Horse Sense

Part 1 of a 3-part series on business strategy.

As the plethora of podcasts on the topic proves, freelancers' and entrepreneurs' craving for business advice is insatiable.

Those seekers of commercial know-how could do no better than Mercator's 10-part series, "Business: Reasons of Failure and Roads to Success."

It's not a podcast, but a series of articles that ran in the British trade journal Saddlery and Harness between August 1892 and June 1893 (the author took December off).

Who Mercator was remains a mystery; but that hardly makes his advice―tips on everything from advertising to time management―any less sound.

On the subject we'd call "focus," Mercator's advice is as pointed as any you'd hear from Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk:

"Amongst the answers given by businessmen to the question as to the chief causes of failure occur the following," Mercator says. "'Unwillingness to labor and wait,' 'lack of perseverance,' 'haste to get rich,' 'undue haste to accumulate,' 'drifting,' 'unwillingness to achieve success in the old-fashioned way,' 'waiting for opportunities,' 'unwillingness to work persistently,' 'lack of appreciation for the opportunities of life,' 'unsteadiness of purpose,' 'lack of persistent application,' 'unwillingness to begin at the foot of the ladder and work up.'"

All these causes of failure, he says, amount to one thing: disdain for details.

"It is a common thing for us to speak of our great men as genii, and to suppose that a genius is a man who from his birth inherited a superiority of brain which was bound to carry him to excellence, when he took up the line of life he was especially gifted for," Mercator says.

"To a certain extent, and in certain cases this is undoubtedly true; but what definition did one of our greatest writers and scholars—Carlyle—give of genius? He said genius is nothing more or less than 'the capacity for taking infinite pains.' This, indeed, is the secret of the success of the most eminent men in all times.

"Take Newton and all the most celebrated astronomers; take Stephenson, Brunel and all the famous engineers; take Watt, Edison, and all clever inventors; take Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, and most of the principal politicians and prime ministers of England; take great poets, artists, warriors, and all the men who have risen to eminence in the world, and you will find that they have almost all been famous for their industry, their patience and their perseverance."

Sound too quaint?

In 1995, Steve Jobs told Computerworld, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

Misericords

Surrounding the chancel of the church where Shakespeare lies buried in Stratford-upon-Avon are 26 intricately decorated choir stalls that date from the 15th century, as I discovered on a recent visit.

Inside each is a misericord (from the Latin for "act of mercy"), a wooden ledge that allowed infirm priests to sit during masses and divine offices, without appearing to do so.

If you wonder why the little butt-rests were considered merciful, you must recall priests had to stand throughout two masses and eight divine offices, which they were required to attend every day.

Medieval people applied the word "misericord" not only to these little ledges, but to any kindness shown infirm priests, including gifts of meat during Lent and blankets during winter.

But mercy didn't stop with priests.

Seats for the infirm were also provided in churches to laymen. Church walls customarily featured built-in benches, where infirm parishioners could sit during mass.

It's from the custom we get the expression, "The weak must go to the wall."

"Victory is to the strong and the weak must go to the wall," Hitler once told a group of his officers, meaning, in our dog-eat-dog world, only the strong deserve to win.

Sadly, his sentiment is alive and well in Washington and many state capitals today.

Why pay for misericords, when our billionaire masters can have more?

Passion Fruit

Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing.

― Donald Trump

If I had a nickel for every time some guru said success stems from passion, I'd be living in Mar-a-Lago.

Sure, passion's prerequisite―but far less so than money, talent, timing and luck.

Passion alone, however, can lead to distinction. It won't lead to "great;" but it can lead to "worst."

Consider the case of Ed Wood, the Hollywood hack who earned distinction as "worst director of all time."

Passion alone―and he was passionate―couldn't carry him to greatness. The tides ran against him.

"Ed Wood wasn’t the worst filmmaker of all time," says film critic Matt Singer, "but he might have been the unluckiest.

"His life story is a series of missed opportunities and broken promises. He would prepare a film, and the financing would fall through. He’d plan a project for an actor, and the actor would die. He made what would become one of the most famous movies in history, then thoughtlessly sold the rights to it for a single dollar to pay his rent."

"Passion is the genesis of genius," Tony Robbins says.

But passion alone can bear bitter fruit. 

Unbacked by money, talent, timing and luck, passion is the font of failure.

Spam. A Lot.

Wasting the time of the audience is damaging the medium itself.

― Derek Harding

Email marketers, take comfort: 7 in 10 customers prefer to receive your content by email, rather than through social media channels, according to EveryCloud.

But that doesn't mean customers won't report you as a spammer.

Nearly half of all emails are spam, EveryCloud says; and because they are, your customers are steeled for a fight.

On any given day, 45% might report your email as spam, because they think you send too often; 36%, because they don't remember subscribing; and 31%, because your content seems irrelevant.

Spam isn't customers' only source of frustration, says EveryCloud.

Customers in general think marketers put them on too many lists, and have no patience for their fine-print advisories about name-use.

What can you do to avoid annoying customers? The answers are self-evident:

• Send great content
• Send it infrequently
• Be clear about your name-use

Stories are Elementary

IBM's supercomputer Watson is named after the company's first CEO.

But the Watson we remember and love was the storyteller.

It's elementary.

Stories stick.

Content's just content.

Now that IBM's Watson can publish content better than any human, the marketer who can't tell an arresting story is dead meat.

Sadly, that's the majority.

If you're publishing content without telling stories, it’s time to reboot and retool.

The silicon Watson can now publish content better than you can.

But how do you tell a story?

You don't patchwork data, as this tale does:

Acme will save 40% of its IT infrastructure costs over the next four years by migrating to a cloud solution. Acme is a small company without IT staff. Before our team migrated its users to the cloud, Acme used a single Domino server, which served up mail and one application, as well as a Traveler server for six mobile devices. Our team migrated all of the users from the on-premise Domino solution to a standalone cloud solution. This also included moving the six Traveler devices. Each user was reconfigured to connect to the cloud servers and provisioned with a clean mail file, as well as given a local copy of his or her old mail file to use as an archive. In addition, the one application (a vacation calendar) was moved to the cloud. In order to do this, we set up a user called vacations@acme.net and had all vacation requests sent to this account. Administrators were then able to go in and approve or deny them. In addition, all users can now view the vacation calendar to see who is in or out on a given day. With a small operation and no in-house IT support, Acme wanted to get back to “doing business” instead of “supporting business.” The cloud solution lowered its costs by eliminating the yearly licensing of Domino and decreasing the onsite footprint of servers.

What should you do, instead?

• Give us a character we can care about
• Give us a drama with a narrative arc
• Give us details that help us imagine what happened
• Spare us unnecessary facts
• Give us insights, new perspective, and a call to action

In short, give us a story:

One of America's most known and respected anvil makers, Acme is a small business whose profits were at risk due to recurring IT costs and poor vacation planning. Ironically, the company's IT needs were simple―email and a sharable vacation calendar―so simple, in fact, the company had no IT staff. But it did have two servers that needed babysitting, and which occupied an office that a key salesperson coveted; plus a $10,000 a year software license―and no sharable vacation calendar. Our team helped Acme move to the cloud. In doing so, we equipped every employee with email and gave everyone access to the vacation calendar, so employees can now plan their work around others' absences. As a result, Acme's two servers are history; the $10,000 annual license is history; a top salesperson now has the office she so desperately wanted, instead of a cubicle on the plant floor; and the company is running a lot smoother. Acme will cut IT costs by 40% in the next four years! Would you like to do that? Give us a call today.

See the difference?

It's elementary.