Tag Archives: advice

June 14, 2019 · 1:05 pm

Finishing In Style

Let’s think, this Foodie Friday, about how dishes are “finished.” No, I don’t mean how you eat every last bit off of your plate. Instead, I mean those last few things you do as a cook when the dish is done but you’re adding what I would call a lagniappe of sorts – a little something extra at the end, almost a gift.

For example. Let’s say you’ve just cooked your guests some perfect steaks. Now you could certainly just let them rest and present them to your hungry diners or you could finish them in style. Maybe you make an herb butter which you allow to melt over the warm steak, adding another layer of richness and flavor. Maybe you provide a container of truffle salt, adding heady umami to the dish.

We’ve all been offered grated cheese to go on our pasta. That’s finishing in style in my book, especially if the cheese offered is correct for the dish itself and not just the same cheese for everyone (and heaven forfend that’s it’s grated ahead of time!).

Finishing in style can be as simple as offering a drop of true balsamic vinegar for aged cheese or even ice cream (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it). What I think it really shows is that the cook is willing to go the extra steps to make a meal memorable.

It’s the same in business. When was the last time you hand-wrote a thank you note to a customer for an order or sent a gift to a new client to welcome them aboard? When I joined my franchising network and finished training, a lovely bonsai tree showed up at my house to congratulate me. Did it make me work any harder? No, but sure showed me that I had exercised great judgment in joining the group that I had. That was finishing in style.

Business today is way too competitive for any of us not to think about the lagniappe – the something extra. How can we finish each transaction – each dish we prepare – in style?

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June 5, 2019 · 12:53 pm

Shared Interests

You can call shared interests believing your own BS or you can call them eating your own dog food. I like to think of it as having skin in the game, a phrase coined by Warren Buffet referring to a situation in which high-ranking insiders use their own money to buy stock in the company they are running. I use it in a much broader context and it’s something you should be looking for at every turn.

Photo by rawpixel.com

I can’t tell you how many companies paraded into my office when I was in corporate life promising to solve issues we might be having with revenue generation, audience measurement, or dozens of other common problems. Many of the offerings were actually quite interesting although not yet deployed in the real world to any extent. If I was interested but skeptical, I’d usually make an offer somewhat akin to this:

I like your product but it’s awfully difficult for me to stroke out a check on something that is promising but unproven. So let’s do this. You provide the product and service as you say and I will pay you a much lower fee (or nothing!). However, if you deliver the results you say you will deliver, we’ll set up a success fee that will pay you more than you’re currently asking. In fact, if your numbers are right, you’ll earn double what you are charging.

In other words, I wanted them to have skin in the game. I wanted our interests to be perfectly aligned and I wanted there to be consequences for us both if we didn’t achieve what we set out to do. The reality is that you should always ask yourself who has what skin where because most businesses do their damnedest to avoid any sort of risk by putting in some skin. Sure, they pay lip-service to the notion of entrepreneurship but there are few who have put their money where their mouth is and invested into the tech ecosystem or directly into startups. Pay attention – much of the time the investment comes only after the product has proven itself or is a direct ripoff of something that’s already successful. I call this the second penguin strategy (you don’t want to be the first penguin that jumps in the water since there may be predators lurking).

If you’ve ever played cards, inevitably there is a kibitzer around. You know – the person who looks on and often offers unwanted advice or comment. They have no skin in the game. There are kibitzers in business too – you can find them writing for many trade publications – and you might even have some in your company as partners or clients or even employees. Not many companies took me up on my offer to make them more money. The few that did were fantastic partners and I still speak with some of the executives from those firms almost 20 years later. Having skin in the game made all the difference. What do you think?

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March 27, 2019 · 3:31 pm

Inauthentic Behavior

I generally rip Facebook pretty hard in this space so, in the interest of fairness, I rise to give them a pat on the back. A number of outlets reported today that Facebook pulled down 2,632 bogus accounts and pages from their platform. They mostly came from Russian and Iran. The reason was that they were conducting “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” In other words, they were troll farms spreading lies and hatred. Lest you think that no one reads and/or believes that sort of vitriol, about 1.7 million people joined one or more of the Russia-linked groups, while roughly 1.4 million accounts followed one or more of the Iranian pages.

Back in January, Facebook took down more than 400 pages linked to operations in Russia. Obviously, this is not a problem that began and ended with the 2016 election and it’s going to get worse as 2020 approaches. Good on ya, Facebook. There is, however, a lesson in this for any business.

The internet has been weaponized and not always in a way that would constitute benign marketing by several companies. Destroying a brand’s reputation is just as easy as foreign governments found it to be in disrupting our elections. I suspect that many of the resources Facebook and others are deploying are focused on election interference and not on businesses. How hard would it be to start up a group or page that’s negative toward a brand? How difficult might it be to promote that page? In the January wave of takedowns, 364 pages and accounts spent approximately $135,000 on advertising and garnered 790,000 followers. $135,000 in marketing is a pittance to destroy a competitor’s brand, right?

If you don’t have a system in place to monitor brand reputation everywhere, you’re likely to be ambushed. Negative reviews on product and review sites, whisper campaigns on social media, and other weapons might be pointed at you right now. Do you know if that’s true? How?

I don’t mean to alarm anyone today. OK, maybe I do. The era of digital being used to connect people has passed. Now it’s being used to divide us, so negativity doesn’t stick out and falsehoods are more readily seen as truths. Pay attention!

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