Some companies are leveraging the power of the Internet in such a powerful way they are increasing market share, earnings, and revenue at an incredible rate. Others are struggling, not fully realizing the potential or understanding what it takes to win with today’s technology.
John Patrick’s answer is that it is all about attitude. He says companies with a “net attitude” have an extraordinary advantage over those who don’t.
Having a net attitude “makes constituents happy,” says John Patrick. Because your “website is your brand,” it’s important to make it accessible, easy to use, and focused relentlessly on a positive customer experience.
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“The prescription starts with a single word, attitude.” –John Patrick
Beyond this, John indicates business vocabulary needs to change to adapt to a new mindset.
John believes we are only using about 10-15% of the power of the Internet. The potential represents an extraordinary opportunity ahead.
Money and scale are not enough. It takes the right attitude. And any entrepreneur or company who adopts a net attitude has a sustainable advantage that will propel them to greater success.
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“Think big, act bold, start simple, and iterate fast.” –John Patrick
Joe Calloway has studied businesses that consistently create positive experiences. His new book, Magnetic: The Art Of Attracting Business, is a look behind the scenes at the strategy, the people, and the art behind becoming a magnetic business. In these organizations, growth is a result of happy customers sending more and more business and referrals. Employees are happy, helping to recruit others. And the momentum continues unabated to create even more success.
I recently talked with Joe about what it takes to become a magnetic business.
Become a Magnetic Business
Would you share one example of a business that is magnetic?
I think that the business pictured on the first page of the book is a classic example of a magnetic business. The Pancake Pantry has a line of customers in front every morning, rain or shine, sleet or snow. This truly is what every business of any kind aspires to: to have customers so loyal to and enthusiastic about your business that they’d be willing to stand in line, in the rain, to give you their money.
Pancake Pantry excels at the basics of what a restaurant should be and have, including a great location, great food, great service. But here’s the lesson: there are no gimmicks. There’s no contrived “wow” factor. They simply offer excellent value to their customers, and those customers tell other customers. Thus, the line out front.
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“It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.” -Jony Ive
You start your book by recognizing that, “Becoming magnetic is a way of thinking.” How do leaders develop the magnetic mindset?
I think there are a handful of basic factors at work that create a magnetic mindset:
Always be focused on creating value for your customers.
Simplify the way you think about your business. Don’t overthink it. Don’t over-complicate it.
Never underestimate your competition.
Be exceptionally easy to work with.
Make sure that the other guy wins.
Be consistently excellent. Consistency of performance is the great brand builder.
If you let these factors guide your thinking, you’ve got a magnetic mindset.
Don’t Overdo Social Media
You teach and talk about the importance of social media but also about overthinking, overworking or overdoing its role relative to everything else. As I say this, what comes to mind as “magnetic advice” about social media?
Social media is vitally important in today’s marketplace and becoming more important all the time. Of course you should participate on social media, but be selective. You don’t have to be on everything – that would take up all your time and drive you crazy trying to keep up. Where is your target market? If they’re on Pintrest, be there with them. My market is on twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, so that’s where I am.
But here’s the key: What you say about yourself on social media is insignificant in importance and impact compared to what your customers/clients say about you. No ad campaign in the world has the positive impact of having 100 reviews of your business with almost all of them being 5 Star reviews.
The way to use social media to grow your business and attract new customers is to do such a great job on a handful of vitally important things that matter to your customers. That’s really one of the core messages in Magnetic: The Art Of Attracting Business.
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Nielsen: 43% of consumers more likely to buy when learning about it through social media.
The Win-Win strategy is what has made me successful. It’s the single most powerful strategy known and is the foundation of how any consistently successful business or individual relates to other people.
My version of Win-Win is to always think in terms of what kind of experience my actions will create for my clients and others. How does doing business with me make them feel?
We all want people to love doing business with us, and if we are to create that, then we have to play Win-Win with them.
It’s the simplest and most effective relationship and business strategy known.
6 Factors to Create a Magnetic Mindset
Always be focused on creating value for your customers.
Simplify the way you think about your business. Don’t overthink it. Don’t over-complicate it.
Never underestimate your competition.
Be exceptionally easy to work with.
