Flipping on your turn signal does not give you the right to the space next to you. It indicates your intent to occupy that space. It starts the negotiation between you and the other drivers around you.

Your turn signal is not a wedge.

(This thought brought to you by me, inspired by a new client with a product for US car drivers…)

Sure, people of my generation were promised flying cars and all that stuff that hasn’t happened yet. (Although these guys are about 2 miles away from my house.)

But from time to time it is the little things that remind me that we truly do live in the future… it just happens so fast we don’t notice it!

This week I helped my parents buy a new point-and-shoot camera, to use on their month-long stroll around Europe. My dad’s slides and photos from the 50′s through the 90′s are a real treasure trove. Amazing stuff documenting a lot of interesting history, with his own particular eye for composition and light.

So while buying the camera he asked, “So what kind of batteries does it take?”

It took me a minute to even parse out the question. Batteries? In a camera? Umm… “Oh,” I said, “no, it comes with a charger. Just plug it into the wall.” And, anticipating his next question, “No, you don’t need a converter. It works anywhere in the world.”

Then he asked how many pictures could be stored on it. So I fired it up, set it to one-less-than-the-highest resolution setting, and said, “one thousand, two hundred and twenty”. But we bought the next-biggest card for it – 16Gb, 4x bigger than the one it was sold with – just in case.

From four AA batteries and 21 frames in a roll, to this.

Then today I needed to ship the light bar off the top of a police car (don’t ask) to Texas. So I made a box for it and brought it down to the local FedEx office. This 44lb package will get from Seattle to Texas in less than 7 days for about $50.

Which is amazing in itself.

But then I took out my phone and took a photo of the receipt, which I then emailed to dude so he saw how much it cost, when it shipped, when the ETA was, how much it weighed, and he even had the FedEx tracking number.

All from my phone. In about 30 seconds.

I remember filling out FedEx forms in the 1980′s, and a common problem was getting one letter or digit wrong in that insanely large tracking number.

And – to top it off – if he is using EverNote to take notes on his computer (like I do) then it will AUTOMATICALLY read the photo and translate the text in the photo into searchable text in the note.

We truly do like in the future.

Now where’s my flying car?

A networking event the other day – hosted by the amazing and wonderful Barbara Breckenfeld – she asked us to indulge her for a bit at the beginning and participate in her “little woo-woo exercise”, I think is how she phrased it.

And then she took us through a brief meditation. (You would probably recognize it: “Put your feet flat on the floor, feel your breath, now imagine roots extending from your feet into the Earth…”)

This simple act brought us all together in the room, cleared the noise out of our minds, and got us to un-distract ourselves from everything outside that space.

We then had an amazing workshop!

But it also forced me to open my eyes and realize I had been trying to be productive in a Half-Working State.

The Forbidden Topic

My office is wherever I am. Usually, this means at my desk, in my bedroom, sandwiched between the dresser and the bed.

I know we consultants are supposed to be all mystical about our “office” and meet in coffee shops, and never admit that once our laundry is done we tend to fold it on our “office desk”.

But the fact of the matter is that many of us (most of us?) work out of our home, and have varying degrees of separation between our home life and our work life. I understand author Neil Gaiman has a gazebo or shack out in the back yard of his house where he does most of his writing. Another author I greatly admire – Adam LeBor – works from an actual office in downtown Budapest that he rents with a couple of other journalists.

But my office is in my bedroom. There. I said it.

My Commute Is The Problem

In the morning I would roll out of bed, tap the space bar on the computer, type in my password, and then go off to the bathroom and take care of the morning ablutions.

I would then return to my bedroom and check to see if there were any urgent issues that needed my attention while still in my sweatpants.

Sometimes it would be HOURS before I got away from the computer and actually put on real clothes, took the dog out for a walk, etc!

The whole morning I would be switching between checking business emails, personal emails, social media, news, To Do lists (yes, several of them), downloading software updates, researching a new invoicing or time-tracking tool, etc. Oh, and doing a little client work in there somewhere as well.

By the end of the day (usually about 10:PM) I would find myself in the same position (albeit dressed, and having taken the dog for a walk once or twice during the day), but with a general feeling of malaise, and a lack of clarity on what I had actually achieved during the day.

What had I done? Was I productive?

