• Service-oriented Marketing
• Kohler Service EXCELLENT
• More time needed for figuring taxes, IRS predicts
• To VC or Not to VC
• Do-it Yourself Money Management
• A Modern Fable of Taxing the Rich
• Adaptation-Level Phenomenon

Service-oriented Marketing

SERVICE MARKETING(tm)
Ben Dean, Ph.D., MCC http://www.mentorcoach.com

Most helping professionals can master coaching skills. If you like helping others, you find coaching to be fun and fulfilling.  But even experienced professionals can often have difficulty marketing their fledgling coaching practices.

There are four keys to building a successful coaching practice:

(1)  Building strong, nuanced skills for coaching both individuals and groups

(2) Having an overall approach to marketing that is both congruent with your personality and effective;

(3) Carrying that approach out; and

(4) Being able to ‘lean into’ your marketing activities with conviction.

I believe that approaching your coaching business development from the standpoint of ‘Service Marketing’  is an effective strategy and frees you to do #4 above. 

NOTE:  ‘Service Marketing’ is, of course, inspired by the work of Robert Greenleaf.  I recommend highly his books: ‘Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness’ and ‘On Becoming a Servant-Leader.’

SERVICE MARKETING—THE STORY

Almost all clinicians/helping professionals can master individual and group coaching skills. 

And almost all helping professionals find coaching to be fulfilling. 

Yet many of these same talented individuals find the *marketing* of their coaching practices to be a distasteful, elusive and difficult enterprise.

This is due, in part, to our values.  Most of us enjoy helping others, healing others, empowering others.

Our values are different from those of other professionals such as MBA students or real estate salespeople or options traders.  They are less conflicted about marketing.

We are uncomfortable with marketing because it seems to be so self centered and involved with self promotion. It feels ‘bad’ to sell ourselves or our services.

‘Service Marketing’(tm)—viewing the activity of marketing as being primarily about serving the world—is a freeing and surprisingly effective approach to serving others while building a coaching practice.

Service marketing means serving the universe of your prospects as if they were already your clients—even though most of them will never become your clients.

Service marketing means evaluating marketing options,  first, in terms of how they can help others, and, only secondarily, in how they will attract clients to your coaching practice.

Service marketing means you will almost never fail in your marketing activities.  A given approach may or may not result immediately in new clients, but you can always design it so as to be helpful to others.

The Basic Points

1.  When you evaluate possible marketing strategies, ask yourself how you can use them to bring benefit to others. 

2.  Know that when you are ambivalent about ‘leaning into’ your marketing, it is almost always because you are *not* viewing it as serving the world.

3.  Know that the paradox is true—the more you give away, the more that will come back to you.

Kohler Service EXCELLENT

The contrast with TracFone was never so sharp as when I called Kohler for a problem with our kitchen faucet. The button needed to switch between regular and spray broke a few days ago. I really didn’t want to call, because the faucet is two years old, and their warranty runs for one year. I was convinced it was going to cost me a considerable amount to replace the hand sprayer.

But…

1) They answered right away.
2) They were able to identify the exact faucet.
3) They are sending the replacement button immediately.
4) They are sending a brand new spray handle once it is available; on backorder.

Essentially, they made a corporate decision to take care of this problem and DELIGHT their customers who had already experienced a problem with this unit by taking good care of them. That is the way to earn loyalty. If they had chosen short term profits, they would have charged me (or tried to), and our opinion of Kohler quality would have suffered. Now we’d look at Kohler first. That is what a brand is supposed to mean.

More time needed for figuring taxes, IRS predicts

Taxpayers need 28 1/2 hours to complete an average tax return with itemized deductions and income reported from dividends, interest and capital gains, the government estimated. [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4749056/ ]

I use Intuit’s Turbotax to do my tax return. What drives me nuts is that I really can’t say that I even begin to understand how the numbers are calculated. Sure, I could go through the IRS instructions and verify the calculations by hand. I’m just not willing to actually spend the 28.5 hours they are saying that are required to do all that. Instead, the whole process took around 8 hours, with two hours of that from a set-back where I lost work in Turbotax when I didn’t save the file after editing one of the forms directly.

To VC or Not to VC

Rick Ellis whose company pmachine publishes Expression Engine (the weblog/CMS software which runs this site) writes:

A common decision faced by small companies like mine is whether to seek outside funding to help growth.  Venture Capital firms and Angel Investors are beginning to look at software and technology companies again after the bubble burst a couple years ago so it’s tempting to pursue these deals.  I was reminded of this yesterday in an email exchange with a friend of mine in which he asked why, in light of a certain competitor with a VC deal, aren’t we more aggressively pursuing funding?  “Wouldn’t you love to have a big staff of programmers doing your bidding?” he asked.  “Well sure”, I answered, “if it were only that simple.”.  It’s not.

