When you get your wake-up call at some Disney hotels, you hear something like: “It’s 7:00 A.M., have a magical day in the Magic Kingdom.”

No need to rely on Disney or anybody else to give you a magical day. You can create them for yourself at will, in your small business marketing or your own personal life – although, truth be told, in the imaginary Magic Kingdom or your own, the very best of days only has some magical moments or hours, some mundane ones and usually, some not so good ones.

Several years ago, in horse-racing, we had a magical night. Carla, my step-daughter Jennifer, and her three sons, Joe, Luke, Zach, all here to see one of our young horses run an amazing race, come from behind and win in dramatic fashion.

Then get their photo taken in the winners’ circle. Also that night, our 3-year-old trotter and priciest pacer (he a $75,000.00 critter) both finished 2nd in special stakes races, picking up about $45,000.00 in winnings combined, racing as good as they could possibly have raced.

And nothing went wrong all night.

For my partner in two of the horses, trainer of all three, Clair Umholtz, it was also a magical night.

You just don’t get too many like this one in an entire racing career. However, our close friend, Pete Lillo (who you know as Pete The Printer) couldn’t be there due to a bout with severe back pain.

And having spent the entire day in the eye of the tornado of the three grandkids, Carla and I were just too darned tired to join the midnight after-party to celebrate.

Is any day ever entirely magical?

Well, anyway, I guess my point is: you make your own magic.

Just as Lee Milteer says “there are no victims, only volunteers”, I’d tell you there are no really greener pastures in the distance; certainly not greener than you might make those you own already.

There are no real wizards or magicians endowed with magic greater than yours; certainly not greater than the powers you possess you could strengthen and exploit.

I was reading an extensive survey to measure the impact of advertising slogans. Among the slogans and advertising tag lines for 22 of the biggest U.S. advertisers, only 6 were recognized by more than 10% of the consumers surveyed.

In other words, not even 1 out of 10 consumers could correctly identify 90% of the slogans. 16 of the 22 advertisers had slogans no one knew – each spending more than 100-million dollars a year advertising them!

Three of these much advertised slogans scored 0% recognition. 0%!

Take the test, see if you can name any of the big, dumb companies that match these slogans:

1. We’re With You
2. That Was Easy
3. The Stuff Of Life

Only Wal-Mart’s “Always Low Prices” was recognized by 64% of the consumers tested. (And by the way, if you can’t have the lowest prices, you might as well be the highest. Not much cache in “Almost Always Almost Lowest Prices Most Days”.)

Those faring poorly, like #1 above, argued that they’d only been advertising their slogan for YEARS!!!! – and, quote, “it takes time to build brand identity.” #3’s spokesman justified their disaster as “ only a transitional slogan”, stating they were moving toward yet another new brand-focused identity, whatever the beejeezus that is. Translation: new slogan being thunk up.

The real laughter is that the copy of this article was from USA TODAY’s web site, and at its end, two companies paid to advertise their services, doing, yep, “corporate branding.”

Is A Slogan A Brand? Isn’t A Slogan just Like A USP?

No, a slogan is not a brand, and these results are not exactly an indictment of all brand-building approaches.

For example, the kind of “personal branding” I teach encompasses more than a slogan, and is usually more targeted to a market.

However it’s easy to have that go awry and wind up with branding that looks good but does nothing. There’s a tightrope to walk there, and it’s easy to fall off. Most ad agency types do.

A slogan is definitely NOT a USP, although it can represent, telegraph or at least be congruent with a USP in your small business marketing.

Actually, Wal-Mart’s is the only slogan in all the ones tested via this survey that enunciates a USP. It is, not coincidentally, the only effective slogan. The others not only fail the Dan Kennedy USP Question#1 (Why should I, your prospect, choose to do business with you versus any and every other option?), they also are so generic they could be used by anybody.

For example, “That Was Easy” could certainly work for Boston Market – how easy it is to put a ‘home cooked’ dinner on the family table, or for DiTech – how easy it is to get a home loan.

Warning: if anybody and everybody can use your USP, it ain’t one.

If any and every Tom, Dick and Mary can use your slogan, why on earth would you want it?

In each of these cases, the minute the ad agency charlatans revealed these slogans in the corporate clients’ boardrooms, the CEO’s should have stood up, pulled out a gun, shot one of them somewhere it would really hurt and bleed a lot but not kill him, and yelled “Next.”

This is the kind of chronic stupidity I encountered when working with big, dumb companies like Weight Watchers and Mass Mutual. (Incidentally, Weight Watchers could use any of the above three dead bang loser slogans. Mass could use two of them. And probably would.)

Every company behind these losers had a spokesperson ready with an excuse. Nobody said, truthfully, “We’re idiots.”

The job site CareerBuilder.com reports that 1 in 5 employees admits to giving bogus reasons for coming to work late. Some of the best are:

• I dreamed I was fired,so I slept in. When I woke up I realized I was dreaming so I hurried in.
• I went all the way to the office before realizing I was still in my pajamas and had to go home to change. That took a while.
• I saw you weren’t there, so I went out looking for you.

Well, this sort of thing is to be expected from employees. Bogus or not. But not from entrepreneurs. And never from Renegade Millionaire entrepreneurs.

One of the things that sets us so far apart from the rest of the population is our taking of personal responsibility and not thinking, talking or offering excuses. In my NO B.S. GUIDE TO THE RUTHLESS MANAGEMENT OF PEOPLE AND PROFITS, I make a very simple statement: excuses and profits are incompatible.

If you want to accelerate achievement of ‘profit’ (however you define it) in your business and your life, simply decrease the quantity, frequency,and acceptance of excuses from yourself (and others). As the latter goes down, the former goes up.

It’s a simple litmus test: can there possibly be ‘profit’ in this?

So,thinking about, buying into or discussing a bad economy, an industry downturn – can there be profit in doing so? Excusing yourself or others for bad performance because you or he are just having a bad day, didn’t get enough sleep – can there be profit in that?

When I was a speaker I often heard other speakers bitterly complaining- before going on stage to sell – about adverse conditions, bad acoustics, excess heat, bugs buzzing about, or seemingly ‘flat’ and unresponsive audiences, and I thought to myself: can’t be any profit in that. (I swallowed at least 1,000 little gnats while speaking at the Cow Palace the day after a livestock show. I didn’t miss a beat. Didn’t display distress. Wasn’t distracted. There WAS profit in that.)

There are only three possible, sensible reactions to “circumstances beyond your control.”

1. Design your business life so as to avoid such things as much as humanly possible.If you take on clients or hire employees who are incompetent or clueless or otherwise troublesome, you may have circumstances beyond your control facing you as a result – but avoiding the mess in the first place was probably very much in your control. If you insist on going to the bank on Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, during lunch hour or on the 1st or 15th of the month, the long line of tortoises in front of you is not really a circumstance beyond your control.
2. