Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

This is Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question, and it’s brilliant.

And what I’d suggest is that you ever so slightly modify it to:

What important truth about your industry do very few people agree with you on?

Note that your answer has to be:

• Important, as in relevant to the customer
• True, and
• Counter to Conventional Wisdom (In Your Industry)

Nail that question, and you’ll have the beginnings of a very powerful branding campaign.

Because what you’ll have is a potential “advocated position” for your company.

Bonus points if you can name several of these truths.

For example, Spence Diamonds would answer that question with the following:

1. Paying for greater clarity than can be detected with the naked eye is foolish, when what really drives a diamond’s brilliance is cut.
2. Most grading certificates are fraudulent and not worth the paper they’re printed on, you’re better off doing business with a jeweler you can trust than relying on a third party’s supposed objectivity.
3. You should be able to clearly see the prices on all the rings you’re browsing for, so you don’t have to awkwardly ask staff for prices
4. Your beloved’s engagement ring should be made just for her, so that hers is the first and only finger that ever wears it.
5. Jewelers should guarantee their stones and rings unconditionally — even to the point of replacing the stone should it ever come loose and buying back the stone at any point should you wish to trade it in, or upgrade it.

That’s a pretty powerful set of statements, right?

But this works for any industry. Another great example of this is Safer Home Services in Pest Control. Their answers to that question might look like:

1. Spraying contact poison inside the home is a shameful practice that’s both ineffective at preventing intrusion by pests, and potentially harmful to pets and kids.
2. Pest-control treatment should only require one treatment per year if it’s done properly. Monthly or quarterly spraying is the sign of amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing.
3. Most household pests don’t live inside the home — they come in for food or shelter — so it’s important to prevent entrance to the home AND to eliminate the real “homes” for pests outside in the yard.
4. A Pest Control company that won’t guarantee their work isn’t worth using. We guarantee no more bugs for a year.

And for a third example, I’ll use Miller’s Home Comfort, whose answers might sound like:

1. When corporate, franchised, or equity-owned heating and cooling companies run things by the numbers, they end up short-changing their customers and squeezing their employees.
2. Routinely pushing repairs over replacements in systems younger than 11 years old is a bane of the industry and represents a dishonest approach to business.
3. Install teams shouldn’t install more than one system per day so that they can do the job properly.
4. The quality of the installation is more important than the brand name or even the specs of the equipment.

Do you see how this makes for powerful branding?

I’m not saying this is the only way to brand, or that you can’t have an amazing campaign if you can’t come up with satisfying answers to Thiel’s question.

But I am saying that having great answers to that question provides an express road to powerful branding.

So let me ask you:

What important truths about your industry do very few people agree with you on?

Do you have solid answers to that question?

And are planting your flag around them in your ads?

If not, why not?

If you're ready to improve your website traffic, let us show you how we can help. Book a call today!

In my last book, I talked about differences in both the types of employees and even executives that a company needs throughout its growth and maturation. So here is a summary of that chapter from my previous book. For many entrepreneurs, the traditional wisdom is that if you do a good job hiring at the early stages of business, you only have to hire someone for a position once and they will grow with the company. I will get into why people think there is never a need to replace anyone, and why that is wrong in a later chapter, but let me focus on the hiring process itself in this chapter. Hiring the right people means you need to avoid hiring the wrong people, and there are many ways to hire the wrong people.

For instance, during those early employee hires, you need to be sure you hire for flexibility and trainability. Everyone, you included, has to wear a lot of different hats. The company can’t afford to hire experts to fill each need yet. Even the owners are probably not experts; rather, they are simply willing to pick up whatever needs to get done to make the next sale and do it.

If successful through the initial startup, what you want to end up with several years later is:

• Written procedures and processes in place.
• A management team that plans and knows how to minimize unplanned events.
• Expertise in their departments who work with other experts in other departments.
• No one is a jack of all trades anymore.

The personal challenge you face as the CEO – and that the rest of the CxO management team faces – is being OK with not knowing the up-to-the-minute operational details of the company the way you used to. Your focus is on guiding an ever-growing organization, which means, much like a conductor of an orchestra, you focus on what will be happening next, rather than what is happening now. You trust your management staff to execute on the future plans and keep you informed enough to be able to make the right strategic decisions. They, in turn, trust their department heads to know enough about day-to-day, but not necessarily minute-by-minute operations.

The most important reason to hire someone is that they have skills that a company needs, are willing to utilize those skills when the company needs them, and are eager to do this at a rate the company can afford. Secondary qualities, like people skills, will help determine how well this person fits into the company culture and how effectively they will interact with employees already at the company are also important. However, you as a founder or a senior manager liking someone as a person, while it is obviously a plus, should be much lower on the list.

