WELFAREMIKE

The world has gone two whole revolutions around the sun and changed almost entirely since the last time I wrote here. My personal world has changed too. Last time I was writing, I had just left my career of 6 years selling beer and was trying to become a graphic designer. Here I sit, two years later as the studio manager and art director of a small design firm. I tried and failed at starting my own thing, then I found my current gig and worked my way up to running the place in a short time.

I don’t like to make all the decisions. I’m glad I’m essentially the № 2 in the company. My boss deals with the clients and I deal with the work. Not all of it is enjoyable, but it beats being an in-house designer because we get to work on multiple brands, in multiple disciplines. That’s important to me because I’m trying to be well-rounded as a designer. The only thing I wish we had is more time. (Doesn’t everybody…) Most clients want it all, for cheap, and now. One client likes to say “yesterday” when asked to provide a deadline. It’s annoying.

These days are starting to run together, so I suppose it’s fitting that today is Groundhog’s Day. We get six more weeks of winter. Don’t we always? This Phil character needs to open his eyes a bit.

How did this become a tradition? Apparently, according to folklore, if it’s cloudy when a Groundhog wakes up, it means spring will be early. If it’s sunny, meaning it’ll “see” its shadow that means six more weeks of winter. This day was picked because it is Candlemas in the Christian tradition, and in Pennsylvania, there is a large concentration of “Pennsylvania Dutch” or Amish people. They would have a celebration around the day and it ended up getting combined with the groundhog folklore, and Punxsutawney, PA sensed the marketing opportunity in the late 1800’s. Now it’s what their town is famous for, and the most famous groundhog of all, Punxsutawney Phil, is trotted out every year to give his bold and inaccurate predictions.

According to scientists, Phil has been accurate only 39% of the time since 1887. The National Climactic Data Center has described Phil as “on average, inaccurate”, especially in recent years.

Is the internship the new “grad school”?

For the longest time, it was “just graduate high school”.

Then they said “graduate college”.

Then “get your masters”.

These were all things you had to do to “get a good job”.

Now, you must intern. Every job that is not a service job requires previous experience in the field, as if going to college to study it was not enough. I’ve been doing freelance web & graphic design (on the side, while I had full-time jobs) for 10+ years, but I did not study it in school. I wish I would have, but it’s too little, too late for that. Yet, with all my experience, I’m un-hireable, because I have not worked for a graphic design firm, nor do I have a degree. Unless I want to intern, which, being in my mid–30s, is not only impossible from a money standpoint, it’s also unlikely, due to the fact I am not coming right out of school. I’ve done everything myself, including the research, client relationships, selling my work, dealing with rounds of revisions, billing and collecting on invoices. Is that experience not an advantage over someone just out of school? Show me a recent graduate and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t really had to sell their work or please a paying client.

So, is interning the new grad school? Something you must do to get a job in this market? It seems to me this system is rigged against people just getting out, they can’t pay their massive student loans or get started on their nest egg and building a life because they must work free for a year or two to really get experience. What does that say about college and how we are preparing our next generation? Is college the new high school and internships the new college? Why are we not producing people capable of starting right out of the gate?

From The Verge:

So far, Nintendo says Super Mario Run has bought in revenue of ¥6 billion or around $53 million. It’s a decent achievement, but still doesn’t deliver the impact the company was looking for. Nintendo chief executive Tatsumi Kimishima said he’d hoped the conversation rate would be in the double digits.

Nintendo wants to make more money and have a better conversion rate? They had 5% at $10. As the article states, $1–2 games have a conversion rate of less than that.

Here’s my idea: I would gladly pay $10 for a new Mario title if I could play it with a controller. The interface is still wonky. The levels are too easy and you really can’t control yourself in Super Mario Run. So, Nintendo should make a phone case that has slider attachments (a lá the Nintendo Switch) that you can fit on the left and right of the screen when you’re playing in landscape mode. Remove the controller attachments when you aren’t playing and you don’t have to remove the case. Charge for it. $30-$40. I know others have tried and it really hasn’t caught on, but this is Nintendo we’re talking about. Not many companies have the ability to build excitement from their products like they do.

Then sell all the old NES and SNES titles for $5 a piece on the app store. Must use controller. I would buy so many $5 titles to have on my phone that I’d have to upgrade my hard drive the next time I bought a new iPhone. You might be trying to go after the youth market by going with phones, but there are a ton of 35–45 year olds with iPhones and tons of money to throw at apps. These old titles are just sitting there. Port them, use them, make the money. No free-then-buy…just charge me $5 and go away.

I honestly think it would work and I’m sure there are prototypes of those things all over Nintendo HQ. They aren’t the type of company to not try things, even if it’s not a direction they want to go in.

The Great Job Search of 2017 continues on. I have been looking for just over a month now. There are things that I’m qualified for and would be good at, but I can’t get a call back to save my life. I just need something shitty while I build up my graphic design business and my other projects. But it needs to cover my bills and my mortgage. Uber just isn’t covering that right now. There just aren’t enough riders in this town, and there are too many drivers. I’m considering adding GrubHub or something to the mix, but I can’t see how they make money.

