Running a business is hard. Who knew?

hmmm...running a business is hard. Running one during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression is harder.

I never really knew what to expect when I started my company. It didn't start with a business plan and investors. I didn't have a forecast for my first year of revenue. I didn't even know I was going to hire employees until a month before I hired my first. When I started my company I knew two things. I knew I was tired of seeing my existing firm treat clients like shit and I knew they were making a ton of money off of my hard work. With nothing more than a passion to see clients treated like I think they should be treated, I started a company. The main purpose behind this new company is that I truly wanted to see clients succeed. I knew marketing technology better than most, but at the end of the day I wanted to see client's succeed in a way they could never do without help. I wanted to be the football coach showing how the hotshot athlete could do better with some focus and a well executed plan.

At first everything was great. I had a contract with a big company. I was going to help them make a difference in a way that wasn't possible before. I was learning everything I could about running a company. Then I started thinking. What happens if I lose my one client? I bet I could find others and work two or maybe three clients at a time. I'll be rich!

Boy, was I a dumbass.

First of all, no one wants to buy your shit. They don't care. There are about 17 million other "marketing" firms out there peddling the same breakthrough solutions with exceptional customer service as you. Just putting yourself out there does not guarantee clients will flock to your door. This I did not know. This was my first lesson in business ownership. It sucked.

The next lesson I learned about running a business was trying to think of how you are different than everyone else selling exactly what you're selling. How was I different? I cared more and wanted them to succeed, but how do you say that without sounding exactly like everyone else who doesn't really care and wants money more than results? "No, I really mean it!" does not seem to work.

Lesson number three was learning to explain what it is my newly formed company does. So, what do you do? people would ask. "Well, that depends on what marketing problems you are trying to solve." Try communicating that without sounding like a chameleon who is willing to do everything from converting new business to vacuuming the floors for money. I was the equivalent of a day laborer standing in the Sam's parking lot waiting for the day's project.

The last, and current, lesson I'm learning is connecting with people you don't know and convincing them that you can solve their problems better than they can on their own and much better than marketing firm #102 (who's having a banner year and blogs about it). It's like a dating game that starts with the question, "So, what makes you so special?" and goes from there.

It's not that I don't think I'm up to it, but it's different than I expected. And harder. It's hard out there for a pimp. Our current client's think we're fantastic, but convincing total strangers that we could be their best marketing friends if they gave us a chance is difficult at best.

Maybe it's because I'm a drummer playing the role of lead guitar. I don't know. I do know that it's hard seeing other companies close business while you struggle. I do see what it's like for natural salespeople who have connections close deals with inferior services. I just don't know what to do about it.

It's exhilarating and humbling all at the same time. I keep following up and putting our services (and myself) out there. And waiting for that first blind date to say yes...

iTunes Genius proves we're all unique in the same way

The new iTunes 8 brings a new feature for your musical pleasure: Genius. This feature works by picking one song and then suggesting up to 100 songs that you would like based upon that one song. For example: I picked "Aeroplane" by the Chili Peppers and it suggested:

All Mixed Up - 311

Pepper - Butthole Surfers

Been Caught Stealing - Jane's Addiction

And so on. It's a great feature because it creates a playlist of songs that otherwise I might not have chosen. How does it know what I like? No doubt it was inspired by Pandora, but does Apple use the same algorithmic approach? After some pretty significant research, the answer is no. The genius behind iTunes Genius come from the behavior of the iTunes community. 

Using my example from the Chili Pepper's "Aeroplane", Genius works like this:

1. Who else on iTunes has downloaded "Aeroplane"?
2. What other iTunes songs others did the "Aeroplane" community play within the same genre and release date?
3. How many times has the community played "Aeroplane" compared to other songs in their library?
4. What iTunes songs did the community purchase?
5. What iTunes songs did they skip over?
6. What iTunes songs did they rate?

There is a high priority placed on the release date. "Going to California" from Led Zeppelin brings up significantly more 70's songs than "I Want to Be the Boy...", a similar blues tune from The White Stripes.

Notice I also say iTunes songs. Genius doesn't work for The Beatles or anything off the bonus disc of Radiohead's In Rainbows. The song must be available for purchase in iTunes for Genius to recommend it. It can't recommend a song it doesn't know the community listens to.

