All For You by Brian Keith

Southwest Airlines blogged a list of things to do to prepare yourself for becoming a flight attendant.

The post is not laugh-out-loud funny, at least not to me, but it speaks to me that a large company like Southwest is willing to poke fun at itself.

You will be hearing soon about how we made a big mistake with a client’s email list, and then turned it into the most profitable event in their history. People make mistakes. That is okay. As long as you fix it and don’t do it again.

3 steps to being human:

1. This week, admit a mistake to a client, a coworker, your boss, whoever. Not something big and fancy. Just a “yeah, I could have done that better.” It helps keep the ego at bay.

2. Discuss your limitations with someone. Talk about how you can team up with people to achieve what you can’t do alone because you are limited. Don’t wait for others to ask for help. Admitting that you need help can make it easier for others to ask for help.

3. Tell someone you appreciate them. Not with any motive in mind, just to say thanks.

“No matter how hard you work, there is no guarantee of anything. There is no guarantee of a job in the months ahead, no firm placement of a where your office may be, and certainly no perks that established companies have.” - Andy on creating value in a startup

Today it snowed here in Seattle. So much that only about one third of our people could make it to the office, with most of the rest working from home. I assumed that my team would be here today so we could work together on a project.

Some people call this assumicide. What if it snows? What if your best client goes bankrupt? What if your best employee is not available? Can you still deliver value?

I work in a small, very fast-moving company. So what Andy says in his post resonates with me. But I have a hell of a lot to learn about not just knowing that their are no guarantees, but planning ahead with that in mind. And the better I get at that, the better I will serve my clients, my coworkers and my boss.

Bob Parsons build GoDaddy.com, which claims to have more domain names under management than any other company in the world.

A week ago he talked about Rockefeller and Business Intelligence, making the point that one of the practices that made Rockefeller so successful, namely measuring everything, is now easy for any business to do.

How much do you measure? How much is the average visitor to your site worth? Install Google analytics. Count how many visitors you have to your site in December. Count your online revenue for December. Now you know what the average visitor is worth.

No, it is not always that easy, but getting ballpark numbers often is. And Parsons tells you about how those numbers can help you make better business decisions.

Read the Parsons article

1. You smiled when you saw me coming.
2. You looked me in the eye.

Read all 16

Cassin New York is launching soon.

So it strikes me. I am writing all these posts about how to get high in google. And my last post, I tagged Cassin.

So if those tags worked, then I should be promoting clients the same way, right?

Let’s see how well this works when I am promoting an actual client.

Leo Bottary writes a blog called Client Service Insights, and his #1 insight is “Insight #1 - Client service excellence isn’t about doing the things no one else can do; it’s about doing the things anyone can do, but just don’t.”

Today I just found out how true that is.

A month ago, we put up an under construction page for a client, whose site is launching next week. Take a look. Nothing fancy.

That nothing fancy page has gathered a large number of names and emails of people who want to hear about Cassin and when the new site launches.

Seth Godin keeps on saying that you just have to let people raise their hands and tell you that they want to hear from you.

Now, when the site launches, we will have a large number of people to inform. And you can bet that email will have a link to tell a friend.

The client did not ask for anything other than your usual under construction page. We were doing the newsletter anyway for the main site, so as an afterthought, we threw the signup form into the under construction page.

Andres has started to tell the story, so I better get my basic version out fast.

Andres had an idea to pay a lot of money ($600 was a lot at the time) to put a picture of Waldo on a website. That sold ads.

I told him a couple of good reasons why it was a dumb idea.

He answered them, I thought about it for a few minutes, walked to the ATM, and got $300 out to buy my equal share of the business (Andres had the idea but not the funds).

Two and a half months later, we sold the site for $800, so we each made a bit of money, and a great story to tell to friends, future employers, family members, and anyone who cared to listen.

We will get more into the details later.

Andres has now joined the blogosphere.

What he is going to talk about, not sure yet. But code, and web concepts like how to get good domains, and mySQL things I know nothing about.

But he has started to speak. And that is the beginning.

Look soon to see a recounting of his and my exploits as business partners when we put Waldo on the Million Dollar Homepage.

Used to be, back when I was a youngin’, you could call someone, meet them in person, email them, or fax them. Or ask someone you knew to do any of those.

There are some rules of etiquette for all that. As in, don’t call someone you don’t know and try to pitch your product. Yes, there is an industry built around doing just that, but as a person in business, I try to shy away. No spam.

I do occasionally cold-email someone, but I don’t just say “hire us” or “hire me” unless I think I have some connection with them and some value to offer them.

Enter blogs. Now, in order to put a friend in touch with a guy I know only through blogs, I made a post giving my friend’s email address and linking to Jeremiah.

Now I know Jeremiah would see that link and check out the post immediately.

I would probably not have emailed Jeremiah and said, talk to my friend. It clashes a bit with my sense of being polite, and seems a bit too much like spam.

But by linking to someone who I know looks at all incoming links, isn’t that the same thing as emailing him?

I am on uncertain ground here. Anyone care to provide some direction?

Andres wants to meet Jeremiah.

Andres had the idea for us to put Waldo on the Million Dollar Homepage and works on techie stuff that I am not quite competent to understand. We were buddies in school and I still talk to him more than I talk to my mom (sorry, mom).