Andrea Hill Video Feed

Impacts of Covid-19 on Globalization and Supply Chains

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 23:24:59 GMT

Transcript not available yet.

Surviving Tough Times: Part I

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 05:00:00 GMT

The transcript for this video is not ready yet.

Surviving Tough Times Part II

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 05:00:00 GMT

The transcript for this video is not availalbe yet.

Online Strategies for B2B Jewelry Producers

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 05:00:00 GMT

Transcript for this video is not available yet.

Marketing Ideas for Right Now

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

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The things we can do to stay sane and stay in business during this sort of crazy time today, I'm going to talk with you about a handful of marketing things that you can do right now that are pretty safe to do right now. But a couple of housekeeping things. First, there will be a webinar tomorrow, Thursday, what is the date? Tomorrow, March 20 26 at 11 a.m. Central Time. And it's part of my majesté webinar series, which we will now be doing free for everyone every single week.

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Tomorrow's session will be with jewelers mutual, several people from the jewelers mutual team and also with Sarah Yood from JVC. And we'll be talking about insurance and legal issues you need to be aware of. OK, so what are some marketing things that you can be doing right now? Because we're trying to think in five day increments and business can't stop entirely. So you need to market. But how do you do that? Well, in this moment. The first is that you can sell, but you need to sell with some caveats.

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So you need to be aware that tone and message are very important right now and also that the population at large is very much in conflict about should we shut down, shouldn't we shut down? And there are opinions on both ends of that spectrum and everywhere in between. And you need to make sure that you are not setting out a tone deaf message when you do this. So when you're selling, I wouldn't be doing a bunch of promote, promote, promote products right now.

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I don't think that's the best use of your marketing time or energy. And also, it risks making it look like we're in business as usual and everybody knows we're not in business as usual. And they they expect you to recognize that we're not business as usual. It's OK to say things like, look, we're here and we're available. If there's something you need, those kinds of messages are great. I would advise that you have some sort of a safety manifesto on your website or as a link that they can get to to see what you are doing, because there are a lot of landmines that you can step on when you're selling.

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Right now, for instance, we've had people's customers tell them, well, fine, you can ship it to me. Don't you care about those UPS and FedEx drivers? But how are you treating your employees? Are they safe? Is your bench jeweler safe? So people are thinking about a lot beyond just the jewelry delivery. So share what you are doing. If you have staff that's working with you, share what you're doing to protect them, share what you're doing to prevent the spread of infection yourself.

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How are you behaving so that you don't contribute to a problem, share how you leave things out for your delivery drivers instead of encountering them face to face, how you've arranged with them to pick up with having to interface with you directly for shipping jewelry. This gets challenging because there are signature requirements and things like that. But work with your shipper and with your insurance provider to know exactly what you can do to avoid contact and still be covered and then share that with your customers so that they know you are thinking about more than just earning money for yourself, because that's that sort of don't be selfish message is out there.

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And for the people who are paying attention to it, it can really affect their perception of you as a brand. So sell but sell with some caveats and a lot of communication about how you are selling as a responsible citizen. In today's moment. It's also really important to stay in your lane. If you're not a medical professional, then it's not a very safe thing to be talking about covid-19 as a in a marketing type of presentation. So if you are, you know, if you have decided to do a certain practice and share the link to the resource that you used for it, share where you got your information from, be transparent.

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Transparency is really important right now because information is changing constantly. So you can say this is the best information I have right now and this is where I got it from. And then that way you're staying in your lane. You're referring to professionals who have given you advice and it just it protects your brand and it protects you. And it's the right thing to do more video right now. You could be doing a lot of promotion on video, just like I'm doing now with this little twenty dollar camera and the microphone that's built into it.

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So it doesn't have to be a great production. You can see no one did hair and makeup here, but communicate with your community a lot more using. Or social media channels or using one to one meetings there. It's a great time for you to have conversations with your customer using Zoom or Vector or go to meeting. I've noticed Google Hangouts is really buggy at the moment. I think there are just way too many people using these free channels that the channels aren't accustomed to this much traffic.

