Jeremy Miller's Blog, page 32

Kickstart Your Creativity with a Creative Retreat

If you’re looking to unleash your ideas, schedule a creative retreat asap.

You don’t discover your best ideas behind your desk or pecking away at your keyboard. And you don’t have a-ha moments when you’re following your daily routine.

Moments of brilliance happen when you change things up.

One of the most effective ways I have found to shock the creative system into overdrive is to schedule a “creative retreat.” This is a short, deliberate getaway to work on a problem and discover new ideas.

Getaway To Get Creative

Last week I took a 3 day creative retreat. It was amazing.

For the last few weeks I’ve been suffering from creative constipation. I’m working on my next book, but I’ve been unable to get the ideas to gel. The topic is defined and the research is well underway, but key elements eluded me: the name of the book, the premise, and the destination.

I was spinning my wheels, and it was starting to cause me a great deal of stress. Finally, I realized I needed to take a creative retreat.

The key to a creative retreat is to break your routine. For my retreat I went to my chalet. It’s in a quiet and pristine setting, and there’s no TV or Internet. It’s a perfect place for me to work in an undistracted environment.

To develop your creative retreat look for a physical place to break your routine. The best option is to get away for a few days. If that’s not possible, look for a place that you can work for a day or two that is completely different from your normal office setting.

Build Your Plan

A creative retreat isn’t a vacation. It’s a structured process that balances work with unrelated activities.

Prior to heading to the chalet I formulated my plan with objectives and workflow:

Desired Outcome: Develop a title and premise for the new book.

Approach: Deep research into the topic. This involved reading books, articles, and case studies. As I found key insights or ideas I logged them on Post-It Notes and organized them on my “ideas wall.”

Activity: To let ideas percolate I booked time to go snowboarding every morning from 8:30 to noon.

I followed the same routine for 3 days. It was intense, but productive.

Creativity loves routine. No matter where you host your retreat, build your agenda before you arrive. The routine keeps you focus on the task at hand, and avoid procrastination and distraction.

Include Exercise In Your Creative Retreat

A creative retreat isn’t all about work. You need other activities to help your brain disconnect and breathe.

For me, I included snowboarding strategically. It’s an activity I love, and it puts me outside in nature. I could start each day of my retreat with fresh air, natural light, and a fun activity.

When you develop your creative retreat look for a complimentary activity. It could be hiking, biking, painting, or just about anything unrelated to your work.

I find the best activities for creativity are outdoors, but not too physically demanding. You don’t want to be exhausted from your activity and unable to work afterwards.

Brilliance Happens When You Aren’t Looking

On the morning of day 3 everything clicked.

As I was riding the chairlift everything started to cumulate in my mind. An idea that I generated in late 2015 bounced to the forefront and linked itself to the prior day’s research. Everything came into clarity.

I couldn’t contain myself. I pulled off to the side and recorded my notes in my phone. I had it!

The interesting part is I wasn’t looking for the idea. I was happily snowboarding. This is the neat part of creativity. You find the best ideas when you aren’t looking for them.

A Creative Retreat Kickstarts Creativity

When you’re feeling stuck or need to find a brilliant idea take a creative retreat.

The combination of a new setting, a precise agenda, and unrelated activities will do wonders for your creativity. The process unlocks your mind and helps it make connections it never would in the office.

I don’t take many creative retreats, but when I do I always come back energized. The process gives me clarity.

If you haven’t taken a creative retreat, I highly recommend it. You will be amazed at what you can discover.

Find Your Advantage: Marketing Event on April 5th

The pace of change is unrelenting, especially for marketing. For example, social media marketing strategies that worked well in 2012 do not have the same potency or impact in 2016.

The best brands are constantly learning, innovating, and evolving. To help you with this mission I have partnered with Constant Contact and the Brampton Board of Trade for a special half-day event: Find Your Advantage.

The event is April 5 from 8:30 to noon. It is being held at the Courtyard Marriott — 90 Biscayne Crescent, Brampton, ON L6W 4S1. Tickets are $39 each and includes a copy of my book, Sticky Branding.