I have been able to find very good people to hire for my clients, but that is not an easy process. Finding a great employee means the company has to do as much work as the person applying for a job. What I mean by that is great hires do not stay available for long. You may receive 25 resumes and see five great potential hires, but those five may have sent out resumes to 25 companies, and the first company to interview them and give them an offer is likely to get them. So do not waste time with filtering tactics that make the candidates jump through hoops. Instead set up an interview immediately with anyone whose resume looks impressive. The first interview may be only 15 minutes and cover just a few questions, but at that point, they are not likely to take another offer without talking to you first. If you simply email your candidates a list of questions, and other companies are already setting up interviews, guess what your odds are of getting a reply to your email?

If you take too long from initial contact to an interview, you will simply end up with the candidates who are most desperate, not the ones who may be the best fit. Finding the perfect employee is easy – it just takes the same amount of effort as making the perfect product or delivering the perfect service!

For many CEOs I’ve worked with, hiring people is second only to firing people as the least enjoyable part of the job in the company. Even ‘people’ people from sales and marketing departments dislike spending time to find the best candidates. Unfortunately, very often that means the solution is just to hire the first person who comes along, replies to filter questions, and doesn’t blow the interview just so they can end the hiring process. This leads to a company full of mediocre people doing an OK job. No one is terrible, but it also means it doesn’t take much to stand out in this crowd. The TV show The Office was based on following the fictional lives of mediocre people selling a boring product. In that show, no one is motivated to do more than the bare minimum. While the head of the office constantly comes up with ideas to motivate people but accomplishes nothing but distracting them from their work. The show was funny precisely because it showed an office full of people doing mediocre work and a boss who thought that his staff was great. It was a TV show written by utterly NOT mediocre comedy writers!

Another common occurrence is to see a company full of twenty-somethings. Yes, there certainly are examples of companies started by teens and others staffed by people just starting their professional careers, like Facebook in its early days, but let’s face it, a successful company like that is a unicorn – it just doesn’t happen very often. For most businesses that have an age bias in either direction, this is a detriment to the success of the company as it starts growing past a half dozen employees. Youth can have skill and energy, but if not balanced with wisdom, which only comes from making mistakes – maybe lots of mistakes – it does not provide the best workforce long term. Likewise, a company full of very experienced people will be missing the energy and creativity of inexperience which often leads to completely out-of-the-box solutions to problems.

I’m a fan of using interns precisely because they bring something unique to the workforce that cannot be taught – namely, an unbiased view of existing processes. But unless you are in college, and you don’t know anyone over 25, you really should be hiring some of your people based on experience and the wisdom it brings to balance out the exuberant enthusiasm of youth. Certainly, by the time you hire your 5th or 10th employee, you should be recruiting for skill and experience.

Mistakes can be made by everyone. Your goal in hiring more seasoned and specialized staff is to pay for what they learned from past mistakes through a higher salary or hourly rate. You pay for more inexperienced staff mistakes through unexpected business losses that come at the most inopportune times when a business follows through on a bad decision.

How do I find the best people if I don’t like wasting time on the hiring process? Well if you can afford to use recruiters (15-25% of annual salary) then do so, but only after doing due diligence on the recruiter. Don’t just trust someone who paid $9.99 for a business card with the word “Recruiter” to help you find a person who will be responsible for potentially millions of dollars in profits or losses for your company. Have the recruiter audition for you. Have them explain their process for finding the best employee for you. Have them tell you about their successes as well as failures of the past. Tell them you want to use one recruiter for the next five years, so they are potentially going to make hundreds of thousands off your company, and that you want to be sure that is the kind of relationship they bring to the table. If you can find a good recruiter, you can avoid having to find new employees on your own. If you can’t find a good recruiter, then don’t use a recruiter as they will merely cost you money and solve none of the problems that you would have if you just hired poorly yourself.

After the initial startup period of hiring generalists, one of the skills of a successful CEO is being able to surround himself with people who are more qualified than he is in their particular specialization. Look around your company and think about the people who you see as being better than you. For each one, you can honestly say that about – congratulations, you made a good hire. For everyone else in roles that are specialized, you probably need to start looking for their replacement sooner rather than later. For menial or entry-level roles you should not expect that people know more than you about doing that job, but they should at least be faster, more efficient, or more regimented in doing their jobs than you would be if you had to do it yourself. Any fault with the staff within a company always rolls up through management and executives to the CEO. Find good specialists, and set high expectations for their hires, and you will have a company of the top producers in your industry. Shrug off the responsibility to take the time to hire the best of the best, and your bottom line will suffer.

