When you work with words, words are your work.

I'll admit it. Sometimes I get hung up on words. It probably comes from hanging around copywriters for 25 years. For example, when someone starts a sentence with "Honestly," I cringe. Perhaps they should have said, "Candidly," if they were being candid, or "Frankly," if they were being frank. But saying "Honestly" can only mean that anything they've said before that was not quite so honest.

Laura Booth brought to my attention another verbal miscue for which I've been guilty a number of times. I used to use the phrase, "I'm anxious to get started on that project." One day Laura looked at me with a sly grin and said, "Are you anxious or eager?" Damn. I was eager. Anxious means I had anxiety about the project. No, I was only eager.

You may say these are unimportant distinctions. I would argue, though, that in our world of ever increasing discourse, it is more important than ever to be clear in our communications. We create perceptions with every communication - written or spoken. Do you want someone to think you're eager or anxious? Candid or honest?

Just a thought or two to ponder.

Someone doesn't like your product

Yesterday, the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City publicly denounced the Bodies - Revealed exhibit at Union Station Kansas City for school field trips. Here's the article in the Kansas City Star.

In my earlier post on Bodies, I mentioned how it was a great example of positioning. It is polarizing. People either really want to see the exhibition or they truly don't.

One of my favorite parts of today's interactive environment is reading the comments people leave on the Star's Web site about specific stories. Boy howdy, did this story touch a nerve. However, it's yet another example of a properly positioned product. People love it or they hate it.

The Bodies - Revealed exhibit is a lightning rod for controversy. If your product is non-controversial (as most products are), then it is extremely important for you to work to find the appropriate positioning so consumers can easily distinguish your product from your competitors. Otherwise you will be an "also ran." Lost in the white noise of marketing. Spending money with little or no return and wondering how other companies seem to find success.

Focus requires sacrifice. Marketers must be okay with being focused on the people most likely to buy and let go of the marginal market segments. Those fringe segments are never going to buy much, and you're going to spend a disproportionate amount of money working to reach them. Take those precious resources and focus them on the market segments that have the greatest potential.

Bodies - Revealed is not for everyone. Neither is your product.

Today, my talk is about...

I was first introduced to public speaking in high school. Through two public speaking classes and active involvement in FFA, I had the opportunity to engage in impromptu, extemporaneous and prepared public speaking opportunities. Of these, impromptu was my favorite. In competition, the judges would give the speaker a topic. Within 15 seconds, the speaker organized their thoughts and began a three-minute or less speech on the given subject.

I also enjoyed the prepared category. This category included prose, persuasive and demonstration sub categories. I remember giving a number of demonstration speeches, from how to build an electric motor to proper lawn mowing technique (yes, my inner nerd is showing again).

Demonstration speeches achieved something persuasive speeches often could not. Demonstration speeches had the power to alter behavior, while persuasive speeches were designed to alter perceptions.

Advertising is typically designed to alter a perception. Direct marketing is typically better at altering behavior. Direct marketing gives the advertiser more room to tell the complete story. It gives them the opportunity to demonstrate the features and benefits of the product. Direct usually engages people a little bit further down the purchase decision pyramid. Due to segmentation through profiling, direct marketers can easily identify their potential customers. Direct marketers can often bypass the need to alter perceptions (through advertising) and move straight to helping the consumer make a choice between two products the they are already considering.

And just so impromptu and extemporaneous don't feel left out, those are left to the sales people. Those feet on the street warriors who (hopefully) listen carefully to the potential customer and then deftly provide thoughtful answers to their questions without having to recant a prepared sales pitch.

Who knew all that stuff we learned in high school would matter?

Polarizing Products and Positioning

This coming Friday, February 29, the exhibit Bodies - Revealed opens at Union Station in Kansas City.

If you're not familiar with the Bodies' exhibits, then you may want to check this out. Just visit the Union Station Web site for details.