You can register on the BBoT site. Sign-up soon. This will be a sell out event.

Speakers

Jeremy Miller, Sticky Branding

My talk is called “Sticky Branding: First Choice Advantage.” I will show you how to create a first choice advantage for your business. In this interactive talk you will learn how to stand out, challenge the giants of your industry, and drive sales.

Lisa Kember, Constant Contact

Lisa Kember is the Regional Director of Constant Contact. Her talk is called, “Beat the Odds: Get Your Customer Engine Running.” Lisa will show you how to build customer connections, keep them coming back, and repeat the process until there is a steady stream of prospects and repeat customers flowing.

Small Business Expo

As an added bonus, the Brampton Board of Trade is hosting a Small Business Expo. This is a great opportunity to showcase your business and connect with potential customers.

You can purchase a vendor table for the low cost of $299, or $199 for BBoT Members.

Register Today

Find Your Advantage is going to be an amazing event. There’ll be great content with excellent networking opportunities. I am really looking forward to it.

Register today. This event will definitely sell out.

Why Your Brand Must Own More Than One Word

“A company can become incredibly successful if it can find a way to own a word in the mind of the prospect,” writes Al Ries and Jack Trout in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

The duo argues that one word can define a brand: what safety is to Volvo; or overnight is to FedEx; or service is to Nordstrom. They go on to say, “No matter how complicated the product, no matter how complicated the needs of the market, it’s always better to focus on one word or benefit rather than two or three or four.”

The “one word principle” is held up as gospel in branding circles, but it’s time to challenge this convention. It takes more than one word to create a competitive advantage.

Competitors and Copycats

Volvo is known for safety, but consumers assume all cars are safe. Safety has transitioned from a differentiator to a table stake.

The same is true for overnight shipping. What was once a transformational service is now commonplace.

In a hypercompetitive marketplace, owning one word doesn’t provide your brand a lot of competitive immunity. It can focus your brand and give it direction, but if you find success it won’t take long for your competitors to copy that word and nullify the advantage.

Developing a brand with a strong competitive advantage is more nuanced.

Combine Strengths and Capabilities

Ries and Trout describe owning one word as “The Law of Focus.” The principle is still sound, but the application of it is more complicated.

Rather than focusing on a word, bring together two or three core capabilities — things your company does brilliantly — to differentiate your firm.

For example, Apple is more than design. It brings together design + ecosystem. The iPhone has an inherent advantage over Android devices, because of the ecosystem. Apple users are held together with the suite of products — iPad, iTunes, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV — versus each product competing on its own merits. The combination of design + ecosystem creates a competitive advantage that’s hard to duplicate.

9 Differentiators

Go beyond just one trait or one word, and consider what your firm does brilliantly.

To identify what your firm does brilliantly evaluate nine areas of your business — the 9 Differentiators:

Market Responsiveness
Product or Service Superiority
Production Efficiency
Natural or Human Resources
Market Dominance
Short Term Profit
Method of Sale
Distribution Methods
Technological Advantage

These are broad differentiators, but you can use them to isolate what your company does better than most (or where your firm is striving to be better).

For example, a company that’s driven by quality and craftsmanship will demonstrate a strength in #2, Product or Service Superiority. Where as a company focused on being a low-cost competitor will gravitate towards #3, Production Efficiency.

The benefit of the 9 Differentiators is you can use them to identify your one-two punch. By combining two (or three) differentiators you can push beyond a simplistic description, like safety, and craft a compelling advantage.

Competitive Advantage Is Nuanced

I love the simplicity of Ries and Trout’s assertion to “burn your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept.” It’s a deliberate strategy to focus on what you do best.

The challenge is one word doesn’t go far enough to differentiate your brand in a fast moving marketplace.

Strong brands secure their position by combining and layering strengths. The richness of advantage makes your brand more interesting, more valuable, and harder to duplicate.

What do you think?

Dick Fosbury, Uber, and How To Disrupt Your Industry

This is an article about innovation, and how to disrupt your industry and redefine normal.

