Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

HUMAN RESOURCES OPTIMIZATION

Are the right people in the right positions?

In an earlier post I talked about hiring well. In this chapter, we continue looking at employees. One area that I’ve seen neglected in all but the largest companies is that of re-evaluating employees and moving them around to the most efficient utilization within the organization. So how does a company go about doing that?

I talk frequently about the evolution of employees both from a business need and from an employee perspective. An early-stage startup business needs flexible people who are jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. The need to ‘jump in and help’ is much greater in an early startup than in a billion-dollar corporation. That ability to jump in and help becomes a liability as the company grows large enough to have managers and specialists. Specialization in departments is the key to growing a business from $10 million to $100 million and beyond. So does that mean that most businesses start replacing their founding employees as soon as they reach $10 million? On the contrary, most businesses simply promote their generalists, jacks-of-all-trades to senior management positions as the company grows. Do these people grow with the company’s needs, specialize in some departments, and become experts? Sometimes, but mostly not.

Many large companies are filled with managers who know less about their departments than both their boss and their employees. These generalists are quick to offer to help and jump in – that is why they were hired in the first place, remember? But this ability is rarely a good thing for a manager. They are loved by their employees because they act just like one of the guys, always covering for their team and throwing themselves on any failures, knowing that their long service to the company and their ability in the early years to do what was needed will ensure that their departmental failures are overlooked. This behavior is not good for the business.

So am I saying that an HR optimization is simply the elimination of all tenured employees from a company? No, of course not. Some employees do indeed find a specialization and end up focusing on it as the company itself grows. These people represent truly the only group of employees that it pays to hang on to for extended periods of time. They grew with the company, grew into specialists, and yet hold a lot of wisdom – knowledge, and experience about failures in the early days. These are the employees who have been with Apple and Microsoft for 25+ years. The people at Google and Amazon have been there for over 15 years. There are very few of them, and they have shown upward progress within the companies, not simply because of tenure, but rather because they have changed as the needs of the company have changed.

So the real question is how do you separate the people who have changed with the needs of the company from the people who have merely hung on? After all, the latter group may very well be more liked by their staff, and their willingness to always say “yes” to helping others is seen as an asset. It is very challenging for most business owners, and even nonowner executives, to admit that these employees are replaceable.

However, for the betterment of the company, the trees need to be pruned on a regular basis. The only way that I’ve experienced this happening is by having an outsider come in to observe and evaluate management. Generally, this will be a management consultant or some similar outsider. Their job is to figure out if the people in the roles within the organization are the ideal people who would be hired if that position were open today, or if they are simply filling that role by default, or as a reward for being with the company a long time, or perhaps for being the only person who didn’t take a step back when the role needed to be filled during a busy growth phase in the past. A business consultant will be able to figure out who is accelerating the growth of the company, and who is slowing it down.

The one exception that I’ve experienced was in a Fortune 500 company years ago. I had been closely working with a senior employee who had been with the company for nearly 20 years. One of my jobs was to evaluate his performance and report back to management. As I got to know this person I started to recognize him as a very dedicated employee who had a bit too much generalist in him. I didn’t think he would be climbing the management ladder but felt that he would be a great asset to any quick response team in the company – essentially a “jump into the fire” team inside the organization.

I was surprised when I found out he had in fact years earlier been promoted to a large department manager. I was wondering if he had failed to be demoted back to a senior non-management employee. As it turned out he had not! He realized after a few years that he hated running a team of 40 people. He much preferred to be the guy in the trenches that others could turn to for help, rather than planning staff reviews and working with project managers and business analysts. He actually saw his own strengths and weaknesses and made the proactive decision to leave management. This was a big benefit to the company because he was able to do what he was good at, rather than be a shitty manager.

Unfortunately, after I was done with that client, I found out they had laid him off anyway. I didn’t hesitate one moment and recommended him to be brought onto a project I was now running for another Fortune 500 company. This new team needed precisely this kind of experience and energy. He was much more valuable as the lead triage guy than as a director or group manager. Of course, his experience level would pay at the level of a director!

This was not the only instance I’ve found someone a position after they were let go from a company I was consulting. If you read my earlier book I’m sure you will remember a few of those stories.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

My colleague, Johnny “FM” Molson, recently wrote that “most people don’t know most businesses.”

For example, how many brands of hearing aids can you name?

You and I are happily oblivious to almost all the so-called “brands” in any category that we don’t routinely shop.

