The Ragged, Ratty, 25-Year-Old Carry-on Bag and the Human ATM 

Bill has a billion-dollar information publishing business. His responsibilities require him to travel all over the world. For the past 25 years, I’ve been doing most of that traveling with him. We are generally very compatible companions. But there is one thing that irritates the hell out of me.

It’s his carry-on bag – a ratty-looking thing. The leather is discolored. The zipper barely works, and there is a tear forming at one of the corners. He stuffs his laptop and all the paperwork he can fit inside it, and then he carries it around the world… into important business meetings, first-class cabins, and five-star hotels in London and Paris and Madrid.

I’m not embarrassed by it. I’m infuriated with it. Sure, it’s none of my business. But every time I see it, I want to force him to buy a new one. And I have tried to do so on several occasions. He just smiles and explains that he doesn’t need a new one.  “It’s a little worn,” he admits, but it gets the job done.”

I, on the other hand, buy a new bag almost every other time I walk into a luggage store. I want one in black leather, another in brown suede, another that has many compartments, another that is plain. Outside the room where I am working right now is a wall that is literally lined with bags and briefcases. There are probably 30 of them, in all shapes and sizes.

Even in this room, in my home office, briefcases and bags abound. At my feet, there is a hand-stitched leather bag from Italy. On the chair across from me is a high-tech synthetic bag made in Japan. Next to my assistant’s desk sits a canvas bag that was made in France. And in the trunk of my car is my latest purchase – a skinny portfolio that should be perfect for carrying manuscripts on my upcoming trip to New York.

Clearly, I don’t need any more of these things. Yet I am sure that the next time I walk by a luggage store, I will want one.

This difference between Bill and me illustrates one of the most important lessons I ever learned about marketing. It is a psychological principle that every entrepreneur should know:

If you convince a customer to buy your product whenever he needs it, you will have a good and loyal customer, perhaps for life. But if you can persuade him to buy a product from you every time he wants it, well then you have something considerably more.

In the first edition of Ready, Fire, Aim, I expressed this insight crudely. I said it was like turning your customer into your personal ATM. It would have been better to say that if you can get your customers to see your company as a constant source of psychological gratification, you will likely have a much bigger and much more profitable business.

Often, when Bill and I would travel together, we’d pass a store that had bags and briefcases in the window. I would almost always stop to look at them… and then suggest that he step inside with me to get himself a new carry-on.

He’d usually oblige, but never with any enthusiasm. For him, a store that sells such things is about as interesting as a store that sells livestock feed would be for me. And vice versa. (Bill is a part-time cowboy and is very happy to spend his time and money on cow stuff.)

Surrounded by dozens of new bags, I find myself flushed with excitement. “What about this one?” I’d say. “This is great, because there is a space to put a fresh shirt for an overnight stay.” Or, “Look at this! It’s got a place where you can put your newspaper!”

But everything that excites me about these bags, bores Bill. He politely gives me a few moments of his time, but his mind is already somewhere else. Perhaps on our mutual business. (As mine should be.) Or perhaps on his cattle ranch.

This is true of virtually every consumer. We buy what we need only when we need it. But we buy what we want over and over again.

Question: If you were in the luggage business, who would you want as your customer? The guy who has one bag and really needs another one? Or the guy who has umpteen bags and definitely doesn’t need another one?

It’s interesting. When I ask that question at seminars before I tell my little story, most people say they would rather have the guy who has one bag as their customer because he clearly needs the product. But when I ask the same question after telling the story, they get it.

They understand that 90% of commerce is not about what customers need. It’s about what they want. To put it differently, successful sales and marketing is about treating your customer as your boss, not your child.

Even when we are selling rice… or tractors… or eyeglasses, we are selling to wants, not to needs.

By committing to giving your customers a rich and rewarding buying experience, you create for yourself a rich and rewarding selling experience. By creating a commercial relationship that works equally well for both parties – for your customers and for you and your sales team – you are building a business on the solidest possible foundation: mutual self-interest.

Those are the sort of relationships that do not just last, but usually get better as time passes.

Now let’s take this modest but crucially important insight to the next level. It is this:

The likelihood of a customer buying a particular product is inversely related to his need for it.

Thus:

The less a customer needs a product you are selling, the more likely he is to buy it.

And:

The likelihood of a customer buying a second product he doesn’t need from you is at its peak the moment he has just bought the first product he doesn’t need from you.

 So:

 The intelligent marketer/salesperson puts 80% of his energy and talent towards selling multiple versions of products that his customers don’t need.

