Make Their Day

On a dreary November morning, my friend and I walked from our Dublin hotel to the bus stop. An elderly man was waiting there so I asked him which bus we needed to take and what the fare would be. “Do we need the exact change?” I asked. He nodded and we began scouring  our wallets looking for coins, but neither of us had enough money for the fare. The man reached in his pocket and pulled out a pile of coins which he held out to us saying, “Ladies in distress are my specialty.”  If the sun had suddenly made an appearance, I don’t think it would have made us any happier than this unexpected act of kindness had. 

 

What do you think might happen to a business that was committed to making everyone’s day a little bit nicer? One business found out.

 

Several years ago, the owner of Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market set a goal to become a world famous business. He decided that in order to reach this exalted status, he and his staff would master four unorthodox principles which included  Play, Be There, Make Their Day and Choose Your Attitude. The silliness and showmanship that resulted from this policy attracted huge crowds and impressive sales.

 

One day a Minnesota filmmaker happened by the market and was mesmerized by the energy  in this unlikely place. He got the idea to film them in action and have them talk about how they ran their business. That film turned into an enormously popular training film that companies around the world are using to inspire their employees. Several books explaining the simple Fish Philosophy have reached bestseller status. The Pike Place Fish Market isn’t only world famous; it’s a role model for running a joyful business.

  

Making someone’s day doesn’t require grandiose actions, but it does require being attentive to little things that can make life more pleasant or memorable. Any business can find endless ways to do this.

 

When my daughter Jennifer was in college, she worked at a variety of jobs including being a parking lot attendant, a job I considered somewhat dangerous because these booths were often the target of robbers. She refused to give it up because it allowed her to get in a lot of study time.

 

One evening a man drove up and asked if he might park in the lot for just ten minutes without paying. Although it was strictly against policy, he was so polite that she gave him permission to do so.When he left, he thanked her and said, “You must get hungry working here,” and drove off. He returned a few minutes later with a dinner of curried chicken, fried rice and a fortune cookie. Jennie was astonished by his kindness and accepted the meal with her thanks and a handshake. 

 

She never saw him again, but he left a deep impression on her. When she called to tell me what had happened, she said, “Now I want to go do something nice for a total stranger.” It may have been the best lesson she learned in college.

 

Start thinking of ways you could delight the people who support your work and then do something about it. A Japanese  proverb says, “One kind word can warm three winter months.” Don’t underestimate the power of this simple idea. The Fish Guys support you in doing so.

Lessons in Doing More With Less

As fascinated as I was by Paul Hawken’s The Magic of Findhorn, I had no idea when I read Hawken’s early book that he would become one of my favorite entrepreneurial gurus. That didn’t happen until I stumbled upon his 17-part PBS series, Growing a Business. Sometime in the late 1980s this visionary program became a Saturday afternoon ritual for me and my friend Chris, who would call from Connecticut to discuss the latest installment and what we’d learned. The series, written and produced by Hawken, introduced us to all sorts of innovative entrepreneurs including Ben and Jerry and Yvon Chouinard. We were dazzled. The companion book for that series remains one of my all-time favorite books on creating a business that’s an extension of who you are and what you value.

 

Hawken, best known as the co-founder of Smith & Hawken, the mail order gardening tools company, was an early player in the natural food industry, opening a store in Boston when he was barely out of his teens. Today, he spends his time writing and speaking about the responsibility of business in caring for the environment. His book The Ecology of Commerce is a popular textbook in colleges around the country.

 

But the advice Hawken dispenses is in sharp contrast to much of the business writing out there.  He says, “When I started the natural food business in Boston, my knowledge was scant. I did the best i could and began reading everything I could lay my hands on…The more I searched, the more confused I became. I began to doubt that I was in business at all. I seemed to be doing something entirely different. I get that same feeling today when I read most of the standard business literature. I believe that most people in new businesses, and some in not-so-new businesses, have the same problem. They don’t feel connected to the conventional wisdom…as if a small business is just a flake chipped off the larger corporate world.”

 

When it comes to entrepreneurial advice, Hawken is a vocal advocate for bootstrapping and believes that hands-on learning is one of the great gifts of operating on a shoestring. Here’s an example of how Smith & Hawken put those ideas into practice. Hawken writes:

 

We did it ourselves or not at all. I never thought much about this in-house advantage until 1985, when a friend launched a new catalog company. He started with an initial mailing of 500,000 catalogs (our first effort had been 487), which he hired a large company in Dallas to create. My friend and I were having lunch when the subject of production costs came up. I asked him how much he spent and he replied nearly $100,000 for production alone. He noticed me choking on my dim sum and he asked how much my last catalog had cost (by this time Smith & Hawken was up to about 1 million circulation). I suggested we break the costs down.

 

His photography cost $25,000. Ours cost $4,000.

His copywriting costs $12,000. I did all of ours.

His layout and design team ran $25,000. Our in-house labor came to $6,000.

He paid $15,000 for typography. We paid $2,700.

He paid $5,000 for a stylist. I asked who or what that was.

He paid $82,000 in total. Our catalog cost us $12,700 for the same number of products and pages.

 

It’s not coincidental that my friend’s company is not in business today. He got further faster in the beginning because he had more money to spend, but he thereby forfeited a critical amount of self-education and development.