Dick Fosbury is credited as one of the most influential Olympians of all time, because he’s the guy who changed the sport of high jump.

People were jumping over the high bar the same way since the sport began. They ran as fast as they could, and they leaped as high they could. They hurdled and contorted their bodies to make it over the bar.

Between 1895 to 1968, high jumpers made incremental improvements to jump higher and higher. They trained and learned from each other, and along the way creating new jumping styles like the Eastern Cut-Off, the Western Roll, and the Straddle Technique.

For example, in the early sixties American high jump coaches flocked to Russia to learn from Valeriy Brumel. He was the leader of the sport from 1960 to 1964, and won the gold medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Sadly, Brumel’s career was cut short by a motorcycle accident.

But all of these innovations in the sport of high jump were small compared to the Fosbury Flop.

At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Dick Fosbury changed the sport of high jump forever. He shocked the world by going over the bar backwards. And not only that, he landed on his neck and shoulders versus his hands and feet. His new jump was weird, but no one could deny it worked.

Dick Fosbury set a new Olympic record by jumping 2.24 meters, or 7 feet 4¼ inches. His new style of jumping was called “the Fosbury Flop.”

Fosbury is held up as a symbol of innovation. He was the outlier that changed the world. He didn’t have exceptional talent — using the scissor kick he could only clear 3 feet 10 inches. But he saw an opportunity to defy convention. If he changed his approach and trajectory over the bar he could go toe-to-toe with the leaders of his sport and win.

Fosbury was a pioneer and an innovator, but there’s a part of the story that goes unnoticed. Fosbury took advantage of a technological innovation to transform the sport of high jump.

Foam Mats and Mobile Apps

Dick Fosbury is like the Uber of high jump. He took advantage of widely available technology and redefined normal.

In the 1964 Olympic Games, and all previous games, high jumpers landed on sand and hay. Following the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo a new landing surface was introduced: foam mats. The mats provided a raised, softer landing area, which was ideal for the Fosbury Flop — considering it requires landing on your head, neck, and shoulders.

I am sure you can do the Fosbury Flop onto a sand pit, but I suspect you’ll regret it soon afterwards.

Dick Fosbury saw his opportunity. He wanted to compete, but he couldn’t win if he followed convention. He had to change the game. Foam mats provided a platform for Fosbury to innovate.

Uber is doing a similar form of innovation in the taxi industry — or maybe even more broadly in the people moving industry. Uber didn’t invent new technology. Rather it challenged convention by using widely available tools — smartphones, GPS, mobile apps, maps, and digital payments — to create a new car service.

In hindsight, Uber and the Fosbury Flop make perfect sense. Their approach is so logical. For example, after using Uber I can’t imagine standing at the side of the road trying to hail a cab. That seems so antiquated.

But timing plays a big part in these innovations. Small technological shifts create opportunities to do remarkable things. The question is are you looking for your proverbial foam mats?

Resistance Is Normal

Mahatma Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Every innovator faces resistance. If nobody doubts you, chances are you’re not striving far enough.

Dick Fosbury faced a great deal of criticism developing his jumping technique. His coaches pressured him to stop with dire warnings of injury and embarrassment. His competitors laughed at him. Ed Caruthers, the 1968 silver medalist who competed against Fosbury, said, “I thought he was nuts, a real goofball, when I first saw him jump that way.”

But Fosbury persisted. He knew he was onto something.

Uber faced, and is facing, similar resistance. When the service launched it was positioned as a black car service for the wealthy 1% of San Francisco and New York. Many would be investors balked at the initial opportunity to invest in the company, because they couldn’t see how the service could scale into the global phenomenon it is today. Now the fight has shifted to municipalities, local governments, and taxi companies that are threatened by a shift in the status quo.

A great innovation will be challenged.

Innovation Happens in Plane Sight

Resistance is normal, and the funny part is everyone sees it coming.

Fosbury didn’t just show up at the 1968 Olympics and say, “Hey guys, I’m here. Can I jump?” No, he climbed his way up to that arena. He competed in local and state competitions, and he competed on the international stage. He fought and climbed, or should I say jumped, his way to the most prestigious sporting event in the world. All of his competitors saw him coming.

