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This is a tale of two movies. Both outstanding in their own way. Both with lessons for businesses that care to listen.

The first movie is Avatar. Last week ourselves and a good proportion of the world decided that Avatar in 3D was a must see movie. If you haven’t yet seen it the whizz bang special effects are truly mindblowing. And the massive investment by James Cameron and his backers have been handsomely returned as a result. Avatar demonstrates the future of film – with exceptional CGI, sound and blended human acting throughout. From a business perspective, Avatar demonstrates that there is always a market for the “next big thing” – for new ideas flawlessly executed.

But today we went to the other extreme. We visited an ancient picture theatre in the middle of rural Queensland – the Majestic Theatre in Pomona.

When you walk into the cinema you step back nearly 100 years of film. To a time when going to the pictures was an event you dressed up for. To a cinema with rich red velvet curtain walls, candelabra lights and painted proscenium arch.

In the early days of movies, film was in black and white and without sound. The plot was moved along by appropriate text slides and the musical stylings of the local muso who played the organ, changing tunes as the action shifted. CGI was not even a dream in the wildest imaginings.

The Majestic is the only cinema in Australia to still regularly show silent movies, complete with organ accompaniment by Ron West.

Recently when we were helping mum clear the effects of one of her friends who had passed, we discovered a stunning photo album filled with postcards of the silent movie stars of the 1920’s and 30’s. We knew the collection had to go to a deserving home, so donated it to The Majestic theatre. We organised our holiday to coincide with visiting the theatre.

As thanks we were treated to a private screening of the 1920’s film “The Haunted House”, with Ron on organ.

To be honest the kids were initially very sceptical – after all Avatar was their most recent movie. But within a few minutes when the candelabras had dimmed, the curtains opened and the music started to play the kids were lost in the movie. They laughed until tears formed in their eyes. The story was universal and the humour spanned the generations.

It was one of the most memorable experiences I have had in a long time. Sitting in a darkened theatre, bathed in the warmth of Ron’s hospitality and listening to the magic of  my kids laughter.

As any parent would know, the sign of a good movie is the car ride home – the kids couldn’t stop talking about what they had seen.  We talked about my kids grandparents and great grandparents. We talked about the cars, the kitchens and the portrayal of African-Americans they saw in the movies. We talked about the universality of slapstick humour no matter the nationality … we just talked. The silence of the movie triggered an avalanche of conversation – given my kids are teens this was a miracle!

Now, silent movies will never make The Majestic buckets of money. But The Majestic in Pomona is the hub of the local community. People travel for hours to attend one of their silent films. And the richness of the experience they offer cannot be priced.

The Majestic shows the value of a good business, doing what it does best consistently and continuously. It does not want to be main stream – it is the ultimate niche business, and everyone is the better for it being there.

So, if you ever are north of Brisbane, take the exit to Pomona and take in a silent movie at the Majestic.  Sure, enjoy the next blockbuster at your local cinema, but enjoy the living history of The Majestic at Pomona.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

One of the fastest ways to grow your business is by reading, studying with and being mentored by the best in their field. One of the people I regularly read is Alan Weiss. He is opinionated, I may not always agree with his thoughts, but he certainly pushes my thinking in a whole range of areas from life balance through to value based fees (one of the best books written on the subject) through to organisational consulting (and no, I don’t receive any affiliate fees from recommending him).

His Monday email this week for an area of focus was a beaut:

Ask how you can best help your target market improve during a recovery, and then demonstrate it. Typical high potential areas: hiring and rehiring; luring back past customers; rebuilding brand and image; rebuilding morale and loyalty; identifying high growth opportunities; professional development; financing; upgrading technology.

What can you do to help your clients improve during a recovery?

A few other words of his wisdom from his weekly e-newsletter:

• Solve it, decide about it, or cope with it. Don’t whine, don’t let it fester. Either correct what’s bothering you, make a decision about options facing you, or simply live with the issue. “To fret” is a rather archaic verb and a rather archaic response.
• Never allow someone to claim “an hour of your time,” or “20 minutes of your time” for that matter. Agree to talk to them, but don’t commit to arbitrary time frames or the conversation will ineffably expand to fill the void.
• Learn to say, “Sorry, no.” If someone says, “Got time for a quick question?” respond, “Sorry, no, bad time, try me later.” They’ll get their question answered elsewhere.
• Never schedule back to back social or business meetings. You need time to reflect, to allow for traffic jams or surprises, and to prepare yourself for what’s coming. Endless meetings form a cincture that can squeeze the life out of you.
• Do things when the spirit moves you whenever you can. If you feel like writing the article, or reading the book, or paying the bills, do it. You’re better, more motivated, and more efficient when you’re doing things “in the mood.”
• Act only on patterns, not random events. Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern. Whether positive or negative, don’t bounce around in the feedback pinball machine. There is usually a systolic cadence to reliable issues and events.

Who do you read to get that “whack on the side of the head?” for your business?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Have you ever stopped, I mean really stopped to see how far you have come? To celebrate your success? Sometimes businesses do it through a strategic planning process, or as part of your life review questions in coaching, but generally it gets a few seconds of consideration and then you are on to your next thing on your to do list.

This forward focus was hammered home to me this week courtesy of my teenage daughter. She has quite a nice singing voice and has been rehearsing for a Cabaret style show at her school. And when I mean rehearsing, I mean every day during school holidays, two nights a week till 9pm after starting at 7am or 7.30am for choir rehearsals, both first and second break at school for the past fortnight and every weekend for at least 4hours for the past 6 weeks.

Now that is a pretty grueling rehearsal schedule no matter your age – but for a 13 year old that is really extreme. Yet she did it without question. “We want to be the best we can – we aren’t there yet” is what she would say when quizzed.  There were days when she was bone weary, and days when she was crying tired. Days when we swore the antichrist had moved into our house and days when she was on top of the world. But she kept plugging away at it.

Tomorrow is performance day, and after a 10.30pm finish last night and a very husky voice today I kept her home from school to rest.

Rachel has been sitting in the lounge this morning watching DVDs of her pre-school and year 1 concerts (we recently had the videos transferred to DVD thanks to Milk2Sugars). While working in my office I heard hoots of laughter during the DVDS, and then she came in to the office to see me.

“Mum, I can’t believe how awful we were. I mean we really sucked. We couldn’t hold a tune, we overacted and you only got a part if you were obnoxious so the teacher would try to give you something to succeed at. I can’t believe you sat through it, clapped and cheered for us.  I guess that unless I had done that, I wouldn’t be here now”.

Now, I had been telling her this for years, but it hadn’t sunk in. It took a video of her before to show her how far she had come, to show her her own success stories. Some people need visible evidence of their progress to realise the distance they had travelled. I know I had the same experience when I looked back over some university assignments 20 years later – to see how far my thinking and writing style had progressed.

In my reflections on life, pretty much everyone sucks at things to start with, but over time and with enough practice everyone can improve. If you really want something enough, and invest the time into it, then everyone can get a credible result. You may never be a world beater, but you will produce great outcomes. That after all is one of the success secrets – time plus commitment equals success.

The other part of success is your cheer squad. For Rachel’s case all her commitment meant driving to and from school to meet the rehearsals (buses don’t get to the school from our place at those hours). It meant shuffling my appointments to work around her. It meant doing “food runs” to make sure she had something warm to eat on her 14 hour days. No-one succeeds on their own. When you are looking back at how far you have come – spend a few moments remembering all the people who have contributed to getting you where you are now.  This cheer squad is part of the meaning of success – they add love and meaning to your results.

From my side of things, it doesn’t really matter how the Cabaret shows go tomorrow. Rachel has already learnt the biggest lesson of them all – to give it everything you have, to invest time in what you want to do and to celebrate your journey.

What about you – have you really stopped to realise how far you have come? What do you do to help you reflect and celebrate? What are your success secrets?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

You all know how much I love poking fun at the Snuggies – the blankets with sleeves. But somewhere amidst all the laughter and the jokes the darn things sold and sold well. Thousands of people bought the backwards hospital gowns, so rather than being a one hit wonder, the Snuggies blanket  manufacturers have now brought out a new Snuggie designer range and chose to launch it at NY Fashion week.

I have my suspicions that a good 50% of all Snuggies last year were bought as gag presents, to be filmed in You Tube videos or to be worn on pub crawls.

The Snuggy fad sort of reminds me of other cringe-worthy niche business ideas/fads over the years – pet rocks, moon boots, roller blades, sea monkeys and hula hoops. Each had their day in the sun after making a mountain of money for the inventors and then slowly faded away only to be found in discard piles at garage sales.

It will be interesting how the new zebra patterns, leopard spots and dog Snuggies actually sell this year. Perhaps the gag will have worn off (we can only hope).

Until that time, I tip my hat to a very quirky niche business (and no … I will not be buying one!).

I give you fair warning though – the first of the designer Snuggie spam emails hit my spambox this morning,  so beware the coming spam onslaught.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

For years I was an advocate of multi-tasking.  I believed that I had the capacity to do multiple things at once – and all well. After all … I am a woman and mother and I seem to remember reading that in my job description.

And then the wheels started coming off the wagon. The more I did, the less I accomplished. But then I discovered an underground movement – one where people are standing up and declaring “Multi-tasking sucks”, and I was hooked!

