Month: March 2022

Crippled CEO Blog #128:

I wrote the below for our Life Saver Pool Fence dealers, but the ideas inside can pertain to pretty much any business. For those of you running small businesses, I thought it might be worthwhile for you.

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What is the perfect attire to wear to get the most sales?

Is it a Life Saver polo shirt and khakis? Is it a Life Saver button down and slacks? What color is best?

You’re a Life Saver. Maybe the best attire is something that reminds people of other kinds of life savers. Maybe you should wear a Life Saver branded outfit that resembles a paramedic or a firefighter, or maybe scrubs and a lab coat like a doctor. 

Or maybe the best choice is a three piece suit, and you put on white gloves before sliding your samples out of velvet bags. 

Maybe it’s the superhero shirts we had made. 

What about for installations? What attire is going to generate the most word-of-mouth, the most referrals, or get the most attention on social media? Is it one of the examples above, or something else entirely?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I do know that there is one. There is an ideal choice, but if you’re not consciously thinking about it and trying to find it, and just haphazardly picking whatever at random, you are definitely never going to find it.

What is the best vehicle wrap for generating phone calls?

What is the ideal vehicle for installing Pool Fence? Everybody has different vans and trucks. One of them is the best one. And there is an ideal way of organizing that van. Shouldn’t we know what that is?

What is the best email signature?

What is the perfect text response to a customer asking for a price? What about the best email response?

What is the best possible voicemail greeting?

What is the best way to answer the phone?

I know a lot of us, me included, do these various tasks and make these choices over and over, without stopping to really think through if we are doing it the optimum way.

Because there are so many of you, we can find out. We should be trying to figure out the best possible way to do all the things that you do, so that we can share that with everybody, and if it is the best way, then everybody should do it like that every time.

If there’s an outfit that closes the most estimates, everyone should be wearing it to estimates every time. 

If there is an ideal vehicle with an ideal set up, that is what everybody should be using.

Let’s stop making these choices practically by accident, and instead figure out what the best answer is. And then do that every single time. 

(Do you know who else wants me to find the most efficient solution? That’s right. Your mom. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.)

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Crippled CEO Blog #127:

I do something weird on a fairly regular basis.

I mean, I do lots of weird things, but there is one in particular that I’m going to tell you about today.

I imagine a large room filled with all of my friends, my one family member, my employees, my former girlfriends, my former not-quite-girlfriends, my employees, my best customers, my other business associates, and so on.

And in the room is a casket. 

I’m inside of it. 

And I’m dead.

And this is obviously my funeral.

And in this funeral, one by one, people take turns recounting all of the amazing things that I did for them. They tell stories where I helped with no expectation of anything in return. One by one, they describe me as the most generous person they ever knew — someone who made the world a better place by existing in it.

Through their combined testimonies, bit by bit, they tell the story of my life, and everyone in attendance agrees that it was a life worth being envious of.

Sometimes, I imagine that a video of me plays on a projector, and I tell the story of my life. I imagine what that story would be if my life went just the way I would like it.

I know what a story of my life should be. I don’t know the specific details, because that kind of planning only leads to disappointment, but I know the broad strokes – I know the general themes. I know what I want to be remembered for.

Do you know this? Because if you do, the next step is getting to work on creating that life. If you do, the direction you should go in becomes simple. It doesn’t become easy, but it does become simple. 

The story of your life is going to be told at your funeral. There will be a story regardless of whether or not you consciously decided what you wanted your life to be, regardless of whether you were the captain of the voyage, or if you let the winds send you in random directions. If there’s going to be a story either way, why not make it a great one?

What else do you have to do?

(Do you know who’s going to tell some crazy stories at my funeral? Your mom. She’s also going to outlive me because she’s indestructible. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.)

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Crippled CEO Blog #126:

Have you wondered how I come up with the ideas to write this blog every week?

No?

Not at all?

Well… I’m going to go ahead and tell you, anyway. 

I have three foolproof techniques that work every time, 75% of the time. 

First, I have the idea list. Before I started writing the blog, I brainstormed every idea that I could think of and wrote it into a list. I got about 50 — a year’s worth — of pretty good ideas this way. This got the ball rolling, but the list is actually my back up plan in case the next methods don’t pan out. 

Second, I seek out stories that happen in my life with a worthwhile lesson that I can use. Between running a business and being crippled, I have a lot of interesting experiences, so this is a good well to draw from. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur or crippled for this to work, though. Most people have at least something of note happen to them each week.