The interesting thing about Genius is that it proves that for the most part, people tend to like the same things musically. If you like, "Aeroplane", chances are you also like "Remedy" by The Black Crowes. Apple proves this concept of community by suggesting to us songs that our friends and their friends are playing that perhaps have slipped our mind. It's a social media application in the largest context. Instead of our friends burning mix CDs for us to listen to, their mix CD choices are sent to Apple along with everyone else to create the world's largest mix CD for all of us to enjoy. And if you don't have the songs everyone is playing, the convenient Genius Sidebar tells you what songs your friends are listening to that you don't own.

While there's no doubt Apple is getting a boost from this feature (I'm sure incremental song purchases through Genius are skyrocketing), I'm thankful that Apple produced the technology to bring us all a little closer. Like Facebook or Twitter, the power of social media is not in the technology itself, but in how it allows us to be closer to those we know and love. Social Media works like cell phones. People don't marvel in cellular technology as much as that they can chat with grandma in New Jersey while stuck in traffic in Dallas. The genius behind iTunes Genius is that through aggregating our song preferences, we are pleasantly surprised each time a forgotten song flows perfectly into our (and our millions of iTunes friends) earphones.

Cross posted from The Marblehead Blog

Kid games

My daughter is getting to the age where she's learning all the kid jokes and things that make you laugh for hours when you're 7. After I picked them up, she quipped, 

"Daddy, why do birds fly south for the winter?"

"I don't know, why?"

"Cause it's too far to walk!"

And then proceeds to laugh like it's the funniest thing in the world. To her it's new and fresh, and she can't wait to share it with everyone. Every day is new with facts about how the world came together and starting to make sense.

"Daddy, did you know how the sandwich was invented?"

"How?"

"Well, there was this Earl named Sandwich and he loved to play cards so much he didn't want to stop for dinner. So he had his cook bring him his dinner on bread so he could keep playing. Then he named it sandwich after he died."

"He died from his sandwich?"

"No silly, that was later."

"Just checking..."

It's amazing to see what they are learning each time I pick them up. It ranges from the philosophical, "Where is heaven?" to the practical, "How can I go to sleep faster?", to critical life skills like how you can make farty noises with your armpit.

"Daddy, can you do this?"

Politics, part 3 - Those Right Wing bastards

In my last post, I really tried to understand liberalism and it's distinctive viewpoint. Now I steer the car to the right and try to figure out Conservatism. Remember, Liberals generally stand for three things:

1. Helping individuals obtain their rights
2. Maintaining equality among citizens
3. Promoting freedom from burdens

Conservatives should stand for the opposite, correct? Sorta. First, no one really seems to know what the hell conservatives stand for except whatever is opposite of liberalism. Here is what I found about conservatives:

1. Fiscal conservatism - A system that advocates smaller government, less federal spending, fewer entitlement programs, and lower taxes.
   
2. Social conservatism - A political system that affirms the government's role in encouraging or enforcing traditional values in the belief that these are what keep people civilized and decent.
   
3. Federalism - A system in which the power to govern is shared between the national and state governments. This is rooted in a belief that the government entity closest to issues should resolve the issue.
   
4. Supply-side economics  - A system that believes economic growth can be created by using incentives for people to produce goods and services, such as adjusting taxes.

In summary, a smaller government fiscally that guarantees less to individuals, but promotes producing goods and services. Unless people go against traditional values, then there should be guidelines in place to keep people civilized and decent. Typically they resist change and what to keep things just the same as they've always been in order to "conserve" the status quo.

Thanks to Wikipedia and The Intellectual Devotional for the info.

Politics, part 2 - Those damn liberals

I don't know much about politics. I do know that people are passionate about them. It's like sports. You support your team and defend it against all others. Even when they suck and you have no basis for it. You make shit up so that your team doesn't sound like they suck. "Well, as soon as Schilling gets back we'll have better pitching." and "Wade Phillips looks like a grandpa but he's a defensive genius." People who follow politics usually support the party their parents did, and their parents, and so on. Defend the party against all others. Even when we have no idea what they believe. It's the American way.

Since I decided to start caring about politics, I thought I'd figure out what some things mean. Seemed like an easy thing to start with. So I want to know 4 things.

1. What's a liberal or better yet, what's liberalism?
2. What's a conservative or what's conservatism?
3. What's a Democrat?
4. What's a Republican?

I plan on figuring that out and writing about it in a simple way that even Wade Phillips could follow.

