With last week’s reboot of Project 52 - which I had been participating in (by publishing at least one blog post per week since 1 January 2010) - I wanted to have a look book at the ideals that I set myself at the beginning of the year.

Here’s a bit of a summary of the things I think that I’ve been making the most progress on…

Writing, Blogging & Rockstar Business. It was important for me to start writing again, as I experienced somewhat of a writer’s block in the 2nd part of 2009. So I’m happy to say that I’m doing quite a bit of actual writing i.e. on pen & paper, I’ve been blogging one significant blog post at least once a week since the beginning of the year and I’ve also finished the draft of my upcoming book, Rockstar Business, which is with my editor at the moment.

Photography. I purchased a shiny new Canon 7D DSLR for my birthday in January and I’ve been using it quite a bit and I’m also learning more and more about both my camera & photography in general. My Flickr profile is proof of this.

Personal Health & Excercise. This has probably been my biggest achievement to date, as I’ve lost 11kg’s since the beginning of the year and I’m also just about ready to participate in my first half marathon next weekend. I feel great and the improvements in my weight & fitness is really a massive personal victory for me.

Everything WooThemes. It would be an understatement to say that WooThemes is firmly on its way to hit all of the goals that we set out to achieve this year. On average, the business has great momentum and I’m confident & certain that we’ll exceed our own expectations for 2010.

And a few goals that could definitely do with some attention (i.e. these are the things that I need to improve on in the next couple of months):

• I set out to read at least one new book a month and whilst I started out well, this has come to a grinding halt. So I definitely need to start reading again, even though I find it really difficult when I’ve been in front of the computer all day.
• I’m not spending enough time away from the office yet. I set myself the goal of getting out of the office more and working remotely either from home or from coffee shops. At least it seems that I’m hitting my target of spending at least one weekend away from home every month.
• Both Radiiate & The Rockstar Foundation has slowly been making progress, but neither of them have sustainable models just yet, which means I need to spend more time to firmly establish those projects as well.
• I still haven’t gotten back into video blogging and I’m not sure whether this is realistic / viable at this stage.

So that’s a bit of a check-in from my side. How are you progressing with your goals?

In recent months - especially since the beginning of the year - I’ve found that the more I align my passions & the things that generally makes me happy in my life, the more I tend to be productive, inspired, motivated & just content. Now this probably seems obvious & trivial, but I’ve learned (about myself at least) that there’s a little bit of a different angle to this if you look closely.

Before I get into it, I need to mention that a lot of this thinking and the tweaking & tinkering in my life is a result of the idealistic goals that I’ve set myself for this year. So on a regular basis, I’ve been referring back to those goals and making sure that I’m making appropriate progress in achieving my aims.

One of the changes that I wanted to implement in my life, was a healthier & more active lifestyle, which means beyond changing to a healthier diet, I’m also training to run a half marathon in April. On most days I would thus go for a 5 - 8km run in the afternoon in preparation for the race. But to get back to how this influences my overall “life happiness” (beyond the obvious result of feeling healthier & more fit than I have ever felt), I now go running for two possible reasons:

1. If I had a great day at the office, my afternoon run is a perfect way to almost celebrate that day; and
2. If I had a shitty day up until that point, the run is a great way to clear my head and just feel refreshed by removing myself from that shittiness.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but even though I thus go running for two very different reasons, it has exactly the same result: I feel much better afterwards. In a similar vein, when I’ve had a great day I get to celebrate it with Jeanne (with whom I got engaged last Friday), but when it hasn’t been the best of days, I can talk to her about it, which allows me to get it off my chest / mind (family & friends can do exactly the same thing).

What I’m trying to say here, is that the different spheres of our lives all has an influence on each other; so if you’re not happy at home, you’re more than likely not gonna be happy at work. And if you’re being challenged & stimulated at work, you’re more likely to feel refreshed & happy when socializing with friends & family or pursuing personal hobbies.

So there’s most definitely a case for making sure that all of these things are aligned. Consider that the energy (and good vibes) generated in one sphere automatically gets transferred to the next sphere as you move between the different spaces in your life; to an extent it should thus be obvious that you need to setup those spheres in such a way as to where they can fuel each other.

In the extremely agile online world, there seems to be a premium placed on getting to market first with a new feature or product. But I’d like to contest the viability and probably the suitability of that premium, since I don’t believe that it’s crucial to be the first to the market**.

Getting to the market first, gives you the bragging rights and all of the hype / publicity that goes along with that. This is obviously great and I’m sure this is every marketer’s dream, since the marketing angles are pretty easy; it is undoubtedly much harder to hype & market something when it already exists, but when you’re game-changing this is a massive advantage. It is also considerably easier to create & build your own share of the market, when no competitors exist.

So all-in-all it would seem like a great idea to get to the market first. This does however not mean that you need to make this the be-all & end-all of your strategy.

I believe that you have just as much space & just as many angles to market your brand & offerings when you aren’t first to the marketplace. You may need to be a little more unique (both in terms of your offerings, which need to solve problems in an unique way *and* your marketing efforts), but it is 100% possible.

