• Fast Wednesday

    Yesterday was a blur.

    I got up early and finally wrote the post about turning Croswell into a charter school. (Actually wanted to do that before the vote, oh well.) Then it was off to the races. Walked to the trolley. Long line at Starbucks caused me to miss my trolley… though a nice mocha and the Car Talk podcast helped me relax and enjoy the wait.

    It was during that wait time that I noticed that Marko activated his new blog theme that I helped create. That was a fun project! His blog is now SEO-friendly, looks a lot cleaner, and helps establish his personal brand a little more. While no work was needed on my part for this, it was just something else to monitor.

    Once I got to the office it was rush around and get ready for the May NYWC conference call. Thankfully, Jonathan helped me out by taking the lead on the Real World Parents newsletter. Traditionally, we each do about 50% of the content and I set it up, test it, and send it out. Taking that off my plate really helped as I worked through the details of the call. Going into it, we were 90% sure what we wanted to do. I wanted Marko to talk in the beginning part about the “why” of what we’re doing at convention this fall, then I wanted to field questions. Despite a massive GotoWebinar fail, the live streaming video portion went really well. Here’s the video from that.

    With that, the first half of my day was done. A co-worker dropped me off at Enterprise and I rented a car (actually, they gave me a sweet Nissan Frontier) and I drove up to Orange County for a quick meeting. I drove up to meet with Dave Gibbons, he’s an author and pastor of Newsong church based out of Irvine, to shoot a quick video about NYWC. The drive went fast as I caught up with some people about other projects… literally, a 90 minute drive felt like 15 minutes. I arrived about 30 minutes early… rare… so I headed into the offices to wait for my 4 PM meeting. (And recharge my batteries!) About 15 minutes later Dave’s assistant asked me to come in and get set-up. Since his office is extremely awesome, setting up only took me about 5 minutes. In the middle of that, Dave came in early from his previous meeting. Literally, I had his shoot ready to go, shot, and I was out the door at 4:01 PM.

    From there, it was off to the races to beat traffic back south to San Diego. I sailed through, making it home at my normal 6:00 on the dot.

    I both love and hate days like this. I love that it is fun, I get a lot done, and the impact is obvious. I hate that there is so much to do that I can’t really enjoy it.

    Nearly a year after starting at YS… I’m still shaking my head at the opportunity.     Yesterday, I spent time moderating a discussion with Marko about the biggest event in my industry. Then I casually drove up and spent time with one of the greatest emerging leaders in evangelicalism. And then I was home by 6. Yeah, I’m not over how much God has hooked me up.

  • Elevator Psychology

  • Leading to the edges

    ruler-edgeEntrepreneurs get this. Start-up businesses get this. New franchises get this. Church planters get this. But no one in an older business, church, franchise, or industry can comprehend this.

    You have grown your audience as much within what you are doing today as you will ever grow it. You primary demographic already knows about you and has decided whether to be a customer or not. They have decided whether to become a student in your college or not. They have decided whether or not your to attend your church.

    People largely make decisions on your project, widget, consumable, or institution in an instant. Five seconds or less. (Test it yourself, watch TV commercials. How soon until you decide if you are buying that product? I thought so.) Spending more money to advertise the same thing over and over again is just a waste of money. This is why Super Bowl commercials can be deal makers or deal breakers for companies you’ve never heard of.

    This is why marketers dump millions of dollars onto the airwaves and see little return on their investment. This is why church marketing sucks. Once you can identify who your audience is… your best possibility for growth then shifts to customer service and care. Can I keep the customers I have? Can I provide them such an amazing service that they tell their friends that they have to go there, be there, or be your customer?

    Growth comes as you lead your organization towards the edges. When you help your church or college find a new demographic, there is growth. When you design a new product that changes the game for an old industry, there is growth. When you serve a need that everyone wants but no one offers, there is growth.

    What’s the first step in determining how to find my edge?

    Spend time and discover where you are failing. Spend time finding out where everyone in your industry fails. Spend time finding out what churches in your area aren’t doing.

    Hint: Studying successful companies, institutions, churches, or whatever will only lead you away from growth and into their market. Learn from their best practices, for sure, but don’t study them to copy them. Their edge won’t ever be your edge.

  • Get a Mystery Box, Will Ya?



    Go here to learn more about the project.

