I’ve started to get more and more questions related to this idea of The Speck.
One of the most common questions I’ve been getting is “How do I pick a speck?”
The first and easiest place to start is with quick and simple assessment of what you have, and what they need.
I drew you a diagram. I hope you like it.
P.S. This isn’t just about picking a speck. This should also give you an idea of how to build and structure content for your speck.
The book tells the story of Horton the Elephant who, in the afternoon of May 15, while splashing in a pool located in the Jungle of Nool, hears a small speck of dust talking to him. It turns out the speck of dust is actually a tiny planet, home to a city called Whoville, inhabited by microscopic-sized inhabitants known as Whos and led by a character known as the Mayor.
~ Wikipedia Entry for Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!
If you haven’t read my post on The Speck, click the link to read it now. The Speck reminds me of Horton. Horton heard the Whos, and everyday people, just like Horton, also hear them. And when they do, they build websites, communities, and products for them. Most of the time, they get paid very well.
My friends, Stu McLaren & Tracy Childers, created WishList Member. It’s a piece of software that allows you to quickly build private online communities or membership sites. I call them “speck sites.”
As of this writing, WishList Member powers over 27, 382 specks! Read that again, 27,382 private online speck sites. Many of which are making money, and a lot of it.
The Speck Formula is what I like to call “Noah’s Favorite Type of Math.” I boil my business math right down to the basics. Let me share it with you.
The Speck Formula
A x B = C
A (the speck – 100-999> people)
B (the fee – the cost of your product or service)
C (the income generated)
Simple right?
I’ll occasionally add a multiplier of 12. This is in terms of 12 months. I prefer specks to be built to pay continuously for months on end. If that’s the case, the equation now looks like this:
A x B = C * 12
Go ahead, plug in some numbers and try it.
Think about the speck today. The speck isn’t about building the next Facebook or YouTube. Instead, the speck is about finding that teeny-tiny speck of people who are trying to get your attention. Think about your own talents, skills, expertise and then ask yourself if there’s a speck out there that’s trying to get your attention.
That speck of dust might actually be an entire planet. All you have to do is hear them. Are you listening?
Last night I sat in a meeting that seemed to drag on for hours. We discussed endlessly, with great confusion, what exactly is marketing, and how exactly should we be marketing a small town.
For the most part, I kept my mouth shut. Marketing, to me, is the story you tell. It’s the story you tell to the world of who you are and what you’ve got to offer. In the case of a small town, what’s the story we’re telling our visitors? What’s the story we’re telling the people who we’re trying to convince to move here? What’s the story our current residents are telling their friends who complain about the high-cost of city living?
If we don’t have a story to tell we’re just as boring as the next town. Now I know what you’re thinking, of course we have a story to tell. We’re a community that’s diverse and rich in history! Well hold on there buckeroo… everyone’s got a similar story.
Hang around me long enough and you’re bound to hear about the Purple Cow. Seth Godin taught me about the Purple Cow.
When you drive through the French Countryside, all you’ll see are cows, black & white cows. Momentarily, you’re enchanted by the cows. After all, you’re in France. But after three hours of seeing the same old cows, you’re bored. They’re all the same. Every cow looks identical.
But what happens if you see a purple cow? A purple cow is remarkable! You stop the car, you take photos, you spend time & money. You might even want to live near that purple cow.
How exactly do you become remarkable? Here’s what I think.
Every town has the same tourist guide. Jokers are wild – they’re all the same. Will the next retired couple looking for a weekend getaway pick up your town’s guide off the shelf? It’s the luck of the draw.
Every town has the same website.
Every town has limited funds and ability to market itself the way we’re taught to market in school, let alone remarkable marketing.
Every town is black & white.
Of course, every so often you run into a purple town.
Using the word “every” is never fair because there are always exceptions to the rule. Every is too concrete. But the simple truth? You don’t want to be part of “every.” We’re at a moment in time where another study or survey isn’t going to tell us the story. We already know the story. It’s up to us to take the story and bring it to life. It’s up to us to make sure the story is purple enough.
And if it’s not purple – well… keep driving, there’s another town a few kilometres away.
My last blog post was on April 6th, 2011. Sigh…
My wife is new to the whole blog world. Her and her sister have their favorite blogs. They enjoy getting together to talk about all the updates and going-ons in so-and-so’s life. This past weekend, I overheard them talking about their all-time favorite blog and how the blogger hadn’t made a peep for months! They were both fed up and had moved on.
It made me think of my own blog, and I thought that I should touch base.
No excuses here except that over the past 5 months I’ve been busy…. very busy.
Before I move on to The 6-month Rule, here’s brief bullet-point update of what I’ve been up to.
There’s more, but that’s a start. Not nearly enough time to go out fishing over the past few months but all is well.
Here’s my 6-month self-employment rule.
A budding entrepreneur recently asked me when it was OK to leave his day job to work on his entrepreneurial ventures full-time. For me, I left my corporate-world marketing job in 2005 and haven’t looked back once. The 6-month rule is simple. You work on your venture, your passion, and your side-business at night or whenever you’ve got free time. When you are able to earn at least the same or more income (i.e. A bigger paycheck!) for a minimum of six months from your venture, you’re probably safe to make the jump.