Lastly, I consume a lot of content. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, I read lots of articles, I watch a metric ton of YouTube videos, and so on, and almost all of it is on the topics I write about in the blog. When I come across an idea that I feel like I can talk about intelligently, or maybe put my own spin on, I steal it. Simple as that. All ideas are inspired by other ideas, and the way I teach it is going to be different from the way that I heard it, and most of you folks would never have learned it from the original source, so I really don’t have any qualms about this. No, I don’t plagiarize. I don’t steal the content verbatim. But I do often teach concepts that I’ve learned from other places. This is a great source of material.

Sometimes, I also do get random ideas during the week, and I try to write those down, but that’s not really a replicable system — it’s just luck. 

And that’s it. That is the secret behind writing 126 blog posts. Now you can go forth and do it yourself. Enjoy.

(Do you know who gives me my most creative ideas? Your mom. But they have nothing to do with writing a blog. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.)

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Crippled CEO Blog #125:

In years past, we used to recommend to our dealers that they put a disclaimer at the bottom of their work order forms. It read something like this:

“We will be drilling into your deck. While we take every possible precaution, we will not be responsible for any pipes or lines we may drill through under your deck surface, or any chips, cracks, or any other damage to the deck.”

This makes sense, right? All kinds of water, gas, and electrical lines can be running under a pool deck, sometimes in places forbidden by the building code, and drilling through those could result in serious damage. We wanted our dealers to be protected if and when an accident like this occurred. Plus, this is what every other pool fence installation company did, too. It seemed smart. Responsible. Prudent, even. 

As the decades went by, though, we learned some things. 

Most dealers only have this happen to them once every few years. 

And even though the customers signed a document saying that the dealers were not responsible, in almost every case, the dealer still ended up making the repair themselves or paying for it to be done. It was worth it to get paid for the job and make the customer happy.

So, since everybody was already taking responsibility for these accidents, we started recommending that the dealers change the language on the work order to read:

“We ARE responsible…”

Now, when giving an estimate, our dealers can point out that, unlike the competition, we take responsibility for our work. They say they don’t. We do. And sure, occasionally they have to fix something that wasn’t their fault, but that cost is outweighed by the jobs they get from people who choose them for that reason. 

It’s good to try to be careful. It is good to try to prevent mistakes, and to have checks and balances. But I’ve also seen it get out of hand. I’ve seen instances where the cost of the prevention outweighs the problem or — more critically — hurts the culture because employees find it to be tedious, pointless overkill. 

The pendulum typically swings and this direction as a company starts to get a bit bigger, as the business gets more conservative, and as certain employees attempt to justify their existence by creating additional bureaucracy. Just because something is safer does it mean that it’s better. Don’t let the cure be worse than the disease.

(Do you know who never wants protection? Your mom. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.)

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Crippled CEO Blog #124:

In 2016, the government was alerted to fraud on a grand scale at Wells Fargo. In an effort to meet impossible quotas from management, Wells Fargo employees opened approximately 2 million bank accounts in customers’ names without their consent. 

When they were caught red-handed and the full scope of the fraud was coming to light, Wells Fargo released a statement downplaying the problem, deflecting responsibility, and failing to apologize. 

As the egregiousness of the catastrophe became more public, Wells Fargo took action: they blamed and fired 5,300 low-level employees — employees who were also victims of the corrupt senior management.

Wells Fargo had to pay a $185 million fine and, more importantly, their reputation was permanently scarred. 

When something is wrong, especially in our business, our instinct is to downplay it. Somehow, we think if we can convince people that it’s not as bad as it looks, that will somehow make things better. 

But downplaying a problem doesn’t fix the problem. And people are smart; they know when you are swindling them. 

How much better off would Wells Fargo have been if they had immediately accepted full responsibility, apologized, and taken meaningful, aggressive action?

We have had problems at Life Saver. We have made mistakes. Supply chain issues, defective products, dumb mistakes, bad decisions — at some point, we have done all of them. 

I can’t tell you how many posts, emails, phone calls, etc. have included phrases like: “We fucked up,” “This situation is absolutely terrible,” “There’s no excuse for this,” “This is 100% my fault,” and “I can’t even begin to express how sorry I am.”

Personally and professionally, people understand that mistakes, big and small, will happen. Trying to downplay them isn’t just dishonest, it’s ineffective. If you own it, apologize, and show people what you’re doing to make it right, folks will respect and appreciate that far more. You’ll look way better admitting your mistakes than pretending you’re perfect. Trust me. 

(I’ve made some pretty huge mistakes. Your mom isn’t one of them. Your mom also gets a text from me every Sunday with a link to the latest blog post. Send a text to 561-726-1567 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the blog as soon as it’s up.)

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