Treat different people differently... but how?

We are just doing some customer research at Justaxi - a mobile phone app which helps you get the best price taxi service in Manchester - and so this blog by Seth Godin is rather well timed.

He has a great point - but in a way - he doesn't have the answer.

His point is treat different people differently.

"Don't teach your students as if they are a monolithic population of learners. They learn differently, they have different goals, different skills, different backgrounds.

Don't sell to your customers as if they are a fungible commodity, a walking ATM waiting for you to punch. Six of one are not like half a dozen of the other. They tell themselves different stories, have different needs and demand something different from you.

Different voters, different donors, different employees--we have the choice to treat them as individuals. Not only do they need different things, but they offer differing amounts of value to you and to your project.

The moment your policy interferes with their uniqueness, the policy has cost you something.

We used to have no choice. There was only one set of data for the student body, one way to put things on the shelf of the local market, one opportunity to talk to the entire audience...

One of the biggest unfilled promises of the digital age is the opportunity to go beyond demographics and census data. Personalization wasn't supposed to be a cleverly veiled way to chase prospects around the web, showing them the same spammy ad for the same lame stuff as everyone else sees.

No, it is a chance to differentiate at a human scale, to use behavior as the most important clue about what people want and more important, what they need.

It's a no-brainer to treat the quarterback of the football team differently from the head of the chess club. We treat our bank's biggest investor with more care than someone who merely wants to trade in a bag of pennies. Instead of reserving this special treatment for a few outliers, though, we ought to consider what happens if we offer it to all of those we value.

The long tail of everything means that there's something for everyone--a blog to read, a charity to donate to, a skill to learn. When you send everyone the same email, demand everyone learn from the same lesson plan or try to sell everyone the same service, you've missed it.

A very long time ago, shoe salespeople realized that shoes that don't fit are difficult to sell, regardless of what you've got in stock. Today, the people you serve are coming to realize that like their shoe size, their needs are different, regardless of what your urgent agenda might be.

So.... what does this mean for an taxi comparison app like JusTaxi - in truth - I don't know. I know that it means that perhaps we aim for personalization but how we do that - is in the hands of the techies - which means.... we will have to ask nicely and tread softly.

Perhaps bringing in the Facebook and social login's will make a difference as the more we know about each customer the more we can personalise the offer. But how much can you personalize the best price on a taxi in Manchester?  

Born or made? Entreprenurs. Discuss.

After a rather turbulent Christmas and New Year. I have been left asking myself about employment vs. entrepreneurship. Whether you really can be an "intrapreneur" and in truth, whether I have a mental problem or something wrong with me. The reason being is that I have left my rather stable world of employment to work as a consultant for a start up once again. This despite knowing the risks involved. 

And you know what..... I couldn't be happier. Well I would be happier if my last employer and I can see eye to eye on the subject of some money still owed to me - rather a large amount as it happens. 

It is this disagreement again and the fact they didn't seem to see it as a problem that prompted my leaving, not the team I left, not the ideas that we had, not the speed of progress made, not the changing of the world or the changing of the seasons. 

Yet, something deep inside me puzzled me about my leaving, so it was with interest that I read the below about entrepreneurship, as it might just be that I don't have a mental problem, it might just be a gene inside me, a gene, called the e gene.  

Recent research by Amway has revealed that, to become a successful entrepreneur, you must be in possession of the 'e-gene', which is categorised by six different personality traits as identified by Chris Coleridge, an innovation researcher at the London School of Economics. And you see - I have several of them - if not all of them.... to an extent. 

The six traits of entrepreneurship are: 

Difficult background - left on a doorstep when I was two, taken into two care homes, adopted by a loving family (of a different race and religion)

Minority/disadvantaged group - originally rather poor - mixed race - luckly adopted see above.

Disability - mild dyslexia (yes I couldn't spell that without spell check - why is that word so silly anyway!  I also wear glasses (very strong ones) and I am a bit odd socially (great on stage but not in groups.)

Risk-lover and optimist - I would say the latter rather than the former, but looking back on it - not starting a career till 36 and always running my own businesses from 16 probably says "risk" 

Independence and social distinction - fiercely so  to the extent it has become a disability (see above) and what else motivates a man to write a blog like this :)

The need for achievement and power- again former rather than the latter. (See above see above)

However, an important distinction it that - power is something - I care not one jot for - and am a firm believer that power simply corrupts - the less of it in the hands of men the better (and I do mean men here not men as mankind.) The more power to the people rather than to man made bureaucracies (and again I mean man made not woman made.) 