And that goes double for what I’d call Ugly Ducking Businesses.

Yet there are exceptions. Take insurance.

You’ve likely only shopped insurance a few times in your life, yet you can easily name a half-dozen insurance brands. Why?

Advertising.

Every major insurance firm runs a heavy-duty, well-crafted, TV branding campaign. To include:

• The GEICO Gecko (and Caveman)
• Allstate’s Mayhem
• Progressive’s Flo
• Jake From State Farm
• Liberty Mutual’s Limu Emu
• The “We Are Farmer’s” campaign with J.K. Simmons

So what can we learn from that?

To Compete with Great Advertising You Need Your Own Great Advertising

The major insurance houses brand with passion ‘cause they can’t afford not to.

If they sat on the sidelines while their competition dominated the Mental Availability and Top of Mind Awareness game, they’d go out of business.

So, if you don’t have any competition running great branding ads, you could wait until they do and then be forced to respond…

Or you could launch your campaign before the competition.

I recommend the latter, ‘cause branding into a messaging “blue ocean” is far easier than having to fight it out in a red ocean of persuasive advertising.

That said, if you are forced to enter that red ocean, it’s better to do so sooner rather than later — and with the highest impact ads you can muster.

Long Buying Cycles Greatly Benefit From Great Branding

Most people associate heavy-duty branding with what the industry calls “Fast Moving Consumer Goods” (FMCG)

Think soft drinks, chips, soaps, fast food, beer, detergents — stuff people buy every week or several times a week.

Coca-Cola certainly does spend a lot on advertising.

Yet branding is even MORE important for products and services with longer buying cycles, bought far less frequently.

Lose a burger sale to a competitor, and you’ll have another chance at selling to that customer later that week.

Lose a roof or AC sale to a competitor, and you won’t have another chance with that customer for fifteen years.

Lose a barn sale, and it’ll be fifty years.

So for long buying cycles, it pays to pre-convince customers before they ever need what you sell, as the cost for reaching them too late is so high.

Conversely, successfully boxing the competition out of consideration hurts them dearly — and profits you even more.

For these reasons, insurance companies know that they have to be on your shortlist, or they’ll lose you as a customer, perhaps for decades. That makes a strong branding campaign a must-have.

If you also have a business with a long buying cycle, it’ll pay to follow suit.

Interesting Characters Make For The Strongest Messaging

Pretty much all of the insurance branding campaigns star and spotlight strong, identifiable characters.

Think of the GEICO Gecko (or caveman), Flo, Mayhem, Jake From State Farm, and the Limu Emu.

Heck, even Farmers has the recognizable spokesperson of J.K. Simmons

There are multiple reasons for this, but the top two are:

1. Interesting characters are dynamite entertainment and ensure better audience engagement.
2. People bond with people faster and more easily than with faceless corporations.

Since 95% to 99% of your ads’ audience won’t be in the market for what you sell, your ads will need to offer entertainment to capture and keep their attention.

Fortunately, characters and character-driven storytelling is the best and most surefire way to provide that entertainment.

And this is especially the case for an episodic or serialized content, such as a TV campaign.

Look at any movie franchise or novel series and you’ll see: people may come for the plot, but they stay for the characters.

You go to a James Bond film to watch James Bond, after all; the plot is secondary. Works the same for branding ads with strong characters.

And not only do the characters engage the audience, they help foster trust in the company.

This works fine with fictional characters, as the insurance campaigns demonstrate, but it works even better for business owners as spokesman, such as Frank Perdue and Gert Boyle.

So if you’ve got a strong Origin Story, you really ought to be telling it — through your mass media advertising.

What’s Your Buying Cycle? And What’s Your Plan for Winning It?

Whether you’re selling burgers or bookkeeping, you’ll want a plan for winning over prospective customers whenever they DO need what you sell.

And it boils down to this:

• If they’re not aware of you…
• If they don’t think of you when they need what you sell…
• If they don’t think well of you…
• If you’re not easy & pleasant to do business with, and…
• If you don’t make & close the sale when the customer calls or shows up, then…

… you’ll lose the sale.

If you wish to win the sale, you’ll need to make sure each step is in good working order.

And nothing on Earth is so effective at improving the first three steps as a character and story-driven, long-term branding campaign.

If you’d like to launch or reboot your business’s story-driven branding campaign, I’d be happy to help.

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“Don’t forget about me.”

I haven’t. But enough people did. John was friendly, and passionate, and had a great location for his service-based business which filled a need.

