When you google yourself, what do you find?  What does your electronic footprint look like?  Do you have a personality online?

It’s been said if a business doesn’t show up in Google, it doesn’t exist.  Is the same true for people?

When deciding whether or not to do business with a new contact, I pay close attention to their electronic presence.  Are they accessible? Do they have a consistent, likeable personality?  If someone has no online footprint, it makes me wonder what they’re trying to hide.

Remember the greatest door to door salesman ever?  He wasn’t selling cleaning products; he was selling personality.  And in some meaningful way, we all are.  Maybe not to that extreme, but being a faceless entity definitely isn’t helping you.  People do business with people.  And they do more business with people they like.

Privacy

To have an online presence you don’t have to leave all aspects of your life completely open to the world.  If you don’t want strangers looking at pictures of your kids, you don’t have to post them, or you can adjust your privacy settings.

While I don’t actively publish my phone number or address, this information is available to savvy users who want to find it.  In seven years I’ve had zero house calls and only a handful of phone calls — one of which made me $100! (Sold a dormant domain name)

Professionalism

A lot of companies want to appear larger than they are.  They use fluffy language and vague corporate-speak on their websites.  I was even guilty of this on Shoes ‘R Us.  With a few more years of experience under my belt, and a new commitment to openness, I crafted a completely new “about us” page for ShoeSniper.com.  I made a conscious effort to step away from the anonymous and cliche’d “about us” pages you see everywhere.

On each product page, I invite customers to contact me directly.  Because of this, I get lots of hate mail from shoppers — usually upset about a pricing error they found on the site.  I try to reply to these quickly — personally apologizing for the mistake.  In these emails there is no “we”, only “me”.  I explain how I receive an updated catalog from 35 stores one time per day, and do my best to maintain accurate pricing on 350,000 shoes.  The stores, I explain, can raise or lower their prices after sending the catalog and it might be 23 hrs before order is restored in the universe.

I’ve been accused of false advertising, been called a very dishonest company, (allegedly) reported to the BBB, and been threatened legal action.  Incidentally, the same people that send these emails are the same that like to type in ALL CAPS and have hotmail and/or AOL email addresses.  But when I reply with a personal apology, thank them for notifying me of the problem, and explain why it happened, it usually is pretty disarming.  For the companies that try to remain anonymous and hide behind impersonal walls, I think their customer service suffers.

In the next week or two, I’m going to try and add a live chat feature to the site to experiment with this theory a little more.  I can take the heat, and I think the live feedback from real shoppers will be very valuable.

XYZ Team

Do you ever get emails with no signature at the end?  Instead it will be signed, “Company XYZ Team”, “Company XZY Customer Service”, or “Affiliate Manager”.   This annoys the shit out of me.  The reply-to address is invariably some unmonitored inbox.  By not telling you who they are or how to contact a real person, the company is telling you exactly how much they care about your business.

Takeaways

1. Don’t be anonymous
2. Be authentic, be yourself
3. Be reachable

-Nick

Related posts:

1. On Leverage Share Tweet Leverage is a beautiful thing, and people have...
2. Best Door to Door Salesman Ever Share Tweet If you’re in sales, this is definitely worth...
3. Why ‘Storage Wars’ is the Perfect Show for America Share Tweet Storage Wars is a reality show on A&E.  ...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The Go-Giver is a short story (120 pages) on the secrets to success in business and in life.  It’s written in the familiar form of a parable like the One-Minute Manager and the E-Myth.

If you like business books, it’s definitely a worthwhile read.  The Go-Giver does an excellent job of explaining that which we intrinsically know, but don’t often think about.  The big “Trade Secret?” Giving.

It seems counter-intuitive, but every great company achieved success by giving customers tremendous value.  For Ford, it was affordable and reliable personal transportation.  For Amazon, it was a convenient and easy way to shop from home.  For Apple, it was 10,000 songs in your pocket.

When you focus on creating value, the money follows.  These companies aren’t hurting for profit.  Consider RetailMeNot, the greatest affiliate success story in history.  They compile coupon information from thousands of online stores, give it away to customers for free, and happen to be insanely profitable.

Lots of good stuff:

“Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated.”

