Welcome To Self-Employment And It’s All Good!

The day of the gold watch after time served with a single company is long gone and the project-by-project employment model has now been the norm for much of America for years, so why do we in broadcast and marketing so lament moving on to the next project? Maybe because we feel that all of the time and effort we put into the medium itself has somehow been wasted? Traditional media’s mutation to both new and emerging media platforms is necessary and natural, although challenging to each of us and to our individual skill sets.
Radio, from programming to sales, has always been an intensely personal medium for the producer as well as the consumer, so it stands to reason we all take any change very personally. Any good sales person has cultivated deep relationships with their clients and has thereby lived the ups and downs of each client’s business cycles and strategic decisions, good or bad for years. Sales people feel just as much loss from those relationships being severed as an on-air personality no longer being able to share in the daily life of each listener.
We are all being forced into making deeper decisions on our own path to success and relying less on any one company’s employment.
So lets try to separate ourselves from the emotion of the moment, and look at the bigger picture of starting our own business. Of course, this process begins with building a business plan for you own new company.
(From the myownbusiness.org site)
Does Your Plan Include the Following Necessary Factors:
* A sound business concept
* Understanding your market
* Healthy, growing and stable industry
* Capable management
* Able financial control
* Consistent business focus
* Mindset to anticipate change
* Plans for online business
We all need to be able to do our market research and build a model that will be in demand not just today, but into the future far enough for us to develop the skills and gather the capitol we’ll need for the next business cycle and then the process begins anew.
Now is the time for all of us to embrace our newfound independence and do everything possible to control our own destiny and no longer be working at the whim of some investment company and their momentary valuation of our worth to their strategic market play (most of those models crashed and took billions of investor’s capital with them).
Since deregulation began with the subsequent “right sizing” of some of the most creative minds in broadcast, we should do as many of them have and go about creating and building the next platform for the delivery of entertainment. As the number crunchers in San Antonio are literally executing their vision of corporate value for the next five minutes, so should we develop our own individual plan for the next several years and begin it’s implementation about right NOW! Research thoroughly, plan well, work hard and just as you always have, do it BIG! Let’s get started!     -     Garry Leigh          Snafu Consulting

Why Are We Here?

No, I mean here, not Here.
When we all started out in Radio or Records, I don’t believe any of us saw ourselves in the positions we currently hold or certainly not doing the things we do every day.  How did we get here?  Did we aspire to do nine jobs simultaneously, often with diametrically opposed philosophies that tap into our areas of weakness as well as our strengths?  Did we see the need to spend a great deal of time trying to work on weaknesses which are there precisely because they are areas in which we have absolutely no interest or passion?  I don’t want to be an accountant and worry about all those little categories you people create for the money that we are spending.  I want to be an artist and create a real communication of passion in areas of man’s greatness, not crunch numbers for some Vice President of Numbers Games dealing with Wharton people all day.  We were born to break rules, or at least stretch them as far as they would stretch, and now we are required to not only write the rules but then enforce them upon the people we used to be.  What the hell?

“The purpose of life is to fight maturity.” –  Dick Werthimer

Hmmmm.  Do you think Dick went to Wharton? No, my bet is he played guitar way too loud and way too late with way too many friends around.
In small business I totally understand the need to accomplish tasks not of our liking because that’s the nature of small business.  We hire contractors to do the things we can’t or don’t want to do and focus on the things that put us in the position to open a business in the first place.  Right?  So what’s the deal with BIG business and the BIG picture people making us all move to the left brain when we are demonstrably good working from the right side?  STOP IT!
Today, let’s try harder to draw on people’s strengths and support them in every way we can to further develop those strengths.  Go with people who are passionate in their area of expertise and make it safe for them to go there while respecting the same of those around them.
I have always loved management retreats precisely because each of us on the team had very different strengths and we could get away and learn about each other’s passions and then try to do a better job of drawing on them in the future.  That’s part of what makes a good team better and in simplest terms why some companies have great leaders and why some never rise above good.
Take the team out and encourage them to express why they are passionate about their department and where they would take it if they could.  My bet is you’ll see the rest of the team pitch in and cover their weaknesses so they can each better utilize those individual strengths and focus more on Why We Are Here!
Garry Leigh

Passion And Profit?

just had to let you in on this post in Ad Age….. great read and an even better gage of success.

 

Wanted: More Passion Brands

Once It Was Enough to Be Passionate Only About the Work. Not Anymore

Posted by Millie Olson on 06.17.08 @ 03:22 PM

 

Millie Olson

As a young copywriter I had to muster enthusiasm for Artificially Flavored Blueberry Muffin Mix with Real Wild Maine Blueberries Inside, Cheese Slices with More Real Cheese (huh?) and Minute Gourmet, a medley of ingredients that came in a bag resembling the one you find in your airline seat pocket. 

I learned to focus my passion on making good ads. The products advertised were less important, as long as they did no harm. 

That’s all changed. 

I blame it on Kashi, whose agency we’ve been for five years now. 

For most of Amazon Advertising’s 12 years we’ve focused on finding gutsy clients with interesting marketing challenges and budgets to match. I mean, there are things we’d never advertise, like cigarettes and Ripple and stretch-mark cream. 

Kashi brought us something more. Instead of crowing about increases in household penetration, they celebrate the number of households introduced to healthy living. 

Once that might have raised a cynical eyebrow or two. But they walk the talk. They’re the Pied Pipers of healthy. They make it a “wanna do,” not a “gotta do.” We summed it up as “seven whole grains on a mission.” And gradually realized we’d signed up for the mission as well. 

No more sugar-coated cereals for our families and friends. Soon the office pantry was packed floor to ceiling with seven-whole-grain cereals, granolas, snack bars and frozen entrees, which we distributed far and wide. 

