Neil Senturia is not your typical…well, he’s not your typical anything, at least as far as I can tell from his new book I’m There for You, Baby – The Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Galaxy, Volume 1 (WARNING: affiliate link).  What I can tell you for certain, though, is that Mr. Senturia knows how to tell a story.

I haven’t had this much fun reading a book since I was a kid reading They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They? by Patrick McManus (yep, another affiliate link…sorry, but it’s just easier than logging out of Amazon).  I don’t often laugh out loud when I read business books, but this one had me chuckling, snickering and, occasionally, guffawing (I may have just made that word up…sorry about that).  Even better, I learned a thing or two along the way.

The book is a series of stories built around The Baby Rules, a set of entrepreneurial truisms culled from Senturia’s experiences as a real estate mogul, venture capitalist, Hollywood writer and all around deal-making addict.  But don’t make the mistake of believing everything you read; Rule #109 states “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”  Senturia’s grasp of the ridiculous, his razor-sharp wit, and his blunt-force-trauma style of truth-telling make for a great read.

One of my favorite lessons, and one that made me stop and think about my own journey, is Rule #19: “Entrepreneurs do not do it for the fame or fortune – they do it for revenge.”   I’ve been thinking about that one ever since I read it; it’s been dogging my steps, haunting my sleep, and generally driving me nuts for weeks.

Because I’m realizing how true it is, at least sometimes.  I find myself driven, sometimes to extreme measures, by a deep desire to prove that I can do it, no matter what anyone says.  The voices in my head, the ones that belong to former teachers and family members and well-meaning friends, telling me to settle down and settle in and settle?  I’ve got a middle finger that would like to speak with you.

And that’s the kind of festering truth that I’m There for You, Baby rips the scab off of.

Thank you, Neil Senturia, for a fantastic book.  And thank you for breaking some shit in my head that needed breaking. Consider me a fan.

The biggest reward of using the “The Go-Giver” as one of our Bob Burg International Consultant coaching programs is that not only do I get to read the book, I get to devour it (while being mentored by the author), and then I’m priveleged to share it with others. There is true power in knowing your craft well enough to teach it to others.

In a short 30 minute chat with Jerry Kennedy on his Blog Whisperer Radio program it has solidified my belief that business as we’ve known it for the last two decades (more or less, your mileage may vary) is so antiquated that to continue “as it’s always been” is maybe the most deadly thing you can do to your business.

If your business has stagnated over the last 12 months, if it’s slowed down to “just getting by”, or if you have serious concerns if you’ll be in business 12 months from now you can cheer up! Pick up the book and follow along as we discover and APPLY these “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success”.

The first Law, The Law of Value states; “Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value that you take in payment”.

You may have heard the phrase giving value misused by the Internet Marketing gurus telling you to give away your “secret sauce” to entice your prospects to buy your product or service. This misses the mark in two ways. 1) As used in the book, giving does not mean giving away – as in free. It simply means to present something, in this case value. 2) value in this context means the relative worth or desirability of a thing to the end user. More to the point it’s about asking yourself the question; “What can I offer that will set me apart – and I mean WAAAAY apart – from my competition and will allow people to want me as the person they choose to do business with?

The answer starts to become apparent in a great blog post by Bob Burg. It says, “…while there are most likely thousands of ways to provide value, they tend to fall under five categories: Excellence, Consistency, Attention, Empathy and Appreciation.”

Near and dear to my heart is appreciation. This is one of the things that cost little or nothing and leaves a lasting impression. Say please and thank you (and mean it). Send Nice to meet you notes – not emails – in a greeting card in your own handwriting. Remember birthdays and, you guessed, it send a card that says Happy Birthday! (If you don’t have a simple and easy-to-use system to do this automatically email me and I’ll share my fun and inexpensive way to do it with you.)

Now that you know that there are five categories that value tends to fall under, how can you take that and apply it to your product and service? Leave your comments in the feedback below. I’d love to here them!

