Author: remap_content_admin

The French saying l’esprit de l’escalier roughly translates to “staircase comeback”, in the case of a hostile exchange. It’s that sick burn you came up with – hours too late. Nice one.

You could also think of it as just a “staircase reply” if the interaction was good or neutral in tone.  “Damn, I had a much better answer to that question”, you say, after it’s too late. I rarely have a long meeting without at least one of these.

I wrote a long article that gave a better answer to the question, “what do you mean by strategy – what is that in this context?”  I had given an unprepared, bad answer in real-time during a large work meeting. I told myself “This is what I should have said” enough times that I finally decided to write it down. That writing process diluted my thoughts on strategy into a satisfying, one-sentence definition that I can give any time anywhere. It may be totally wrong but at least I don’t rattle on incoherently.

I have thousands of amazing staircase comebacks; some of them just keep getting better over the years (:

You must have a few? I hope so. I think you should accumulate les esprits des escaliers with no shame. It means you care about the quality of your interactions.

But instead of muttering them to yourself or a friend, get them out of your head and onto a page. Not only that – try publishing that page on the Internet, on your business website. 

Next time around, you’ll be much more clear.

Have a great weekend ahead,
Rowan

Yesterday, I wrote about business and marketing gurus foisting complexity on us. Here’s one idea foisted 1000 times a day:

You have to “find your passion” in life.

(Other words we swap into this phrase – seek, follow, bliss, calling, vocation.)

When people say they have found their passion or vocation, whatever that means, they seem happy. And that makes me happy.

I suspect it means they tend to get into a “flow state” on most days. That is, they get deep into whatever they’re up to on that day.

*  *   *

Author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about Hobbies, Jobs, Careers, and Vocation. It’s worth watching.

She’s right that you don’t have to love your job – but that we all need one.

Her take on hobbies is spot on. She’s also right that if you hate your career,  take that career and shove it.

And her “find your passion” concept of a vocation fascinates me. I think she found her flow state early and often. Maybe that’s why she has written so many compelling books. She bursts with positive energy, helpful ideas, artful output.

But.

But don’t “find your passion”. 

Here’s an alternative: find, cultivate, and fiercely defend, your flow state.

Maybe this is semantics and these are two ways of describing the same thing.

But “finding your passion in life” feels a hell of a lot harder and more stressful than finding a flow state. 

The latter is a commitment to today, not to thousands of future days. And while that commitment part is not easy, it’s doable. Once you get into the zone, the flywheel of energized focus spins up and ensnares you for the day – and for the next day as well. And on and on.

The concept may sound woo woo. New age types do love it. But it’s not woo woo; it’s an accepted psychological phenomenon. It comes from psychologist and prolific author Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. He describes it in Flow as a mental state in which: 

people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

No wonder some want unretirement.

It’s a mysteriously pleasing state of immersion in a specific activity. It lets you find contentment in even menial labor, such as washing dishes. My hope is that it offers a reprieve to the billions of humans forced to toil in robotic repetitiveness. Especially to the segment thereof who must be creative geniuses by nature.

It also reduces stress and anxiety by taking time and other pressures away from your mind.

But it’s important for a knowledge workers such as you in a special way. As Csikszentmihalyi explores in Creativity, a flow state can enable creative ideation.

Thus, it makes you more of an expert by letting you incorporate new ideas into your work. Special bonus: finding a flow state can help free you from relying on brainstorming meetings (ugh) to get new ideas. The two approaches complement one another.

But careful not to slip out of the flow and into merely getting stuff done “on cruise control”.

Productive Rhythm vs Creative Flow

Being in a creative flow state isn’t about mindlessness, randomness, or silliness. Nor is it a general prescription for happiness which Csikszentmihalyi views as a  personalized undertaking:

happiness is, in fact, a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person

Similarly, a creative flow state must be cultivated and protected. How? By deliberately challenging yourself intellectually. By doing something that’s mentally hard almost every day. 

Compare this to the “productive rhythm” state of control, where your skills outweigh the challenges.

As with a creative flow state, Csikszentmihalyi describes both this “productivity rhythm” state as a feeling of control over your mind.

