Movie Theatre Psychology

The snack bar at the movie theatre is a good example of how to put psychology to work in business. With upsells, cross sells, and focus on savings they cash in big time.

But is it unethical to market this way or is it just good business?

Let me know in the comments!

Facebook Fan Page Marketing - News Feed vs. Inbox

Facebook Fan Pages are a great way to market your small business, but think twice before sending out direct messages to your fan's inboxes. In my opinion, the news feed updates are definitely the way to go.

How have you used Facebook to market your business? What gets results and what doesn't?

Cinderella Wine - What's The Business Model?

Cinderella Wine is a deal of the day type site launched as an expansion of Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library. I know that there's a bunch of different ways that they can be making money from selling dirt cheap wine on the front and and on the back end, but I'm just wondering if anyone has any insights on how this runs.

Business development fascinates me, so I'm just curious about the business model here. Always looking at what other industries are doing and how I can apply them in industries I'm in.

Crush It! by Gary Vaynercuk Book Review

Crush It! – Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion
By Gary Vaynerchuk

My book review notes:

• This book is about building brands by pumping out online content and building community.
  
• The mainstream media no longer holds the lock and key to content distribution. So now instead of buying up ad space on media that has eyeballs, you can create your own show and build your own viewers/readers/listeners/fans.
  
• The concepts in this book are vitally important to both employees and businesses alike.
  If you are a business, you should be talking about your products, services, industry, or all of the above on a regular basis.
  
• Would it be easier to buy ad space instead of creating your own content? Of course, but I would argue that it wouldn’t be more effective.
  
• Put it this way, would you rather be an company advertising on the Oprah show, or would you rather be the Oprah show?
  
• If you are an employee without your own business, that is no excuse for building your own personal brand. If you’re a computer programmer at a large company for example, you should be putting out all kinds of content about computer programming on your own. That way if you have the chops, you’ll always have a job because your depth of knowledge is out there for the world to see, you’ll probably have other companies offering to pay you more money to come work for them, or you’ll have the opportunity to go start your own business.
  
• I’ve been following Gary for a couple years already, so I have been building my businesses with the use of video. Check out http://www.sprinklerdaddy.ca/ for an example.
  
• This book isn’t long, but it puts it in very simple terms at how this new game works for businesses and individuals. It has given me so many ideas to put into place for our clients, our own businesses, and other businesses that I don’t have anything to do with.
  
• As the days roll along, I’ll be putting together more videos on how the ideas in this book can be applied for different business and individuals, so hopefully I’ll be able to touch on something that can help you with what you’re doing.

Hitting for Average - How it Applies to Business and Life

The key to long term success in fitness, business, and life in general is doing things consistently over a long period of time. I find myself (like most people) trying to take the occassional big swing but fizzle out shortly after. Instead of doing this, I'm putting my focus on doing things consistently, day in, day out.

Time Management - The 30/30/30/10 Conversation

The other day I had a conversation at the gym with a guy that really put things in perspective for me as to how I am using my time and how I need to focus on becoming more effective in the time I allow myself.

What has worked for you to use your time more effectively? Any tips you can pass along?

Outliers - The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Book Review

Here's some of my written notes:

Outliers – The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell

• Having skill is one thing, but you need the opportunities to nurture that skill if you want to truly become successful.
  
• Hockey players born in January are more successful because of the opportunities presented to them.
  
• They are grouped in the elite group from the start and given the best coaching and more practice time because they have had an extra 10 months to grow over someone born in October.
  
• Everyone has potential, we just need people to provide us the opportunities to realize that potential.
  
• Skill is nothing without opportunity, but opportunity is nothing if you don’t take advantage of it and put in the work.
  
• That computer purchased by the Mother’s Group was available to more people than just Bill Gates, but he seized the opportunity to use it. He worked hard at mastering computer skills, but he was lucky that the personal computer kits came out when they did to make that skill useful. When those computers came out, he had is 10,000 hours already.
  Commit to something early and wait for your opportunity. Joe Flom didn’t get a job with the big law firms of the day, but he made the best of it and created an opportunity and started his own company. He took the work that he could get and became the best at it. Then he got lucky when the law climate changed so that the skills he had been honing became in demand.
  
• Whatever you are doing, take that opportunity to be the best at it. You never know when something will change and an opportunity will arise for someone who has put in their 10,000 hours.
  
• Don’t ignore where you come from (both geographically and your family history). This can have a drastic effect on your approach to things, so don’t discount it. Determine how your history might be affecting a situation, identify it and compensate for it.
  
• If you truly want to be the best at something, there is no way around putting in the time.
  You don’t have to be a genius to be great, you just have to be smart enough. The Nobel Prize examples show that the facilities that are supposed to be the filter of greatness (Harvard) get it wrong all the time.
  
• Example of the above point not from the book – kids make it to the NHL all the time after falling through the filters of the elite. Martin St. Louis, Tanner Glass, Tyler Bozak, Dustin Penner, Rick Rypien, etc. all fell through the cracks at some point and were told that they couldn’t play at the highest level for their age group. They were cut from teams, some went undrafted, but turned those setbacks into opportunities. Instead of being in the lower tier of the elite group, they were given opportunities to get their 10,000 hours of practice in by being the elite player at the second tier of play. They got the time to play on the power play, penalty kill, and in key situations. They were given the opportunities to make mistakes and succeed. They put in the hard work and were ultimately rewarded for it. That’s more than you can say for kids drafted in the first few rounds of the NHL draft who aren’t playing hockey anymore. Those kids felt as though they were already the best, so they didn’t have to work anymore.
  
• Give your kids the opportunity to see what greatness is like and what it takes to get there. Joe Flom’s parents snuck him in to Carnegie Hall. They weren’t well off, but they did everything they could to expose Joe to greatness. If you study success and consciously think about being successful, you will be. Just like in golf, you don’t think about not hitting it in the water, you think about hitting it to the exact spot you want on the fairway.
  

Delivery Truck Advertising vs. Brand Building

I've been stumped on this business model for a while now. Delivery trucks that drive around town with rotating ads on them or just billboard style ads on the side without putting their own brand anywhere visible on the trucks.

Are you in the advertising business or the delivery business? If your deliveries are so booked up that you can't do any more, then I can maybe see the point of growing the business by advertising. But why not buy another truck and get mroe delivery business if you're that busy?

It seems to be short term thinking to me, why not grow your delivery brand instead of growing the brands of your advertisers?

Anyone have any thoughts? Let me know.

I'm Back!

Ok, so I confess that I have royally sucked at keeping this blog going. I got to 100 posts and pretty well hit the pause button for an extended period of time. If this blog was a plasma screen tv we'd have a serious case of burn in going on.

But no worries. I've re-dedicated myself to coming back strong. As I said last year, we've turned our focus primarily to running Sprinkler Daddy during the summer months so that's kept us away from the blog. But I'm writing this post as much for me as anyone else, to publicly declare that I refuse to slack on the content production anymore - summer or winter.

If I want to get anywhere, I've got to focus on getting things done (a video to come on that later).

So let this post show that I'm back, and I don't plan on leaving for an extended period of time again.