The Bodies exhibit is one of those products that could define audience segmentation at an emotional level. Typically, people are either completely enamoured with the exhibit and cannot wait until it opens, or they are completely repulsed by the exhibit and would go no where near it.

It is typical to see this kind of polarization surrounding social issues and political campaigns, but it is rare to find it in an product. There are those who would argue the Bodies exhibits are a social issue. The developers of the exhibits would argue they are for scientific purposes — giving all of a the opportunity to take a peek inside to see what happens to our bodies as we age, grow, develop disease and die.

Do you have customers who love your product? Do you have people who hate it? A good test of how well you have positioned your company is if you have detractors — those people who go out of their way to say they would never buy your product. Of course, you don't want a lot of these people. Negative publicity at a certain level can kill a product or company.

To have love, you must have hate. To have good, you must have evil. To have customers who would do anything to have your product, you must have people who have made a conscious decision not to buy from you.

Get the best work from your agency

We often talk about what agencies should bring to the table when working with a client. But we rarely talk about what clients should bring to the table. Here's a short list. I'm guessing there are more. But when these are present, clients typically get the best work from their agencies.

Enthusiasm
Corporate life can be challenging. You deal with politics and budget pressure and product development challenges and channel marketing problems and the list never ends. It's sometimes hard to be enthusiastic when faced with so many different issues. But enthusiasm is contagious. If you're excited about a new product launch or a re-branding effort, odds are good your agency team will be, too. Agency people know the solutions they bring will not solve all (or even most) of the issues you face every day, but they do believe it will create a platform on which you can build — creating a sense of clarity and direction that will create a path of growth.

Enthusiasm from a client leads agency people to push harder for bigger, better ideas.

Trust
This is a tough one. Because trust is earned, not given. It's also a two-way street. The agency must earn your trust, but you must also earn the trust of the agency. Agency people put their heart and soul into the work they do for clients. All they want in return is for the client to work with them on the development of the campaign and to champion it within the halls of the company when the agency people are not there to champion it themselves. If a campaign doesn't fly, then what the agency people want to know is that their client advocate did the best they could to sell the campaign to their management. It the client contact stood up for the agency, then the agency team will go back and work even harder to get it right.

Engagement
Agencies want their clients to be engaged in the process. They want to know the client is just as interested in the success of the campaign as the agency is. That may seem unlikely to some, but occasionally clients act as if the advertising is not expected to achieve results, and therefore do not appear to fully engage in the process of creating and executing the campaign. Agency people can sense this lack of engagement and will begin to question how hard they should push, which in effect, reduces the chances of creating advertising that will move the sales needle.

Candor
Be forthright. If there is something the agency should know, then let them know as soon as possible. If the CEO is having second thoughts about a campaign, then there needs to be further discussion or a significant change in direction. Many good agencies unintentionally get thrown under the bus because of lack of candid communication. By the time the agency learns of the C-level questions, it's too late. The damage has been done.

Metrics
Set an objective for the campaign. A good objective should be achievable, measurable and within a specific time frame. An objective of "increasing sales" is not an objective, it's an goal. An objective is quantifiable. Your agency should ask you how you intend to measure success. You want to have an answer for that one.

There are a lot of companies clamoring about ROI. They want measurable results. The irony of that is many of these same companies are not interested in investing in the back-end systems so that campaign effectiveness can be measured. It's hard to manage what you don't measure.

Agencies and clients don't enter relationships anticipating failure. However, just like any other relationship, successful, long-lasting client/agency relationships require an effort from both parties. When that happens, great work and results follow.

Try something new.

I'm working on a speech I have to give in a few weeks about social media. I'm a fan of social media. As a blogger, I guess I would have to be. It has been fascinating to watch the transformation from companies controlling message content to consumers controlling content — and often the context — of marketing messages. The Web has changed everything. But not all marketers have changed — yet.