Here you’re content and efficient – but you don’t exploit your creativity. This is where you expertly “copy-paste” your thoughts and your work, maybe for hours.  The simple coding task. The drying of the dishes at warp speed. The 37-holiday cards mailed out with efficiency. When you’re done you say, “Wow, I knocked that out in two-and-a-half hours?!”.

If you find yourself saying that about your work too often, there’s a problem. For many people, productivity rhythms don’t sustain. But the bigger problem is that you’re not ideating, you’re not building up expertise, you’re not cultivating convictions.

Not to mention you’re probably not creating valuable assets for your business.

How to level up into a flow state? Challenge yourself. With research, mental exploration, the feedback of others, etc.

James Webb Young offers a glimpse of what the mental exploration part of the flow state can look like:

What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and you feel them, as it were, with the tentacles of the minds. You take one fact, and turn it this way and that, look at is in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit.

To activate your tentacles of the mind, you must attempt something difficult:

• Scripting a webinar
• Writing an article
• Designing a proposal
• Creating your best case study yet

Which are the happy (and maybe lucrative) byproducts of entering deep into your flow-state, not the end goal. The end goal is the state of mind itself.

Awkward question: what’s your passion in life?

Better question: what activities put you into your flow state?

– Rowan

On Sunday, I watched Curb Your Enthusiasm like it was Saturday (till late). On Monday, more of the same. On Tuesday, I have foisting stuck in my head.

Here’s why. There’s a Curb’ episode where Jimmy Kimmel has foisted his hapless assistant onto the show’s anti-protagonist, Larry David. Larry realizes this post-foist. Larry then re-foists the assistant onto his arch-nemesis on the show, Susie, who is also his best friend’s wife. 

The American Heritage Dictionary has a good definition of foist: “To impose (something or someone unwanted) upon another by coercion or trickery.”

“Trickery” being the operative word. That’s why you often don’t realize you’ve been foisted until it’s too late. And you’re 2 months and $30k into a complex CRM migration.

Do you know what else gets foisted? 

Complexity.

Marketing and business gurus foist complexity by insisting, for example, that:

1. You need an “omnichannel” marketing strategy. Nope. We used to do omnichannel marketing on 7-figure advertising and marketing budgets when I was at Blackbaud. The idea is that you synchronize marketing and advertising communications to the same person over a long period of time. Ad there, email here, print mailer over there – all coordinated.

It’s never really worked. Frankly, I think it’s BS even for most large brands. With the exception of warm advertising (retargeted display ads) to visitors of your very important web pages, it’s probably not for you. Create your content, run your ads, build your funnels – and If the same person sees the same message, content, idea twice, so what?

2. There’s a single “specialization decision”. No. There’s no one-time specialization decision that you need to make.  As you ride through life you should make multiple positioning decisions. It’s a constant process and a state of mind, so don’t get stressed out if you don’t land on a specific one – just do something that works. And once you do make one – congratulations, now start imagining the next one. Our world is changing too fast to set it and forget it.

3. Long, detailed strategic marketing plans are cool. Bwoah, Nein. Look, you can create and assign all the marketing tasks you want in your project management tool. That’s fine and may be necessary. But the strategic marketing plan, where your entire strategy is expressed, doesn’t need to be longer than one page. There’s at least one book about this. There’s also a “canvas” about this. I have created my own “1-page Strategic Marketing Plan” canvas based on what niche B2B expertise firms need to prioritize. 

(Other things that can be just one-page: proposals for services projects, book outlines, case studies, and resumes).

4. You need a CRM. Nah. You might want a CRM. You might like using a CRM. But that’s probably because of your personality-type, not your business need. Like taking on a new employee, don’t get involved with a CRM until you have to. Notion and Airtable have plenty of lightweight CRMs for you to use in the meantime.

5. You have to learn value-pricing. (Or as Alan Weiss put it in his book, Value-based Fees). Not really, no. This means you charge based on a percentage of the total value of the project to your client. You’ll want to learn this if you want to get rich as a consultant, yes. But you can do just fine by focusing on fixed-fee pricing, as discussed in the prior episode. As long as you learn and practice a bunch of other things about pricing. Value pricing an interesting way to view the world and a valuable skill once you have 10-20 years of experience and expertise. But you don’t have to learn it, especially when you are starting out.

