I was invited one evening to dine at a high-end seafood restaurant with a client who wanted to do a working dinner with an out-of-town consultant.

While I had eaten at this restaurant on other occasions, on this particular visit I was spell-bound by the quality of service from a young African-American waitress who exuded confidence and competency in delivering a fine meal.  Even the act of pouring water was a ritual of removing each stemmed glass from the table, placing it on a small circular tray in her left hand and pouring the iced water from a large crystal pitcher in her right hand.  There was a real sense of showmanship in her delivery of the product.  No detail was overlooked.  Her level of service was perfect – not too many interruptions, and not leaving us wanting for anything.  This occurred on a Monday evening and I was surprised to look around the restaurant and see every table filled.  Certainly, no effects of the dire economy there.  People were more than willing to pay a high price for excellent food and outstanding service.

A day or two later, I was attempting to have a mid-morning meal at a family restaurant chain noted for their breakfast offerings.  The hostess was quick to seat me at a table that had just been cleaned.  The paper placemat was plopped down in front of me and quickly adhered to the very wet surface.  She then dropped the silverware, wrapped up tightly in the paper napkin, not onto the placemat but onto the wet table.

When she brought me the coffee and water I had requested, she was carrying both in one hand and promptly spilled them onto the middle of the table.  She just laughed.  I responded, “This is not acceptable.”  She laughed again.  I mentioned the wet table, and she countered, “but it’s clean.”  I again repeated that it was “not acceptable.”  I said, “Your restaurant touts a quality experience, but this is not quality.”  At this point, other diners around us had turned their ears to listen in on the dialogue.  I arose and repeated again, “This is not acceptable.”  And walked away.  Her jaw dropped.

I drove three miles to another local family chain and was promptly seated at a table that had a number of pieces of trash on the floor beneath it.  I was pretty hungry at that point, so just ignored it.  When I went to pay the cashier, the silent, stoic gal behind the register had no comment at all.  I asked, “Aren’t you supposed to ask me how my meal was?”  Her eyes widened in shock.  She sheepishly responded, “How was everything?”  I related how the food was okay, but was surprised that I was seated at a table with a lot of trash beneath it.  She just laughed and said, “It’s so hard to keep up with.”  And that was the end of the conversation.

Being a marketer, I take the time to give feedback on my various experiences, as I would want the same feedback on my clients’ products and services.  I emailed the customer relations departments of both food chains, merely stating that “workers need to be properly trained.”  I also asked that they not send a follow-up letter or discount coupons for another visit, but to give better service to their other future clients, which would not include me.

One of the restaurants sent coupons.  The other emailed me for more feedback, but that wasn’t necessary as they had a full description of my experience in my original email.  All they had to do was act on it.  Both mentioned that they would be contacting area training personnel. 

I was relating these experiences to a business development colleague and he reminded me of a metaphoric question often asked by David Byrd, president of Leadership Management, Inc.:

Fresh paint sometimes looks good on a metal surface without a primer coat, so why waste your time with a primer coat?”

He admonishes that a primer coat of paint takes time, investment, and work, but it protects the finish coat from rust over the long term.

This illustration points out the big difference between training and development.  You can teach an employee a process such as clearing a table or ringing up a cash register, or you can develop an employee to think about how they can improve the process over the long term.  At the seafood restaurant, it was quite obvious the young woman had not just been trained; she had been empowered to think about every aspect of the delivery process and adjust it for continuous improvement.

So what are you doing in your business?  Are you training your employees to do tasks, or are you developing them to assume responsibility for doing the tasks in the most professional, most cost-effective and most timely manner?  If the latter, then you are a leader.  Leaders develop.  Trainers train.  In retrospect, I should have told the two restaurants that the employees needed proper “development,” rather than “training.”

In the next few days, be alert to the levels of service you receive in business and personal transactions.  You will readily notice the difference between a worker who has been trained and one who has been developed.  

If you are in a managerial position, assess whether you are training or developing your employees, and whether the technique is creating more or less value for your business.

If you are not in a supervisory position, look at areas of your job where you could assume more responsibility for improving a product or process.  A progressive organization will recognize and reward you for your increased efforts. 

Continue the blog and share how empowering an employee or assuming self-empowerment has resulted in a more positive outcome for you or your business. 

–Ralph Yearick

Stephen Covey, in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, starts the final chapter with a short story:

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

 “What are you doing?” you ask.

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim.  “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat.  This is hard work.”

“Well, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire.  “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.” 

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically.  “I’m too busy sawing!”

How many of us are too busy in our day-to-day business to take the time to “sharpen the saw”?  What does that mean?  It means taking a fresh look at what we do, how we do it, and how we could do it better – whether that is more efficiently, more cost-effectively, with higher quality, or with more creativity.  We get stuck in our comfort zones because they are simply that – “comfortable.”

When was the last time you looked at your business with fresh eyes?  Maybe you’re too close to the work to see it.  Maybe you “hire” a fresh set of eyes to look at your business.

That’s what I did three months ago.  I hired a business coach.  In a short period of time, we’ve addressed some major issues that we had been putting off for years.  We have a new strategic plan, revised mission statement, new business development process, reorganized client servicing structure, increased communication at all levels of the company, and we’re moving toward a long-term succession plan.  I can’t wait to see what the next three months will bring.

Sharpening the saw is about getting out of our ruts and making every day a new day in business.  It’s not at all comfortable, but it creates some dramatic changes.

There’s another maxim about a retiring teacher who was asked how long he had been at the profession.  He replied that he had taught 20 years.  He is then questioned as to whether he taught 20 years, or he taught one year 20 times.  I actually had that latter experience at a well known university where the professor was using the exact same class notes for at least ten years.  We had only four students in our class, so he photocopied his 3”x5” cards (ask your parents what they were for) and distributed them to us at each class.  Many times the dates on the cards coincided with the exact same date of the lecture, only with a 10-year difference.  This was a man who was teaching the same year throughout his career.  It was a technology course, and a good thing that technology wasn’t changing much back then.  It related to the printing industry and much of it is not recognizable today.

So how are you making every new client project a “fresh” project?  When was the last time you took a continuing education course, read a marketing or design book, looked at consumer trends, asked about social networking goals, looked for “a horse to ride” (Al Ries and Jack Trout), sat through a Webinar, or just went networking at your local professional association meeting? There are countless ways to “sharpen the saw.”

Sometimes we just become “stuck.”  When that occurs, don’t be afraid to ask for help, get a jump-start, or sometimes a good ‘ol fashioned kick in the rear end.  A new perspective can make business a lot more fun, not to mention more profitable.

Continue the blog and share how you have kept your skills fresh, your work sharp and your talents creative.  Or share a time when you got “stuck” and found a way to turn it around. 

–Ralph Yearick

Most people have heard the metaphor that “time is money.”  But what does that mean – time is money?

About 20 years ago, I heard Charles Faulkner, noted Neuro-Linguistic Programming author, developer and trainer, talk about the metaphors of business.  “Time is money” is a big one according Faulkner, who claimed it had only been around about 150 years.  So fast forward to today, and it’s been around about 170 years.

He traced its embrace to the early days of the railroads in the United States.  Train tracks suddenly appeared in isolated towns and villages, linking the outposts to urban centers.  Regular train stops provided many needed goods from far away locations, as well as a way to move farm crops to markets where they could be sold for a profit.

History has it that Richard Warren Sears, a railroad station agent in Minnesota, received a large shipment of watches from a Chicago jeweler, which were unwanted by a local jeweler.  Sears purchased them himself, sold the watches for a tidy profit to other station agents up and down the line, and then ordered more for resale.  Sears would later partner with Alvah Roebuck, to create Sears, Roebuck and Company.

Time became a valuable commodity.   Trains ran on schedules.  If a trader wasn’t on time to meet the train, he missed an opportunity to buy or sell goods.  Time became money.  People on the prairies could no longer look to the height of the sun in the sky to determine the time of day.  They needed more precise time-keeping methods, such as watches and clocks, so they wouldn’t end up missing the train.

Time and money have definable traits.  Time has numerical units.  It can be tied to an exchange rate, and in doing so, it becomes valuable.  Money also has units.  As a commodity, it can be exchanged for a certain amount of time, goods or services.  We aren’t at choice about money.  We need it for survival as we live in complex societies.  When people save it, it becomes an object.  When it is scarce, people want more.  Money can offer a sense of security.

In my work, time is definitely money.  I bill my services by the hour.  In fact, our agency bills in 15-minute increments.  (Some law firms bill in six-minute increments.)  When friends or associates ask how our firm makes money, I tell them that we sell hours.  There’s an old saying that successful people do things other people don’t like to do.  Our philosophy is a bit broader.  We exchange creative services for money from clients who don’t have the expertise to do the things we do, don’t like to do the tasks we do, or don’t have the time to do them.  They can gain time by exchanging money for it.  Which leads to another metaphor – “money is time.”

