The reporter with whom I spoke yesterday was intrigued, and welcomed my contrarian outlook on the economy. I told him that companies are still spending money on marketing, and the good ones always will. I told him the creative freelancers I know continue to fill their days with paying work. I told him that Redlake’s most recent three clients are in or related to the real estate business(!) and have hired us to create strategic marketing strategies. They’re planning.

Last night I heard for the gazillionth time a popular and self-serving Washington cliche, and for the first time, it made an impact on me. “We want to get the economy working again.” Well, the fact is that the US economy IS working and has been steadily for the past 225 years. There are plenty of places around the world to remind us what a non-working economy looks and feels like! But, this is not a political discussion-for that let’s hang out sometime. Rather, this is my assurance to you that while the economy is in a downturn, there are LOTS of people making great money and the same can be done by anyone reading this.

Here’s how: First, recognize that you must focus on delivering an exemplary quality of work now more than ever. Picking up a regular paycheck by doing “good enough” and taking your clients for granted was never a prescription for grand success, but is less so now. So, how would YOU answer these six questions:

1. What is your written plan for success?
2. How much of each day do you engage in income-relevant training?
3. Exactly how are you applying that training?
4. What is your level of engagement in on-line social media? I don’t mean looking a recent Letterman episodes on YouTube, but instead, reaching out and joining the discussion related to your skills or profession.
5. What three things within your control can do you this week to improve the quality of your product or service?
6. What income-supplementing activities can you enlist outside of your professional job requirements? Examples include multilevel marketing of a great product, active participation in the stock market and selling your knowledge on the Internet. Don’t know how? Then learn! (see #2 above)

Getting your personal economy working doesn’t require an act of Congress! It requires you to take personal responsibility for producing the absolutely best product or service of which you’re capable, and then effectively marketing that product or service to the broadest possible audience. Not sure how? Start by reading aloud your answers to those half dozen questions!

Yesterday, I was on an important business conference call. Ten minutes into the call, I was dropped. I immediately used my other line to dial back in and after 4 minutes I was dropped again. As I’ve become skilled at through years of experience, I rebooted my modem. I finally got back on the call and at the end, I complained about your company being the sole provider in this area for my cable, Internet and phone. One of the other conference attendees immediately exclaimed that he was about to sign up for your triple package. After my 3 minute rant about how abysmal your service is throughout every aspect of the organization I have touched – and I’ve got years of touching(!) – he thanked me and said he would use your competitor. Where he lives, he has options.

I realize that complicated technology sometimes goes awry. So, it is not your technology I dislike. Rather it your service. I have questions:

Why must I ALWAYS waste my time working my way up the ladder of service competence being transferred from one department to the next to the next to the next until I finally get to that really smart person who seems to hold all the answers? What’s her direct number?

Why do I need to… dial my number into the recording that answers my call, only to be required to give it AGAIN to the service person I speak with?

Why do you NOT give me the option to speak to a live person unless I trick the dial-in system by continually hitting “0″ over and over until it cries “uncle” and connects me to a live person?

Why has almost every service call over the years consisted of the technician telling me that he found the problem, only to have the technician on my next service call tell me the problem is what the last technician did?

Why must each support call I make about a dire emergency with my dead service needing to be looked at by the next level department “that handles that” end with your phone rep cheerfully asking “Is there any thing else I can help you with?”

Why do you ask me EVERY TIME at the end of a service call if I could just take a brief survey to “rate the quality of my service”? Who wastes their time taking those surveys, and do you really think that’s the way to get accurate customer feedback?

Sincerely,

A Severely Dissatisfied Customer.

****************************************************************************

Dear Severely Dissatisfied Customer,

Please do not respond directly to this email as it has been sent via our automated responder.

Thank you for your inquiry. Your issue has been forwarded to the appropriate person and someone will get back to you within 24 – 48 hours. For additional inquiries, please email our award winning customer service at click here.

Please take our brief customer service survey to rate the quality of our service. Click here

*****************************************************************************

The point is: Every customer matters, even if you are a mega billion dollar corporation, but especially if you are a small business. News travels fast and in ways you can’t even imagine. Make it easy for people to solve their occasional problems with your product or service, make live people and phone numbers easily accessible (No, the Internet hasn’t made telephones obsolete!), and rethink your policies, especially if you consider and name them “our policy”.

You can no longer hide from bad word of mouth. Ask my friend who is now that other phone company’s newest customer!

A letter from our heating oil supplier had teaser copy that claimed that they want to help us. Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed it, and at the moment of my son’s innocent enthusiasm, I was reminded how jaded most of us adults are regarding advertising copy – and how important (and difficult) is it to write it well.

First, I must give kudos to my heating oil company for… adhering to a cardinal rule of advertising copy: Write from the perspective of the customer. They did this when they wrote “We want to help you.” Far too many advertisers continue to write copy that speaks about them: “We’ve been in business over 50 years.” “We have locations throughout the Northeast.” or “Our service can’t be beat.” None of that copy would excite my 8 year-old son. So how do you write copy that resonates with grownups who are likely to buy your product or service?