I’m going to preface this post by saying that I voted for neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump. Yes, I voted third party. But this is not a new development for me, as I have been a registered Libertarian for much of my adult life. I say this because I feel that I’m truly as small government “centrist”, and I don’t believe we can sustain this bloated system for much longer. I also believe that if you think that more government is the answer, you’ve got bigger problems.

I have people from all stripes in my social network feeds. I’m one of those people that can understand why people from both sides support their candidate and I refuse to unfollow someone based on their political beliefs. What I can’t stand, however, is the mass amount of hypocrisy I’m seeing from both sides right now. I’m seeing people unfollow and unfriend others because of memes. I’m seeing my left-leaning friends pulling the same shit my right-leaning friends have pulled for the previous 8 years. I’m seeing just as many “a-HA, gotcha!” fake news stories being throw around as fact from both sides. I’m seeing BOTH sides only use facts that further their narrative and disregard anything else.

I only want the truth. I want facts. I want no-spin, and I don’t mean Bill O’Reilly. I want “The President said X” instead of, “The President said X, but now we have on 4 talking heads to tell you what he really meant.”

I’m so behind on getting these podcasts edited. I have about 6 in the can, and I’m recording them faster than I can edit. Luckily, we haven’t launched anything yet. Just trying to have a load of things in the hopper for when we do launch. I’m not sure how the audience reaction is going to be and that scares me. Fear can be a good motivator, but it can also stop you from launching in the first place. I need to make that not happen. We must launch and soon.

I have a major problem getting the words out of my mouth. i have full sentences in my brain, and when I’m not recording, I feel like I’m eloquent, but when that red light is on, it’s game over. It’s um, uh, ah, oo, eee. All over the place. Luckily, I do most of the editing and I edit those bits out, but sometimes they aren’t easily removed. I do this a lot with my Lead Fast videos, though I’m getting better at those. With those, I can’t edit things out, because of the video component, and I really don’t want to take the time to do a voice over afterwards, because my voice overs always sound like reading anyway.

I get to play host most of the time, which means the guest does most of the talking and I do most of the asking. A couple minutes for them, a question from me, and start the process over again.

I’ve been doing a lot of podcasting lately for this project I’ve been doing. It’s been a real eye opener as far as the amount of research these guys must go through on a daily basis, not to mention the amount of work it is to edit these things. You basically have to listen to the episode about 3 times. I can’t imagine these guys like Myke Hurley or Dan Benjamin that do multiple podcasts a week…though I’m sure they have people that edit the podcasts for them, if they aren’t live to tape anyway.

I missed the blog yesterday. I didn’t follow through on my goal of posting every single day, without fail. I could post twice today and “get back on track” but it won’t be the same and I’ll know…

In truth, I don’t really care. I was busy with good stuff, and when you’re busy with good stuff, it’s ok to miss something like this. It’s not like I have a following or anything. On the other project, the one I was working on yesterday, I do have a small following, somewhat, and what I worked on was timely.

I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. I’ve been tired before 3–4 pm. Like, can’t keep my eyes open tired. I haven’t been getting quality sleep because the dog sleeps with us. My girl could sleep through a nuclear blast, where I wake up at the smallest little thing. I slept on the couch last night in an effort to get a deeper sleep. It worked. I actually had a dream for the first time in a while.

This is the eighth in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”.

In your business, your brand is your livelihood. You planted it as a seed, watered and fed it, and have cultivated it into the beautiful flower it is now. Poisoning your brand, or digging it up, would be a bad idea if it is flourishing. This is not to say change isn’t good, and refreshing a tired brand can have a good effect. But what if your brand is working? Stay the course and don’t change your path just because the rest of the market is doing something.

Case in point: everyone seems to be redesigning their brand, simplifying down their graphics to their essence, and changing their wordmark to a sans-serif font. There always some reason why, yet the truth is this: everyone is doing it, and “we look tired and old if we don’t change too”. Designers will help you change if you want to, but it’s the rare designer that will actually do the research and say “don’t touch a thing” if it truly doesn’t need to be changed.

In the craft beer world, there are tons of breweries opening every day. They all are trying to stand out, and shelf & tap space is limited, so what do they do? A lot of their salespeople use pay-to-play, a tactic that is illegal in almost all states, but some look the other way more than others. It’s a tactic that doesn’t work well in the long run. It may not mean giving away beer, but maybe promotional products, buying the bar a cooler they need, etc…all illegal. And short-sighted. But some craft breweries are refusing to play that game. One such brewery, Stone Brewing from San Diego, out-right refuses to do anything of the sort, and in fact punishes their distributors if they do it with their products. It may have hurt them in the early days, but they focused on the quality of their beer and have grown into a top 10 US craft brewery as well as expanded into a brewery in Germany. They did what was right for their brand and refused to play the game that so many others have played and lost. They let the market work in their favor, as their fans wouldn’t go to places that didn’t have their beer because the taps were full of pay-to-play brands.

