March 14, 2018 · 10:48 am

Who Are Those Guys?

I don’t know if you remember the classic film “Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid,” but I thought of it as I was reading this morning. Paul Newman and Robert Redford play the title characters who spend much of the movie being pursued by a group of men determined to bring them to justice. Every time they think they’re in the clear, the posse turns up again, at which point Newman or Redford asks “who are those guys?”

I suspect that a number of my former colleagues in television have had a similar experience over the last few years. I remember having one back in the 1990’s when ESPN became a major presence in sports. In the late 1980’s, we used to laugh about them at our TV sports sales meetings.  After all, even though the industry, spurred on by the 1984  Cable Act, was wiring the country like crazy, cable was barely in half the homes. Even as late as 1992, Springsteen told us there were 57 channels and nothing on.

Then BOOM. TV ratings started to dive and cable ratings started to climb. The peach baskets the broadcast networks used to stick out the window and fill up with money started to take a lot longer to fill up. Who were those guys? Well, we identified our competition and started to extract payments from cable carriers just as our cable brethren did. Things we different but more stable, and the broadcasters began buying the cable content providers.

Things continued to change. I’ll let the CEO of Turner (as quoted in Digiday) explain what happened next:

All of a sudden, our biggest competitors are no longer Disney, Fox, NBC, CBS and other networks; it’s these “digital companies” that are coming in and taking two-thirds of all digital ad revenues and 85 percent of the marginal growth in digital ad revenues.

Who are those guys? The point that any business can take away from the TV experience is this. Someone is always chasing you. You have something they want, whether it’s customers, market share, technology, data, or just plain attention. Like the posse, they’re going to be relentless. Unlike the posse, it’s never going to be the same guys all the time. You need to be attentive and take countermeasures, hopefully not like Butch and Sundance do by jumping off a cliff.

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March 12, 2018 · 11:37 am

But You Got To Have Friends

According to Facebook, I have 388 friends. One very social member of my family has over 1,300. I suspect that in her case, and I’m quite sure that in mine, that some of those “friends” couldn’t pick you out of a lineup, so one might speculate as to how real the friendship is.

There is a much easier and yet way harsher method for figuring out the whole friendship thing. First, ask yourself who routinely interacts with you off social media. Then ask yourself of that group who does so when they don’t need anything from you. After that, you can ask yourself who from that much smaller group will return your call when YOU need something and, even more importantly, who will actually help you. We’re now approaching your real friend count.

Here is the good news. You don’t really need all that many friends. This report from AOL.com goes back to 2016:

According to new research, you only need five friends in your life. British psychologist, Robin Dunbarm breaks down our friendships into layers.

The top layer consists of a spouse or best friend that you interact with daily. The next includes up to four people — that you care about and require weekly attention to maintain the relationship. The layers after that are made up of mere acquaintances.

Why the rant about friendship today? Because those few real friends are the key to your business success. They provide two of the parts of Maslow’s Hierarchy that allow you to function productively. They are your sounding board. They can, as they have in my case, help you grow your business by providing contact with potential clients (every client I’ve ever had, save for one, is as a result of a friendship, either directly or indirectly).

The Michael Corleone character in The Godfather says “My father taught me many things here — he taught me in this room. He taught me — keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” I get his meaning – understand those who would do you harm and pay constant attention to them – but I disagree about the closer part. Find your few true friends, both inside and outside of business, and pay them as much attention as you do anything. Your business will benefit and so will you. Make sense?

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March 9, 2018 · 2:13 pm

Side Dishes

It’s Foodie Friday and today I’m inspired by a friend of mine who loves side dishes. Anytime a meal is discussed, the only question raised is “what are the sides?” Beef Wellington that took hours to prepare? Meh, but what kind of potatoes? You slaved for five hours over a perfect Bolognese Sauce? Interesting, but what veggies are we having?

I suspect that many of us think in an opposite manner. Side dishes are a throw-in – a starch of some sort, maybe some roasted veggies and a salad. When was the last time you just tossed a steak on the grill but worked for hours over perfect Pommes Dauphine? I suspect the next time will be the first since it’s much easier to put a bag of tater tots in the oven. Even when one goes to many restaurants, while the main proteins often have lengthy descriptions of each dish, the side dishes are generally just a listing of the vegetables and starches available.

I’m starting to pay a bit more attention to the sides. As it turns out, many businesses are too. What do I mean? Take the airlines. Originally, “ancillary revenues” such as baggage fees, change fees, advance boarding fees, and all of those horrible nickel and dime items the flying public hates were just side dishes. The main business was in filling seats. Today, airlines make over $80 Billion on these sidelines, and in many ways, they’re the entire profit center for the business. In other cases, what began as a side dish became the business. Groupon used to be an online fundraising site and only sold stuff as a sideline. Nintendo sold playing cards and making video games was a sideline. Twitter was a side project within a podcasting company called Odeo.

When was the last time you thought about the side dishes contained within your business? Maybe there are folks out there who love the sides more than the main and would be willing to skip the main altogether?

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