Work(Hard and Good)

When you launch a new blog, start a new business, or accept a new job, you might be tempted to work long hours and throw yourself into your work.

What you think might only be a month of hard work turns into more months and sometimes years. Your hard work becomes a pattern. You forget that there is a difference between hard work and good work.

Instead of compromising your health and relationships, start slowly. Don’t worry about how busy you are, but what you are really accomplishing.

• Answering email all hours of the night instead of having dinner and time with your family is not good work.
• Generating busy work by creating collateral or buying things that you don’t need is not good work.
• Trying to connect with as many people as possible is not good work.

Instead, focus on quality connections that develop into long term relationships. Work with what you have, and only check and respond to email 2 or 3 times a day during business hours.

You will be happier, and healthier. That is good work.

Best,

Chris Dutton

Business 2.0

There is no doubt that the business world is changing and that means you need to change too. It doesn’t matter what business you are in, if you want to succeed, you must change.

Change doesn’t have to be radical, but simple shifts in how you see and do things are necessary.

Simple Shifts in Business for…

Sales, Realtors, Business Owners, Entrepreneurs

• Instead of numbers first, put people first.
• Replace the words leads, prospects and conversions with people.
• Give people what they want, not what you want.
• In social media, be social. Have a conversation. With people.
• Don’t add people to your mailing list because they gave you a business card.
• Stop calling to “follow up” or “check in”.
• Say “I don’t know” when you don’t know.
• Make every interaction valuable for people.

Websites/Blogs

• Turn off the music.
• Pull down the pop-ups.
• Be Mobile Friendly.
• Add your picture.
• Use a light background and dark text.
• Kill auto video/audio.
• Don’t add people to your mailing list without permission.

Notifications

• Notifications are distractions. Turn them off. All of them.
• You don’t need your phone to remind you that you have email.
• The first thing you see when you open your computer doesn’t have to be an announcement of what is happening at work,news,etc.
• You don’t need an email to tell you who subscribed and who unsubscribed from anything.
• Birds don’t need to chirp when someone mentions you on Twitter.

Social Media/Email

• Be social for 20 minutes and then get back to work.
• Stop auto tweeting.
• Stop following everyone that follows you.
• Don’t check email when you don’t know what to do next.
• Don’t check email hoping for something great to happen.
• Don’t check email because it makes you feel busy.
• Check email 1-3 times a day and respond thoughtfully.
• Do good work not busy work(I’ll touch on this next time).

If you work for yourself, you know that your customers (people) put food on your table. If you work for someone else, remember that your boss might sign your check, but it’s your customers (people) that make that check good.

Out-behave your competition and start treating your customers like people instead of dollar signs. If you don’t do these things, you will lose business to someone who does. If you do these things, get ready to grow.

Commodity

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’re at your neighbor’s house for dinner. She is serving you Quiche, at which point you made a face slightly resembling this……….?!!!!????!!!!???

As a result, you hesitatingly ask her to pass the salt……..

So what does this have to do with anything?

When your neighbor was passing you the salt, would you have thought twice about which brand it was? Was it Table Salt or Sea Salt?? Probably not. You would have taken the salt and irrigated your Quiche with it, correct?

The reason for this is because salt’s considered a commodity.

Commodity- Something that is needed, but for which there is really no difference across the market. In other words, there aren’t preferred brands of salt, generally speaking.

Far too often, businesses treat their products and services the same way – as if they were an everyday commodity, when in fact, there is absolutely nothing “everyday” about you, your service, or your products!

You just might not have been sure how to communicate that.

However, the problem with that becomes this:

When you don’t give your prospective clients a reason to pick your product over the other, they won’t. As far as they can tell, your product is just another salt shaker.All that matters to them is that the product gets the job done. And that’s the moment they start “shopping around”- because at that point, price is really the only differentiating factor.

Your Job?

Give Reason:

-Give them a reason to pick your product. -Give them a reason to become your #1 fan. -You are not a helpless pawn in your industry. -You are a Genius.

NOW ACT LIKE IT!

The way you do that has a lot less to do with what you + your product does……….and a lot more to do with how you + your product do it. You need to be strong enough to step up to the plate with your product and your personality.

It’s about the way you do something. It’s about the experience.

It’s up to you to evoke emotion, so you can help your customers FEEL SOMETHING, and by extension, CONNECT WITH YOU!

This is why creating a brand experience matters, and this is why it affects your bottom line.

Don’t stand out. STAND UP! And watch them stand with you.

Only then, once they feel like they belong with you, does the sales process even start-whether you knew it or not.

 

–Chris Dutton

Management 101-Trust

As a liaison to many small business’, When I speak  with managers or owners , I often ask, “Do your people trust you?” Most are taken aback. It’s not something they’re often asked or a question they’ve even asked themselves.

After some thought, most eventually say something like, “Well, I think so. I hope so. No one’s said he doesn’t.” In fact, as they ultimately admit, they don’t really know for sure.
It’s a question worth asking. Do your people trust you?

Chances are, you don’t know for sure, either. If so, that’s potentially a problem because your ability to elicit people’s best efforts depends on their trust in you — their confidence that they can count on you to do the right thing. Your basic job as a boss is to influence others, to make a difference in what they do and in the thoughts and feelings that drive their actions. Yet, even as the person in charge, the one with authority, you can ultimately influence people only to the extent they are willing to be influenced by you. And that willingness will depend on whether they trust you. Without trust, why should people do what you ask, especially if you’re asking something difficult? Why should they accept your judgment? Above all, why would they devote the care and extra effort that quality work requires? As the boss, you can demand compliance but you must earn commitment, and the coin of that realm is TRUST.

As I explore this topic with managers, we find it’s a subject both familiar and unfamiliar.
Most people don’t know how to think about it constructively. Why?

First, they often don’t realize how context-sensitive trust is. So, when I ask, “Do your people trust you?” we’re not asking about people’s confidence in you as a person in general — whether, for example, they think you will repay them promptly if you borrow $10. Instead, we’re really asking, “Do your people trust you as a boss?” For them to accept you as a boss, they must trust you in that context. When we delve later into the components of trust, you’ll see why context is so important.

The second reason most managers feel a little lost when they think about trust is that most of us resist the idea that trust is something you can actively and consciously encourage. To say it can and should be fostered feels manipulative and self-serving. We instinctively distrust the person who exclaims, “Trust me!” We usually don’t consider trust an outcome we can or should try to control directly.

But believing as a boss that trust will somehow take care of itself may not work out the way you want. You do need to think about it. And you may need to take conscious steps that make clear to others that you deserve their trust. None of those steps involves dishonesty or manipulation — on the contrary — but they do involve your being explicit about yourself, about what you know, and about the reasons behind your decisions and actions. In other words, it may require that you be more open as a boss than you might personally be inclined to be.

Remember, don’t take trust for granted, or believe it just happens, because virtually all you do as a boss begins with people’s trust in you.