Leaning The Seat Back

By Filed Under: entitlementality

Leaning Your Seat Back:

Who leans their seat back on a flight?

We’re in a cramped plane, we’re all packed in. There is some sort of unspoken camaraderie of working together to just go in peace.

Invariably, we get people that don’t understand how their actions impact others. Yes, the seat reclines. But it’s a zero sum game. Your comfort – in this case – isn’t a value ad. It’s coming at the expense of someone else’s.

It’s perfectly legal, but the kind of person you become when you’re indifferent to the people around changes things.

Freelancing? In a Service Business? Here’s What To Do First…

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals, Sales

The first thing that you want to do is get to 50 paying customers as fast as you can.Yo

It doesn’t matter, really, what they are paying. A token wage, an insulting wage.  Whatever it is.  50 customers.  That’s the goal number one.  Everything else follows.  Get to 50 and you have a real business.  At almost any price point.

Why 50?  Partly because it’s a lot, and partly because it’s in site. The idea is that you’ll get good at the mechanics of making the sale. You’ll get insight into what people will want to pay for at something resembling scale.   You’ll probably need to approach 200-400 people to sell something 50 times.  You’ll get to refine your pitch.  You’ll actually have some money and some work.

For some of us it might take 3 months.  For others, a full year.  That’s the focus though, 50. That means that you have safety.  With 50 customers, you control your own destiny.

The beauty of 50 is that if you acquit yourself with aplomb half the time you’ll have the connections of 25 people – or more (some people that you treat poorly become your best referral sources, as odd as that seems).  You’ll probably have the connections of another couple dozen almost sales. 

 During the 50 customer hustle, you’ll say some ridiculous things.

You’ll make some mistakes. You’ll embarrass yourself.  You’ll look stupid.

All of these things will happen at least once.  Possibly more.  Probably more.  It’s OK.  The end of the tunnel means you have something substantive.

You’ll over reach, you’ll wear out one of your connections.  Someone will think you’re lame.  50 is a lot of people. Some of those 50 won’t like you.  If 4% hate you, that’s 2 people.  No president – ever – has had a 96% approval rating.

When you get your 50, you’ll be more or less in control of your fate.  You will probably have to change the way that you offer to do things. This is called a pivot.

This is what you focus on. This pays the bills.  A Business Plan will not. A Shiny Website might be needed to sell 50 times, but that is a tool to get to 50.  A brand strategy won’t be meaningful till your brand has encountered 50 people.

A lot of my entrepreneur friends install bottlenecks as a precondition to action.  ”I can’t possibly sell anything because my business card isn’t back yet,” or “I have to really plan out my brand strategy before I can sell anything.”  Nonsense.  To sell, you have to connect with people and sell.  Offer. Something. People. Want.  Start with a ridiculously low – no brainer – price.  Ratchet it up as you can.  It’s not that hard.

What’s hard is dealing with the success that comes from it.

Fixations

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals

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.

Sunday Mornings

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals

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.

 

I Need You To Do This.

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals

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.

The Tools I Use (That Don’t Matter)

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals, Products, Projects and Process

These tools will probably pass away and be replaced by other things at some point. Nothing is religion.  But, I’ve done a fair amount of progress in my business and I’ve organized things to a selling system that I like.

Obviously, whenever possible, I make tools I like into Simplifilm customers, as I’ve done with RescueTime, Yesware, Clicky, and ScreenFlow.

Anyway, I have a sales system that I’m more or less happy with at the moment.  It’s certainly working now, and I can sell films and run the company in a more or less streamlined manner.  I’ll get into what I’m doing to do that at some point.

Here’s just a snapshot in time of what I’m using right now.  Remember: the Tools don’t matter.   Each of these adds 2-5% to my efficiency.  Nothing is life and death.

To run my life:

RecsueTime.Com.  I use this in fits and starts.  This week I’ve been sick, so my productivity goes to hell (think: playing Civilization V).

Before I Sell You:

GoogleReader:  I have a tuned set of alerts that help me find people.  I am enthusiastic at heart.  I love to ping people out of the blue.  I have some blogs I follow that are off-the-beaten-path with insight as to tech stuff.  I can go through this.

Search.Twitter.Com  I use a refined version of This Method, to help sell more stuff.  I’ve had some ways of getting better at doing that than I had been in the past so, there’s that for you.

Batchbook:  This is my CRM.  I’m more or less happy with it.  Nothing’s perfect, not even Batchbook.  However, there are events that it handles fairly well, and it’s better than anything that I’ve found (for me, at least).  It’s got some better capacities than I’ve used, but it helps me stay on track with lists of things that I might want to do.  I do the ones that I want.  (My to-do list is a suggestion list. Nothing more.  GTD is over.)