Uber was launched in June 2009 and the service was expanded to international markets in 2012. From the start Uber has been well funded, well promoted, and well recognized. Every cab company could see Uber coming.

Truly remarkable innovations are visible for all to see. But the irony is convention — the way things have always been done — has a seductive hold. There’s comfort in the past, and that blinds entrenched players to what is about to happen.

For example, Jim Balsillie, then co-CEO of Research in Motion/Blackberry, dismissed the launch of the iPhone in 2007. He said, “It’s kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers. … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.”

Oh how wrong he was. History blinds the incumbents to what’s actually happening. They can see the innovation unfolding, but they miss how the future is being rewritten without them.

Change Your Perspective, Change Everything

I recently wrote in a post, Great Brands Are Built in Periods of Great Change, if you ever had aspirations to grow an iconic brand, now is the time. There are foam mats all around.

The rise of the internet, social media, mobile technology, 3D printing, and so forth are creating an ideal climate for innovation. You don’t have to have billions of dollars for R&D and marketing, and you don’t have to invent any new technology. You can use what’s around you, and change the world. You just have to think broadly and challenge convention.

What are the conventions of your industry?

Social
Political or regulatory
Technology
Buying habits
Competitive norms

Chances are when you examine the conventions of your industry you will see many of the rules were created for the market leaders by the market leaders. Once upon a time the market leaders were small, innovative companies that were setting out to challenge convention. They were like Dick Fosbury and Uber, and saw a better way.

As these organizations innovated they defined a new set of conventions and expectations — conventions that favored them.

Now it’s your turn.

What do your customers, or potential customers, really want and need?
How can you make their lives just a little bit easier?
What conventions or industry norms are preventing you from fulfilling that objective?

When you change your perspective and question conventions you will find a massive world of opportunities. The foam mats are all around. Redefine what is normal and you will disrupt your industry.

Embrace the Power of “I Don’t”

“I don’t” is one of the most powerful behavior changing phrases in your vocabulary.

In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers found the phrase “I don’t” is up to eight times more effective than saying “I can’t.” And “I don’t” is more than twice as effective as saying “no.”

This is cool. If you want to change your behaviors, or even shift the culture of your team, start proclaiming what you don’t do. This is a powerful insight to increase your potential to achieve big, transformational goals.

A Clear Guideline for Success

“I don’t” creates a clear guideline for success.

In January I began the Whole Life Challenge. It’s an eight week diet designed to change your behaviors, and it’s fun because the program is gamified. You play with a team — in my case a group of friends from my crossfit gym — and score points every day for eating well, exercising, drinking water, stretching, and other weekly lifestyle challenges.

The key to the program is what you don’t do. Over the eight weeks I’m not eating sugar, flour, or dairy. (If you’re interested, you can view the food options here.)

Saying “I don’t” has been transformational. For Sticky Branding I travel a lot as a keynote speaker and brand strategist. And I find it hard to eat well on the road. Between restaurants or getting a quick bite to eat between meetings, I struggle to make good choices.

Since starting the Whole Life Challenge my choices are easier to make. The phrase “I don’t eat …” guides me.

For example, last night I was out for drinks with friends, and I said “I don’t” — and it was definitive. I didn’t have to do any internal negotiations or rely on my willpower. I just did, because I said what I don’t do.

By stating what you don’t do, or what your team doesn’t do, provides you the freedom to make better choices.

“I Don’t” vs “I Can’t”

In the “I don’t versus I can’t” study, the researchers split participants into three groups:

The Control Group. This group was not given a strategy. They were told to “just say no” when they felt tempted or might lapse from their goals.
The “I Can’t” Group. This group was coached to say “I can’t” when they felt tempted or might deviate from their goals. For example, “I can’t eat popcorn.”
The “I Don’t” Group. The third group was coached to say “I don’t” to overcome being tempted or avoid a lapse from their goals. For example, “I don’t eat popcorn.”

