» Entrepreneurialism

No, You Rock, Seth Godin!

shawn — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:44:45 +0000

This morning, Seth Godin posted this:

You rock

This is deceptive.

You don’t rock all the time. No one does. No one is a rock star, superstar, world-changing artist all the time. In fact, it’s a self-defeating goal. You can’t do it.

No, but you might rock five minutes a day.

Five minutes to write a blog post that changes everything, or five minutes to deliver an act of generosity that changes someone. Five minutes to invent a great new feature, or five minutes to teach a groundbreaking skill in a way that no one ever thought of before. Five minutes to tell the truth (or hear the truth).

Five minutes a day you might do exceptional work, remarkable work, work that matters. Five minutes a day you might defeat the lizard brain long enough to stand up and make a difference.

And five minutes of rocking would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just about anyone else.

It is a great example of the quick shots of inspirational adrenaline that Seth scribbles out nearly every day (sometimes multiple times a day) on his blog. But I would amend his wise words just in the slightest and add emphasis to one line in particular.

First, the amendment. I don’t think five minutes is enough. I also believe that we are capable of much more than that. I appreciate that Seth is letting us off easy, but I personally feel that I can work in flow for between 30 minutes to 2 hours almost every day. For more on Flow, a brilliant practice that you should be bringing into your business life, you can go here.

Now for the emphasis. He says that a potential great work is “to deliver an act of generosity that changes someone.” I say that the greatest work you can do is lift another person with your generosity. I would emphasize Seth’s point that the work you do in a day is measured by the people you can effect.

If you are in business, your output of a product or service is only as good as the positive change it creates in the lives of your customers. But you, as a human, are also only as good as the positive change you are directly making in the lives of your people. Your employees, your co-workers, your family and friends should all end each day feeling appreciated and fulfilled, bettered for having passed through another day of trials, growth and human interaction.

And that typically takes you just a little longer than five minutes.

Inexpert Review: Economic Support for Becoming a Call Girl

shawn — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:51:20 +0000

“Levitt and Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics: Rather than a Sequel to the Original and Uncanny Economic Stories We Presented in Freakonomics, We’ve Created a Dry Scientific Journal of What Other Economists are Doing and How They’re Passing It Off as Pop Psychology. Also, We’ve Included a Bonus Guide on How to Start Your Own Business as a High Paid Escort Including Suggested Services and Hourly Rates.”

The full title is very long, but funny in a “pick it up off the shelf and show your friend to get a laugh” marketable way. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Levitt, the economist and presumably “the source” for the material again pairs up with Dubner, the storyteller, to rekindle the magic they made together four years before with Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I loved Freakonomics. It was, in so many ways, the right book at the right time. Like lightning striking, many factors came together to create the perfect conditions for a dramatic effect. Freakonomics published on the heels of Gladwell’s counter-intuitive bestseller, Blink, into a general resurgence of interest in pop psychology and pseudo-educational non-fiction.

Levitt and Dubner grabbed some literary headlines with their sensational, statistically-based assertions, including the deliberate counter-argument to Gladwell’s explanation of decreased crime covered in The Tipping Point. They had a lot of fun, fresh and surprising discoveries that were shared in a punchy and “radio-friendly” way that is a tribute to Dubner’s writing ability—he was able to convert Umberto Eco into Dan Brown. The masses could enjoy Freakonomics.

But like the old adage about lightning striking, Superfreakonomics is a miss.

UNLESS you are looking for financial data to support your transition from your current career into the thriving industry of High-Paid Escort Service Providers. In which case, the first 55 pages are a “must read.” In these pages, a world-renowned economist will explain to you that prostitution is not about buying sex, but really about limited suppliers seeking to satisfy a decreasing demand for a price inelastic service. It is virtually a cut-and-paste business proposal for you to take your Brothel plan to the investors for your A round.