We drank the Kool-Aid — or maybe the spring water. 

Not only did it make our employees feel proud to work at Amazon, it helped us attract new ones. And it began to affect new business. 

A while ago, a well-known cookie company asked us to participate in a pitch. It would be a fun account, and a visible one. 

One of our creative teams poked around the company’s website and discovered it was touting one of its pastries as a healthy breakfast. How can we work for a client who would misrepresent itself this way, the creative team asked? Ultimately, we bowed out. It didn’t fit our growing desire to work for “passion brands.” 

Whew, it does narrow the prospect list. Out with our unequivocal embrace of the Fortune 500. No lusting after big car companies (unless they’re rolling out fleets of hybrids). No sugary soft drinks, no overly processed foods. You know, all those companies with the big budgets. Maybe we won’t burst out of our office space so fast after all. 

Reminds me of a saying by one of my first creative directors, Keith Reinhart: “A principle isn’t a principle unless it costs you.”

Is this any way to grow an agency? Well, it might be. 

We did get hired by Peet’s, whose coffees inspire such passion that 200,000 “Peetniks” actually have it delivered to them all over the world, despite the ubiquity of you-know-who. And we’ve been entrusted with advertising the wines of Robert Mondavi, the man most responsible for bringing the civilizing effects of good wine to the American dinner table. Now there’s a mission I can sign up for. 

No Super Bowl commercials here. But the joy is, you’re not making anything up. It all comes straight out of the client’s DNA. And the passion comes straight from our hearts. 

 

2 Comments

 

Passion comes in many flavors courage comes in but one. By rejecting adulterated, denatured unhealthy products, you clearly have the courage to put your money where your mouth is, which in my book makes you truly courageous. You’ve demonstrated that not only is high fiber needed for good heath, so to is moral fiber. Congratulations on setting the bar one notch higher. –Marvin Double, Richmond Hill, ON

You’re taking great steps towards transparency in today’s market. What a refreshing read! –Holly Rains, Toledo, OH

Who Cares

Our radio industry seems to have had the passion squeezed completely out of it as the commercial investment companies have squeezed into it.  Why did the investors show up in the first place?  Because the product people had created such compelling entertainment that our margins were topping 50 and 60 percent.  So who wouldn’t want into that kind of business plan and then want to squeeze a few more percent out?  In the process they squeezed most of the product people out and with them went the those most passionate about the product and left a lot of great sales people with nothing very creative to sell.  That leaves the investors holding a rather smelly bag and resultant ratings have been nothing to write home about as our stations have become a pasteurized homogenous tangible dated product.

Ownership and investors need to do a deep gut check on the product side, much as CBS has, and get some passion back into the equation.  Let’s get the hallways humming again and try some new concepts. Yes, many will fail and that will lead to many more successes.  Entertainment is a continuously evolving process and every day is a new one.  Maybe this blog post from Mediapost today will add a little inspiration.    Garry Leigh at Snafu Consulting

Last week Max wrote “You’re Nothing Without A Link.”Dwight Zahringer wrote in response, “Well, I am glad to see that mainstream media is finally getting it to a certain point. I’m happy to read this article but also shake my head on why these simple tactics take so long to get embedded in the brain of media professionals. I work with so many agencies- people with large professional degrees that their parents paid a lot of money for and they never learned basic common knowledge that they must evolve with media. SEO is basic and if you write for a living then realize this simple statement, ‘Content is King, Links are Queen.’ Without content there is nothing for search engines to grab and without links there is no way for them to find content. Keep up the education. Bite small and chew, then swallow.

Friday, May 2, 2008  Why Passion Matters By Max Kalehoff  In a hyper-competitive market, competence is expected and only flawless execution is tolerable. But that’s no longer enough. Today, the ultimate competitive advantage is passion.When passion lets loose, you drive focus, cultivate mastery, leverage spontaneity, foster creativity, build intuition and live toward mission. The dots connect. Clarity emerges. Your own bar of excellence sets higher, and you become infatuated with exceeding it. The result is accelerated and extended value creation that otherwise would never have been possible. Think of the places in your business where the presence of passion really matters — making you stand out beyond the rest, or sink into mediocrity. It’s about approaching things with the utmost thought and care, versus doing anything less. In my experience, there are a few places in business especially sensitive to passion:    Listening and understanding your customers and the market.  Innovating based on your market insight and intuition.  Building your product with quality and speed.  Ensuring the highest aesthetic and usability.  Refining your product over and over and over again, until it’s better and better and better.  Paying attention to all the details and signals that comprise the experience.  Inspiring your employees, customers, investors and other stakeholders.  Engaging and collaborating with customers.  Fixing things quickly when they go wrong — and then making them far better.  Using your product yourself and recommending it to friends because you truly believe it’s the best.Businesses with passion tend to excel in these areas, while businesses that don’t tend to just get by or break. I know — this is all obvious. But the irony is that most businesses and brands I encounter come up short. It’s probably because passion is not something that can be bought, outsourced or faked. Rather, the presence of passion has more to do with an authentic and fierce desire for your product to really change the game. Of course, it also has a huge amount to do with the CEO and leadership. It has to do with hiring and grooming an employee base that is culturally aligned and motivated with a real stake in the outcome. Same for investors, advisors, customers and partners. Who’s doing it right? We can all name some of the mega-brands that veer toward passion, like Apple, Google and JetBlue. But passion is equally important in smaller businesses, and perhaps more attainable and prevalent. In my life, some examples include instant-messaging aggregator Meebo and microblog platform Twitter. On a micro scale, there’s my barber Alberto at Astor Hair, the many local farmers at New York’s Green Markets, the Little Mexican Café near my home and, of course, my son’s nanny, Aliana. Does your business and product embody passion? If not, it’s probably at risk of being displaced by one that does.