Ahh its time for the cookies and chocolates to roll in! Lets celebrate the office party!!
While I love a tin of cookies or an all out party as much as the next guy, sending a tin of cookies or throwing a party is partially the SEER style, but the other side is to do something that hopefully lasts well beyond lunch or one night. This holiday, as we have for the past 3 years, are giving away $100 gift cards to each of our clients through justgive.org. What this does is make sure that our motto of “be good” (Be good to our clients, be good to each other, be good to our community) continues to be illustrated in our actions.
The biggest by product that has come out of this (that I never expected) is finding out more about our clients, not as “clients” but as people. I have had clients share stories of their sick children, their favorite animal shelter, the organizations where they spend their free time, the shelter that they support, or the group home they spent some time in while they figured out their youth, the list goes on and on.
So I ask you, people who read this to think of ways to do something for your clients that humanizes your relationship with them, and their relationship with you. If you want to stop being labeled a vendor and are seeking to be labeled a trusted advisor, partner, or friend, you have to act that way, all year long and sometimes, just sometimes, your holiday gift can open a dialogue that would never come up in a weekly call or quarterly report – all while doing something great.
I also ask you NOT to do this as a GIMMICK!
Clients can smell BS a mile away…make volunteerism a big part of your company, and this will be a natural extension of who your company is, doing this only at holidays is a nice gestrure but will not yield what it does for us.
Interested in where SEER people volunteer? Just read our about us page, and if you are applying to any of our open positions…you better have a good idea on where you are going to spend time making this world a better place or you won’t be a good match.
I must say I am not fond of the title one bit and hope to change the content. To me winning is not about what the world sees as winning. Very few people will ever know if I am truly “winning” because the metrics by which I judge success will never entirely be found in quickbooks or in a P&L or in an award. Now of course, growing SEER is part of my success equation, but no amount of awards makes up for the many other ways I feel like I am on the right path.
To me, I my definition of winning changes every so often, it evolves, but today, to me…
winning means I get to spend as much time with my loved ones as possible and that work doesn’t prevent that for me, OR for people on my team
winning means I don’t have someone who has invested in my company poking their nose around or pushing me in directions I don’t want to go
winning means we retain our clients and we retain our team members
winning means our reputation is in tact and that our referral pipeline is strong
winning means I spend serious time doing something to help someone other than myself, my friends or my loved ones
Its funny, when you look at sports, you win when the final buzzer sounds, or when the first person crosses the finish line. There is no final buzzer in business, maybe some people would say at a sale of a company, an I’ll say maybe I agree, but a lot of exits are not all we think they are.
For SEER and surely there is no finish line that I have crossed yet.
History is littered with athletes or companies (Ahem myspace vs facebook) who started pulling up because they were in the lead, only to watch someone come from behind and whoop their ass.
So for me, what am I going to talk about at the panel? It surely won’t be winning in the traditional sense, because thinking of myself or my company as a winner would be like myspace thinking they were the winners in social networking back in 06, oh wait that did happen.
My advice to anyone out there, whether you run your own show, or not, is never ever ever congratulate yourself while you are still running the race, always act as if you are behind and that someone is on your tail trying to take your place. It will pay dividends in all aspects of life.
You will be more likely to “win” and sustain “winning” if you never act like you are “winning”.
So instead of making my part an “I’m awesome” brag session, I’m hopefully going to convince the panelists to do something more like I was invited to do by the Happy Cog Crew lat year at SXSW, check out the video below that was an excerpt of our panel with Greg Hoy, Tracey Halvorsen, Kevin Hoffman, and Greg Storey. Maybe one small part of “winning” is being comfortable enough to share with a massive audience your losses and not think it makes you look bad.
I was on my ascent to Reno from an awesome day at the SEMA show presenting on search marketing in Las Vegas. I got on the plane and was pissed, why? Because of that stupid no electronic devices rule (c’mon guys, if I can cause you that many problems with a laptop looking for wifi, you’ve got biger prolems). I was swamped with work, and wanted that couple minutes to keep banging away at work.
