Erich Stauffer

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  • The Law of Focus

    The Law of Focus: Management, Measurement, and Value

    Management, Measurement, and Value

    There are many variations of the Law of Focus, but they all stem around a singleness of thought.  In Jeremiah 32:39 The LORD says, “I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children after them.”  It seems that God supports the idea of focus in order to achieve a desired outcome.  Six Sigma mixes the Law of Focus in with Pareto’s Law stating that 20% of a process causes 80% of the waste.  Six Sigma is about increasing efficiency, but I would like to introduce a Law of Focus that is based on three things: management, measurement, and value.

    Management

    Every manager managing a department worth his salt collects data of some sort.  This data is usually associated with a predetermined metric of some sort.  A metric is simply a measurement that can reliably compared to another measurement to allow for analysis.  Analysis is in of itself the act of comparing one metric to another.  The manager then uses these measurements to make decisions.  How many errors were there last month versus this month? Why? Production was higher this month than last month? Why? What happened? How can we do this again?

    Measurement

    The manager can only manage what he or she is measuring.  If you’ve ever had a boss that cracks down hard on dress code or attendance, he or she is probably not busy actually managing what Peter Drucker calls “social technology”.  They are not innovating, they are only keeping the status quot.  Innovating managers will look for differences in their analysis of the metrics, but they can only create an analysis if they have measurements to begin with.  What you are not measuring you are not managing. Period.

    Value

    The last leg of this three-legged stool is the glue that holds it all together.  For unless the manager cares about the measurement, he would not ask for it.  And by default, what he or she is not asking to be measured, they are saying that they do not value it.  Regardless or not if this is true, this is how your staff will perceive it.  Have you ever noticed that once a metric begins to be measured, that metric naturally begins to improve over time? This is because the manager is bestowing value on the measurement by asking for it.

    Summary

    Measurement changes things. What you care about you will focus on. What you focus on, you will measure. And because you are measuring it, it will improve. This is the Law of Focus.  I like the way Karl Moore put it, “Intention sets direction.” What you focus your intentions on will grow.  These are universal truths that can help you in your business, your life, or both.

    More > If you liked this post, be sure and check out > 4 Steps from Wanting to Receiving…

  • The Confidence-Success Loop

    confidence-success-loopThe “con” in con-man is short for confidence.  Con-men are successful because they are confident.  They “fake it until they make it” one might say.  This same confidence can and is used by successful law-abiding citizens every day.  What I am suggesting is that there is such a strong connection between success and confidence that once one enters the loop through solid work, the loop begins to feed itself.

    Lets talk for a moment about what I have identified as the entry point, “solid work”.  This is the preparation, the due diligence, the hard data gathering that backs up the confidence.  Yes, you can “fake it until you make it”, but those who make it eventually create solid work to back up their confidence.  Without it, the faking can only last so long.

    Now, if you’ve heard or read Jim Collins talk about “the flywheel concept”, you can see how this kind of applies here.  In the beginning, it takes more solid work to get your confidence up, but once you have it, the past successes will make you more confident.  Confidence will then lead to more success, but if you don’t keep backing it up with solid work, the flywheel will eventually stop spinning.

    Danielle Franklin of ForexExplore.com says that “Once you earn new experience, the confidence increases,” and I would have to agree. Whether you are in stocks, sales, teaching, politics, or management, managing your confidence-success loop is critical.

  • Getting the Right Marketing Mix Using Social Media

    Currently there are many social websites that have created a platform for you to speak directly to and with your current and future customers.  There are also many tools that help manage this relationship, pushing the same content out to all platforms at once, or changing it slightly using built in rules.  There are no hard and fast rules for the Web 2.0 landscape because it is all still so new, but what we can do is look to those businesses who are having success in these new areas.Know, trust, buy. Erich Stauffer Marketing Consulting.

    We measure success by the three methods, “know, trust, buy.”:

    1. Brand awareness. (Does the customer know you?)
    2. Brand favorableness. (Does the client trust you?)
    3. Increased sales. (Does the client buy from you?)