We met with a company recently that was perfectly poised to author a corporate blog. We walked them through the strategy of how to do it. We created the content platform. We even showed them how to use the blog to aid in their selling process. And while they initially loved it, the idea died a sudden death. The top management didn't understand the power of the idea. They couldn't get their heads wrapped around the concept, so it died.

I suppose it was like this when television was introduced. Or radio. There had to be business people who were skeptical. But over time, new technologies get accepted and people begin to innovate within the medium.

If you're reading this blog, then you have made a first critical step. But think about what you could be doing to leverage your personal industry knowledge. Think about with whom you could be connecting on Linked In or Spock or Plaxo or Facebook or MySpace. These are more than Web sites, they're communities of like-minded citizens who share ideas, tastes and goals.

One of the basic tenants of marketing is to find people who think in a similar manner and market to them. It's referred to as market segmentation. Blogs and social networking sites inherently segment. That's the whole idea.

While it may be a little late for a New Year's Resolution, maybe you could try this one. In 2008, try something new in your marketing effort. Start a MySpace page about your company. Start a blog. Find a way to tell your story in an engaging manner and do not be fearful of a) what people will think or b) the technology you use to tell it.

I don't presently have a MySpace or Facebook page. But in the next few days, I will be setting one up. I've found it is much easier to speak with credibility when you have actually been involved in the activity.

I leave you with this challenge. In the next two months, do something on the Web that you would expect Apple or Southwest Airlines to do. Surprise your customers — delight them in fact, when they learn you are working to keep in step with their needs.

Social media does not take away from traditional media. It enhances it. Both are necessary, both will be here long time. And now is the time for you to try something new.

Innovation and Marketing Convergence

I went to the hardware store this weekend for zip ties. They're those semi-hard plastic strips used to hold electrical wires in place. Perhaps one of the top ten greatest handyman innovations of the past 30 years.

As I walked the cavernous isles of Home Depot, past the paint and light bulbs and sheet rock and foam insulation and air conditioners (on sale right now, imagine that as it's 20 degrees outside?), I remembered a pitch we were in a number of years ago for a hardware store chain. Our research team was doing a poll to gain insight into how people shopped in hardware stores. One of the questions was, "Do you ever walk the isles of hardware stores just to see what's new?"

At first, I thought it an odd question. But then I realized that's exactly what I do. Typically, I do not do it intentionally, but I absolutely glance left and right as I'm walking down an isle to see if anything looks new. I like looking for things that make projects easier, or things that will enhance an experience, or things that can be used in a different manner than originally intended (I suppose the screwdriver opening the paint can falls into this category).

Why do we care about new? Why do we look for innovation? Because we have been conditioned to look for new or different or enhanced or special or longer-lasting or stronger or bigger or better. We seek, and sometimes even crave, innovation.

And while many marketers work to improve their products, how many of them seek insight from their customers as part of their product development strategy? Some do, certainly. Apple with the iPhone, Southwest Airlines with their new boarding procedure and Dutch Boy Paints with their square paint can, to name a few. But the vast majority of companies, those that make up the center of the bell curve, only guess. They would argue these are educated guesses based on years of experience in the market place. But no matter how much experience a corporate person has, there is still a high likelihood their insights are still biased.

A few months ago, we met with a company who simply would not consider research. The CEO was adamant — "I've been in this business for 37 years. I know what our customers want."

We passed on the opportunity.

It is widely accepted that discovery is necessary to craft a brand message. However, it is also necessary in product development. In fact, companies should not separate the two. The product development team and the marketing team should all be in the same room at the same time.

Peter Drucker commented years ago, "There are only two things in business that matter, innovation and marketing." If he is right, then there is no reason for the discovery that drives product development to be separated from the discovery that will eventually connect the customer to the brand.

Bring both parties to the table at the same time. The results will be amazing.

Why Advertising Awards Matter

The Kansas City Ad Club held its annual Addy Awards Saturday night. Actually, this was really the first annual Addy Awards. Until this year, they had been called the Omni Awards. But, to get in step with the American Advertising Federation and every other Ad Club in the nation, they changed the name.