Here’s a good place to mention one of the most important keys to making this law work, and it may be a deal breaker if you can’t commit to it, it’s that you have to give without any emotional attachment to the outcome. Now I know that’s going to sound really wacky to you but that’s how it works… because there is an outcome every time.

Tune in next time for Law #2 “The Law of Compensation”.

I’ve barely been here 2 hours, and I can already tell that this is not where the real innovators are hanging out. The folks here at CES might be showcasing ‘new’ products, but as my lunch table companion pointed out, most of the products I’ll see on the showroom floor have been in development for several years. Couple that with the fact that the booth trolls are in charge, and you can see why I don’t hold out much hope of bumping into the next game-changer.

Why?

Because he or she is probably holed up in a garage somewhere, trying to figure out what else can be sold to pay for the materials needed to bring the dream to life. Don’t get me wrong: there are some amazing products on display. But the really amazing ideas, the ones that will really blow the doors off the future? They’re still out there, waiting to be brought to life…maybe by you?

Well, what are you waiting for? What would it take for you to get started?

The answer is probably a lot less than you think.

“If we’re going to take this walk together, we need to start by facing the same direction.” –Pindar,
The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann

As I was reading Chapter 2 in “The Go-Giver“, reviewing the material for one of my Mastermind Groups, I thought “Hey, you didn’t make sure everyone is facing the same direction!” Here’s why it’s important.

Imagine you and and I are standing at a cross-roads. I’m facing North and you’re facing West. I tell you we’re going to take a six month journey and say “Let’s go”. Do you think, after taking the road in front of us for that amount of time, we’d end up in the same location? Nope, not a chance.

We need the same map to arrive at the same destination. Simply put, the book is the map, the directions are each of the “Five Stratospheric Laws”, but they require a secret key to unlock their power.

That secret is “Giving”.

What does “giving” mean to you? Let me know in the comments below.

Let’s talk about billboards.

Seriously?   Where I live in Sacramento, ClearChannel has just erected about 10 new electronic billboards and, from the looks of things, major corporations (like Bloomberg and Yahoo!) are lining up to pay the big bucks to be featured on these larger than life TVs.  Unbelievable.  This is a prime example of…

Mistake #5:  You Don’t Follow Up To Make Sure They Did It

Millions, if not billions, of dollars are spent every year on marketing efforts that are supposed to “raise awareness” of the brands who are spending the money.  Please.  I’d be hard pressed to find a worse use of those marketing funds, especially when there is no way for the companies who are spending the money to measure the effectiveness of the ads.

The Bloomberg ads that are currently running on the new electronic billboards in Sacramento are a perfect example: they essentially say “Bloomberg is for smart people; you should watch it.”  Really?  I can’t imagine how Bloomberg expects to measure the return on this campaign, other than to make a random attribution of the 0.1% increase in viewership following the ad campaign to the billboards.  What a waste.

In contrast, a local gym made good use of billboards recently: they had a “Text to Win” campaign.  If you sent a text message, per the instructions on the billboard, to their short-code, you were entered to win a free years membership to the gym.  Once they’d collected all the phone numbers, they chose a winner for the year-long membership, and everyone else won a consolation prize of a free 2-week membership.

The gym got something at the end of their campaign that Bloomberg never will: measurable results.  I spoke with one of their reps who said that the campaign was an overwhelming success.  As proof, I offer the fact that it took them nearly 5 months to call me to notify me that I was a winner.  Obviously, they’d collected a few phone numbers.  And those 2-week complimentary memberships?  They were the perfect opportunity to build a list of prime prospects for gym membership.

Bloomberg and Yahoo!, on the other hand, are left to guess whether their campaigns were effective.  They had no measurable way to track their results.

And that’s the lesson for you: if you don’t have a system for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, you might as well not be marketing.  After all, if you don’t have a measuring stick for performance, how do you know if you’ve succeeded?

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I’m in Vegas this week, attending the SMB Nation Fall Conference.  Look for posts about the different events and trainings, as well as special tidbits I pick up while I’m here.  Maybe even a video or two…who knows.  Talk to you soon!

