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Author: Phil Wrzesinski

Lesson #1 Raw Ingredients – Excerpt from Hiring & The Potter’s Wheel

(Here is another excerpt from the book Hiring and the Potter’s Wheel: Turning Your Staff Into a Work of Art)

Chapter 4 Lesson #1 Raw Ingredients
“The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.” – William Temple, Sr.

Mary arrived at the deli early and sat at the same table she and Dr. Scott had shared last week. She had worked herself up to really let Dr. Scott have it when he arrived. But as he walked through the door, seeing Mary already seated, Dr. Scott waved in her direction and exclaimed with a broad grin, “Wasn’t that fun? I just love digging my hands through clay. Forget pottery, I could just play in the mud and be happy.”

Dr. Scott’s outburst disarmed Mary, but she gathered herself enough to respond, “Sure it was fun, but I didn’t learn a thing about human resources, and I still don’t have a plan for how I’m going to be successful hiring twenty new people. I think you set me up just to fill up your brother’s class. You owe me for that.”

Dr. Scott could see Mary was upset, but he peered over his glasses and started in, “Mary, you can…”

“Stop, I know what you’re going to say. I can do better,” Mary replied. “Don’t go there right now. I’m not happy about all this. I’ve got this job to do and you’re toying with me.”

“Okay,” he said. “I probably should have warned you about my brother. But he is a great teacher, and I stand behind what I said about this class being the best program on human resources.

“Tell me, Mary, what did you learn last night?”

“I learned about clay. Not people, just clay.”

“But what did you learn about clay?”

“That there are three main types of clay, and you must choose the right raw ingredients to get the right final product, otherwise your pottery will be flawed before you even start.”

A thought hit Mary… the right raw ingredients. It dawned on her. Yes, that’s it! It was there all along. You have to have the right raw ingredients before you even start.

Dr. Scott could see Mary’s face dawning with realization. “Something’s coming to you, isn’t it?” he said with a grin.

“It’s all about the raw ingredients. If I want to find the right twenty people for the job, I have to know what raw ingredients I’ll need. Otherwise, I may pick people without those ingredients and they’ll be flawed at best.”

Dr. Scott smiled with approval. “I always said you were one of the smart ones. You are absolutely right. It’s all about starting with the right materials. You have to identify the right traits your potential applicants should have. So, the next step… how are you going to do that?”

Mary thought for a moment. “I’ll need to make a list of all the traits the perfect person would have for the job.”

“And what else?”

“What else? Isn’t that it?”

“You did say there would be a training program, right?”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“What will you teach in that program?”

“Oh, I get it. I need a list of traits or skills that will not be taught in the training. Sort of the… uhh… ‘non-teachable’ traits.” Mary thought further. “I know. I’ll make a complete list of traits and break them down into two lists, non-teachable and teachable. Then I’ll know first, what I’m looking for and second, what we’ll be training.

“Dr. Scott, I must apologize. I take back all the mean thoughts I’ve had about you since last night. This is great. I feel so much better about this.”

“One more thing,” Dr. Scott added. “After you make your list of traits, draw up a list of questions for the interview that will help you identify if the applicant has those traits. You have to have some means to truly find out if your applicants have what you want. If you need, you can email your list of traits and questions to me for review. Maybe that will make up for the little deception you feel I played on you,” he added with a slight grin.

Lunch was served and Mary spent her meal making mental notes of how to get her staff to brainstorm a list of teachable and non-teachable traits. Mary was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t notice that Dr. Scott had already paid the bill and was ready to leave.

“Have fun Wednesday night,” Dr. Scott said as he departed. Do you want to meet again Thursday?”

Mary was so excited about her new discovery she had forgotten about the next pottery class. “Sure, I’d love to meet Thursday. But this time I’m paying.”

“Deal.”

Mary felt like skipping back to her office. The rest of the day she and her staff interviewed the current sales reps trying to identify all of the traits necessary to be successful in that position. By the end of the day Wednesday, they had their list, and Mary had the start of her plan.

Here is what people are saying about the book…

“Phil, Just finished reading your book, and I loved it! Perfect length. Easy to follow. Beautifully written. Seriously, pulling off dialogue like that is incredibly difficult to do, and it deepens one’s understanding and appreciation for the lessons you taught. The topology between hiring and pottery was spot on. I’ve done a poor job of hiring employees in the past, and really wish I had this step-by-step process when I owned my retail business years ago. I especially like the tip about giving new employees a safe place to practice their new skills. How true!” Tom Wanek – Marketing Beyond Advertising

“Just finished your book and loved it. A very easy read with a format that will be helpful to many small business owners as it follows a story line with a company in need of hiring fast and hiring right. You take it one step further though and stress the importance of integrating the new employees correctly. I especially love your tying the job to specifics found in the job description and by interviewing the hiring manager to formulate interview questions as well as your stressing having a set process to follow when hiring since all of us HR types understand the importance of following a consistent process too.” Karla Dobbeck, PHR – President, Human Resource Techniques, Inc.

Get your copy of the book today!

-Phil

Seasonal Hiring

I admire Doug Fleener. I follow his blog. I get his daily email full of great advice for retailers.

Recently he sent an email about hiring seasonal employees. I’ll recap some of his main tips here:

  • Hire a Specialist – someone just to do one task rather than a jack of all trades – much easier to train
  • Hire a Customer – she already knows your business to some degree
  • Don’t Compromise Your Standards – a poor employee does more harm than no employee
  • Recruit Former Employees – some of your good people have moved on, but might have a few hours to give you around the holidays

To that I would add one important point…

Hire Personality, not Experience
Experience does not necessarily mean “good with people”. And experience at a national chain is not the kind of experience you want, anyway. Unless that experience is specifically with your store, experience may be as much a hindrance as a help. You can expend more energy untraining than you do training.

When you hire someone who is truly friendly, caring and helpful, they will learn your way of doing things more quickly. They will treat your customers the right way. They will treat their co-workers better. They will find solutions. In short, even when they don’t know exactly what to do, they will do it in a way that makes the customer happy. An occasional incompetence is a lot easier to swallow when a friendly, engaging person makes a mistake, a lot harder when done by someone with an attitude of indifference.

Everyone wants their seasonal staff to perform at the same level as their full-timers. Your best chance starts with hiring the right personality for the job. Everything else you can teach.

-Phil

For more tips on hiring and training get the book that one MBA and HR professional said,

“It is frankly one of the better business books I have read (and I have read quite a number!)”

Hiring and the Potter’s Wheel: Turning Your Staff Into a Work of Art

Sleep is the Great Eraser of the Mind

Note: Most of the stuff in this post I learned from Roy H. Williams. Please forgive me for stealing.

Okay, you’ve made one point, spoke to the heart, made it relevant, and didn’t look or sound like an ad. Yet, the needle isn’t moving. No one is remembering your message, let alone acting upon it. Why not?

Sleep.

Three Levels of Memory
Everything that happens throughout your day is put into electrical or Working Memory (think RAM like a computer). At the end of the day all of your Working Memory that wasn’t relevant or impactful is erased by sleep, including stuff only slightly relevant or impactful.

Declarative and Procedural Memory are chemical memories. These are stored in your brain (think hard drive). They come from repetition. Declarative is the memory of things you can recall if asked (your cousin’s phone number). Procedural is memory that comes without thinking (slamming your brake when a deer crosses the road)

Frequency is Key
With repetition, electrical Working Memory is converted to chemical Declarative memory, and as repetition continues, from Declarative to Procedural.

The amateur practices enough to get it right (declarative). The professional practices until he cannot do it wrong (procedural).

Hitting the Nail on the Head
Another way to think about it is the hammer and nail. If you hit a nail one time, it will make an impression in the wood. But then the big claw called sleep rips that nail out, leaving just a hole. If you put that nail in the same hole, however, and hit it again, the hole gets deeper. Keep putting the nail into the same hole and hit it over and over and eventually sleep will not be able to rip that nail out.