The results paint a vivid picture:

3 out of 10 members of the Control Group achieved their goals over ten days.
1 out of 10 members of the “I Can’t” Group achieved their goals over ten days.
And 8 out of 10 members of the “I Don’t” Group achieved their goals over ten days.

A simple phrase — “I don’t” — drives behaviors, reduces reliance on willpower, and makes you more successful.

Apply “I Don’t” to Your Brand

“I don’t” is a powerful phrase for accomplishing goals and changing behaviors, but it also has an interesting correlation to your brand.

The connection is with your corporate values and culture.

I typically find value statements a colossal waste of time. Featuring posters of your core values around the office turn into white noise. They’re there, but no one sees them. And worse still, no one knows what to do with “respect,” “integrity,” “communication,” and “excellence.” (As a side note, if those happen to be your corporate values it might be worth updating them. Those were ENRON’s core values.)

Apply “I don’t” or “we don’t” statements to mobilize your team and heighten awareness of your firm’s values.

For example:

We don’t leave a customer on hold for more than 30 seconds.
We don’t compete on price.
We don’t discriminate.

Take what you believe and convert them into action statements. This makes your values more actionable, memorable, and relevant.

These internal behaviors translate externally to your brand. Your brand is built from the inside out — from the way you work to the way you innovate to the way you interact with customers and partners.

By heightening your firm’s focus on what it doesn’t do makes it focus more on what it does do brilliantly.

A’s Hire A’s, and B’s Hire C’s

Talent is the great divider of brands.

Adam Morgan writes in The Pirate Inside, “Great brands are about people. Not necessarily about founders. But ambitious and impatient people: people who want to make a significant change, and make it now.”

This is what drives big brands like Apple, Nike, and Starbucks, as well as what drives small businesses. It’s the people that make the brand remarkable.

Your organization’s ability to attract, hire, and organize talented people is what will separate it from the competition. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s.”

Great Talent Choose Great Brands

Before founding Sticky Branding I led a sales and marketing recruiting company.

One of the unspoken truths of recruiting is the best brands hire the best talent. It’s no accident that companies like Salesforce.com are able to hire the best B2B sales talent. They have a strong brand, generous compensation plans, and they spend an astronomical amount of money on marketing.

When given a choice, high performers choose organizations that promise the most room for growth.

On the other hand, small companies with less established brands have to fight that much harder to attract the A’s. And often they have to make compromises, such as hiring more junior talent and grooming them into superstars.

But a junior superstar is still a superstar.

The companies that commit to hiring remarkable talent — whether they’re junior or seasoned — go further, faster. They achieve more, because they have the people that can convert a vision and a strategy into a brand.

Held Back By Weak Talent

Talent is the throttle for your brand.

When you work with great people, it’s like stepping on the gas. It’s surprising how fast you can go and what you can accomplish with a few A’s.

Weak talent slows you down and stunts your company’s performance. It’s like driving on bald tires. You can make progress, but it takes an inordinate amount of energy. You spin your wheels just doing the basics. And with a weak team it’s almost out of the question to attempt anything extraordinary.

Peter Drucker wrote, “Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.” It doesn’t matter how much money or resources you have at your disposal. A talented group of people that is committed to growing a brand will find the opportunities to stand out.

Great Talent Works For Brands, Not Companies

A strong brand is a recruiting engine.

A’s aren’t just looking for a job. They could get one anywhere. They are looking to make a dent in the industry. They are looking to stretch and grow their capabilities, and focus them on meaningful work. They want to build and shape brands.

This is a little like the chicken and the egg parable. A strong brand attracts strong talent, and strong talent grows strong brands. They are closely linked.

But it all starts with a commitment. Hire the best people, focus them on a clear purpose (what your brand stands for), and reward the hell out of them. A’s hire A’s, and B’s get the leftovers.

Pivoting Too Soon and Too Often

High growth firms are taught to “pivot or persevere.”

This is a core idea of Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup. Eric argues, “Every entrepreneur eventually faces an overriding challenge in developing a successful product: deciding when to pivot and when to persevere. A pivot is a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, business model and engine of growth.”