Let me give you a list of questions, that if answered correctly, will provide you with powerful ad copy. Before I give them to you, it’s critical that you know where to get the answers. They do NOT come from your advertising agency and they don’t even come from an internal meeting of your senior staff. They come from your customers. Ask each of these questions of your customers and your ad copy will turn to gold.

1. What are the goals of my customers and what are the main problems that stand in the way of them achieving them that my product/service eliminates?
2. What do they believe about the problems they’re trying to solve?
3. What other options do my customers have that might also eliminate the above problems?
4. What do they believe about products like mine?
5. What do they need to believe about my product/service in order to buy now?
6. What are their objections about buying my product now?
7. Who/what are their enemies – people or products they distrust?
8. What are their dreams for the future?

Ask these questions of your customers either in person, through surveys or by reading on-line blogs and forums so that you can gather answers to as much of the above as possible. Then find some commonality between answers and write your ad copy as if your customer were speaking it themselves.

P.S. My son was elated by another envelope, this one from an insurance company carrying a message beneath the clear address window that read, “Pay to addressee or bearer”. As my son yelled, “Dad, someone wants to give you money!”, I asked myself in this day and age, if anyone BESIDES an 8 year-old is taken in my that trick! Don’t use gimmicks. Just good copy that resolnates with your audience.

The Anchors

So if the first two reasons weren’t enough to make you start questioning who may need to be called into your office and shown the cold light of day, maybe this reason will be enough to push you over the edge. B and C players bring to work with them their bad habits, cynical attitude and contaminate your environment. A great analogy is to look at your company as its own little ecosystem. Think of it as a little fish bowl with everyone living together in this tight little bowl doing their thing. Now, if you have a good filter everything is fine and dandy, and everyone goes on thriving indefinitely. What happens when the filter breaks or if–god forbid–you don’t even have a filter. The toxic build-up becomes overwhelming and the fish start to die. Do you think your office is any different? When you have B and C players who bring in their toxic garbage day in and day out…… and there is no filter, meaning there is no consequences for pessimistic attitude or not taking responsibility or blaming others or the trivial backbiting or always bemoaning their situation. All of this and more is toxic waste, and when you allow it to go on you have removed the filter on your fish tank. Very slowly over time, the result is that your environment becomes polluted and you don’t even know it. Everyone seems a little less hopeful, a little less excited and as these players drag your company’s energy down like an anchor so goes the revenue. Your company starts to experience a slow and painful death as it fights for oxygen in a toxic waste dump.

Congratulations, if you have made it this far that means you forced yourself to read this article and I’m very proud of you. You’ve taken the first step in fixing the problem. I can guarantee you that we lost some folks somewhere along the way because the truth was far too painful. My one last request is that you get up right now and go find a mirror, take a few deep breaths and then stare intently into your eyes for a few moments. DO NOT LOOK AWAY and ask yourself the following question. From this moment forward what is it going to be: respect or likeability? If you choose the first, it will change your destiny and dramatically reshape your company.

Top Flight

We’ve discussed the need to let go of the people holding back your organization and how to identify them. We’ve profiled those of you who have difficulty doing that (i.e. firing them) because you prefer to be loved. Now let’s talk about the challenges with running a company by the ‘I just want to be loved’ mentality? Eventually over time you will lose your top talent. A-Players will grow tired of carrying the load of the less motivated B and C players. They will valiantly carry the extra burden for a while depending upon how much they like you and wrestle with their own loyalty issues. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough that ‘convenience’ is keeping them there because it’s close to home and they want the flexibility. But, rest assured, the longer the A-players are forced to carry this extra load…… the more ammunition is building in their head to finally look in the mirror and make that hard decision. They will submit their resignation in search of a boss or owner that they can respect within a company where they can make an impact.

The reason that this will eventually happen is because an A-Player wants to continually advance, grow and experience the joy of an ever expanding paycheck that continues to rise with their effort and results. The problem, however is that they can’t do that in a mediocre company. The money won’t come because the profits are being sucked down by all the dead weight. Salary after salary is being paid to people who can’t or won’t get the job done. It’s an ever revolving circle of nice people carrying and paying nice workers who show up but aren’t moving any mountains. What results is a nice, happy, safe environment that is slowly chugging along with no one understanding why it isn’t experiencing a hockey stick-like sales explosion. Hmmmm can’t imagine why!

Even more tragic is that eventually every B and C-player that these A-players continue to carry puts a noose around their neck. They are working desperately to carry the extra load, but high school physics teaches us, there is only so much load a given entity can hold before it cracks under the gravity of unending pressure. At a certain point, with too much dead weight around their neck, the A-player wakes up one day, begins rubbing her neck and starts putting together their resume while finally uttering those terrifying words… “I quit.” When the letter finally hits your desk, nothing less than shear panic sets in as your mind starts racing as you start contemplating ‘life with out my A-player’ who’s been holding down the ship these past few years. For those of you whose stomach is now growing ever more queasy, keep an eye out for our last installment of this post where we dive even deeper into the ramifications of holding on too long to the dead weight.

Read part 3 of 3

Then there is the business owner who is just in flat-out denial. Their response will more likely be, “Well it’s not like I’m going to fire them” and it is usually muttered with more than a little bit of defensive tone as if to say, “what are you thinking? as if…… firing someone who isn’t doing their job is a mortal sin. For any of you business owners who are now reading this and experiencing a bizarre, sudden illness welling up in your stomach, I suggest you keep reading. Chances are this is your gut telling you, “Listen up buddy, you need to hear this!”

While your friends and associates may jibe you about being a ‘softy’ or having ‘too big a heart’ to let someone go, all the while lovingly feeding your inner martyr, I’m going to be straightforward and force you to ask yourself some difficult questions. Just realize that all growth comes from when we push past our comfort zone.

The 3 most important reasons you need to fire ALL of your C-Players and half your B-Players. (If you want to see a copy of “The ABCs of Hiring” email me at cregan@redlake.tv and I will email you a copy of the document.)

No Respect
In the immortal words of Rodney Dangerfield, “I get no respect I tell you. No respect.” Here is the first and most important issue: Most managers and business owners don’t fire people because they want people to like them and they don’t want to be looked at as the ‘bad guy.’ Here is the root problem with this idea: When you place ‘liking me’ above ‘respecting me’, you sacrifice one for the other. Right about now some of you are shifting in your seat saying to yourself, “No it doesn’t”…really!” But, let’s just explore this a bit more.

Prior to founding Redlake, when I was in corporate America, many of my employers held this same misguided belief. It was obvious from every action that they took that they were more concerned with being the ‘good guy.’ What does that mean? It means they were never prepared to have those ‘difficult conversations’ with a troublesome employee or to ‘fire the fat’ so to speak. As a result, they carried these B and C players in the department year after year even when they weren’t getting the job done.

This is a very frustrating place to be for an A-player. Yes, I am an A-player. I care passionately about what I do and I always want to contribute at the highest level. While in these positions it became obvious to me that while in most cases, I genuinely liked this manager or owner. They were nice guys/gals. But, I didn’t respect them as a manager or as a business owner because I looked to them as the leader to set the highest example and they weren’t doing it. They were more concerned with being liked than with running a great organization and pushing their team to excel at the highest level. It’s like being on a sports team with a coach who doesn’t care if the team wins a championship as long as his players love him. In the end, however, those teams won’t win and his players won’t end up loving their work or their coach.

The biggest problem for the manager or owner is that they are sacrificing respect just to bask in ‘likeability.’ Let me be very clear here: If you have someone on your payroll who needs to be fired and you won’t fire them, your employees don’t respect you. Why would they? You haven’t demanded their respect. Here is the kicker, though. If you truly cared about their deep respect, you would have that difficult conversation, take the action that needs to be taken, so that they perform their job much better and reach their goals. You would then get both their respect and admiration as an effective leader. As an owner, when you place ‘liking me’ over ‘respecting me’ you are destroying the very foundation of your company. Let me ask you: How can a leader lead an army that doesn’t respect him? They can’t. The employees are leading the company and they’re taking your business on a direct course to mediocrity. In your competitive environment, how long do you think your company can survive running on a daily diet of mediocre performance?

Finally, and most importantly, when you allow yourself and your business to be so disrespected by these B and C players who have now embraced the belief that they are ‘entitled’ to a job with you and at some level you feel you have a ‘duty’ to keep them, your self respect begins to erode. Now you are saying: “You’ve gone too far. They respect me and I respect myself.” Do they? Do you? Of the people that have come to mind as you have been reading this and have now been lumping into the B and C player category, what were the last few things that you have asked them to do that they failed to do? Are they not making those cold calls? Are they not treating the customer with respect? Are they showing up late or running out early? What things have they been doing or not doing that you have tried to curb yet still continue. Here is the real scoop, if they respected you as their leader, they’d change their behavior. The problem is that since they know there are never any consequences, they know they don’t have to listen to you. They know you don’t have the stomach to fire anyone. They know they’ve got a job until they quit or the company folds. You’ve proven that to them daily as they ignore your orders and experience no consequences.

How long can you continue to write checks giving your company’s hard earned money to people that aren’t performing and don’t listen to you? Do you think that doesn’t effect your self esteem? Do you think your gut doesn’t know the real deal? Your gut knows. That’s the sinking feeling you’ve been having every time this issue comes up and you force yourself to change the topic. Not yet convinced. Read part two coming shortly.

Read Part 2

Read Part 3