I-Team: ID Theft and Children: MyFoxATLANTA.com

Awhile ago during one of our Board meetings, they were…shall I say, “in our face.” They were blunt about things that needed improving. It was tough medicine and driving home, I felt like I had been through the ringer.

At 2am (when I occasionally do my best thinking) it struck me that their feedback was exactly that I needed to hear. We did make changes and our company is better off today because of that. I’m sure it will happen again.

Are you open to hearing bad news? As a leader, do your colleagues have the confidence to tell you what you don’t want to hear?

I’ve worked at places where people were intimidated or even scared of the boss. About the last thing they’re going to do is raise some issue that will upset the boss. And yet that culture of fear is one reason companies decline.

At What’s Up Interactive, when we occasionally lose out on a piece of business, one of the hardest calls to make is to the customer to find out more about why we didn’t win. It’s a little unsettling for the person on the other end of the line, too. Sometimes we get a sugar coated answer about how they’ll probably call us for a future project. Other times, we get someone who is honest and gives us the straight scoop.

You know what? I can remember every one of those conversations and can tell you how our company improved because of it. I appreciate their candor, just like I appreciate when someone on our team comes in and says, “can we talk for a second?” and then speaks their mind.

Bad news isn’t as much fun as good but it’s more valuable for growth.

Recession #2 came along in the summer of 2000. Few realized the dot com bubble had blown until the economy was headed straight down that fall. 9/11 made it worse. And on top of that, most of our customers were companies that had invested too early in internet marketing and were turned off by it. At this point I’d been around long enough to know times were bad and, indeed, business took several years to bounce back.

18 months ago the old feeling was back. With this recession, it wasn’t so much that companies canceled their plans or that we lost out on projects. It was more a case that customers decided to do nothing. Many of our competitors were experiencing the same thing.

Well I’m here with good news. Times are changing. Customers are thawing. There’s a white board around here from a year ago that shows our early 2011 pipeline and right now that’s where some of our new business is coming from. You can feel it. Yes, companies are still sensitive to pricing and in some cases, they tend to want a modest scope of work with a promise of add-ons down the road. (And in a few cases, those add-ons got added-on faster than expected).

I wonder if we just get tired of recessions and that’s how they end.

As a leading economic indicator, I’m here to tell you that 2012 is looking good. Barring some disaster in Greece or something we didn’t expect.

“If you’re not willing to cannibalize yourself, others will do it for you.”
- Mark Zupan, dean of the University of Rochester’s business school

Through the years, I think my experience has been the same as most business owners. A lot of good people and a larger number of competent people have worked for us. My biggest challenge in growing a healthy, sustainable business has been putting together a team that’s “simpatico.” A team that’s simpatico means assembling a group — particularly those in leadership positions — that plays well off each other. They don’t have to have the same vision, they don’t agree on everything and they aren’t above arguing from time to time to make their point.

Disagreement is fine. As General George Patton said, “if everybody agrees then no one is thinking.” No, being simpatico is more a matter of each person bringing results to the business in their own way. Because they’re contributing to the growth of the company, they’ve earned the respect to be heard.

Studying companies I respect (A&M Records, Apple Computer) and a few local competitors who got it right, I notice that they all had strong players who were simpatico. The skills are complimentary — what one person excels at, other executives didn’t and vice versa.

My biggest challenge has been to build that kind of team. Those times when someone who wasn’t effective at their job, it was a relatively easy decision to move them out. Painful, yes, but necessary. As Bill Bennett put it the other night at the Georgia Chamber’s annual meeting, “getting fired isn’t terminal.”

The bigger challenge is what to do when team members are just OK. They’re not ripping off the company or sleeping on the job. They’re just going through the motions. They’re not simpatico, a critical issue if they’re in leadership roles. This is the biggest challenge a CEO faces and it’s where I’ve struggled the most.

Fact is, those people either have to be moved to another position where they can become great or they have to be moved out. And moving them out sucks.

But you know what? In most of those cases, those people went on to greater success elsewhere. Some just needed a different kind of environment than ours. Yes, a few of them don’t say kind things about me or my company after they left even though we always did the right thing by them. But that can’t slow you down. It’s the price you pay for being the CEO.

The more often I have made the difficult moves to build a team that’s simpatico, the more it’s paid off.

Bulldog fans can hear his call of the Auburn game in 1982: “Hunker down, you guys! If you didn’t hear me, you guys, hunker down! I know I’m asking a lot, you guys, but hunker it down one more time!” Play-by-play like that earned him the endearment of UGA football fans all the way through his final broadcast in 2008.

I first crossed paths with Larry early in my career at WRFC Athens, then the flagship station of UGA sports. He referred to my crowd jokingly as “you and your hippie friends.” By the mid 1980s, he did daily sports commentaries for the radio network I managed.

In person, Larry spoke in play-by-playisms… short, staccato sentences that oozed storytelling. “Ahh, Richard, I tell you it was COLD this morning. I got out of bed, made my way to the kitchen and it was all I could DO to keep from freezing.”

He loved to tell dirty stories (sorry all you politically-correct Bulldog fans) and was always baffled by sports money. He couldn’t understand how an athlete could possibly be worth a multi-million dollar contract. Sky-high rights fees commanded by sports teams were equally perplexing. That attitude about compensation spilled over into his career.

A radio station in a large Georgia city called me one day, asking if I would help get Larry to record commercials for a local car dealer. You know the kind…“Hi, this is Larry Munson…” I said I would. Larry, of course, was happy to help because the radio station carried UGA sports.

He asked me, “How much do you think I should get for doing the spot? Fifty bucks?”

