting them done is important.

Be in the cult of done.

.:.

What happened was this: we had 270 people see a site that was under construction.

But we got it done. We had 29,000 people see a site that we were both unhappy with.

90 days of traffic with an ugly site.  We were avoiding THAT.

.:.

So, I want to do routine follow up with people. It takes time  for people to part with the 5 figures that it takes to get a Simplifilm sold and created.

The messages have to be right.

But they have to be in place first. They have to exist. 

You can’t improve something that’s not deployed, not really.

So, get it out there.  Set a reminder to reevaluate.  Build a loop.

Then improve it.

.:.

Put something in place, make a loop.

Set a reminder.

Make something, then plan to make it better.

Deploy, improve, repeat.

I’m profoundly grateful for many things.

The idea that, to me, is pretty rough, is that there are a lot of debts that can never be repaid.

I can’t ever repay Marcus Aurelius for filling my soul with good things.

I can’t ever repay my children, Jack and Ruby for transforming my charachter.

I can’t ever repay the people I remember fondly, the teachers, the first co-workers.

The clients that supported me and let me get away with murder and indifference.

I can’t repay my parents for doing the best they could.

There are even people that are not in my life (and won’t be) that I owe something to for a kindness shown towards me.

I feel like I’ve got a much richer, better life than I deserve. I feel like I’ve been selfish and gotten away with something to have the life I do.

I don’t know how I got to the point that I’m at. I don’t know why I have a great life.

All i can do is try and be kind, quit delusions, and listen a lot more.