Okay, let me step back from the above. Just a bit. I confess, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian. I have no interest is giving advice and creating rules that make perfectly simple sense to those that hear them. In creating rules for entrepreneurship and its many components (such as sales and marketing), I feel compelled to make my case with statements that sound, at first consideration, nonsensical. But I’ve found that all the best insights and successes I’ve had in my entrepreneurial career have come from those.

So, yes, you can make a business by selling people only what they really need. And you can use your own superior moral judgment to dissuade your customers from buying things from you that they don’t need.

But if that’s your idea for building a profitable business, you should have a Plan B. Because the great likelihood is that the sales experiences you will be giving your customers will be, from their perspective, about as much fun as buying bags if you are Bill or buying cattle feed if you are me.

Stablecoins: The Latest Buzzword in the Crypto World 

Stablecoins are currencies that, like Bitcoin, exist on the blockchain and offer some of the advantages that the blockchain provides. But unlike Bitcoins, they are not issued in limited amounts.

Here’s how Stellar, a platform designed to tokenize fiat currencies, explains it:

In general, digital currencies have a high degree of volatility. Their prices can fluctuate dramatically, making them difficult for most people to adopt. Not knowing what the value of your tokens will be tomorrow can feel very uncomfortable…. Stablecoin is a digital currency that is linked to an underlying asset such as a national currency or a precious metal such as gold…. Since they are pegged to a more stable asset such as the US dollar, stablecoins were created to manage price swings often seen in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

There is a big difference between stablecoins that are linked to gold (or other precious metals) and stablecoins that are linked to the US dollar (or other national currencies).

The value of a stablecoin linked to gold would rise and fall like the US dollar did when the dollar was tied to the value of gold. In other words, stablecoins tied to precious metals would offer one of the major advantages that Bitcoin offers: They would be resistant to artificial inflation caused by the issuance of more US government debt.

But stablecoins that are tied to the US dollar are an entirely different kettle of fish. The value of those stablecoins will have the same vulnerability to inflation as dollars do. Their values would always stay even with dollar values. They would always be easily convertible to dollars. They would be, in effect, precursors to what I predict is coming next: a digital version of the US dollar.

The money that Amazon, Apple, and Google will be printing in the future will be just another form of stablecoins – digital currencies that are tied to the US dollar.

And like stablecoins, because of this link, none of them will have any intrinsic value whatsoever. They will merely be replica dollars with the same vulnerability to inflation, but they will be perceived by cryptocurrency enthusiasts as something more and better.

This delusion has already taken place with one stablecoin. Tether, the leading stablecoin, has a value of $60 billion.

From a long-term perspective, paying a premium now for a digital dollar is insane. But that doesn’t mean one can’t speculate on the insanity. Despite my view that Bitcoin and similar true limited-in-issue cryptocurrencies will one day be outlawed, I am 100% sure that there are lots of opportunities for profitable speculation in the meantime.

In fact, I have already personally profited from the cryptocurrency mania. Some while ago – just for the fun of being in the market – I bought a small amount of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. My profit to date is more than 600%.

And, yes, I sometimes think, “Why didn’t I buy more?”

But then I tell myself, “It’s because you’re a pragmatist, which means you are a dabbler and, when necessary, a hypocrite.”

Speculate if you like with digital currencies. But don’t bet on Bitcoin long term.

Click here and here to read two good short articles on stablecoins.

The Invasion of the Digital Dollar 

There is indeed something that large governments like about Bitcoin. It exists on a blockchain, which means that each and every financial transaction that is made (including minor purchases) is recorded and can be retrieved. Thus, being able to access this information would allow them to monitor every commercial action done by every citizen and end the last vestiges of financial privacy.

Think about that. Every transaction from the hamburger you ordered at McDonald’s… to the donation you gave your church… to the news channels and streaming services you subscribe to… to every toll booth you went through on your trip out west.

This is a dream world for big government. There would be no corporate or bank crime that couldn’t be detected, no theft that couldn’t be tracked, no commercial or financial transaction that couldn’t be audited and prosecuted. Nor would there be a dime’s worth of tax avoidance. The government would have 100% control not only of money supply, but of money flow and money location and, most importantly, money “management.” Governments would, in effect, be the mediators of our money. Like children on an allowance, every decision we made about saving, spending, investing, or even giving away our money would be subject to government monitoring and approval.

That’s what big government people like about Bitcoin. What they don’t like is that it is virtually impossible for anyone, including the government, to get access to any of this financial information, because access to the blockchain is not available without a secret key code that only the Bitcoin owner has.

But don’t be deceived. When the government wants to, it can and will get hold of those codes. Not with cyber technology, but with very rudimentary technology – guns, handcuffs, and jail. (My young, Bitcoin-owning, Libertarian friends tell me they would never surrender their key codes. I shake my head.)

The reason that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies haven’t yet been made illegal is precisely because, for the moment at least, they pose no threat to the dollar. And yet, as digital currencies, they make us comfortable with currencies that can be meticulously monitored and controlled.

This is how I think the government will gradually make its move:

Step 1. Quietly encourage the use of digital currencies, particularly those introduced by Google, Amazon, Apple, and other big government allies.

Step 2. Introduce the Digital Dollar, with little or no fanfare to avoid scrutiny.

Step 3. Subordinate the Big Tech currencies to the Digital Dollar, also as discreetly as possible.

Step 4. Begin a national campaign (supported by Big Tech) against Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as vehicles for crime.

Step 5. Outlaw cryptocurrencies. Offer free exchange for the Digital Dollar (or any of its subordinate, Big Tech equivalencies).

Step 6. Go after those that do not surrender their cryptocurrencies. Most – probably 80% – will capitulate when faced with the threat of prison. The other 20% will be in prison, unable to use their cryptos.

At that point, the Digital Dollar will take over, and the government (and Big Tech) will have full financial control of its citizens.

Does that seem crazy?

Maybe it is. But China is already up to Step 2.

Click here to read an interesting take on this (sent in by JM).

My Beef with “Creatives” 

In my business – the idea-publishing industry – some workers are valued more than others. These are the so-called “Creatives”: writers, marketers, advertising copywriters, and sometimes publishers.

The reason they are valued more is that their work contributes more directly to revenue and profit growth. Thus they earn more – sometimes 10 times more – than an equally intelligent and hard-working person that happens to work as an accountant or inventory manager or customer service manager.

This relationship between rain-making and money-making is true of all businesses that operate in free markets. It’s the reason actors of questionable technical skill, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith, get paid tens of millions for every movie they make. And it’s the reason Tiger Woods and Floyd Mayweather were able to make hundreds of millions of dollars after their athletic skills were in decline. They bring the gate.

It makes perfect sense to me that this should be so. In any given profit-making business, some professions will contribute more to the bottom line than their peers. If you want the revenue pie to grow bigger, which allows the business to pay everyone more, including the “non-Creatives” you have to pay the rainmakers.

Nevertheless, I have a gripe about the rainmakers in my industry. I object to calling them Creatives.

In my experience, only two or three in 10 marketers, copywriters, salespeople, and publishers are creative. The rest are good at only one or maybe two ways of stirring up the rain.

A creative person, by definition, is someone that instinctively and incessantly innovates. Someone undeterred by obstacles. Someone that vaults over obstacles with new ideas.

That means someone with the emotional and intellectual flexibility to come up with and adjust to dozens of new and different ways to achieve any particular goal.

To merit the title of Creative, one has to be able to innovate easily, constantly, and brilliantly. When the business or marketing landscape changes, a Creative will see it as an exciting opportunity to quickly discard the old, proven practices and the ideas that were derived from them in favor of new ones that would have been considered idiotic just a few months or weeks earlier.

When I think of Creatives in my industry, I think of Jay Abraham, with whom I worked closely 30-odd years ago. What always astonished me about Jay was not his natural intelligence, which was considerable, but his ability in brainstorming sessions to come up with alternative ideas in rapid succession. If, as often happened, his client would object to his earlier suggestions, Jay rarely spent more than a minute arguing in favor of any particular marketing idea he had put forward. Whenever one of his ideas was objected to, for whatever reason, Jay would almost instantly come up with another idea. And if that wasn’t taken, he’d come up with a third. And on and on until his client was happy. That was Jay’s genius, in my view.

The idea-publishing industry has gone through several dramatic changes since the conveyance of ideas moved from printed paper and the post office to digital delivery on the Web. And with one of my clients, in particular, recent challenges have required fundamental changes in our approach to sales and marketing, from beginning to end.

To deal with this, my partners and I have been busy urging our rainmakers to start thinking out of the box. And I’m happy to report that some have responded to this quickly and even gratefully. But most are struggling, and some are downright resistant.

Those that are resisting are not stupid or belligerent. Nor are they blind to what is going on. The problem for them is that however smart and skillful they may be, they do not have the creative flexibility to succeed in this new environment.

The old tricks they mastered, the ones that worked so well in the last era, cannot work today. But since they aren’t accustomed to thinking creatively, they feel trapped. Rather than acquiring new tools, they insist on using the old ones that no longer work.