The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success:

1. The Law of Value: Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. It’s not about losing money or even having the lowest prices. Louis Vuitton can sell $1000 handbags because their customers get even more value from owning them.
2. The Law of Compensation: Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.  How can you scale your value?
3. The Law of Influence: Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.
4. The Law of Authenticity: The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.
5. The Law of Receptivity: The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.  Because there are two parties to every transaction.

So, what can you give?

-Nick

Related posts:

1. On Leverage Share Tweet Leverage is a beautiful thing, and people have...
2. Best Business Books for Young Entrepreneurs Share Tweet These are the must-read books for aspiring young...
3. Skip This Ad Share Tweet These days a lot of big websites have...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Storage Wars is a reality show on A&E.   The premise is when people stop paying the rent on their storage unit, it goes up for auction.  Bidders can’t enter the unit, but can look in from the door and get a short amount of time to assess what they think the contents are worth.  Then they try and sell those contents for a profit.  I haven’t seen a single episode, but I believe this program captures the very essence of America.

We had people to make us things
We had people to sell us those things
We didn’t have enough room for those things
We built lots of self storage – Jimmy Buffett, 1986

If you had to explain America to someone who’d never heard of it before, Storage Wars is the perfect place to start.

First, we developed a culture obsessed with the accumulation of stuff, and the economy depends on this obsession.  Consider the “He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins” bumper sticker, or George W. Bush’s infamous call for us to “go shopping” following 9-11.

But our demand for stuff outpaced our capacity to store it, so some enterprising individuals and companies created the concept of self-storage.  This is capitalism at its finest: discovering a need in the marketplace and offering a win-win solution.  What’s interesting is that self storage is a uniquely American “need”, with nearly 80% of self-storage facilities worldwide here in the US.

We are terrible with money.  Just like our government, we live life in debt.  With an average per capita consumer debt of $8000 (Federal Reserve study 2011), it’s no surprise a certain percentage of storage unit renters eventually fall on hard times and can’t make their payments.

If the renter can’t find more borrowed money, after a few months of borrowed time (3 months in California, where Storage Wars is filmed), the contents of the borrowed space go up for auction.  In this case, enterprising individuals have found a great opportunity to profit on the misfortune of others.  With a keen eye for assessing the value of other people’s stuff, they’ve created their own niche reselling businesses.  Very entrepreneurial of them.

But the culmination of all of this is when this circle of events gets repackaged as entertainment and sold to the same people self-storage-buying public.  A&E has created dozens of new jobs out of nothing in producing Storage Wars, and they profit from selling advertising during the show.  The ads convince people to buy more stuff they don’t need or have room for, ensuring the business continues in perpetuity.  It’s a beautiful thing.

-Nick

Related posts:

1. Domain Registry of America Scam Share Tweet Have you received a letter from Domain Registry...
2. Should Airlines Show Their Seat Maps? Share Tweet Seat Maps Should Airlines show their seat map...
3. How Does Two Buck Chuck Make Money? Share Tweet How does Charles Shaw sell wine for just...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

“Experiencing higher than normal call volume.”

I doubt it.  I think it’s far more likely you laid off customer support personnel in the recession and don’t have the workforce to handle customers any more.

If you are frequently “experiencing higher than normal call volume,” I’ll let you in a little secret: that’s the new “normal,” and you should adjust accordingly.

• Find out why people are calling you and offer other avenues to solve their problem
• Handle calls more efficiently
• Hire more customer support staff

Customer service is viewed as a cost center, but it can be a hugely effective marketing platform and generate tons of revenue if used correctly.

-Nick

Related posts:

1. How to Scam the Garbage Man Share Tweet Local garbage pick-up was recently taken over from...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Seat Maps

Should Airlines show their seat map to customers shopping for tickets?  I’m going to argue they should not.  Not all do (kudos to them), but many have started to show the seat to customers before they buy their tickets.  And what do you think when you see a seat map like this?

When I see this, I reason that the price of the flight is likely to fall.  If 84 out of 116 coach class seats (72%) seats are empty, it seems silly to pay whatever they’re currently asking (unless it’s a limited time screaming deal).  They need to fill the seats, and the current price isn’t getting the job done.