The cold reality is that at least 70% of funded ventures fail.  When you scale up your expenses hiring staff, leasing office space, buying infrastructure, and paying for advertising - without the revenue to support it - the likelihood of your long terms success decreases drastically.  Most ventures never recover from the high cash-flow burn rate. 

Yet VCs need a high level of risk to make the investment worth it.  At least 3 out of 10 companies will fail so they rely one or two very big hits to pay for all the other speculation.  In business, you generally don’t hit a big home run being conservative. 

On the plus side for angel or VC investors, if you get the right one they can provide perspective and experience as well as depper pockets than other partners may have. In one company I am familiar with, quarterly board meetings that include outside investors do provide a focused attention to our finances, budget, sales projections, etc. They also provide a time when we are, to an extent, “selling” the vision AND the detailed execution of the company to outsiders.

I attended a breakfast meeting with Andrew Sherman, a lawyer with McDermott, Will & Emery [ http://www.mwe.com ] in Washington, DC. He is also an adjunct professor at Univ of Maryland. There is a strategic pyramid for capital formation that runs from your own money/resources at the base (the bootstrap mode) to money from family, friends, and key employees, SBA loans and small biz commercial lending, then Angels. Venture Capital is higher up the pyramid. Indeed, it doesn’t make sense to consider VC unless your capital needs are such that it cannot be bootstrapped, or borrowed. Why give up the control?

Andrew also recommended the book Every Business Needs an Angel by Cal Simmons and John May. The key here is that if financial projections show that the company will need capital to grow, an angel investor who knows the industry, may be retired but also interested in a “fun” project can be the right and best next investor up the pyramid. Choose the right one and if, just if, your business evolves to be the type that may need additional investors through a private placement or VC, and leading to an IPO if that is the path, you will have broadened the company’s expertise in the key area of capital formation.

Do-it Yourself Money Management

The movement of do-it-yourself money management is often portrayed as a choice, as if there were viable alternatives. But even if you rely on others for help—or even give others control over your resources—you still have to choose the right people, and keep an eye on them. There are times when people need good financial advice—there’s nothing wrong with that. But no matter whom you hire or what organization you rely on to secure your future, the only person who has to live with the result is you. [Motley Fool http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2002/foth020606.htm ]

A Modern Fable of Taxing the Rich

The following article appeared in the February 23, 2002 issue of the Lakeshore News-Salmon Arm, British Columbia.

Ron Adams, a local financial advisor who writes a regular column in the paper, wrote it. Ron is sometimes a little irreverent and ruffles many conservative feathers in town, but he is often entertaining and usually gets straight to the heart of the issue. As written by Ron:

Tax Cuts for the “Rich”

I was having lunch at PJ’s with one of my favorite clients last week, and the conversation turned to the Campbell government’s recent round of tax cuts. “I’m opposed to those tax cuts,” the retired college instructor declared, “because they benefit the rich. The rich get much more money back than ordinary taxpayers like you and I, and that’s not fair.”

“But the rich pay more in the first place,” I argued, “so it stands to reason that they’d get more money back.” I could tell that my friend was unimpressed by this meager argument. Even college instructors are a prisoner of the myth that the “rich” somehow get a free ride in Canada. Nothing could be further from the truth. So, let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand.

Suppose that every day 10 men go to PJ’s for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If it were paid the way we pay our taxes, the first four men would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1; the sixth would pay $3; the seventh $7; the eighth $12; the ninth $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

The 10 men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.” Now dinner for 10 costs only $80.

The first four are unaffected. They still eat for free. Can you figure out how to divvy up the $20 savings among the remaining six so that everyone gets his fair share? The men realize that $20 divided by 6 is $3.33, but if they subtract that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being paid to eat their meal. The restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. Here’s what he came up with . . .

The fifth man paid nothing; the sixth pitched in $2; the seventh paid $5; the eighth paid $9; the ninth paid $12; leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of $59. Outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out the $20,” declared the sixth man. Pointing to the tenth, he said, “And he got $7!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got seven times more than me!”

“That’s true,” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks.”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor.”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They were $52 short!

And that, boys and girls and college instructors, is how Canada’s tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore. There are lots of good restaurants in Switzerland and the Caribbean.

Attribution: I got the idea for this allegory from an article in The Taxpayer reprinting an article in The Chicago Tribune. It has been rewritten “Mall Arkey” style. Copyright 2000, Mall Arkey Investments, All rights reserved.

Adaptation-Level Phenomenon

Part of the reason behind why our material wants can overpower us is because of something known to psychologists as the adaptation-level phenomenon: Whatever it is that’s going on in our life, we immediately adapt to it and then that becomes neutral. So if you get a big promotion and raise, you’ll think that’s wonderful—for about six months, and then it becomes neutral… and eventually not enough. [From Fool.com]