    Here’s a fun back story that I didn’t share on the blog or the video. Ian [YS’s media guru] and I went down to City Heights to shoot this piece last Tuesday night. I hadn’t met Christopher before, but Ian knew him from the shoot he did for the NYWC story last year. Reality Changers meets in this very cool office building, a gem of a building in a transforming neighborhood. We were welcomed with a surprise. Each time they meet parents from the group provide a meal to students and they invited us to join in. Let me just say… it was some good eats! But that’s not the cool part of the story.

    Ian and I had an opportunity to sit in on part of their big group program. We were in for a treat as one of the students was sharing about his recent trip to the east coast. See, Reality Changers had helped him change his reality big time. Not only was this young man going to get to go to college, he got to chose between attending Harvard or Columbia. He told us every painstaking detail about his flight, the subway, what he ate, who he met, on and on.

    You know, I knew Reality Changers was doing amazing things. But to hear just how amazing… shocking!

    So, help YS and Reality Changers. Make a donation of $20 or more and YS will send you a box full of goodies.

  • Nuke Your Phone

    HT to Cory

  • Stoney swims!

    We adopted Stoney, a yellow lab, three and a half years ago. As I have well documented he is part of our family.

    Yet Stoney had one weird flaw. (beyond his love of humping middle school girls legs.) He hates the water. Most lab owners can’t keep their dogs out of the water and I couldn’t get mine in.

    Since we now lives just 15 minutes from the ocean I have gotten used to taking him to Ocean Beach dog beach every week for something I call, Beach Therapy.

    I did some reading this winter and learned the trick to getting reluctant dogs to swim. It involves lots of praise and play.. Two things Stoney really likes!

    About 4 weeks ago I got him to play in very shallow water. He came home wet and I knew he had a good time. Today, the water was a lot warmer and the tide was way, way out. Long story short, I was able to throw the ball into the water and he would go get it.

    He is still reluctant about bigger waves and doing more than wading up to his chest… but you could see instinct begin to take over. He even did that characteristic hop labs do to hurdle through water.

    Congrats Stoney, you did it.

    Now if only he could read.

  • Saturday Tunes

    Saturday Tunes

    A quiet weekend here in San Diego for us. Yesterday was a big day for YS as we launched this year’s NYWC website. With just 145 days until the first convention… it’s fun to see things coming together! We also kicked off a little fundraiser via the YS Blog yesterday. I’m stoked to see the response so far. I have  yet another project going live Sunday, I’ll share more about that on Monday.

    Last night, Kristen and I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire. What a powerful movie. I can’t imagine how hard it was to shoot that thing.

    This morning Kristen is off jogging while I’m home with the family. Later Paul and I will be taking the dog to the beach and from there, who knows? Here are the next 10 tunes I’m listening to. As always, totally random and my ratings included.

    #1 Portadown Station by Sandra McCracken *****

    #2 Believe by The Bravery ****

    #3 Realize by Colbie Cailat ****

    #4 Supersonic by Family Force 5 ****

    #5 There’s Only One by Caedmon’s Call ****

    #6 Falling by the Wayside by People in Planes ****

    #7 Yours is the Kingdom by Hillsong ***

    #8 Belonging by Kendall Payne *****

    #9 I’m Sticking With You by The Velvet Underground ****

    #10 Free Fallin’ by John Mayer

  • Rounding 3rd

    softball-gameA few years ago I was on the church softball team. Being a church league for adults it was mostly filled with people who used to be able to play well, but time and a few extra pounds had lowered their skill level down a lot lower than their imaginations thought they were. In other words, most of the teams sucked. And none was worse than ours!

    After a couple of weeks of frustration I started to figure out how to hit. The first 5-6 times up to bat my golf-styled swing lead to easy outs as all I could do was hit the ball right down the fairway… easily gobbled up by the pitcher, 2nd baseman, or center fielder. While watching a few games I made an interesting observation: There were a lot of dropped balls. I noticed that there was a high likelihood that the person playing first base wasn’t going to be able to keep his foot on the bag and catch a poorly thrown ball.

    So I learned to just keep running. In game after game this strategy worked. I’d hit a ground ball to 3rd base and instead of trying to beat out the play I’d just round first and keep running. Time and time again they’d drop the ball or it’d fly over their head and I was off to second or even third.

    The last game of the year, while I was riding to the game with a few other players, I joked that I wasn’t going to stop at third base. I was going to just keep the calamity going all the way home. I had a feeling that if I rounded third the same way I rounded first, I could make it a home run.