If you have the time and interest to learn more about effectively selling yourself on the street at an hourly rate, this book is for you. If this does not currently align with your career goals, borrow it and read chapter 5 about global cooling, as this will be the water-cooler topic sometime in the near future where you can impress your friends.

My rating for the book is 20,000 otherwise stable housewives turned drug addicted prostitutes because of inalterable economic incentives out of a possible 50,000 otherwise stable housewives turned drug addicted prostitutes because of inalterable economic incentives.

Also, in my extensive research for this blog (i.e.- “reading wikipedia“), I learned they are making a film adaptation of the first book. This will be bad. I look forward to writing another Inexpert Review in the future, apparently sometime around August 2010.

Tony Hawk Wants to be Your Friend

shawn — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:04:00 +0000

Are you lonely? Unpopular? Looking for a world-famous, professional athlete to hang out with? Do you have a couple of extra grand you’re willing to spend for a friend? Then Keep Reading!

For $2,000, professional skateboarder and videogame character Tony Hawk will call you, answer any question you have or change the outgoing message on your voicemail. For a little more, he will go Go-Kart racing with you, play mini golf, escort you to Disneyland, or even show up at your school.

From his website
“For the first time ever, you can spend the day with Tony Hawk and his friends in some of the most unique places. The Tony Hawk Experience is your exclusive opportunity to have a personal experience with you and your friends with the world’s most famous action sports figure and to benefit the Tony Hawk Foundation while you do it.”

This is Genius! Professional athletes and celebrities have been doing things like this for years. It is typically labeled under something foggy like “Guest Appearance,” includes a hefty appearance fee, and is trafficked through their agent. But most people don’t know about it or think of it. The brilliance behind what Tony Hawk is doing is that it is posted as a prominent link on his website. He is putting it right out in front of his audience! Hawk recognizes that fame is directly tied to having fans, and he is offering himself up to those fans in the places they spend the most time – the internet.

Tony Hawk’s online popularity, augmented by the release of his 11th video game title, is evidenced by his more than 1.4 million Twitter followers, ranking him 24th most popular on the site. It is the old maxim of “Go Where Your Fans Are” and he is using his fame to augment his fame. The more kids that can afford his phone calls and Go Kart races, the more people will be buzzing about him online, the more video games he will sell, and the more kids will pay for his phone calls and Go Kart races. It’s a vicious circle.

My favorite is this for $75,000 – “I will pick you up at LAX in my 620hp Jeep SRT and we will visit cliché tourist spots” around L.A. That’s a bargain, folks. I would charge you at least twice that and I’d pick you up in a Honda Accord.

The Value of Being Amateur

shawn — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:02:00 +0000

I recently wrote about professionally-produced videos and music being passed off on YouTube as amateur work and I labeled it “Promateur” creation. I also labeled it as “Inauthentic.”

This morning, Seth Godin wrote that there are four ways to offer professional quality service to clients in the marketing business:

1. Hire a professional.
2. Be as good as a professional.
3. Realize that professional-quality work is not required or available and merely come close.
4. Do work that a professional wouldn’t dare do, and use this as an advantage.

What Seth is talking about in number 4 is what I called an “Amfessional,” and this is an exciting concept. An Amfessional is the person that is doing something that would normally be done by a professional and doing it at the professional level because he or she loves it. It’s the MySpace fan site that has more friends than the Athletes own page. It’s the YouTube video that is getting more views than the TV ad. In the past, Amateur Work was looked at as shoddy and second-rate. But today is the day of the Amfessional.

Because of advances in technology and the availability of professional-level production and editing tools (i.e. PhotoShop, Final Cut, DreamWeaver) the non-pro “regular guy” can now create and interact at the professional level. And now, more than ever, the mainstream audience respects and assigns value to work at this level. Watch as the model is reversed in businesses where, instead of hiring a spokesperson and trying to create a brand around them (Nike’s Michael Jordan, the Snapple Lady) brands are finding individual fans that live their brand and then bringing them onboard (Microsoft’s I’m a PC, Coke Zero’s NCAA Fans, Jared for Subway).

