Do you have a cringeworthy teenage moment captured forever on film? I used mine as an inspiration last week when I was honored to guest post on the 5 by 5 Design “Inspirations” blog. Thanks to Wendy & Diana for the opportunity, and for the work you do every day to help your clients look “wow”! (Go ahead, click through to read the entire post!)
Image credit to Clara Natoli
(Images of my own angst-filled teenage years will remain unindexed by Google)
The best ideas, and the truest epiphanies, come to you in the shower (or so ‘they’ say.)
This morning, I noticed that I held my breath for a moment as I washed my hair.
A new client has given me the opportunity to join a team helping a small business launch a line of organic, toxin- and silicone-free beauty products. Our role is to help them craft a strategy to go from startup to success – to help get them from where they are to where they want to be. At the conclusion of the first meeting, the team was sent home with sample sized versions, to “see for ourselves.”
I really like the business owner. She’s passionate and genuine, and her product seems to be compelling, legitimate, and fit a need in the marketplace. She’s got incredible energy, a great story, a vision, and is willing to do the work. She knows she needs help. As I poured a quarter-sized dollop into my left hand, I realized that for me, it was the moment of truth.
What if I hate it?
What if it smells funny? What if it leaves my hair feeling limp and disgusting? (One of my few true vanities is my hair.)
I chastised myself for being overly dramatic; I made quite a ridiculous picture standing there stark naked debating this dollop of gel in my hand: “So what? It’s shampoo. There are a million. If you hate this one, there are others.”
… but my job is to help THIS one.
I found myself whispering a little prayer that it would lather. As the bubbles formed beneath my fingers, the tension in my shoulders eased and I took a deep breath. I was palpably relieved when the scent of the shampoo mixed with the steam was a pleasant herbal – citrus, the resulting effect a kind of aromatherapy sensation. I’m pretty sure I have never paid that much attention in the shower in my life.
I’m not arguing that every piece of work we do has to be an all-encompassing, life-fulfilling, purpose-driven one, but rather proposing that (for me, at least) I do my best work when I care about, believe in, and like the people / products I’m working with. I recognize how fortunate I am to have a career that has provided me a wealth of opportunity to work with products and industries I genuinely like, doing work that makes a difference in the lives of individuals who I care about.
There are only so many hours in the day, and so many days in a lifetime, a number which none of us can know. Can you pour your heart , effort, and your most precious resource of time into something you don’t genuinely like or believe in?
Some people can: they believe in the process or art of what they do without necessarily finding a kinship with or liking the product, company or person itself (criminal defense attorneys, for example, representing a distasteful or possibly-guilty client – but believing in the bigger picture of the justice system). Others can’t detach their personal self-identity from the specific people & products they choose to work with.
Can you?
For me, the answer came in the shower.
Photo credit: Alex France
By the way, the client here is anonymous, in keeping with the ‘Rules of the Game’.
A few years ago, my husband and I became fascinated with the TV show The Colony. It created a mostly-realistic (it’s TV, people, let’s suspend a little disbelief) post-apocalyptic disaster environment, put real people with a variety of skills in and told them to figure out how to survive as a group over a series of weeks. Each person had to look inside themselves and ask, “what skills did I have in my old life that are relevant here to our group’s mission of survival?” As the season unfolded, the group gathered food, built shelters, started fires, filtered water, created small engines, protected themselves from marauders, and generally figured out how to survive. It’s a modern day interpretation on surviving the military ‘scorched Earth’ philosophy.
One of the major challenges I see facing nonprofit organizations today is that many are surviving almost entirely on momentum and history. They’re doing things that have always been done (electing the new committee, producing the annual report, running the tradeshow at X venue) because inertia and momentum keeps things moving. Multi-year contracts exist. Some volunteers feel entitled, others go unengaged. Staff resources are stretched thin. The infrastructure is complicated and relies on many people playing their individual parts, not unlike an assembly line. Staff and volunteers generally are not incented to ask “what should we be doing differently?” In the meantime, the for-profit world has stepped boldly into direct competition for community, eyeballs, subscribers, participation, sponsor/ad revenue. The competitors are leaner, hungrier, and have cultivated better skills for the fight ahead. (With some slight nuance, this is true for both charitable nonprofits and trade association nonprofits.)
Honestly, I doubt that most traditional nonprofit organizations could survive a ‘scorched Earth’ scenario. Most have cultivated neither the creativity nor the competitive spirit to survive. Joe Rominiecki observed in a blog posting this week that Associations by nature have “a workforce that discovers, likes, and comes to depend on the comfort of the status quo. And it goes without saying that comfort breeds complacency.”
Your team’s creative skills, sense of competitiveness, and risk tolerance might be sharpened with a little ‘scorched Earth’ exercise. Ask yourself: if literally every dollar of revenue (and expense obligation) that your organization has coming in was gone tomorrow, what would you do? Where, precisely, would you start rebuilding? (I’m betting it wouldn’t be a 2 hour staff meeting with highly paid executives debating whether or not your annual report should be printed magazine-style or delivered in an interactive video series.)
In a scorched Earth scenario, you’d ask:
When you can answer these questions with some tangibles, list them and prioritize where and how you would start to rebuild your community.
If there were such a thing, the "Doomsday Clock" for old-school nonprofits has ticked notably closer to midnight in recent years.
With the competitive landscape for most organizations out there today, is this really such a far-fetched scenario? Sure, it might not evaporate overnight, but with very few exceptions, the revenue is drying up (let’s stop kidding ourselves that it’s just economic constriction, a lot of it is shifting to other outlets.) If there were such a thing, the Doomsday Clock for old-line nonprofit associations has moved notably closer to midnight in recent years.
If these answers to the ‘scorched Earth’ exercise don’t align with your current organizational structure and division of resources, you have just found the opportunities to make some difficult and likely very painful changes. But the roadmap you have just created is an alternative to near-certain death. You can’t go back to the ‘good old days’ but you can find different ways to thrive that WILL turn back the hands on that Doomsday Clock. A three-or-five year plan isn’t going to cut it. Revenue victories are going daily to the nimble. Are you among them?
Just as the post-apocalyptic scenarios may be a little farfetched (for all but the least optimistic among us,) I do still feel a little comfort knowing I have multiple gallons of freshwater and a generator in the basement. With some courageous leadership, virtually ANY organization can create a team that will not only survive, but thrive in a ‘scorched Earth’ scenario – but you’ll have to burn some old ways of doing things & be ready to eat some of your sacred cows for nourishment along the way.
(Stay tuned for Part II – How to Start a Bonfire & Grind Up the Cow)
Cover photo credit: George Schick
I’m not a golfer. But if I were – (or maybe BECAUSE I’m not?) – I’d be a heck of a lot more inspired by Bubba Watson than by Jack Nicklaus or Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods (ahem.)
Golf has universal, published, indisputable rules of the game. It’s a magnificent way to teach the concept of ethics to kids (what do you do when you’re not being watched?). You learn the rules and you play by them. Simple, right?
But beyond the specifics of the rules, there’s also a rich tradition in golf. A ‘way it’s done.’ Decorum. Elegance. Ritual. Expectations. (You know this if you’ve ever tried to go to a country club in cutoff jeans & flipflops.)
Bubba is self taught in an industry where that “just isn’t done.” He’s a lefty – one of only three to ever win the Masters. People have said, “Oh, Bubba plays by his own rules.” He doesn’t, though. The rules are the same for everyone. What he does, rather, is play with little regard to the traditional path of finding success; he eschews the common approaches others have used to achieve greatness.
In every business, there are rules (taxes, regulatory compliance, shareholder reporting, etc.) and then there are the ‘ways things are customarily done.’ As I look out across the landscape of true innovation right now in events (peer retreats vs. old-school associations, TED, Ignite, SXSW (before it jumped the shark)), in consumer products (SPANX, i-almost-anything), in online communities (Pinterest, Instagram) – the success stories are being written by the Bubbas. Those who say, “well, I see the commonly accepted path, and that’s fine for them, but I’m doin’ it my way.”
(image credit: Mike Segar/REUTERS)
Are you great at something? Bubba is. But he didn’t give in to the push to walk a traditional path to prove his greatness. He didn’t look at the odds against a self-taught left hander, he just followed his gut. That green jacket is on his back today largely BECAUSE he wasn’t on the traditional path. Don’t imitate him (it wouldn’t work) – rather, take some courage from his playbook to be your own person. Actively cultivate a trust in your own instincts. Stop listening to the very-loud voices that say you ‘should’ do it this way or that way. Those voices would have you believe that there’s only one path to success, and it’s a well trodden one filled with things like swing coaches, professional services, advisors, right-handed players, etc.
Be a ‘Bubba’: Swing wildly. Be authentic. Follow your spirit to the place where your passion and your uniqueness intersect.
And even if you aren’t in the proverbial green jacket at the end of the day, you’ll be the authentic version of yourself, which is the best prize of all.