Years ago, I read a business advisor’s advice to pay for services you can do yourself when you can buy them at a lower hourly rate than you charge for your services.  Then you are saving the value of your time.  For instance, if you can hire someone to clean your house for $10 an hour, and you bill your services at $75 an hour, then you are buying time.  Money becomes time.  You can fritter away the time or invest it in more money making.

Time is one commodity that everyone has an equal amount of.  Whether wealthy or poor, everyone has the exact same amount of time.  It’s how we choose to spend it.  Time, like money, is spendable.

Faulkner, who has made a living out of studying metaphors, says that when you shift your metaphor about money to “energy,” then you suddenly seem to have more of it.  So if we reverse the metaphor to “energy is money,” that gives a new way to look at being more successful in our businesses.  If we put more energy into our work, we’ll likely be rewarded with more money.

What are your metaphors for time, money or energy?  Do they support you in your daily business activities?  If your metaphor is the old “Money is the root of all evil,” then it may be time to find one that is more positive and supportive to demonstrating success in business.

Continue the blog and share how your metaphors are supporting you or may be holding you back.  As Charles Faulkner reminds us, “We can’t not think metaphorically.”  Choose your metaphors consciously.

–Ralph Yearick

I was shoveling my driveway recently from the February snow storms when a neighborhood jogger ran past and asked, “Are we having fun yet?”, a saying coined by cartoonist Bill Griffith in the late 1970s for his comic strip character Zippy the Pinhead.  I was more than surprised to look up and see a crazy man running down the street in his spandex outfit; but once I recovered, my response was a quick smile and a simple, “Yes.”

A few days later I was roaming through my book shelf and found some ten-year-old notes from a talk by motivational speaker and author Harvey Mackay, while he was leading an American Marketing Association meeting in Pittsburgh.  There were just 10 lines on the sheet — the distillation of a morning-long program.  They obviously were significant because I realized I had incorporated many of them into my everyday business practices.

Near the bottom of the list was one sentence with a star before it:  “Put some fun and creativity into your life and your business!”

Not many business gurus talk about fun in the workplace.  Steven Covey, famous for his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, admonishes that there are four basic needs of every individual:  to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy.  The four L’s.  I’ve been meaning to write Covey a letter and suggest that a good fifth L would be to laugh.

Laughing comes with having fun.  Stone-faced Covey didn’t seem to acknowledge that having fun can lead to being more creative and profitable.

When I had a mid-life career shift and joined an advertising agency, I was suddenly thrown into brainstorming meetings for client ads.  Our creative skills were put to task to come up with ways to communicate the clients’ unique selling points in memorable ways.  There was a great synergy in sitting around a table shooting ideas into the air.  We laughed a lot and, as a result, put out some great work.

The ad agency was such a refreshing change from my previous position that my friends would casually remark to new acquaintances, “Don’t ask him what he does.”  For those who were willing to chance it, I replied, “I’M AN ADVERTISING MAN.  And they even PAY me to do it.”

Needless to say I was having fun.

The years have rolled by and I’ve worked at times among a more sober bunch.  At one point I recognized our corporate culture as being too serious for a creative team.  The laughs needed to be more frequent, so I started working on it.  The staff looked at me oddly when I told them to have a joke ready to start the staff meeting.  We had a few laughs over it and over the joke, too.

At another point, we even instituted the position of Fun Officer, who was responsible for planning employee activities.  One of the perks was her “fun” budget, a minor expense compared to the value we received in staff teambuilding.

So here’s the question, “Are you having fun yet?”  Because if you aren’t, your work will be mediocre and marginal.  Your message will be functional but lifeless.  And hardly memorable, which doesn’t satisfy our needs as marketers.

I recently sent a congratulatory email to a client who had just been promoted to a new branding role in his company.  His one-statement reply was “Thanks.  It might be fun, too.”

With that attitude, I know he’s going to do a great job.

Harvey Mackay’s challenge to “put some fun and creativity into your life and your business” is one that requires a conscious choice.  When you look for ways to do it, you’ll find them.

Continue the blog and share how adding some fun in your job or workplace has produced a better ad, a more memorable trade show, a superior employee outing, or some other positive outcome.

–Ralph Yearick