Posts Tagged ‘Business’
The Future of Toll Booths
Business is being reshaped online, it has to, the very way of survival is change, it is however, doing a poor job of translating it to traditional business forms. What I call the OLD Business Model still needs to be looked after, but it also needs to be transformed and reshaped to adopt the online mentality if it’s to survive. No longer can we use the phrase, ” we’ve always done it this way”, if someone says it, they should be fired on the spot. It sounds harsh but, if that person has influence, the future of that business is and will be in jeopardy if they stay with that thinking.
Toll Booths are the mechanism for getting paid, online & off, it’s the way of the business world. These toll booths are being reshaped, they are becoming more & more invisible to the consumer. This seamless trend will continue to the point we may not know when we’ve actually paid for anything! The strategic alliances, the partnerships, and the stand-alones must make paying for goods & services effortless in order to make the experience positive. Not unlike the Apple example, iTunes has made buying music almost painless but not completely. You still have to download an application and you still have to have a valid account with a healthy balance in it before you can feel the benefit. Plus, it’s a closed system, you don’t get to touch it, feel it or make changes to it. Still, this toll booth is better than no start to the future of toll booths, and probably one of the best examples to date.
My son recently purchased eye glasses online, it was a great experience, and he saved money to boot! It was a simple three step process, choose your contacts & or designer frames, enter your prescription & customize your order, and then see the savings delivered to your door. It took him less than a week to get his new glasses, he put them on and they were perfect. The company is called Clearly Contacts, a Canadian company that is making it easy to buy glass & contacts, and they accept PayPal as a means of payment! In the future, we will have our eyes tested online so we don’t have to drive to the optometrist to get the prescription.
Soon there will be a secured cookie mechanism, a cert if you will, it will eliminate the actual payment click of the mouse step, it will be similar to the RFID chip. It will be a Secured Digital RFID Cookie that will handle the payment process for you. Of course, you will have to approve it, but as web browsers die, other technologies of viewing websites will make this process even easier.
The current build of toll booth is still too cumbersome, a link to PayPal or another means of making payment needs to be hidden from plain site, making the experience better. The current method makes you feel like you have been violated, or you’ve left the house unlocked, I need to feel things are well looked after, I don’t need to see it. The experience is everything for the user, much like Attention is to the seller. Attention is the new currency for anyone or any business selling products and services online. The problem is, getting that attention is going to get harder and harder, and it’s also going to be extremely difficult to keep that attention. One way of helping the cause, make paying for your products & services as easy as possible. Don’t ask users to fill out a LONG form, requesting name, address, phone numbers and so on, that will be the death of you. Find ways to make the toll booth invisible, and above all, an experience they can’t stop talking about in a positive way.
Where you put the toll booth matters, the experience users have using your site & toll booth will be the difference maker. The future of toll booths? Simple, hide them, embed them, make them work seamlessly online and you will have a winner. Better yet, you’ll get attention, and that means good things for you and your business.
We Need The Small Victories Too
Have you ever found yourself day dreaming, you see some people and they seem to have it all going for them, and they make everything look so easy. We all have people like that in our lives, we see the grass greener in those people, they’re luckier, they get all the breaks, and you don’t. Come on, admit it, you’ve done it, and you’ve probably done that your entire life! I know I have at times, and I’m 52 years old, and have been around a short bit, which means I have probably thought it a million times over the course of my life. There’s a problem with that kind of self talk, many problems actually, far too many and they are far too deep.
Negative self-talk takes us to a place where fear can get a firm grip on us, it can immobilize us, and we start the downward spiral of feeling sorry for ourselves in a heartbeat. You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this, walk with me a bit.
I’ve had many careers, jobs, and have been on my own over the years, and I can tell you that self-talk is critical to your success. I don’t mean getting yourself all jacked up with unrealistic expectations, they will almost always fail, and when things don’t go as planned, you’ll lose your momentum. I didn’t say, don’t have big dreams, that’s not what I’m saying. Big dreams need to be broken down into manageable parts & goals, why, because we need the little victories to keep us going.
Those people in your life, or the ones you might know, aren’t as happy as you think they are, and I’m certain things weren’t as easy as you perceive them to be, they too needed the little victories to get them to where they are today. I struggle daily with not having enough small victories to keep me in a happy place, to keep me motivated, I have to get out of my comfort zone most of the time to get them. I hate that!
I’m willing to wager that when you find yourself having these little envy chats, it’s almost always related to money. I hate money actually, there I’ve said it. Money makes us focus on all the wrong things, it distracts us from whats really important. I’ll let you decide what’s important to you, but what’s important to me is my wife & two boys. I have never heard anyone say on their death bed, I wish I had more money. They will say, and I mean everytime….I wish I had spent more time with _________,you fill in the blank.
