By Michael Port

This issue came to light last week as I told my long-time landscaper that I would no longer use his services for one of my properties. Afterward, I told Petra that I had that horrible feeling of breaking up with a high school girlfriend who does not like what she’s hearing so she won’t give back your Letterman’s jacket and proceeds to throw a strawberry milkshake on your car (we’ll save that story for another day).

In the case of landscaper, he said things like:

• I don’t know who this dream guy is that you think is going to be better than me.
• How can you do this, I’ve always taken care of you like a brother.
• I’m offended because I always give you a special price.

Oy vey, the guilt was piled on a think as cream cheese on a bagel at Sunday brunch with a bunch of Jews (my family). I suppose I should mention that we did not know each other before he started working for me, didn’t socialize or even speak other than to discuss the work on my properties.

Has this ever happened to you?

You call up your contractor to let them know you will no longer be needing their services and, instead of a professional conversation about why you’re making the choice, you feel like you’re having a breakup conversation with your girlfriend or a family argument with your brother?

I bring up this issue because you’re a service professional and I don’t want you to make the same mistake as my landscaper. Please consider the following two points.

One

Using the bonds of familial relations to guilt your client into feeling poorly about their decision to stop working with you while also creating a false argument to defend the real reason they are dissatisfied with your service, is not going to “save the sale.” Moreover, it’s an adolescent way of being.

Two

It’s OK to become friends with your clients, to have personal conversations and even socialize outside of your work together. However, when having conversations about projects, prices or the continuation or discontinuation of services, remember that you are not their friend, boyfriend or brother. You work for them. Pure and simple. If they are unhappy with your services, you have two choices. One, you can try to fix the problem or two, you graciously let them go. Either way, you’ll find ways to improve your services and will likely stay friends.

Here’s a third and bonus point: If you do work with friends or family, giving them special deals and perks and they decide to let you go, nonetheless, the same hold true. Never mention that you did special things for them. If you’re going to hold that over their head, you shouldn’t have done those “favors” in the first place.

I once heard my friend Ben say, “Don’t lend money to friends if it will be a financial hardship for you if they don’t pay you back.” His point was, the good deeds you do don’t always get repaid so do them because it pleases you to help, not because you require reciprocation. Otherwise the relationship will come undone. And, you might even end up with a milkshake covered car.

Now, since I’ve been treating you like a paying client, even though you’re not, and this post took me two hours to write, not to mention that I gave you that third and bonus point to boot, I expect you to share this post with everyone you know.  If you don’t, I’ll huff and I’ll puff and never write another post or book for you for as long as I live. So there!

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By Michael Port

Yesterday was a bad day for the world markets. Economic growth is flat. World governments, with the U.S. leading the way, are dysfunctional.  And starting today, you’re going to hear the phrase, “double dip recession” ad nauseam

Don’t let it program you into a small thinking, fear-driven choices.

You can buy into groupthink and de-individualism or you can be in an individual who charts your own course. Which will it be?

Any progression, global, local, or personal, is about being fully self-expressed in the face of all the forces that conspire to pacify your drive, your hunger to be the most you can be. It starts inside you. And that’s how it should be.

This is your time—to think bigger about yourself and what you are capable of. Because, if not now, when?

Yet it is inevitable that your transformation will set an example for others.

As people experience personal revolutions, they will join with others to bring about bigger, more sweeping changes.

Hopefully, and ideally, this is a revolution that will bring us together to achieve something even bigger—the changes we need to make a better world.

In the meantime, you will achieve more than you imagined possible when you reject doom and gloom groupthink and de-individualism and choose to think bigger about who you are and what you offer the world.

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By Michael Port

Finally, once and for all, I’ll reveal my laborious, difficult, and unreliable system for procrastination.

I promise, even if you hate wasting time, within minutes of learning my best-kept secrets, you’ll be wasting more time than ever before.

In fact, even if you multi-task all the way through my unfocused presentation, you’ll still master my best time wasting secrets.

You’ll discover how to:

• Blow a minimum of 3 hours per day on unproductive social media meandering.
• Miss valuable time by gossiping and complaining with other time killing (un)professionals.
• Do time-consuming busy work under the guise of “perfecting” your product so that you never actually get it to market.
• Plus 100′s of more advanced time killing strategies.

With my easy-to-follow roadmap for doing nothing, you’ll know how to miss the best years of your life and be one step closer to letting your dreams pass you by all the while making the least of your potential.