Be strict. Feeding your spouse & children should always come first.
What have you been up to?
P.S. Here’s a picture of Avalon. She’ll be 8 months old in a few days. Scroll down, and look at the picture below taken at 3.5 months.
There are a million books out there that tell us the importance of thinking outside the box. I’ve read hundreds of them.
The ultimate benefit of those books comes when you realize you don’t really need to read very many of them, because the box is really just an artificially, self-imposed restriction you’ve placed on yourself. The box is what you decide is your reality. Tony Robbins calls them limiting beliefs.
The box is how you gauge your situation or your business at the present moment.
Is your business doing poorly because of a bad economy? Is your business stuck in the box, or is your business doing poorly because you’ve chosen to accept it and do nothing about it? Surely, you could never attempt such a unique outside-the-box method of increasing your business, could you? Not you. Stay Stuck.
Are you angry at your current situation? Frustrated that you can’t get that pay raise or that gig you’ve been applying for. Is it because you’re stuck in the box or is it because you choose to watch six hours of Dancing With The Stars every night?
The box, fortunately for us, is a fictitious confine. It’s devastating because the box is so powerful, we all find ourselves struggling with the invisible cardboard walls on a daily basis. I know I do.
Take one step to the left or one step to the right. Take one step forward or one step back.
Basically, a single step in any direction and you’re out of the box.
Try it.
Okay, you’re out. Now what?
While I’m not generally a fan of his work for many reasons, I’ll be happy to explain in other posts, I am a VERY big fan of the topic of a book that Jack Canfield (of Chicken Soup fame) wrote. It’s called “The Power of Focus.”
Individuals, businesses, and even countries always seem to struggle with the issues of focus. Here’s an example. Since my daughter, Avalon, arrived, I’ve been bitten by the photography bug. I’ve probably read at least twenty books on the subject in the past three months. In the past three months I’ve gone from not really understanding f-stops and aperture, to having a distinct understanding behind the photography triangle and how it all works. I’m like that. When I want to learn a new skill, I don’t just jump in haphazardly; I’ll devour everything I can find about the subject.
I’ve learned that lenses (expensive lenses) can suffer from serious focus issues. For example, I’ve learned that lenses can front and back focus. You might think you’re focusing on the eyes, but the lens might actually be focusing on the forehead. I’ve learned about focus shift. And I’ve learned that lenses can suffer from chromatic aberration, sharpness issues, light fall-off and so much more… the list goes on and on.
Wow – like with anything else, the closer you try to get it perfect, the harder it gets. The closer you try to get a perfect focus in photograph, the harder it is.
When I first got into photography, I assumed if I bought a camera and a lens, off I would go. Of course, with all these issues and more and you could end up with a life full of blurry memories and years later blame your shaky hands.
Or, you could end up with shots that are pretty great. They’re not going to win any awards, but they’ll be clear enough to bring a smile to your face.
How does this apply to businesses?
When a business decides to jump on the social media wagon, there are focus issues. There is too much promotion, and not enough social interaction. The same thing happens when a business decides to build a website. There can be focus issues. Too much time is spent on clever behind-the-scenes SEO and not enough time spent on crafting the message you want to portray to your customers.
Whether it’s websites or cameras, you can spend forever searching for perfection. But to butcher the military motto: “A good plan executed now is infinitely better than the perfect plan executed two weeks late.” Just go out and shoot.
Focus issues and chromatic aberration are not for the fellow shooting pictures of his newborn daughter. These are the issues the photographer at the New York Times needs to be concerned with, not you and me.
Google Canada recently announced 50% of businesses in Canada don’t even have a website. That seems absurd. This boggles my mind actually. I’ll take a website with a bit of missed focus, that actually exists, over a well thought out plan that never happens. We can learn to adjust for the kinks along the way, and we’ll compensate the minor focus issues when needed.
My friend Shawn talks a lot about the trap of the “Wild Blue Yonder” when it comes to business planning. It is really easy to spend a lot of time worrying about what MIGHT happen, or what CAN happen when you’re massively successful. But that doesn’t help you NOW, when it’s time to launch.
Now, you just get something out there. You need to take the first step. And if it’s a bit blurry, that’s okay, You can worry about correcting it later. The most important thing is to put it out there. Its 2011 folks. Most people aren’t using the three-pound phonebook to find out about your business these days.
For the first three month’s of Avalon’s life, we’d been blessed by the Gods of Sleep with a baby who loved to sleep. The trade-off, is an ever-growing insatiable appetite for the discovery of new things. She’s starting to get up more through the night and realizes there’s a lot of fun to be had while awake than there is while sleeping.
The biggest mistake is letting her make eye contact with us during the 3am wakeup, because that brings on an ear-to-ear grin of excitement and happiness! “I don’t want to sleep, I want to play!” She’s suddenly hungry for the world. Hungry to have fun. Hungry to explore.