Yesware: Fabulousity. Our video is in production.  When I email you, I can know when you open it, if you forwarded it, if you clicked the links and more. It’s a mean and brutal tool.  What I’ve already done with it has been to call the people that were interested in engaging us.  I’m developing a library of sales and process messages.

Clicky: We’re gearing up to take over the world on the Internet.  Clicky is a big part of that.  We see how the customers get here, what they do and how often.  There’s a concept in marketing called a scent trail.  Beacons of competence at every place.

Screenflow: We like to make movies.  We use Screenflow to a fair amount, and we’ll be doing some more with it especially now that they are customers.

Google Docs: Frictionless collaboration FTW. We do our scripts on a yellow pad at first, andthen we move into google docs at some point.  I use a ton of “comments” and “notes” in my writing- there is often a way of saying something…we have to note what we don’t love.  I’m a mediocre writer but a great editor.  The form of the “Explainer” is suited for me.  150 words, and largely, it’s about editing.

 

The Urge To Brag

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals, Application

Nobody on planet earth knows what I’m up to.

Not my wife, my business partner or my mom.  Nobody. I don’t dwell on it much because I already know I’ve wasted years of my life on some sort of delusional mania.  I’ve got an epic amount of balls in play right now, and soon, the harvest starts.

I’ve told people bits and pieces. People that have inspired me to do more ought hear that they are having an impact. It’s for their benefit, not mine, to sustain and fortify them to make them know that their work has a purpose.  One of the things that sustained me when I was struggling harder was the people that wrote me to say “thanks, man.”

:::

Restraining myself against the urge to brag, the urge to write incessant mission statements, the urge to make everything into a weight and measure  has meant something tangible: I’ve accomplished more in 18 months than I have over the last 10 years.   I’ve gotten to be more useful to others.

I can’t say exactly how, how often. I  still feel like I probably brag too much, relative to what I’ve done, and I look towards the time where I can just exist without having to exchange facts for approbation.

After a time, it’s kind of fun having secret plans, secret ideas, and hidden objectives.  You feel like you know a little more than others, and the tension behind keeping a secret is a fun way to live your life.

Negotiations

By Filed Under: Sales

Mark Suster writes a great article on negotiations.

He haggles for a living, and there’s no doubt he’s better than I am. I represent myself at the level of conscious incompetence.

One of the things that he doesn’t (yet)  get into, not really, is the iterated game. You fight this battle to make the next one go more smoothly. He says:

In face, your goal in a negotiation is not always to get the lowest possible terms. Your goal is to understand the needs of your partner and create win/win outcomes where both sides are incentivized to continue to want to work hard together – now and into the future.

Here’s the deal. A lot of times people I negotiate with have a reflex aggression that doesn’t help them.  They’ll fight for terms that they don’t need and conditions that actually disincentivize deals from getting done.

This is not a surprise. We have to get things done despite man made obstacles.

I negotiate with legal departments all the time. They get involved in profoundly dumb ways.  Simplifilm pursues course towards big and small companies.  We’ve pursued multivideo deals worth, often, tens of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of man hours of work.

We’ll often come to terms with the person needing the work, and legal will push back on some type of material point.  It has occasionally absurd.  Everything from net 60 pay days (which would hurt us majorly), to who gets to choose the voice talent (seriously, legal has said that they get to pick from a minimum of 40 choices).

At a certain point, we push back.  Even when we can live with the points. Demonstrating indifference – in a respectful and cheerful way-  is how you create long term clients.

Now, it seems like an ego trip. FAR from it.  Having us be a peer and not a lackey means that the tension that comes from the back and forth yields a superior product. That’s what the client wants.

Being willing to walk means:

  • We get respect.
  • The client gets better work.
  • We don’t go through mutual agony or client-side tantrums.
  • The client rehires us
  • We’re peers, not serfs.

Having respect is only possible when you negotiate with vigor and good cheer.

When a client gets the idea(delusion) that we’re financially in need of this deal…holy hell, will the number of revisions double or triple.  When the client feels like they are lucky we made time for them, they respect our ideas for the video, and it closes smoothly. For them, and for us.

“What do you think about this idea” is a more respectfil starting point than “we need you to do this for us.”

I was willing to kill what was the second biggest deal we had done over a minor point. Client wanted X’d out “mutual approval” on script and said “All scripts to be provided by client with no revisions by Simplifilm.”  This was tens of thousands. It came at a time where we felt that losing this would set our momentum back.  You can’t make a great video with a bad script.  We needed to have mutual approval.

We were willing to walk, and in a way that can’t be faked. I sent a letter – and I’m paraphrasing:

Dear _______.

Thanks for getting this far.  I hope to be able to work with you on these videos, but we won’t be able to go forward if we can’t have input and approval on the script.  I would like to know in the next 2 days if this will happen or not.  If that’s a sticking point for you, it is for us too, for reasons you can understand.