(Photo credit: Header, Scott Liddell, Inset: Mike Segar/ REUTERS, as seen here )
I was chagrined to read the recent indictment on meetings, the Inspector General’s investigation into the GSA Western Region Conference in Las Vegas. ($823,000 and 6 planning meetings spent on a 300 +/- person training conference). You may have seen the story in the news these past few weeks, a scandal unfolding as the new poster child of wasteful government spending.
It’s situations like this that give meeting professionals a black eye, and the behavior of a number of individuals involved here offends me on so many levels. (SIX PLANNING MEETINGS!?! Unconscionable.) I could devote a full month of blogging to the varying and egregious ethical issues raised in this report. But the one that I’d like to focus on today (my addition to the conversation that the wise Liz Zielinski opened up here) is the question of commissionable third parties.
A few quick definitions, for those of you not in the industry:
I disagree with the Inspector General’s assessment that, “since the GSA already employs several full-time event planners, the use of the third party seems redundant and wasteful.” There are certainly full time teams out there that are completely overloaded with work. The raison d’être of an effective third party is to plug in and provide services to supplement the skills of the core team. Use of third parties is increasing in the meetings industry as many staff teams have been reduced to a minimum or outsourced completely. Third parties don’t carry the same overhead as ‘full time staff’ and can be added or subtracted to scale an organization’s capabilities quickly as needed. Without knowing the workload on the full-time staff, there’s no way for me (or the IG for that matter) to really evaluate whether bringing in a third party was “redundant and wasteful.” That being said, however, I am fundamentally concerned if our government policies even allow for the use of commissionable third parties rather than fee-for-service third party assistance.
Every client wants to assure that their own best interests are primary when a third party is being utilized. Our government has not only the right (but I would argue the obligation) to ensure that parties negotiating on their behalf actually have their best interests in mind.
It’s a simple fact: a third party paid on commission is financially incented to keep rates high, and to choose properties that offer the best commission percentage (which can be 3% – 10+%, depending on the property.)
It is my long-held opinion that third parties who claim that their site selection & negotiation services are “free to the client” are stepping into a disturbingly grey ethical area.
None of us work for free (and when we do, it’s called ‘donating services to a worthy charity,’ or an unpaid internship , which is education-in-lieu-of-financial-compensation.)
My opinion is simple: when you accept money for performing a service, I believe that the definition of ‘client’ changes to be “the entity who pays you.” When a meeting services company receives $12,000+ from a hotel for placing a meeting, the client is the hotel, not the group who ‘allowed’ them to place the meeting.
This “It’s Free to You!” promotional language, saying that “the budget for commissions comes out of a different pocket at the hotel, so it doesn’t change your rate” is patently ridiculous. In the aggregate, any increase in expenses (taxes, cost of electricity, food prices, labor rates) WILL most certainly affect the rates that the hotel is able to offer. And thus, exorbitant commissions absolutely raise the rate tide, for everyone. Let’s not pretend that the added expense doesn’t exist.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not opposed to the concept of commission in general. It’s a very effective motivational tool for salespeople, and as Liz points out, there are many industries that use commissions quite successfully. But “commissioned salespeople” are just that – salespeople incented by the seller to bring in business. It is logically impossible that a representative can be negotiating in the best interest of BOTH parties in a contract. When a services company is paid by the seller, they defacto work for the seller. Period. I buy products where the salesperson makes a commission all the time – many of us do, and we’re quite happy with them. But I don’t delude myself that the guy selling me that car is really “working for me.”
Groups who choose to work with commissionable third parties should do so transparently and clearly with the full understanding of the organization’s executive leadership. At a minimum, an annual review of service agreements should be conducted, with executive leadership having full awareness of commissions being made from the business being booked. Conversely, I suggest a regular auditing of all fee-based service contracts to ensure that there isn’t a “double dipping” going on. All hotel contracts booked by a fee-for-service agency should clearly identify rates as “net, non-commissionable.”
None of us work for free.
This all boils down to transparency and ethics: we should all be proud of how we do business, and prepared to disclose and defend the fees we are paid. This information should be available to the client organization’s leadership, to the attendee staying in the hotel room, to your ultimate ‘customer’ footing the bill for an event – in this case, the taxpayer. And as a taxpayer here, I’m uncomfortable.
You’re a taxpayer, too: what’s your opinion? Should US Government policy allow for the hiring of commissionable third party meeting services agencies? Would your group use one?
(FULL DISCLOSURE: MonkeyBar Management provides site selection & contract negotiation services to some of our clients. Clients pay us a fee for our services directly, we do not accept commissions.)
