Here are my notes from the conference:

• From the book Good to Great ask yourself: What one thing do we do best?
• Richard Davis: Do it my way. Don’t change your brand. Pick it and stick to it. Consistency of your message!
• From the book Blink: Indecision vs intuition. Aggressive mistakes are fine.
• Find a great mentor
• Focus on a need. Be the best at solving it.
• Tell a simple human truth that people can relate to.
• Mike O’Brien’s advice:
  • If you are not failing you need to buckle up and try harder.
  • A good manager: motivate and facilitate.
• Bob River’s advice: One word: EMPATHY.

I’ve been learning that taking a break really helps.  Anything from taking Moose for a walk to doing the dishes is enough to get my mind off the problem and reinvigorate myself to get back into it. Occasionally, a solution will present itself to me in this away time.

Sometimes you just gotta step away in order to fix something.  This is non-intuitive and hard for a guy like me that just likes to roll up his sleeves and get stuff working.  But a valuable lesson learned that can be applied in the office every day and also in life.

Sunny’s Business Lessons

1. Get a Job. Before she started Sleep Country USA, Sonny got a job in the bed business to learn the ins and outs of the business on someone else’s dime.
   
2. Do your homework. She then looked up all the bed warehouses in the area and visited each one in person.  She took notes on every detail, especially the customer service and how she was greeted and treated while in each store.This can be applied to a website by visiting your competitors’ sites, signing up, and going through the checkout process all the way to the final page, then canceling the order.  This kind of research intensity reminds me of playing (and getting schooled) at fantasy sports by Aviles growing up.
3. Cut your budget in 1/2 and make it work. I love this one!  It’s so easy to think money will solve all the problems your business faces.  Be more resourceful.  It’s a lot easier to spend less money if the money your business spends is your own.
4. Advertise! I have a hard time with this one because advertising is really expensive, but Sunny knows what she’s talking about here.  Especially that damn Sleep Country jingle.  I actually have to mute the tv or change the channel whenever one of her commercials plays so the jingle isn’t stuck in my head all day!Build an advertising budget into your business plan from day 1.  This does make sense.  After all, the #1 reason a business fails is… lack of sales. Just because you have a fancy website doesn’t mean squat.  It only works if people know about it, which means you need to find ways to spread the word.

   She says that 1/2 of the money spent on advertising will be wasted, but you don’t know which 1/2 so don’t worry about it.  Of course, this applies to the old school advertising methods of TV, radio and print.  With the advent of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online ads, a lot more information is available on which ads are working and which are not.  I wonder how Sonny would be advertising differently in the age of the Internet.  One thing for sure, she would be advertising.

5. You can’t do it alone, but your help doesn’t have to be on your payroll. She said a friend came up with Sleep Country’s tag line “Why buy a mattress anywhere else?” and her only cost was a pitcher of margaritas!  I love it.  That’s resourcefulness at its finest.Sunny also said to hire people who love to do what you hate.  Even if it means money out of your pocket, it will ensure that things like accounting get done right, and will give you more time to do what you love.

   7 out of 10 employees are clock watchers.  Their #1 motivation is RECOGNITION.  Sunny would write thank you notes personally to employees and she said that they valued this type of recognition more than any other.  Even something simple like a Kudos bar.

6. Ask your customers how you are doing and make it easy. Direct feedback from your community of customers is the most important feedback a business can get.  Be sure to listen to them as they are the ones keeping you in business.
7. Our community efforts can make a big difference in our customers’ minds. Make this an integral part of your business model.  Remember, it’s not all about making the most money. Leaving a positive mark on your community is just as important as loading up your bank account with tons of cash.

   Make giving a part of your business model.  Interact with your customers in a non-sales environment.

So, some good lessons learned from Sunny Kobe Cook.  Of course, like anything else in business, just because you know what to do doesn’t ensure success.  It’s the actual doing that will get you there, and teach you a lot of valuable lessons along the way.

She closed her keynote with the following inspiration:

• She started Sleep County with $5,000 and had 8 stores and was profitable in the first year!
• She saw a plaque in a restaurant many years ago that said, “It’s impossible to be 1,000% better than every other restaurant. Let’s try to be 1% better in 1,000 little ways.“

The process for refilling the spent cartridge wasn’t too compicated but a bit messy.  I followed the instructions to a tee and the whole project took about 30 minutes from start to finish.  Plus, future refills would be a lot quicker now that I knew what to do.  So far, so good.

