1. Develop a personal brand,
2. Learn the language of early stage finance,
3. Invent a bionic product or service,
4. The five W’s (and one H) of sales,
5. Recruiting away your weaknesses – We all have strengths and weaknesses; not everyone is as perfect as Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. However, we don’t have to wallow in our own filth just because we lack the genius of Sergei Brin or the fluid sales skills of Bill Clinton…we can simply hire, recruit or partner away our problems!! This starts with recognizing your limitations, understanding the basic roles that every company requires (even startups), and then being a strong enough person to realize that strength comes from resolving problems and not by ignoring them or pretending these weaknesses do not exist. If you can’t sell…you can’t sell. If you stink at finances…admit it and move on. A few key words: Partnerships -be careful and lay it all out early. Hiring – be careful and lay it all out early. Outsourcing – be careful and lay it all out early.
6. Feed the beast – Marketing & branding. Not yourself, but your company’s products and / or services. Pick a niche, and announce to the world your amazing expertise and the gifts that you bring to humanity through your new venture. Ideally, this is a well crafted, well thought through game plan for expanding the world’s knowledge of your company. Marketing is the support system for sales. Your carefully branded message, supported by well developed marketing efforts feeds your sales staff, who in turn feed the company. One final note about marketing and branding: the web has introduced a new paradigm to this venue, currently being ignored by many ad agencies and pr firms. The web eliminates, in many cases, the idea of the “integrity of the media”…but the social web reverses that and empowers the people’s message. That means they are definitely going to talk about you online, and that will be perceived by many as “truth”…might as well join in and try to guide or manage the message.
7. The secret to managing people - Many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent (and earned) every year as business owners and managers try to figure out that elusive target of managing others to efficient and profitable performance. Most of these otherwise fantastic books and speakers miss the key point of management…leading by example. Leverage, through technology, capital or people is the easiest way to insure your business can grow or at least sustain as you sip Bahama-Mamas on the beach. You will never be able to leverage people if you do not know how to recruit, train, motivate and lead them (i.e. manage away mediocrity). Truth is…they tire of the speeches, the harassment and the “motivational” ass-kicking. What they really want to know is…WWJD…What Would Jefe Do? Do you come in late and expect your people early? Do you refuse to sell, service, or dig into details? Do you set the right example…nearly all of the time? If you don’t, you should expect them to follow suit. They will do half of what you do when they are duplicating positives and 300% your efforts when duplicating negatives (because that is usually more fun). You better get GOOD at managing others, managing managers, and managing yourself. BTW – when managing others, consider Machiavelli’s book The Prince, which can be summed up with, ‘It is best if one is both loved and feared. Given the difficulty of uniting both in one person, one ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he at least avoids hatred.’
8. Learning to snorkel – Last year, I snorkeled for the first time on a trip to Belize (stayed at Francis Ford Coppola’s Turtle Inn…awesome). OK Boo-Boo, I may be a little slower than the average bear…because it took me a while to figure out that I had to breathe through this tiny little apparatus, and if I went nuts wearing myself out…the hole never got any bigger for me to suck oxygen through. I had to keep it unobstructed and had to bring it above water every now and then. Cash flow to your business is an awful lot oxygen to a slightly overweight man ten feet under the water…you need it to survive and you better pay close attention to its availability. Recently a restaurant opened close to my office. It was busy, had decent food, and looked like it was going to be successful…then one day it closed down with no notice. Happens every single day, probably the most common destroyer of businesses (especially new businesses)…the owner ran out of money. Some businesses eat money faster as they grow more and more successful. My company, Pop Labs, has a similar financial model. Our cost to provide service is much higher during the first 3-6 months than the cash flow brought in by a new client. Thus, our success eats more cash than the business spins off on new clientele; the more successful we are, the more cash we need. You MUST manage cash flow daily; insure you have enough for your payroll, client services, key vendors, etc. Guess who gets paid last? You. Isn’t being the owner awesome!!

Just two more to go…nine (9) and ten (10) are about your goals and obligations. Leadership ain’t easy, nor is ownership; but when done right…it generates safety and security beyond the simple appearance of a “good job” or good benefits. If you are serious about starting a business…get ready to fight, every day of your life, for a while…because, as Tom Hank’s character said in A League of their Own, “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”

What does this mean, in the overall world of Internet advertising?…and what does this mean to Webxites current model? It probably isnt a threat and, while exciting to read about, it wont ever likely be a serious offer from Google or Yahoo for the typical small to mid sized business owner.

Why? Here is the bottom-line. Lets say we decided to share in the risk with a customerwe absorbed the click through costs, and the web development expenses, and only charged them for the actual action / conversion. Whats wrong with that pretty little picture?

What if the business owner was simply no-good at running their businessor at converting qualified leads. The company paying for the ads would suffer unduly from their incompetence. Simple things such as staffing the phones, their overall pricing model, quality of the product / service being offered, etcall add up to weaknesses in the overall revenue model BUT the business owner is not the one paying the price for the cost of marketing and, thus, is not suffering from poor decisions.