    So, true to form our team was down big with just two innings left. I get up and absolutely tee off on a ball that splits the outfielders and one hops to the fence. It’s a stand-up double and I could probably make it to third if I weren’t so out of shape. The third base coach gave me the stop sign at second. But I look at his stop sign and throw caution to the wind… it’s time to go home! As I got close to third I could tell by the way the third basemen was looking that the ball was coming in and he would tag me out. So I rounded third. My locomotion– instead of sliding– caused him to look up for a brief second and he bobbled the ball. Halfway home he tossed the ball to the catcher which made me stop and retreat to third. But wouldn’t you know it? When the catcher tossed the ball back to third, he dropped it and I turned for home… stretching a double into an inside the park home run.

    During my commute yesterday I was thinking about this, I love rounding third. I love the whimsy of finishing stuff off with a bang. Which is a weird statement for a guy who spends a lot of his mental day imagining ideas for projects that will never get done. That might lead you to believe I’m a project start-up kind of guy. Nope, I love seeing that small percentage of ideas come to fruition.

    With three of those “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if” projects just hours, days, or weeks away from completion I’m finding that rounding 3rd base has given me a lot of energy and momentum. I know that locomotion, surprise, and a smile will carry it home from here.

  • Stock Market Rally

    Americans are addicted to bad news. So this may come as a surprise. There are stocks within the market that are on fire! I’ll give you one example from my portfolio.

    ford-rally

    In February, I took dividends from Honda Motor Company (a stock I’ve owned a long time, having a flat year) and invested those dividends in Ford Motor Company. For those who don’t know what that means, investing dividends means that I didn’t put any of my cash in from my accounts, this is money Honda “gave” me as my share in their profits. It wasn’t “real money” but untouchable income, “free money” to me in my IRA.

    I bought Ford stock at $1.92 per share on a hunch. (Remember, I was playing with dividends… just cash sitting in my account.) Zooming out on their 3 year history I could see that Ford is traditionally a $10 per share stock. And while they aren’t doing well in the U.S., their European line is doing fine. Since they have a lot less debt and cut deeper, not taking government bail out money, it was reasonable to assume that their sector (American auto maker) had dragged their stock down more than real losses.

    Look at March and to-date in April and you will see a massive rally. As of this moment, shares of Ford are trading at $5,98. That’s $4.06 more than I paid for them. Roughly 200% interest. Of course, looking at the chart you can see that I sold some shares at $4.24. Last week, I locked in some of those profits by selling enough shares to cover my original purchase. That means that I guaranteed that I wouldn’t lose any money on Ford… the balance of those shares becomes more free money. So, I took dividend money, which was free to me, and in less than 90 days was able to double it while still holding on to free shares in Ford.

    My point is not to make myself look like a genius. Though, right now, I’m feeling pretty good about this investment. Certainly, in the last 5-6 years I’ve made the exact opposite mistake. I invested a ton of my portfolio in Sirius Satellite Radio because they started putting free radios in every car being made, never thinking it was an overvalued stock. The iPod hit it big and Satellite radio became the 8 track player. Shares I bought at $7 and $10 in the early 2000’s… I sold at $3 per share. (Currently trades at .43!) So you can see I am not a perfect investor.

    My point is that you can’t base how you feel about yourself on news reports. There’s a lot of talk about our nation being in a recession. Certainly, millions of people are out of work and we are facing a very real housing crisis. But, that doesn’t mean that everything in the world is bad and we should wallow in our depression! There is certainly lots and lots of money to be made. People on Wall Street are making BAGILLIONS of dollars right now while the rest of the nation thinks we are in a borderline depression. (The swine flu is also a great cover for this! Can you say, “distraction?”)

    Think of a recession as a shifting of how money is being spent. It’s not that people aren’t spending money. It’s not that there is less money in the marketplace. It’s that they aren’t spending it in places that we expect them to.

    How do I know what to look for?

    Companies are typically slow to react to that shifting. Ones who jumped the trend, even a little, will do well. Companies that tried to ride out the last few dollars on yesterday’s trend (Just look at every car General Motors had on their line in 2008… another example would be AOL/Time Warner) are going to get punished because they don’t have a product people will buy. You have to be like Warren Buffet. Before you invest in anything, see it. Do your research, read the reports… but that shouldn’t replace walking around a store… or in this case a car lot.

  • Fail Forward