eROI Days Email Agency

I regularly give speeches on the importance of blogging.  It is one of the core pieces of our grassroots marketing effort, personalizes our brand, engages a 2-way dialogue, helps search engine optimization of all eROI sites and blogs, seeds some press that we get, and indirectly generates some leads through all of this.

That being said, there are weeks like the past one where it is really challenging to make blogging a priority as a CEO. Over the past 2 months, I’ve gotten a lot more engaged in the company and am actually working a bit harder (60 hour weeks vs. 50 hours before).  My focus has shifted more towards Sales, Speaking Engagements, and Product Development (and I’ve kept the same high level of commitment towards interacting w/ employees).

I am not making excuses (actually, that’s exactly what I’m doing), but that’s why I haven’t blogged in 8 days. My biggest reflection of this poor blogging discipline is that I missed Haiku Monday (by 5 hours at is now 5am on Tuesday). After a brief, private flogging, I now forgive myself for this major faux-pas.  Let the haikus roll like water in a rocky stream:

I had my daughters
To myself this weekend and
We laughed and danced.

Tom Szaky lit
Up the stage at eROI - telling
Huge successes of Worm Poop

Last Tuesday, an articulate, inspiring man was voted into office and people all over the world celebrated. In my own neighborhood, fireworks went off and a group of 25 college and high school students were banging pots and pans and stopping traffic on Hawthorne Street to jubilant honks in passing cars.  My family of four walked thru the misty evening and soaked in the positive energy that had our girls jumping up and down gleefully shouting “Obama.” After my wife and I put our girls down to bed, I headed over to a sports bar, OnDeck, for drinks with some close friends - the place was packed and rowdy with 50+ huge TV screens monitoring all of the events of the evening.  The bar became immediately silent when President-elect Obama gave his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago.  We hung on every word.

Since then, it’s been an adjustment. The party only lasted one night and reality set in the next day with the stock market down and life moving at warp speed. Every newspaper and magazine has blitzed us with this momentous, historic event and Obama has lived up to the expectation, for now.  Expectations are so high, that at some point, there will be cracks in his armour. But, hopefully, as a human race that values inspiration, innovation, and progress over fear, we will support him when he stumbles.  As an exercise of documenting a few of the videos and articles that mattered most to me, I am showing them below:

Transcript of Obama’s speech >>

Video of celebrations around the world >>

Thomas Friedman’s Op Ed article from the NY Times >>

Here is an email that I’ve been sending to my entrepreneur friends in Portland today:

Tom Szaky is one of the hottest, most dynamic, young green / sustainable entrepreneurs in the country.  I’m writing you because I know you’d love meeting this amazing entrepreneur who is coming to Portland b/c of its green, sustainable presence (and because I asked him after getting to know him at the past two Inc. 500 conferences).

Tom Szaky is an absolutely amazing speaker (up there w/ President Clinton as another keynote at the Inc. 500 conference last year).  I invited him to fly out here from Trenton, New Jersey to speak to 45-60 entrepreneurs at eROI and he’s able to be here on Sat, Nov 15 at noon (free lunch). This is a Starve Ups event - thanks to John Friess and the Starve Ups member companies for making this happen.

He really is an amazing guy (27 years old and running a $15 million green / sustainable company called TerraCycle where everything about its product and packaging comes from waste) – please consider coming to this.

Here is my past blog post and a Danny Deutsch video:
http://eroidays.com/2007/09/10/amazing-inc-500-conference/

Please let me know if you are interested.  Thx.

I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve failed in the past. I left Intel and started my first company on March 21, 2000 (the week that the dot com bubble showed its first major signs of bursting). Unfortunately, we had a product that was before its time and the generally techno-phobic, construction industry undervalued our ultra-niche software, so the company failed. Our failure was due to our inability to adapt our business model. It was our fault, not the economy.

As an entrepreneur, I think one of my strengths is that I’m naïve. By definition, no entrepreneur in his right mind would start his first business if he truly knew how brutally challenging it would be to build something out of nothing (knowing that anything that can go wrong will go wrong). Six years ago, I founded eROI, an email and web marketing company. We’ve been fortunate to grow from an idea in late 2002 to where we are today, a multi-million dollar company with 47 employees. I know I’m supposed to be writing about how the economy is going to continue to tank and that you should buy a year’s worth of rations to store in your basement, but instead, I’m going to tell you about the audacity of growth in uncertain times ahead.