When do we lose that hunger? At what point do we decide, “this is my life, and this is how my days will play out. There’s nothing I can do about it”?
The animals in the zoo certainly have no choice. Tough luck. What a sad reality. When the monkey is depressed and want’s to start down a new path, she’s got no choice. Sit behind the glass as the children poke and prod. All day long. Factory work for monkeys.
Yet we have the choice. We’re the one creature that can decide today is going to be different than yesterday.
It’s the power of childish eyes. The power to have the thirst and hunger of discovery like little Avalon is now realizing she has. And yet so many of us are afraid to wield this power. Maybe you forgot you had it?
If the animals in the zoo see an open door, they usually use it.
We’re given this power for a reason. The door is open. Don’t waste the opportunity.
Wandering aimlessly is easy, especially if you don’t have a map. And before you know it, the hours pass into days, days pass into weeks, and weeks pass into years. Where are you going? How do you know if you have arrived if you don’t really know where you wanted to go in the first place?
This is where your cartography skills come into play. Map making.
In January, if you haven’t noticed, I changed the header’s design on my blog. I wanted to provide a few of the ideas and words I try to live by.
Make your own rules.
Draw your own map.
Live your own life.
Own it.
Last week I came across this note while making the rounds on the net (via lettersofnote.com). The note was written by Bruce Lee. Bruce wrote the letter to himself when he was 28 years old. What’s remarkable is that with something so simple, so short, so sweet, and under 75 words, Bruce was able to give himself the guiding light for moving forward.
Here’s what it says:
My Definite Chief Aim
I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highest paid Oriental super star in the United States. In return I will give the most exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession $10,000,000. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.
Bruce Lee
1969
Bruce drew his own map instead of wandering aimlessly; going in circles, looking for someone else’s map, secret or shortcut, and never searching for Wonka’s Golden Ticket. Instead, he put the pen to paper and wrote it down.
Have you drawn yours yet?
Henry Ford was laughed at when he suggested his world-changing plans to build the automobile using the assembly line.
“What a nut!”
“Sure, good luck with that Henry”
In the Windsor area, where I live, folks jump for joy when a new call-centre decides to open up in town. You can’t blame them, jobs are good, and we certainly need them here. The problem is we’re officially replacing factory work with more factory work and the new factories pay less.
Of course, this is merely a stall-tactic as we’d be fooling ourselves if we believed these new factories will offer the same long 30-40 year careers our parents had.
Yet, we’ve decided it’s easier to take the factory work than it is to start something new. I’m starting to wonder what we can do to get over that hurdle, because I’m not sure we can stall that much longer. So what needs to be done? Who needs to speak up?
Do I? Maybe I do. Can you hear me???
We need to find our pokers. We need to find the folks willing to cause a ruckus. We need to find the ones willing to initiate and start stuff, because poking is infectious.
What we really need are people who are not afraid to be laughed at.
I’m not afraid of being laughed anymore, but I’ve certainly done my share of hiding. I’ve procrastinated and avoided starting something when I should have. I’ve left projects in the dust because I chickened out. I’ve spent time writing but didn’t hit the publish button because I was afraid of being laughed at. That’s normal folks. We’re all a bit afraid.
But the real magic happens when you suppress the fear long enough to get something out the door. I started a new business last year that was exposed to an audience of well over ten million people in its first 60 days of operation.
We need to be more like Henry.
Overlooked. Unappreciated. Undervalued. Underpaid
Why do any more work than you have to? Why not just do the bare minimum? Why do any more?
Hide in the shadows. Stay out of your bosses cross-hairs. Keep quiet. Keep a low-profile. Do what you’re told. Shut up. Don’t ask questions. Follow the guidelines.
I’ve worked in places like this before. I’m sure you have too. It’s certainly not the type of working environment where Linchpins will thrive. Your employees may be asking themselves, “Why bother? I’ll just show up, take the paycheck and be on my way.”
But what if you were the employer, and you were to make it your goal to foster a working environment where employees were engaged and recognized for their achievements?
What if your employees were encouraged to make decisions and act on their own judgments?
What if you empowered employees to solve customer service complaints without having to speak to the manager first?
Would it be worth the bother?
Just the other day, I overheard a story of a project that’s currently underway. The project includes the installation and setup of some very sophisticated and expensive equipment. It’s costing one company millions of dollars and another company is being paid millions of dollars to complete the project.
It took only one employee, taking a single glance at the project’s progress and saying “stop, wait, you’re installing the entire system backwards.” He was right. Thankfully, luckily, the error was caught before it was too late.
A disgruntled, hidden-in-the-shadows, unrecognized, undervalued, unappreciated employee may have seen the error and kept his mouth shut. He may have driven home that evening with a big smile on his face. Instead, this company is doing its best to foster a working environment where employees are recognized and valued for speaking up. They’re recognized for their achievements and the work is appreciated. Sometimes, even a single nod of recognition is all it takes.
So I’ll ask again, why bother?