Bonus. You must “find your passion”. Not so sure about this.  I think what matters more is the daily work of finding your flow – more on this tomorrow. (If you have any ideas on this in the meantime, hit reply and let me know!)

In sum: keep it simple, keep it short, and don’t get foisted (:

Rowan

 

 

I had a lawn care business quote me $1400 for a job later completed for $250. And completed by a much nicer person. So nice we actually hugged. Helpful context: he was a hippie. More helpful context: this was for a property that had been listed for sale.

So what was the non-hugging lawn care-shark thinking, with his outrageous quote? Well, this is what he said:

“Look, this is an investment in the sale price of your home. You’re going to get this much more if you have the work professionally done.”

At worst, he was preying on my ignorance as a consumer.

At best, he was value pricing – a ridiculous tack given the alternatives to his lawn care business.

I admired his technique. I even negotiated with him for the hell of it. 

But the whole exchange illustrated how ridiculous and narrow-minded on-the-fly value-pricing can be.

One problem is that it usually presumes the thing you do is more valuable than what the others do on the same project. What about the other contractors working on my house?

Imagine a company that wants to expand its headquarters. They hire 12 different kinds of businesses:

• real estate lenders
• surveyors
• architects
• foundation/cement layers
• masons
• electricians
• plumbers
• framers
• finish carpenters
• roofers
• interior designers

Can each of the above businesses value-price their work? At 10% to 50% of the total value of the project? Does any single contributing company account for even close to 10% of the total value?

Perhaps the architect can make the case; sometimes they do. But that depends less on the value she actually creates than on three other phenomena:

1. Her differentiating reputation in the market.
2. Her selling skills: real-time negotiating, pricing, and emoting
3. The perception that her work creates more value than the others

Part of value pricing is actively downplaying the value of the contributions of others. 

This happens with large web and app software projects – for a six or seven-figure project, how do you ascribe value to one type of contributor over another? Should one software development firm get 20% of the project value and the designer $90/hour (0.2% of the project value)? Or another way around?

Who-gets-paid-what can come down to not just reputation, perception, and soft selling skills. It can come down to, “I know what I’m talking about; they don’t”. (This usually happens because tend to believe it).

Another approach: price in pre-fixed fees. Make productized services and price them preemptively on your website.

If the non-hugging lawn care guy had a printed out a fixed price of $600 describing the work I needed, I might have gone for it – even though it was about twice what I thought I’d been willing to pay.

Selling fixed-price products also requires reputation-building, soft-selling skills, and shaping the perceptions of your value and that of others in the ecosystem.

Just not as much.

One of my favorite hummus brands – Sabra – constantly asks me, “how much will you pay for a container of hummus?” It uses dynamic price-testing, varying the price between $2.99 and $7.49, for the exact same thing. Tricky.

My reactions look kinda like this:

$2.99 – What great deal!! Is it mispriced? Buying now
$3.49 – That seems like a good deal, it’s worth it – I’ll buy it
$5.49 – Hmm, that seems a little high. I might not buy it
$7.49 – Rip off. I’d NEVER pay that, come on

So I’m guessing Sabra thinks its hummus is worth about $4 to $4.50 to me.

Part of me thinks – I could buy all the ingredients for this in this same store. So what am I paying for? I’m really paying for a service with a bow on it – for sitting down and blending it all together. Oh, and having the culinary taste to do so in the right proportions and the right way. 

Prepared or semi-prepared food products are productized services.

Just like the ones that you make and sell in the form of consultative expertise – all wrapped in a neat bow, ie packaging. That bow consists of a well-designed and informative product page with self-service ecommerce purchasing and automated email follow-up). 

We know how hummus makers price productized services – how do we price ours? The same way – figuring out what buyers are willing to pay.

That’s why the productized service pricing calculator gives that “What Will They Pay?” factor more weight than the answer to, “What would you charge for this in custom services?”. The latter is so variable. You might be overcharging or undercharging based on your reputation, your lead flow, your selling and custom pricing skills, and your skill at delivery.