Some of you might argue that you can pound a nail in one stroke. Sure you can. How many of you know exactly where you were when you heard about 9/11? That happened only once, but the impact was big enough to push it directly into declarative memory (plus there was the added frequency of it being talked about for months on end).

Your ads will not be as impactful as a terrorist attack or space shuttle explosion.

The Magic Number
In advertising, the magic number is three. It takes the average person hearing/seeing an ad three times in seven days before it gets stored as Declarative Memory. And they must hear it three times every week until they need the product or service. And when I say “hear” I’m talking about actively engaged in the ad, not the subliminal effect of background noise.

To get that kind of frequency you need to put your message out there as often as possible. Whether you use TV, newspaper, radio, Facebook or Twitter, your success will be tied to the consistent and constant use of the medium every single day. Otherwise, you are just spending your advertising time and money foolishly.

-Phil

Don’t Look Like an Ad

My radio ads were roundly criticized when I first started doing them the way Roy H. Williams taught me. The biggest criticism was, “They don’t even sound like an ad!”

Good.

That was my goal.

Filters In Play
We are bombarded with advertising – over 5,000 advertising impressions a day! Our brains can’t handle all that info. Our brains don’t want all that info. Our brains realize most of it is useless and irrelevant. So our brains filter as much of it out of our lives as they can. If it looks or sounds like an ad, the brain shuts off and says don’t look, don’t listen.

The more your ads look or sound like everyone else’s ads, the less likely you’ll get the attention of your target audience. (Not to mention the less you’ll stand out in the crowd.)

Here is the script of the most successful radio ad we’ve ever run…

I couldn’t believe it. They were taking customers into the men’s bathroom. Yes, my staff was taking men and women, young and old into our men’s bathroom. And the customers were coming out laughing and giggling, oh yeah, and buying, too. I guess when you find a product that cool, you just have to show it off however and wherever you can. The men’s bathroom, gotta love it. Toy House in downtown Jackson. We’re here to make you smile.

I ran that ad in August 2008. I still have customers asking about the men’s bathroom two years later. It doesn’t sound like an ad. There was no music or jingle behind it. Just my voice plain and unvarnished.

It Really Works
It didn’t look or sound like anything else on the radio, so people heard it. And people responded. We have now sold over 2200 of the product hinted at in the ad, mostly because of trips to the men’s bathroom. That ad had legs because we were willing to be different from all the other advertisements on the air, which got us past the filter and into the minds of our customers.

One of the benefits of such an ad is that we also generated a lot of word-of-mouth from it. Everyone was talking about our ad, the local deejays, the newspaper, the local TV, and oh yeah, a whole bunch of customers.

The Wrong Way
But none of that would have happened if it looked and sounded like an ad. I could have written an ad like this…

It fills up your room with a starry night and puts your mind at ease. The greatest new sleep aids, the Twilight Turtle and Twilight Ladybug, are helping parents get their children happily to sleep. If your kids are struggling with bedtime, make sure you get them a Twilight Turtle or Ladybug for their room and watch the transformation. Bedtime becomes fun time when you have the Twilight Turtle or Ladybug in your child’s room. Available at the Toy House.

Sales would be in the dozens, not thousands with an ad like that. And I can guarantee no one would be talking about it.

Your message is good. You just need to deliver it more powerfully. When your ads don’t look or sound like ads, more people will pay attention.

-Phil

PS For more examples of radio ads I have used, click here.

Not Relevant Equals Not Seen

Are you a newspaper reader? Quick, tell me all the ads you remember from yesterday’s paper. No fair peaking at the recycle pile. And don’t just guess the big furniture chain or tire store. They might have been in yesterday’s paper, or was it last Monday’s?