In recent times I have a new motto “one task at a time until completion”. I was tempted to needlepoint it and put it into my kids bedrooms but given their walls are covered in Twilight posters I figured it may clash.

In my work we have new processes. If we are focused on writing for a client – then that is what we do until the spark of creativity is burnt out. This means yes, the phone does go through the answering machine when we are writing. We figured you wouldn’t want a doctor doing surgery to pause and answer their phone in the middle of it – well why did we stop when we were writing for our clients?

And the results are significantly better for our clients – it means the flow is not lost and the language is clearer.  We are not constantly having to regroup and gather back our train of thought.

It also means that emails get answered every day or so in a big blip and it means we return calls in a single window of time.

Yes, our way of working does also mean we will lose some clients who are impatient and need answers now. But those we do keep appreciate the quality and craftsmanship. They appreciate that we focus 100% on their business and their work – allowing no other distractions until we are done.

One of my colleagues is one of the champions of this underground anti multi-tasking movement. Donna-Marie Coggins teaches businesses the mysteries of setting up and running successful online businesses, and she has recently released a great free e-book titled

“Multi-tasking Sucks: The High Achievers Guide to Squeezing the Most Out of Every Second”

Look this is a great book (and you can’t argue with the price). It is full of tips to automate business processes, save time on the computer, increase your efficiency and build a successful online business. This is not one of those light on content high on hype ebooks – it is just pure useful stuff you can use straight away. I fully recommend it! Go to her site, enter your details and grab your copy of her book. It is worth it!

So – what have you done in your war against multi-tasking?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

In another great example of how looks can be deceiving check out this latest clip from Britain’s Got Talent – Greg Pritchard.  His style of voice was common in the 1600’s – 1700’s in Operas – although the voices were generally surgically created.

Love to hear your reaction!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Many people believe that you have to be the best in your field to be successful.This sets you up for major stress and a lot of disappointment.  It also makes for situations where business goals are written down as  “to be the best in the world (insert business here)” – which serves as a demotivator to employees and generates a “ho hum” response from clients.

The good news is you don’t have to be the best to succeed – otherwise all of those kids who were Dux’s of High School would have taken over the world by now.

If you think seriously about it there is ever only going to be one “best in the field” at any given time. If we let that stop us there would only be one painter in the world, one footballer and one stockbroker. All the rest would say “ah well – I am not going to be the best so I may as well do something else”.

We know that isn’t true. There are thousands of successful painters, hundreds of A-league footballers all making a mint, and thousands of professional stockbrokers. There’s room enough for all of them to make a successful living.

So cut yourself some slack. All you need to be is one of the best in your field, or at least be known as one of the best in your field. You don’t have to be perfect – you just need to be known to be better than most of your competition.

Someone once told me that you have to be a better marketer of what you do, than a doer of what you do. I am not so sure that I fully agree with that sentiment. I personally believe marketing and professionalism go hand in hand. There’s no point in being the inventor of the world’s best mouse trap if no one knows about it.

You need to balance both sides of the equation for success. You just don’t need to be the world’s best at doing it. There … doesn’t that feel better?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

I have been working with a wonderful niche wholesale business over the past month. Their website is well optimised and they appear on page 1 of Google for all of their main keywords  at the end of the first month the site has been up.  To make it even better they have shown a strong profit from their first month of operating. Pretty impressive by any standards – even more so as this is a small business run from private home.

But what has impressed me most about this particular business is their willingness to work out their numbers – and in particular the cost to acquire each new customer.  They track each and every new customer to work out where they came from, and they have done this tracking seamlessly as part of their process rather than as an add-on or afterthought. For this reason they have some solid data to work with.

They then have a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists all of their marketing campaigns for the month in both print media and online adwords. From here it is simple maths – how much did it cost to acquire each new customer, and how much on average did customers acquired by each medium spend in their first month.

What they have found is customers acquired from online sources only cost them $1.03 each and they spend on average $50 in the first month (we are just starting to see this group moving into repeat orders – a whole new set of numbers for the spreadsheet).  Customers from the print ads cost my client $21 each and only spent on average $26 in the first month.

Think about it – if you could gamble $1.03 and consistently come up with $50 – would you gamble the money? What about gambling $21 and coming back with $26? Which gamble would you take more often?

The thing here is to realise that you can track your numbers – and use them to inform where you spend your marketing budget. If you advertise “to get your name out there” you are doing yourself and your business a disservice. Warm fuzzy name marketing is great for big business – but doesn’t pay the bills of small business where each dollar counts. You want tangible results from each campaign.

Yes, we only have one month’s data to go on, but we have statistically significant numbers given the traffic through the site (I knew those years of Behavioural Statistics back in my Psychology degree days would one day come in handy).

