Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
The New York Times has an interesting article about advertising on cars. Click here to read it.
An excerpt from the article:
Brian Morris, the owner of We Fix Ugly Pools, a pool repair and construction company in Phoenix, wrapped more than 30 vehicles in his fleet in ads for his company. He monitors how customers find him, and attributes more than $1 million in revenue over the last year to people seeing one of his trucks in a driveway.
I just read Warren Buffett’s Annual Shareholder report. I’m not a shareholder – I just like learning from the best! This is a quote that resonated with me.
“Eroding fundamentals will overwhelm managerial brilliance”
For me, this quote means: It doesn’t matter how amazing our Bramble Berry management team is if we’re in a declining market, if our customer service is slipping or if our pricing is being crunched. Wonderful ideas, executed in a weak market, produce subpar results.
My challenge is to ensure that Bramble Berry is in a market that can sustain growth, increased competition and continue to innovate and improve. If we are not in a dynamic market, all of the ‘managerial brilliance’ that we possess (or at least we hope we possess) will be for naught.
I work out five times a week. Not because I love to work out or because I have copious amounts of free time; no, I work out because all the business books, magazines and my mentors say its important to do. Apparently, having a strong physical body leads to good things in my business. So, I work out. But, I don’t love it. In fact, I do it mostly because I know it’s good for me. And, there’s a teensy part of me that’s vain. I like being able to buy clothes and have them mostly fit without major lumps, crevices or valleys.
Because I’m all about efficiency, I’ve run 2 to 3 times a week for the last five years. Running is calorically one of the best work outs to do.
My husband Chris lopes like a beautiful graceful gazelle. He will easily do 4 miles in 35 minutes and come back to do a 20 minutes weights circuit. My friend Angie (on left in photo) runs 5 to 7 miles a day and counts the time as her quiet meditation.
Me? I generally pop caffeine pills and put my iPod to a punishing, loud song I to force myself through my run. I am not a graceful nor natural runner. I look like a lumbering elephant. I sound like a wheezing walrus. Anyone I come upon starts to look around, fearful, and patting their pockets in a frenzied manner. I suspect they are looking for a phone to call Animal Control about the wounded wildebeast thrashing around in the general vicinity.
But still, I persist in my running. Convincing myself to run sounds like this:
Shaming – “Anne-Marie, if you were a good CEO that had self-discipline and the ability to manage staff, you would want to run. Look! All the really amazing successful mentors you have run. All the CEO’s you respect and admire run. Running is good for you. It shows mental fortitude. Now, go out and run. Now. You don’t want to be a loser do you?
Bribery – “Anne-Marie, if you run 25 days this month, I will buy you a new video iPod. Once you have the video iPod, you can have all the work out songs you want to inspire yourself on the run.”
Back to shame – “Anne-Marie, I just bought you this beautiful iPod. Why are you letting me down? Why aren’t you running? What happened to the bargain we made?”
Reasoning – “Anne-Marie, you know that running is good for you. All the cool kids are doing it. If you run, you will be a better person, a more balanced leader and you will be healthy enough to meet whatever challenges life throws at you.”
Embarrassment – “Anne-Marie, you know your husband is running today. He’ll make fun of you if you don’t work out and he does.”
Competition – “Anne-Marie, you know your husband/sub-par CEO/neighbor/employee is running today. You’re just as mentally tough as he/she/they is and you’re in just as good of shape. You need to run to keep the score even.”
Once I start to run, my competitive nature takes over. I try to beat my last time. I attempt to run faster than ever before. I run exceedingly hard. I flail. I pant. I wheeze. I sprint at the end. I end up sweaty, in pain all over but I feel proud of my accomplishment.
This system has worked until last week. Last week, my knees started hurting. In fact, my left knee hurt so much that I couldn’t work out for four days. I tried to compensate calorically by eating nothing but boiled eggs and granola bars. This program lasted for about 3 hours.
So, I started researching running. Thanks to Michael Hyatt, one of my favorite business blogs, I came across Chi Running (“a revolutionary approach to effortless, injury-free running”) and signed up for their Vancouver course in September. Chi Running seems to be all about listening to your body. Apparently, my forced sprints and negative self-talk wasn’t the best way to enjoy running.
So, today, Day 5 of knee pain, I went running along my favorite trail. I was gentle to my body. I walked to warm up. I didn’t immediately zone out with my iPod. The Running Gods rewarded me with a view of a beautiful harbor seal. I started taking baby steps, paying attention to my body. I kept taking baby steps. My body was happy with small baby steps. I relapsed. I put my iPod on, jacked up the beats and took off. My knees protested. My Achilles tendons ached. So, I listened to my body.
My body wanted to run slowly. It wanted to run so slowly, in fact, that a woman, on a cell phone, with a dog on a leash and a newborn baby was moving faster than me. That’s right, a woman who was still probably recovering from labor was beating me.
I finished my 3.2 mile run in record (slow) time – 45 minutes.
My ego is bruised. My competitive nature is furious.
My knees? My knees are feeling good. Ego and competitive nature can heal. Knees can’t.
Chi Running. Listening to your body. I’m going to try it. I’ll let you know how it goes.
This is the last soap carving post for a while – unless there is a massive amount of interest in this long-lost craft (?).
The soap artist-e says:
“Carving soap is stupid hard, but smells neat.”
It is apparent to me that’s it’s a clear vote for soap over sandstone in a carver’s repitoire.
I’ve blogged before about my massive information overload problem. I’ve decided it’s officially a “problem” and two of my 9 quarterly goals involve tackling my information overload.
According to The Economist too much information begins to decrease effectiveness. In their article, they described giving a horse-racing handicapper five pieces of information versus 40. The successes of predictions was worse when given the 40 pieces of information versus the five.
Mark Hurst, the author of Bit Literacy wrote an entire book on how to manage massive information overload and make technology work for you, rather than you being enslaved to technology and the tyranny of the urgent. Given my Goal #2 above, I will not be reading the book just yet but it sounds like a potential fix for my information overload woes.
In a recent post on his blog, Ben Casnocha, the uber-boy wonder who wrote the book “My Start-Up Life” said “I see less and less value keeping up day-to-day”.
The author of “The 4 Hour Work Week” (which I haven’t read) suggests not reading anything besides the headlines to avoid getting overwhelmed with information. While this seems a bit drastic to me, it goes hand in hand with the idea of allowing free space in your head.
This will end up being a bit like my Clean Desk goal– two steps forward, two steps to the side but ultimately a bit of forward movement over time.
This article is a how-to method for working on overcoming resistance to change. The method seems like it would be useful in business as well as family life.
Here is a teaser from the article:
When most managers encounter someone who won’t change, their natural
impulse is to push back even harder. We might launch into our prepared
talking points about the inevitability and necessity of the change. Or we
may tell the employee what will happen to them if they don’t change. Or
we may just get irritated and fire them. But whatever our particular tactic of
choice, all are predicated on the notion that we can beat down the walls of
resistance.
The problem is that the truly resistant typically have more energy for
resisting than you do for breaking down their resistance.
If you read the article, I would value your feedback and thoughts. And don’t forget, all comments this week are entered to winfive 3-D molds and a Soapmaking DVD.
Gloss.com has officially closed its doors. It appears that Gloss.com was having pretty significant traffic issues. According to Alexa.com, Sephora is ranked as the 4,306th most visited site on the net. Gloss.com is 105,838th most visited site. That’s a large difference in daily hits. This lack of eyes on the site probably resulted in low daily sales. It’s too bad – diversity in suppliers generally brings pricing down, customer service rises and the perks increase as everyone tries to compete with one another.
Beauty Brains has a well reasoned post on Burt’s Bees new campaign to get the term “Natural” certified.
Here’s a teaser quote:
…most concerning is the implied notion that “all natural is good” and “all synthetic is bad.” Such a simplistic approach only serves to spread misinformation and fear.
I just stumbled on Steve Pavlina’s blog, Personal Development for Smart People.
His post today is why humans are not as intelligent as we think we are. Here’s a teaser:
Once a pattern of thought and behavior has become conditioned, it can be very difficult to reprogram. This causes bad habits, addictions, and Republicans.
I blogged about Bag, Borrow or Steal back in February. Their business model confuses me. I personally wouldn’t use their service because it doesn’t make financial sense to me.
At the time, I said:
I’m not totally counting them out though. $8.25 million is a lot of capital to sit it out and wait for the market to come to you.
It turns out that maybe $8.25 million doesn’t go that far in terms of sitting and waiting. Bag, Borrow or Steal has just gotten their third round of venture capital financing, this time for $15 million, partially financed by Kuwait Holding Co.
Now I’m really scratching my head about the business model’s viability. If they’ve truly gone through $8.25 million in about a year, their burn rate is fast, furious and does not appear sustainable.
Kudos to the local PR firm I wrote about earlier this week. They happened upon my blog and read my rant about the $150-per-photo-charge. Rather than cringe in their offices or whine about my lack of understanding, they picked up the phone and called me.
That takes guts.
The PR Firm told me their side of the story. They’re not selling the photographs. They contracted out to a third party photographer for the shoot. The photographer is selling the photographs for $150 per photo. He believes his work is worth $150 per photo.
I still disagree with the price tag but that’s okay. I’m still left with a better feeling about the situation because the PR Firm called me to chat about it.
The outcome didn’t change. The photos are still $150 per photo and I’m still not buying any. But, I feel good that the local guys cared enough to call.
I have a completely professional crush on the Pangea founder. Listen to a wonderful (long) interview with him at Organic Beauty Radio. For those of you that haven’t seen their wonderful soaps and lotions, Pangea makes organic (or as organic as you can get!) body care and skin care products. You can buy the entire product line on their site.
If you want to learn more about Pangea, there’s a great article here and here.
The highlights: he pays his employees a minimum of $12.50 per hour, has a vegetable garden at the warehouse so all his staff can eat organic veggies, and employs a cook to cook lunch for all the staff.
The downlights: Pangea has been open for five years and has only shown a profit for one of those years.
It’s hard to balance profitability and social responsibility but Joshua sounds like he’s well on his way to figuring it out.
Dell supposedly has improved their customer service. I’ve seen countless blogs mentioning their new and improved customer service infrastructure and fawning articles in business magazines about how Michael Dell is getting back to the basics. Well, for this gal, that’s just lip service as far as I can tell.
My husband ordered a massively expensive laptop for a new engineer in his firm. This machine was built to be so powerful that it could probably easily run small countries. It had more computing ability than 15 Big Blue machines. All in all, an incredibly complex, expensive machine and a powerful tool to use.
As the day quickly approached that the new engineer was to start work, my husband phoned Dell to ask where the computer was. It was 4 days overdue at that point. It turns out that Dell had canceled the order. Why had they canceled the order? Because there was a part out of stock. When my husband asked who they had notified about the cancellation, Dell told him that no one had been notified. The order for this $10,000plus machine had simply been canceled.
The sheer idiocy of canceling a custom order with high profit margins is beyond ludicrous for a company struggling to regain the title of number one PC seller in the world. Not informing the customer that they canceled the order is criminally bad customer service.
Needing the machine, my husband put in the entire order again. He was promised he would have the machine 3 days before the new engineer was due to arrive. The date the new computer was due came and went. My husband called Dell. They promised to overnight it to him. The next day came and went with no computer. Again, a phone call to Dell but this time, he got only an answering machine. Multiple calls and emails later, he had extracted a new verbal promise of overnight shipping and Dell would throw in a 15″ monitor for free. The next day, no machine. When Chris finally got a hold of a real person, he found out that whoops, the new order had been put on the “slow track” rather than receiving the priority service he had been promised.
The new engineer started without a computer. He was not able to work any billable hours without the computer and thus sat, as an expensive highly paid asset, underutilized. The Dell laptop finally came almost a month after it was ordered and four days into the new engineer’s tenure. Dell paid for overnight shipping, the free monitor and a few other minor goodies, undoubtedly negating all the profit on the custom built laptop.
To add insult to injury, Chris didn’t even get an apology on the Seth Godin Scale of better than 1. He got a slightly mumbled half apology from “Ygnacio” at Dell after the first delay and nothing after that. It was beyond disapointing – it was downright pathetic. If I were an investor in this company (and thank goodness I’m not!), I would pull all my money out. And, I’d pull it out fast.
I don’t know if you’re guilty of this, but I’m forever going into a shop, looking at a company and then assuming I know how much they are making. My mind is often tallying up the purchases of the customers in line at my local juice bar and trying to figure out their overhead, margins and ultimately, their net profit.
In my head, everyone is making more money than they are in reality.
And now, someone has proven that! The New Yorker has a really interesting breakdown of what the real life pay of different businesses and occupations in NYC make. Check it out here. Being a high-end drug dealer makes pretty incredible money per hour if you can get over the whole illegal and jail part of the business. Being a yoga studio isn’t all it’s cracked up to be though the lifestyle benefits are pretty hard to beat.
