Business inspiration

The Place Where the Magic Happens

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In any kind of creative endeavor, there’s a place where the magic happens. When you hit that place, your work flows effortlessly, and your business can even become sublime. That’s the magic that we’re aiming for whenever we tackle a new project.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you about magic. Specifically, the magic that happens when you have a team that’s working on a project and things just start clicking. They start firing in unison, and the work just begins to flow. There’s a place where this magic happens, and it’s much more than the mechanical execution of the required steps. This kind of magic happens in music. It happens in coaching. It happens in sports. It can happen in your business. It can even happen with a good web design team.

If you were to describe a concert that you went to, you could talk about what all the people are doing individually. One person is rubbing some steel strings with a plastic pick, and another one is banging on a membrane with a stick. Another person might be making noise into a microphone. All true, but yet far from the truth. The elements involved in performing bad music are about the same as the elements in performing great music. But they’re so different! And that difference is the magic that I’m talking about.

That magic comes when everybody not only knows their job, but when there’s a kind of a connection between all the members of the team, between all the members of a band, or all the members of a sports team, or even between a coach and his client. You see, the magic is some kind of flow that begins to happen when everybody is doing a great job, and they’re doing it together.

We’ve all seen this happen in music. We’ve seen a choir or a band or orchestra come together and perform amazing, stunning music that is much more than the sum of the parts, and is much, much more than the execution of notes on the page with the instruments. You see this happen in sports. When a team comes together they can be a group of okay players, or they can be a group of great players. Or, there’s something more than a group of great players, and that is a great team. A great team functions as something that is much more than the sum of the parts.

When I was a kid I always liked watching the Globetrotters games on TV. The Harlem Globetrotters are a basketball team, and you can just see the connection that they have between them as they’re playing basketball. It’s almost like watching a dance, the way that they pass the ball around to each other and coordinate together, and each one knows where the other one’s going to be in the next move. And that is the magic that I’m talking about.

I see this in the business workplace as well. When I’m working with some of my coaching clients, that’s really what we’re going for. The coaching is not about me having some expertise that I can pass on, or some wisdom and knowledge that I can teach people, but rather it’s when my client and I get together and both of us come with an open mind and an open heart and an open inquiry, and we talk about some of their business challenges and goals and issues. And somehow in that discussion, many times it just starts clicking, and the magic comes out, and all of a sudden the ideas begin to flow, and together we come up with these amazing ideas that move the business forward and take it to a whole other level. And those ideas would never have come out of one person by themselves, but rather it’s the magic that takes place in that coaching conversation.

I see this happen in a number of small businesses that I work with. When you get the right team members in place, the right leadership, when you get the right mission and everybody’s clear and on board, and you get the right people and they’re trained, and they start clicking?my goodness! The result is so much more than the sum of the parts. And the business just seems like it flows effortlessly, and it’s even fun for people to come to work because of the team and the spirit and the camaraderie that taking place in the business.

We have the same thing happen when we approach a custom web design project. Good web design is comprised of a number of different disciplines and elements. It includes good communication verbally. It includes good strategy. It includes user interface design and really understanding the mindset of the ideal customer and how they’ll interface with the website. It involves a lot of technical knowledge of hosting and search engine optimization. It involves a lot of visual design skills and communicating things visually. And it involves coding?often in several different coding languages to make the website work right.

And those are not things that any one person is going to be good at across the board. So a really well-designed website is almost done by a team by definition. I’ve seen it happen where you pull together a good coder and a good writer and a good designer and a good SEO person and even a project manager, and somehow that team just doesn’t quite click. So there are all the elements, and each of the elements is done well. But somehow the end result is at best the sum of the parts. But I’ve also worked on many projects with a team at my company where everybody not only knows their business and is really, really good at it, but they really understand the team and how the team is going to function. And when we get into the project, and we bring the client into the team and make them part of the team, things just begin to click. And it just begins to flow, and all of a sudden the magic happens. And we see people getting excited about the website and how it communicates and how it connects with them personally and emotionally. And that’s the kind of magic that can also connect with a client.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

The Place Where the Magic Happens

Twice for Transformation

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I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.
– Bruce Lee

The first time I read something I can get some good information. The second time I read it, it starts to sink in and transformation takes place. The third time I read it, it starts to crystallize inside me.

Once for information.

Twice for transformation.

Three times for crystallization.

There’s a fallacy that growth, forward progress and success is about getting more information. If I just read enough books, go to enough seminars, listen to enough audios, watch the right videos, then I’ll get the information that I need to be successful.

That’s why the self-help industry, and the info-marketers in particular, are making billions of dollars. People go from one how-to system to another, from one seminar to another, from one home study course to another, looking for the magic information bullet.

It doesn’t work that way. It’s not about information. If information worked to change our lives, we’d all be beautiful, healthy, thin, rich and popular. Transformation starts to take place the second time you go through the material. And the real shifts happen on the third and fourth time through, as you are practicing what you learn.