I love the moxie of a small company in a small town in Northern California who looks at a giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and says “Yeah…we can fix that.”

That’s exactly what Mobius Technologies, of Lincoln, CA, has done, and they didn’t stop there.  When Mobius realized that it was going to take too long to get through the bureaucracy and red tape required to get their product approved for use in the cleanup, they set about using social media tools like YouTube and Facebook to recruit a volunteer army and encouraged them to spread the message.

And while I think the powers that be at Mobius Technologies are making a huge mistake by not engaging with bloggers to help them spread their message (it seems they don’t consider bloggers to be “true” media outlets), I can’t argue with the results they’re getting.  Have a look at this video from the local ABC affiliate in Sacramento.

Mobius is starting to get some traction, and I applaud the work they’re doing.  More than that, though, I applaud the way they’re going about it.  Here are some valuable lessons other small business owners and entrepreneurs can learn from the example of Mobius Technologies:

The kind of ingenuity and innovation Mobius Technologies is demonstrating is impressive.  They’re a great example of how vision and determination can lead a small business to the forefront of an effort to solve a global problem.

It’s examples like this that make me believe the future is bright for small businesses, especially the ones who can bring an “A game” like the one Mobius Technologies is playing.  Congratulations, guys!

I was having a conversation via Skype with my cousin Ed, an entrepreneur who runs Natural Merchants, an importer of organic foods and wines from Europe to the USA.  He lives in Spain.  It was 1:00 AM for me on a day that had started at 6:00 AM, and 10:00 AM for him on a day that had started at 5:00 AM and would end around midnight.

Ed is just getting into using social media to expand his customer base (if you like organic European wine and foods, you should become a fan of their page on Facebook), and we were chatting about some of the tools he could use to make his life a little easier as a social media newbie.  The conversation came around to the same question it always does: where am I going to find the time?

And we agreed on the answer: if you want to add to the mix of what you’re doing, something else is going to suffer.  This goes back to the discussion about work/life balance from a couple of weeks ago.  Remember: there is no such thing.  Building or growing a business means extra work, and extra work means you won’t have time for something else.

That’s not a bad thing; it just is.  Accept it as a fact and move on to deciding what you’re willing to sacrifice to squeeze in that extra work.  If you’re not willing to sacrifice anything, forget about committing to the additional work.  You can’t do both, at least not with our current understanding of space/time.

For me, I’ve decided to shave an hour or so off my sleep routine.  This has a cumulative cost, and I know that every couple of weeks I’m going to have a morning where I sleep in a few extra hours.  I shoot for Sunday, but it doesn’t always work out that way.  I fought it for a long time, and suffered as a result of my stubbornness.  Since I learned to just roll with it, I got rid of the guilt and made my life that much easier.

And I think that’s part of the answer, too.  Whatever you decide to do, you’ve got to arrange things so that you don’t feel guilty about what you’re doing.  If you’re working late on a new product and feeling guilty the entire time because you had to miss your kid’s soccer game, are you really going to be performing at your peak potential?  Probably not, so don’t so that to yourself.  It’s a recipe for disaster.

Communication is key.  You need to let the people around you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how long you plan to be doing it for.  If your loved ones know what to expect, it’s less likely that there will be drama to undermine your efforts.  Everyone involved should be in agreement about the rules of engagement, and you should do your best to live within those rules, so define them carefully.

When you commit to your entrepreneurial dream, you need to be ready for some changes.  Don’t operate under the illusion that everything in your life will be the same as you try to build your business.  Rarely does that happen.  The good news is that if you’re prepared for the changes, they’ll be easier to deal with.

And don’t worry too much about losing a little sleep.  Sleep is overrated, anyways, and you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on your rest when you’ve created the business of your dreams.  In the meantime, be ready for some hard work, and a whole lot of fun, too.

One of the biggest challenges I face as a budding entrepreneur is what to do when I get stuck on a project.  I know I’m not alone; in fact, this post was inspired by a friend on Facebook who is one of those wacky serial entrepreneurs you’ve read about (thanks for the idea, Travis).  It was nice to find out I wasn’t the only one who gets in this mode from time to time.