The Invisible Truth
The truth is, the only ads you see and remember in a newspaper are ads for products in which you currently are in the market. If you need a new couch, all the furniture store ads pop out at you. If you need a new car, every auto dealer suddenly becomes visible. Every other ad is invisible. Heck, newspapers are designed to teach us to ignore the irrelevant. Headlines are written to get your attention. If you don’t care, you don’t read.

The only ads you see are the ones relevant to you.

Relevant: ˈre-lə-vənt
a : having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand
b : affording evidence tending to prove or disprove the matter at issue or under discussion

If it isn’t important to us, if it doesn’t have significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand, we aren’t looking, we aren’t listening, we aren’t paying attention.

Three Roads to Relevancy
You can make your ads more relevant three different ways.

Make it about a product. Your store isn’t that important. It’s the products in your store that attract attention. If you sell widgets and your ad is all about widgets you will immediately attract the attention of all the people in the market for a widget.

Make it about a felt need. We all have felt needs such as the need for more money, security, prestige. When your message addresses that felt need it becomes relevant to all who share that feeling. If you are filling a specific need, speak to that need and your message becomes more relevant.

Make it about the customer. The most important person in your world is you. The most important person in your customer’s world, however, is her. She isn’t interested in hearing about you, but she loves to hear about herself. When you can tailor your message so that it puts the customer in the starring role, the relevancy of that ad skyrockets.

When you raise the Relevancy of your message, you get more people paying attention.

-Phil

Field of Dreams

“If you build it, he will come.” -Shoeless Joe Jackson, Field of Dreams

Great movie. Bad advice for business.

Yet too many independents start out that way, thinking all they have to do is build a wonderful little shop and people will climb all over themselves to get in and give them money.

Roy H. Williams said, “If making a profit were easy, everyone would be doing it.” But not everyone is making a profit. Those who aren’t making a profit are closing their doors. And the first complaint out of their mouth is that they didn’t get enough traffic, followed quickly by the blame…

  • The downtown doesn’t have enough parking.
  • The Buy Local campaign didn’t advertise me enough.
  • The city didn’t support me.
  • The newspaper wouldn’t write a story about our opening.
  • There just aren’t enough people in the area.
  • No one knew about me because of the sign ordinance.
  • Unemployment is too high.
  • People are too cheap.

You know somebody who has made one of these statements. Heck, you probably have thought one or two of them.

Yet there are businesses thriving in hard-hit downtowns, thriving in high unemployment locales, thriving in spite of a lack of support from government, the newspaper, or a Buy Local campaign, thriving without coupons, discounts or cheap products.

You Have To Market Yourself
One of the biggest things they are doing differently is Marketing. Just building a store is not enough. We are over-retailed as it is. The most successful businesses are making a conscious choice to actively and creatively market themselves to the public. They are creating marketing messages, marketing plans, and mapping out new and unique ways to attract customers.

You Can Afford It
And it doesn’t cost as much as you think. There are many ways to advertise your business spending primarily time, not money. You can learn seven of them by downloading my FREE eBook Main Street Marketing on a Shoestring Budget.

And if you have the money to spend, before you drop a dime get to know how the different advertising mediums work with two more FREE eBooks – How Ads Work Part 1 and How Ads Work Part 2.

The movie is wonderful. But it is just a movie. In real life the quote is:

If you Market it, they will come.

-Phil

Make Only One Point

Our attention spans are short. Our memory is faulty. Heck, I tell my staff that I am not responsible for anything they tell me. Write it down!

So how can we expect a customer to remember more than one point in any of our ads?

We can’t. And they won’t. So why bother?

Unclutter Your Ads
When you know exactly what your message is, make sure you don’t clutter that message with other messages or information that is unnecessary. You don’t have to include your exact address and phone in your ads. If you make your point powerful enough, they’ll find you. You don’t have to give your hours, unless they are the hours for the event you are marketing.

The reality is that the person receiving your message is likely to remember only one point at best. So the more points you try to make, the less likely she will remember any one of them, and the better the odds she’ll remember the least important of those points.

