You’re losing business because your presentation sucks, not because your fee is too high or someone else is smarter, more creative or more accomplished. You’re going in scared that you won’t compete and that same fear drove your preparedness and your crappy presentation. I’ll explain in a minute, but for now, wanna see 200 photographs of my recent business trip to Indianapolis? It’s loaded with killer shots of the thoroughly unremarkable office building I worked from. No? OK. Well what about video of surgeons removing the deceased section of my sigmoid colon? No!? Man, you’re tough to please. Oh I got it! How about I talk to you for an hour about how awesome my six-year-old son is at soccer?

Seriously. How many of you are remotely interested in any of these topics, let alone eager to view, watch or listen to me carry on about them for an hour? Read the rest of this entry »

Recently a prospect asked me how much it would cost him to build an online storefront, populate it with products and launch it. I told him I would need to know the particulars of the project and from these findings could issue a formal proposal and number I feel confident will be fair to us both. That wasn’t good enough for him. He asked me to ballpark the figure and I said I really couldn’t do that without first knowing more about the gig. He persisted. “Oh can’t yah just give me an idea?” Again I insisted that if I were to estimate his costs sight unseen, it would be based on a completely arbitrary number and that might cost me the sale and damage his perception of my consultancy. Read the rest of this entry »

I am tremendously concerned with my legacy. Always have been. What am I giving to the situation? Particularly during moments of contention or heated debate, I ask myself if I am making good choices. Am I saying it and doing it in a way that makes me proud? Typically it’s not difficult to leave a good legacy. Adherence to fundamental virtues such as honestly, authenticity and fair mindedness usually do the trick. But what fascinates me about the act of legacy building is how often subtle self-indulgences govern otherwise well-intended people. These subtleties came into play during a recent spat I had and subsequently inspired this post. Here’s what happened.

The other day I suddenly found myself being criticized for using my BlackBerry while a colleague talked to me. What I found so sudden about the criticism was that the person issuing it entered the room I was in, interrupted me reading my email and began speaking at me.

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Yesterday, a friend and I grabbed lunch at that wildly popular, 2.0 eatery, Chipotle. Yummy. Anyhow, as I was devouring their killer and yes overpriced guacamole, my lunch companion began telling me of his plans to launch an online portfolio for his creative works. I said, “Cool. Why?” He went on to explain that the site would showcase his creative brawn as an artist and creative director. Said my friend, “It’s a place to point people who may be interested in my skills.” So I said to him again, “Cool. Why?” And he smirked, noting my snarky approach to emphasizing my original question.

I said, “well, if you’re going to go through the work of putting up a site, why not fully realize the idea first, ultimately making more of your site than a typical online display case?”

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