Watch as Target adds more and more Mompreneur brands and hand-made boutique items on their shelves and erodes Wal-Mart’s annual sales of store brands and imports. Watch as the heavy-consuming 12-17 year-old category moves from stocking their ipods with big label movies and music and creates playlists of homemade videos and songs from their friends and connections.

Corporations and Marketers right now are not giving us what we want: Authenticity. In a few more years, maybe they’ll get it, but right now is a perfect time for the person in the trenches– that is closest to the product, the brand, the experience– to create the meaning for the product his or herself. Now is the time of the Amfessional.

Shawn's Graduation Speech

shawn — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:43:00 +0000

Shawn’s Graduation Speech for the GSU
Global Partners MBA Class of 2008

The four things I learned from my MBA program.

1. I’ve developed a physical dependency on PowerPoint.
2. I learned a new language.
3. I learned that anything worth learning can be conveyed in a chart
4. I learned to take existing models, charts, concepts and ideas and apply them to new sets of data.

I have elected to not simply tell you about these new competencies, but also to demonstrate them to you during the course of this speech. Item number one, my adeptness at PowerPoint that has been carefully honed over the course of the program, is best illustrated by the creation of this presentation. Number two is that I have learned a new language. To enter the global partners program, it is a prerequisite to know another language besides English. We were told that this was so that we would be able to quickly adapt and understand in the cultures and countries that we visited as part of the program. But we were lied to.

The REAL reason is that our professors wanted to make sure we would be able to learn a brand new language: the language of business. As MBA students, we have learned a brand new language, complete with its own vocabulary. I apologize to those who are in attendance who have not yet learned this language, because I would like to deliver the next segment of my speech in b-school-ese.

“4Q and 1600 ICH ago,
We determined that the FV of our WACC
Could be improved by exchanging CA for FA
and leveraging our IP.

After a SWOT analysis of our OTB,
We chose an MBA with GSU in the program called GP.
In Oct. 07 in CS 600, the Cof’08 began.
We met P-Y and KDL. And also Robin M.

We learned Econ and Pol Strat, Comm Dip and Int Bus,
Bus Law and Bus Mark, and Cost and Info Sys
In our IT class we read how HDVD
Would go DOA thanks to PS3
And in P-Y’s Ops class at IAE
We learned to streamline Mfg using JIT

We saw RDJ and flew to CDG
We changed our USD into RMB
In PRC we toured the BOG,
Then grabbed some US food at MickeyD’s

After all that, we’re back at GSU
Here in ATL with 1 thing to do,
To cross the stage and receive our degrees
And add 3 new letters to our CVs.”

The third thing that I learned was that anything worth learning can, and SHOULD, be communicated quickly and easily with a graph or chart. I would like to demonstrate the truth of that too you with a few examples.
· A Pie Chart About Pie
· A SWOT Analysis of the SWAT
· The f(x) = excitement x effort
· The Brown Cloud and
· The Classic Marketing Matrix

The fourth thing that I learned was how to apply existing models and analysis to new data sets to reveal new patterns and models. I feel that this skill can be accurately demonstration by taking the comedic model of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might Be a Redneck” and applying it to our own particular data set.

You might be a GPMBA…
1. If you’ve ever tried to calculate your student loan debt in Euros.
2. If you know the right way to pronounce “Strategy” and “Tactic”
3. If you’ve ever used the word “widget” to describe a theoretical product line.
Or if you’ve ever looked up the translation for “widget” in French or Portuguese.
4. If you’ve ever checked with a fellow student to know not only what class you have tomorrow, but what country it’s in.
5. If you’ve ever sat in a class taught in English and had to think “What language am I hearing?”
6. If you’ve ever lost 150 thousand dollars in a virtual margin call on the virtual stock market.
7. If you’ve ever accidentally started a nuclear war in Brazil or depleted the world’s oceans of their fish population.
8. If you’ve ever spent more than 8 hours in the DC airport. Twice.
9. If you’ve ever begun a question with the phrase “I was reading in the Wall Street Journal…”
10. If you’ve ever bragged that your new suit was made in China
Finally, If you’ve studied 20 subjects across 4 continents and traveled around the entire world in 432 days as part of your international business education…