AB-InBev is one of the biggest companies doing this, and they have to raise prices every year just because their share is going down every year and they need to offset the losses for their shareholders. When a 6 pack of Bud Light becomes just a little cheaper than a craft beer 6 pack, instead of very much so, the budget buyer may just spend that extra dollar to check it out…that seems to be happening now, if you dig into the numbers a bit.

Do what is right for your brand, no matter what everyone else is doing. Watch what they’re doing, make changes that make sense, innovate, yes…but don’t jump of a bridge just because your friends are.

This is the seventh in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”

I think the title speaks for itself. Always always always be the bigger person. No matter how shitty someone is to you on a review or a comment on a post, it doesn’t matter. Be cool and be calm. Wait a day if you have to. Compose yourself before you compose your thoughts. Reply with honesty and straightforwardness, but never be mean or cutting.

It’s obvious by now that people are way more intense and mean online than they are in person. They will say anything to your Twitter account, but given the chance to say those same things to your face, they wouldn’t. I think the key here is that they just want to be heard, and in their experience, they aren’t heard by big companies, especially on social media. Sure some social media manager reads it and has the ability to maybe fix a small problem, but often companies use their social media as an advertising platform instead of a support platform. It should be both, and even more. So these people say the worst possible things in order to get you to at least engage them, because all they want is to be heard. Nothing more.

Hear them, respond to them with tact, reach out to them in a public forum and a private one, and alleviate their concerns and fix their problems. When you respond with “What can I do” and “How can I help” instead of flying off the handle, you will put this person down and make them feel smaller than any snarky clap-back could have done.

This is the sixth in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”

Gary Vaynerchuck likes to talk about not just using content to sell, but to document the process. Document, don’t create is the saying. By documenting, you are showing yourself in a similar light to your customers: they can watch you go through all the day to day machinations that they too go through. It shows your humanity. People want to feel like they’re supporting a person, not just a faceless business. When you think of Apple, you think of Steve Jobs (even though he’s dead). Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Tesla, Elon Musk . Brands that have a face often succeed faster and more thoroughly than those that don’t.

That’s what branding is. It provides that face if you don’t have one in the CEO or some other company employee. Colonel Sanders for KFC. Remember Dave, the owner of Wendy’s, in all those ads in the 90s? Hell, Wendy herself. There’s a reason so many brands are named after someone.

When I buy popcorn, do I want to buy from some brand, or the nice old man Orville Redenbacher?

This is the fifth in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”

In the article, they talk about checking into a place that had things they didn’t need, but no TV, internet, or even spoons. Anticipating the client’s needs is just as important as anything else. You’ve finally got the client, now make them feel like they are being taken care of. There are many options out there, yet somehow they chose you. Make them happy with their decision.

When you anticipate their needs, you also may be showing them something they didn’t know they needed, but now can’t live without. This can go a long way in helping expand your services and offerings. What a great feeling it is when you buy a product and find that it has a little use that you didn’t really know about. That “whoa, game changer!” feeling.

This is the fourth in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”

Branding matters, no matter how small the business.

Your brand is your face, your name, your personality. A brand isn’t just a logo and a color theme, but a way of doing business and the feeling your customers have about you before they even do business with you or communicate with you. It is said that people don’t remember what you said, but how you made them feel. Your brand should echo this statement.

When you’ve decided on your brand’s personality, it is imperative to follow up that promise with action. Is your branding cute and cuddly? Best not to be cold and concise in your messaging. You look the part, now act the part. Every little thing matters in the messaging, even temporary things. How many times have you seen a sign on a door saying “use other door” and it’s printed in Comic Sans, but you’re walking into a bank, or something similar with conservative brand messaging? It’s jarring, it doesn’t belong, and it’s not on message. Comic Sans doesn’t match with a bank’s personality, just as Trajan isn’t for a toy store.

This is the third in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”

Assume your customers are comparison shopping. Especially in the online world, where they really have no personal relationship with you and can’t be “caught” shopping somewhere else. Knowing what your competitors are doing as far as discounts, deals, coupon codes, newsletter offers…the list goes on and on.

If you’re not subscribing to the email newsletters of every one of your competitors (and even people that orbit your space, but you don’t consider a direct threat), you aren’t doing your research. You have to assume your competitors have done the same market research you have, that their deal structures aren’t just thrown on the wall to see what sticks. Watch what they do, and more importantly, what they do again. What worked? What didn’t? what obviously lost money? What gained customers? And then, of course, apply this same research to your own products.

This is the second in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”

In this section, the article discusses about being up front with your customers, managing their expectations about what your product/service is going to do for them. How the customer is less likely to have a bad experience if they know everything going in. Common sense.

I would add that this tenet should work on the entrepreneur’s end as well. You should manage your own expectations about the business you’re launching. It’s one thing to be confident and proud, but another to think it’s going to be such a hit that you don’t have a contingency or two in place. When you’ve managed your expectations, you know what to do once you’ve launched and have seen how the market has reacted. If you launch a website and hope that all the revenue is going to come from affiliate links and ads…when that doesn’t work, what’s the plan? If you’ve managed your expectations about the amount of money you’re going to make from those monetization methods, you’ll have a back up to be able to continue. If you’ve managed your expectations, you would already know not to rely on those methods.