But the print quality sucked!  Totally faded and certainly not usable.  Only when I printed using Best quality did it look acceptable.  Argh.

I removed the cartridge and tried refilling it again but this didn’t help much.  The printouts were very faint.

Instead of wasting more time with the messy and disfunctional refill kit, I decided to bag it and simply ordered refurbished cartridges from a website.  I bought 2 black ink refills for $22 including shipping and they are set to arrive any day now.  This is still half the price of purchasing 2 new cartridges from an office supply store, plus I don’t have to waste time and get frustrated trying to do it myself.

When I decided to start a website design business in 2004 my first marketing effort was to mail a postcard introducing my services to local businesses.  It was the week before Valentine’s Day and I had a good idea for a memorable postcard.  Now I just needed to find some potential customers to send it to.

I went through a Sunday paper and created a spreadsheet of around 200 businesses that were advertising that week.  This took a few hours but wasn’t hard to accomplish.  I used my home computer and printer to print addresses onto labels and my roommate and I spent an hour or so preparing envelopes to be mailed.  The only thing left to do was print and insert the postcards.

1-2 seconds to make an impression.  Hmmm, how will I do that?  My postcard idea was a play on those candy hearts that we all used to get in elementary school.  Make a cute/funny message using the candy hearts.  Surely this will stand out amongst my competition of boring and drab unsolicited mail!

Here’s what the postcard looked like:

Obviously I am not a great graphics designer.  Nor am I a great copywriter — my Mom helped me rework my original choppy copy into the more fluid version you see above.  But the results were very good.  I got 6 or 7 leads and picked up 3 new clients!

The total cost of producing the card was around $150 and the bulk of that cost went into printing the cards at Sir Speedy and postage.  The design of the card was perfect for fitting into a regular envelope so there were no extra costs there.

I guess the most important lesson that I’ve learned so far in sales is to know your audience.

Here’s the follow up card that I sent that August, which led to 2 more new clients.

These cards are the only active marketing that I have done in 4 years of running my website design business.  All of my clients have come from referrals, and many of those referrals came from the people who responded to these cards!

In Seattle’s case, over 120 people from all sorts of different industries paid their $20 and showed up Friday at 6pm. After some brainstorms, quick pitches and votes, we agreed that Seattle would create a Rideshare program to help solve our local traffic issues. However, this idea was scrapped in less than an hour when we realized that there was already some stiff local competition. Check out Ready, Set, Goose.

The team changed gears and we started skillbit, an online service for helping small-medium businesses better manage information about their employees. Our tagline: Your Team’s Potential, Now.

Here’s how skillbit works in a nutshell:

• team leader sets up a free account and invites team members to join skillbit
• team members create a profile with some basic info about themselves
• (the magic) anyone on a team can ask a question to the rest of the team, and the responses are aggregated in a searchable database — these are the Q&A’s.

Once enough Q&A’s are in the database, the teams have a useful tool for quickly learning about their internal resources. For example, do you know which members of your team speak French? Instead of asking them all, or sending a group email, just search skillbit for “french” and any related questions with everyone’s answers will show. Voila! Uncover the skills you already have on your team, and realize your potential today.

My experience participating in Startup Weekend was bittersweet. The bitter part was the difficulty in communicating between such a large team on very short notice. Decisions had to be made all the time, and quickly. Many times a decision was made and not communicated clearly (or at all) to the other teams. This was frustrating.

The sweet parts of SWS was the collaboration and teamwork, meeting a lot of really smart and cool local people, seeing us on the Sunday 5 o’clock TV news, and the excitement of the event. Oh yeah, and creating a real company in one weekend.

Lesson #1: Double-check your math.

The last time I checked, 3 x $83.30 = $249.90 not $251.40. I’ll opt for the 3 easy payments, Dr. Warren. (He’s the guy you see on the commercials, and the founder of the site.)

Lesson #2: Pay attention to the details.

Where’s the ) after Email?

I’m always telling this to my programmers. The difference between a decent website and a great website is in the details. Personally, I hold it against a website when they have typos and spelling mistakes online. I can’t help it. It’s just plain sloppy. You’re telling me that you can afford a multi-million dollar advertising campaign, but you can’t notice the obvious mistakes on your site. Yikes!

It would take about 2 minutes to fix the above mistakes.

And, no, I didn’t setup my free account on eHarmony.com; I got engaged last September and the wedding is scheduled for August 10th. =)