The Job Search: Lessons from Booksellers

shawn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:46:00 +0000

What You Can Learn about Job Searching from the Publishing Industry

When you are job searching, it’s easy to get caught up in the process and overlook the big picture. So, let’s look at the way YOU will look to your future employer by examining the old adage

YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER.

“The bookstore browser averages less than eight seconds looking at the front cover and fifteen seconds reading the back cover. You must hook them immediately and keep them reading the back cover or they will put the book back on the shelf.”

The 5th “P” of marketing is “Packaging.” How’s your Appearance? In our society where book covers are the #1 indicator of book sales, you cannot overlook the importance of your own packaging. A career change is the perfect reason to go out and spend some money on a nice haircut and updated professional clothes. Get a good night’s sleep. Use your free time to exercise and eat well. Just because you’re Job Searching is no reason to LOOK unemployed! If you feel good about your appearance, then others will see that you have poise, confidence, and value.

“Book publishers spend more than $50 billion on product packaging design. $50 billion, not for the products or even for the wrappers, but $50 billion just for the design of the wrapper.”

What is your wrapper? Or what is the first thing that an employer will see about you that will formulate his decision to Buy or Keep Browsing. A key part of your wrapper is your Resume. Update it with all new things. Don’t just add your most recent position; update your skills, recognitions, awards and accomplishments. Add any new groups you’ve joined. No new groups to add? Quick, go out and join a group. I mean, you’ve got some free time right now, huh? Then, add it to your resume. Also, breeze back over the years of experience you’ve had and do some re-write to touch up those tired histories through the lens of your greater life experience. Add or update your value statement and 2 key accomplishments right up at the top under your name and contact info, like the headline of a newspaper:

Extra! Extra!

Here’s why you should read about this guy.

Remember, this is your leave behind, so in most cases, may be the last thing a potential employer sees. Make sure it gets them excited about what you can do for them.

With your packaging covered, it’s time to get started. Create your list of contacts and your list of companies you’re interested in. These are organic lists, which means they WILL keep changing! Each contact has a network that they can lead you to, the goal is to get the names of decision makers, their titles and their business addresses. Then you’re going to write them a letter. Not an email. Write them a letter.

The letter should say:
I’m this guy, I know this person that you also know. I am interested in your company because … (“It is the top performer in the industry”, “It fits my values and interests,” stuff like that. Just communicate that you know the company.) You’d be interested to know that in my past, I have done these things and would like to help your company do these things. Please feel free to reach me by phone or email at your convenience. Or, I will call your office on this day.

Really, write that stuff? Yes. Employers get upwards of 125 emails a day. They read about 20%. They also return about 20% of phone calls. The question you are answering for them is this:

“How Determined are You to Get This Job?”

Ready for the key secret to this process? Make the Call! Writing the letter already set you apart from every other person that just hit “Apply” on monster.com. Now, when you said you would call about 4 days after you send the letter, you MUST pick up the phone and make the call. Call early in the morning (Before 8:30 or 9:30). Call again at lunch time. Call again after work hours. This way you have a better chance of getting someone who is not the professional Gatekeeper. Or perhaps even getting the person you’re looking for! Be prepared to leave a professional message.

“Hi, I’m this guy. I sent you a letter regarding my interest in coming to work for your company. I think you would be excited to hear how I could help (company’s name).”