Now that I read more and more on my iPad, I was stuck…no magazine, no newspaper, no printouts, just me and that seat back pocket magazine from Southwest called Spirit Magazine – here’s their Twitter account.
So I opened it up, little did I know the lessons, I would learn on the ascent to Reno.
1 – What did Spirit Magazine teach me about my business?
As I read about pilots (like Paul Feichtinger) who fly F16’s in our national guard and double as southwest pilots and as I read about pilot Gary Im and his volunteer efforts, it reminded me so much about humanizing your business, giving your business a personality. I think we do a decent job of it, but it got me thinking of ways we can improve.
For starters, I NEVER review blog posts before they go up, our blog is there for our team to express their views w/o my approval.
As a company with a heafty volunteer component, I bet most people don’t know about the hours that people at SEER pour into making this world a better place in addition to “kicking some search engine buttocks”.
Right now we add everyone’s early childhood picture to every proposal, giving holiday gifts to clients now is done with just give, and I’m looking for more ways to get the SEER story out there. My next big goal is to have breakfast with every one of our employees at least every other month – not to review their work, but to understand whats going on with them. To ask about their families, their volunteer efforts, their goals and how SEER can help them achieve them. This is going to be tough and I may not succeed, but I am going to try.
2 – How did Spirit magazine help me think of a link building idea?
Simple, as I flipped through the pages I saw an ad from one of our clients, ummmm hello…you might want to tell us about such things. As such as soon as I am done writing this I’m firing out an email to Brett letting him know they are using landing pages – and that I bet they have a bunch of old ads with vanity URLs that are probably not 301’s. Thank you Spirit magazine, you helped me build links for my client!
3 – Lastly, what did a PAPER magazine teach me about ONLINE social media?
Ok, so I am on a flight to reno visiting 2 clients, and before takeoff (since I can’t be online on southwest planes…cmon guys) I send out this tweet / update.
I get a response from GoTahoeNorth.com … someone I don’t follow, but I figured ok whatever, and shut down my laptop figuring I MIGHT take a look.
Then as I am flipping through the magazine I see an ad from them! Instantly it gave me a feeling that these guys are credible. Your reaction might be different, but for me it made me feel a little bit like OK, I really should check these guys out now. Major reminder that offline media influences credibility a lot which helps the online. I took that thinking into my client meeting right after I landed with some of the best guys, selling the best snowboards on the web. We talked for 7 hours about SEO, but for a good hour I hammered home how offline perceptions will help them with their online objectives.
I also walked out with this dope longboard (on the left)
will potentially finally rid me of the 10 USB sticks that I have and the fact that I always lose them, leave them in my pockets (so they can be washed), or forget them when I travel. Having one that is thin enough and durable enough to keep with me on my keychain is KEY! Not to mention the element 02 grill by fuego, that I MAY consider sitting in my back yard.
So my biggest takeaway…there are lessons about life, love, and yes business, all around us. The question is do you keep your eyes open for those lessons? Are you an opportunist? Do you look at every single interaction as a chance to learn, even when the learning opportunity is not obvious.
And yeah, I also realized that maybe unplugging for all of about 7 minutes on an ascent can be as much of a learning experience as reading 300 blog posts this week and going to pubcon to learn all about SEO tricks.
Thank you Spirit Magazine and southwest for helping me learn some lessons about my business.
PS I would LOVE (LUV) to fly you guys more often (b/c I love your people, I even had the rapping flight attending on my flight to Vegas from Philly a year ago) but you guys aren’t in the star alliance so I am stuck with US Air, who never responds to my tweets… and treat me and my gold membership like a second class citizen. If you guys ever get in the star alliance I’m SOOO in, but I lose all my international travel points 🙁
OH BTW can you guys do something about this turbulence its killing me, I’m still a little scared of flying.