I had one client that had shown an ability to grow sales very quickly. They were riding the wind as it were. Then it turned out that the ride was unsustainable. When I came in, I was surprised to find a company full of people in their 20s. I wondered if it was all the innovative ideas of younger employees that helped them grow so fast. It may have been, but it was also the cause of their downfall. As I mentioned, everyone makes mistakes, as much as we try to be perfect. We can make fewer mistakes by remembering our own past errors and the mistakes of others. Nothing will prevent someone from making an error in judgment nearly as much as a bitter memory of the price they paid the last time they made the same mistake.

Learning from others’ mistakes is a half-step in the right direction, and it contains wisdom, but not the instruments of enforcing adherence to that wisdom. So when you have a company staffed by people who have made very few business mistakes in their lives, they will not help you as the CEO in avoiding mistakes. They have nothing to fall back on personally, and they will respect and admire you as a successful CEO even if you make bad decisions, further hurting your decision-making abilities by creating a false sense of always being right. We see this type of thing happen with politicians all the time. They surround themselves with sycophants and then end up falling from grace, but never understanding why they fall so far.

Making mistakes is human, learning from your own mistakes and the mistakes of others makes you superhuman. Unfortunately, most people need to make the same mistake multiple times before they actually learn from it. For companies that is often even worse because mistakes get institutionalized and become part of the normal process. It’s not wisdom unless you avoid the same mistake in the future.

If you have no other reason than this to surround yourself with people who are more experienced and better qualified than you, it is that their internal criticism and disagreements with you will give you the opportunity to prevent making extremely costly mistakes with the entire company. But that will only happen if you take their advice! If you surround yourself with only enthusiastic but inexperienced youngsters, they will have little criticism to offer you and you will keep making costly mistakes.

Unless you work with seasoned marketers with rich experience writing irresistible advertising, like Ryan Chute’s teams at Wizard of Ads®. Book a call.

There’s a relative I haven’t spoken to in five years. Half the family hasn’t spoken to him for even longer, and it was a consequence of running a family business. My name is Michael Catanzarite, and in this series of posts I will be going over some of the unique challenges that face family businesses of all sizes. One caveat is that every family’s dynamic is unique, and we’ll be using broad strokes here based on my experience of working in a family business that grew from relatively small to the largest arts and crafts wholesaler in the country.

IF YOUR MINDSET IS “FAMILY ALWAYS COMES FIRST,” YOU’RE PUTTING A CAP ON HOW LARGE YOUR BUSINESS CAN GROW

Family coming first sounds good, but the reality is that as your business (and family) grows, at some point, you will have to put the business ahead of a family member. I don’t mean choosing to spend time at work instead of with your kids. I mean potentially having to fire someone. This should be a last resort, but your business is there to support your entire family. It’s something you started and put your heart and soul into, and you can’t let one problem person screw it up. It’s also unfair to your employees, some of whom will become like family. In my case, a family member was fired, and it divided us. For the sake of this post, it doesn’t matter who was right or wrong, the point is he was one of 1,500 employees, and no one was untouchable. This person wasn’t stealing, wasn’t a screw-up, it was simply a personality conflict that had gone on a long time and was potentially causing issues with other employees who didn’t have the power to do anything. The person who did the firing thought they were doing what was best for the business, but I don’t think they thought through the repercussions.

In a smaller business, a squeaky wheel sticks out even more. Let’s be honest, the bigger your family is, the more likely someone isn’t going to work out. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, just a bad fit, or maybe they just don’t like the job. Of course, there’s also the chance they’re just an idiot. Every family has one. That‘s ok. Talk to them and see where their head is at. If they’re there out of a sense of obligation, encourage them to move on and find something they like. Forcing someone to work in the family business never works out, and they’ll resent you for it. This will fester and eventually blow up in your face. In our family, we were encouraged NOT to work there. Why? Because it was hard, stressful, and could make you feel trapped. I left the business for five years to go and do something on my own. It was a great experience, and when I returned, it was with a new perspective.

So make up your mind if you truly always want to put family first. Just know that if you do, the business may suffer, and your other employees will most certainly resent you.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.

“Leading brands and agencies have known for many years that more creative work delivers better results than ‘safe’ and rational advertising.”

-Keith Weed: Chief Marketing & Communication Officer, Unilever

How often does your phone buzz, and just by reading half of the subject line, you can tell it’s spam?

Or have you ever wandered the maze of a corporate trade show, only to find that every booth feels the same?

Do you remember a single ad you saw last week on LinkedIn?

I sure don’t.

Growing a business requires developing systems.

Effective marketing requires creativity to stand out.

These two things can co-exist, but in order to do this effectively, your marketing team must be free of corporate bureaucracy. This means you must be willing to:

1. Say NO to committee-based decision making.

When decisions are made based on group consensus, creativity tends to get neutered.

2. Say NO to short-term metrics.

Short term metrics incentivize marketing teams to scream, “Sale, Sale, Sale!” which often yields short term results but has a detrimental effect long-term. As JCPenney and Bed Bath & Beyond will hopefully learn one of these days… Clients become conditioned to either ignore your shouts or just wait until your next sale. This leaves you with too narrow of a profit margin to grow. Steady growth comes from brand building over time, not primarily through sales activation.

3. Say NO to following the leader.

This should be obvious: marketing like everyone else defeats the purpose. Having spent 9 years in tech, I’ve learned that common sense isn’t common. If your customer would say your ads look the same as your competitor’s, you’re doing it wrong. If one media avenue is saturated by competitors, let them have that space. Plant your flag on top of another mountain.

This is one major challenge that industry-specific marketing firms face. They may bring a level of knowledge about your industry, but their strategies tend to be “rinse and repeat” for all their clients. They like to say things like, “We’ve taken this approach with hundreds of clients JUST LIKE YOU and they all had great results.”

I say, “RUN!”

To effectively market, you need to catch people’s attention, not blend in with how all the other industry ads look.

If you’d like to brainstorm, I set aside time each day to consult with business owners on their creative marketing strategies.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.

…10 cents to cover the cost of printing…

That was my close. See, I wasn’t selling the magazines – the official technical term was, in fact, Placing the magazines. With good people. Good Hearted People. Maybe, they would get The Truth…..maybe, actually, they Got the truth. I was only 4 or 5 years old at the time, so who knows?

I learned a lot about selling as I knocked on doors with my parents. I imagine I learned a lot before that when mom was pushing me in my stroller as she knocked on doors.

Did you know when you offer something to someone – not just verbally, but physically hand it to them, almost everyone will actually take it from you? And very few will give it back. My stats (made up just now from memory) say that on any given Saturday morning, only 1 in 23 won’t find you the dime, somewhere, once they are holding the mags.

I also learned about tracking…..because whether you call it a Return Visit or a Back Call (and that kind of critical terminology can change from time to time in that kind of nonsales-sales), going back to see the nice lady that had a dime two weeks ago will probably result in another dime!

Not that I could keep the dime…. well, sometimes I could. But only if the dime had already been paid up the ladder by Mom and Dad. To cover the cost of printing, remember?

I was disappointed to find out, years later, that the dime had a healthy profit built in because of the volunteer labor involved. Profit for the Publishers …..but honestly, I (and my parents) really believed it. It was “almost free,” but yeah, closer to that guy on the beach in Mexico…..

The Months of Special Activity (roughly translated – Go More and leave no/charge tracts with people) taught me about tracking placements and getting the job done. Everyone had to have a copy of those tracts. With no dime in play and the little trick of handing each HouseHolder their personal copy, we placed 100’s.

My close was “Please read it,” and I think most of them actually did (there was no recycling bin in most entrances back in the 70s). My dad taught me the trick of precounting out 100 tracts into ten piles of ten, and then keeping them in a stack (x10 front facing, x10 back facing, x10 front facing, etc.) Then, at the end of a Morning of Activity with the Group, you could count what was left, and voila- the difference was how many you had placed. Math and Sales!

I still love tracking.

Of course, the ideal was to move from a tract placement to a magazine or even (dare to dream!) a book (I think they were 25 cents, but I can’t be sure) and then on to Free Home Bible Study….ideally using the 25 cent book.

Even being a cute kid, my conversion rate from selling a magazine to a weekly study was, well, low.

Which always surprised me because I was offering these people the opportunity to learn about Ever Lasting Life- in paradise, no less.

I especially remember the nice ladies that gave me a quarter. I almost always put it all in the Contribution Box.

I promise you, no kid ever comes to my door without me buying the almonds – even if I don’t want them. They are always especially excited when I buy them and give them the box to keep for themselves.

I met a lot of “nice ladies” as a kid, and now I get to be one.

So cold calling has never bothered me. Selling is a fun way to make a living. But I promise you, helping people- and their businesses – is always the why.