Each year agencies from around the region enter the awards. Most years, there are 800 to 1,000 entries. This year, however, there were over 1,200. A great year for the show and stiff competition for everyone in the show.

With this backdrop we began the evening. We thought we had a chance at winning a few Gold Addys. And on this special Saturday night, Meers Advertising did something we really didn't expect. We won 16 Gold Addys, plus Best of Design and Best of Show. You can read Jennifer Mann's story here in the Kansas City Star.

I've always believed awards are the result of good strategic thought executed in an exceptional manner. Research, insight, brand message — great advertising. It's that pause in the middle between brand message and great advertising that's the challenge. For that, you need exceptional people. And I'm proud we have them.

Should your agency win awards? Yes. It is an affirmation the agency is doing work that resonates with the target audience. Should your agency focus on awards at the expense of results? No. The advertising has to work. You just want your advertising to work harder than your competitor's advertising. That's why you want your agency pushing harder. And when that happens, appropriate awards usually follow.

Here's to the Meers' Team. Thank you for making Saturday night one to remember. And for making this, my 400th post to Smoke & Meers, one I won't soon forget.

The few. The proud. The marketers.

I remember watching some ABC Movie of the Week that was about joining the Marine Corps. I don't recall the specifics of the film, but I do recall the boot camp scenes. I remember these rag tag guys showing up on a bus and lining up to get their heads shaved. I also recall lots of running in full gear, an incessant number of push ups and, one scene in particular, of all these guys holding five gallon buckets with sand out to the sides of their bodies while the sun beat down on them. There was a point in my life when the armed services seemed somewhat attractive. That simple film changed my perspective on that notion.

There was something else I took away from that movie. I came to understand the importance of being disciplined. Yes, the Marines break people down in order to build them back up. The same is true in marketing. There is no quick fix. There is no silver bullet. Marketers have to put initiatives in place and see how they work. Some will make it. Some will fail. Some will fail miserably. All of those can be considered "boot camp."

The more efforts you put forth, the more you will learn, the more seasoned you will become. And the more success you will find.

Marketing 12-Step Program

"Hello. My name is John and I'm a marketing conformist."

It seems there are some defining characteristics of companies that struggle with marketing. Are they addicted to making the same mistakes over and over? Is there a cure? How can they come to understand the challenges they face? Why do they feel they have to conform to conventional wisdom?

Here's a 12-Step Program to consider. Good luck.

1. Admit you have a problem.
Ask yourself this question. "What are we going to do this year that is different than what we did last year?" If the answer is nothing, then you have a problem. You may very likely have Marketing Malaise. It's brought on by following the lead of your competitors versus charting your own path. It can also be contracted from previous marketing directors, and no amount of Purell can prevent you from catching it. Fortunately, it's a curable. Read on.

2. Identify your co-dependents.
It is very likely you're not alone in your Marketing Malaise. Odds are good you have people around you who, unknowingly, are keeping you in the same old pattern of marketing strategy and tactics. It could be an obvious person like your CEO — trapped in the past because no one has ever challenged their conventional wisdom. It could be your competitors or your channel partners or your sales counterpart or media reps. Co-dependents can be anywhere. You can spot them easily by paying attention to the number of times they present you with a new idea. No new ideas? Then count them as co-dependents.

3. You don't know what you don't know.
This is a critical step. You must admit that there are things you and your executive team do not know. Yes, it's hard. Especially when there is someone on the team who says, "I've been doing this job for 37 years. I know what our customers want." Ignore that person. Actually, stay as far away from them as possible. They are highly contagious and can infect your entire senior management team with a sneezed sentence.

There's only one cure for 'You don't know what you don't know.' Research. You must do some discovery with your customers. You must make an intentional effort to come to understand why they buy from you. And get ready for this! You're going to learn things you didn't know. And best of all, you're going to find they are not buying your product for rational reasons at all. No. They're buying because they have an emotional connection to your company, product or, shall we even say it out loud, your brand!

