Highs and Lows

I was reminded recently of one of my favorite entrepreneur sayings.  What drives me nuts isn’t the inevitable presence of highs and lows of running a new company, it’s when they happen at the same time.

It’s one thing to get used to the roller coaster ride of running a startup.  That’s part of the fun and the challenge of it all.  There are great moments when everything’s working beautifully.  Your strategy is proving to be spot-on.  Your team is executing brilliantly.  Your biggest client renews and gives you a testimonial.  Then there are the dark moments of despair.  You’re running out of cash.  The new product release is behind schedule.  A competitor steals a top client.  No one lives for the lows, but you at least grow to anticipate them and realize that "this, too, shall pass."

But the thing I can never get used to is when those highs and lows occur simultaneously.  It just seems unfair.  Let me enjoy the good news — whatever it is — for at least a day or two before clocking me with something terrible!  But perhaps that’s just another, even more poignant part of the humbling process that comes with running a startup.

Next One is the Big One, a.k.a. Nine is Fine

Today, Return Path turns nine years old. 

What an exciting year we’ve had, too.  As I mentioned a couple months back, we completely reorganized the company this year, marking a major transition and a new stage in the life of the business.  We acquired our largest competitor, Habeas, consolidating our space and further establishing ourselves as the leader in email deliverability and whitelisting.  We marched right past our 1,000th client milestone and now are well on our way to our 1,500th.

Thanks again to our fantastic team and our great group of investors and Board members for another fun and exciting year.  Nine is fine…and now the march to The Big 1-0 begins.

People are People, Part II

In Part I, I talked about the diminishing distinction between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, and how getting the right message to the right person at the right time blurs those traditional boundaries.  I have a different thought on the same theme today, spurred on by Elly Trickett, who is DMNews‘ fantastic new Editor-in-Chief.  Elly wrote a great editorial in the October 1 print edition of the publication that I just caught today entitled “Don’t Forget Your Consumer Side,” in which she recounted a speech she made to an audience of marketers where she asked them to come up with examples of trigger-based digital marketing they had received, and one member of the audience replied with the statement, “We’re not consumers.”

Hogwash!

That’s just the kind of comment that gives the marketing and advertising industry a bad name, not to mention leading directly to bad practices. 

When we as a profession treat the recipients of our messaging like numbers, we do bad things.  We get excited about moving a 1% response rate to a 1.5% response rate (a 50% improvement!) without remembering that 98.5% of our messages fell on deaf ears from being the wrong message, to the wrong person, at the wrong time, sent in the wrong way.

When we as a profession figure out how to treat the recipients of our messaging in more of a Cluetrain Manifesto kind of way (that is to say, as humans, not as “targets,” “prospects,” “consumers,” or “users”), we do our best work.  We engage our prospects and customers.  We think of them as our audience, not as dollar signs walking around with bulls-eye targets on their backs.  We push back when our boss asks us to crank out a rushed email message to make this quarter’s numbers look better when it goes against our better judgment.

So people are people.  If you wouldn’t want to receive an advertising message that you are sending out…maybe it’s worth thinking twice about whether or not to actually send it out in the first place.

The Highest Form of Flattery

Competitors copy us all the time.  Sometimes it’s big things like product features or strategy.  Sometimes it’s little things like marketing collateral or a logo or product name.  Those are always a little annoying, but really, there’s nothing one can do about it.  As we say at Return Path, it’s the price we pay for being a market leader.  And to be honest, I’m sure we do the same on occasion, whether inadvertently or on purpose.

But we spotted one today that’s so incredibly egregious and just plain silly, I don’t even know where to start.  A competitor — name will be hidden to protect the guilty — just ripped off our boiler plate language at the top of all of our job descriptions.  I know this because I personally wrote the copy for ours, and I did it before this competitor even existed.  At least I think they did…let’s compare:

Here is ours:

If you’re obsessed with creating a world class organization and looking for a great company to call home, we want you! Return Path is a growing, thriving company full of smart, motivated people. Our 140+ employees are a tightly-knit, super-focused and incredibly dedicated team. We work hard, and we’re passionate about making email work better for both our clients and their customers.

And theirs:

If you are a smart, dedicated top performer, we want you! Company X is a growing, thriving company full of smart, motivated people. Our employees are a tightly-knit, super-focused and incredibly dedicated team. We work hard, and we’re passionate about safeguarding the credibility, rendering, and effectiveness of our clients’ digital communications.

You be the judge!

New Media’s Influence on the Traditional

Last week, DMNews unveiled its new look and feel and format (of the print publication) at the DMA’s annual convention in Chicago.  Hats off to Publisher Julia Hood and Editor-in-Chief Elly Trickett for diving in and coming up with some great improvements to the publication so quickly after taking the reigns.