We are all trying to make a living for our families, for our community, and to build a better work environment for our employees who trust us. It should be fun, and it should feel good to do it. Just like a Saturday morning of giving up cartoons to place magazines. Yes- it feels better After, not before, and not always during.

I love working with teams. I love helping my clients create and own their own stories.

I love to make a difference.

I learned that knocking on doors with my parents.

Now, I offer my clients a partnership. A way to develop a strategy together, to help see and grow business in a way that will make you fall in love with it all over again.

It’s not Ever Lasting Life, but the investment truly covers the cost of printing. And radio. And online. And most especially, wide-awake dreams of a fantastic, brilliant business life.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.

What would you do if all your digital lead generation disappeared now?

What if you were locked out of your website, digital advertising accounts, or social media accounts?

What if the phone numbers you use for tracking calls were redirected to your competitors ?

Or maybe the agency you hired is underperforming, but you have no way out of paying them extortionary fees.

These things happen all too often. Yet business owners don’t share this publicly because they’re frustrated, trapped or even ashamed.

You Need a Hostage Prevention Plan

First steps: walk yourself through the following safety checklist. If you don’t know the answer, find out who does.

And make sure you have control of it as the business owner.

• Who has access to your website (maybe WordPress or other content management system)? Are you an administrator?
• Who has access to your website’s host (what server is the website sitting on)? Who controls the administration of your business email accounts?
• Who has access to recent backups? There are backups, right?
• Who has access to your ads? To Google AdWords? To Social Media ads? To third-party lead generation providers?
• Who has access to your business analytics and financial data?
• Who has access to your Google Business Page? Apple Business account?
• Who has access to your Google Search Console and Bing accounts?
• Who has access to your Google Analytics accounts?
• Who has access to all of your domains and their settings?
• Who has access to the settings for the phone numbers you use for your business?
• Who has access to your ServiceTitan or other customer and staff records?
• Who has access, rights and permissions to all your photography, logos, videos, etc.

You might consider a business level password manager such as Dashlane for Business.

You need to create a plan of what happens when someone is no longer working for you. A disgruntled employee, senior executive, outside consultant or agency – all of these are danger points.

What happens if someone tries to remove themselves by locking you out? You want to kick them out before they can lock you out. And if they lock you out, then you need to have the legal documentation for these accounts so that you can get them back.

Audit this regularly. Make sure no one has control but you.

Don’t let these stories happen to you

Wizard of Ads partners work with many home service companies. Consider these three cautionary tales.

Story I – Fraud – 4 months to fix, ~$60K in fees, and unknown lost profits

The business owner initially hired Agency A to build and manage their website. Afterwards, they switched to Agency B. However, Agency B’s work was also poor. Agency B claimed to take over hosting. Frustrated, the owner sought help from a Wizard of Ads partner to regain control of their website and assets. During this process, the website mysteriously went down, and Agency B falsely asserted that they had transferred the website to a new company. After days of downtime, they revealed that Agency A had never handed over hosting to Agency B, despite the owner having paid them. In fact, Agency A had secretly been hosting the website for two years. The Wizard partner intervened, restored the website, and transferred control to the owner. Fortunately, they created a backup beforehand. After fifteen hours of work, the partner successfully fixed the issues, thus averting the need for a new website.

Story II – Hostage taking – 3 months to fix, $220K in fees, and ~$500K in lost profits

Another home service company had a falling out with the marketing agency who had caused a loss of $1.5 million in revenue. The agency then held the company’s accounts hostage, demanding over $100,000 before access would be restored. The home service company paid half that amount to regain control of ~75% of their accounts and had to recreate everything else. The agency then created fake Google My Business accounts, listing themselves as the owner, and used the company’s tracking numbers to forward calls to competitors. Our partner regained control, but it was costly.

Story III – Non-performance – 19 months no results, ~$350K in fees and lost profit unknown

A large home services company hired a digital marketing agency very well known in the industry. They contracted to handle their website, leads, SEO, pay-per-click, and social media advertising based on its reputation. Unfortunately the contract lacked specific details about the services that would be provided, and the mis-matched expectations and the agency’s performance frustrated the owner. A Wizard partner helped the owner compile and catalog a list of accounts, and created backups. Before the owner ended the agency’s services, they removed access to all digital accounts. This ensured that they easily transferred the website, before any incident could occur.

Forewarned is forearmed

We hope you never encounter such situations. Please take the time to gain control over all your accounts, passwords, permissions, and regularly conduct audits. Running a business is hard enough without becoming a digital hostage.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.