The Half-Working State

At Barbara’s workshop, after doing the meditation exercise, I realized why I had that feeling of malaise: I had been in a Half-Working State the entire day!

In that state I had never focused on any one thing in particular. I had never taken care of myself personally (where IS my glass of water?), and I had not gotten “in flow” or produced fabulous work for my clients.

I had never drawn a line and actually started working!

Part of why I work for myself is because I greatly enjoy what I do. But recently I had not been enjoying it as much. I felt a bit disconnected from my clients and their passions.

Experiencing that meditation – drawing that line between “not working” and “working” – was what was missing. In that simple act, Barbara got us out of our “outside” heads and into the room together, ready to participate. It was very effective and we had a really amazing workshop.

I Know It’s Soon, But…

The next day after the workshop I began setting my alarm 1/2 hour earlier, not waking the computer until I was ready to work, and AFTER I had sat and meditated for a bit to clear the head and focus on the tasks at hand.

The effect has been profound. Things that I checked compulsively before, distractions that took an inordinate time away from my work, all seem to have lost their importance in the face of doing what I really enjoy doing, which is helping my clients!

Regardless of whether you are a consultant, employee, or unemployed, it is important to work with intent. Draw a line between the thing you were just doing, and the thing you are going to focus on now.

Your work – your life! – will be more satisfying. I can vouch for that.

If my site looks a little strange to you, well, it’s not you.

It’s me. Really.

I made some changes to the back end of my site in preparation for a big update… and broke everything.

So, while support tries to figure out where I went wrong, I’ll take a few minutes and write this explanation. Sorry for the jarring look!

Now to go check back in with support and see how things are going…

Two things have been on my mind. I have not been able to shake them, and I just realized why: They parallel each other.

The ideas seem to be wildly divergent: On the one hand, I have been marveling at the inability of the Obama administration to tell a compelling story; and on the other hand, I have been thinking about the design of my web site.

At first they don’t seem related, but I’ve finally worked out the connection… if not the solution…

Muddled Messages

With less than 40% of the American public even bothering to go out and vote, there aren’t a lot of people listening carefully to what President Obama says.

There is also the 24 hour newsbeast that must be fed. And sadly, most people get their information about Obama and his ideas from the newsbeast. So Obama says something. Someone writes about what he says. An Editor selects a few key details from the story, a writer summarizes that, and the TV presenter speaks those words in front of the camera.

So – even in the very best case – the majority of people who hear what Obama has to say, actually hear it third-hand, after a couple of revisions and edits.

None of this is news. I know.

But imagine how frustrating it must be for Obama to present an idea with his full dialectic and intellectual abilities… only to have the majority of people hear a watered-down, filtered, and largely incorrect version presented? How frustrating.

Not exactly rocket science, but…

Creating messages that survive this slash-and-burn editorial process is a skill some people have in spades… and none of those people work for Obama.

The naive gullibility and ineptitude of the Obama Administration when it comes to story telling is jaw-droppingly bad. The simplest preventative measures are repeatedly overlooked, flubbed, or simply ignored.

Analyzing the colossal communications failures of the Obama Administration is a tired and well-covered topic, so I don’t need to go into the total howlers – like letting their insurance proposal be called the “Individual Mandate” – but the overall failure to tell a simple and compelling story, time and time again, is simply inexcusable, especially considering that his detractors are phenomenally good at it.

Is there not a single person in the administration who has taken Journalism 101 yet? You think they’d learn how to throw a punch after being beaten up by the schoolyard bullies for so long!

Which brings me to my web site! (No really… this will totally make sense! Bear with me…)

Ooh Shiny!

Losing all the special customization and design of my web site was a bit of a blessing (despite losing the money it cost me to get it done), and now that I have overcome the initial shock of the loss, the blessings are more apparent.

There was a lot of pretty in that version of the site, but the story wasn’t there.

I had lost the essential message of what it is that I do, and who I do it for, and it was lost under too much text and colorful logos.

As I rebuild my site, I will do it slowly, and in appropriate increments. I’ll add the essentials of the story back into the site, and leave the shiny flashy bits for those who do shiny flashy things of no consequence.

Parallels

So where is the parallel between Obama’s inability to tell a story, and my old, over-designed web site? It comes down to this:

Everything is story.

No matter where you look, everything is trying to tell you a story. Because that is what humans connect with.