Beware though. There are people within your company who do not want to know anything new. No matter what they say they want to know. They've worked hard over the years at becoming competent. New information will challenge their competency. Change is scary. Go gently.

Discovery should be left to professionals. First, they know how to get to the real insights. Second, if you do it internally, it will be biased. And in the end, none of your co-dependents will believe you. Spend the money. Hire the pros.

4. Focus
Another tough one. You cannot be all things to all people. And you know what? Your customers don't want you to be. No, they want you to do what you do best and keep doing it for them. Your challenge is to determine what it is you do best, then find more people like the customers you have and do it for them. Once you're secure in your product and profit, then you can seek out new products and niches.

5. Find a partner.
You can't do this alone. Not only will the research be impossible to do by yourself, arriving at a brand message that doesn't sound like it was written by a committee will be impossible without a professional communications agency. You don't have to look far to see companies that have shunned this advice. In fact, you need only look at the nearest trade magazine for ads that have been honed by a butter knife. Keep them by your bedside to help you fall asleep.

6. Tell your story
I'm not talking about the history of the company. No one cares about that. What they care about is why people do business with you. Potential customers what to know what makes you special. They want a reason to connect. They want to feel loved. They want to feel important. They want to know that you care about them more than any other company possibly could.

Odds are good you have a good story to tell. After you complete the discovery step, you'll likely have the insights you need to craft a compelling one. Again, find someone to help you. Corporations have a long history of trying to brand themselves. Most often it comes out titled "Mission Statement." How many of your customers have purchased your product because of your mission statement?

7. Do fewer things, better.
A definitive sign of Marketing Malaise is the laundry list of tactics. In fact, some Marketing Malaise sufferers have come to believe a list of tactics constitutes a marketing plan. The challenge is to determine the objective (notice we used the singular 'objective' versus the plural 'objectives'). More than one objective is no objective.

Then make the conscious decision to take the precious resources you have been alloted and actually do something that will have an impact. Don't do ten things, take the same dollars and do three things. You'll find those three things, executed well (because you actually spent enough money to do them right) will have five times the impact of the ten things you would have done.

8. Follow your own path.
It's your company. It's your career. It's your chance to do something that will make a difference. Just because the person before you did it that way doesn't mean you should. Try something different. Test something new. You can't make a wholesale change all at once. And besides, no matter how compelling you are, your C-level executives will think you have lobsters crawling out your ears if you attempt to change everything in one year. Pick your battles, think it through and move forward. The worst that can happen is you get fired.

9. You can't manage what you don't measure.
Answer the 'Butts in seats' question. How will you measure success? How will your management measure success? What metrics will they measure you by?

When you're putting your plan together, make sure you are measuring everything you possibly can. With the Web, it is far easier to put metrics in place that will give you a dashboard of data you can share with your sales team and executive leadership.

10. Learn to fail successfully.
You can fail unsuccessfully. In fact, that's what most marketing people are used to. But with the appropriate metrics in place you can fail successfully. With each marketing initiative you learn from your mistakes. What a wonderful idea! With this mindset, you put as many initiatives into the marketplace as possible within the shortest time possible. The more you do, the faster you learn what works well and what doesn't work so well. Remember, you're not trying to determine what marketing efforts work, you're trying to determine what marketing efforts work best.

11. Get back on the horse.
You will fail. Accept that at the beginning but don't let it slow you down. Never doubt that you will prevail while at the same time accept the brutal facts of your current reality. This idea got Admiral James Stockdale through a North Vietnamese prison for several years. Surely it will help you get through your marketing challenges.

12. Celebrate your success.
This is not a time to be modest. While you live and breathe marketing, others within your company do not. They have their own burdens to bear. So when you have a win, share the news. Celebrate the victories immediately, because tomorrow there will be some other challenge you must tackle. Let people know where you and your team have had success. In fact, share some of the challenges along the way. Who knows, you may inspire them to seek out their own 12-Step Program.