And John invited people. In a bunch of ways. There is, you might have heard, only so much money for advertising. But John didn’t want to miss anyone. At least, not all of the time. And so he jumped from a bit of this to a bit of that. Some signage, some flyers, the occasional radio spot. Community sponsorship too, of course. He understood that he could not talk to everyone all the time. But he was convinced he could bounce around enough to remind all people everywhere about his business.

He loved the excitement of something bright, shiny, and new that just might work better than the last shiny new possibility.

Change and movement feel like we are going forward. It is the wind in our hair.

The daydreams of the ultimate “moving” sale or better yet “grand opening” event are endless! But a business owner ready to sink their teeth into success does not keep moving locations, even for that rush of change and “what if….” Not even successful food trucks move all the time. They fight over and guard a stable location.

Business owners looking for a crowbar lever to the next floor know changing an address does not serve sustainable growth. You sign the lease – or the mortgage papers, set up shop, and flip that sign on the door to Open. And you stay.

I left home at 18 to get a job and figure it out. University was not an option but I had a cheque for $500, $140 bucks, and change and it was a Saturday in late August. A perfect day to pack everything I owned into my Red Chevy Nova 3 on the tree 4 door and head to the not really big but kinda big city 2 hours away. My sister rode shotgun.

We found my first apartment, a one-bedroom basement suite, and the caretaker let me move in that day even though I wouldn’t have the damage deposit until the banks opened on Monday. I paid him cash for the last week and a half of the month and only just realized that he no doubt pocketed the cash and let me move in, telling the apartment owner that he had a renter for the beginning of September.

Hmmmmm.

Of course, on Monday, no bank would cash my cheque until I called the small town bank where it was drawn from. First, I had gone with the very hyper-friendly caretaker who offered to vouch for me at his bank, but it turns out he was really overdrawn on his account.

I did have a full tank of gas because I had taken the last bit of cash I had and filled up – I explained to my sister that we needed to make sure not to run out of gas and we didn’t. But we were a bit hungry until the cheque cleared on Monday. Rent was $217 a month so I was job hunting right away and put my writing career in neutral.

I lived in a bunch of places over a few short years, moving for a bunch of reasons, buying a lot of beer and pizza for friends with trucks, and patching a lot of nail holes with bits of toothpaste (always use white- not peppermint).

I loved the basement suite I rented from an old woman with a hump on her back which I heated by keeping the oven door open and sitting on a chair close by with a book in my lap reading and imagining that one day I would have a fireplace. And a pool. And a puppy. And be a writer.

I didn’t write or read or study or live nearly as much as I could have. I was moving around too much.

Marketing decisions are the same.

Stop moving around, here, there, everywhere. There is only so much money, remember? And even if you can keep cutting checks for every earnest marketing guru with an idea for you, just stop.

As I told John, pick someone to work with. Even if it isn’t me. Roy Williams is right – trying to talk to everyone, everywhere means you will be forgotten by almost everyone when they finally need who you and your business are.

Work on your business. Make a decision to handle your marketing in a specific way, and move on. Trust someone to do your marketing. Trust yourself to grow your business. Pick someone who has a vested interest in your success. Believe in someone who believes enough in your business to be paid according to how you grow. Who? If you are on this site, reading this blog, you already know.

Don’t jump all over. A Wizard of Ads partner will create a plan and a team based on what you have created and what you envision.

A business that no one will forget.

Don’t keep losing your damage deposit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the best means for marketing your specific business, you can book a discovery call here.

Have you ever come across one of those doors that people perpetually get wrong?

Where people push when they should pull and vice versa?

Doors that resort to signage to help clue people in? Like this:

Those are called Norman Doors, after the industrial design legend Donald Norman.

His contention is that people intuitively and subconsciously respond to the design language of the doors themselves.

So when the design language mismatches the function, people automatically attempt the wrong action.

In the header image, the broad, flat black platforms look like affordances for pushing.

So that’s what people do — only to get jammed up against the non-moving door.

Similarly, the doors in the side image have pulling handles attached, when the function requires users to push.

In both cases, the building managers band-aided the problem with signage.

But I’ll guarantee you people continue to routinely screw it up. Even people who pass through the doors on a daily basis.

A far better fix would be to install proper pull handles on the doors in the header image and to install those black pushing pads from the header image on the doors in the side image.

Got it? Great.

So…. what’s this gotta do with high-performing lead generation?

Everything.