Liberalism

Best I've learned, liberalism is 3 things. That's it. Well, really 4 things, but the 4th thing (and most accurate) is "Whatever I don't agree with". I'll leave #4 alone and focus on the 3 items that make up real liberalism. Feel free to use #4 whenever you don't have anything to support what you're talking about. Saying, "It's really because of the damn liberals in the White House" is always a good thing to say to the JesusGodFlag crowd. They'll usually agree with you, no matter what you said previously.

Here are the the tenets of liberalism:

1. Individualism - A liberal political system believes that its purpose is to secure some good for individuals. Liberals believe that individuals have desires and wants that existed before political systems, and the purpose of political systems is to attain these goods for individuals. These rights typically include education, healthcare, housing, and employment. The more liberal a political systems is, the more "rights" it believes the government should provide to individuals.
2. Equality - A liberal political system also believes that all citizens should be treated equally by the government. The purpose of the political system is to make sure everyone is treated equally. Laws against discrimination, equal employment, and equal access to the same rights and privileges for all citizens would be supported by a liberal political system.
3. Freedom - The liberal system should take an active role in promoting the freedom of citizens. They believe that real freedom can exist only when citizens are healthy, educated, and free from dire poverty.

So there you have it. As simple as I can put it. The argument against liberalism is that it takes money to provide all these rights to people (i.e. higher taxes). Liberals would say in return, "if not us, than who? Who is going to take care of the poor, uneducated, unemployed, etc. etc."

Maybe the church should do it. Just saying...

Thanks to Wikipedia and The Intellectual Devotional for the info.

Politics, part 1

Never before have I been interested in politics. It was always something that happened outside my weekend plans and school activities. I didn't see how the president impacted my daily life and therefore didn't care too much. 

I don't know if it's getting older, the media, or meeting a few people consumed by it, but I care now. In fact, I'm hooked and it's making me both mad and scared. It's making me mad because I see how little America seems to care about the real issues and focus on whether Obama wears a lapel pin or how funny his name sounds. More interested in whether community organizer is something to be proud or ashamed of rather than his stand on the issues or his ability to improve things domestically and internationally. More concerned about what his pastor has said or a particular sound bite wasn't "gracious" or implied people were "bitter" regardless of what he meant. We're a bunch of sensationalist 4 year olds with no real grasp on evaluating candidates on who's best to lead the country. 

And at the same time, this election makes me sad because there is a whole generation of young people who have found someone that inspires them. Gives them hope (the audacity!) in something bigger than their world. Provides for a whole new group of people a path to see how they could be proud of their country again. What we need more than anything is a leader. JFK was like that. Reagan (like his policies or not) could pull people together. And I think that if Obama isn't elected. If he's too black or too muslim sounding or too whatever and people elect McCain so we can fight in Iraq for a dozen (or 100) more years, that whole generation is going to give up believing in politics at all. Give up believing that a person can make a difference and the country is indeed just a place to make as much money as you can and take what you want and fuck what that means to everyone else. It scares me that we'll revert back to the 90s gen Xers who just don't care any more. 

I'm so wrapped up in this election now it's crazy. Regardless of what happens this election, I'm thankful that it helped me care about the world outside of Lakewood.

Sunday fathers

It's funny how songs mean different things to you at different times in life. In high school, I could listen to Kyri Eleison by Mr. Mister over and over again. I thought the synthesizers were the coolest. LOL. I couldn't imagine getting ready for school without playing that song. Now it's been more than a decade since I've heard it. The opposite has happened to me with a song from Sting's Mercury Falling album from 1996. I probably heard "I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying" a hundred times with no effect. It was filler until the other good songs on the CD were played. That is, until I had kids and got divorced. Now that song stops me in my tracks. I can't even play the song in my head without bawling like a 5 year old at bedtime.

The song talks about a father whose wife left with the kids. He tries to reconcile how much he misses them while at the same time thinking, "...a kid should be with his mother, everybody knows that." It hits me because I struggle with that every day. I miss my kids dearly. By far, it's been THE hardest thing about being divorced. 

I used to make them breakfast every morning. I'm a morning person so I would get up first, either go to the gym or make coffee and read. At 7 I'd start breakfast and then go wake the kids up. My daughter Abigail is the type that wakes up immediately in a good mood. "Hi Daddy!" and she was up. My son Hudson is the exact opposite. He'd bark out, "No, sleeping..." and roll back over. After they were up, we'd eat breakfast, finish Dora, and I'd drive them to school. They would argue over who got to poke their heads out of the sunroof while waiting in car line.