That bumper sticker. The font choice for that company’s logo. The menu at your local restaurant. The hidden forward-pointing arrow in the FedEx logo. The color of that shop.

Every one of these details was selected to make you feel something, to tell you something about the offering, and to engage more than just your reasonable, rational mind with choosing that product or service over another.

The devil may be in the details, but the story goes all the way down to the smallest of those details.

What story are you telling? Does it flow? Does it work across multiple different media? Does it survive vicious editing? Is it easy for someone to remember and repeat to someone else?

If not, then you have some work to do… right Mr. President?

We all have heard stories of someone who couldn’t sell something, they raised the price to a ridiculous level, and then they sold like hotcakes. This isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m sure if we had the data we could trace this human behavior back centuries.

So why is it that we insist in breaking down so much of our work into billable hours?

The Illogical Billable Hour

Let’s break this down a bit and check the logic of the billable hour for a moment…

• I am a morning person, so my 8:AM – 9:AM is far more valuable than 12:PM – 1:PM. Should I charge more for it?
• When I have one of those 2:AM flashes and work like an inspired demon until 5:AM, do I charge more for that time, and less for the next day when I am groggy and dopey from lack of sleep?
• Or what if I am having an “off” day, and everything I do is a trudge? Do I charge more because it is taking more effort and time? Do I charge more because the work is harder? Or do I charge less because the work may not be as good?
• Or what if I am “in flow” and generating oodles of amazing work? Does everyone get a discount because I had a great day?
• When I come back from vacation fresh and rejuvenated and full of energy, do I charge $1000 an hour for my inspired visions and infectious energy?
• And in the last two weeks before I head out on vacation do I charge less because I have “short-timers syndrome”?

In short, one hour is not equal to another hour, and the value I place on my time may be different than the value you place on my work. In short, billing by the hour is just wrong on so many levels. All the incentives are off.

And – to bring us back to the first line of this post – history has shown that humans regularly respond better to prices being RAISED rather than lowered!

And finally, hourly billing assumes one can define beforehand how long a project will take, and account for all factors.

We all know this is just guesswork based on experience (at best) and more commonly a number pulled out of thin air that simply “feels right”. The result is that when something goes wrong on the project and it takes more time than I projected, I lose money. If the project takes less time than was budgeted, then then incentive is to pad the hours out to the full price of the bid. In short, the incentive in that case is to lie.

Hourly billing just doesn’t make sense for most things because it doesn’t value the WORK, it values my TIME. But the part you want, the part you will use, the part that you will take home with you is the WORK.

Defining Value vs Time

Ask yourself: Do you want 10 hours of my time, or do you want a problem solved?

As I have shown, my time is not the thing that you value. It’s not what you want. You want my product, my work, my skills applied to your problem to make that problem go away.

If you sit and think about it for a few minutes you can place a value on having any problem solved. How much is it worth to not have X problem any more? How much would you spend to not have to write that press release? If a great elevator pitch gets you that meeting with the venture capitalist that funds your company, how valuable is that? The value here is not in my time, it is in the results you achieve due to my efforts.

The cool thing is that the incentives work great from my side of the fence as well!

For example, if I write content for a brokerage that has 25 readers a week, and content for an online retailer who has 10,000 readers a week, do those two pieces of writing have the same value? Or is the broader-read one more valuable?

Consider this, then: What if 5 of those 25 brokerage clients wind up doing $10k of business with the brokerage due to my work? What if 2,000 people do $1 of business with the online retailer? Now which post was more valuable? Which client got the better deal? Or did they both get a great deal?

Which brings us to Project Pricing

I price my work by the Project, not by the number of hypothetical idealized hours it is going to take to do the work.

You and I will sit down, discuss the problem, how I can apply my skills to solve the problem, and then we will arrive at a price. You will be happy with the price because you got to define it according to your needs and valuation of the work. I will be happy with the price because we have worked together to clearly define the scope of the project and the value. If I can’t make the numbers work on my end (a branded worldwide social media push for $1000, for example), then I’ll turn down the work and explain to you why it isn’t feasible for me to do it for that price.

Either way, we both leave the meeting in a good place. You either got free marketing consulting, or we decided to do a project together. Either way, we are happy.

Because at the end of the project I want you to be smiling and happy when you cut that check, no matter how big it is.