What Is Your Branding Intuitively and Subconsciously Communicating to Prospects?

Your brand voice and attitude as well as your brand codes all communicate on an intuitive and subconscious level to prospective customers.

Let’s call this your “brand design language.”

So when that brand design language mismatches your business model, you run into trouble.

When you get leads through discount offers, but your business is set-up to provide a premium product or service, you’ve got a mismatch.

And that mismatch, wherein you attract transactional customers to a relational business, inevitably drives low conversions, bad reviews, and low margin.

If your business was set up as a low-priced provider, there’d be no problem. Your brand design language would match the customer experience, your operations, and your business model / economic engine.

If you attract bargain-seekers and price shoppers, but you’re set-up to profitably do business with that type of customer, you’re all set.

Walmart does a roaring trade doing exactly that.

Conversely, if your ads used a brand design language that attracted relational customers who place a premium on convenience, quality, expert help, and professionalism — and if your business was set-up to provide that level of customer experience, then you’d be all set.

Apple became one of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world doing that.

Either way works, so long as you are matched up on brand design language, customer experience, and business model.

It’s exactly like push doors work and pull doors work whenever the design language of the door matches the function.

For lead generation, the key is to craft ads with the right brand design language to attract the right kind of prospects into your business.

This will skyrocket your conversion rate and help you to make the most of your lead-gen efforts.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.

The big brother lived with his little brother, his mom, and his grandma.

They lived in an apartment, with an entrance that looked like the one on Sesame Street. Today I understand that meant this fractured family lived in an inner city, somewhere. When I first fell in love with this book, I just thought it was cool.

I have no idea what that children’s book was called, or who the author was, but I will gladly pay a bunch of money to the used bookstore I find one day that has a dusty copy sitting on a shelf. I always imagine it will be low down, forgotten, near the back.

There are a lot of booksellers out there I still have to visit. It was a brilliant story. If I remember it, so do other people who were once upon a time in grade 2.

Connecting people who have with people who want.

People who need help with those that know how. This is the dance of every single small business.

Service or product, any small business exists to serve. If they do it right, they thrive. Their business thrives, their community grows, people have jobs and little Johnny gets a new pair of shoes.

Some don’t thrive, they survive. Squeaking by year after year. The owner owns a job, and not much more.

I believe the tragedy is when it’s a great idea of a business, the owner is beyond passionate… But Not enough people know. Even worse, they know but can’t imagine themselves needing it and walking in that door to Get It. So even, one day, when they finally actually need that perfect local business holding on by fingernails of faith, they don’t think of it. It doesn’t pop into their heads. They ask their friends, coworkers, and spouses, “Who should I call for…..Where should I go to buy….” And no one knows about the shop around the corner.

All of us are potential customers, looking for something.

When we wander into a shop, call a company for help, or scroll past cat videos that make us laugh out loud, there is something we are looking for. A need or a want…. there is always something.

“Can I help you?” asks the shopkeep.

“No thank you, just looking.”

That happens every time someone drives by your location, even if that location is on their screen and not on the road in front of them. We drive by in a lot of different ways.

The pictures in that book were beautiful, glossy prints of canvas paintings with bold colorful strokes – there was a texture to the faces and the furniture – the granma’s smile – that carried the simple plot beyond the words. I could feel that big brother’s heart all the way through the story, completely connected to mine.

The pictures told me he was black and that made no difference – he was completely my twin brother.

This little guy (my age, but still, I thought of him as little) had realized he did not have his own room. Granma explained that he and his little brother shared the couch and the one bedroom belonged to her and mom. But – all was not lost, he could have his own corner.

Well, that was grand. He picked a corner and fixed it up beautifully with Granma’s help. A little plant, a crate, some drawings, and even a small turtle. His little brother kept annoyingly invading his sacred space… even though the wise Granma had bestowed corners on both boys.

The Grand Corner of the older brother simply could not be made perfect and wasn’t fun… And it should have been! Finally, the big brother realized – with Granma’s wisdom of course – that there could be no joy without the satisfaction of helping little brother create his own perfect corner.

I just loved that big brother. And the little brother. And that sage Granma. It was the building and the sharing and the creating that was the ultimate joy of having.

That is why I love advertising so much.

By connecting what your business is to a message and a campaign that people remember, you take a project and a job and turn it into something beautiful. Something brilliant. Something bigger than just a corner in your side of the room.

Because somewhere out there, someone has this… something, they keep looking for. Or a needed service that would make their life better.