Coleridge argues that a combination of these six traits can be identified in all "successful" entrepreneurs. Which brings up the subject of success which creates another points. As many / most entrepreneurs are failures for a long time, some argue that it is that ability to be a failure in the eyes of the world and still love what you do, still continue, still work at it and become successful that is another characteristic (and even a necessary part of the process.)

But isn't this the same of all artists and creators? When looking into the "Over night success stories" from musicians to comedians you often see the magic 10 years and the irony of them being called over night successes.  However, back to Coleridge's e-gene traits. According to the research, Richard Branson has four of the traits – disability, risk-lover and optimist, independence and social distinction, and need for achievement/power, whilst Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, possesses three - difficult background, minority/disadvantaged group, and independence and social distinction.

"Having researched entrepreneurs' personalities and traits, most of the successful possess an effectual logic – an approach to solving a problem that starts not with the desired end but with the available means, limiting the risk of failure," he adds.

Which pretty much sums me up.

And for the record I have all six traits - which cannot be healthy. 

But not everyone agrees (which is good otherwise the world would be boring) as serial entrepreneur Jonathan Richards believes that an entrepreneurial mindset is the sum of all our experiences and it is not something that we are born with.

"An entrepreneur is created when an idea comes together with a person who is happy to balance creativity and management; understand, live with and manage risk; evangelise the idea in the face of negativity; and stay responsive and positive," he says.

However, if you see the six traits, less than half are you born with. 

Former Dragons' Den judge and founder of School for Startups Doug Richard also believes that nobody is ‘born’ an entrepreneur and that entrepreneurship can most definitely be taught.

But he would as he teaches it. And very well might I add. Sometimes with my help.

What Doug says is...

"If you give a group of people a violin, certain people will have a natural ability of course, but that becomes irrelevant if everybody is given a chance to learn and practice. We all need to do exactly that in whatever we choose to do professionally or otherwise. Nobody can claim to be born an entrepreneur, and nobody wakes up one day with a successful business and brand. Hard work, mistakes and a determined attitude combined with the right support at the right time are the not-so-magic formula."

After reading the Outliners book and others it would seem that 10,000 hours should do the trick and then everyone would be entrepreneurs. The problem with this thinking is that some personality types, many of whom I have met now as I have had a job, simply wouldn't want to ever become a entrepreneur.

Perhaps entrepreneurship it is like greatness. Some are born great, some make themselves great and some lucky ones through clever marketing and PR have greatness thrust upon them! :)

Either way it is with the spirit of an entrepreneur I create my consultancy contract for working with a geo location mobile software specialist start up called Justaxi.  They have a great technology, an eager investment team, some real pedigree in entrepreneurship on the board, a great culture and new team (lead by me) and an amazing £1 billion market to aim at.

I am going to do their marketing and business development, bringing in social and mobile, maybe even a bit of augmented reality, definitely some gamification for the app experience and loads of digital guerrilla marketing ... as a consultant at first.... but you never know I might let them employ me :) 

Today it was really interesting to read something about branding. Which made me think...

I used to do workshops on branding. And our branding back here at The Apprentice Academy is starting to get standardized - something I have been gently implementing for a couple of months.  The change is coming... we will get there. 

So today it was really interesting to read something about branding. Which made me think...

From the Linchpin Academy (like the name...) 

There is an  edited down a brilliant video that talks about BRAND.  

You will find the video here.

It is really well worth a watch. 

This video talks about lots of global brands which obviously have taken a colossal amount of money, time and effort to build the brand equity to where it is now.   

Couple of keys things to take away from the video were:

• Brand is an expectation you set and it's not something you own! 
• Expectation is set through a prospect's experience.
• Declaration of a promise or value is nothing more than words.  (saying you deliver great customer service isn't the same as experiencing great customer service)
• You have to pay to build a brand. You either pay with money or time. There are no shortcuts.

All the above is soooo true. 

Your customer MUST experience something which aligns with your story and your brand promise for it to become something they will tell people about. 