If you get the gatekeeper, you can simply say: “I’m calling for whoever.” And when they ask what it is regarding, you can say: “I am following up on a correspondence he and I had last week.” Or even, on a good day, “He’s expecting my call.” Sales people use this technique all the time. Warning: don’t make the Gatekeeper think you’re a salesperson!

So When Do I Use Email?
Emailing your resume is your closing tool. It is your leave behind. You did not include it in your first letter, therefore, it is important that after you have talked on the phone to the person and they have requested your resume, that you get their email address. Ask them if they would like you to include references, and then tell them that you will email it to them. And then of course, you follow through with that . –Shawn Butler
http://www.parapublishing.com/files/articles/ArticleAB-202CoversSellBooks.pdf

Balloons, Popcorn, and Snow Cones

shawn — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:17:00 +0000

A Little about Cost Markups: What do Balloons, Movie Theater Popcorn, Snow Cones and Starbucks Coffee have in common? They, along with Cotton Candy and Fountain Drinks are on the list of

the Consumer Products with the Highest Markups

But what is a “Markup?” and “What does this mean to us?” Markup, or Margin, is a marketing term for the price that a business puts on a product above what it costs to produce and deliver the good, usually determined as a percentage. In other words: the part that is straight profit.

Certainly there are more expensive items than coffee, cotton candy and popcorn –like porsches, condominiums and golf resorts– so what makes these items special? What kind of a markup would cause such a big deal?

How about this: No matter what a company sells, their price is a combination of two numbers: the cost of making and transporting the good they are selling (COGS) and the margin of profit (Markup).

COGS + Markup = Price

COGS is a set cost determined by the various expenses, fixed—such as overhead and insurance, and variable—such as raw materials and employee wages, that go into producing the product. Companies can do very little to affect this aspect of price, or at least that’s how I see it from the marketing side of the fence. The second part of price, however, the markup, can be shifted easily—this has no basis other than the price your customer is willing to bear.

For most consumer products, the average markup (“Retail”) is about 30%. For commodities –sugar, soap, pillowcases– markup is closer to 10%. But for “Premium” products –retail items aimed at the very rich, or the very demading (this is where we talked about Porsches, but also includes watches, Italian shoes, and vodka)– markups often approach 200% of Cost. And then “Ultra Premium” –products called by names like Mikimoto, Piaget, and Alfa Romeo– enjoy 400 and 500% markups. People gladly paying $750,000 for a car that costs around $20,000 to produce. For more on this, here is a great link.

But these don’t touch the 99.9% profit margins of the products mentioned above– the less than 1/50 of a cent that it costs to produce the .5 grams of a latex balloon that is filled with a burst of helium valued at 1/80 of a penny and sold for $3.00 at fairs and circuses across the US. This equates to a 1000% markup above COGS. Similar equations can be run for cotton candy, snow cones, your super-value bucket at the movie theater and your double iced caramel machiatto.

Imagine paying a 1000% markup on your car or your next burrito. That would be a $20,000,000 Altima or an $850 dollar Carne Asada bowl.

Room to Grow

shawn — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:29:00 +0000

I am going to share with you today’s observation of China. Close your eyes and envision a map of the United States. Okay, now open your eyes and keep reading… You’re going to point on that map to these locations as I list them: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose. These are the Top 10 U.S. Cities by Population and Rank. You may have noticed your finger stopped in about every major region of the country and crossed the continent at least 3 times. Further down that list you’d touch Detroit, Memphis, Jacksonville and Seattle at 23.

Now, the Top 10 Cities in China are Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guanzhou, Tianjin, Nanjing, Dalian, Hangzhou, Shenyang and Harbin. If you were to do the same mental map-pointing with this country, you’d find your finger never strayed from the east coast. In fact, you’d find that most of these cities, 8 out of 10, cluster like shotgun fire to within 2 hours of each other.