But researching (even in your own imagination or from memory) is the best approach.

This similar to the approach you intuitively use when billing at an hourly rate – you try out different rates and see what sticks.

An easy way to do this is to talk to a former client who will give you 15 minutes of their time and keep asking them prices until you hear some variation of:

(1) What great deal!! Is it mispriced? Buying now
(2) That seems like a good deal, it’s worth it – I’ll buy it
(3) Hmm, that seems a little high but I might buy it
(4) Rip off. I’d NEVER pay that, come on

These questions come out of research by ProfitWell, which aggregates pricing and churn data from thousands of subscription SaaS and DtC products.

Profitwell found that the most profitable price (factoring in total, long-term conversion, and total, long-term churn) sits about 30% of the way between, “seems like a good deal” and “seems a little too high”.

You might find the same.

–Rowan

 

In a recent episode of Akimbo, Seth Godin posits that “he” might not be real. He/it might actually be an AI-generated robot podcast host, author, and newsletter publisher. 

I have a client whose software generates reports that aren’t “real” either. As in not written by a real human. They’re written through “natural-language” generation (NLG). His NLG packages dry data into paragraphs that look like they are written by a human. The intent isn’t to fool anyone; in fact, my client discloses to his customers the role of NLG in their reports. He just uses it because it makes the reports easier to read.

The SEO-faction of content marketing teaches us to write like this, too. We are supposed to game search engine algorithms using artificial writing and video production conventions, including:

• Artificially favoring (but not too much) “search keywords” that connect your content to searches performed by your potential audience
• Writing in one-sentence paragraphs to create a sense of build-up and make your content easier to scan, rather than read
• Over-using huge letters, bold letters, italicized letters, bullet-points – all to generally avoid a series of substantive paragraphs of plain text
• Over-using images of people’s faces, large, dramatic landscape images, and over-using images in general
• Setting artificial constraints on length. For example: 7 minutes for YouTube videos, 25 minutes for podcasts, 2000 words for blog posts

There’s an economic logic to these rules. YouTube recognizes that on average fewer people watch a 27-minute video than a 7-minute one. Google recognizes that people are more likely to share a 2,000-word blog post since it’s difficult to create one based entirely on fluffy thinking. Difficult but not impossible, that is. One can double the length of blog post with empty phrases.

But here’s the thing:

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.
–George Orwell

This has the effect of “plasticultura” tomato cultivation – looks like a tomato but tastes kind of like neutral cardboard.

But machines are competing hard with humans to produce cardboard content. Like 100’s of other viable, purchasable software products, Zyro CMS (similar to Wix or Squarespace) already offers AI text generation. Make a new page, title it, keyword it, and let it write your web copy the way the SEOs say to.

Or tries to.

I typed the first paragraph of this post into Zyro’s AI Content Generator as a “contextual prompt”. In response, the AI output continues some kind of narrative, at least, but not a very good one (AI-generated text in italics):

In a recent episode of Akimbo, “Seth Godin” reveals that he might not be real. He might be a robot podcast host, author, and newsletter publisher. On the show, you’ll hear from Seth’s daughter Sasha who is worried for her dad as she shares details about his unusual appearance which includes missing eyesight in one eye, two fractured vertebrae on his spine (with ligamentous damage) due to bone fractures involving bones near each other muscular weakness caused by neck/hip muscle injuries resulting when wearers were prone to falling out of chairs during their youth… 

While impressive (and also a bit hilarious) for recognizing that there was a narrative in play to build on, there are some major problems with this content:

1. The narrative is complete nonsense. The context I gave the AI had nothing to do with medical problems
2. The grammar is bad to the point of causing ambiguity or confusion
3. It contains empty, vague, over-used, or unnecessary phrasing: “On the show”, “you’ll hear from”, “as she shares”, etc.
4. There’s a lack of original writing style
5. It offers no valuable insight

My suspicion is that problems 1 and 2 can be corrected. Possibly problem 3 can be partially corrected, though that would seem to require a massive cognitive leap or increase in meaningful memory. In other words, maybe you can teach an AI never to use a cliche, an empty phrase, a redundancy, or a long word when a short one will do. But a Google-sized content index would be expensive.