The question remains, though: what should you do when you get stuck?  Is it better to muscle through in an attempt to get to the other side?  Or are you better off just giving in to the “stuck”-ness and switching gears to a different task?  Or should you, as my friend Joel D Canfield says you sometimes should, just call it a day and head for the beach?

The answer, of course, is that there’s no one right answer.  That said, here’s what I do: I meditate.  Rather than make a decision when I’m feeling frustrated by a lack of progress or productivity, I’ll consciously make an effort to step away from the project for a set period of time, say 15 or 30 minutes.  During that time, I might push my chair back, close my eyes, and let my mind wander; or I might take a brisk walk and take in the scenery (this is especially effective on perfect spring days like the one we had today in Sacramento).

Whatever I do, I purposely let go of any thoughts of the project I was stuck on and just take some time to enjoy being (thanks to Paul Coltharp for reminding us of that one).  You’d be amazed at how powerful this little exercise can be.  Sometimes I return to the project with a fresh outlook and manage to get past the place where I was stuck; other times, I realize I’m not going to get anywhere right then and I pick up something else to work on and leave the current project for later.  Either way, it beats staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for something to happen.

The power of this technique lies in its simplicity.  If you really want to get past the place where you’re stuck, sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and let go.  Trust me, the problem will still be there to solve when you get back; you however, might have changed just enough to be able to solve it more effectively.

This past week, I’ve been re-reading Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau and contemplating why I’m so drawn to Thoreau’s message of non-conformity.  It all began to make sense to me when I got this Copyblogger article by Sonia Simone in my email last Thursday.

The post basically said that in order to be a successful entrepreneur you have to be a little nuts.  You have to be willing to step outside the realm of what others, particularly your “normal” friends and family, consider to be right for you.  Taking the plunge and trying to create a great business that supports your lifestyle is risky, and it’s hard to conform to what the herd is doing and take risks at the same time.

Sonia’s article was a big deal for me; I had a pretty strong emotional reaction to it.  You see, I’ve been struggling for the past several years to create what I consider to be my dream business, and I haven’t had the kind of success I’ve wanted so far.  As you can imagine, that’s been pretty frustrating.  I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what it is that I’m doing wrong and why things aren’t working the way I think they should be.

As I was reading the article, I realized what I’ve been doing wrong: I’ve been trying to build my business based on other people’s ideas of what was “normal”.  I’ve been taking the advice of well-meaning friends and family and putting it into practice in my business.  I’ve been obsessed with the idea of “credibility” and whether or not I have it.  I’ve worried about what other people might be think of the things I write here and elsewhere.

And all the while I’ve been suppressing my inner punk-rocker.

Now I’m not saying that I suddenly feel the urge to go out and get a mohawk (or even a faux-hawk) and pierce my body in weird places; I’m still pretty conservative when it comes to my appearance.  I even wear a tie to work (which fact makes me a bit of a non-conformist, I know, but in a way I’m comfortable with).  What it means is that I’ve got a rebel inside that needs to be allowed to come out and play.  The rebel is the part of me with all the pent-up creativity and drive waiting to be expressed.  I’ve seen glimpses of his genius when I’m desperate and don’t know what to do; it’s at time like those that I let him out to save the day.  What I need, though, is to let him out on a full-time basis.

This is tough for me.  For the past two decades, I’ve become a master of keeping the rebel under lock and key.  I see now the damage that’s been doing to my business life; I’ve been stifling the part of me that has the best ability to get things done.

So I guess it’s time to get out of my own way and give the rebel free-reign to get things done.  I’m sure there are going to be some bumps in the road ahead, but I’m excited to see where this new leader takes me.

What parts of your personality have you been suppressing in an effort to appear “normal” to the people around you?  Do you see where that might be holding you back from achieving greatness?  If so, it might be time to let that cat out of the bag.

What’s the worst that could happen?

