July 24th, 2010
As a keynote speaker, consultant and business executive, I am often asked how to keep employees motivated. At our PhoneSmart call center, we work on motivation issues every day. Taking hundreds of phone calls a day can wear down even the most self motivated positive thinker. After all the things I have done and heard about to motivate employees, a carry-in lunch is by far the best.
Carry-in lunches are a great way to motivate your people and get them working together on a fun project. We try to have one at least once a month. You would be amazed to see how many excellent chefs you have on staff. People have so much fun preparing their favorite recipes and eating other people’s favorites. People spend a good week getting excited about what they will prepare and talking with everyone else about what they are preparing. The team work and cooperation that surround preparing a carry-in and cleaning up afterwards are very special and bonding moments.
You could not get better food from any restaurant or any caterer. Our carry-ins are delicious. You will be especially pleased if you have a diverse workforce with a wide range of ethnic heritages, because you and your coworkers will get to taste interesting treats you would otherwise never know about. The pride people feel when everyone raves about their dishes goes a long way to making people feel good about the people they work with and their workplace.
We sometimes have special theme carry-ins based on a holiday or a particular style of cooking. It is a lot of fun to see how everyone interprets the theme through their cooking. You’ll find that employees will become famous for a dish or two, and popular demand will mean they bring those dishes often.
Get this tradition started in your workplace and you will love the results. The eating will be great and your people will feel really good about it.
Tags: employee perks, food, motivation
Posted in Management, business speaker, keynote speaker, people | No Comments »
July 3rd, 2010
When acting as a keynote speaker at self storage meetings I like to give some good tips for renting up all the empty space self storage owners have available.
I put all these tips into “Rent it Up!”, my book on self storage sales and marketing. You can order “Rent it Up!” by following this link.
You can also see some reviews of “Rent it Up!” on Amazon.
Please let me know how you like it.
Tags: books, Rent it Up, self storage books, self storage marketing
Posted in Management, Rent it Up, business speaker, keynote speaker, marketing, sales | No Comments »
May 15th, 2010
A business speaker needs to write books to get the information that people could use out to people. I am working on a new title about sales culture.
I could have picked many titles for this book. I could have chosen a challenging title like: “So you think your company’s sales culture is good?” I could have picked a brusque attention getter like “Hey, your company’s sales culture sucks!” I could have picked something a little more academic sounding such as “Stimulating a 2 percent improvement in bottom line corporate profits through the institution of sales culture enhancements”. I could have picked a title that boasted: “I quintupled the revenue of my company by creating a sales culture…and so could you!”
Any one of these might express my feelings about the value of a good sales culture and about my opinion of most companies’ current sales and customer service practice.
But why did I choose the title I did?
Tags: books, bottom line, business speaker, revenue, sales culture
Posted in Management, business speaker, marketing, personal growth, sales | No Comments »
April 29th, 2010
On of the things a business speaker likes to talk about is the moment when someone changes his or her mind. We all have opinions. Some are better informed than others. Some are just other people’s opinions that we regurgitate. But if we are lucky, we come across a time in our lives when we look at an opinion and realize that it is “off”. If we stand strong, we change our mind.
I am not so interested in the little changes, like when you might decide you really do like guacamole after having avoided it for years. I am more interested in the big changes, like when you decided that the invasion of Iraq really was a stupid thing, or when you decided that acquiring more parks and open space really are good things to do for the next generations.
It sounds like Governor Crist of Florida has had one of those moments. After taking an airplane tour over the massive oil spill that is uncontrollably taking over the Gulf of Mexico and after thinking about the people who died in the explosion, he said that he had changed his mind about off shore drilling. Crist is now convinced Florida does not need it or want it. After seeing how much damage can come from an accident, he has set aside one of his party’s biggest mantras: “Drill, baby, drill!”
Now Crist might be heard saying, “No drilling near Florida!”
As a business speaker, I would find a way to use this turnaround in a speech about leadership. Sometimes you have to take the right stance, even if it is opposite of the mantra of the day.
Tags: crist, drilling, florida, gulf of mexico, oil spill
Posted in Management, Travel, alternative energy, business speaker, history, people, personal growth, politics | No Comments »
April 17th, 2010
You may or may not be interested in self storage. But I took a lot of the sales know-how I have been assembling and put it into a book for self storage operators to use as a guide. All businesses need to sell better. You can order “Rent it up!” from Wheatmark publishing or from MiniCo Publishing. Even if you don’t work in self storage, you might find a useful perspective or two.
Tags: book, sales konw-how, self storage, sell
Posted in Management, business speaker, marketing, sales | No Comments »
April 13th, 2010
A business speaker is generally a noun or a pronoun. You get some information from the speaker or you have an enjoyable time listening to the speaker. But when someone becomes a verb, you have impact. As an example, I had the honor of training sales people to go door to door placing free trails for bottled water coolers and bottled water service. I did not invent the methods I found most effective. I did work hard to perfect the talk, the actions and the responses. The routine developed a name. It was called “Troning”. I didn’t name it, but I ran with it.
Becoming a verb helps people understand and internalize what you are trying to teach them and help them mimic and repeat your successes. So how can you become a verb?
Tags: bottled water, noun, speaker, training, verb
Posted in Management, business speaker, marketing, people, personal growth | No Comments »
March 23rd, 2010
As a business speaker, I am always amused and sometimes appalled at hearing legislators, board members and committee members speak their minds. Clearly the nation’s health care system needed big changes. Did we get the changes we needed? Do we even know what we needed? Will the issues of quality of care and preventative activities get the prominence they deserve?
If you listen to what the people say who did not support this bill, we have just thrown our nation and our collective futures to the dogs. That seems a little over-reactive to me. My impression is that the party out of power tends to spend more time posturing than anything else.
It reminds me of playing street hockey back in Brooklyn when I was a kid. There was this one guy from a few blocks over who liked to play hockey against my block. He was always starting fights and being a sore loser. One time he skated hard at me to try and check me against a parked car. You see the cars parked in the street served as our “boards”. He missed me because I moved out of his way. He slammed into the car and crashed all over himself, falling to the street. He jumped up and started yelling about how he hit me hard and I went down and I was a sore loser. I had to laugh out loud. But after a few minutes of his speech, a few kids thought he had actually checked me to the street, even though they saw what happened.
Politics, like street hockey, has some odd moments.
Tags: brooklyn, business, cars, dogs, health care bill, hockey, legislators
Posted in Management, business speaker, dogs, health care debate, marketing, people, personal growth | No Comments »
March 6th, 2010
The cab driver’s kids.
As a business speaker, I love to talk to people about their businesses. After the end of the Inside Self Storage World Expo, I jumped into a cab to take me to McCarran airport and home. I had been gone from home for what seemed like a very long time. The cab driver was playing a CD of music that sounded East African and had a nice beat and an endearing melody. So I struck up a conversation.
I said, “I am enjoying this song. What language are they singing in?” “Ethiopian”, he said proudly. So we chatted about music and we chatted about how busy Las Vegas seemed this week. He asked me if I had ever been to Africa or to Ethiopia. I said I had not, but that I had heard that Ethiopia was a beautiful land.
The cab driver’s kids live in Ethiopia in a small town outside of Addis Ababa. He hasn’t been home to see them in a year. When he can go, it takes him 19 hours to fly from Las Vegas to Washington-Dulles, where he has a four hour layover before flying to Rome to connect to the flight to Ethiopia.
Last year he was home to see his kids twice. One time a few years ago, he flew through Frankfurt on Lufthansa and saved two hours of layover time.
The can driver sends his wife $300.00 a month. That is enough to support the cab driver’s wife, the cab driver’s two kids and his brother’s family. They don’t live in style, but they manage to get by. There is little work in Ethiopia and even less cash. So a few American Dollars become significant.
The cab driver used to live in California, but the cost of living was too high. In California he had to drive a cab 16 hours a day, six days a week in order to be able to send home $300.00 a month. In Las Vegas, he can make more money, spend less money and save a little money driving 12 hours a day, six days a week.
He lives in a cheap apartment he shares with three other cab drivers who send money home to their families every month in Ethiopia, Somalia and Iraq.
He is saving money to bring his family over to the U.S. He just finished getting his US citizenship. It took him three years and about $2,000 to make it happen. There are no opportunities for his children in Ethiopia. His oldest child is a ten year old boy. At 14, the army will come and take him away. He doesn’t have a lot of time to get his children out.
He hopes his kids will get a good education in the US. He hopes they will not fall in with a bad crowd of kids when they get here. He hopes the corruption and inconsistencies in the Ethiopian system won’t prevent him from getting his family here before his boy is conscripted. In the US he can have some hopes for the future.
As we pulled up to the curb at the American Airlines door, I told him I would complain less about being gone from my kids when I travel for work. I wished him luck. And I wished his kids luck, too.
Tags: africa, american arilines, inside self storage world expo, kids, las vegas, lufthansa, McCarran
Posted in Management, Travel, business speaker, marketing, people | 1 Comment »
February 20th, 2010
Today I was teaching and doing face to face marketing at the Kansas City home show. We had a lot of people pass our booth. We had a simple sales goal: get a post card with a “special offer” in the hands of everyone who passed by. So as a business speaker, I needed to develop a great script to use.
At home shows, you hear the cooking demo people and the tool demo people doing their pitches. Some of their pitches are long and involved. I realize their goal was different then ours. They are trying to make sales and collect revenue at the show.
But our script was simple: “here you are”, “Here is something you can probably use”, “Did you get one yet?” were our phrases.
Then we had to perfect the physical business. We learned to extend the arm all the way to the person passing by. We learned to leave our hand with the card out in front of the person until the card was accepted. You can’t get much simpler than that. We also handed out about 1,500 offers. We had a good day.
Tags: home show, kansas city, post card, sales goals, special offer
Posted in Management, Travel, business speaker, marketing, sales | No Comments »
February 19th, 2010
A business blogger is a business speaker
A speaker has more than a few ways to let his voice be heard. Standing in front of a group trying to make a point, teach a lesson or motivate some action is certainly one way. Writing a story around a point is another. Writing a blog post works too.
There are so many voices competing for people’s attention that sometimes people do not have the time or the interest to listen to a business speaker. Some times people only have a few minute to devote to skimming a blog post. So how do you get your voice heard in a short post? Get to the point.
Make a point worth making. Prove your point. Then let the reader go. You said your piece. Your voice was heard. Now let the reader go. If your point was interesting or useful, the reader will come back again.
So when a business speaker cannot get in front of a big group for a long period of time, he can get in front of a small group for a small time in a blog. Now that you are in front of me, I feel like I may have made my point and I will let you go now. I hope you come back.
Tags: blogger, motivation, speaker, teaching, writing
Posted in Management, business speaker, people, personal growth | No Comments »
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