I see them on Wednesdays and usually one day over the weekend. It's hard to cram parenting into those two days. Sting laments, "What can a father do but babysit sometimes..." That's exactly how it feels. Babysitters try to make the night as pleasant as possible until the parents come back from date night. Sometimes I feel that's all I can really do. Help pass the time until they have to go back.

Sting closes the song by reflecting on how "the park is full of Sunday fathers and melted ice cream." A full time role vainly trying to be filled on a part time basis. The other time you're wondering what they are thinking. What made them laugh today. Whether they were confused or scared. Trying to figure out how best to protect them from this crazy and often unkind world while being across town in a now empty house.

"We try to do the best within the given time."

Amen Sting

Making sacrifices

For the last few weeks I've been watching the HBO miniseries on John Adams. It's a fantastic adaptation of the book by David McCullough. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney provide Emmy worthy performances. As the champion of independence until Congress adopted it in 1776, Ambassador for the newly United States, its first Vice President and second President, there is no doubt he was a great man. What is focused less upon is the sacrifices he made in order to achieve these great things. Settled in Boston, he spent 3 years in Philadelphia for Congress and a staggering 10 years overseas gathering support and money for our new nation. 13 years his country required him away from his home, wife, and kids (And John and Abigail had a marriage where they wanted to be together, as evidenced by the almost 1200 letters they exchanged while apart). 

That got me thinking. Many times what separates those who accomplish great things and those who don't is their ability to sacrifice. Often the big things in life require putting off immediate gratification and enduring something painful and difficult.

I remember hearing an interview with Mark Cuban about starting broadcast.com, the company he sold to Yahoo for $5.9 billion in 1999. He said for 7 years he worked 12-14 hour days and did not take a vacation while getting broadcast.com started. This is after he sold his previous company for $2 million to EDS (meaning he didn't need the money). He sacrificed for something he believed in instead of taking his cool 2 million and partying in Cabo. His company became a success and he's now #133 of the richest man in the world.

Sacrifices.

Whether it's losing those last 10 lbs, reading a book to your kids before bed, or starting a company, you've got to make the sacrifices necessary to do it. Making the sacrifices now means you'll be able to enjoy the benefits later. And as an added bonus, you become stronger and have more faith in yourself as you achieve greater and greater things. The surest way to build personal integrity is to make and keep promises to yourself. Once you see yourself faithful in the smaller things (I will turn off the tv tonight at 8pm), you set the foundation for the bigger things (I can write a book).

Sacrifices brought Dave Ramsey back from financial ruin.

Sacrifices made Tiger Woods the best golfer to ever play the game.

Sacrifices separated Paul from other Roman citizens.

Sacrifices motivated Richard Pimentel to create the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Sacrifices helped Jared Fogle lose 240 lbs.

What sacrifice do you need to make to keep one small promise to yourself? Start there. You'll be surprised to find what great things you'll be able to do in life through these small sacrifices.

Who knew I'd make enemies

I used to think rap music was stupid. In fact, I still do. But I've come to appreciate one tiny slice of the otherwise banal repetition of ego, endowment, and experience with ladies and law. And that is the "payback" they give all their naysayers. Most rap songs have some sort of "To all those who said we won't make it, Fuck you." statement. Some mention to all the people who told them they wouldn't make it big, did little to help, or even actively tried to hold them back. I never thought much of those statements. Then I started a business.

I never thought people would be anything but positive. And 99% of them are. But a few through jealousy, envy, or just evil heartedness have made it obvious they want me and my business to fail. Some actually SAY it to my face. It's boggling. At first it was like an unexpected slap in the face. I remember hearing the first person wishing my company would fall off a cliff and thinking, "Are they really saying this to me?" Over the years I've become a little more used to it, but it's still amazing to hear. It still stings, but at least I can see the slaps coming now. They hurt less each time.

So to the company that wouldn't pay me, the agency that stopped doing business with me after I wouldn't sell out, the FAMILY that said it'd never work out and I should get a real job, the photographer that took advantage of my giving nature, and the couple of others who did less than nothing to bring down the company. I'm keeping a little list in my head for the "payback" statements. Expect to mentioned in a book, award speech, article, or company retreat.

You'll be remembered.

I'm doing my part to fill up the internet

Hi and welcome!

I decided to create a personal blog because there were thoughts and opinions I wanted to write about that didn't fit on our corporate blog: http:\\blog.marbleheadllc.com. This way, I can offend as many people as I like. :) Note there isn't a link to this blog from the corporate one. It's on purpose.

More to come!