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So I'm noticing that we're not getting great reception on our Google Hangouts channel. There are lots of affordable one to one and group meeting tools that you can be using and you can use those with your customers. So share video on social media. Do Facebook live if you want to do LinkedIn live. That's a great option also. But you have to sign up for it. You have to go to LinkedIn. And if you type in the search term for LinkedIn live, it'll show you the directions to a page where you can share what you're going to use LinkedIn live for because it's not automatic, like anybody can do Facebook live, but not everyone can do LinkedIn live and then put little videos up on your social channels talking about what you're working on and what your challenges are right now.

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And those are all really good ways to connect. But video is a powerful way to connect in this moment. Oh, if you are using social media schedulers to have, like, meet Edgar or HootSuite or any of those, if you've got content scheduled out, go look at your content. Q It may be time to clean up that queue or even suspend the Q or replace some of the information in the queue because messages that made sense, you know, even three weeks ago may not make sense today.

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They may be tone deaf today. So, you know, make sure that you take a look at that. Q If that's something you use, also make sure all of your messaging is in brand. Now, that is a very individual thing. Your brand is specific to your presentation. So if you're typically funny, be funny. If you're typically quirky, be yourself. If you're typically serious, be serious. If you have a tendency to be political and people know you for that, then don't stop being who you are.

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Just make sure you're in the brand that you've already established with your customer base. If you have been very careful not to share sort of a personal or personality with your community before and now you're starting to do video, your personality is going to come through. So make sure you think very carefully about who you are and how well your customer base already knows you so that you can stay in brand and not, you know, slip off into some messaging or some portrayals that actually won't work for your customer base.

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And finally, in your marketing efforts right now, this is a really great time to be about your community. We're all trying to think of ways that we can help or improve the current situation, make that part of your communications, share what you're doing. Like Lauren Harper, they're making masks and they're shipping off batches of them to places that need them. And that's part of her marketing, but it's also part of her brand and part of her personality.

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So as a designer, that really works. I've noticed that models find Glaucus is doing the same thing. They're deep into making masks because that seems to be where the greatest addressable need is at the moment. So find an addressable need and work on that just because it's the right thing to do. We all need to pitch in right now and then also share that information with your community so that they can participate with you if they want. They can share more ideas with you.

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If they want, they can just cheer you on if that's what they've got to offer. And it helps us build connections for later. So sell with caveats. Stay in your lane, watch your messaging. Don't be tone deaf. Be aware of the fact that there are lots of people out there who may view this whole experience differently than you do. Keep the messages within your brand. And if you haven't thought about what your personality is as it relates to your customers, hone in on that right now and try to do things that are community focused.

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And those will be very good marketing activities for right now. Remember, we're working in five day increments. So that's something you can do right now that will be meaningful. And again, please join us at the webinar tomorrow where we're going to be talking about your insurance requirements and some legal questions. And at work start world. You can also see the rest of the webinar series that we're about to offer. So that's it for the moment. Thanks bye.

What Can You Do Today? OODA Loops!

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

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If there's a recession, we know what worked and didn't work in the last recession, we don't necessarily like the fact that things take a certain amount of time to get through or that they cost a certain amount of money to get through. But there's a precedent and this time we don't have a precedent. And so I think all of us wake up every morning with a certain amount of anxiety. We wake up, we remember we're still in this moment and then we think, I don't know what to do and that not knowing what to do and not being able to imagine what comes next really shakes us up because we're used to knowing what to do and what comes next.

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I guess the first thing to remember is that it's OK not to know what comes next.

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It's not comfortable, but we are all in this together. No political leader, no business leader. Nobody actually has the answer of what to do next. And that may sound terrifying to you, but the reality is we are a very creative species and answers will start emerging and we just need to stay tuned and pay attention. So what do you do today with that, though? You know, what do you do today when you're worried about what comes next?

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Well, there are a couple of leadership skills that I think every one of us can apply in our daily business. The first one I just said, I was reminded by some of my business school heroes. They reminded me of something called the OODAloop, which I hadn't thought about in forever. And yet it is the perfect tool for today. So it comes from a I believe, a Navy fighter pilot, definitely a military fighter pilot. May have been Air Force, but OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

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And fighter pilots are dealing with rapidly changing situations that are life and death. And so they have to go through and it's called a loop for a reason.