Make sure that the other guy wins.
Be consistently excellent. Consistency of performance is the great brand builder.
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“When you say no to the wrong people, it opens up the space for the right people to come in.” -Joe Calloway
This is a guest post by Simone Smith, a writer at Online Courses Australia. She believes that inspiring company culture and work-life balance are keys to success.
Internal Branding Matters
Internal branding refers to the process of providing employees with the training and education they need to support, understand, protect, and advocate for your brand’s mission. A critical part of expanding a successful business is internal branding.
In fact, internal branding should matter to companies of all sizes, from the solo professional to the Fortune 500 company. The reason for this is very basic: If you and your employees can’t fully get behind and believe in your brand, how can you expect complete strangers to become lifelong loyal customers?
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“Strong brands are built on unshakable values and authenticity.” -Simone Smith
Here are some of the key benefits of internal branding for your company:
Develop a relationship between the brand and employees
With internal branding, you are essentially handing your employees the keys to unlocking the secret to the mystery of how they are integral to the overall company mission as well as the vision for the brand. Employees discover how the job they do affects how the brand is viewed by customers.
Develop better relations between coworkers
Shared goals between coworkers are a proven way to bring people together to create a cohesive team. The same can be said for sharing a powerful brand vision. When employees share a strong belief in what they are working toward, productivity and morale go way up. Employees also become more vocal advocates for the brand.
Improve hiring and retention
Believing in the brand’s promise and feeling passionate about being an important member of the team that helps bring that brand’s promise into reality for the customers helps employees remain loyal to the company. When a company gains a reputation for having happy, passionate employees, it is easier to keep people from leaving to explore other opportunities. Likewise, it is so much easier to attract great talent when prospective employees know they will be treated well and enjoy working in an encouraging, community-like atmosphere.
Internal branding builds character within an organization
Strong brands are built on unshakable values and authenticity. When a brand spreads its message and vision internally, employees are encouraged to adopt the same values the company has shown that they prize. This makes it less likely that employees will act in ways that are counter to the brand’s accepted culture and values. This promises a more consistent brand experience for every customer who buys from you.
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“If you and your employees don’t believe in your brand, how can you expect strangers to become lifelong customers?” -Simone Smith
Have you seen something take off and then get consumed with worry about what’s next?
How do we create an encore worthy of that success?
Ken Goldstein’s new book, Endless Encores: Repeating Success Through People, Products, and Profits, tackles the difficult topic of creating continued, repeatable success. His various corporate roles make him uniquely suited to share his perspective on success. Currently, he is Chairman & CEO of SHOP.COM and previously he was Executive VP of Disney Online and Publisher of Broderbund.
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“All success resets expectations for what comes next.” -Ken Goldstein
You wrote a fictional story about a topic that seems to haunt many: repeating success. Why did you choose this topic?
I think there are two challenges that weigh heavily on our minds at work: first, how do we achieve success, and second, once we achieve some success, is that the last success we are going to have? In many senses, the second challenge is much more haunting than the first. When we’re initially trying to break through the noise and get noticed, we have nothing to lose, so our leaning toward risk is high and our openness to the unusual is ungated. We are open to helping others, and we welcome their help because together we are stronger. Once we have a reputation of any kind, fear starts creeping into the mix. No one wants to be a one-hit wonder, but often we become our own worst enemy and unintentionally box ourselves in. We worry about our next thing being compared to our last thing. That worry can filter our creativity, our bias to action, even our kindness toward others as competitiveness takes over. None of that negativity helps us win again at all, it just clouds the way forward. That’s why I chose this topic. So many people I know are consumed by it, overwhelmed by it, and sometimes frozen in place. The colleagues I’ve helped in person in a leadership capacity have continued to move forward with the new, and I thought if I could capture that spirit of innovation in a story with real characters, I could inspire others to keep looking forward and only forward.
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“Leadership is earned and recognized, not granted.” -Ken Goldstein
Why is success difficult to repeat? After all, if you did it once, you can follow the same process . . . or not?