This is a small business – and yet they know with a fair degree of accuracy which marketing gets results for them. So before you run your next marketing campaign ask yourself – do the numbers add up? If you don’t know – find a way to track the results and determine whether the investment is worth it for future expenditure.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Yesterday I took some time out to read this month’s edition of Nett magazine – and was fascinated by the story about Big Brown Box who have had phenomenal growth in the online world in a very short time.

Reading it, I was reminded that if you want to grow your business there is one equation you need to be aware of – business growth costs time and/or money. You either invest your time or the time of your team to learn how to do a particular thing and then implement it, or you spend money and get it done for you.

Big Brown Box went with the spend money approach. As they so rightly put it, they had a parent company with very deep pockets that funded 12 months of research, planning and fine tuning before the company went “live” on the net.

But even if you don’t have  the level of backing that Big Brown Box had, their strategy is very easy to adapt no matter the size of your business or the money you have to invest. Here’s a snapshot of what they did in that 12 month period:

1. Conduct extensive research on what consumers wanted from an online store – the “essential requirements and minimum standards … before they would buy online”. They used the findings to shape their online strategy. Many businesses miss the research phase – but businesses win or fail based on their initial research.
2. Know what makes them unique – they looked at best practice around the world for online stores and created a service that was unique to the Australian market (free delivery across Australia). Yes, this USP can be matched by other online brands in the future, but they have market leading advantage.
3. Get the basic functionality right – think like a customer and not like a Geek. Customers look for things on your site in different ways to people who intimately know your business. Make it easy for customers to navigate around your site and find what they are looking for.
4. Education not just information - If you are online, one of the key roles you have is providing education and not just information. How can you educate customers about your product or service?
5. Encourage interaction – “the best recommendation is from happy buyers” – Actively seek honest feedback on your site. Big Brown Box requests a product review after each purchase and follows up those who don’t submit a review.
6. Balance SEO (search engine optimisation) with paid traffic - most businesses need both in order to be successful. In both strategies – focus on the smallest niche at individual product level for best results.
7. Aggresively target quality links back to your site to boost your rankings.
8. Build strong alliances with influential people on the net – Big Brown Box targets influential bloggers as a way to get their brand out there.
9. Track & respond to online discussion of your brand – both good and bad comments need to be addressed. Take negative feedback on board and acknowledge any mistakes.
10. Have an exceptional customer service team that are empowered to take action to resolve complaints. Your online business is only as good as the humans behind it.

Each of these 10 things can be implemented in your business, no matter your marketing budget. You may need to invest time to achieve the same results, but each is very “doable”.

What can you do in your business today after learning from the success strategies of the Big Brown Box?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Last night I attended a black tie awards dinner for the Qld Sustainable Business Awards with my client Spick & Span Commercial cleaning. Although Nuwan didn’t win – the winner in that category was  a truly remarkable industrial estate that was 100 self-sustaining and carbon neutral (Mitchell Enviro Industrial Estate), it was  a brilliant evening.

What made the night spectacular was looking at all of the visionary businesses who wanted to make a difference to the environment. Each business owner was sparked by an idea – one that filled them with passion and excitement and which they turned into thriving, profitable businesses.

There was the Qld Complete Printing Service that only uses biodegradable soy ink and enviro sensitive paper. There was the innovative Cooee DustBloc company that reduces water needed on mine site roads by 90% through a special blend of road coating (given sites generally use 4 million litres of water a year that’s a huge saving), and a brilliant sustainable building at Bond University.

There were many other fascinating businesses on show last night – all founded with a spark of creativity.

What was also interesting was the under-the-sea theme of the event. Guests walked under a giant 20 octopus to get to their tables with lighting and table decorations to give the impression of being underwater.

The entertainment (other than the band) was a group of 5 men with stuffed nemo like fish on poles that waggled when they walked. This caused much discussion at our table – trying to work out how the guys came up with the idea – and how they would pitch their entertainment to business owners “let’s get five very serious guys in black and get them to waggle fish at people”.

Fish on Sticks

These guys took their job very very seriously. Only one smiled the whole night of waggling – the rest just quietly walked around with their fish in a school. The fish school periodically would stop at a table and swarm the guests or the table centre piece and then quietly move on their way. Not a word was spoken by the fish wagglers.

We tried to work out what hourly rate you would pay fish wagglers, and how you could possibly find them on Google. But then we decided that sometimes creativity just has to be enjoyed – there is no other purpose. They had the ultimate small business niche.

The fish wagglers were no different to the industrial estate creator – they had the same spark of creativity and the same passion – they just applied their creativity differently. Where does your spark of creativity do you have in your business?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer