I was just doing a quick review of recent and pending activity. I have been busy. I was a featured speaker at the Self Storage Association’s Executive Ski Workshop, where I spoke on the power of branding and how local branding is more important than ever. 

I did three sessions for the first Virtual Self StoragExpo with the good people at StorSuccess and Bitsonthewire. I talked about training sales people, specific sales tactics and trends in the industry. 

I lead a webinar for my friends at the Mini Storage Messenger on how people still like to deal with people…if they like how those people treat them. 

I am getting ready to do two sessions for the great folks at Inside Self Storage for their March world expo trade show. The one session is about conflict in the workplace…how to handle things when you don’t like the people you work with, your customers are rude, and your boss is a jerk. Not that I have first hand experience with any of these scenarios, but I can give a good talk even on things I don’t know personally. ( wink) The other session is a panel on new technologies that I will moderate. We will talk about all kinds of new tools from automated delinquent notices to the new self storage kiosk in a pocket. I hope the attendees will have lots of questions and stories to share about what they are using, what they have tried and what they hope to test soon. 

I am doing lots of business speaker activities for the storage industry while helping the crew at PhoneSmart get ready for its busy season. I really like what we are seeing from consumer demand. I really like how well our crew has developed in the last few years and all of our new tools, tactics and processes. 

And my favorite business speaking event is not far off. The PhoneSmart Hawaii Un-Conference is coming up June. You don not want to miss that.

It is typical for people to have a love-hate relationship with their workplace, their co-workers and superiors. If the people running the organization are paying attention, they can use this to improve the business weekly.

Take employee comments seriously. If they compliment you and tell you things that they love about work, try to find a way to do more of the same. If they tell you something they hate or bring up a problem, take this very seriously. Use the problem to find some root causes, expose some weaknesses, uncover some sloppiness. Then do something about it.  Create an initiative, a training exercise or a new protocol. Measure results. Reexamine the process and measure results again.

If you do this correctly, employees can love to work at your place of business, even if there are things they hate about it, because you try to address what they hate and make it less hateful.

Do you love to work where you work, or do you hate it?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.