    Blasting your message out to one or as many social media sites as you can will help get your brand more noticed, and so achieve more awareness, but you also need to be genuine.  The best Internet marketers make sure to engage with the customer and not just try to sell them something at every turn.  The medium lends itself to this sort of engagement and turning down the opportunity to do so may break the trust, or the brand favorableness.  Once you have established both the know and the trust, then the customer feels free to buy from you, but there is value to both brand awareness and brand favorableness even if the one who you are impressing does not buy.  Once the goodwill is out there, the person you engaged with may refer you to someone else.  Like the butterfly flapping it’s wings, even the smallest twit on Twitter may lead to a hurricane sale on the other side of the world.

  • ROI on Traditional Mail Marketing Campaigns

    Peter K. Francese, President of American Demographics, is famous for his rule of thumb, “If you get more than two replies for every hundred pieces of mail you send out, you’re doing great.”  This is because in the old days, a 1% return on a direct mail marketing campaign was considered successful and eventually became the standard.  Recently, some email marketing companies have touted returns as high as 1 in 57, but once you convert that to a percentage, it is still in line with the overall average of 1-2%.  So is direct mail or email the best route for your business?

    Gary Christensen, who has been writing about making profit through the mail since 1973, recommends a “2-Step Method”.  The first step is mailing as many small ads as you can in order to draw inquiries.  These ads should contain something for the reader in exchange for contacting you.  The second step is to process the iquierers by contacting them by phone or another round of mail.  The same could also apply to email.  In this way, you are spending more money only on those who may actually be interested in what you have to offer, rather than sending out more information to more people first, which is more costly.

    However now that we have discussed both the traditional ROI and the 2-Step Method, you can see that there may be a better way to gain more customers or clients for your business.  The more targeted the ad, the less money you need to spend, and the more the return on investment.  This is how Google, Bing, Amazon, and other online advertisement companies have changed the marketing landscape in the last decade.  Instead of blasting out your message to 99% of the wrong audience, you can pay to only speak to the people already searching for your product or service.

    If you have more questions about promoting, advertising, or marketing your business, services, or products online, please contact Erich Stauffer at http://erichstauffer.com.

  • Running into the Future

    This is a guest post written by Zac Parsons:

    I do not have the body of a runner.  I barely have the body of an athlete.  When I see video of myself in physical activity, I wince like most of us do when we hear our voice on a recording and think “Is that really what I am like?”.  But, for whatever reason, in every stage of my life, I have run.  Today, I ran to the beat of this song, by Panic! at the Disco:

    The drum beat has fantastic cadence for my running stride.  I love letting the image of the video run through my mind as I run through the streets.  The Sgt. Pepperish outfits are a throwback to the 60’s, and the song dances back and forth with talk of the past and the future.  Even the title asks some clever questions:  “At what point would 9:00 ever be considered the afternoon?”  and “Is the afternoon the end of your daily rhythm, or the beginning?”

    In researching for this article, I discovered the band has since split up since writing and recording this song.  The remaining members (the drummer and the front-man), just released a new single entitled “New Perspective”.  The song doesn’t grab me right away, but the title and some of the lyrics seem to indicate a view towards the future and what could be, juxtaposed with what was.

    We’ve all heard the phrase “time marches on”, and it certainly does.  I sometimes wonder if growth and maturity are inevitable based on the ticking of a clock and the movement that must take place in the midst of the march.  In many cases, time does drag or push us into the future, whether we wish it to or not.  And that seems to be the difference: our wishes and intentional movement.  There is a future to be entered into, and it can be our choice of how and where we enter.

    I have this picture in my mind myself walking through life in between a set of parentheses.  If I start to feel sorry for myself and sit down to pout, the parentheses keep moving.  Eventually the lagging one is upon me and dragging me through the dirt, forward through life.  It’s when my focus is on the leading one when I am most content and at peace with life.