A couple of weeks ago, I led an all-company meeting on our fourth floor. The message was clear: be aware of the global economic situation, but it is imperative for all of us to focus on what we can control – to truly go above and beyond in our own jobs. We should collaborate productively with our fellow employees, delight our customers on a personal level, practice frugality, and exude positivity and optimism.

Believe in the Future
When eROI began, we leveraged a good product and built a great service company around it. Now, we are investing in research and development to build powerful software on top of an already strong framework. Many would argue that we made a bad decision to invest precious cash into software that will not generate revenue (and profit) for at least 9 months. However, we strongly believe in growth opportunities in the near future, and there is no better time than now to inspire your team to create a product or service that will have a hugely positive impact on the world. (more…)

I’m a huge fan of a quintessential Oregon entity called Live Wire! Radio - a mix of edgy humor, music, and Garrison Keillor-style story-telling and political humor. My wife and I went to the show w/ other folks from eROI and one distinct thing that they do at every show is the Audience Haiku.  Let me preface this blog post by saying that I am clearly no poet, haiku expert.  In fact, they may be so bad, that they are laughable.  But, it’s Monday morning and I want to have you, my loyal blog readers, participate a little more and inspire me with some of your haikus.  Here are only two ground rules - 1. it’s got to be as close as possible to 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables; 2. theme can be edgy, vulgar, random, whatever, but NO excessive swearing please.  Let the absurd poetry of haiku begin.

dark in the morning
cold as hell on my red bike
I am refreshed

Anticipation
of Halloween begins and
finance market scares

Yellow leaves cascade
slick as banana peels squish
under Nike Air

Now, it’s your turn.  Comment with your haiku - you could win a free eROI collectible gift of a robot named KillROI - the famous hero in www.KillSpammer.com!

The smiley face image to the left makes this blog post all the more enjoyable to write.  So, as an entrepreneur, let’s talk about which strategies worked and which failed last week amidst the absolute chaos in the financial markets and subsequently the economy. I was visiting clients and prospects from our NYC office on Mon-Wed last week and media is EVERYWHERE in Manhattan - you cannot escape it. 

However, I was with our NYC Director, Chris Masagatani, who is super talented and hilarious to hang out with while dashing to meetings all over town.  So, my NYC strategy was “Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil” in relation to all the news surrounding the markets crashing continuously.

Then, on the plane flight home to Portland on Wed night, I watched a little of Anderson Cooper and Suze Orman on the Jet Blue flight and Suze said the Dow could easily drop another 1000 points to 8,200 (little did I know that this would actually happen during the day 36 hours later).  This was on top of all the other stuff I had been trying to ignore - and the honest truth is that a lot of anxiety and a little panic set in.  It didn’t last long, but it was there for a brief moment that night.  Failed strategy #2.

I had the most relaxing, peaceful weekend with close friends and all of our families at Black Butte Ranch in Central Oregon (where I still managed to get a ton of work done) and I realized that the successful strategy #3 is to be aware of what is going on globally, but focus all of your energy on your own little world - your team, delighting customers, being frugal in how your company operates, stay calm, and exude positivity and optimism.  So, if an anxiety attack hits, remember to be happy dammit!

PAUL BENNET, IDEO (600 people)

Panasonic & fly a plane on AA batteries
One woman’s comment: Even of if I was the biggest Panasonic competitor, I’d want that plane to fly

Doing good begets doing Good.

Patient Experience – fully get into shoes of customer

1) Happy People unabashedly doing Happy Things
Teamuriggly-putting smiles on people’s faces, no consequences

2) Zappos core values, twitter, zappos.com (After two weeks, offer $2,000 to quit)

Best Buy- like TiVo for your work. Employees are being given permission to be people

1) You need to create a culture of contribution

2) Forget symphonies. Enable jazz= improvise + create your own melody

3) There is no B2B or B2C. Become P2P (person to person); small allows you to behave like human beings.

