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.

If you can join us, you will not be disappointed.

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?

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.

 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.