As Bruce Lee said, the formidable opponent is not the one who has learned 10,000 kicks. It’s the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

You don’t need to read 10 sales books to be successful in sales. You don’t even need to read everything in one book. You can take one chapter and practice it over and over until you become formidable.

Sometimes in my emails, I’m sending out what is (hopefully) good information. But often I’m focused on creating distinctions. Distinctions are the insights that come, the things that you see that you can’t unsee. Like how gravity works. If you let go of a book, it’s going to fall. You don’t know it because you learned that as a fact in school; you know it because you’ve seen how gravity works and you’ve internalized it as part of your reality. Believe it or not, before Galileo, people didn’t understand quite how gravity worked. But after Galileo showed them, they saw it and it couldn’t be unseen.

So if you read something to help you with your business, read it from a different place. Create a space in your reading where insights can come and “ahas” can happen. Slow down. If something moves you, read it again. Then again. And practice and apply what you read. Because otherwise it’s just information.

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

Antifragile

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We hear a lot about resilience. People talk about being okay in spite of circumstances. And we’ve all experienced the opposite, being hurt by something that happened to us, either physically or psychologically.

But there’s a third state of being that we all have access to that may benefit us even more.

The scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this third state of being in his book Antifragile. He observed that there are things which are easily broken (fragile), and things which are not easily broken (resiliant). He coined the word antifragile to describe things which are made stronger by volatility, stress and adversity.

There are materials that illustrate this. Glass is robust up to a certain point, but then it shatters with the right amount of stress in a sudden shock. Brass is fairly resilient. You can drop it, step on it or throw it and it will not shatter. But a bicycle frame made out of carbon nanotubes actually gets stronger when you pound on it. Instead of labeling, “Fragile. Handle with care,” you could label the antifragile package, “Benefits from shock.”

A fire is also a good illustration. A candle is fragile, and is easily blown out by a slight breath. A blow torch is resilient. It is not easily blown out, even in very windy conditions. But a forest fire is antifragile. The more you blow on it, the hotter it burns. If you throw logs in front of a forest fire to try to stop it, you only feed the fire.

Our bodies are mostly antifragile. Without stress, our muscles and bones become weak. Stress, resistance and a constantly changing outward environment is what makes us stronger (within reason of course).

What we don’t realize is that fragility, resilience and antifragility are also emotional states that we can choose in response to any situation. Say something bad about me, and I could crumble (fragile), or I may not care (resilient). Or I may decide to work harder to prove you wrong (antifragile).

The more I am conscious of this choice that I have, the better my life will be. In my life, at any given moment there are things that I am upset about (fragile), things that I am indifferent to (resilient), and things that have me upping my game (antifragile).

We love movies about antifragile people. Rocky. Rudy. Remember the Titans. How much more powerful we will be in our business and in our daily lives when we choose to live the same way. Antifragile is a place to come from, in the way we work, in the way we interact with people. Put a label on yourself, “Benefits from shock,” or, “Benefits from adversity.” Be the kite that rises against the wind.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Antifragile

Wealth Comes from Service

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A lot of people have the misconception that wealth is things and comes from having things. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, wealth comes from service. Put another way, wealth comes from our relationships with other people.

Here’s a brief thought experiment inspired by the work of Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Imagine that everyone in the world has made you their heir, and then suddenly everyone dies. You are now the owner of trillions upon trillions of dollars. You own all of the gold in the world, all of the silver in the world, even all of the banks in the world. Every car, every private jet, every yacht, and every expensive toy on the planet belongs to you. You own all of the world’s real estate, including every high-rent office building in every city on the planet.

But all of your gold, silver and cash cannot buy you anything. There are no new goods being produced, and no one to hire to provide you with any service. There is no pilot to fly your private jet, and no one running the oil refineries to produce fuel for your jets, yachts, boats and cars. There is no one to maintain the roads. Your high-rises are worthless because there is no one to rent anything, and there is no one who will maintain them for you.

The toys are fun (for a few days), but lose their appeal quickly because there is no one to enjoy them with. The worst part is that the tens of thousands of people who used to labor to provide you with groceries, electricity, running water, medical care, and everything else that made your life comfortable are now no longer available. You are quickly reduced to eking out a subsistence living as a hunter/gatherer in a decaying landscape. And the purpose you used to find in your life via your career, your family and the communities you served no longer exists.

None of the things that you own provide any real wealth. So we confused cause and effect. Real wealth results in having things, but having things is not wealth. True wealth comes from serving others and being served by others.

In sales and in business, it’s also easy to confuse this cause and effect. Success in sales and business IS a matter of serving others, and is its own reward; the tangible rewards that come later are the effect of that service.

Every day in driving to and from my office through the Denver Tech Center, I pass billions of dollars worth of property — more wealth than I could ever need or use in a lifetime. And yet none of that has any meaning apart from the people that I am also surrounded by — and that I am put on the planet to serve.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Wealth Comes from Service

A better chocolate cake

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Imagine for a moment that you’ve been working at becoming a good pastry chef. Every day for the last week you’ve made a chocolate cake. But each time, the cake looks flat and tastes horrible.