Going off script and doing something HUMAN
– Start obsessing about ROC (Return on Customers)
– Welcome to the Zappos Experience
– Change one part of your language. Track it “re-schedule appointments” to “broken promises” – 10% down to 3%

Community, Family, Team, Collaboration (NOT Staff, Policy, Training)

Bhutan created the Gross National Happiness Index - super important

Alex Bogusky was on the cover of Inc. magazine a few months ago with the headline something like “Can this Hot Guy Make Microsoft Cool?” Well, Crispin Porter + Bogusky are off to a good start w/ the Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates commercials, and even better, the PC commercials. So, I pose the question - did Bogusky make the Inc. 5000 Conference cool? Having been to 2 consecutive years of conferences, I can clearly say that it was already very cool before he came along, but Bogusky did a really good job of speaking to more than just creativity but accomplishing business objectives in a creative way. Here are my notes:

CP & B: 900 employees, 900 freaks, early on, worked with a ton of underdogs. Very Scrappy.

The Truth Campaign- Anti-Smoking
Change the cultural perceptions around a product Brand around youth rebellion. Rebellion is great. This choice is not rebellion, it’s about being manipulated by a huge machine (tobacco campaigns).

Advertising must play into PR and web, social “Playing with your consumer”

Molson Beer- 200 different labels “I’m not wearing any underwear”

Creativity is just a way to leverage business goals

Burger King Whopper Freak out- people got really pissed off with no Whopper. Super funny.
• embrace the creative process – makes it fun
• “you know what you ought to do,” have someone fill in the answer

CP+B 1 Rule: NEVER LIE. NO FIBS. NO BS. (more…)

Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, is a 27 year-old, game-changer, in the world of green products and the world of beautiful waste. Here are my notes from his Inc. 5000 Breakout Session:

Traditional Green perspective - The more eco-friendly, the more expensive
The larger stores like Walmart & Target are leading the way for more than Whole Foods, etc.

Bottles (Plastic)
Revsed Virgin 30% Recycled Compostable
$0.02 $0.05 $0.07 $0.15

Our products must be: Better, Cheaper, Greener

Pre-Consumer/Post-Consumer (overprint CDs/DVDs), 75% of gift cards never leave warehouse

70lbs waste was produced to make 1lb of waste

99% of what you buy is waste in 6 months

Waste is America’s biggest export

Key is to separate waste

CapriSun- 4.5 billion drink pouches per year

Terra Cycle gets paid to collect the waste (profitable) becauses it is branded

Sort, Sanitize, Waste in Trenton, NJ – then gets flown to Mexico & gets sewn there

Revenue: 3M -> 8M -> 15M

What are the solutions for retailers for greent?
Working with big brands to create creative solutions

You have to evaluate on first two- Better, Cheaper (prove ROI) BTW-it’s Green

Do NOT sell on the virtue of being green. Green is the assumed baseline now. It’s the gravy on top.

Recycle Bank- give credits/$ coupons for recycling more. They’ve increased recycling rate from 20% to 90% in some small cities.

If I can collect enough of 1 thing, it creates value. Lock up I own these waste streams.

BILL McDONOUGH- Cradle to Cradle (Upcycling vs. Downcycling)

Natural Foods Tradeshow, Expo West, Expo East
• Tiny consumer products & companies inspire to be in Whole Foods
• People who are authentically green who don’t work with big brands/retailers

Question: In Germany, charge a lot for garbage to consumers and retailers

Clorox – Green Works – owned the market by being same low price and green

All purpose cleaner- same exact stuff as all the other stuff

More notes from the Inc. 5000 Conference.  This young, 30-something, Bay Area entrepreneur is outrageously talented and currently running 3 mind-blowing companies.  Insane.

 Paypal, Zip2, (SOLD THEM)
Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City (NOW RUNNING)

Tesla Roadster- faster than a Ferrari, more energy efficient than a Prius, 3.9 seconds (0-60 mph), $4 for going 250 miles, Price: $109,000

Elon in press is called nano-manager:
• Re-design and re-modeled doors, headlights
• Delorian failed because it was a bad-performing car
• Orders – 1,200 deposits

Charge agent:
Example that Tesla sets for the entire industry (Chevy Volt happened because of that)

Solar City- as big as 5 competitors combined in California

SpaceX- lead designer on space rocket-3 tries- keeps improving. First two paid for by DARPA, third paid for by Air Force.