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You have to observe, Orient, Decide, Act, observe, Orient, decide, act very quickly as the conditions change. And the idea is, if you are doing your ouda loop, your Observe, Orient, Decide Act sequence faster than the conditions are changing, then you're in control of the situation. If you're doing them slower than the conditions are changing, then the situation is controlling you. So every day we can wake up and we can observe.

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And what's happening now, we can orient ourselves to the current condition.

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We can decide what we can do within the current conditions and then we can act on that. Sometimes conditions are changing faster than that. Sometimes we need to do it twice a day.

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Now, I've been observing the situation since it emerged in China. I was out of the country when the flu started. I started keeping spreadsheets almost immediately. My spreadsheet goes back to January the 24th and I've been managing a company in Italy throughout this whole transition. So I can tell you from my experience, I have never seen the conditions change more than twice in a day. It's not three times a day. It's not six times a day. It's once or twice a day that we've seen dramatic condition changes.

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So, hey, look at it this way.

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We're not fighter pilots. We don't have to do the loop every 30 seconds or die. We just need to reorient and consider once or twice a day and then we can decide what to do today. So what can you do today? Because that's what's going to give you comfort. That's what's going to give you a feeling of control. Well, a lot of you have been referring to the fact that you're learning things that you need to learn for your business.

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That is a tremendous thing that you can do today, is invest in your own learning.

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But the other thing that all of us can be doing should be doing is this process of imagining the scenarios that will evolve and how we might respond to them.

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So typically in business, we say, what are the possible things that could happen? And they're kind of a known list. And then how can I respond to each of those things if they do happen in this situation?

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It's a much bigger list.

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We don't actually know all the things that can happen, but we can each go through the process of imagining different types of outcomes.

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So if you sat down today and imagined for your business four or five different possible outcomes, maybe they're simple, like, what if I can open up in four weeks? What if I can open up in eight weeks? What if I can open up in twelve weeks? And then you think, OK, what will the world look like? Four weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks from now?

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So you kind of put together these scenarios, these imaginary.

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It's scenarios like draw a picture of what you think the conditions will look like and then say, OK, in scenario A.

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These would be my challenges and these would be the things I could do to meet the challenges in scenario B, these would be a different set of challenges.

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I mean, if we shut down for 12 weeks, it's going to have less economic ramifications than if we're shut down for 16 or 20 weeks. Right. So each scenario has different conditions and we can imagine those conditions just make them up, put some bullet points on paper.

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The other condition that could be changing is that you may have different available skills in your business by then that learning that you're doing.

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Melissa quick posted yesterday that she's working on her CRM right now. And I'm like, yay, Melissa, that's a great plan.

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The things that you're learning will also change your conditions eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks from now.

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So imagine and don't try to imagine 700 scenarios. That's overwhelming. Try to imagine several different scenarios and then imagine how you might respond to those. That kind of creative thinking and problem solving is what we do as business leaders every day. And it's something that everyone is capable of doing. And it starts building this library of ideas that you will need to get through this thing. So that is a very active thing that you can take control of and start doing for your business.

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So remember that it's OK not to have all the answers right now. You're not missing the ball because somebody else knows what to do. And you don't do surround yourself with experts. Do make sure you are listening to the most qualified information you can have.

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Again, none of us have the answers to this because we haven't been through a global pandemic in the modern technology and business environment.

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So nobody can tell you they have the answers, but do the work of surrounding yourself with information that comes from qualified people who can bring pieces of their knowledge to your thought process and make you smarter.

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That's really important. Assemble the right team in a business. We assemble the right team by pulling together the experts that we need for that internal team. As an entrepreneur or a small business, you need to assemble those elements from your external advisors and maybe they're a direct adviser that can sit down at the table and talk with you. Maybe they're just a thinker or a knowledge person that is publishing or talking on webinars.

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But do do police the quality of the information you take in and then focus on your learning and focus on these scenarios and readdress your scenarios every single day. I told you I started keeping a spreadsheet in late January. Well, I have revisited that spreadsheet once a day and I've got another tab that has all my different scenarios about how things may play out. It's not about forecasting it accurately. Nobody has forecast this thing accurately some days and close in some ways.

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I'm off. It's not about the accuracy, it's about the thinking. So as I have done this work of revisiting my scenarios over and over and over the last few months, I add new thoughts to the process. New ideas, new insights, new ideas. And all of that is going to help me be more prepared as this thing rolls on. You can do that, too. So that's my thought for you today.

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Get on those processes and information will keep evolving and we'll get smarter together.

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Oh, if you haven't signed up for in stores webinar today, we're going to be talking about a lot of the things we do know and can plan for. And also that the webinar series that I do with my essay, we're going to publish a brand new schedule of really frequent webinars over the next few weeks to keep addressing these things. So look at those two resources as well, because we're going to try and keep you informed as much as we possibly can with the best information we can come up with.

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So have a great day to talk to you later.

Navigating the Coronavirus: Working from Home and Planning Your Future

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 05:00:00 GMT

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Right now, the first is that you need working hours. Now, a lot of people think when they start working virtually, that they're not going to work enough. But what I've found is that most people actually work too much. There's this compulsion to stay at your desk or your bench or your computer and put in as much time as you can because working from home doesn't quite feel like working. So it's almost like people feel like it's not quite as legitimate and it's not healthy to work all of the time.

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So set some working hours and convey that schedule to your family and your friends and stick to that schedule. That's the first thing. The second thing is that you need a space for work. And it's not just about a place to put your computer or put your tools or whatever it is you're doing for your work. It's also about making the mental transition to work. You need to gear up to work, and the faster you can make that mental transition to work, the more productive your day will be.

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If you have a big place and you can set aside space to work, that's great, then dedicate that space. But I know a lot of you are working with smaller houses, more people in the house and small apartments where you don't even have an extra room to work in. That does make it harder to dedicate space to work, but it is not impossible. I travel a lot for work.

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Just last year I think I was on the road 110 days and so I'm working in hotel rooms a lot. And what I realized early on is that in hotel rooms I wasn't being very effective. So I would sit down to work, but I wouldn't be focused, I wouldn't be as clear. And I discovered it was because I couldn't make that mental transition to working in my hotel rooms.

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What I figured out to do was that I would always set up every hotel desk, no matter what kind of hotel it was, no matter how different the desk was, I started setting up my hotel room workspace exactly the same way, so that as soon as I got to a hotel and I set up my workspace, it was familiar and it involved including a couple of familiar things and it involved the way I arranged that workspace. But once I got good at that, I could sit down in a hotel room and I could immediately get to work.

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You can do that with a small home space as well. You can set up your kitchen table exactly the same way to work every single morning, then break it down at the end of your working schedule and return it to its other purposes. But create a space to work because you need it to help you make that mental transition to work. The other thing is that you need to do meaningful work. And I know that sounds like a silly thing to say, but it's really important, perhaps even more so right now, where we're trying to figure out what our meaningful work is.

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So if you sit down in your space during your work hours and you don't carve out meaningful work for yourself, work that you can set goals for work that moves you forward in both your personal and professional and business goals, then you'll feel like you're sitting in your workspace just wasting time and spinning your wheels.

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And that is a terrible feeling. Don't do that to yourself. So pick meaningful work to do. If you can't figure out what your business looks like 12 weeks from now, make that the work, make part of your work being developed to devising multiple scenarios for how you think the world might be and then what you can do within each of those scenarios to earn your living or set aside that time for learning. Learning time is worthy time. So study something you've always meant to study, study skills that you know you need for your business that you haven't had time to invest in.

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Make that your meaningful work. If you don't have meaningful work to do, don't sit in your workspace. Go do something else because you'll feel much better about that time later. The next thing that I have to share with you is no jammies. It might seem like a great time to start working in the most comfortable clothes you own, but that doesn't necessarily put you in the best mental space for working. We don't wear shoes in our house. We've never worn shoes in our house.

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And I realized shortly after I started working from a home based office that I was going to work in slippers and it didn't feel right. I actually felt like I was totally unprepared for work, for something as simple as shoes. So I bought a pair of shoes that I could wear just inside the house so that when I was at work, I felt dressed for work.

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So I have a personal schedule that matches your schedule for going to an office or your store.