China is a huge country, roughly the same area as the United States, but with more than four times the population. Across such a broad expanse of people and geography, one expects the country to have developed several distinct and unique cities and cultures. In the US, for example, we have Northerners and Southerners, we have City People and Country People, but we also have Suburbanites, Rednecks, New Englanders, Westerners, Mid-Westerners, Snow Birds, Beach Bums, Grunge Rockers, Cowboys, and Californians. There are lots of different lifestyles with different cultures and values, but these groups are dispersed across the length and breadth of the country. From what I can tell, China does not work this way.

In China, the businesses, industries, infrastructure, government, and foreign political influence—not to mention the wealth and leading founts of culture—are all located on a stretch of the country’s east coast spanning from Beijing down to Shanghai, the rough equivalent of the state of California. Meanwhile, the western portion of the country, perhaps 90% of the land area, is occupied by about 60% of the population and responsible for less than 25% of the GDP.

So, why does this strong disparity between East and West exist in China? Similar to that of the industrial North and agrarian South in the antebellum US, the cause is the drastically different cost of doing business in the regions. “The government is doing things to move China west,” said Randy Creel, a logistics expert at a major MNC in China. “The hesitation is the lack of infrastructure and its effect on logistics costs.” Effects on logistics costs that work out to about 200% more investment per mile for companies to run their businesses in Western China. China is on a self-perpetuating cycle of eastern growth and western lag that will require more than government incentives to Western businesses and FDI spenders. It may require an all-out reallocation of infrastructure build-up that the country has never before undertaken. At least not until the 2008 Beijing Olympics. –Shawn Butler

A Small World

shawn — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:40:00 +0000

This is a quick interim blog just to keep up a with the world from here in Paris. My daughter and I celebrated our birthdays last month in our own pseudo-European style, inviting about 15 people over for a party and birthday crêpes.

asmallworld.netshawn butler

After 5 weeks in France, I’ve decided that I’m pretty much exactly the kind of person that should be doing the Euro scene. To prove that I am now a jet-setting elitist, I am joining the exclusive group at aSmallWorld dot net, where I will be rubbing “virtual elbows” with supermodels and James Blunt. See you when you get there… shawnpbutler@gmail.com

The World is Still Round…

shawn — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:24:00 +0000

In spite of Thomas L. Friedman’s best efforts to claim otherwise in his newly revised The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Release 3.0. Just as in his previous books, Friedman showcases his journalistic forte for information gathering, analysis, and insight-laden extrapolation. He supports well his own previous arguments for free trade, market specialization, and classical economic theories regarding absolute and comparative advantage. (Smith, Ricardo, … Reich)

I’ll pause here to acknowledge that I, too, am a strong proponent of globalization. I have seen first-hand the dissolution of geographic and political barriers to trade and the ensuing benefits to the local economy. I find no fault in Friedman’s historical observations, including his 3 eras of globalization, his 10 flatteners, and even his recommendations for new hybrid fields of study he calls “Mash-Ups.” These ideas are spot-on in our global economy of increasing convergence.

But why all the doom and gloom, Mr. Friedman? Instead of telling your readers how the new “flattened” world will make lives better—spurring the economy of our New America into a greater leadership role as the birthplace of ideas and a nation of entrepreneurs—he focuses on the bad. Friedman follows the M.O. of Lou Dobbs, crying wolf over foreign theft of US jobs and a general disappearance of the American middle-class. Rather than pointing to the strengths of our human capital as inventors, creators, and brand builders, he tells readers that the American sky is falling in competition with Indian and Chinese ITs and engineers.

Friedman leans toward the dramatic, but what do you expect from an Opinion Columnist? He opens with this quote from an Indian software CEO: “The global playing field is being leveled… and the US is not ready.” This is followed by other sensational statements of hyperbole. “Today, people in China and India are starving… for your job!” he warns his children. But then, you are given to flights of the inflammatory if you are to make your living as an op-ed writer. The Title The World is Friendlier to International Business because of Improvements in Technology and Transportation doesn’t sell books.
–Shawn Butler