Not Just Another Boring Hotel

The biggest surprise of my life is how many beds I’ve slept in. It just didn’t enter my mind that satisfying my wanderlust would mean staying in hundreds of hotel rooms. While I’m hardly an expert on hotels, I do know that most of them are so similar that I don’t remember much about them. 

That all changed when I had a hotel experience that was so extraordinary, that I couldn’t wait to return. I was doing a seminar series in Sacramento and learned that the hotel I’d stayed at in the past was under new ownership and had a new name, Larkspur Landing. I assumed the name change was the only difference. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Even though major construction was taking place, there were  little signs of change all around. A table in the entryway had perpetual coffee, tea and other hot drinks plus a heaping bowl of fresh fruit. Hot-from-the-oven cookies were added every evening. In the rooms, which all had a small kitchen, I found Starbucks coffee, bottled water and a packet of microwave popcorn—all without the exorbitant charges attached that you find in most hotels.  What really captivated me, however, was the Larkspur Library where you could borrow books, DVDs, CDs, and (my favorite) board games.

There were plenty of other amenities, too, including  an exercise room, a laundry, vending machines with foods that were not junky, and free wireless service. Since they were still remodeling, they hadn’t gotten to  the fabulous mattresses and pillows that are part of the Larkspur furnishings. 

 

On a return visit, after the remodeling crew was long gone, I was charmed by their lobby which looked nothing like those in other hotels. Instead, the space adjacent to the front desk looked like a living room in a lovely  Arts and Crafts home. The centerpiece was a fireplace with bookshelves on either side. Seating was arranged for conversation—or daydreaming. 

This was all accomplished without charging any more than an ordinary hotel. I loved being there and noticed the staff and the guests were all smiling alot. 

I’ve been musing about how this hotel came to be so memorable and I’ve come up with a theory. Instead of simply copying how other hotels do things, I suspect that someone decided to create a hotel where they’d actually enjoy staying at themselves. As a result this attention to small details makes something ordinary into an extraordinary experience for Larkspur’s guests. 

 

The Pleasure of Their Company

 

Ever since I connected with them on Twitter, I’ve been a big fan of Flashlight Worthy Books, a Web site that makes recommendations on all sorts of books both old and new. Since they also invite experts to create reading lists, I submitted a list of books with the title The Art of Being an Entrepreneur.

  

It finally posted today and here’s how FLW announced it on Twitter: Stop laboring for someone else this Labor Day Weekend. Use these books to become an entrepreneur. 

 

Check it out. You’re bound to find a title or two worth adding to your personal library.

Everyday Lessons in Being an Entrepreneur

Hardly a day passes when I don’t hear from someone telling me that they’d like to start a business but have no idea how to go about it. I have to assume that they have done no investigating on their own. Had they looked, they would find an abundance of useful information. Besides books, seminars and teleclasses, the Internet is loaded. But there’s an even bigger source of information and unless you’re a hermit living in the woods and eating roots and berries, you’re in touch with it all day, every day.

 

Even if you aren’t a big consumer, you can hardly function without encountering all sorts of businesses and all sorts of people in charge of operating those businesses. Some of the most valuable things you can learn about running a business can come from paying attention to the role models around us. As a customer, what delights you? What makes you grit your teeth? 

 

Just this morning, I made three phone calls to different businesses and each experience was unique. The first was to my oral surgeon with a question about a problem I was having with my recent surgery. The woman answering the phone excused herself to consult with a surgical assistant and promptly returned with an answer–and some additional encouragement. 

 

The second was to my publisher to order more books. Unfortunately, the young man on the phone seemed totally lacking in people skills. I assume he got the details of my order entered properly in the computer, but he certainly didn’t make any effort to make me feel that my call mattered to him. Guess they hadn’t pointed out to him that authors pay his salary. 

 

Then there was the third call, the one that reminded me of everything I hate about large companies and their automated phone systems. I needed to order checks and wanted to get the same ones I’d been using. I called the company’s 800 number and had to wade through several different departments, each pitching another product to add to my order.

 

When I eventually reached a live person, our transaction was loaded with more upselling. After she had located my account in the computer, I told her I wanted to order two boxes of the same style. She figured up the total and when I expressed surprise at the amount she said, “Well, you haven’t ordered for two years so the prices have gone up.” Then she assured me that she could save me some money if I doubled my order to four boxes. I declined. When I finally hung up the phone, I felt like I’d just walked through a maze.

 

In my Las Vegas seminars, I include an exercise that involves sending small teams of participants to different hotels on the first night of our event. Their assignment is to study the hotel as if they were an anthropologist, making a scientific study of the customs and attitudes of the business. Who is the hotel’s ideal customer? How do they communicate who they want as their customer? How does the staff treat those customers? What are their different profit centers? 

 

The teams report back the next morning and they always have stories to tell about what they’ve discovered. I suggest that they make it a habit to assume the role of entrepreneurial anthropologist as they go about their their normal lives, noticing what they like, what they’d like to incorporate in their own businesses, what they wish to avoid. I highly recommend it as part of your own joyfully jobless curriculum.

 

This month, I’ll be sharing stories about businesses big and small that have added pleasure to my life as a client or customer–and a few who have added pain. Of course, these examples will be filtered through my own personal preferences, but I’ll do my best to keep my anthropologist’s hat on and tell these stories in the hope that we’ll all learn a little more about building a better business simply by paying attention.