Here’s what I have discovered repeatedly: You can almost never recreate a success, but it is absolutely predictable that you can recreate a failure. That’s why we learn more from failure than we do from success. In failure, we learn what not to do again. It didn’t work, so put that on your list of things you don’t need to try again. In success, if we do the same thing again, or even a modest alteration, we will not create the same inventiveness or excitement that we did with the original. Something can only be unique once, and success is usually unique. That’s why it is so hard to repeat success, because no matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, all that is in the past, and you must start from zero. It’s also why I say you’re not really failing if you’re learning, because the learning is what sends you back to try again. When we embrace the empowerment and humility of starting over, releasing defensiveness and facing the blank canvass with a set of trusted colleagues, we have the best shot at repeat success, which is the same shot we had at first success. Accept that and innovation is all you need to worry about (and that’s plenty).
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“Offer customers more than what they think they want.” -Ken Goldstein
What’s the best way to have a mission that is “more than words”?
When a company’s mission statement is in a binder on the shelf or buried in the company handbook, it’s dead text — it means nothing and empowers no one. Shared values are what drive people to work together and innovate. A set of shared values allows a mission to be more than words, but only if those around us embrace the values with authenticity and conviction. We live in a cynical world where conflicting data and untested opinions are communicated broadly in real time. If we say “our people are our most valuable asset” and then lay off 20% of our staff because of a bad quarter, was that a shared value? If we say, “We cherish integrity here,” and then our CEO resigns for unexplained reasons around a publicly broadcast compensation scandal, what happened to our commitment to integrity? Walk the walk, lead by example, and you can get the people around you to rally to any cause you share, but you must share it as a set of consistent actions (emphasis on “consistent”), not a slogan.
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“Long-term leaders spend the majority of their thinking about talent.” -Ken Goldstein
Dr. Chuck Bamford’s new book, The Strategy Mindset, is a practical guide for creating a corporate strategy. Having read more books on strategy than I can remember, I particularly like this one. As I read the book, there were times I found myself arguing with the author. At other times, I was nodding. Still at other times, I found myself with immediately actionable ideas to improve the process at my own organization. And that’s why I enjoyed the read so much.
I think the most controversial part of his book is likely the myths section, where he takes apart existing myths of corporate strategy.
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“Strategy is about making decisions that will impact the company in the future.” -Chuck Bamford
First, you say that people are not a competitive advantage. You argue that almost all employees are interchangeable. Good employees are just “table stakes.” Is it not possible to have employees who, on average, are better than the competition?
It flies in the face of so many beliefs that it is just hard to accept. Employees are VERY important as the way that business delivers to customers. However, the moment that you actually believe that your employees are smarter than your competitors’ is the moment that your competitors will start beating you in the market. You have the same (or relatively the same) collection of amazing employees, capable employees, and poor employees as your competitors. All the HR processes in the world today have not changed that dynamic in companies. The employees that you have working in your company are a combination of luck (the biggest factor), HR practices, networking, and did I mention luck!
I’m not trying to be divisive here, but most of your customers do not generally care (or if they care at all, it is slight) who takes care of their business needs as long as the needs are taken care of. This does not apply to every employee in a company, just most. At every company I have ever worked with or for, there is a contingent of “franchise” employees. Those are employees who, if they left the company, would impact the success of that company quite substantially. We all know who these folks are, and if executives are smart, they take care of these employees to ensure that they stay with the organization. These “franchise” employees are not just the customer-facing employees; they reside throughout an organization.
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“Employees are not your competitive advantage.” -Chuck Bamford
Second, you are not a fan of the SWOT. What’s wrong with the way most organizations use it?
SWOT is the single biggest impediment to doing real strategy that exists, and it exists because certain big consulting firms continue to use it with their clients, and it makes clients “feel good” without really having to do strategy.
SWOT was an attempt to bring some structure to the topic, and as a conceptual approach, it is still fairly robust. Unfortunately, many authors, academics, and practitioners decided that SWOT was an analysis tool and a means for a company to develop its strategy. SWOT is NOT strategy, and it is not an analysis tool.
Anyone can create a SWOT. It is grounded in your own biases and view of the world. In the end, a SWOT is simply the opinion of the person or group filling it out.
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“SWOT is the single biggest impediment to doing real strategy.” -Chuck Bamford
Copyright John Patrick, Used by Permission