One more on the issue of urgency.

Peter Darling's post about the importance of urgency hits the nail on the head. If you're not comfortable with the marketing execution proposed, then find one with which you are comfortable and move forward.

I love the Patton reference, too.

It's not what you start that matters, it's what you finish.

There never seems to be a shortage of ideas. Good ideas, in fact.

We had a client that allowed us to work with them to generate some very good ideas for their business. There were collaborative — involving the appropriate people on their team and always willing to have everyone we needed on our team in the sessions. Research was completed. Plans and budgets were written and approved. Creative was developed and presented to the decision-makers. And then the second guessing would start. "What if we're wrong? What if we're focusing on too narrow of a market segment? What if we don't get the ROI we're looking for? Maybe we should promote a different product line?"

This particular client would allow this second-guessing phase to go one for weeks, sometimes months! By the time they made a decision to move forward, the market opportunity was past and there was new information that caused the direction of the campaign to change. Which required the creative to change. Which cost the client more money. Which frustrated the client and us. Eventually, we ended the relationship. It was just too painful to continue to create work that never saw the light of day.

There's an old axiom I occasionally hear in the halls of marketing organizations: "Do something, even if it's wrong." On the surface, that sounds irresponsible. But when you think about it, that is exactly what you should do.

'Wrong' is relative. All marketing has an element of risk. The important thing to remember is that each marketing initiative should teach you something you can apply to the next marketing initiative. We refer to this as "failing successfully." Make sure the metrics are in place to measure as much as you possibly can, then go! This is yet another case for corporations to have a sense of urgency. Get the initiative in the market now!

Not every marketing effort will be a home run. Some will be singles, some doubles and sometimes, you will strike out. But that's okay as long as you learned something from the effort.

Some people measure success by how may initiatives they start. We measure success, in part, by how many initiatives we finish.

Solve a Different Problem.

At lunch today we were talking about how Sprint and the cable companies made the decision several years ago to build massive fiber optic cable systems to carry, what was anticipated to be, an ever growing load of data. Imagine the people involved in these decisions. They were extraordinary minds working to determine what the data needs would be ten and twenty years in the future. They were looking at the bandwidth it was taking to send streaming video over the web, combined with Voice Over IP and normal Internet usage and scratching their heads to arrive at a decision. I'm sure when they finally arrived at the engineering specs for the system, they were telling themselves it would be out-dated in 3 to 5 years.

Meanwhile, most likely somewhere in California or Japan, another group of engineers was working to solve a different problem. They were working to compress messages, signals and video so that it would take less and less bandwidth. Today, ten years after Sprint launched its nationwide network of fiber optic cable, only a fraction of the bandwidth is being used. All because someone solved a different problem.

The opportunity to solve a different problem presents itself often in marketing. Whether it's customer acquisition, customer retention, channel marketing, pricing, product innovation or branding, the opportunity to solve a different problem is there. But it only comes through research and discovery.

Customer insight drives strategy. Very rarely does a business-changing idea arise from inside a company. Sea change ideas come from your customers. They're the people using the product. They're the ones who know the good, the bad and the ugly. And if you ask them, they'll tell you the truth about your company, your products and your service. If you ask them.

And if you ask them, and you listen closely, they'll likely take you down a path toward solving a different problem — which will solve the problem you were looking at in the first place.

You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
George Bernard Shaw

The Urgency of Voting

Like a few million other Americans, I went to the polls on Tuesday and voted. It was raining. Hard. And I didn't have an umbrella. It was cold. And I had to park about 70 yards away from the door. But I didn't care. Because I wanted to cast my vote.

I love the clarity that comes with voting. Prior to going to the polls, people do their research (or at least we hope they do), they form an opinion and they cast their vote.

Imagine what would happen if, within each corporate meeting or committee gathering, an issue was clearly defined and people made an informed decision. The operative word here is decision. The facts are presented and a decision is made.

Do people ever have all the facts they need? Not likely. But then when people went to the polls yesterday, they didn't have all the facts, either. It's impossible to know how a candidate will perform once they're in office. But when voters went to the polls, they made a definitive decision - one #2 penciled circle or punched chad at a time. They did so because they only had one opportunity to do so. Tuesday was the only day they could vote. Which is kind of like the ultimate sense of urgency. If you don't vote, you don't get another chance. You can't postpone your decision until you get more information.

My previous post centered on why most corporations lack a sense of urgency. I guess there is one thing that, without a doubt, creates a sense of urgency more than anything else.

An immovable deadline.

Make every moment count.

I was interviewing a farmer a few years ago in Danville, Indiana for a client we had in the agricultural category. We covered a lot of topics in the conversation, which is typical. But as the conversation was winding down, the 50-something grower of soybeans and corn turned to me and said, "Sam, it's pretty simple. If I'm lucky, I get about 30 chances in my lifetime to grow a good crop. That's it. Thirty chances. I want to make the most out of each one."

That comment stopped me in my tracks. Even growing up on a farm, I had never thought about the business of farming in that way. You get one crop per year. There's not a lot of room for error. You blow it and you've blown it for the year.

In some respects the clarity that comes with that kind of situation should be envied by corporations. It is much more challenging to have that kind of focus on production when a company is manufacturing light bulbs or brake pads. There's no seasonality. The companies simply sell, produce and ship. If there is a sense of urgency, where does it come from? Does it come from the desire to reach a corporate profit goal? Maybe, but it's pretty hard to motivate employees around a corporate profit goal.

Does it come from TQM or Six Sigma? Perhaps. People love to feel they're doing a good job and working toward continued improvement. But these processes don't necessarily create a sense of urgency. They bring focus within a given time frame, but not a sense of urgency.

Maybe you're asking if companies need a sense of urgency? In my mind, they do. A sense of urgency drives innovation — it gives people a reason to make decisions. Where does it come from in corporate America?

Farmers know they have only so many seasons to get it right. Is the same true for companies? Yes, but we often fail to think of it that way. There are only so many opportunities. There are only so many times a company is going to have the opportunity to knock one out of the park. When the opportunity presents itself, executives must be willing to step up to the plate and swing. They must be willing to make every moment count.

Why five minutes matters.

I worked in the video and film production department while in college. It was a great experience. We shot video all over Illinois. We then edited it and mixed the sound and music. Not a bad experience for a 20 year old.

My boss's boss's boss was a guy named John Behrends. John always reminded me of the Lou Grant character on the Mary Tyler Moore show. Kind of gruff, but a nice guy underneath. I actually didn't have the opportunity to interact with John all that often. Being a student, I worked part time, so I didn't get invited to department meetings. Typically, I saw John most when my two immediate supervisors were on assignment or vacation.

Such was the case one spring afternoon when I showed up for work ten minutes after 4 PM. It seems John had been noticing a pattern to my arrivals - and the pattern was that I was consistently late. It was five minutes here, ten minutes there. But it was a pattern. And to John, it looked a lot like a bad habit.

So that particular afternoon, John met me at the door at ten minutes after 4 and said, in his best grumpy and curmudgeonly voice, "Sam, when you tell someone you're going to be here at 4 o'clock, then you damn well better be here are 4 o'clock!"

That was a great lesson.

What does it say about a company if a promise is made that a service professional will arrive at 4 PM and they show up five minutes late? Compare that to the perception created when the service professional arrives five minutes early. And if they consistently arrive five minutes early, it begins to create a halo effect around the entire company. Customers may begin to believe this company really has its act together in all areas of the company.

It's the little things that can make a big impression.

Twenty five years later, I bumped in to John at a University of Illinois alumni function. I didn't waste the opportunity to tell him how much that tongue lashing in 1980 had impacted me and my career. At age 85, it brought a smile to his face.