    Hope abounds.

    Optimism rains from the sky.

    Energy fills my heart and mind, and my body runs toward the future.  I think that this is part of the reason why most children are happy as a default setting in their lives.  With less to look back on, there is the future waiting to be entered into.  I also think this is why the phenomenon of a mid-life crisis is so rampant, and legitimate.  After getting “over the hill”, many of us want to scramble back to the top and enjoy the view.  Or even to climb back down to a part of the trail where the peak is still ahead on the horizon.

    Time is marching on.  It’s my responsibility to stay on my feet.  Right now, I’m running.

  • 4 Steps from Wanting to Receiving

    I went to bed last night thinking about my experience earlier in the day with my daughter at the gas station.  We walked there to get my wife a coke, but had some “extra” money to get her some candy.  When we walked through the candy aisle, she started looking at the bags of candy on the left and I looked at the money I had.  I had to bend down and tell her that she could only look on the other side of the aisle, in a section in which I could afford to buy her something.  In bed that night I started thinking how much more awful it would be to do similar things in the future to clothes she’ll want to buy, trips she’ll want to go on with friends, etc..

    All that we have been reading about, hearing about, and preaching about, start doing and acting on it – believing it.  We know it’s true, but I would encourage you to develop the faith.  If I could boil all of our conversations about this down, it would go something like this:

    Develop and understand what you want.     – Desire, or love, is what keeps you attached or attracted (as in Law of Attraction) to the rest of the steps involved. I would venture to guess that for both of us right now, this desire is to first be able to pay all of our bills monthly, then be able to provide extra for our families.

    Believe or train your mind to believe it. – Faith is the next step, bridging the what (desire) and the how.  This is where limiting thoughts from yourself, friends, family, and society creep in, but can be let go through self-talk or mental exercises.  It’s a matter of being acutely aware of your thoughts and managing them towards your stated desires.

    Act as if you have already received it.     – This means both being thankful for everything you have now, but also what you will have in the future.  It also means acting how you will be after receiving the desire, for example, developing systems and/or routines for paying bills and saving money once the revenue starts coming in, believing that it will and we need to be prepared for it.

    Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. – This adage means to not review a gift before accepting it.  Once you have the desire, have trained your mind to believe it will occur, and have started changing actions to prepare for it’s arrival, the next step is it’s arrival.  Make sure that for more open-ended desires like “more money” you are also open-ended on where you expect the money to come from.

    I’ve been listening to an audio version of Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship book.  In that book, Drucker talks about how entrepreneurship is not about starting a new business, but identifying surprises, incongruities, or miss-assumptions, and then creating something new that shifts resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield.  The reason I bring this up is because sometimes businesses, which are ran by humans with similar brains and emotions to our own, go through this same process.  Some succeed and some fail.  Let me give you an example:

    Drucker talks about Macy’s department store in the early 1960’s.  We can assume that the desire of the business was to earn revenue.  They believed that they could and acted as if they had already received the revenue by purchasing buildings, inventory, and machines to process the transactions.  But in the early 1960’s, more revenue started coming from appliance sales than from fashion and for twenty years, managers worked to suppress these appliance sales in order to keep the ratio of fashion-to appliances the same.  Then in the late 1970’s new management embraced the change and despite rampant inflation, Macy’s department stores began beating the market.

    Another story is about IBM thinking they would sell equipment only to universities and scientists until one day they were bothered by a woman who complained that she could not get an IBM sales rep to come down to her library to talk to her.  The next morning, the head of IBM walked into that library and closed a deal with enough revenue to cover next month’s payroll.  That was when IBM decided two things: that they would start selling to anybody and start asking for the money up-front.  You see, the original sales rep desired to make a sale, he believed that he could make sales, but when a sale came by that didn’t match his idea of what a sale would look like, he passed it over.