Tiger Woods was a world-class rainmaker. But he was not creative when it came to making his money. His trick was being the world’s greatest golfer and a seemingly nice person. But when his world changed, he had trouble finding a new way of earning back his fan base. His tendency was to stay under cover, and then to come out to play and keep his head down. Because of his enormous global popularity, he was still able to bring viewers to every tournament he played in. But it was a diminishing game, because he could not reinvent himself. After winning his last tournament, he retired. A smart ending to an amazing career.

Floyd Mayweather was a rainmaker too. He made tens of millions when he was at the top of his game. And he, too, had public image problems as well as personal financial problems that could have left him – like so many boxers before him – a once-great athlete struggling to pay his bills.

Instead, he reinvented himself by doubling down on his reputation for being financially irresponsible. He bought a strip club, promoted himself as Money Mayweather, and agreed to take on an exhibition boxing match with Conor McGregor, a top-notch MMA fighter. He made something like $50 million for slipping McGregor’s punches until he closed out the fight in the sixth round. It didn’t bother him that he was fighting a non-boxer, someone that was, in theory, beneath him. He not only embraced the change, he produced the fight. He made more money as the producer than he did as the star attraction.

And just last week, he did it again. With a social media personality that had no professional boxing experience but millions of followers, a percentage of which were willing to pay $50 a pop to watch the fight.

It’s great to be a rainmaker. It’s fantastic to develop a financially valued skill. But if you want to be in the game for the long haul – long after the world you entered has changed a half-dozen times – you have to be a Creative. And not just in name, but for real.

(I’ll talk about how to do that in a future essay.)

White Privilege and Black Power in the Windy City

What’s Happening to Chicago? 

Inflation is up. Employment is down. Storefronts are shuttered. Offices are empty. The streets are strewn with debris. And homeless people – drug addicts and the mentally disturbed, primarily – wander about asking for handouts, fighting with one another and intimidating passers-by.

But what is most disturbing is the recent surge in violent crime. By the end of May, there were 1,156 recorded shootings and 252 homicides in Chicago – up 20% and 5% over the same time frame in 2020.

There is also a scary new trend among the young: armed car jackings for joy rides. 632 of them were reported in the first 5 months of this year.

These are alarming facts. The sort of facts that merit media attention. But I’ve seen next to nothing about it in the NYT or on CNN. It’s as if none of this violence matters. Why would that be?

Maybe this could be a factor: The great majority (maybe 90%) of this surge in violence is Black on Black crime.

It’s true. Since George Floyd’s murder, the riots that followed, and, most importantly, the call for defunding the police, Chicago has experienced a tidal wave of violence and murder in its Black neighborhoods. And Chicago isn’t alone. In Baltimore, Memphis, Atlanta, and New York City on the east coast, and in LA, Portland, and San Francisco on the west coast, a surge in violent crime this past year in Black neighborhoods has forced mayors to request emergency funds to put more police on the streets.

Like some others on the left, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, blames her city’s woes on White people. The argument, a layman’s version of Critical Race Theory, goes something like this:

Systemic racism makes it impossible for White people in power to treat Black people in non-racist ways. Even when Whites believe that they are acting in the best interests of Blacks, the actual effect of their decisions is to maintain a culture in America that keeps Black people from achieving success.

The solution is to have more African-Americans at the top of every area of life that matters – in business, in politics, in the media, in education, in entertainment, and in sports.

And the only way to do that is to abandon the inherently racist idea of equal opportunity and replace it with the Critical Race Theory concept of equity: a distribution of benefits according to race. If Blacks represent 13% of the US population, they should represent 14% of the CEOs, 14% of the engineers, 13% of the doctors, and so on.

Using the same reasoning, 13% of Ivy League students (and graduates) should be Black, 13% of law school graduates should be Black, and so on. Blacks should also represent 13% of America’s billionaires, and African-Americans as a group should have the same income level and net worth as Whites.

The most appealing aspect of this theory is that it is simple. Just legislate it. Pass a law that requires equal representation of Black people in every aspect of American life and these systemic problems will gradually disappear.

But here’s the problem with that…

Chicago is already such a city.

* The Mayor is Black.
* The Superintendent of Police is Black.
* The Cook County State’s Attorney is Black.
* The Chief Judge of Cook County Circuit Courts is Black.
* The Illinois Attorney General is Black.
* The Chicago Fire Department Commissioner is Black.
* The Cook County Board President is Black.
* The State Senate Majority Leader is Black.
* The Illinois Lieutenant Governor is Black.
* The Illinois Secretary of State is Black.
* The Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County is Black.
* The Cook County Clerk is Black.
* The Chicago Police Board President is Black.
* The Chicago Transit Authority President is Black.
* The CEO of Chicago Public Schools is Black.
* The Commissioner of the Department of Water Management is Black.
* 40% of the City Council belong to the Black Caucus.