Considered one of the most powerful women in the world (and certainly in business), Marilyn is CEO of Carlson Companies, and has grown the company from $12 billion to $40 billion during her tenure. She recently wrote a book showing the more human side of how business is just one aspect of life. Here are my notes from her Inc. 5000 speech:

What deeply cared for, fight for, of what personally mattered to her

Sunday School Story – if you don’t like it, fix it -> her Dad

Financial Collapse- Similar to performance enhancing drug for athletes. Performance was pushed (artificially) over stewardship. We are all suffering from this financial economic collapse.

9 days ago (1 week before Paul Newman’s death), his business partner, A.E. Hotchner brought over a thousand CEOs to their feet w/ tears in their eyes at the Inc. 500 conference. Here are my notes from his talk:

“Paul Newman’s Own” Companies:
Great product testimonials of Neman’s Own Salad Dressing, Spaghetti Sauce, and hilarious story of a 70-year-old man with erectile dysfunction for 20 years. In the past, this man had tried Viagra many times, natural supplements, everything, yet nothing worked. Until one day, he ate Newman’s Own spicy mango salsa, and it shocked his system into a frenzy - he and his girlfriend are very satisfied with the product and he keeps a pouch of spicy mango salsa on him wherever he goes.

Over the years, Newman’s Own has given almost $300 million to charitable causes.
– Over 25 years of camps for Kids with cancer. At the time only 30% kids survived the year after.
– Now, 119,000 Kids have attended these camps, 70% survived now, investing in cure for cancer.

– Don’t just give to charity, start your own charity.

– Story of 10-year-old girl who held his hand and thanked him – she lived all year just for 8 days of camp.

STANDING OVATION – SNIFFLES AND INTERNALIZING FOR NEXT 20 MINUTES

The Right Stuff – doing wrong stuff, re-examine, fix it, and get it right.

Numbers run the business, not people.
• Share numbers with your people
• Teach your people how the numbers related to their job
• Teach anybody anything

We DON’T train our employees well enough (which is why we create needless rules)

Practice learning, Practice courtesy

Speaker, Norm Brodsky, greeting people at the door
Hand-written note

Exposing entire life & numbers -> Share with employees – profit sharing culture is huge

(more…)

Reduce the Job of leadership to 3 Words:
1) Strategy
2) People (We need to optimize these 3 categories)
3) Execution

1 Man Band- all infrastructure, resource, run through 1 decision-maker, risk is too great.
• Start up or crisis

Tribal Band- strong leader with helpers

Sovereign Organization- leadership creates a hologram of the minds of people

Strategy- (Strategic Planning) a collection of ideas of how we’re going to web

Psychology of Routines- Strategy helps you breakthrough the routine

1) Most companies think about Strategy too seldom -> Should do it every 90 days!!!
a. What are 3 most Strategic important accomplishments we’ve had in last 90 days? (some element of how we’ve changed the field of play)
b. What are 3 most important strategic ways we fell short of our strategic potential?
c. What are 3 most important things we’ve learned about our strategy?

You could build a strategy in 48 hours that is 90% as good as 3-month planning. (more…)

TOM PETERS - A self-described capitalist pig, but a big fan of distributed taxes
SETH GODIN - Not accepting status quo

(GODIN): When asked about the next president, said it’s important to consider:
• How you live the Earth for kids and grandkids
• Amount of debt
• Level the playing field

(PETERS): Small Business leaders should focus in the personal financial issues and microfinance, NOT macro. Everything is ambiguous as hell. Most of the time you could be lying and don’t even know it.

(GODIN) Contract between leader and who is being led.
->Certain things a leader should NOT tell about stupid things said by a board member.

(PETERS) “The Manager’s Handbook of Decency” (Loves that word and word GRACE)
• Caring

(GODIN) Temptation to take a shortcut is so overwhelming because we feel like we deserve it, but we as Inc. 5000 entrepreneurs didn’t take that shortcut – so damaging for taking the easier path.

(PETERS) Engineer, Practical “The Dream Manager”
Everyone has a dream, and as CEO, we are the enablers of our people’s dreams.

(PETERS & GODIN) Great camaraderie, but not afraid to disagree.

(GODIN) There will always be a reason of some catastrophe on front page of Wall Street Journal for me not to reach my goals. We create our own destiny no matter what happens in the outside world. Must be aware of what’s going on, but it can’t change your character.

(PETERS) 100 year flood in financial world. Absolutely floored by crisis, but glad for our leadership in Washington. (more…)