In fact, sometimes I actually prefer this approach, as I have a lot more information available to me before having to commit to a specific strategy. When we first launch the club subscriptions on WooThemes (for example), we were heavily influenced by some of Joomla theme developers (most notably RocketTheme), who were already offering similar services. We may have not been first to market and club subscriptions definitely wasn’t a groundbreaking idea at the time, but we did bring our unique thinking to the business model and today it makes up a considerable chunk of our monthly revenues.

If you can do something better or in a more unique way to your competitors, you’ll always have a chance to gain market share and build a business from your efforts. So don’t be too focused on getting to market first; rather do something unique in your own personality & time.

**Note: This applies in most cases, so I’ve used a good dose of generalization here.

The title to this post probably sounds a little cynical, considering the well-travelled business mantra that “the customer is always right”, but I’d really like to challenge that point of view in the business environment.

As a company grows, the user- / customer-base normally grows as well and the increased number of people that requires your attention, leads to added strain on your customer service functions. So during this growth period, it is important to streamline one’s policies & activities in such a way to allow you to scale the energy & resources required to service an ever-expanding number of customers.

What I’ve found though, is that some customers are just simply more difficult than others, which is probably an indication of the varying personalities that one encounters in business. This isn’t a problem in itself, since most of the “difficult” customers actually have valid points and they just require a little more attention than average to feel as happy with your company as the “easier” customers. But even though I can objectively say that, I have also encountered the type of customer that is being difficult purely because they want to be difficult. It is also this kind of customer that simply doesn’t trust your company from the get-go, calls of your actions into question and becomes offensive & insulting when they don’t receive an e-mail response within 5 minutes (if this seems like I’m exaggerating; I’m not).

Pulling The Plug

I recently made the call with a customer that I just wasn’t interested in working with them anymore, after they had become extremely insulting and called my character into question. Whilst I’m always willing to deal with any seemingly difficult situation on merit, I draw the line when it becomes unprofessional, as that is normally a clear indication that someone is being difficult purely for the sake of being difficult.

So what did I do? I simply recommended a competitor’s product instead, refunded the customer’s purchase and noted that I don’t think it would be possible to continue a professional relationship in this regard.

This may be a tad radical, but I’m not telling the full story here obviously. Instead I’d like to point out that I was trying to avoid a 20/80 situation whereby the 20% of customers who are difficult will drain 80% of the energy & resources devoted to customer support. I’m not suggesting an exclusive approach here whereby only the “easy” customers gets your attention, but I am suggesting that your good customers should receive the same amount of attention.

By eliminating the odd (really) bad customer, you are thus freeing up resources to invest in your best customers who don’t necessarily request / demand customer service, but are actually most worthy of your time.

“Right to Admission”

Ultimately this comes down to the standard “supply & demand” argument, whereby just as much as a customer may choose a company, a company may also choose its customers. Service companies regularly chooses which clients they’d like to work with, so why shouldn’t a retailer be able to do the same? Just because you are selling to the general public, you don’t necessarily need to accept every single customer as your customer and even less do you need to accept them being difficult without rational reason.

This however becomes more complex when you consider how much customer service resources is spent entertaining difficult & irrational customers; so this behaviour is almost endorsed in a way where companies are saying “it’s okay sir / madam, you can be irrational and we’ll offer you the best customer service available and make you feel better”. To that, I’d like to say: Bullshit!

Back to supply & demand. When customers purchase from a company, they enter into an implicit sales agreement whereby they agree that they are paying X and in return they receive Y. That’s the bottom line; it’s normal supply & demand. Customer service operates on a different level (probably marketing and / or public relations), which means that no customer is *entitled* to being difficult and even less should they be allowed to demand a company dealing with their irrational / offensive / unprofessional behaviour.

If the company handles those situations really well, then kudo’s to them. But when you’re looking to scale a business, you’re gonna find that you can’t entertain 100’s or 1000’s of difficult customers every day, unless you increase your overhead expenditure on support resources significantly.

So I’d throw my hat into the ring for companies to stop entertaining difficult, irrational customer behaviour and instead fight fire with fire in an objective & professional manner. The sooner that customers realize that the company-customer relationship is a two-way street, with equal “power-sharing” amongst the parties, the sooner we’ll get rid of difficult clients.

“If you’re customers (existing or prospective) do not understand what you are telling them; everything you say will purely be marketing speak.”

I wrote that bit down recently as I was contemplating additions & tweaks to WooThemes and realized that as marketers we have an integral part to play in the education process for our products & services. See, I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your products & services to someone that is uneducated about what they are really purchasing and spending money on.

Prime example of this (in our context), would be the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to WooThemes’ collection. Instead of just being able to market them (side-by-side) with our WordPress themes, we’re busy building its own, unique channels, with its own angles. It’d be a lie if I said that it has been easy to introduce our WordPress users to the idea of using EE as an alternative CMS. But why?

Simply put, the only way I ever see a WordPress user switching to ExpressionEngine** is if they are properly educated about the pros & cons of such a decision. So part of our marketing strategy should be to include that educational information and in such a way, interact with our users about those pros & cons. Without that understanding of why they’d potentially make such a decision, all of our EE marketing talk would be limited to sounding like us just pushing something new & shiny at them.

So just something to consider in your marketing efforts: people can’t spend money on something that they don’t understand.

** This is not a WP vs EE post and neither is it about the viability of platforms.