No, getting rid of White people in power is not the answer to Chicago’s violence problem. Neither is defunding the police. And by the way, Chicago’s Black denizens already know that. Polls in Chicago and other large cities have shown time and again that the majority of African-Americans want more, not less, police protection.

So, what is the answer?

One possibility: Cities that have implemented what is sometimes called “the broken window” theory of policing saw a dramatic drop in violent crime.

The strategy consists of tougher policing and criminal prosecution for relatively minor crimes like breaking windows, public intoxication, petty larceny, and even vagrancy. By clamping down on the small crimes, the big crimes diminish considerably.

An extreme rendition of this strategy, frisking people that merely look suspicious, was correctly seen by civil rights advocates as unconstitutional harassment. In dismantling such policies, many cities took their agenda farther, instituting an assortment of catch-and-release protocols (such as the suspension of bail) that sent a signal to criminals that they were now in a prosecution-free zone.

Meanwhile, wealthy citizens are fleeing their cities in droves, moving to the suburbs or even to other states where they can work remotely and in peace. As a result, the tax bases of those cities are diminishing drastically… which will lead to the higher taxation of middle-income workers… which will lead to more capital flight.

You won’t hear much about this in the major media because it negates the BLM and Antifa narratives they have been supporting. But the governments of those cities will be very much aware of their diminishing tax base, and they’ll be forced to bring back efforts to establish some level of law and order.

As mentioned above, some are already doing that. The question is: Is it too late?

“Wuhan Lab Theory No Longer a Conspiracy According to Biden and the NYT”

When I was covering the upcoming national elections in September, I predicted that most of the scary stories about COVID that were ubiquitous back then would dissipate if Biden was elected.

The reason: It was generally agreed that the best chance of getting Trump out of office would be to scare people about the virus and blame him for “mishandling” it.

That’s exactly what happened. Almost overnight, the stories printed and broadcast about the virus turned from frightening to hopeful. And last month, a senior executive at CNN admitted that the station’s policy was just that.

A parallel narrative accused Trump of spreading a completely unfounded conspiracy theory when he suggested the virus might have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a top-security lab that allegedly performed gain-of-function research (GoFR).

Now, 15 months later and six months into Biden’s first term, the “plandemic” theory is no longer a lunatic idea. It’s a genuine possibility, according to a growing number of US scientists and health officials.

This should be an embarrassment for Biden and team, but his handlers have spun him a narrative that makes him the hero. Here is part of the script they wrote for him:

“After I became President, in March, I had my National Security Advisor task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” Biden said on May 26, adding that he wanted intelligence agents to “redouble” their efforts in finding the origin of the virus.

“As of today,” he said, “the US Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.” Then, quoting from their report, he said, “’While two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.’”

In this NYT opinion piece, Ross Douthat acknowledges the bias in the media against the lab theory and explains why it matters.

And here’s an explanation of why Biden tread lightly.

Anti-Asian Hate Crimes: What’s Going On? 

On May 20, President Biden signed a bill meant to address hate crimes against Asian-Americans. It was supported overwhelmingly (364-62) by both sides of the aisle. It wasn’t clear from anything I read whether the bill has any realistic mechanisms to achieve its goal. We’ll have to see about that.

In the press conference that accompanied the signing, Biden referenced this year’s mass shooting in the Atlanta area that left six Asian-American women dead.

It wasn’t an anti-Asian attack. It was an attack on three particular jerk-off parlors by a nutcase that patronized them. He blamed the shops for his sex addiction – and when he went on his rampage, he killed everyone in them indiscriminately. Asian, White, and Black. If it was a hate crime, it was a self-hate crime.

The script that Biden read that day referenced the ubiquity of video clips on the internet displaying these attacks in ugly detail.

From The Washington Post:

Many Americans have been shocked by publicized surveillance or cellphone video released in the last year of Asian-Americans, many of them elderly, being accosted and beaten by strangers on the streets of US cities, as well as by reports of people spitting on, cursing at, or refusing to serve Asian-Americans and accusing them of causing the pandemic.

I checked out about two dozen of those videos. (There are literally hundreds of them.) As a group, they don’t support the Biden administration narrative: that the attacks were caused by Trump’s rhetoric on the “Chinese virus.”

The great majority – and I mean about 90% of them – were not perpetuated by White men in red hats but by Black people, men and women.

This is obvious to anyone that looks at the videos, but it is something one is not allowed to say.

But I’ve said it. So it begs an answer to the question: Are Blacks in America more anti-Asian than white people?

