Steve Miller's Blog, page 14
April 1, 2018
Mattress Mack & Me
If you never heard of Mattress Mack (Jim McIngvale) down in Houston, well, you should.
Jim owns Gallery Furniture, a very large retail furniture store and has been a staple of the city, as a successful entrepreneur with wacky TV commercials and an active community philanthropist. He received national attention when he opened his stores to shelter and feed many people displaced during the recent Hurricane Harvey disaster.
Now Mack, I mean Jim, and I are connected. And there are several really great marketing lessons that can be learned.
Watch Episode #90 of my weekly UNCOPYABLE Business videos and steal these ideas!
Do NOT miss a single UNCOPYABLE Business episode! CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP!
March 27, 2018
Episode #89: Year-to-year increase of 1879.1%!
I can’t promise you’ll have the same results, but my new best friend, Pete Harris, Co-Owner of Incisive Computing Solutions sent this to us this week.
What was the #1 reason why Pete and his great team (hello Jim and Matt!) achieved such phenomenal results. You’ll have to watch this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business video to find out!
If you aren’t getting notice of my UNCOPYABLE Business broadcasts, CLICK HERE!
March 19, 2018
One BIG Lesson From Toys R Us
Toys R Us is closing their doors and that’s sad.
I used to sell to Toys R Us and had a great relationship with them. They even helped me to market the #1 boys toy way back in 1983!
What can every company large, small, and micro-small learn from their demise? Watch this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business video to find out!
BTW, I’m very proud to share that my book, UNCOPYABLE: How to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition, has achieved BESTSELLER status in multiple categories on Amazon! If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to go get it right now! It’s only 152 pages (mostly one-syllable words, like I think and talk), and has 57 FIVE STAR reviews!
March 12, 2018
5 Tips for Being Awesome in Videos
One of the best ways to be UNCOPYABLE in your market is by showing personality. And the best way to do that is through VIDEO. Just look at great examples, like Gary Vaynerchuk, Will It Blend, and the spate of new YouTube superstars, like Simone Giertz (huge fan, Simone!). They all have personality, baby!
Unfortunately, many people are uncomfortable on camera. But just because you’re not super effervescent doesn’t mean you can’t be awesome. Just share your personality, baby!
I’ve done thousands of hours of video over my life and in this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business video, I share five very simple tips you can use to make your personality stand out. (#5 is the best!)
Are you getting notice of my weekly UNCOPYABLE Business videos? If not, be sure to sign up here!
March 6, 2018
Are best practices hurting your business?
My mission in my business life is to help you create a competitive strategy that uniquely, clearly, and meaningfully differentiates you from the competition.
Notice I didn’t say “help you be better than the competition.” Better is never good enough. In fact, it’s unremarkable and eminently copyable. Worst of all, it’s short-term. As soon as you find a way to be “better’ than the competition, the clock starts counting down to whenever they decide to “out-better” you.
Most companies don’t realize they’re in that vicious cycle, much less the fact they need to be. It’s the proverbial “box” everyone talks about getting out of. Trouble is, you’re not in that box by yourself. You and all your competitors are in there together.
Want to see if you’re in that box? Watch this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business blog video and find out.
February 28, 2018
Are you focused on the wrong Marketing Tools?
I recently surveyed my BFFs (that’s YOU!) asking to rate their use of a list of marketing tools. How competent do they feel about these tools? Which tools do they want to learn more about?
After studying the results, three important questions came to mind:
Are you focusing on TOO many tools?
Are you focusing on the RIGHT tools for your company?
Which tools should you definitely be using, but aren’t?
Interested in what I found? You should be! Watch this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business video and be sure to listen for an important announcement part way through.
And be sure to register for my latest FREE POP-UP OFFICE HOURS WEBINAR. Thursday, March 1 at 2:00pm ET. My subject this week is, 10 Smart Ways to Generate New Leads. Click here to register!
February 19, 2018
Would You Be An Olympian In Your Field? Take the Assessment.
I often think about how cool it would be to compete in the Olympics. But since I’m not, My mind took me another direction.
What if there were Olympics in YOUR field? I’d like to think I’d rank pretty high as a marketer, so it would be very cool to represent the USA competing in the Marketing event!
Going further, it stands to reason there are common traits between superstars in all walks of life. So I’ve looked at Olympic athletes and asked what are those traits?
I’ve come up with five. And I believe we can all improve our lives, both professional and personal, by working these.
Watch this week’s UNCOPYABLE Business video and learn my list of top habits of superstars. Then after watching, go take your own assessment and compare your results with the world’s best!
Click here to take the assessment: theadventure.com/olympics2018
Would you make the team?
Be sure to take the assessment! theadventure.com/olympics2018
February 14, 2018
178 Olympians “Breaking” Rules?
My smokin’ hot wife, Kay, and I love watching the Olympics. The competition, the athletes and their stories, keep us glued to the TV every evening.
I found it particularly interesting that 178 athletes at this Winter Olympics are competing for countries they were not born in. In a curious getting-around the-rules manner, many of these athletes have figured out how to achieve a life-long dream of getting in the Olympics when they might not have otherwise trying through their native country.
It’s all completely legit in the Olympic rules, which made me wonder what we, as business people, can learn?
Watch this week’s Uncopyable Business video and get my take on using rules to your advantage.
January 25, 2018
ABA Marketplace 2018
Thank you, thank you, thank you for attending my keynote at the 2018 ABA Annual Meeting & Marketplace! It was a great honor for me to participate. Most important, of course, I hope I gave you some great info to think about and work on.
As promised, you can download the visuals from my presentation. Just right-click the visual below, or THIS LINK.
As an FYI, I do have regular weekly videos where I talk about marketing, branding, and innovation ideas to help grow your business. Just go to the sign-up on the right side of this page!
And any questions you have, please send me an email: stevemiller@theadventure.com.
January 20, 2018
Uncopyable CES 2018 Interview
Steve and I were both thrilled that his new book, Uncopyable – How to Gain an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition (you may have heard of it?) was selected as one of only eleven books to be featured at CES 2018. John Grisham was one of the other authors. It was a huge honor and a pretty big deal!
The book selection was part of Gary’s Book Club, named for Gary Shapiro, who is the CEO of CTA, which runs CES (had enough acronyms yet)? As you probably know, Uncopyable isn’t a book about technology. But if you’ve read it, you can appreciate its universal message on marketing and innovation.
It turned out to be very cool:
1. Steve has a long history with CES, first attending over 40 years ago. His dad was an exhibitor, and Steve was the teenaged son dragged along for cheap/free labor. That was back in the early days, before the show grew into the gargantuan Consumer Electronics Show. It was way before the name Consumer Electronics Show was shed, and re-branded as simply “CES.” (The word “Electronics,” once modern and futuristic, is understandably too dated to describe today’s cutting-edge technology.
2. For CES 2018, Steve got to drag his own kid along! At 25, Kelly is not exactly a kid. And that girl is nothing if not enthusiastic…she was excited to see the show and watch her dad’s big interview.
3. Steve was interviewed on the CES stage about his book. Afterward, there was an official CES book signing, with people stampeding wildly toward the Barnes and Noble booth to buy a copy. (I’d like to think there was a stampede, anyway. All I know is “Uncopyable” was the top seller, and by the end of the show the books were completely sold out. So I’m sort of filling in the blanks.)
4. Steve was interviewed by David Kretzman from The Motley Fool. After the show they invited Steve to visit Fool Headquarters to present to the staff and discuss further participation with them.
It also turned out to be uncool:
1) The morning of the CES interview, Steve wasn’t feeling well. I’ll skip the details, but it was either the stomach flu or food poisoning. Think back to your last experience with either. ‘Nuf said.
2) He somehow made it on stage…the interview started…and like a true champ, he rose to the occasion. Everything was going remarkably well. Kelly was in the front row, and reported that she couldn’t even tell anything was wrong. The whole thing was very impressive….right up until the time the power went out.
And that’s why the video ends abruptly, in the middle. Pretty ironic, right? The biggest high-tech event in America was brought down by a glitch in…electronics.
Yes, there were a couple of curveballs. But in the grand scheme of things, it all (mostly) worked out. The video is posted on the CTA site with a note about the power outage. Steve packed great info into the first 12 minutes and 43 seconds. And the Gary’s Book Club honor led to other media interviews that will help spread the word about Uncopyable.
One more thing that’s cool: YOU can watch the interview below. And after you listen, you don’t even have to fight the wild stampede to order a copy