And that is why I don’t bill by the hour, and neither should you.

The female embodiment of passion and energy and ZOOM! is Danielle LaPorte. I am constantly inspired by her.

On her blog she posed the question, What do YOU want to revolutionize? and asked people to post, write, blog, their responses.

Despicably Annoying

Only one aspect of the computer industry has failed to mature, innovate, or proceed in any discernible way for the last 15 years at least: PRINTING.

No, I don’t mean the inspired, passionate, and creative ink-stained wretches who turn out gorgeous letterpress business cards, etc. They amaze me.

I mean that worthless hunk of plastic that takes up an inordinate amount of space on your desk, which is actually cheaper to buy brand new than the ink that goes inside it. Whether it is Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, or anyone else, these “printers” are simply an offense. And they need to be stopped.

The muddy imperfection of the inkjet is now an accepted standard. Serif fonts with blobby rounded edges due to imprecision. Off-kilter feed mechanisms that give you 3/4 inch margin at the top left of the page that grows to 5/8 of an inch at the bottom. Paper trays that take less than a ream of paper. Wasteful pools of ink sitting in the bottom of the printer, or inaccessible in the “empty” print cartridge. Software that installs literally hundreds of useless geegaws and widgets throughout your entire system, and then clouds the operating system’s well designed built-in print options.

The litany of failures goes on and on. Ask around and you will find exactly zero people who love their printer.

Simple Problems, Simple Solutions

There is absolutely no reason that a printer should take up that much space in my work area. It simply is not that valuable. My monitor, mouse, and keyboard do not take up that much space COMBINED, and they are far more critical to my work.

So take it off the desk, and mount it on the wall. Twelve inches wide, fourteen inches long, and four inches deep. Mounts to the wall like a shelf. The front is magnetic, or whiteboard, or corkboard, or something useful.

It fits a full ream of paper, so I simply open the paper and put it in. I don’t have to store 1/3rd of a ream of paper somewhere until the printer decides to allow me to put the rest in.

Software should be non-existent. The people who make this groovy new printer will have written the drivers for it, and have provided those drivers to each of the operating systems out there: Mac OS, Windows, and 3 flavors of Linux. It is built-in. No downloading necessary.

And finally, dump the inkjet technology. It was an interesting experiment, but the quality is repulsive. Go back to the Apple LaserWriter technology, in grayscale. Once we get used to high-quality printing again, the engineers will figure out how to do laser-based color right, and we will have truly exceptional output available at the consumer level. (I could go off on a rant about graphic design and the excessive use of color to cover poor design choices… but I won’t.)

Curmudgeonly Conclusion

I know I sound like a grumpy old man, but I have earned it. Printers have occupied an inordinate amount of my desk and my time since the late 1980′s. The problems have been consistent ever since the inkjet technology replaced Apple’s LaserWriter, and they have never gotten better.

Last year I finally gave up. My life, my time, and my money is better spent elsewhere. And fortunately I live within a few blocks of a Kinko’s. (Yes, I said Kinko’s. FedEx is a shipper. Kinko’s is a printer. I don’t care what they call it now.) If I REALLY need to print something, then I walk down to the Kinko’s with a USB drive and get it printed.

The result is that everything I print looks GREAT. People comment on how nice my printouts look. They notice.

Sure it costs more per page, but the overall cost is FAR less than I would spend on a printer, cable, and inkjet cartridges per year.

In the end, the way the printer companies treat us is just rude. They release more and more marginally passable garbage, and expect us to fawn over them like some Pacific island cargo cult. That level of hubris and openly hostile treatment of their customers needs to stop.

SOMEONE needs to invent the next printer.

Please?

Now you kids get off my lawn…!

If one of the items on your To Do List is, “Consolidate To Do Lists”, you may be avoiding something.

We all like to start the new year off on the right foot. Some people make resolutions. Some finally address their “pile of denial” and clean it up. Others paint the living room. And others empty their email inbox.

To help people get a fresh perspective and an energetic start to 2012, I am teaching my popular “Make an Impression” elevator pitch workshop twice this month, and then following those up with “Business Storytelling for Fun and Profit”.

Make An Impression

The first workshop – Make an Impression – is focused on developing your introduction. Whether you are at a dinner party, a networking event, or meeting a potential client for the first time, it is important to have a good introduction. Business owners, salespeople, job seekers, artists, teachers… no matter who you are, making a good first impression is critically important.