Make Only One Point
Here is an example of a print ad that makes only one point. See how uncluttered it is? And if that point resonates with you, you’ll remember that ad.

Another example is a bra shop called Bras That Fit. They advertise on the local sports radio program – yeah, advertising bras to guys. Their message?

“Hey guys, are you tired of hearing your wife complain about her bra not fitting? Send them to Bras That Fit to get the right size that makes them feel better.”

They don’t clutter their ad with their hours, or talk about swimsuits or other services they offer. It’s all about getting a bra that fits so your wife won’t complain.

You’d be surprised how many guys tell their wives where to go bra shopping.

Concentrate, Concentrate, Concentrate
Think of your marketing as a bottle of perfume. If you mix one perfume with another, you won’t notice either (and the result might be toxic). You can add water to your perfume to stretch it out and make it last, but that just dilutes it until the scent is gone. Everyone knows that the more concentrated it is, the more powerful the scent, and the less you need to use.

Your ads are like that bottle of perfume. Keep your marketing concentrated on one message and more people will see it, hear it and remember it.

-Phil

Say Something Interesting

Your message is fine. But how you are delivering it needs some work. No one is getting it for one simple reason – you do not have their attention. Sure, you could yell and scream, but that doesn’t really get you anywhere. We are bombarded with so many advertising messages that it is like trying to fill a teacup with a fire hose. But you can get your message safely into the cup as long as you remember to…

Make your message more interesting than whatever occupies your customer’s brain at that moment.

You can do that by telling a story.

Stories are Interesting
We all love stories. They hook us in and get us to listen. Facts are boring and dull, but stories are interesting and fun. Whether you are doing traditional ads like radio, newsprint or TV, or just coming up with a way to get your message across in networking or social media, turn your message into a story.

Here is a copyrighted (meaning don’t use it verbatim, copy the style, not the ad) example from Roy H. Williams’ book Wizard of Ads (pg 28-29)

Announcer: You are standing in the snow five and one-half miles above sea level, gazing at the horizon hundreds of miles away. Life here is very simple. You live, or you die. No compromises, no whining, no second chances. This is a place constantly ravaged by wind and storm, where every ragged breath is an accomplishment. You stand on the uppermost pinnacle of the earth. This is the mountain they call Everest. Yesterday it was considered unbeatable. But that was yesterday.

Client: As Edmund Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak of Mount Everest, he monitored the time on a wristwatch that had been specifically designed to withstand the fury of the world’s most angry mountain. Rolex believed Sir Edmund would conquer the mountain, and especially for him they created the Rolex Explorer.

Announcer: In every life, there is a Mount Everest to be conquered. When you have conquered yours, you’ll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come pick it up at Justice Jewelers, your official Rolex jeweler, on Highway 65 at Battlefield Road.

Client: I’m Woody Justice, and I’ve got a Rolex for you.


Make Your Customer the Star
Not only does this ad tell a fabulous story, it stars the world’s most important person – “you”.

When you can tell a story and make the listener/reader the star of that story, they will listen and hear your message. They will become engaged with your brand. They will picture themselves doing exactly what you want them to do.

Here is another example of a story that speaks to the heart:

He left Detroit 9am Christmas Eve. Some store somewhere had to have the one toy his sweet little six-year old wanted. Six stores…seven hours later, he stood, travel-weary, across the counter from me. “I suppose you don’t have any Simon games either.” As I handed over the last of our Simon games he smiled and said, “God Bless You!” Believe me, He already has. Merry Christmas from the Toy House in Downtown Jackson. We’re here to make you smile.

This true story was from my first Christmas Eve as an official employee back in 1980. I was 14 years old and will never forget the look on that man’s face. We banked an entire Christmas ad campaign on this story. Results? Best Christmas ever. Yet we never mentioned our hours, our address, or our services. But everyone got the message… Looking for a toy? Save the hassle and try us first.