I doubt it. I suspect the prevalence of Black-on-Asian attacks is about proximity – about the fact that Asians are more likely to be the owners or employees of stores situated in Black neighborhoods.

In fact, most of the videos I saw were about theft: either Asians being beaten on the streets as they were robbed or, less frequently, Blacks upset by what they believed was racial profiling by Asian store owners.

But don’t take my word for it. Decide for yourself:

Bystanders Step in to Protect Asian Man in New York City

Two Witnesses Save Asian Man From Brutal Attack in Oakland

Man Threatened to Stab Undercover Asian NYPD Police Officer

Woman Charged With Hate Crime in Attack on Asian Beauty Store Owner

Asian Man Repeatedly Punched on Manhattan Sidewalk

67-Year-Old Lyft Driver Is Beaten and Robbed at Gas Station

Man Threatened to Stab Undercover Asian NYPD Officer

Want to Be a Good Writer? It Isn’t Easy, but This Is the First Step 

“Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.”

– Jacques Derrida

When writers discuss their craft, the conversation is often about larger issues – like structuring a plot or developing characters… connecting thoughts and weaving themes… creating tension and anticipation… and the architecture of persuasion.

But we seldom talk about the first and foremost challenge: how to write a good sentence.

Hemingway famously said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’ve never heard a good writer dispute this.

In Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg – one of my favorite writers about writing – says there is a reason the sentence must come first:

“Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. In your head. Did no one ever tell you this? That is the writer’s life.”

Most of the sentences that beginning writers write, he warns, will not be worth keeping. “You will have to delete them. And most of the rest of your sentences will have promise, but they will need fixing. The hard part now is deciding which to kill and which to fix and how to fix them.”

This is a skill. A skill that the writer can never completely master.

He continues:

“A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences. The relentless exploration of possibilities, the effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say the possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”

If that sounds like hard work, it is. But if you learn to write a single good sentence, you can writer another, and then another still.

“Shape, form, structure, genre, the whole – these have a way of clarifying themselves when the sentences become clear,” Klinkenborg says. “Once you can actually see your thoughts as perceptions, it’s surprising how easy it is to arrange them or discover their arrangement. This always comes as a revelation.”

What is a good sentence?

It’s impossible to define exactly what a good sentence is because good sentences are ephemeral things. A sentence is not a block of meaning alongside of which one can lay down other blocks to form paths of thought. Nor can they be stacked upon one another to build plots and themes.

A sentence is a mercurial organism that morphs – and should morph – into whatever shape its environment needs it to be.

Sentences can be units of thoughts, as my first grammar book defined them. But they don’t have to be. They can be partial thoughts. Or mere fragments of thoughts. Or sometimes… just… words.

Good sentences are never inert. They are active. They have jobs to do. They can tell. They can show. They can explain. They can surprise. They can delight. And so much more.

We live in a digital world that has democratized just about everything, including the practice and profession of writing. The worldwide web has expanded the population of writers a thousandfold or more.

But writing and writing well are two very different things. And the difference between a writer and a good writer is easy to tell. Good writers aren’t content with disgorging their thoughts and feelings. They are happy only when their sentences work well.

My Million-Dollar Minimum Fee 

“You get what you pay for.”

When Early to Rise was at its peak, I was regularly petitioned by readers asking me to mentor them. I was always flattered by such requests and wrote personal no-thank-you notes, which were generally well received.

But then someone wrote me back, accusing me of being stingy with my time. I sublimated my indignation into an essay in which I recounted the experience that first made me realize how rude it is to expect someone you hardly know to devote his valuable time to you.

The essay was widely read, but it did not achieve its goal of forestalling further demands on my time. After several more requests arrived, I published one of them (name withheld) with a blunt reply that pointed out the obvious considerations:

* Time is a limited resource. When you ask people for their time, you are asking for a lot.

* You are not the center of the universe. Just because you need help doesn’t mean others are obliged to help you.

Alas, that didn’t work either. So I tested another idea.

It was at a conference. After I gave my speech, a young woman, brimming with excitement, cornered me to describe her brilliant business idea and suggest that I might want to mentor her.

Now it just so happened that one of the concepts I’d talked about in my speech was that in business, time is money. And in order to use your time as advantageously as possible, you need to know how to value it.

“You take the amount of money you wish to make this year and divide it by 2000 (the number of working hours in 50 40-hour work weeks),” I’d told the conference attendees. “So if you want to make $100,000, the value you ascribe to each hour is $50. If you want to make $500,000, it is $250. If you want to make $1 million, it is $500.”