    Even I encountered this yesterday while doing micro-niche searches for the Thirty Day Challenge.  I kept coming up with results matching resumes and jobs, but every time, rejected them as not what I was looking for.  Then it dawned on me that what I was looking for should only be classified by the mechanisms and categories that got me there.  As long as it fit the goal (desire) of finding a micro-niche that had over 80 hits a day and less than 30,000 competing websites with phrases that matched mine, I had found what I needed.  To clarify, there are two steps past that (SEO competition review and Monetization) which my brain may have been pre-filtering for, but it’s hard to tell pre-filtering from bias.

    Be sure and check out what Zac has to say about this topic in particular in a blog post he wrote back on January 6, 2009 entitled Who Limits Your Success?

    More > If you liked this post, be sure and check out > The Law of Focus…

  • Indianapolis Dentistry Embraces Twitter

    An Indianapolis dentist has begun using Twitter to reach out to his patients in a way that he has never done before.  “I didn’t even know what Twitter was until I started using it,” said the dentist.

    Twitter is a micro-blogging service founded by some of the same people who made blogging accessible to millions through Blogspot. The catch is that each blog entry is limited to 140 characters.  Users can post from their cell phones, email, directly on the site, or through third-party applications or websites.

    Our client now has 623 followers and is one the top-followed dentist in Indianapolis according to the Twitter directory, Wefollow.  A follower is someone who opts-in to hear what you write or “tweet” about.  We have seen traffic to their website coming from Twitter so we know it is working as a promotional tool.

    How can we help you promote your business online or around Indiana?

  • Using Google Apps with Microsoft Outlook

    One of our clients wanted all of their staff to have email access through Microsoft Outlook on each PC, but they didn’t have the need for a Microsoft Exchange server.  Instead, we configured their domain to install Google Apps, created email accounts and distribution groups for the staff members, then configured Microsoft Outlook on each staff member’s PC to allow them to have access.

    “The difference between Exchange and Google Apps is transparent to the user, ” said Erich Stauffer, Business Consultant at Erich Stauffer, Inc.  “They don’t know and they don’t care – as long as it works.”  And it usually does.  Google Apps sports a 5-nine’s uptime which means they are up 99.999% of the year.  This means they can statistically be down for up to 8 hours a year, but uptime is significantly higher with Google than with your own standalone Exchange server.

    However, cloud computing like this is not for every customer.  Some would not be able to keep secure data on remote servers and Microsoft Exchange does offer the ability to keep all email stored locally, but even so, only the email kept internally stays secure.  Once it leaves your organization, unless the email is encrypted, it is prone to eavesdropping.  Another reason for an Exchange server would be for backup’s, but with Outlook, you can download Google Apps mail as a PST, then store the PST as your back-up.

    What unique, money-saving technology can Erich Stauffer help you with today?

  • The Gristmill at Spring Mill State Park: Mirror Matter Moon

    I always looked up to Zac at college.  He was cool and people liked him.  I can only remember talking to him once my freshman year.  He and I were both standing in line to make our own omelets.  I was wearing a Plank Eye shirt at the time and somehow we started talking about the band.  Plankeye - SparkI was amazed to find out that he was best friends with the drummer, who had quit the band to go to college.  I had seen the band for the first time, sans-drummer, in Chicago with The Prayer Chain during a reunion tour.  That is where I got the t-shirt.   I don’t remember ever talking to him again, but I do remember his role in John Mann’s play our sophomore year.  It started with Zac tilting his head all the way back in class as if he was asleep or bored.  Mann had the play start in a freeze-frame.  I later went on to study film with Mann at Milligan, but that is another story.  This one is about the Gristmill at Spring Mill State Park.

    In June of 2008, our friend Brian Reid, was killed in an automobile accident along with his wife, Jenna.  I and some friends had posted some video of Brian Reid on Youtube, which is actually how we found out he died.  People who went to church with Brian started writing comments about how much they would miss him and how they were glad “they went together.”  One of those to comment was Zac and I ended up striking up a conversation with Zac really for the first time.  Zac was actually in one of the Brian Reid videos, entitled Never Let You Go (which audio has been removed from for copyright infringement).  I don’t know if I ever told Zac this, but I was really upset to find out that Brian had been living less than an hour from my house and I didn’t even know it.  Brian and I had lost contact over the years.  The last time we spoke was in 2001.  It had been seven years.