The concept of pivoting is brilliant, especially in a high growth environment. Your firm’s growth may slow down or stall if you’re unable to change directions and pursue greener pastures.

But you can pivot too much. Pivoting is becoming the entrepreneur’s equivalent of calling “squirrel.” (Dug, the talking dog’s tagline from the movie Up.) Pivoting without purpose gets you nowhere.

Purpose Drives Progress

Sticky Brands are built for their customers. They have purpose.

When a company pivots too often or too soon, it’s often a sign the leadership team isn’t clear on the brand’s purpose. The team doesn’t know who they are, why they exist, or what they’re trying to achieve.

Thrashing about in business model renovations demonstrates a lack of purpose.

Your company’s purpose shapes its brand and guides behaviors. Hold onto that. Use your company’s purpose to guide you to create products and services that positively impact your customers.

Pivoting Is Drastic

Pivoting is a powerful concept, because it recognizes that a strategy must evolve.

When a project starts you don’t know what you don’t know. As you implement the strategy you have an opportunity to learn and adapt. Executing the plan provides valuable insights into how the market receives the product, where it fits, and what to do next.

Pivoting is a recognition that your assumptions were off when you formed the strategy, and it’s time to change directions. But this is drastic.

Realistically a company should not be pivoting multiple times every year (or even every 3 years).

Outgrow Your Strategy

Instead of changing directions and pivoting, shed the skin.

I prefer the metaphor of “shedding the skin” — a concept I introduced in Sticky Branding (the book) — to describe the evolution of a business strategy. Think of your organization like a snake. What does it take to break free of your current confines and grow into an even larger, more powerful brand?

Shedding the skin recognizes that your business evolves and changes, but it also stays true to its purpose. You’re not coming up with a new vision or purpose; you’re looking for new and better ways to fulfill it.

To shed the skin ask three questions:

Where are we today, and where do we need to move towards?
What’s working, and what isn’t working?
Who here is part of the team moving forward, and who has stopped growing and cannot keep up?

Let the questions guide you when you feel stuck or you’re hitting a plateau. You may find you don’t need a drastic change in strategy to achieve your goals. It may be a small tweak or a big a-ha that propels you forward.

Pivoting With Purpose

Besides my book, I gift The Lean Startup the most. It’s approach to developing and testing ideas is brilliant.

But the popularity of The Lean Startup has elevated pivoting to unsustainable heights. Pivoting is a last resort. It’s a dramatic change in strategy to leverage insights gathered from testing ideas.

The more sustainable approach to strategy is purpose driven. Focus on your brand’s purpose, and identify how you can transform your business to grow faster and serve more customers.

Rebranding Sticky Branding: What Do You Think?

A strong brand is a visual brand. You can see the difference.

Sticky Brands pay a lot of attention to their identity, and create optically engaging experiences. But maintaining a strong visual brand is a process. Brands have a shelf life and need to be refreshed every few years.

To start the New Year I am following my own advice. I am excited to announce the launch of StickyBranding.com with a fresh new brand.

Below I have prepared a short overview of our process and results. Let me know what you think.

The Goal: Always Be Converting

In a B2B company, your website is the face of your brand. It’s your salesperson.

Working with Design & Develop, we created an entirely new website experience. The process was unique and productive. Instead of starting with design, we started with the company’s story — how to describe Sticky Branding and what makes it unique simply, succinctly, and visually.

The strategy focused on 2 challenges:

Find what you want in 1 click
Every page drives to a logical next step

As I developed the brand strategy I started using a phrase, “ABC, Always Be Converting.” This required being deliberate about how we tell the story and describe the services. We had to eliminate all the fluff and distill our story into 3 core pages: About, Services, and Speaking.

A New Bee, a New Identity

With the new website came a fresh new identity for Sticky Branding.

Since the company’s inception in 2009 I have been struggling with the brand identity. I have worked to create the “perfect bee” to symbolize the brand, which has been surprisingly difficult. You can see some of the iterations of the bee in my post, The Great Bee Debate.