Join me for this non-event and I will help you become a master of wasting time. When you do… you’ll have even fewer clients than you do now.

Start today! Wait, what am I thinking? Start tomorrow! Wait! Why start tomorrow when you can put of starting even more? Start next week or next year or, better yet, never!

Bottom line! Don’t act ever. Right now decide to never go for it!

See you nowhere.

(You get the point. Now, get to work.)

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By Michael Port

Consider the biggest website mistake most people make: they don’t know what they want their visitors to do when viewing the site and if they do know, they don’t know how they’re going to get the visitor to do it.

Most people consider a web site to be one thing. It’s not.

On the contrary, a web site is made up of a collection of pages that live on the same domain and are related to each other.

For each page on your site, you should be able to answer the following three questions with complete clarity:

1. Who is coming to the page?
2. What do you want them to do?
3. How are you going to get them to do it?

Knowing the answer to each of these three questions will ensure that the content on each page of your site is perfectly designed for the type of person who visits the page.

Why? Because you will consider what kind of story you’re going to tell, and how you’re going to tell it, to get your visitor to reach the goal you’ve set for that page.

Content and Structure

The content and structure of your web site includes the information you wish to convey and how you organize and label it for easy navigation.

As you consider your content and structure, your focus should be on your target market. It is especially critical when you’re working with a designer to think like your target audience.

Think like your audience. What do they want? Design to meet their needs.

Your content and structure are key elements in determining whether your web site is effective. The content has to be relevant to your target market and the layout should make it obvious where the visitor needs to go and what the visitor needs to do.

Visitors to your site want information and resources that will assist them in their work and their lives. If they can’t find what they need, they’ll get frustrated with your site and with you. The result is a lost connection.

Make your site easy to navigate and easy to use, and you’ll establish an immediate rapport with your visitors because they will feel that you already know and understand them.

Make the web a better place to work by sharing this post with your friends.

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By Michael Port

Interviewing experts in your field is one of the fastest ways to to earn credibility with potential clients while building relationships with the important influencers in your industry. But, you’ve got to be careful. The last thing you want to produce is an unhappy guest and a uninterested audience.

There are three parties that influence the outcome of an interview.

1. The interviewer
2. The interviewee
3. The audience

For an interview to be successful, each party must feel that they got the better end of the deal.

Now, I should state that I have no particular experience or training in being an interviewer. I do, however, have extensive experience as an interviewee so I’ll offer you my thoughts on how to conduct a successful interview from that perspective.

An effective interviewer:

1. Strikes a nice balance between what the audience wants to hear and what the interviewee wants to talk about. (You’d think it’s always one and the same but it’s not necessarily the case.)
2. Prepares and rehearses, based on the bio given to them by the interviewee, a short introduction that highlights the key accomplishments of the interviewee. This bio is intended to ensure that the audience is impressed with the interviewee before they answer they first question. (This is not a time for ad-libbing.)
3. Does their research and prepares relevant and revealing questions. They do not expect the interviewee to do this work for them (my pet pieve). However, these questions aren’t introduced in list or scripted form. Rather, they are conversational and flexible. (Note, however, that a great interviewee is able to answer almost any question you ask in a way that reveals what’s important to the interviewee. Don’t be surprised if they take you in a direction that is different than you expect.)
4. Makes the administrative details organized and easy.
5. Keeps the pace moving and has great timing. They can sense when the interviewee is wrapping up a point and they transition well from one topic to the next. (Whatever you do, don’t interrupt the interviewee when they’re on a roll just to get to another question on your list.)
6. Plugs the book and/or the website of the interviewee. (They don’t make the interviewee do it herself.)

A great interviewer takes responsibility for every aspect of production and they do not, under any circumstances, expect the interviewee to do their work for them. Making work easy for others is a key to success no matter what kind of work is being done.

These simple secrets should produce successful interviews (shock jocks and antagonizers not withstanding). Have fun, be playful, and create value. And, don’t be intimidated. Go for it!

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By Michael Port

Following up on my previous post about how to conduct successful interviews, I thought I’d share a book by MIchael Zipursky based entirely on interviews. The book, Masters of Consulting, offers 9 interviews with the “worlds leading consultants” (his words, not mine).

I read through some of the interviews and they’re quite good; very good, in fact. Featured are Michael McLaughlin, Kevin Hogan, Bob Bly, and yours truly, among others.

Just goes to show you, that developing skills as an interviewer, and using those skills to produce information products based on interviews with experts in your field, can be a career making initiative.