    The Mirror Matter Moon theory is one of the most prominent theories on LOST to explain what the island is and why it might behave like it does.  Essentially, the island is a moon made of mirror matter.  There are two types of matter, the matter we know and love, and the opposite.  We can exist in either habitat, but one can not see the other.  This is why the island can not be seen until you cross into area around the island – into the mirror matter moon.  This website does a much more extensive job explaining it, but I wanted to use it and LOST as an allegory for my relationships with both Zac and Brian.  At college, Brian and I were best friends, and then I left to go to Milligan.  Zac and Brian stayed and graduated at Kentucky.  8 years later, Brian dies and Zac and I become friends when we had never really been friends before.   Brian’s car wreck – the “plane crash” – separated the world in which Zac and I lived in before the crash and the one we lived in afterward.  Prior to the crash, I couldn’t see Zac, nor did I know he existed, but after the crash, we were in a mirror world where Zac and I could both see each other and that’s when things started getting weird.

    The day I found out about Brian’s death I was contemplating running away.  I was going to drive to a farm house in rural Missouri, leaving my house, my job, and my lifestyle behind.  I was furiously hoeing my garden when my wife came out to talk to me.  She calmed me down and I went inside.  Upon checking my email, I saw the message from my friend about the comments.  By the end of the month I would have hernia surgery and a new job working as a business analyst.  I would be working with my best friend from that same college in Kentucky.  I would also begin communicating with Zac who was going through his own set of changes.  A set of changes that would eventually lead him back to someone he too met while at college in Kentucky.  What was it about this “island” in Kentucky that would not let us go?  Was Third Eye Blind speaking from Brian to Jenna in the video, from us to Brian, or from the college to us?

    The bigger story is how we all descended upon Kentucky in the first place.  Each person has their own unique story about what drew them to that place.  Just as in LOST, the characters both had a series of events that lead them together and a string of influence.  In me and Zac’s case, it was Eric Barnes.  Barnes made an impression on not just Zac and I, but on my friends who also attended Kentucky.  I remember Zac speaking to the entire campus during chapel saying how Eric impressed him so much by flying out to Arizona to meet him.  My friends and I would actually drive down to Kentucky on weekends during our senior year in high school just to hang out with Eric and eat in the cafeteria with Brad Green for free.  Eric was a critical “cog” to the systematic recruitment of students to the college, but the biggest factor was probably their summer program, which brought droves of high school students to the college each summer.  It was so influential that the dean of student life made it a point to tell us on day 1 that student life there was nothing like summer camp.  This should have been my first clue.  There are good cogs like Barnes and there are bad cogs like this dean.  And there were many bad cogs at this college, which is part of why I left, but this post is about the Gristmill at Spring Mill State Park.

    The Gristmill at Spring Mill State Park stands among several houses and other log buildings in a cleared plain in the middle of a large wooded area.  The terrain is crossed by a babbling brook (which cleared up within a couple of days after the rain turned the water a chocolaty brown).  This brook powers the mill, given the lever is pushed to allow it – and the cog is in place to accept it.  A lot of things have to come together for the whole system to work.  And one day, one of those things stopped working.  Why is it that this mill and these buildings are still in the same fashion they were in the early 1800’s?  Because the village was a failure.  The reason? The person who ran the mill died – taking with him the knowledge of how to run it.  Without food or a way to process their crops, the villagers left, leaving the log buildings as they were.  If the village had continued, the log houses would have been torn down and replaced in the name of progress long ago.  The park partly exists, and is named after a failed startup, but we wouldn’t have had the park unless the startup failed.  If it were successful it may have looked something like Gatlinburg, which has less log cabins, but more “cogs”.