And you only have three things in life - money. time and energy. There are no shortcuts - what you pay with one you save with the other. 

There are no shortcuts to establishing a brand especially when you are in an established industry like we are at The Apprentice Academy. 

Apprenticeships are as old as the hills. But new modern apprenticeships like our digital and social media apprenticeships are brand new. But they do not make a brand. They start it.

What are 2 key factors driving the social web in 2013?

Many moons ago i said that there would be three things pushing social along.

1. Being mobile. Hmm - yep that one was spot on.

2. Being photos - I think Instagram and the numbers behind vine etc tells that story.

3. Being location - this is yet to come.

According to a GlobalWebIndex study it is:

1. Mobile – with the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone increasing by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years.
2. Older users adoption – On Twitter the 55-64 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic with 79% growth rate since 2012. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google+’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively.

These 2 key factors are keeping the social web bubbling along. So maybe the reason your grandparents aren’t turning up to that dinner party is that they have now discovered Facebook and Twitter!

So let’s look at some of the facts, figures and statistics for the major social networks.

Facebook

Facebook continues to grow and work out how to make money from its ads and mobile users.

Here are the latest facts and figures from its earnings call for the first quarter of 2013

• Daily active users have reached 665 million
• Monthly active users have passed 1.1 billion for the first time
• 751 million mobile users access Facebook every month
• Mobile only active users total 189 million
• Mobile now generates 30% of its ad revenue up from 23% at the end of 2012

Twitter

Twitter is the fastest growing social network in the world by active users according to a GlobalWebIndex Study.

So how does that translate into hard numbers?

• 44% growth from  June 2012 to March 2013
• 288 million monthly active users
• That means that 21% of the world’s internet population are using Twitter every month
• Over 500 million registered accounts
• Twitter’s fastest growing age demographic is 55 to 64 year olds, registering an increase in active users of 79%

YouTube

When you wanted to watch a video it used to be VCR, then it became a  DVD player, then we moved onto cable networks and now it is YouTube.

These numbers from YouTube’s own blog put some perspective on it penetration into our culture and time.

• 1 billion unique monthly visitors
• 6 billion hours of videos are watched every month
• This means that 50% more hours of video are watched in March 2013 compared to last August when it was 4 billion hours a month and last May when it was 3 billion.
• YouTube reaches more U.S. adults ages 18-34 than any cable network

Google+

Google+ is making an impact on the social media universe and is now the second largest social network.

What are some of the numbers on Google’s social network built to protect it from Facebook’s growth and data capture to ensure it remains relevant?

It is Google’s social layer that enhances it’s other online assets.

• 359 million monthly active users according to a GlobalWebIndex study
• Its active users base grew by 33% from June 2012 through to March 2013

LinkedIn

The largest professional business network on the planet continues to grow but not at the pace of Twitter or Google+

Here are some numbers from Visual.ly.

• Over 200 million users
• 2 new users join it every second
• 64% of users are outside the USA

 All of this is great stuff. 

But what really now interests me is WHO - not what - but WHO - who is going to do all this clever social things for companies? 

I truly believe that one way is to arm the next generation with training, with real know how, with business needed skills so we can all join this social revolution :) 

Which is why I started working with The Apprentice Academy - as they, like me, know that training young people to be apprentices - in established companies will be better way forward for the economy in the UK, than a couple of new companies starting up. 

Not enough pennies in Britain - maybe there is....

Malcolm Evans in his excellent blog - Corporate Finance North West - has made a great point. And so I have popped it below.He was chatted about:

"the seemingly endless overhang of investment funds in the region – VC, PE, mezzanine, banks saying they want to lend, the RGF, the BGF……goodness you’d think that potential growth companies could gorge themselves in a region flowing in milk and honey. (Not something we have seen at goAugmented - the independent Augmented reality development company I have been working with.)

Somehow, through, all this seems to work like the amusement arcade penny falls – money accumulates and accumulates but precious little of it ever seems to tumble out.

And I am absolutely convinced about what is going on – it is a situation which has long been evident but which has been radically heightened post-Credit Crunch.

Just about all of the tides of capital are looking to drip feed super-performance. By this I mean that they will only cherry pick the prospect of exceptional returns over relatively short periods. That disqualifies the vast majority of the business world, which I categorise as performance. I would estimate that some 2% of the SME market comprises super-performance and 98% performance.

