No Matter the Size of the Market, All Business Is Local
If you’re big, act little. If you’re little, peacock.
Doing the unexpected will get you noticed. That’s branding. Look at Threadbare. Here’s a bunch of buddies that are grossing $20 million but, surprise, won’t do the paperwork to get them increased sales channels.
Via Jason at 37 Signals:
“It’s about time the Chicago press noticed a few dropouts in their 20s selling nearly $20,000,000 worth of T-shirts on Ravenswood Avenue.”
“It certainly doesn’t hurt our PR when we go to speak and stuff like that to say, ‘Yeah, we turned down Target. We turned down Urban,’ †Kalmikoff says. “But honestly, a little bit of it was laziness. We were like, ‘Well, who’s gonna fill out all this paperwork? I’m not doing it. Are you gonna do it?’ It just sat for like two weeks. Then we’re like, ‘Just tell ‘em no.’ We couldn’t take the time away from our client work for our side project to be filling out the paperwork to get into Target.â€
Don’t think that they’re naive. They’re doing the unexpected and getting recognized. The fact that they turned down Target and Urban Outfitters just adds to their underground mystique.
Besides, you have to love a bunch of guys who are sticking it to the man just because they’re too lazy to sign the contract. That’s exactly the attitude they’re cultivating. That’s their brand.
Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations, & Branding for the quick-read crowd.
Zag… As in, when others zig. Marty Neumeier storyboards marketing, advertising, pr, and branding in the clearest way I’ve seen. You’ll notice that that branding image at the end is obviously holding the most weight with the intended audience.
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Love Thy Customer…
Customer obsession the Amazon way:
pushing 300,000 – 600,000 units of product per day through a fulfillment center is no easy task. gratefully, amazon’s home-grown software and efficient processes help to deal with the immense volume. sometimes, if there are inventory gliches or poor product flow, an activity known in warehousing as “product chasing†occurs. “chasing†is when a product is ordered, but it is nowhere to be found in the (1MMft^2) facility. in reality, it is somewhere, but according to the inventory software the product is supposed to be in its assigned bin, but it has been moved somehow, drifted to another bin, or stolen. this defect is called Inventory Record Defect Rate and is one of the most important metrics at amazon, and is highly scrutinized and reviewed by Bezos and his senior team. why is it important? because when the front-end amazon store allows you to order something, the precondition is that the product and the quantity desired is currently in an amazon facility: the software follows a very complicated algorithm based on network optimization, shortest path techniques, and traveling salesman routing; a check is made against the inventory database — in real time — how many are available, which facility, and how many have been committed already. when the order drops into the assigned facility, the picker goes to the bin where the product is supposed to be, but because IRDR is poor, the item is not there. this situation leads to two following options: (1) go to a local store and buy the item and ship it to the customer or (2) do a “network flipâ€, where the assigned facility “flips†the order to another facility that has that product. option (2) is ideal, but during the holiday season, it is very difficult to do. during the holidays, option (1) is common.
doing option (1) is heroic and is a true example of customer obsession at work: it’s not about serving all customers as an aggregate, but it’s about serving one really well, several million times. at amazon, they really believe this and live this.
10 Free Advertising Ideas
Jake Wolf started his landscape business after posting “Landscape design student needs your home for portfolio development†on a local yahoo group. Within a week of his post he received 30 calls and had lined up enough work to quit his job.
Jake’s plan for 2007 is to have 100 customers signed up for his monthly fertilizing and pesticide program. Here are his plans for signing that first 100:
My plan for signing up 100 new customers by the spring rush.
- Send out a thank you email to all existing customers and alert them to my plans for next year.
- Join as many local online groups as possible. Many allow new members to introduce themselves.
- Call up landscapers who don’t have pesticide licenses and work out an affiliate deal with them to take care of their fertilizing and pesticide applications.
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Build Your Network: People do business with those they know.
I get inquires from between 5 and 10 physicians each week who are looking to learn how to open or run a medical spa. Why do they call me? They know me.
Well, it’s not really me that they know. They’ve seen my picture and read my bio, but they’ve also read what I’ve written about cosmetic medicine and it’s struck them that I might actually now what I’m talking about. They feel a simpatico, a sense that our thinking is similar and a feeling that I’m approachable and can help them. They feel that they ‘know’ me.
Having potential clients or consumers know you is branding. You know Apple is for cool, jeans wearing hipsters. You know that IBM is for big stodgy businesses. You know that Germans engineer better cars and that the Japanese make a science of efficiency. What you ‘know’ about a brand, is the brand.
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75 Posts On What It Means To Be An Entrepreneur
Josh Steimle runs a creative agency in Salt Lake. I know Josh only slightly having met him on a few occasions in his agency and at Fight Club.
Before I met Josh I already knew of him from his blog DON LOPER.
Josh is regularly listed among Utah’s upward bound entrepreneurs and has obviously met with some successes. But reading his list I was able to relate to almost every point. (In fact, I used it for the first post on my Nimble blog.) Josh is turning his list into a book by posting daily on each topic.
The 75 post series on What It Means To Be An Entrepreneur is about the best I’ve ever read on the headaches of bootstrapping a start up.
Here’s a few topics:
13. You’ve averaged 60-80 hours per week of work for the past five years.
14. You’re the lowest paid employee in your company.
15. You’ve had dreams about your employees’ wives yelling at you.
16. You have to begin interviews of potential employees by saying “I need you to understand that sometimes I won’t be able to pay you.”
I’m more than tempted to rip of Josh’s long list book idea and write a series for physicians running a medical spa over on my medical spas blog.
Josh has it right when he says:
Sometimes “wise” people are merely the product of circumstances beyond their control, and idiots likewise. In the end will I be wise for having put my savings into my business, or will I be an idiot? Luckily I do have a large measure of control in the situation, but only time will tell. Unless you think I’m an idiot for even taking the risk, in which case you’ve already got your answer.
Jeff Barson
Hirevue.com Can Change The Way You Interview And Hire
Hirevue.com is changing the way that businesses hire.
Hirevue is run by an entrepreneur named Ryan Money (you can read his blog, Money Talks, here).
Ryan started Hirevue with an idea to use technology to eliminate the majority of useless interviews that a manager has to make before making a hiring decision.
Hirevue works like this. Hirevue sends out a small video camera to a potential hire, or an individual location can use a computer where people can take their first interview with a camera. (This cost’s about $20 per interview I think. Sending the camera costs more.) The company conducting the interview asks whatever questions that they would like, and the person taking the interview has roughly between 10 and 20 minutes to respond. You can ask a very technical question, very detailed questions, or basic questions to judge what the applicant’s response will be. The video is uploaded into a database that is entirely searchable and can be used by any number of people to screen the applicants.
It is not a way to hire people. It’s way to narrow down the field from say 10 applicants down to three that you’re actually going to really interview. As an example, Kennecott Copper uses this service. In the past, Kennecott was forced to fly-in from around the world engineers that were in high demand – they might fly in ten or twelve of them. Now, they send out Hirevue cameras for $120, and they end up only flying in three, which saves their cash.
Service Medical Spas, my company, is starting to use Hirevue on a location basis where we have an applicant come in for a video job interview, almost like keeping their resume. They come in and take a video interview that is then pre-screened by the office or location managers and then kicked upstairs for further assessment.
Hirevue.com saves a huge amount of time on the front end and allows our hiring practices to become much more collaborative. We also keep the interviews on file for potential hires that are not an immediate fit but might be later. Hirevue is a great service that works.
Jeff Barson
