My inspiration for writing this post was that I discovered a new startup in South Carolina called Loft Resumes. Dodd Caldwell and co-founder Emory Cash, both graphic artists, opened shop last week. For $99 they take your ugly-ass Word resume and hand craft it into a design masterpiece. If you’re job hunting I think this is worthwhile [...]
Continue Reading →Business Dashboard
In the last week two different friends asked me for advice on how to build a business dashboard. Well, they didn’t actually ask specifically how to build one but they had questions which could be solved if they had one. So I helped them build it. I have used business dashboards to track my performance [...]
Continue Reading →Yelp Me, Please
After its IPO today Yelp (NYSE:YELP) closed with a market valuation of $1.3B. That’s billion, with a B. Last year Yelp booked $89 million in revenue and had a net income loss of $16 million. What’s hard to believe is that Yelp has been in business for seven years. Help me understand why you want [...]
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5 Keys to Writing a Good Contract
I am not an attorney. But why should that stop me from giving you legal advice? Well, there probably is a law prohibiting me from doing so but I’m not an attorney so I’m unaware of any. While I’m at it I also included some medical advice at the end just to keep things interesting. [...]
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Helicopter Still Grounded
With the start of the new year I decided to freshen up the look of my blog. I also changed the name from Lon’s Blog to FrmLon. The wizards at Creativello, specifically Kelly Bahr, helped with the logo design and naming. I did the website design which surely took me more hours than a professional but [...]
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Being Afraid
Many of you know that this month marks iClick’s ten year anniversary. I started iClick on Dec 31, 2001 in my Seattle apartment with 14 credit cards, a computer connected to dial-up, and a half-baked idea to import digital cameras. I could use this opportunity to reminisce but I did that already at our holiday party. [...]
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Amex and Helicopters
Last week I was in Seattle to celebrate iClick’s ten year anniversary (big party!) and year-end board meeting (good meeting– no beer). The first thing I do when I get to the Seattle office is sift through the massive stack of mail addressed to me. The pile consists of the usual suspects like credit card offers, industry [...]
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Confidence in Cycles
For the last two weeks we’ve been on tour in Boulder. On the preschool visitation circuit to be exact. Even though preschool doesn’t start for Lucy until the fall we were encouraged to submit applications ASAP in order to get on the wait lists. Prior to our visits I thought preschool was about finger painting, sandboxes, [...]
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Foosball, Bean Bags, and Free Soda
Well, hello there…it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve had a busy past four weeks including a trip to China, settling in to a new office in Boulder, and helping Lauren nest before our second is born. Nesting, for this dad-to-be, entails: assembling cribs and the like with one allen wrench and cryptic Chinese instructions. [...]
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Designing for Business
I feel like more than ever, there has been a lot of talk about the value of great design to companies and brands. This probably has to do with the many recent retrospectives of Steve Jobs and the success of Apple. They proved to the world that design can be a key competitive advantage. But great design [...]
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Steve Jobs
I had a draft post I was working on and planned to send next week. It was about how Steve Jobs built Apple not by saying yes to every opportunity but by saying no. How great leaders learn to achieve focus and clarity by being curators for their business. Today Steve Jobs passed away but his [...]
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RIGHTSLEEVE Office Space
My last post on creating a fun work culture spurred lots of interesting comments. One of which came from a good friend of mine Mark Graham who owns RIGHTSLEEVE (a promotional design agency in Canada). He shared with me a video produced a few months ago by Globe and Mail highlighting their environment and culture. It’s [...]
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How to Build a Fun Office Culture
It starts from the top. No exceptions. Create a culture of respect before worrying about if it’s fun. When making hiring decisions consider how the candidate will fit in with the culture you’re trying to build. Surprise people with small gifts or activities. Expecting something is less fun. Lose the dress code. We all feel more comfortable [...]
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Who Would Miss You?
Gut check…If you never called on a customer of yours again, would they miss you? It’s the purest measurement of customer loyalty. If iClick closed its doors tomorrow, would anyone care? Yes. We absolutely have customers that would be very unhappy if we didn’t exist. Of course not every customer feels this way about iClick. But [...]
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How to Spend Marketing Dollars
I received a call last week from a promoter of an industry event. They wanted Creativello, a design agency that I co-founded, to be the lead sponsor of the event. Cost: $25,000. Ouch! Way out of our budget…at least this year. The promoter pitched me on all of the reasons why it would make sense as [...]
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Stand Behind Your Idea, Not Your Boss
When a new idea succeeds in the company, we take the credit. When one fails, we take the blame. Regardless of whose idea it was, we’re the boss and ultimately responsible. (This also begs the question: Is there any such thing as a “new” idea? But I’ll reserve that for a separate post…) We all appreciate [...]
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Cash is Still King – and Hard to Resist
As a follow-up to my last post on incentives, let’s talk about cold, hard cash. Legal tender. The Benjamins. Real money, nothing virtual. The kind you measure by sheer bulk. Here’s my theory: If I add a $100 bonus to your paycheck this week or give you $100 cash, what’s the difference? First, the cash [...]
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Zazzle Order Experience
Last week I attended NALC (a leadership conference for the promotional product industry) and watched David Nicholson of Leeds moderate an interesting discussion about Alibaba, who many feel is a threat to our industry. Alibaba connects factories, mostly in developing countries, with end-buyers thus, circumventing the traditional Factory > Supplier > Distributor > End-Customer model the promotional products [...]
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Good Incentive
Sales incentive plans can be tricky. Usually that’s the problem. They are too tricky. Sales managers create elaborate models to drive results from multiple angles. In the end, though, we just want to hit our projected sales numbers. And sales people just want to get paid when success is achieved. Over the years I’ve identified [...]
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Get Cloud Savvy with Google Apps
If you want to save money, make life easier, and never reboot your Microsoft Exchange server again then move to Google Apps. At iClick we dropped Microsoft Office two years ago and never regretted it. Google Apps is the online equivalent of Microsoft Office only it costs $50/user/year and it’s completely online. They have a [...]
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