Figure out how to tell the story of your message and you’ll begin to see that message resonate a whole lot better.

-Phil

Definition of Insanity?

Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Never change your message, it is the key to your long term branding and growth.

Two truths. Yet, two seemingly opposite statements. How do we reconcile them? It would seem that if your advertising isn’t working, then doing the same thing won’t change that, therefore the message needs to be changed. But there is a flaw in that statement. Do you see it?

It isn’t the message that needs to change, it is the way you deliver that message. You can only change two things in your message delivery:

  • The audience to whom you deliver the message
  • The strength with which you deliver the message

The first one is easy. Just switch mediums or stations, or papers, or magazines. I can promise you that there is an advertising salesperson who has “exactly the right people for your business”. But you’ve already tried that and it didn’t move the needle. You have bounced around from newspaper to TV to radio with the same lousy results.

A Stronger Delivery
That leaves you one option. Strengthen the delivery of your message. Your message is good, but the delivery is weak. Common mistake we all make. We water down our message in hope of not offending anyone.

But if you calculated your market share, you already know that 95% of the population are currently choosing to not shop with you. Who are you afraid of offending?

Messages are like magnets. The stronger they attract, the stronger they repel. In fact, your message’s ability to attract new customers is in direct proportion to how much it repels others. You can’t get everyone to shop at your store, so quit worrying about the people you repel and start thinking about who you want to attract.

Then make your message delivery so powerful that those you want to attract can’t help but hear what you’re saying.

Insanity is thinking you can attract anyone with a weak delivery of your message.

-Phil

Don’t Alienate Your Fans

At the Michigan Downtown Conference two speakers talked about sign ordinances. The first was Sheila Bashiri, City Planner from the city of Birmingham, MI, a well-to-do suburb of Detroit nestled in amongst the other wealthy suburbs.

Because Of or In Spite Of?
Birmingham has the most strict sign ordinance in Michigan, so strict that some of the slides Sheila showed us of attractive signage wouldn’t even be allowed in her city. Yet many retailers want to be part of that bustling downtown. And Sheila claimed that her sign ordinance was a main reason for their success.

I guess the dense population of millionaires is only a secondary cause of the businesses thriving there.

The next speaker, Robert Gibbs, mentioned how much he liked the Birmingham sign ordinance and how all communities should adopt it for their business districts. In a private conversation afterwards, he went so far as to tell me that all existing businesses in those districts should be given 5 years to change their signs or move out.

Does he really believe Frankenmuth should tell Bronner’s and their two million visitors a year to take down the billboards or get the f*** out? Or that Ann Arbor should give Zingerman’s a remove the ugly trailer and all that neon outside the Roadhouse or else ultimatum? Hugely successful, yet eccentric retailers are what give our cities their character.

Businesses do not thrive because of sign ordinances. They thrive in spite of them because the city has the population base to support them and the stores are taking care of that population. Period. End of story. Sure, a well-crafted sign ordinance can give a city a uniform characteristic and look, but that does not draw traffic or grow business. The stores draw the traffic because of who they are and what they do. And signs are what help you find those stores.

It is no wonder that most downtowns are struggling. There is a huge disconnect between the city leaders/planners and the businesses that pay their taxes. Both of these speakers advocated not having businesses in the discussion for things like sign ordinances. Both believed that only city leaders should make decisions on what they want their business district to be.

A Business Lesson
That would be the same as you not listening to your customers. You wouldn’t do that would you? Of course not! You will value some customers’ opinions more than others. But if you aren’t listening to your best customers, they won’t be your best customers for long.

Don’t make the mistake others are making. Listen to your best customers. Include them in your plans. Not only will you make better plans because of it, you’ll empower those same customers to become evangelists for your business. By giving them a say in the matter, they will be your strongest advocates, and give you incredible word-of-mouth exposure.

Not everyone has an unlimited supply of millionaires. Take care of those who are taking care of you. That’s a lesson for retailers and for cities.

-Phil