Every economic decision (business or personal) should be weighed mentally against a simple equation: When you take COSTS and factor in the RISKS, is the desired end amount (upside / ROI) significantly greater than the investment, such that one is willing to incur the risk of loss in order to have the possible upside / ROI (return on investment).

For example, when analyzing a bet in a casino, you take risks and possible ROI and consider whether it is worth doing or not. On a roulette table, you can bet $1 on a single number and, if you when, you get $64 back. A nice returnbut what are the odds of winning? Slimvery slim. Less than 3% likelihood of hitting your number. In blackjack, it is closer to a 45/55 likelihood of working and, thus, they only pay you 1:1. Your risk has to be weighted by your possible ROI. (note: dont drink and gamble thats where they get ya!)

In businessif someone (Google or Webxites) decided to shoulder the risksthey would want a much higher possible ROI. In order to offset the likelihood of continual losses for a time. The only way, either Google or Yahoo or Webxites would shoulder this burden is (a) if they knew the business owner could sustain the amount of prospects sent their way, (b) if they knew the business owner was capable of handling conversions (i.e. customer service / sales staff), (c) if they knew the business owners product / service was priced appropriately to attract conversions, (d) if they knew the business owner could pay the likely increased transaction costs (i.e. not $3 a click, but $200 a conversion or $20 a call for example), and at the end of the day(e) if they knew the risks were worth taking.

Why PP-Action / PP-Call wont be a valid offer to the small business communitytoo much risk to Google, Yahoo, or Webxitestoo much risk, not enough ROI. If the client were Dell Computers, who could show proof of conversionsno problem (for a shared upside anyone would do that)but for a small business owner, with an unproven business, and a world of unknownswont likely ever happen.

Sowhat is all this hype of pay-per-action about? Content network and fraud protection. If you read in detail, you will see that Google is ONLY beta testing PP-Action on their content network. Meaning they will only allow PPA ads to be run on someone else’s web site. This is to encourage advertisers to consider Google’s content network as a viable option and to eliminate or reduce the risk of click fraud on those same content network sites. In other wordsGoogle will let the content publisher take the riskin order to drive more ads to them (by eliminating or reducing the possibility of click fraud from the content site owner), but they will not do it on their own site, or on the search network sites (AOL, other search engines, etc).

What about the PP-Call hype we’ve read about? Hype. There are a number of companies that are, functionally, shouldering the risk of PP-Call. Either technology providers who are reducing the overhead risks and making huge ROIs ($10 a call +) OR vertically focused entities who know so much about the industry they are willing to shoulder the risk for specified SELECT clients. For example, a college admissions company that will charge the college only for successful applications; they run the SEO / SEM campaign and then sell the colleges the apps at highly marked up rates. Same model, functionally, for Service Magic.

At the end of the daythe business owner will ALWAYS have to pay for their marketing expenses. These are all simply economic games to splice the up-front costs out or to share the burden of the up-front costs with the business owner.but just as in Vegasthe bigger the gamble / risk the higher the required pay out / ROI. Anyone sharing the risk with the business is going to do so ONLY if they know the business, the industry, the target marketing, the conversion numbers and the ROIand then they will exploit their financing of the marketing expenses such that the business owner pays MORE per lead in that environment than in any other environment.

That is the ONLY way in which the PP-Action model will ever workwhen the person burdening the risks makes a higher ROIwhich means lower profits to the business owner.

Will Webxites ever offer something like this? Maybe, if we can get an inordinate return, we know the industry and we know the business owner is efficient at converting prospects. A lot of . For nowit is just too risky. This is just another example if how rising click-through costs will create industry fragmentation of pricing models, advertising venues, and overall service offerings (local, yellow page, shopping, vertical portals, etc.), which simply continues to justify Webxites’ flat rate client-focused Best of Breed / Six Sigma service model.

Why?

Because I was confused, because I was busy, because I didn’t trust anyone else to advise or help me start the task.

It is not that I did not have anything to say. If you asked my staff, or the occasional client I interact with, most of them would tell you my emails and conversations are usually a bit too verbose. So…in reality…why did I take so long and what am I afraid of getting done here?

Possible answers for why I took so long:

• I am lazy
• I was not convinced that a blog would be of benefit
• I kept marking this a C1 priority on my handy-dandy Franklin Planner .
• I was scared of what this could do to me or my business and/or I was afraid of embracing the future.

• My thoughts might be exposed to the world
• I might be creating extra work for myself (and I’m already too busy)
• My comfy-cozy business world might change and I might not feel like I am in as much control as before.

So…why am I doing this now after two years?

• Duh, being dumb for the last two years does not mean I have to be dumb forever
• My fears have subsided and I can stand up and be the man my Mommy once ordered me to be
• I have built up a lot of well written, well thought out content that the world absolutely NEEDS in order to survive

Not sure which it might be…but I am ready to embark on a new journey that will force me to be in this century, will create new revenue for Pop Labs, and will educate the hordes of people dying to read my self-righteous teachings that somehow come magically from my own personal point of view.

Get ready world…here it comes!!