Now, Larry could have gotten use of a car as compensation, but he was much too uncomfortable to ask for that much. The station got its Larry Munson commercials, and Larry got his $50.

Where Athletic Director Vince Dooley had the polished and well-connected Loran Smith doing such bidding for him, Larry had only himself. He wasn’t interested in hiring an agent and always had the best interests of the Bulldogs at heart.

So much so that when I asked him to record something for my telephone answering machine (“My God, do you realize Richard and Lenka aren’t here? Leave a message when you hear that tone thing!”), it never occurred to me that I should pay him.

I should have. As the old saying goes, “Don’t be sad it’s over. Be happy it happened.”

I’m happy we had Larry and that I had the experience of knowing him.

Stretch Your Dollar: Online Bargains: MyFoxATLANTA.com

Like learning about the passing of a relative who has been seriously ill, the jolt of Jobs’ death was cause to ponder the larger questions in life. Here’s a reminder: this is going to happen to me someday. As Jobs once said, “live your life like today will be your last and someday you’ll be right.”

Like thousands of others now expressing their sadness at his death, Jobs had an impact on my life in a big way.

Many years ago at my former job in radio, I earned a $6,000 bonus for exceeding my quota of signing radio stations to carry Atlanta Hawks radio broadcasts. What to do with all that money?

Personal computers were new and I knew little about them except that small businesses were beginning to use them. I asked my WGST radio colleague Mike Lawing, an engineer at the station, what to buy and he said, “Oh, you want a Mac.”

So I took my checkbook to a computer store in Cobb County called BusinessLand and bought a Mac SE and an Apple dot matrix printer. It took almost all of my $6,000. When I got home, my wife was on the phone, which allowed me to sneak the boxes in without her seeing them until she hung up.

I grinned and said, “Look what we got!” She responded, “Alright, and what are we going to do with that?” “I don’t know.”

The machine sat in our home office for almost a year before the idea for a business of my own kicked in. That Mac SE, the one with a 20 meg hard drive and 1 meg of RAM helped launch the business that fed and clothed our family and dozens of others.

Steve Jobs’ design of that late-‘80s Mac, its intuitive black and white bitmap desktop and software like HyperCard and the Font/DA mover helped What’s Up Interactive get off the ground.

We stayed with the Mac platform in those early years — never a Windows machine even though they were a lot cheaper — moving to a Mac LC, then an SI, then PowerPCs even through the dark times when Jobs wasn’t at Apple. This was the era when Apple was doing so poorly, Michael Dell suggested that Apple be liquidated and cash paid out to stockholders.

At one point in the late ‘90s I was the only one here on a Mac and my IT guy said it was time to standardize on Windows. (“Nope. Ain’t gonna happen.”)

Because I respected Steve Jobs, I went back to BusinessLand and looked over his NeXT computers, but they were way too expensive for what we needed. And when Jobs returned to Apple, things began to hum. We went from System 6 to System 7 to System 8. (Was there ever a 9? I just remember OS X.)

There has always been enough material out there about Jobs and Apple to get a sense of the man. His design brilliance and attention to detail, his disdain for consensus, his arrogance (parking his car diagonally across handicapped parking spaces) and how hard he was to work for, sometimes calling employees “dumb” and creating such tension during development of the first iPhone, an Apple executive slammed her office door so hard it fused shut. They had to use an axe to get her out.

Then, following his illness, his brilliant Stanford University commencement speech addressed his thoughts about the larger questions of faith, career, family and death.

His influence in multiple industries is well documented. Jobs up-ended the music business, disrupting the comfortable lifestyle of wealthy record execs and re-setting the playing field for musicians who had been paid a fraction of their worth. He reinvented movie animation. He re-set the relationship between mobile device manufacturers and major telecom carriers. He reinvented tablet computers, given up for dead, and ignited the product category.

Steve Jobs’ legacy is certainly felt at our house and in our company.

Today we use Final Cut, Adobe’s Mac products and Apple’s awesome Keynote presentation software that puts PowerPoint to shame.

When my daughter Cameron texted me last night that “Steve Jobs died,” I had to stop what I was doing and for the next while, take it in.

Never met the man. But Steve Jobs’ influence helped define the course I’ve taken.

What’s the most effective way you can get the attention of a potential customer?

You probably want to begin by talking about what a good job your company does. But this is not the most effective approach – and could blow your opportunity to engage the potential customer more quickly.

Sales coach Dean Minuto of SalesBrain says your first step is to focus on the customer’s fear of loss — “if you don’t do this, then this could happen.” Fear of loss, it turns out, is twice as effective a motivator as the potential for gain.

Try focusing on what the customer’s competition is doing well and how your can help your customer overcome that… if they’ll take this action now.

The second tactic Dean talks about got my attention because I’ve seen it work so well: online video testimonials.

Dean says, in business, we’re all concerned about making safe choices. Most of the time, we don’t necessarily want the best choice or even the cheapest. We want the one that carries the least risk that ensures we won’t be fired.

How do you convey safety? By presenting customers on your website, talking about the great job you do. A customer is an impartial third party who has already chosen you and seems pretty happy about it.

Unless they’re prevented from participating because of corporate policy (or because they don’t want the outside world to know they use vendors), customers usually love to give testimonials.

Give ‘em some questions in advance, put ‘em on camera or behind a microphone, make them feel comfortable, ask a few questions and — voila! — you’ve got a powerful sales tool.

Online video testimonials should include visuals of your product or service in action and should run no more than 2½ minutes.

Online audio testimonials should only last a minute or so, though you can create a second version that’s 6-10 minutes long describing what the customer learned from working with your company.

Fear and safety: we’re all wired the same way. Might as well profit from it!