June 21, 2019 · 10:41 am

No Strings

It’s Foodie Friday and it’s also the first day of Summer. Actually, it’s felt like July down here in the Carolinas since May, but I digress. In honor of the day, Dairy Queen is giving out coupons for a free soft serve ice cream cone. Yum! What better way to celebrate the new season?

Well, not to be the one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but of course, there are strings attached. You see, in order to get said free cone you need to purchase something else at DQ. Not that I’d generally mind doing so but that little bit of fine print sort of chills my enthusiasm (see what I did there?). Oh yeah, one other thing – in order to get the coupon you need to have installed the DQ app on your phone. I mean, who doesn’t want yet another app tracking you, sending data to who knows where, taking up room on your phone and hitting you up with “big announcements” every hour or so?

My point is a broader one that just beating up on Dairy Queen. I’ve always had an issue with seemingly benevolent marketing or charitable offers that are really self-serving. You know what I mean. How many offers have you seen for “buy this and we’ll make a donation to this worthy cause”? If the cause is so great, why don’t you just make the donation? Then there are those “free” offers that cost you in other ways. Opera, the browser company, offered “free” VPN a couple of years ago. Of course, you had to agree to let them track your usage and share the data with third parties.  Sure, it’s supposedly completely anonymized but if it includes a device identifier of any sort or location data, it’s not hard to merge it with other data.

Gift horses may, in fact, be Trojan Horses too. There are way too many “free” offers that are really scams. We’ve all seen the “free” product that involved paying shipping and handling charges that are detailed in tiny print and quite costly. Then there are the “free” products that require you to hand over a credit card, ostensibly so that if you make any “optional” purchases it’s a seamless transaction or maybe they’ve enrolled you in something that will charge you monthly once your “free” period is up. Illegal? Actually no, if it’s disclosed (you read all the mouse-type every time, don’t you). Shady as hell? You bet.

If you’re going to make free offers or do something nice for your customer, do so without strings. A gift involves altruism. If there is an ulterior motive lying within, it’s not a gift, right?

 

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June 19, 2019 · 3:09 pm

GSD

We’re starting down that road to another presidential election here in the US. There are a lot of people who want the job, apparently although having watched my way through “The West Wing” multiple times I’m not sure why. The plane maybe?

No, we’re not heading into the world of politics but one thing that struck me as I have been watching the various candidates making their cases is that there are an awful lot of good ideas being tossed around. Every candidate has a grand solution to one or more of the many things that can be improved here in the US of A. Of course, so did nearly every other person who has run for the office over the years. What they found is something that’s useful to any of us in business: good ideas aren’t enough.

I’m sure you’ve had many groundbreaking ideas in your business life. Maybe you even got the chance to try and bring them to life. The reality is that a good number of those ideas withered away because the strength of an idea isn’t really enough to make it happen. You need buy-in from all the stakeholders which means you also need some good persuasion skills. You might need money which means you need to be able to justify your brainstorm in dollars and cents for the money mavens. And of course, you need the leadership skills to make others understand your vision and work hard to implement it even if the value of that idea isn’t necessarily apparent to them until the very end.

Being great means Getting Stuff Done or as Elvis used to have on his belt buckle, TCB – Taking Care of Business. I had a boss who used to tell me I had 100 ideas a day and 99 were pure crap. I had to learn how to get that one great idea done. He was right (well, maybe more than 1 a day was pretty good). I became a much better manager when I learned not to fixate on the idea but to pay attention to the process so the idea could bloom. Yes, it’s like a garden – the great idea is just the seed and without a proper environment and lots of care it will wither and die.

So now you know that. I wonder how many of the candidates do?

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June 17, 2019 · 3:48 pm

Vendors And Partners

President Reagan has been quoted as saying “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” are the most terrifying words in the English language. One phrase I used to hear a lot that was just as terrifying to me was “we want to be your (fill in the blank) partner.” That could be a tech partner or a marketing partner or whatever. The thing was that most people have a tremendous amount of difficulty distinguishing between a partner and a vendor. The sad truth is that very few people or organizations that you’re in business with want to be the former and that’s a shame. Vendors are a dime a dozen while good partners are rare.

How do I distinguish between the two? Vendors send you bills while you usually end up sending a partner their share of your joint profits. Vendors come into your office and tell you how great their product or service is, even if you’re using it or them. They tell you their story and ignore yours.  Instead of telling you what they are doing for you specifically, they tell you about the latest success story they’ve had, usually with some other “partner” of theirs.

It’s always easy to spot the vendors and the potential partners almost from the second they walk in the door. Partners will talk about you and your situation and tell you specifically how they can help. They’ll ask for reasonable compensation but also volunteer to share in the upside because they believe in their product and its ability to help you. Vendors come in with a canned, generic pitch. Their rates are fixed in stone and they don’t share the risk and so don’t have any interest in sharing the rewards.

I’ve always felt that my goals and those of my business partners were very much aligned. I can’t say the same of many of the vendors I’ve worked with over the years. I’ve also always tried to do business with my consulting clients and franchise candidates in that way – as a good partner and resource rather than as a vendor. Is that a difference without a distinction? Not in my book. How about in yours?

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