Hertz Giveth, Hertz Taketh Away For years, I’ve hated all rental car companies for forcing me to scramble and find a gas station to fill up on the way to returning a car at the airport or get faced with an insane refueling charge. I never understood why one smart company didn’t decide to just do away with that moronic policy, figure out another way to make a profit, market the heck out of it, and endear themselves to customers. Finally, Hertz jumped in a few months ago with just that. Return a car without refueling? No problem. A modest $5 surcharge and market rate for the actual gas required solves the problem. Brilliant! They were even marketing it to…
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Business
If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It First Class
If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It First Class I have long made this statement, not just about business, but about life. Why bother doing something big if you’re not going to do it right? Don’t just write a senior thesis, get an A on it. Don’t invite the boss over for dinner and serve chicken nuggets. You get the idea. Our marketing team at Return Path totally nailed this last week with our IN conference on Reputation. They selected a venue, the American Museum of Natural History, that wasn’t just a standard issue hotel conference room. They sought out a killer keynote speaker, Seth Godin, instead of just having Return Path staff and clients talk. They…
Managing in a Downturn
Managing in a Downturn I spoke at a NextNY event last night along with several others, including fellow entrepreneur David Kidder from Clickable and angel investor Roger Enhrenberg about this fine topic (Roger wrote a great post on it here) and thought I’d share a few of the key points made by all of us for anyone trying to figure out what to do tactically now that Sequoia has told us to be afraid, very afraid. Hope is Not a Strategy: Your business is not immune. It will do what everyone else’s will. Struggle to hit its numbers. Struggle to collect bills. Lose customers. There is no reason to hope you’ll be different. Get Into the Jet Stream: Develop your…
Hands in the Cookie Jar
Hands in the Cookie Jar It feels like I’m closing a lot of transactions lately. Today is another one – we are closing on a house. Somehow, no matter how much of an owner you are of your business, wiring money out of your own personal bank account is a bit harder than wiring from the corporate account. I’ve observed something over the years with transaction closings – both personal and business. I call it the Hands in the Cookie Jar phenomenon. When a lot of money is on the table and trading hands, and when there are a lot of parties involved (not just the principles, but various agents and lawyers as well), the closer you get to the…
Opportunity Knocks
Opportunity Knocks When our friends at Habeas announced that they were exploring a sale of the company a few months back, we were intrigued. While fiercely competing in the marketplace does create some degree of tension or even mistrust between two companies, that activity also creates a lot of common ground for discussion about the market and the future. So we are very excited today to announce that we are acquiring Habeas in a deal that is signed and should close within a couple weeks. Cutting through all the PR platitudes, here’s what this deal really means for our stakeholders: For everyone we work with, this deal means we have even more scale. More scale is a good thing. It…
Book Short: Catchiest Title in a Long Time
Book Short: Catchiest Title in a Long Time You have to admit, a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has a pretty enticing title. The email geek in me thinks that if it were a subject line, it would have a good open rate. Anyway, the book, by Timothy Ferriss, is a breezy read that blends self help with entrepreneurship, has a lot of good resource lists in it, and is worth reading if you don’t take it too seriously. There are some good central points to the book. First, life has changed, and people don’t want to slave away until they’re 65 any more so they can do all the fun…
Book Short: On The Same Page
Book Short: On The Same Page Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points: Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team Create organizational clarity Overcommunicate organizational clarity Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go…
Book Short: On Employee Engagement
Book Short: On Employee Engagement The first time I ever heard the term “Employee Engagement” was from my colleague David Sieh, one of the better managers I’ve ever worked with. He said it was his objective for his engineering team. He explained how he tried to achieve it. I Quit, But forgot to Tell You, by Terri Kabachnick, is a whole book on this topic, a very short but very potent one (the best kind of business books, if you ask me). It’s got all the short-form stuff you’d expect…a checklist of reasons for disengagement, an engagement quiz, the lifecycle of an employee that leads to disengagement, rules for dealing as a manager. But beyond the practical, the book serves…
Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter
Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter I have read a bunch of books lately to try to improve my presentation skills. The latest one, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam, was good, and quite different from some of the others I’ve read recently like Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points, both of which are much more focused on effective use of Powerpoint. The Back of the Napkin takes a different approach. The focus is much more on creating compelling visuals. It’s not about Powerpoint so much as it is about teaching how to crystallize concepts into tight and compelling schematics. Roam creates two pretty good frameworks for thinking about this: one…
Driving Out of the Bubble
Driving Out of the Bubble It’s easy for those of us who live in the Internet bubble to confuse the words “startup” and “entrepreneur” with the word “technology.” Every once in a while, I am struck by a fantastic entrepreneurial idea that’s low-tech or no-tech. In the last few weeks, I’ve learned of two of them — oddly, very similar ideas. They’re both going after the New York City black car limo market (all those car services that take business travelers to and from airports and meetings), which is a lucrative but kind of gritty business. I’ve used black car services for 16 years now, and while I’ve found one that’s pretty good, they all have massive customer service problems…
Book Short: How, Now
Book Short: How, Now Every once in a while, I read a book that has me jump up and down saying “Yes! That’s so right!” How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life), by Dov Seidman, was one of those books. But beyond just agreeing with the things Seidman says, the book had some really valuable examples and two killer frameworks, one around culture, and one around leadership. It’s a book about the way the world we now live in — a world of transparency and hyper-connectedness — is no longer about WHAT you do, but HOW you do it. It’s about how you can have a great brand and great advertising, but if your…