Mutual approval means that we’re both happy with the script.  It could be that your script is fine as is, or it could be that you’re walking into a minefield.

Let me know, and if this particular gig isn’t a fit, we’ll be happy to consider whatever you needs the future.”

…

We got the deal, and everything went swimmingly. They referred us more in the future.

That was for everyone’s benefit.

Things I No Longer Understand: Lessons From Apple

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals

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.

The Tools Don’t Matter

By Filed Under: selling/marketing

I used to blog a lot about tools and tricks.

I was so clever. I knew everything about various CRMS. I talked about sales techniques.  Till I bored myself.

Oh, I was smart.

Here’s the thing: the tools don’t matter.  As a salesperson you need about 3 things:

  • A place to find people to connect with them.  Could be the Rotary Club, Twitter, a forum, or conferences.  Could be your blog.  Could be some combination of these things.
  • A pitch to get in front of them.
  • A system for checking in and adding value.  This could be index cards, 43 Folders, a CRM.

That’s it. Everything else can more or less take care of itself.  You don’t need to spend time optimizing this stuff, you need to spend time executing.    People want to spend time optimizing nothing.

The art of the hustle is the important thing.  Focus on timing. Focus on adding value – in a real way.  It’s hard to do.  I want to talk to people daily but I have nothing to give.

Confessions of a New Media Hustler, Part II WordPress, Thesis and Mutant Clients

By Filed Under: Achieving Goals
thesis-theme-300x250

[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.

 (as a complete aside: man, do, I love typing on the apple full sized keyboard.)

—

((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.

Confessions of a New Media Hustler, Part 1

By Filed Under: entitlementality
sales-letter

One of a bazillion examples of crappy content sites.

The web has turned pro.  And couldn’t be any happier about it.

In 2008, when I showed up in the space, right out of the Mortgage Broker Call Center (and all that that implies) tons of sales letters and other drivel – like you see on the left were actually normal.  There are still the remnants out there, the “Marketing Geyser,” or the “Stomper.Net” types leftover shilling god knows what.

The idea was that you can use services like TweetSpinner and amass a shit ton of traffic that was all more or less indifferent to you, and send them to sites to sell them things. They’d obediently buy.

Not all of ‘em but if you only had 2% of your 12,000 followers…you’d make oodles.

How hard is 2%?

Even though you would never be fooled, we all believe that they are dumber than us.  They are idiots.  We are just a little bit smarter.

So the story goes.

There were oodles of things you could buy, from people claiming that they were the big time.  Information products from $5.00 to $50,000 were to be had.

I saw them all. I studied the landing pages and copy. I saw what they were doing and I called it good.

Ten Steps To Pissing Away What Little Currency You Have!

It used to be – just a couple years ago-  that people could show up online, spout some sort of BS in their WalMart Headset and then suddenly expect to be paid for it all. I knew then that this wasn’t sustainable.

I joked with Keith Baker  that I was just here for the bubble.  This was all during the election between Obama and McCain.  The social media bubble had been in full swing then.  It’s only gotten worse.

This was before Panda, this was when you could apply some SEO superbasics like title tags to an older site and reasonably expect to get into the top of the search engines.  A little linkbuilding was all it would take.  The web was 90% crap. Sturgeon’s Law applied to the remaining 10%.  You could buy,  at a variety of prices,  poorly done e-books (many about writing poorly done ebooks).  You could get pumped up by worthless commentary from late 40′s baby boomers who had the sense to buy a flip cam and spout nonsense onto YouTube.

I was doing it.  What else would I do?  Sell more houses?  Stay a loan officer?  Gawd no.  I made a living.

The whole business of it seemed instantly schemey.  I was in it, doing the Loan Officer Survival Guide, and a series of other content “products” mostly because I saw that the FIRE industry was dead, and people were working from misguided premises.  My plan was to use my “relator knowledge’ to move into a different space.

A whole bunch of people – then and now – still believed in online e-courses, all that.  I still believe, but I wasn’t Kahn academy.  Hell, I wasn’t even Ramit Sethi.

I didn’t love it.  I love selling.  I always love hustling, I always love instigating, creating, causing.  I love making something from nothing.   I love “closing” as a skill and science.   I get a charge from helping people get what they want- and getting paid for it.  Coaching?  Consulting? Coach-sulting? Selling e-books?  Urf.  Not a fun time.

To sustain that stuff, you have to have a quality product, and something you believe in.  If you don’t, you’ll self destruct.

I didn’t want to be an infomarketer, I realized that I didn’t know anything (despite the revolting and omnipresent assurances that I was enough/beautiful/and I was worthy of success).   

People crave real quality. The genuine article.  Not “the appearance of quality,” but the real thing. In a way that you know when you see it that Apple has made a computer, or that Moleskine gives a shit about their notebooks. Or, hell, even that Columbia cares about their pants.

I wasn’t quality.  I was a netbook in an iPad world.

.:.

There’s a scene in Matchstick Men where the Nic Cage charachter- a con artist – says “I didn’t steal their money, they gave it to me.”  What he means is that people everywhere want to believe that the con was true.

People need to believe even preposterous ideas. Full Sail University  will get you into a career in Hollywood.  Or that once you learn Medical Billing from Devry that you’ll be in a fast growing field and set for life.  That an ordinary iPad won’t be better than you at medical billing in a year.

People were worn out.  The were eager and happy to spend their last $900 on some  e-course to help change their career.  They believed.  Once they learned the skills that were easy as 1-2-3, they too would be successful.

They got their credit cards out.

They bought.  From others.  From me.  They bought my courses and others courses.

When there was nothing of substance there, they rarely even got mad at me or anyone else.  Those that did got a refund.  No harm, no foul.

Even the “regulars’ the info-junkies came again and again.  This time it would be different.  This time, the $800 product really would save me from myself…and it wouldn’t be a bitter waste.

.:.

I did my very best.  I deluded myself. Never are those ideas mutually exclusive.

For a time, I thought that I was helping.

Now, before you get mad. What I mean by nothing of substance was this.  My “course” if you would had the same open and structure of the rest of the “courses.”  Those people that would benefit from it can’t be helped.  You’ve seen the course, here are the modules:

  • Register With GoDaddy
  • Sign up for hosting
  • Get your WordPress going.
  • Select your theme.
  • Start writing.
  • Learn SEO
  • Connect
  • Etc.
  • Etc.
  • Etc.

The problem is that the intensity that you have to write can’t be taught, not really.

You’re either online or your not. You either gravitate, share and have a near biological need to do this stuff.  It’s like closing. You can refine the instincts of a good closer. But you can’t teach a noncloser to close, not really.  They have to have a belief and zeal for it.

You either can’t be stopped, or can’t be helped.

Otherwise it doesn’t work.  SEOing your crap about how it’s a “Great Time To Buy or Sell Your House” isn’t going to do you much good.

And if you needed a course from me on this, you weren’t going to execute with passion or aplomb.  If you were going to execute well, you’d find the info and get started.

I knew this, and that’s why I pivoted towards a service business (you’ll have to wait, maybe a long time, for part 2)

Habits

By Filed Under: Start Here

When you have a habit established, moving forward yields a certain kind of inertia.

You have run for 4 days, so you do what your supposed to on day 5.

You eat right so you don’t “waste” your run.  You run 4 miles because you don’t want to waste yesterday’s 6 miler.

You up the intensity at the office so you can be free to do another workout.  The heightened intensity means that the to do list gets shorter.

Every good, sustainable habit is likely to cause order in other areas.  I don’t suggest that we force every area of our life into some sort of lockstep.  That’s not particularly productive, it hits diminishing returns, and always watching the clock means that you don’t produce your best work, you’re not in flow as much as you might be.

Still, forcing one habit on yourself, something important (running, writing, coding, whatever), means that other areas fall into place.  There’s one set of actions that’s something like a lynchpin.

For me, there’s also action that cancers all I try and do.  If I play a video game, say Civilization or  World of Warcraft or if I jump on Facebook chat, there will be a smothering burden on me that won’t be lifted till a clean break is made.

For me, the important habits are:

  • Running. Not the elliptical, not “cardio”, not lifting weights.  Pure, real running. Attacking previous good times, seeing how far I can go.  The preferred workout is about a 9:40 pace with 1 mile as fast as I can go at the end (right now just under 8, but that’s with holding onto the treadmill for dear life).
  • Follow up: I ping people whenever I think I can add value.  I use a CRM to do almost everything, and stay familiar with people.  I don’t spend enough time doing this, and I have to push hard to do it.  But, when I work to help people, add value, and connect, good things happen.
  • Reading: Right now, I’m working off of a few of reading lists: Ryan Holliday’s is excellent, Brad Feld’s is good, and Derek Sivers’s  is pretty good.  The most interesting stuff is hard and not the low end business books that I’ve been reading forever.  (If you know of a list, email genuinechris@gmail.com and I’ll work off of it).  I try to read at least 2 books a week, and it comes and goes.  Some of the bigger biographies I wind up skimming the long passages of exposition.

Of the habits, running is again new, and Reading has probably made the biggest difference in my life.  I’m still given over to lashing out at bloviating idiots, etc. etc. but as a whole reading has changed the course of my life more than I’d imagine it would.  Not just in knowing history, but in acting decisively, thinking clearly, understanding what great people did (hint, it’s not answering fools on quora)

If I’m regularly doing those three things, everything else takes  care of itself.

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