With that in mind, I did a quick calculation and told the young woman that I would be delighted to help her, but my minimum fee was $5,000 an hour. (This happened at a time when my income was quite high.)

“Huh?” she said.

“What?” I smiled.

“You must be kidding.”

“Actually, I’m not. You see, for every hour I would spend working on your business, I’d be taking an hour away from working with one of my partners or employees on one of my businesses. And each of those hours is worth about $5,000 to me.”

She became indignant. “Well, it’s not worth that much to me!”

“Well then, you have your answer,” I said.

That ended the conversation.

But I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Not only was I pretty sure that I had failed to get her to understood the very important lesson I was trying to teach her, I knew that in her eyes, it looked like I just didn’t care if she succeeded or failed.

I chewed on that a while, and came up with another approach… one that finally worked.

I had, basically, two clients at the time. One was a large company and the other was a start-up. The deal I had made with the second client was the same as the deal I had cut for myself with the first. And that was a combination of a base yearly fee and an incentive bonus, with a minimum payout of a million dollars.

It had worked extremely well for my first client and was working extremely well for the second. So I decided that I would incorporate it into my response to all future requests for my time in helping others build their businesses.

From then on, I would say, “I would be happy to consider helping you. But you should know that my minimum compensation starts at $1 million.”

That did the trick. It ended the conversation politely and without provoking resentment. And so I used it successfully for several years. Until someone – some already successful businessperson that wanted to grow his business – called my bluff.

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.” He reached into his satchel, pulled out a checkbook and a pen, and said, “How should I make it out?”

Now I was the one learning the lesson. I had met someone smart enough to understand the value of my time and rich enough to pay me for it. But I knew from experience that mentoring a new business was itself a full-time job, even if my role would be simply to give advice. And I honestly didn’t have the physical or emotional bandwidth for that kind of commitment.

I had to admit to him that my million-dollar minimum fee was specious. But I made a counterproposal.

I told him that I would give him all the same advice, answer all the same questions, make the same suggestions and introductions, etc. as I would if we had a formal agreement – but I’d do it for free.

Now he was perplexed.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean just that. I’ll do it for free… but at my convenience and on my terms. You can hit me up at my favorite cigar club any Friday between 5:30 and 9:30, which usually means between my first and my fifth tequila. After that, you’re not going to want to listen anyway.”

“And that’s all for free?”

“Yes.
“I don’t get it,” he said.

I explained. If we went with the fee arrangement, he would feel obliged to follow my advice. And since he would follow my advice, I would feel obliged to help make his business succeed. That mutual obligation would put a lot of pressure on both of us. It would be a serious business relationship.

But if I gave him the same advice for free, I’d feel no obligation to make it work. And he’d have no obligation to follow it. We’d both just be shooting the breeze. The advice would be the same. But its value (to him and to me) would be de minimus.

He told me he would think about it.

And then, the next day, he called to say that I was right. So he’d have to decline my free offer.

“But don’t forget,” he said, “my original request – and a million dollars – is still on the table.”

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little better.” – Jeff Bezos

Customer Service Made Easy… and Profitable

There are two types of sales in business. In my industry, we call them front-end sales and back-end sales.

A front-end sale is the acquisition of a new customer. A back-end sale is any subsequent sale to that existing customer.

Front-end sales are almost always more expensive and more difficult than back-end sales. You are selling a product to someone that hasn’t bought from you before, may not have much trust in you, and – to make matters worse – you may not know who he is and where to find him.

Front-end marketing, therefore, is all about research, experimentation, and testing. And each of these can be very costly. That’s why I have said that the first responsibility of the Stage One entrepreneur is discovering the optimum selling strategy (OSS) for his/her business.

Because of the enormous costs of front-end marketing, most new customers will come to you at or below your allowable acquisition cost (the maximum dollar figure you have, through testing, determined you can spend to bring in a new customer).

What that means is that, for most businesses, you are not going to be making profits on your front-end sales. (If you are making profits, it means that you are probably not spending enough money on front-end sales.)

Profits, therefore, come from back-end sales – i.e., selling additional products/services to your recently acquired and existing customers.

How do you do that?

There are many ways to answer that question, but for our purposes here I’m going to answer it this way: Back-end sales depend on the customer’s experience of his initial purchase and how he’s been treated since then.

In other words, back-end sales depend on customer service – how you treat the customers you create.

Great customer service has three components:

1. Knowing what your customers want – i.e., what they really want.
2. Figuring out how to give them an endless supply of what they want.
3. Learning how to start a conversation with them and keep it going.

Let me show you what I mean.

I was walking down a fashionable street in Bucktown in Chicago when I saw a large poster in a shop window that shouted, “New! Children’s Yoga – Sign Up Here!”