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Get up in the morning, put on your makeup, get dressed, put on your shoes and get to work feeling like the version of yourself you want to be when you are being really productive. So those are my guides for how to get yourself in a routine of working from home. So now what about this thing that I took a few days off to ponder?

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It seems to me that if we treat this time as an absence of a good life, if we treat this time as if we are pausing everything we love and know about life and simply waiting for life to get back to normal, then this time will be the most negative possible version of itself. I'm not saying it's easy to find peace and happiness in in a world where jobs are disappearing and money is frightening and we're worried about the health of ourselves or our family members or our communities.

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So I'm not suggesting that it's going to be easy to find your happy place, but you can find a better place. And to me, I always feel more positive, more optimistic when I feel like I have some control over my situation. So the approach that I'm going to take is I'm going to figure out what this new version of my life can look like, not as an absence of all of the things that I normally love to do and can do, but rather within the current constraints.

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What's the best version of life that I can have? And it could be very different than my normal life. There's no risk in approaching it this way. So I'm learning new things I'm applying myself at. Work a little differently, we we've set up new routines for family life that take into account that we're all, you know, stuck together in the house as opposed to being able to run out and do our thing and come back together in the evening.

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We're determining what our new normal is and we're making it the best version of the new normal we can. If it turns out that eight or 12 or 16 weeks, the world goes back to exactly what it was before. We haven't lost a thing. We just made the best of the time we had. We found our new normal for this period of time. But there's a really good chance that we're going to find some things to do and think about and act on in this new phase that we can carry forward into the next phase of life, whatever that looks like.

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So I'm working hard on not treating this time as a loss or a pause or simply a wait until I get my old life back. I'm going to approach this as what what could my life be the best version of my life be right now? What can I control? And hoping that I can learn some great things that I can carry forward into the future, whatever that looks like. So that was why I wasn't making videos for a day. I was sitting and plotting and planning and and thinking about the best version of my life and then discussing all of that with my family so we could make those plans together.

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So that's all I have for you right now. I hope that you have a peaceful end of the weekend and beginning of the week, and I'll talk to you soon.

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Bye.

Expertise, Hubris, and Success

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 06:00:00 GMT

When I was a really young adult I set a goal of becoming the president or CEO of some significant sized organization by the time I was 30. And I achieved that goal. And then the first day in my brand new office at my brand new desk, when I should have been feeling flush with accomplishment. The feeling of responsibility for that accomplishment hit me like a buss. And I felt not only responsible for the organization's health, but also for the 200 plus people who worked for me, and the families that depended on them. So I began the process of figuring out what it takes to be responsible for a company. And over time, I've discovered three really important things. The thing I started with, the thing that got me to that 30 year old goal, was appreciation for the importance of expertise. We have to invest ourselves every single day in being an expert. And being an expert in running a business is different than being an expert in marketing or in selling or in being a doctor. Being an expert in business means that you have to have sufficient expertise in all of the areas that the business depends on to be successful. You don't have to be the biggest subject matter expert in those things. In fact, it's wise to bring people to work with you that are the biggest subject matter expert in each of those areas. But you have to have enough expertise in selling, in marketing, in product development or product acquisition or product manufacturing, or finance, and management and leadership 0151 all of the moving parts that make a business work. You have to have enough expertise in each of those areas, to be able to listen to and appreciate and support the true subject matter experts that you assemble to help you achieve your goals. So, expertise is really important.

There's also never a point at which you get to stop developing that expertise.There's no such thing as achieving all the expertise necessary to be the successful business person you want to be, because the world keeps changing, and as we've seen in the last 25-30 years, technology keeps changing. So what it takes to be successful keeps changing. And when I say this I'm sure you're thinking, Well, duh. But I keep encountering people running businesses who stopped developing. Maybe they stopped in 1982, or maybe they stopped in 1992, or maybe they only stopped in 2006, but business has changed so much even since 2006, that these people are now operating at a disadvantage, and so are their businesses, and the people that depend on them to keep that business going so that they can earn a livelihood - and their customers and their vendors because all of these people are partners in your business. So there's never a point at which you get to stop developing expertise. The older we get, the tireder we get and the more we think "I just kind of like to chill out a little bit," the easier it is to give up the knowledge development, part of our work.