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By Michael Port

According to the Kauffman Foundation, individuals between the ages of 54 and 64 represented 22.9% of the entrepreneurs who started businesses in 2010. That’s up from 14.5% in 1996.

Furthermore, the Kaufman Foundation says, that since 2007, this group of grannypreneurs (my word, not theirs) has created new businesses at a higher rate than any other age group. Sweet.

The data, writes Kauffman’s research director Dane Stangler, demonstrates that “The United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it.”

Hey, maybe this trend, in addition to speeding the economic recovery, will compel America’s youth to respect their elders.

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By Michael Port

“What are my dreams to the world? Does it really matter if I keep thinking small?” It matters.

Thinking small is no longer an alternative. Fatalistic thinking has never worked. It’s killing us—our society, our environment, our dreams. I think we need to deal with it.

We live in the world. We need to understand it. More—our world needs us. Sometimes thinking big means facing up to some harsh realities, like the cost of thinking small. Let’s start with a few reminders. It might not be pretty.

Throughout history, small thoughts have stood in opposition to big thoughts.

• The church reviled Galileo. The earth is flat, right?
• Darwin was disbelieved in his time. We couldn’t possibly be descended from apes, could we?
• Slave owners fought to the death to prevent abolition (don’t get me started on sex trafficking).
• Men did not let women vote (still the case in many parts of the world).
• Jazz was deemed illicit.
• Someone tried to kill the electric car (many are still trying).
• Books (and sometimes even the publishers’ offices) continue to be burned. Writers are incarcerated.
• We are poisoning our environment, but we keep on guzzling gas, consuming stuff, stuff, and more stuff and piling up trash.
• Endless wars are waged because nobody wants to let go of their hatred and moral posturing long enough to enable peace.

We are up against a society controlled by people and institutions who generally think small.

• The corporation that seeks to control and manipulate what you think, what you buy, what you believe.
• The friend who tells you not to be too big for your britches.
• The husband who dominates his wife and makes her feel irrelevant.
• The teacher who tells you there is only one way to do something.
• The television network who wants to dumb you down.
• The news media who want to tell you lies and answer no questions.
• The self-help guru who tells you to face death to really live (and people actually die).

Albert Einstein once said:

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form.”

Express yourself. Be bold. Take risks. Stand for something. Think big.

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By Michael Port

Strategic alliances and partnerships are my favorite way to leverage my skills and talents while getting around my weaknesses.

When should you form a partnership with someone outside your business? When 1+1 = 3 or more.

You only want to create a profit-sharing relationship when you can build something bigger together than you can alone.

The partnership should end when the math no longer adds up, when 1+1 = 2 or less.

Resource: if you want to learn more about creating profitable partnerships, check Pam Slim’s, Partnership Playbook (affiliate link). I was interviewed for it along with Guy Kawasaki, John Jantsch, and others. It’s really an impressive product.

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By Michael Port

The best way to evaluate people is to watch them work. Some companies take this literally.

BMW has a simulated assembly line. Job candidates get 90 minutes to perform a variety of work-related tasks

If you’re hiring for contract work, you can do the same. Give a small assignment or project with very specific details, and watch your potential new hire work. See how they deal with the critical issues that make up your matrix.

In fact, you can even work in the kinds of obstacles and issues that come up in your business. If flexibility is a big part of your culture, start them on a project and call them the next day with changes or additions to the project. See how they handle it. If they are going to do customer service for you, ask some real customers to give them a hard time and see how they handle it.

Companies that hire smart often start their recruiting close to home—promoting their own employees and drawing from their pool of contractors. That way they already know how a person works and what personality traits are going to show up on the job. And, when going outside the organization is necessary, smart leaders look to their networks. Brian Scudamore, the CEO of  1800-GOT-JUNK?, emailed me recently asking for leads to fill the COO spot at his company — and they have 200 locations across three countries.

I once hired an assistant who had all the right skills—tech savvy, bright, experienced, and so on. But he didn’t like to reflect on his communication style, an outgrowth of what I found to be his somewhat blind and arrogant attitude.

When I would try to speak with him about problems that others were having with him, he would point out all the tasks he had accomplished. He wasn’t open to hearing about any ways in which he might change.

Sure, he was doing the tasks of the job, but he was bringing down the general morale with his prickly presence. Even though he got things done, it wasn’t worth it to keep him.

Just like you shouldn’t marry someone because they’re good on paper but impossible to live with, you shouldn’t hire someone just because their resume suggests they have the requisite skills but are a pain in the ass to work with.

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