The bee symbolizes stickiness. I describe the brand as “attracting customers like bears to honey.” The bee creates the honey that attracts your customers.

What’s Next?

Branding is a process, not an event.

Rebranding Sticky Branding is a piece of our marketing strategy, and the new website is paving the way for a marketing automation system. We are implementing Pardot, which is Salesforce.com’s marketing automation suite, to really amplify our sales and marketing efforts.

The website provides the visual representation of the brand and our services, and the content and tools make it come alive and sell.

Let me know what you think.

Feel free to ask me any questions on our branding process, strategy, and how we measure performance. And by all means, let’s talk about your brand too.

Accomplishments in a Bottle

Here is a simple team building idea for the New Year.

The problem with ambitious people is we always want more. We’re always chasing something new. And with the New Year around the corner, it’s exciting to focus on what’s ahead.

Don’t forget to look over your shoulder and acknowledge what you have already accomplished. Before your team launches into the New Year take a moment to pause and reflect:

What did you and your team accomplish this year?
What were the moments that made it a success?
What were the little wins, as well as the big wins?

In the rush to achieve it’s easy to forget the stepping stones that make you successful. This year don’t let those little moments go unnoticed. Capture and celebrate them with “Accomplishments in a Bottle.”

It’s a Simple Activity

When you or a member of your team have an accomplishment, even a small one, log it on a piece of paper and stuff it in a bottle. At the end of the year have a party. Break open your bottle of accomplishments, and reminisce on all that you accomplished.

Step 1: Get a Bottle

You will need a glass bottle for this project. The ideal is something that’s big, clear, and attractive.

Find a bottle that you’d want to display in your office. My favorite is an empty bottle of scotch, but really any glass container can work. You could even use a decanter with a lid.

Step 2: Capture the Moments

On a small notepad, or on Post-It Notes, capture the moments.

Get your team to write down a “win” when it happens. It could be the launch of a new product or campaign. It could be bringing on a new customer. It could be hiring a new employee.

When something happens write a short note and stuff it in the bottle.

Step 3: Make a Routine

When things get busy it’s easy to forget to log your moments.

Make this project part of your team’s routine:

Add a section to your daily or weekly huddle to capture your team’s accomplishments. This will keep the project highly visible.
When you notice a member of your team making an accomplishment, encourage them to log it and place it in the bottle.
Celebrate your bottle as it fills up. It’s a visible reminder of what you’ve already done.

Step 4: Throw a Party

You and your teammates stuffed all those scraps of paper in a bottle for one reason: to have a party.

At the end of the year throw a party, and break open the bottle. Then over some drinks take turns reading out the scraps of paper and share stories.

The party is a blast. It’s filled with laughs, and it’s a great reminder for everyone of how far your team went in 12 months.

Simple Marketing Idea: Send New Year’s Cards

The holidays are right around the corner, and the post office is busy distributing Christmas cards.

I haven’t gotten into the holiday spirit yet, because it has been so unseasonably warm. Blue Mountain, my local ski resort, is reopening its summer activities this weekend.

Even if Mother Nature isn’t cooperating, my mailbox is telling a different story. Every day a new batch of Christmas cards arrive. They’re festive and fun, but they’re not unique.

The more important day to acknowledge, at least from a business context, is New Year’s.

Spice up your marketing with a New Year’s card. It’s a simple idea that will start your year off on the right foot.

We’re Receptive to Ideas on New Year’s

People are at their most reflective on New Year’s day and their birthday.

These are milestone dates. Another year has passed and it causes people to reflect, ponder, and plan for the future.

On New Year’s we consider what we achieved in the past year:

Did I hit my goals?
Am I happy?
What resolutions should I make for the upcoming year?

These reflective questions are opportune for marketers. A timely message can be powerful.

Celebrate the New Year

Send out New Year’s cards this year.

They’re a novelty. Very few companies send New Year’s cards, which means you have an opportunity to put a message in your customers’ hands that will catch their attention.

New Year’s cards are a simple idea. Easy to execute. And it can set your marketing off on the right foot this year.

What do you think?