So, we show up every morning and we we do the work that needs to be done that day. And the thing that gets sacrificed is the constant investment in new learning. In fact, I had a friend who told me, and this is like 10 years ago now, "I'm tired of learning new stuff. I just want a year when I don't have to learn a bunch of new stuff." But that's not a living goal. That that's not something that people who are alive to decide to do. So, you have to keep learning, and you have to recognize that if you're going to sacrifice anything, because we are busy and we're raising kids, and then we get a brief break and then we're taking care of parents and the business demands so much of us and blah blah blah blah blah. The thing you cannot sacrifice is the professional and personal development. That doesn't get to happen.

So, we need to have expertise, and then we need to keep developing that expertise, because we realize that the world is going to change. And we need to keep changing with it. And then at some point, that expertise actually gets in our way. It got in mine, and I see a lot of other people for whom this is true. So I think it's something we have to watch out for. There is a hubris that comes with expertise, the sense that "I already know what needs to be done. I've done it well already, have done it well for years, I've had some crazy success stories so obviously my expertise is the answer."

But it's not, it never is or it might be enough of an answer but not the best answer. So the other thing we have to do is surround ourselves with people who are more innovative than us, or more intuitive than us, or more technical than us. We need to surround ourselves with people who have different types of deep subject matter expertise. But it's not enough to just surround ourselves with them. It's not enough to just have fun meetings with them and do brainstorming with them. Because if we walk away and do our own thing based on our comfort with our own expertise, then we're just wasting everybody's time. So we also have to make it safe and possible for those people that we surrounded ourselves with to actually have an impact. We have to listen to them, we have to try their ideas.

So there are two things that most of us have to get past in order to successfully do this. Well first,, there's these three things we need to do. 1) We need to get to a level of deep expertise, 2) we need to commit to never stopping developing that expertise, and then 3) we have to surround ourselves with people who have different types of intelligence in greater doses than our own, and we have to listen to them.

So what are the two barriers that get in the way of that? Well, the first is the resistance to learning. Most everything you need to know to learn to run a business is entirely within your grasp. So it's not like acquiring new knowledge is outside your ability. But when we're faced with learning something new, and technology is a good example, a lot of business leaders don't want to figure out how the technology in their business works. Or, they may be totally comfortable with understanding how the technology in their manufacturing environment works, but they don't want to have to learn how the technology in their marketing environment works. So technology is a good example. We have this resistance to learning something new, and it's based on fear. We're usually intimidated by the idea that we have to learn this new thing, or it's based on just feeling like it's going to take more energy than we have. I mean, the truth is if you can get up and get in the car every morning and go to the office, or if you can get up and work at your bench, or if you can get up and jump on a plane and go visit customers, you're exerting the same level of energy that's needed for learning. You're just exerting it in a different area. We can get past our resistance to learning, if we can stop and say, "I need to learn this new thing, and I can." Then that breaks through one of the two major barriers to be successful with 1) developing expertise, 2) continuing to develop our expertise and 3) inviting opposing and challenging viewpoints.

The second thing we have to do is to resist our own tendency to feel threatened by somebody who knows more than us. I thought this issue was only true for people in corporations, where everybody's climbing up the ladder and everybody wants their manager's job and the manager wants the next manager's job. So there can be a real tendency to feel threatened by people coming along who know more than you do or who are more organized than you are or who are more charismatic than you. In the corporate world we started talking 20 years ago about the fact that if you didn't prepare the person behind you to take your place, that you couldn't go anywhere. I'm sure that seems like it should have just been really rational, and I'm sure there were business leaders going back 200 years ago that understood that. But about 20 years ago we really started trying to push this, because corporate politics being what they are, people were being held back instead of moved forward. So we were trying to introduce this idea of self interest, that if you don't prepare the people around you to replace you, then you can't go anywhere else either. And I thought that was going to be mostly a corporate type of behavior - that the politics of corporations lead to managers feeling threatened by strong people around them. But I found out that's not true. The more I work with independent business owners, the more I've discovered that it's a human trait, not a corporate/political trait. And I recognize it in myself. It's something that I've had to always work to make sure it didn't play an important role in my decision making.