Just as debt is an inappropriate funding vehicle for financing the development effort of a pre-revenue digital startup, so venture capital will also likely be inappropriate for replacing plant within a long-established componetry supplier embedded deeply within multi-national supply chains.

There are many such subtleties – and, indeed, thousands of funding applications out there that are sheer rubbish! But the trend is that just about everything sub the bottom end of super-performance, or at least the very top end of performance, is too often no longer getting a look-in.

We have become very poor capitalists – possibly the worst at any time since the Industrial Revolution. State initiatives tend to end up mired in the “mushy middle” of public sector bodies which appear more and more to be creeping back to swallow up cash, if, for that matter, many of them actually went away in the first place.

The banks have decidedly – and often by their own admission – undergone a revised risk profiling. Whilst the question used to be “is this business and this person capable of repaying this loan”, lending assessment has now entered the realms of super-performance. Just being good enough in business to service loans is no longer deemed good enough. But performance is enough – it is what makes the economy go round. The banks don’t do this very much anymore – we need to find ways in which performance is validated with appropriate investment.

We need new funding mechanisms – and we need to be precise, practical and determined about it. There was talk today about regional business investment banks.

That’s great – but we will need to be extremely vigilant and determined lest all the investment money continues just to feed the penny falls operators."

Myself I am wondering if Malcolm has every heard of the likes of USA crowdfunding portal Kickstarter which seems to be doing rather well.

It is interesting what this all might mean for finance. As Fred Wilson from America rightly points out here... in Gigacom.

And I think it is this crowdfunding route I am going to go down with for my next venture in mobile marketing - Massmob - a platform for mobile game developers for the business to business market place.

The question is.... is it a good idea?

What's the difference between the floor and the ceiling: is it just where you stand?

This is all to do with how much you should / could get paid by being a freelance consultant - and it's a very important question for those professionals looking to start their own business.

There are two methods for assessing your fair billing rate, and both are important, the floor and the ceiling.

This is an excellent post by Christopher S Penn - which is so good I decided to copy it pretty much word for word.

The Floor

Here’s how to judge your minimum billing rate. This is the rate you must charge in order for you to justify your time and the project you’re working on. First, you need to know what your mandatory annual income is, the money you must earn in order to be able to survive and reasonably thrive. As a consultant, there’s a good chance you will be a 1099 consultant as well, so you’ll need to budget between 30-50% extra for health insurance, self employment tax, etc.

For example, let’s say you have $40,000 in actual expenses for the year, including rent, food, etc. Your IRS tax bracket is 25%, so tack on an additional $10K for federal taxes and $5K for state and local taxes. Health insurance for a small business owner varies wildly from state to state, but call it $10K to be safe. You’re now at $65,000.

Once you have your mandatory annual income, divide that by 2,080, the number of work hours in a year. (52 weeks x 40 hours a week). That’s your effective hourly In this example, your required hourly rate is $31.25/hour.

Now here’s the part almost every consultant I’ve ever talked to gets wrong. They assume 100% utilization, meaning every hour they’re clocked into work, they’re doing billable work. That’s far, far, far from the truth. The reality is that consultants are lucky to get 2/3 utilization, and a better, safer estimate is 50% utilization. The other 50% of your time will be spent building your business. Thus, apply the appropriate multiplier based on what you think or know your utilization rate to be. If you’re just getting started out, assume 50% to start. That would mean your billable hourly rate would be $62.50/hour. That’s the floor.

Don’t accept any project under that rate unless there’s some massive leverage that comes with the project, like the opportunity to move up the food chain somehow. If you’re billing a project with a “Set Rate”, decide how many hours it will take you to accomplish it, multiply times your hourly rate, and be sure to specify in your contract that the project is restricted to X hours, with additional hourly charges for every hour after that point.

This is something that I wish I had read earlier in my career after making a series of terribly costly learning errors in pricing models i.e. we didn't get paid enough.


The Ceiling

The ceiling is where you make the big money, but it’s much harder to judge, much harder to assess without a lot of experience. The ceiling fundamentally is based on how much your work is worth to your client. For example, let’s say you’ve been asked to speak at a conference and you’re a popular speaker. You know that you can put 50 butts in seats just by telling your fan base that you’ll be there. You know that the conference is charging $495 per ticket. Effectively, your value to the conference is $495 x 50, or $24,750. If you don’t speak, the conference may or may not fill those seats.