They have money to buy it. But they don’t know who to call so it’s going to be a lot tougher to connect and do the dance.

Advertising is the invitation. There is no Best Before date and no expiry on the invite.

Let’s tell them to come when they are ready and need what you have for sale. We start by telling them the story of what you have, and why.

And it might not be what you think you are selling. The brothers got their very own corners, but Granma gave them much more than that.

I promise the process will make your corner feel exactly right and help you create the perfect corner for your customers. You will be just what they were looking for.

I know people who know how to help you do that.

The picture above, “Jonathon and His Mommy”, isn’t the book, but it’s the closest I’ve found… so far.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.

Oh PPS, how most people hate you for no good reason! Processes, Procedures, and Standards.

These are the money-makers of the big 6, er big 4, er, big 2 Business Consulting Firms. The Showtime show House of Lies takes the idea that business consultants are just snake oil salesmen full of hot air to the next level. I love that show because they do manage to use some of the right buzzwords I’ve heard (and used) in the last 25 years. But like any other show, it’s more “dramedy” than reality when it comes to fixing companies.

In my experience, most senior executives in large companies ($100+ million) think their departments use PPS. When interviewing department heads in the same companies, that percentage drops significantly to about 25%. When interviewing staff in the same departments, virtually no one would call whatever written documentation they had as being usable processes, procedures, or standards! Everyone explained that these documents were old, obsolete, or otherwise not applicable and that the company had changed enough things to make them useless.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Companies that have become certified in standards, such as ISO 9001 or even ISO 27001 must have PPS to become certified, and so they absolutely have PPS – for the areas covered by requirements. For that matter, they have PPS on how to keep their PPS up to date. Of course, companies that practice Kaizen, have Six Sigma programs or have contracts that require PPS, try to have it to whatever degree they need to.

But let’s look at the typical small to mid-sized business. Selling $25 million top line and maybe getting $2 million in bottom line profit. How many of them have up-to-date, meaning actually usable, PPS? Not many at all and if you’re like the average company in the US, you probably don’t either.

So what’s so great about Standards or Processes anyway? Well, to put it into money terms, they allow you to have a more standardized product or service delivery for a lower cost. So you can do stuff cheaper and of consistent quality. With business, unlike art, variety is the enemy of success. No matter how much people like your product, if you can’t repeat what you did, you will never taste the reward of that success.

Repeatability allows you to make and test incremental changes. Quantifying the results of those incremental improvements is impossible without consistency.

Standards define what things are, what they need to be produced, and what to measure the final product against. Procedures describe how things are made or assembled, or designed in a repeatable way. These are step-by-step guides like Ikea furniture might include. Processes are the big-picture view of the business operations. They discuss standards and procedures and show processes necessary to drive the business.

If so many businesses operate without them, then why would small businesses need them? Well, competition favors those who can offer the best thing at the most reasonable price. Notice I didn’t say cheapest since you have to compare apples to apples, not oranges!

There are many advantages to standardization and continual improvement. I had the pleasure of having the W. Edwards Deming Institute as a client many years ago. Deming is the American responsible for most of the Japanese auto industry overtaking US automakers in such a short time. Today Toyota is the world’s largest automobile company. I happily defer to the Institute for training on the benefits of the Deming method or to a plethora of Six Sigma training programs for quality and process improvement.

Most of the Fortune 500 companies utilize some form of PPS, and for one I am happy to name a company where I consulted. P&G – Procter, and Gamble – is leaps and bounds ahead of any other company I have worked with in their adherence to PPS and continuous improvement.

While I came into P&G with multiple certifications in various technology and business practices, I was very happily surprised at the level of process control and improvement at every level of the company with which I interacted. As you can imagine it is much harder to ensure processes are followed and monitored in a large company than a small one – there are just so many more moving pieces – but P&G managed to lead the way for other large businesses. It is interesting to note that in 2017 P&G cut $140 million in advertising online. There may be many factors that played into that decision, but a significant factor was the lack of tangible return on investment.

Unlike companies that act like lemmings, following one another blindly, P&G evaluates all their contracts and expenses to be sure they are performing at the level of expectations. This process is very uncommon in small businesses and almost unheard of in large corporate America. P&G determined that traditional media like television, print, and radio had a better quantifiable return on their branding spend. After all, it’s impossible to have an ad-blocker block out commercials from the radio station you are listening to in the car – and that includes SiriusXM!

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads™ today.