OK.  I admit it.  I’m a huge fan of American Idol.  I haven’t missed an episode since Season 3, and it’s not likely I’ll lose interest anytime soon. I don’t care what anyone says: it’s just great entertainment.  And since it’s (finally!) Idol season, I thought I’d share three business lessons I’ve learned from AI over the years.

#1: Know who you are

One of the things we’ve heard over and over from the judges is “you need to figure out who you really are”.  In other words, the contestants need to be able to take someone else’s music and sing it like it was their own, to give it their own unique brand.  And there’s business lesson #1.

I don’t know what business you’re in, but I’d be willing to bet that the product or service you sell is available somewhere else at a lower price.  That’s OK; a lot of bands make a great living playing covers.  But every now and then, along comes a singer or a band who can make a cover sound like an original.

Think of what Whitney Houston did for the Dolly Parton song “I Will Always Love You”.  Dolly wrote a fantastic song, and so long as she was the only one singing it, everyone knew that.  The second Whitney’s version hit the airwaves, though, it was “Dolly who?”  Whitney made the song her own, and every person who sings it from now to the end of time will be compared to Whitney, not Dolly.

So here’s the question: what can you do to make whatever product or service you sell, no matter how long it’s been around or how commoditized it is, your own?  How can you make sure that when customers think of your product, they think of you?  How can you create a situation where you are the industry standard by which all other suppliers are judged?

#2: If you’ve got it, flaunt it

Another common criticism from the judges is “You sang that well, but I felt like you were holding back.”  The most common cause?  Lack of confidence on the part of the performer.  They allow their fear of failure to hold them back.  They don’t take risks, and as a result their performances are a little bland.

Then along comes a performer like Adam Lambert, and things get interesting again.  Adam did things with familiar songs that no one on the Idol stage had ever dreamed of doing before.  He dressed like a glam-rocker from outer space, went for impossible notes without any hesitation, and owned the stage.  You couldn’t take your eyes off him, and every week you wondered what kind of magic he was going to do.

So here’s your homework assignment: What risks have you avoided taking because of your fear of failure?  If you weren’t stuck in fear, what would you do differently that would set you apart from the crowd?  What makes you outrageous?

When you figure it out, go do it.

#3: At the end of the day, it’s not just about how well you sing

The judges are always quick to remind the performers that Idol is ultimately a singing competition, but I think Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, and Adam Lambert might disagree.  All three lost out to performers who are nowhere near as talented as they are, while performers like Sanjaya Malakar and Jasmine Trias survived on the show much longer than their talent warranted.

The same is true in your business: being the best at what you do doesn’t always mean you’re going to be on top.  Business is, ultimately, a popularity contest.  Don’t be mad about that, and don’t try to fight it.  It is what it is.  Just realize that you’ve got a decision to make.

If you want to get the most votes (make the most money, sell the most product, beat the competition), you have to give the voters (customers) what they want.  Remember, though, that the voters are fickle: what they say they want isn’t always what they really want and what they really wanted last week is entirely different than what they want this week and in a different universe than what they’ll probably want next week.  Confused?  Get used to it.  If you decide you’re going after the popular vote, this will be your job: figuring out what to sell to people who have no idea what they really want.

Of course, the other option (and the one I’d encourage) is to just do what you love and be really great at it, no matter what the majority might think.  You run the risk of alienating some of the voters, but the ones who like you and like what you do will stick by you (again, just ask Daughtry, Hudson and Lambert, who’ve sold millions of albums in spite of “losing” on the Idol stage).

There are many other business lessons AI has taught me, but these are my top 3.  What business lessons has American Idol taught you?

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I know this is really late, but I wanted to let you know that the winner of last week’s Social Media Fable Pick-a-Moral contest is Jim Keenan, who said that the moral of the fable was “Act online as you would offline. Being social is being social no matter where you are. It’s still about people.”  (I know, that’s technically three morals, but all three were really good!)

Congratulations, Jim!  If you’ll direct message your mailing address to me on Twitter (@jerrykennedy), I’ll get your autographed copy of “Motivation 101″ sent out right away.

Thanks to everyone who contributed a moral…all of them were great!