A client recently asked me what was up with “associate” as my title. My cards have said associate since I started the company. Even when it was just me, I knew that I wanted to be part of a team, and I wanted everyone on the team to be part of the success.
Here’s what I have learned about not having a title:
People may not know its your company when they speak with you / meet you. This is a good thing b/c you may be more likely to see some people’s true colors.
You avoid hiring people who place a lot of value in titles
It grounds you, whenever people ask me about my title and I tell them it is a reminder of what my values were when I started the company.
Part of that reminder is that even though I started the company, I am just one of the members of the team that helps create success for our clients.
Not having a title can confuse the heck out of clients, it makes it hard for them to know who does what, so it takes more time to explain since its not evident.
Bankers hate my title, they want me to be president or CEO – something they are used to.
It can hurt some types of employees, who have been trained to expect to have junior associate, associate, senior associate, account director, types of progressions through their careers. As seer you live and die as an associate.
Lieutenant Daniel Kaffe said it best – the law is about what you can PROVE!
I recently learned the VERY VERY hard way, that the law is not fair. Being right doesn’t mean squat, its all about what you can prove. Keeping with the many themes of this site (That business 1.0 is taking the things we learned in kindergarten and applying them to today’s business leaders in an effort to simplify life).
Its important to not get all huggy / touchy feely about this stuff – keep in mind that as a business 1.0 person who follows a “do whats right” approach to the tough decisions that arise in the course of doing business, that most people in our world do not operate that way.
What I mean is that if you believe in karma and if you believe that if you keep doing well ALL good things will happen to you, that is false. I think you have to look at it more like this:
What kind of person do YOU want to be – and stick to that regardless of how many times “doing whats right” blows up in your face. Learn from those blow ups.
I have a simple rule about anger…if you can do something about it, stop being angry and start working on the solution. If you can’t do something about it, go back to running your damn business and adding value for your clients.
Unless you get paid for anger (like maybe an MMA fighter) – never allow anger to derail you from being the best you can be.
Your clients don’t stay with you b/c you are angry, new clients don’t sign on the dotted line b/c you are the angriest, they work with you b/c you add VALUE and you are part of helping them achieve their goals. NEVER FORGET THAT.
So next time you get pissed about something, whether you deserve it or not, whether it is fair or not, give yourself 2 minutes to vent, then get your butt back on the grind start putting things in place to make sure whatever made you angry never happens again, and funnel that anger into adding more value for your clients.
Last Friday I picked up the phone – “SEER Interactive, Wil Reynolds Speaking” – Client thought they dialed the wrong # 🙂
Nope, I actually pick up the phone sometimes was my response 🙂
The answer I got back was – before you transfer me over – I want to tell you that our account manager Mark is amazing, he’s really on top of us to move this project along…
3 weeks ago another client said the same about Napoleon (when I just randomly picked up the phone)
Yesterday after our kick off another client said the same about Brett
And earlier this week another client said the same about Jaime
Having such an amazing team has made my job very enjoyable to be honest. Its hard to keep great people, but I try my ass off to do everything possible to let everyone know how much I value their input.
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Lately I’ve been chatting about the fact that I dedicating more an more time to SEO and not running the business strategy and sales? Because I don’t need to micro manage people at SEER, they already have the desire to work their tails off!
Picking up the phone is not all la-la land either…about 3 months ago I had a conversation with a client where they had some feedback on a team member and we discussed it and that helped us retain the client and make some adjustments in how we communicated with them. That underscores even more why you got to pick up that phone once in a while.
If you are a software business, review the Live Chat requests (as mentioned to me by Tom Kulzer, CEO of Aweber).
I can tell you this, I’m never going into an ivory tower, it is my goal to do the following four things:
work as closely on client SEO strategy w/ our account team as possible
keep hiring amazing people who want to kill for our clients
continue to build a culture I am proud of
Fire the bad clients, I never want to saddle people this amazing with crappy clients when there are so many good ones to work with.