To fix it, you might work hard on your technique. How you whisk the batter, how you crack the eggs, mixing the dry ingredients before adding the wet, etc., but nothing seems to produce any better results. Finally, you give up in failure thinking, “I’m just not meant to be a cook.”

Then a friend stops by and looks at your recipe. Somehow the recipe you’ve been following calls for a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar instead of a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. No wonder the cake turns out horrible! The problem is not you; it’s not your technique, and it’s not your oven. You’ve been working off of a bad recipe!

This happens to a lot of people when they build a website. There’s a lot of misinformation about how the process actually works. So many people are following a bad recipe. But they blame themselves for the result. It’s frustrating and demeaning. I think websites just don’t work in my industry. I’m a failure. I’m really bad at getting what I need in a website. I should just focus on networking or direct mail.

But if we see that it’s the recipe that’s at fault, we can let go of all our stories of failure.

I can tell myself the story that I’m a bad cook, or I can throw away my entire history of cake failure and simply upgrade the recipe. Your technique can be perfect, but if your recipe is wrong you’re going to fail every time.

We have a recipe that works for building an effective website. Without a good recipe, you might think that you’re just not cut out to have a good website. But having the right recipe makes all the difference in the world. If your website has never worked as well as you want it to, and you’re open to trying a new approach, send me an email and let’s talk.

Are You a Local Business?

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One of the biggest marketing opportunities that has been created in a long time is Google’s implementation of localized search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very competitive process. In the past, a small local business did not have the resources to compete in SEO on a national scale with tens of thousands of businesses. Now, the market a local business is competing with has been reduced to hundreds, and in some cases, even a small handful of businesses. And since most small businesses are not doing their SEO right, anyone who does stands to benefit a lot.

In a national SEO campaign, a $10,000 investment can be a drop in the bucket, unless you’re in a small niche market. But in a local SEO campaign, it is not unusual for my clients to generate $150,000 or more in new business on a $10,000 SEO investment. That has enabled some of my clients to double, triple or quadruple their business on a small marketing investment.

To benefit from a local SEO campaign, you need to (1) be a local business, (2) have people searching for you, (3) be able to handle a lot of growth, and (4) provide good service.

So how do you know if you’re a local business? The biggest indicator is the presence of a small map in Google search results. If you type the word “dentist” into Google, you will probably see paid ads at the top of the page, then a map showing dentists near you, then a number of website listings, most of which are for local dentists nearby. That is because Google has determined that most people searching for “dentist” are probably looking for a service provider. And if I live in Denver, seeing a list of dentists in California is not going to help me.

However, if your business is helping dentists manage their practices, Google does not consider that a local business (even if you work only with local dentists). Try typing “dental practice manager” into the search engine and see what comes up. Most likely, no local consultants are there in the search results.

There is a very long list of what Google considers “local” businesses, but some of the obvious candidates are dentist, doctor, chiropractor, veterinarian, home health, electrician, plumber, HVAC, roofer, home builder, painter, handyman, restaurant, florist, hardware store, financial planner, real estate broker, insurance agent, etc.

Next, to benefit from a local SEO campaign, you need to have people searching for you. In my immediate neighborhood, there are 300 searches per day for a massage therapist, 130 searches per day for a dentist, but only 3 searches per week for a salt spa. Here are some additional search stats for my local area:

Chiropractor ~ 49/day
Dentist ~ 130/da
Veterinarian ~ 112/da
Home health ~ 11/da
Plumber ~ 670/da
Electrician ~ 376/day
Roofer ~ 83/day (but very seasonal)
Handyman ~ 31/day
Massage therapist ~ 300/day
Spa ~ 243/day
Real estate broker ~ 476/day
Mortgage broker ~ 32/day
Insurance broker ~ 67/day
Business bank ~ 30/day
Financial planner ~ 15/day
Naturopath ~ 18/day
Professional organizer ~ 3/day
Salt spa ~ 10/month

In fact, during the time you are reading this post, in my area alone there have been close to 20 searches for the service providers listed above. And I haven’t included restaurants, for which there are about 60,000 searches per day in the Denver metro area.

Also, to benefit from a local SEO campaign, you have to be able to handle growth. I have a friend who owns a chain of restaurants. Right now, his restaurants are busy and he has his hands full just keeping them staffed. If I doubled the number of people walking through his door it would cause all kinds of problems for him. I also know a plumber who works alone. If he got 8 extra calls for service per day, he wouldn’t be able to reach all the people. Many companies are in the same position. But a local business that has adequate staff and is hungry for growth could get huge benefits from a local SEO campaign.

Finally, to benefit from a local SEO campaign, you need to provide good service. Local SEO makes your company very visible online, and online reviews and reputation are a significant factor. If you have a constant string of customer complaints, your local SEO campaign will make that more visible. If your customers love you, your local SEO campaign will make that more visible.

If you are a local business, have people searching for you, have capacity for growth, and provide good service, then local SEO may be an excellent investment for your business. If you know someone in this category, give them a Christmas present and share this post with them to let them know about this opportunity.