I looked up at the store’s marquee, expecting it to be a yoga studio. Instead, it was a children’s clothing store. “That’s smart,” I thought, “very smart.”

Knowing What Your Customers Really Want 

Indeed, if the woman who owns this store knows what I think she knows, she will have a very successful, growing business. What I think she has figured out is the first component of great customer service: knowing what your customers really want. In this case, she knows that her customers – young women with children, for the most part – want to give their children a rich and productive growing-up experience.

She hasn’t settled for the most obvious and superficial conclusion: “The people who come into my children’s clothing store want clothes for their children.” She knows that if clothing their offspring were their main goal, there are other stores – discount outlets and department stores – where they could get a wider selection at better prices.

She has recognized, in renting space on a fashionable street and stocking her store with expensive, hard-to-come-by clothing, that she is going to be selling to a certain type of young mother – an affluent, educated, and upwardly mobile woman who sees the success of her children as a direct reflection of her. Perhaps because this store owner is such a mother herself, she understands that her customers are interested in much more than clothing.

What her customers really want is to do everything possible to give their children the best of everything. And for these mothers – being young and affluent and upwardly mobile – that means indulging them in all the latest trends in quality living.

One of these trends is surely yoga. Yoga is practically de rigueur among wealthy 20- and 30-something mommies these days. If it is good for the mommies, why wouldn’t it be good for their children too?

I don’t know how this clothing store merchant managed to offer kiddie yoga classes, but it’s likely that she made a deal with a local yoga teacher who agreed to provide free or low-cost lessons in hopes of securing other, more lucrative business from the store’s customers later on. But however she managed it, she is sending her customers an important signal: She understands who they are and what they really want.

I can imagine the positive response her yoga promotion must have created: new customers walking into the store, asking about the classes… goodwill generated by her existing customer base… and both new and old customers feeling that she really gets it… not to mention thousands of extra dollars from the sale of a line of little yoga outfits.

Figuring Out How to Give Them an Endless Supply of What They Want 

If the owner of this children’s clothing store really does understand what her customers really want, you can bet that the yoga classes are just a single step of a lifelong journey she (and they) will be embarking upon. Long before the success of the yoga line ebbs, she will have thought of a half-dozen other campaigns that might attract additional back-end sales.

She could, for example, test a line of expensive educational toys and invite someone to lecture on early childhood development. Or she might do something with a local music conservatory – perhaps arrange for free introductory piano lessons, and then back-end the lessons with a line of clothing appropriate for giving recitals.

As the children of her current customers grow up, so could her offerings. If her customer base is sufficiently large, her children’s clothing store could, for example, give birth to a teenage clothing store.

Likewise, she could create new product lines that are connected to her customers’ lifestyles – traveling outfits for the summer, skiing outfits for the winter holidays, and so on.

And by making strategic alliances with other local businesspeople who could profit on the back end, she could provide additional benefits for her customers – demonstrations, tastings, and the like – at no cost to her.

The key thing she will have to remember in developing her back-end products and services is that everything she does has to be consistent with the understanding she has of who her customers are and what they really want.

Learning How to Start a Conversation With Them and Keep It Going 

If you recognize your customers’ deeper desires and provide them with more and better products more frequently, you will double or triple your back-end sales and, thus, double or triple your company’s profitability.

And if you do one more thing – talk to your customers about what you are happy to do for them – your profits can skyrocket.

This is an aspect of customer service that too many entrepreneurs, even good entrepreneurs, neglect.

If our shop owner is as good as I hope she is, she is already collecting the names and addresses (or, better yet, email addresses) of all her customers and is sending them information on a regular basis. She is surely sending them announcements about special events and sales, but she should also be sending them advice that helps them achieve their deeper objectives.

She should be sending them a monthly newsletter that talks about all the great new parenting books and information products that are specifically geared toward affluent parents. She should be talking about what events are taking place in the store and what new ones are being planned, and including testimonials (which she should be collecting) from customers who have experienced her special events in the past.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that it makes this sort of communication easy and affordable. Instead of printing up a four-color monthly newsletter, she can email her customers informally any time she has something to say. If she reads something interesting in The New York Times, she can pass that along to them. If she is thinking about bringing in a tennis teacher to give introductory lessons, she can ask her customers if that’s something that would interest them.

With the software available these days, it would be easy for her to communicate with all of her customers on a first-name basis. Each of her communications can have the intimacy of a personal letter and, where appropriate, the urgency of a postcard. By establishing a pattern of communicating in this way, she can create a very profitable, long-term relationship with all of her customers.