My Suggestion

Of course, the opposite is true if you look at the seat map and the plane is nearly full, but I have a solution that fits for both scenarios.  Instead of showing customers the actual map, airlines could just have a little red note that says, “Only 3 seats remain at this price.“

Could they be lying?  Absolutely, customers would have no way of knowing.  But in either case, it builds a sense of urgency that they should buy now.  I think Zappos does a great job of this, and I doubt they are lying in the way I could totally see an airline.  When you select a color and size combination of a shoe that is running low on inventory, they let you know.

If the plane is still empty, all the airline has to do to stay “honest” is change the price after those “final” seats are sold.  Even a few pennies or a dollar would technically maintain the truth behind “only a few more left at this price.”  Plus, customers understand that airfares can change on a daily or even hourly basis.

When they show the seat map, they’re essentially eating into their own profitability, encouraging customers to wait for the inevitable sale.  It’s a case where too much transparency can be a bad thing.  Well, good for the customer but bad for the airline.  But then the customer isn’t too happy either because they have something they’d like to take care of right away but feel like they risk being punished financially for doing so.  Tomorrow I’ll discuss my pricing proposal for airlines to improve the ticket-buying experience.

-Nick

Related posts:

1. Why Everyone Hates Ticketmaster Share Tweet On Facebook, 111,389 people “like” Ticketmaster.  These 111,389...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Rework, by 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is a series of short essays on business minimalism and how to run a lean, effective, and profitable company.

Rework was a really interesting read, even though it could probably be summarized in 3 words: “Less is more.”  Since the chapters are only a page or two long, it goes really quick and there is useful insight throughout.  Among them: embrace simplicity, question growth for growth’s sake, and stop business planning. The authors argue that the constant pressure to add features, add employees, and add structure is counterproductive.  Small and lean means fast and agile.  You can’t be everything to everyone, but if you can still be valuable to customers, that’s good enough.

It’s similar in theme to one of my favorite quotes: “Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”  I liked the writing style and the content, and got some good takeaways.

Some people might find the tone a little arrogant at times, but the authors have earned the right to speak with some authority on the subject.  With just a skeleton crew of employees, 37signals builds software that is used by millions of people (most notably the project management/collaboration tool basecamp) and makes tons of money.

Rework is definitely worth the read, and it will only take an hour or two to finish.

-Nick

Related posts:

1. Best Business Books for Young Entrepreneurs Share Tweet These are the must-read books for aspiring young...
2. Smarter, Faster, Cheaper Share Tweet A couple weeks ago I came across David...
3. On Leverage Share Tweet Leverage is a beautiful thing, and people have...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Leverage is a beautiful thing, and people have recognized that fact for thousands of years:

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the earth.” –Archimedes, c. 250 BC

Leverage gives you the power to achieve far more than you ever could on your own.  It is a lesson from physics applied to business.  How can a business leverage its expertise, mastery, or assets to yield exponential results?

The prime example is McDonald’s.  A stand-alone restaurant has a relatively low ceiling, meaning even if it is the greatest restaurant ever, there is a physical limitation to how many customers it can serve and how much money it can make.  By franchising, Ray Kroc eliminated that ceiling.  Selling hamburgers became a front for selling the proven process of selling hamburgers.  By selling the business process itself, McDonald’s can now sell 30,000 times as many burgers. Franchising was McDonald’s’ lever.  What’s yours?

Consider the plumber or the dentist.  The number of people they can serve is limited by the number of hours in the day.  If they want to make more money they have to either take more customers (and work longer hours), or charge more.  Conventional wisdom would say there’s not much opportunity for leverage.  But are these small businesses any different than McDonald’s was in the 1940s?

Many entrepreneurs, myself included, struggle to find the right leverage for their business.  I am certain the tools exist to create far greater results with far less effort, but I’m still looking for them.  I’m looking for my lever.

-Nick

Related posts:

1. Best Business Books for Young Entrepreneurs Share Tweet These are the must-read books for aspiring young...
2. Why Everyone Hates Ticketmaster Share Tweet On Facebook, 111,389 people “like” Ticketmaster.  These 111,389...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big (and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas) kind of jumped into my cart at the library a couple weeks ago.  I was going to get 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, but the more I read the book jacket the more it sounded like it was just going to be Fox News-style revisionist history.  So I went over to the marketing section and found this one instead.

Small is the New Big is a collection of Godin’s blog posts, magazine articles, and e-books from 1999 – 2006.  Because of the age of the material, some of it comes across as pretty dated.  There are lots of references to PDAs and “the Net,” and Godin writes with a giddy enthusiasm for the empowering connectivity and global reach of the new wired world.  It’s old news; not because it isn’t true, but because we take that stuff for granted now.

That said, there are still some universal marketing truths explained, which serve as good reminders or idea starters on how to run a better business.  None of it is earth-shattering, but most is at least good.  Tell authentic stories, listen to customers, be agile, and build something remarkable.

You will probably get a few nuggets of wisdom from reading it, but it probably won’t change your life.

-Nick

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How does Charles Shaw sell wine for just $2 and stay in business?  That’s less than some bottled waters.  Between the land, maintenance and utilities, harvesting, bottling, distribution, and general labor and overhead costs, Two Buck Chuck is an amazing triumph of economies of scale and modern capitalism.  I was curious about this myself so decided to do a little research into the wine industry.  Here’s what I learned.

“We make money.  And Trader Joe’s, who’s our partner with the Charles Shaw label, does all right, also.” –Fred Franzia, CEO of Bronco Wine Co.

The Charles Shaw label is owned by Bronco Wine Co, the one of the largest wine producers in the country.  The company owns a huge chunk of California; over 40,000 acres in total. With their massive high-speed wine-making facilities, they can produce up to 200,000 bottles per day under Charles Shaw and a handful of other budget labels.

Two Buck Chuck is made with inexpensive grapes from California’s Central Valley, where land costs $8000 an acre, compared with upwards of $200,000 an acre in Napa county.  If the company is paying for the land over a 30-year period, it might cost them about $650 a year per acre in principal and interest.

The price of Central Valley grapes typically vary between $200-300 a ton.  Let’s say $250 on average.  (Think $3000 a ton for Napa grapes, on average.)

Although it varies quite a bit, let’s say an acre of vineyard land can produce 5 tons of grapes in a year.  Just in terms of land-carrying-cost, that would be about $130 a ton.

As a general rule, the final bottle price of wine can be estimated at 1/100th the price of a ton of the grapes that went into it, so $2 is right on the money for a $200 ton.

A ton of grapes can yield approximately 60 cases (although it is possible Bronco uses some quick water-harvest-stomp methods to increase the juice yield per grape).

At 12 bottles per case, that brings us to $250 for 720 bottles, or less than $0.35 worth of grape juice a bottle!

Add in another $0.18 for the land-carrying-costs, and we’re up to $0.53 a bottle.  Plenty of room to make money at $2 a bottle, but there are still lots of other costs incurred before the wine reaches the shelf at Trader Joe’s.

I found some interesting estimates related to the materials and overhead costs of running a wine business here:

• 7% – cost of grapes / growing ($0.14 per bottle at 7%… significantly less than my guess of $0.35)
• 9% – cost of winemaking ($0.18 per bottle)
• 4% – bottles, corks, boxes, labels ($0.08 per bottle)
• 2% – marketing.  I think the $1.99 price is all the marketing they need.
• 13% – salesmen, distribution from the winery ($0.26 per bottle)
• 3% – administrative costs
• 2% – interest
• 4% – taxes to government
• 5% – actual winery profit ($0.10 per bottle)
• 20% – wholesaler markup – the people who get wines to wine shops.  It sounds like Bronco deals directly with Trader Joe’s, so this may not be applicable.
• 31% – wine shop markup

Bronco sells 6 million cases of Charles Shaw a year, representing about 30% of their total unit sales.  If they’re making only 5% like this this estimate shows (my guess would be 10% or more), the Two Buck Chuck business is worth $7.2 million a year in profit.

I’ll drink to that!

-Nick

Related posts:

1. Susan G. Komen Spends Donor Money Suing “Rival” Charities Share Tweet Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a non-profit...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

These are the must-read books for aspiring young entrepreneurs and the “Retired at 25″ set. Some are classics, some you’ve probably already read, and some I hope are new to you. Each is inspirational in its own way.

1. Rich Dad Poor Dad

I have a special place in my heart for Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. It was one of the first non-fiction books I read that wasn’t for school. I was 18 or 19 years old at the time, but was in the middle of my first true entrepreneurial experience, running a painting company as a branch manager for College Works Painting. This is a book about financial intelligence, and how the school system and conventional wisdom don’t teach what it takes to get ahead. Employees, Kiyosaki argues, are fighting a losing battle because they only trade time for money. The relationship is linear; to earn more you have to work more. Business owners and investors on the other hand, leverage their time and money to reap exponential returns. Rich Dad Poor Dad is easy to understand and rings so true. I found myself saying “Yes!” and nodding along at nearly every page.

Key Takeaway: How to accumulate assets to achieve the holy grail of financial freedom: multiple streams of passive income.

The Next Level: Everything I’ve read in the Rich Dad series has been worthwhile.

2. The Art of The Start

Every great company starts with an idea, and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start is written to help you turn that idea into a viable business. Kawasaki cut his teeth in the Macintosh division in the early days of Apples, and now runs his own venture capital company in Silicon Valley. Successful entrepreneurs, he argues, require humility and modesty mixed in with their revolutionary “curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending” ideas. It’s a book about how young entrepreneurs can change the world once they learn a little more about the game they’re playing.

Key Takeaway: To be great, you need to make meaning.

The Next Level: You might like Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries.

3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Author Robert Cialdini packs weeks of sales training into Influence, and it’s all backed up by his research as a professor of psychology. This is probably the most concise and important book on how marketers and salespeople can influence customers. It’s filled with great stories and and is packed with useful and sometimes surprising information. Every entrepreneur can learn something from Dr. Cialdini.

Key Takeaway: How to sell.

The Next Level: Try Why We Buy and Getting to Yes.

4. The 4-Hour Workweek

Something we can all aspire to! Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek has been a runaway bestseller because of the promises it makes on the cover: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. The claims are certainly audacious and probably unrealistic for most, but Ferriss shows that with a little effort, a dramatic change in your lifestyle is possible. The writing style is very direct and some of the suggestions won’t work for everyone. But at the very least, you will learn some effective tips to free up a few extra hours every week, including limiting email access, outsourcing, and intentional ignorance, which should definitely improve your quality of life. If nothing else, it will get your brain turning.

Key Takeaway: Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. Protect yours dearly.

The Next Level: The Other 8 Hours is a good follow-up read on how to better spend your time.

5. The E-Myth Revisited

Do you run your business or does your business run you? That is the key question in Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. Many entrepreneurs fall victim to the self-employment trap, where they fool themselves into thinking they’ve got it made just because they’re their own boss. The problem is if you spend all your time working on the day-to-day grind of the business, you’re not an entrepreneur, just a glorified employee. Instead of working in the traditional sense, your job as the boss is to build systems that allow employees to do the work for you. Before hiring my virtual assistant, I was guilty of the same sins as many of the business owners featured in the book. It’s not easy to remove yourself from the system, but the rewards make it very worthwhile.

Key Takeaway: Take control by letting go.

The Next Level: For quick ideas on managing your people and your business, you can’t beat Kenneth Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager and The One Minute Entrepreneur.

6. Capitalism at the Crossroads

On the average, earthlings are better off today than at any point in our history. But on the extremes, more than a billion of us still live in dire poverty. Stuart Hart’s Capitalism at the Crossroads is a book about how businesses can improve the lives of those people and make money at the same time. The basic premise is that charities and non-profits on the whole have done a pretty crappy job at creating lasting change for the world’s poor, and that the often maligned “profit motive” can and must be used to serve the “bottom billion.” It’s an interesting read and a reminder that businesses don’t have to exploit the environment and developing nations to make money. Indeed, those that can solve some of our challenging ecological and humanitarian problems over the next 50 years stand to truly cash in.

Key Takeaway: Between 1 and 4 billion potential customers are being ignored by most of today’s companies.

The Next Level: If you want change the world, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and The Go-Giver should probably be on your bookshelf.

Don’t have time to read these and all the other great business books out there? Why not give Executive Book Summaries a try. They give you the Cliffs Notes version of all the classics and latest books on productivity, sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, and more.

-Nick

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.