What I find particularly interesting about the new format is that its design and even content structure seem to borrow heavily from the world of online media,  such as:

• A top-of-page “navigation bar” that tells you at a glance what articles are on the page (email, circulation, multichannel, legislation, lists, etc.) so you can flip pages and figure out quickly where to stop based on your interests
• MUCH shorter news briefs
• More “fixed” topic sections that are (I think) meant to be recurring in every issue…”Gloves off,” “Duly noted,” “Nailed it”
• “Key points” call-outs of an article etc. instead of all the long form of the prior generation of the publication
• A section called “data bank” that is almost like an analytics widget

I had been ignoring the print edition for several months, assuming I’d catch any critical articles to me via the web site, keyword feeds, and the email newsletter.  But this new format will definitely have me back to at least flipping through the print edition looking for relevant articles.

Eight is NOT Enough!

Today is the eighth anniversary of the founding of Return Path. No offense to Dick Van Patten or Grant Goodeve, but Eight is NOT Enough.  We are just hitting our stride here! 

Congratulations to our incredibly hard working and dedicated employees, and thanks to our clients, partners, and investors for all their support these past 8 years.  Eight may have been Great…but Nine will be Fine!

Holiday Cards c. 2007

Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature.

And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year.

I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology. All with the same quality of art/creative as printed cards. It’s great! A good use of the email channel…much less cost…easier overhead for distribution…and of course better for the environment.

I wonder what made 2007 the tipping year for this.

Bad Side Effect of Tropical Heat Waves?

I love David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column called Fast Forward.  In his most recent edition, he talks about the connection between technology and world peace, which is insightful.  But it also led me to click on a link in the first paragraph to Wikipedia and its great map and listing of ongoing global conflicts here. 

I’m not sure if anyone has ever done any research on this — I’m guessing the answer is yes — but what jumps off the page for me is that all of the ongoing global conflicts today are clustered around the equator.  I do know that crime in urban areas swells in the summer when it’s hot out and tempers flare. 

Not to be too glib, but is it possible that we just need a giant air conditioner around the middle of the planet (an environmentally kind one, of course)?

The Gift of Feedback

My colleague Anita Absey always says that “feedback is a gift.”  I’ve written in the past about our extensive 360 review process at Return Path, and also about how I handle my review and bring the Board in on it.  But this past week, I finished delivering all of our senior staff 360 reviews, and I received the write-up and analysis of my own review.  And once again, I have to say, the process is incredibly valuable. 

For the first time in a long time this year, I got a resounding “much improved” on all of my prior year’s development items from my team and from the Board.  This was great to hear.  As usual, this year’s development items are similarly thoughtful and build on the prior ones, in the context of where the business is going.  Since one of my prior year’s items was “be as transparent as possible,” I thought I’d share my development plan for the coming 12-18 months here on my blog.  If you’re reading this and you report to me, you’ll get a longer form debrief at our next offsite.

1. Continue making the organization more of a Hedgehog, lending more focus to our mission and removing distractions wherever possible.

2. Move the organization’s leadership team from “pacesetting” to “authoritative” management styles by focusing more on :

    a. standards of excellence around employee behavior and performance: develop a more clear performance management system, raise the bar on accountability around leadership and management issues, shift management training from tools to values-based coaching

    b. clear communication loops: balance open door policy with manager empowerment by getting the executive in charge to fix issues (instead of fixing them myself) and/or facilitating stronger manager-employee communication

    c. constant translation of vision into execution: foster clearer context and deeper employee engagement by not just communicating vision, but communicating HOW the vision becomes reality at every opportunity

3. Sharpen elbows further around leadership team: identify key attributes of success, weed out underperformers, re-scope other roles, and clarify “partner for success” opportunities as part of core responsibilities. Make each individual’s development needs public in the senior team (I guess this is the first step towards that!)

4. Make the organization more nimble, inspiring a bias for action through shifts in priorities and cross-functional swat teams where required

So there you go.  If you work at Return Path, please feel free to hold my feet to the fire in the coming months on these points!

I Can’t Tell If I Like This Or Not

I am blogging at 35,000 feet, using American Airlines’ new GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi service. I am definitely having mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it’s nice to download the 47 emails I just wrote before two-hours after landing (sorry, team!). It’s also nice to be able to clean out my Inbox so it’s not overflowing when I get to our California office.

On the other hand, it has the potential to destroy one of the last few places in my life that’s completely free of connectivity. That kind of makes me sad.

I think I’m going to turn it off once I do a single pass at the Inbox. I guess I can turn it back on for the same $12.95 fee if I need it again. This service is a great convenience but a bit of a luxury. At least the guy next to me isn’t using Skype!

Why The Rules Have to Be Flexible

We have clients ask us all the time – how much email should I be sending out to my subscribers? One a week? One a month? And usually, we give the same advice – it depends on what you are sending, and on what expectation you set with your subscribers when they sign up.

This week is a great example that proves the rule “it depends.” I get the Wall Street Journal’s email alerts of major headlines. I think I’ve subscribed in two different categories, maybe three – I can’t remember, since I signed up about 10 years ago. In a typical week, across all the categories, I might get 5 or 10 emails from the Journal. So far this week, I’ve received 42 — and my guess is that we’ll close out the week around 50.

With all the global financial markets in turmoil, of course the Journal should be sending out news more frequently. It doesn’t even occur to me that it’s “too much email” or spam. In fact, I would have thought something was weird if I didn’t get a lot of them this week. Context makes it right.