It's really importan to challenge our tendency to feel threatened by people presenting new ideas and challenging the ideas we have, and it's probably because ideas and expertise and our thought processes, they're very personal to us. So there's a, an underlying threat to having the things we're comfortable with get shaken up. But if we can do those two things, if we can resist the resistance to learning, no matter how old we are, and if we can resist the tendency to feel threatened by others that bring different types of intelligence to the experience, then we have a really good shot at running a successful business, no matter what size it is.

You Need to Play the Long Game

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 05:00:00 GMT

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I've been thinking a lot recently about how hard it is to play the long game in business. It requires several things. Most people lack: Trust in the future, confidence about their choices and patience. The requirement for a long game is true in many areas of your business, but nowhere is it more stark than in the area of creating a meaningful online marketing presence. When social media first hit the scene in 2007 and 2008, we were all struck by the instant-ness of it all.

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I think of an idea. I write it. I publish it. I come up with an idea for a visual. I turn it into a graphic. I post it. Fast, fast, fast. Right? The problem is that the ability to produce and post things quickly has absolutely nothing to do with creating customer awareness or becoming a fixture of their consciousness. That is slow work, tedious work, and it takes a long time to see results.

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Because in today's marketing environment, success isn't measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. Let me say that again, because what I just described to you is the most basic understanding of search engine optimization or SEO. Success isn't measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you.

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When we talk about telling stories online, when we talk about creating rich content, what we're talking about is all the words and phrases you bake into your website that will help a searching person find a product or a service you offer. And that takes time. Time isn't the only thing. It also requires a strong CMS website. That means content management system, not just eCom. It requires the creation of lots of good content — across articles and products and promotions on your Web site.

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And it requires patience, as you build out that content over time and that content gets turned into links by search engines. But time. Time is the thing most small business owners underestimate. After all, in the past, you could run a radio ad and a few people would come off the street as a result of it. Or you could run a TV ad or a newspaper ad and you could see pretty quickly if there was a response. You can run those same ads today and you might even have a few people respond.

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The problem is that today's consumers are completely distracted by whatever is happening on their smartphone and they're inundated with marketing messages everywhere they look and listen. Also, they aren't shopping around for products like they did in the past. They do their shopping online. And then if they like what they see, they come into a store to buy. And yes, 90 percent of all purchases are still happening in a store. In a recent report on retail, the NRF or National Retail Federation reminded its membership that it's not about "online versus retail" at all.

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It's about retail dependence on online. Today's consumers see online marketing as a seamless part of their retail experience as they search for online products and knowledge and references. And then they seek products out in stores and in-person. And how do those customers find your business, so you can be the store they walk into? Using search. They search for what they seek. They drill into the links that show the most promise. They check out the ratings and the reviews of the seller and the individual products, and then they decide where to go to buy. The creation of that website content — leading to meaningful links —takes time. The creation of a strong system of references and reviews and ratings, which is what we call social proof, that takes time and patience and more time. But here's the interesting thing. In the first two or three months, it feels like you're doing a lot of work for absolutely no results. Then in the four to six month range, you start to see tiny benefits, but it's hard to trust them because they're small.

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Then if you've been super disciplined and you continue to develop content, despite the fear and frustration at around one year, you really start to see results. They begin to build slowly and then steadily. When I first started my blog in 2006, I had a grand total of three readers and I was related to all three of them. Now, 13 years later, my blog drives thousands of visitors per day to my websites. All those blog posts over all those years serve as links to my online presence. I don't pay for any advertising beyond my blog, because the rich content that I've put on the Internet is all the marketing I need. Of course, 13 years is a long time. You don't have to and you shouldn't have to wait that long to see results. And if you're selling jewelry or other luxury goods, you will need other marketing tools besides a blog. I just use this as an example of the exponential power of rich content.

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What you need to remember is that a year or two is not very much time at all. You also need to remember that this is the way marketing and selling work now. So if you haven't already, you need to commit to a long game of content creation so that a year from now you've already made significant progress. After all, the time is going to go by either way. What do you want to have to show for your business's marketing presence when next year rolls around?