So what are those little victories, sometimes we can’t recognize them because we are focusing on the wrong things, or we’re distracted. Most of the time, these little victories are as simple as writing a Blog Post, a chance meeting with someone you never thought you would meet, an opportunity to help someone, it could be a phone call that helps you secure the next project or job. They could be even smaller, telling your wife & kids how much you love them, thank your neighbor for letting you use the lawn mower. But for most of us, it’s usually business related, that’s where the little victories really gets us charged up. Why? Probably because we made money, and we like money. Money is what we measure success by, I think we need to get back to something more valuable for measuring success.
I know in my business, I need to have something positive happen everyday when it comes to cash-flow, when it doesn’t, I start the bad self-talk. We all do it, I’m a failure, what could I have done different, or better? Recognize the questions, we start asking what we did wrong instead of what we did right, and what the next right step should be! One of the problems is, we rely on our own knowledge to solve problems, and you know what? We don’t know, what we don’t know. Success always requires other people, they are the ones who give us perspective and possibly vision. They are also the ones that give us those small victories 9 times out of 10.
I have found over the years, other people helped move me along to the next step, they either encouraged my, gave me an idea, and more importantly, they believed in me. It’s the affirmations, it’s the validation of others that gives us the courage to stand in the gap when times are bad, so we can stand tall with our chin up. Don’t believe me, watch this video and tell me what happens to you while you are watching it.
So, everytime you catch yourself thinking how someone has it better than you, is doing better than you, is smarter than you, STOP IT! Find out what motivates you, and then list the small victories you need from it. Yes, it’s hard work, life is hard work and it sucks, but you are not different than everyone else, why? We all need the small victories too.
I Invite You To Help Me Write My Next Book!
After great deliberation and deep contemplation, I am going to write a book on the Open & Free Business Model – The Future of Business. I am escaping to the sunny warm, no, HOT climate of the Okanagan in British Columbia for the next 4 days to get started. I don’t know how long it will take but, I would like you to be a part of the journey and my book.
In my mini-workshops I always ask participants what questions haven’t been answered or what else they were hoping to learn. I also have them fill out a Feedback form for the purposes of improving the mini-workshop. Keep in mind, the mini-workshop is only 4 hours long because one can only absorb and retain so much information in one sitting. You do get a workbook to take home, and the content shared is only available via PowerPoint to those who attended the workshops for later review.
Some of the great things I love about holding workshops is, the people’s willingness to dig in, the sharing of ideas, the discussion of possibilities, and the creativity that flows out of each person, it’s far too much excitement to contain. How I’ll be writing this book, I tend to start with the easy stuff first, and then move on to deeper issues and questions, and that’s where you come in. I would like to answer your questions, questions you might have on the Open & Free Business Model, better yet, if you know of good examples of businesses using the model, so I invite you to leave them in the comments for the world to see. OK, you can send your questions via e-mail to if you want to remain anonymous. If you’re not sure what the model is, that’s OK, I’ll be posting more about it as I go along, you can ask me anything related to the topic or what you think the topic is, and I’ll do my best to give you answer.
So what will I cover? Firstly, what the model might look like for you & your business, then I will touch on what I see coming in the next 3 – 5 years, I’ll look at trends and then talk some facts on what’s really going on. Mostly, I will try to give many examples of businesses that are having success with the open & free model, some don’t even know that’s what they are doing! It’s my hope that when you finish reading the book, you will have a better understanding of what the open & free really means, you’ll be able to come up with some creative ideas for your business, and a simple way to implement your ideas. Of course it’s easier said than done, the workshops are the best way to tackle the confusion. So I will try to make the book much like the workshop, so you can do it on your own.
I thank you in advance, please send questions & examples via e-mail at:owen@owengreaves.com
THANKS FOR YOUR WILLINGNESS TO PARTICIPATE, HEY – I’m Writing A Book, Go Figure EH! (Ya I’m Canadian)
Twitter Hashtag #openandfree
I recently started using the Hashtag #openandfree on Twitter to track my conversations on the topic (Open & Free as a Business Model), some very interesting things are starting to come out of these conversations. The conversations also trickle away from using the hashtag, but I still get the interaction. Whether I’m speaking or consulting, there is always a series of questions, How do I know what should be free content and what do you mean by open? I’m usually surprised by the questions because, well, when I dig a little bit, it becomes obvious to me. It’s not that I’m smarter than anyone, it’s just what I’m listening for and or looking for are the opportunities in and around their business. Most people are too close to the problem(s), that’s the difference, if they could step outside of themselves and look at their business the way they did when they worked on the first draft of their business plan, they might see what I see. I think it’s human nature to see other individuals challenges and have solutions for them rather than our own.