And in any case, taking away the crap doesn’t give you an original writing style – problem 4. It just makes you write like a less annoying robot. 

And even if it did, so what? As a business owner, you don’t need to worry about “writing well”, let alone in an original style. Sure, that helps. But all you need to stand out from the millions of machine and human content-makers is to provide some valuable insight.

Un-robotically yours,
Rowan
 

PS. I understand that if the singularity happens, the concern expressed in this email may become moot. “What if AI treats us the way we treat less intelligent animals?”

How do you price productized services?

I made this calculator to answer that question: https://www.rowanprice.com/productized-services-calculator/

Happy pricing (:
-Rowan

Working Without Pants podcast. The name is a reference to location-independent digital entrepreneurs more so than Magic Mike types. The host is the founder of one of the small handful of B2B lead generation agencies I’ve recommended: LeadCookie.

(There are so many bridge-burningly awful lead gen agencies; make a note when you find a good one.)

On the episode, Why Selling Marketing Services Is Stupid, he talks about a new venture he’s established that’s based on commission pricing: BridgeTac. BTW, he also admits that this episode’s title is a bit clickbaity. Most of his revenue still comes through selling (productized) marketing services such as LeadCookie provides.

But he makes a really good point – is there an opportunity for essentially partnering with some of your clients? Not partnering as in claiming, we take a partnership approach in your website messaging; this is misleading. And not partnering as in defer-billing-till-funding-round, as some Silicon Valley marketing consultants do. 

Instead, Jake’s talking about actually sharing financial risk by getting paid a percentage as soon as a client deal closes. 

Nothing new here in the big, wide world. You’ve bought shoes sold on commission and people have probably done commission deals since pre-history. But it’s unusual for most niche, expertise-based businesses.

Here’s the downside, though:

• Wait a long time (think 6 month-ish) for deals to close
• Take the risk of deals not closing, ever
• Risk bad intentions – the client-partner not paying you because of their greed
• Risk good intention – the client-partner not paying because they misunderstand the terms of a complex deal
• do attribution work (the work of attributing what sales are attributable to whom)
• allocate your own resources against all of these risks, including the time it takes to structure the deals themselves

So choose carefully – as with any partnership.

Jake reveals that so far, these risk were worth 12.5% of revenue, at least for one client engagement. Total earnings for that deal nearly 10x’ed what he’d have made selling cash-pay marketing services, too.

Is this value-pricing? Not really – value pricing is getting paid according to the total value you create, which is not something you can constrain to a specific timeframe.

This is why value pricing might actually represent a larger de facto commission. It also relies on massive trust. It also only works for a certain kind of client.

Performance-pay partnerships like Jake’s work better for businesses focused on optimization, as opposed to transformation.

If that’s you, you might want to consider the “true partnership” model.

Best,
Rowan

 

Most of us should work on two businesses at minimum – the current business and the future business. And you can roughly divide your time fifty-fifty to address the needs of each.

Current business activities look like:

• Getting new clients for the kind of work you do now 
• Doing client work
• Delivering client work
• Proposals and contracting
• Bookkeeping and other operations processes
• Refining current products and services

Future business activities look a little different:

• Talking to new clients about the kind of work your future business does
• Designing future products and services
• Doing research on your market
• Designing and implementing growth strategies for the future
• Publishing/recording your thinking and insights 

Caution: if you’re spending 95% of your time on the current business, the future business will suffer.

You’ll notice that the two businesses have something in common: clients.

BTW, here’s the difference between the two – getting clients for the kind of work you do now looks more like sales or outreach marketing.

Whereas getting clients for the work you do tomorrow looks more like marketing, especially content marketing or inbound marketing.

But something else happens when you work on your future business – you create content about the work problems you used to have but have now mastered. You can even ask yourself, where are you helping a prior version of yourself solve a problem you used to have?

You know more about this than almost anyone. Among other things, this’ll make you a great team leader and a pretty good hiring manager too. 

Our right-now business pays the bills, but we need to find out if we do helpful work for three versions of ourselves: past, present, and future.

My best
Rowan

My conversation with subscriber Oliver become a very nice article.