It’s reasonable, therefore, to ask for a percentage of that ticket fee as your pay. How much should you ask for? Some conferences are offering up to 50% of the ticket price as a commission in their affiliate programs (Jason Keath’s SocialFresh is one such excellent event), so it’s reasonable to ask for that as your fee outright or in an affiliate program if you’ve got a great audience/community.

Now think about the contrast there. If you charged your floor rate of $62.50/hour, even if you billed for an entire day for the conference, you’d only make $500 at floor rate. If you got 50% of ticket under your affiliate program (assuming 50 seats at $495/seat), you’d get $12,375. That’s a really, really gigantic difference, and it’s why you should look to finding your ceiling as quickly as possible.

In order to develop a fair ceiling rate, you have to know and understand deeply the industries and companies you’re serving so that you know the economic value of the work you’re providing. As another example, say you know a particular method for looking at Google Analytics, a way that can instantly increase the ROI of a company by 30%. If you know the company’s industry and know that 30% more in their digital marketing ROI is worth X, you can justify charging a percentage of X and explaining how your pricing works.

A third example might be a graphic designer whose work increases website conversion from 2% to 5%. What does a 3% increase in conversion mean? Well, if the designer understands the companies he works with, he or she can say, “you’ll earn more with my design because my methods improve conversion from 2% to 5%, and that’s worth X to your company in additional revenue, thus my fee is a percentage of X’s value over the first year my design will be in operation as long as my design hits 5% conversion. After that first year, 100% of the increased value will be profit to you“.

That’s the power of ceiling pricing – it goes far beyond day labor rates because you know what your work is worth, and once you explain that to your clients, chances are they’ll be okay with it. Why? Because it demonstrates your understanding of their business and the value you are providing, and you have a performance target built in. If your client reaches 5% website conversion, you get paid a large fee because you created the value they were seeking.

Which is where Great Marketing Works is now heading - a new business model based on understanding the client's business not just understanding the client's industry or position.

We will therefore be doing a lot less work with small businesses and a lot more with established ones that understand the ROI from what we do - and have the commercial cashflow to instantly benefit from it.

Conclusion

Your goal in doing any kind of consulting is to get to your ceiling rate as soon as practical, while never violating the floor rate. That means developing a strong, deep understanding of the value of your work to your clients and moving away from the floor where you’re just another hired hand whose work quality may or may not impact their business.

It also means that you have to think about your personal brand a lot more than perhaps you did before... which is what I think I will blog about next week... Which all links in to our linkedin training... but that's another story...

I just returned from SAScon. And met with some very cool and clever people.

I just returned from SAScon. And met with some very cool and clever people (and some fools too)

The below are comments from a former rather than latter i.e. a clever person - called Barry Adams who is the senior internet marketer for search at Pierce Communications in Belfast.

When he’s not helping his clients achieve online world domination, he writes blogs for State of Search and Search News Central as well as the occassional rant on his own blog www.BarryAdams.co.uk

Here are his SAScon Six…

Don’t follow hypes

Whenever you read about the latest app, new social website, or exciting new technology to hit the internet, always put things in perspective before you eagerly jump on the bandwagon.

Put your client first

The first thing you should be contemplating whenever you want to use a new channel or tactic is ‘what’s in it for the client’? Never do something just for the sake of doing it, even if it’s the hip & trendy thing to do.

Distrust industry ‘thought leaders’

The people who are most famous in any industry – especially SEO and social – are usually the ones that have a vested interest in being and staying famous. That means they usually have something to sell. Keep their commercial interests in mind whenever you read expert advice, and you’ll soon be able to spot the gaps in their logic.

Try stuff out

Don’t just use tried & tested methods. Don’t stick to ‘best practices’ because someone else told you to. Try stuff out – preferably on test sites rather than client properties – and see for yourself what works and what doesn’t.

Break the mould

Following the rules religiously is rarely the most effective method for achieving success. The biggest winners are those that are willing to do things differently.

Get drunk

Or, more specifically, get industry veterans drunk. Catch them at a post-conference social event and buy them a few beers. Chances are they’ll share interesting tidbits with you that would otherwise never be shared. ;)