I’ll touch on the 1st question of what content should be free. It’s can be easy to figure out, but it’s mostly confusing for most, because business owners are trained for control, conditioned to old business models where free is not done. It’s always about what you can get, rather than what you give. Being open means you aren’t keeping all your content behind walls, where access is much more difficult to obtain. It put things out in the open and trust the quality of that content, and you need to learn to trust the people formerly known as consumers. They might pay for your content on their own, you can no longer force them to pay, because they will go and not come back. The new acronym is PFE (Proudly Found Elsewhere).
The thrill is when the lights come on after just a couple questions, and then show a simple effective way to get the creative juices flowing again, that’s all it is really. We need to think outside the box, even unlearn what we know about commerce and advertising. Sometimes we get stuck, sometimes we can’t see the forest for the tree’s, it’s like writer’s block and the like, you can sit and spin your wheels for what feels like hours, or hire someone to come in and kick start the creative gene.
By using the hashtag (#openandfree) on Twitter I’m collecting data, I’m looking for ways to help, and I will always direct you to come here for the basic steps. If you are a DIY (Do It Yourself) kind of person, then poke around here on my blog and chip away.
A recommended exercise is, ask yourself this question:
What is your CORE Business about?
Now we tend to struggle with the CORE because nothing is static anymore, press on and you will get the picture. Don’t stop on the first answer, drill down and ask yourself the question three or four times until you can answer the question in a preferably short accurate sentence. Get your answer down to a simple statement, crafted in a clear concise way that the masses will understand easily. Sometimes it can’t be kept short, but you want your prospect or the person you are sharing with to get it quickly, then you can move on to the next point or question knowing they understand.
Once you’ve arrived to a satisfactory statement, you now can begin the process of figuring out your content questions. But that’s another blog post.
This step also helps you design the why of your business, assuming you haven’t completed a business plan, that’s called the vision.
Does this make sense to you?
Don't Just Be a Business – Be a Social Business
I came away from a business meeting today and I couldn’t stop shaking my head, it seems business owners just can’t see past the next project or payroll deadline. Yes payroll is important, but only looking two weeks out seems like a bad strategy to me, call me crazy. The other funny thing I find with business owners is, they love to be social, take you out lunch, buy coffee and go to business conferences. But why can’t they see there business as social, leveraging their current base of customers through social networks. It seems the “social” part is only something they do personally rather than letting their business be open and social.
Being a social business means you are listening to, interacting with, and letting the conversation be the sell for your business. I understand that scares the day lights out of business owners but, imagine what might happen if you let your client base communicate with you in a more intimate way. Being a social business means you are open and transparent, collaborating instead of dominating, making it easy for your customers to do business with you without the controlling red tape. Giving them simple and easy ways to make payment, providing packaging that’s attention getting and making sure the interface is appealing and easy to navigate. Sounds simple enough doesn’t it, then why isn’t it happening with more regularity?
If you ask a business owner if their customers are the most important part of their business, what do you think they would say? I bet they pat their backs raw with a glowing report on how they support and give their customers the best service. But if you gave the customer an opportunity to answer that question would it be the same glowing review? Allowing your customers to express themselves, and share their experiences in dealing with your brand (you) is a scary thing isn’t it, why? You don’t really believe that you are giving the best service and providing the best products, thats why. If you did you would let your customers speak for you, it’s called word of mouth, and that’s at the very center of what a social business is.
The more digital we get, the more it’s about the experience with a brand, then asking the very people that had that experience, what they thought and how they felt about dealing with you. This is where the trust begins to show itself, if your customers trust your brand and service, you get a good grade, but if not…..
The truth is, business owners have to make a paradigm shift, we are in a connected world and getting more connected each and every day. A connected and networked audience is dramatically different than the audience you used to be able to control. The control mechanism is breaking apart and business owners don’t know how to deal with that problem. You cannot control a connected audience, pure and simple. Why? People are re-grouping on the fly that’s why, they are fickle and always on the move. To keep them you have to do something special, create a magnetic brand that builds attraction and trust, then you can turn that attraction into a transaction.
Business owners think about this, the more in control we (you) are, the more out of touch we become with our customers. Don’t just be a business, be a social business and get connected with them.
So is your business just a business, or is it a social business? If you don’t know or would like to learn what that might look like for your business, attend my workshop April 30th. Send me an e-mail for details and to reserve a seat: owen@owengreaves.com