At some point some clever person started calling this initial introduction an “elevator pitch” because your intro should be short enough to engage the other person in the duration of an elevator ride: say, 30 to 60 seconds.

In this workshop I teach you several tricks and tips to help structure your elevator pitch, and then we spend the rest of the time practicing / refining / tweaking until it really embodies YOU.

The coolest part of a great elevator pitch is that it is easily memorable. So when you meet someone and tell them you are a “business storyteller” for example, they can easily remember your pitch and refer other people to you. And we all know referrals are the best leads we can have in our businesses!

But an elevator pitch is a short, quick, memorable introduction. What happens when you see someone you already know? Or how do you write a great blog post? Or how do you craft a great client story into something that people want to spread virally?

Business Storytelling for Fun and Profit

That’s the focus of my second workshop, Business Storytelling for Fun and Profit.

This is a much more intense workshop where we use the raw facts from one of your stories, and weave it into a compelling and engaging story that will make people want to do business with you.

You will learn the techniques necessary to do this on your own through practicing with a key story from your business. Those techniques you can then take away to improve your social media interactions, blog posts, article writing, and greatly improve your videos as well!

Nobody Leaves Unchanged

I have taught these workshops to literally hundreds of people, and one of the most amazing parts for me is seeing the boiling power and bubbling enthusiasm people have when they leave the room. If you are in a flat spot in your business, if you are unsure about what you should be doing or focusing on, or if you just need a shot in the arm in the dark of winter, take either one of these classes. You will come out transformed and feeling powerful about who you are and what you are supposed to be doing right now.

Three Consecutive Mondays in January

Due to the popularity of the Make an Impression workshop, I will be teaching it twice on consecutive Mondays (Jan 16th and 23rd), and then the advanced Business Storytelling for Fun and Profit workshop on January 30th, the last Monday of the month.

I personally see the MAI class as a precursor to the Storytelling class, but that is not a requirement. Feel free to sign up for either one or both, by RSVPing to the Facebook event, or sending me an email at Christian@BoombaChicken.com.

Make An Impression
January 16th – 7:30-9:00 PM – $15
January 23rd – 7:30-9:00 PM – $15

Business Storytelling for Fun and Profit
January 30th – 7:00-9:00 PM – $20

The Fine Print

• All workshops will be held at the Georgetown Arts and Cultural Center in Seattle, WA (in the vintage ballroom above Stellar Pizza in the Georgetown neighborhood)
• There is ample off-street parking available.
• Payment can me made any time before the workshop, cash, check, and credit cards accepted. (If you would like to pay the day of the workshop, please let me know and show up 15 minutes early.)
• Class sizes are limited to 12 people for the Make an Impression workshop, and 10 for Business Storytelling. Please reserve your space ahead of time, so I can be sure we have room for you.
• If you need to cancel, please let me know ASAP so I can give someone on the waiting list your space.
• Light snacks, tea, and water will be provided. The facility does have a full kitchen as well.
• Please bring something to write with and something to write on. You will be taking notes. (Digital note-taking devices – iPads, smartphones, etc – are welcome.)
• Thank You for reading this and adhering to these simple rules!

I look forward to seeing you there!

To anyone with eyeballs in their head, the music industry is doing it wrong. It doesn’t matter what part of the industry you look at – new artists, radio, music sales, video, distribution, marketing, etc – there is no aspect of the music industry that actually works.

And I thank them for that!

All the factors are there: Pervasive networks (audio, video, and online), a product that irrationally affects people’s hearts, a constant stream of new and old content, and a demographic map that spans literally every single person on the planet.

But in all regards, the music industry fails.

Watching those failures is a very educational way to avoid doing it wrong. No matter what business you are in, there is a Bad Example from somewhere in the music industry.

And the guy dissecting the zombified body of the music industry is Bob Lefsetz of the Lefsetz Letter.

The best part about reading Bob’s posts is that he illuminates the people who are Doing It Right, and then goes into the details of why their method works. For example, his post about Louis C.K.’s new concert video is full of gems.

And that is my two-fold Christmas gift to you: The Lefsetz Letter and Louis CK, “Live at the Beacon Theater“. I hope they both entertain and enlighten you.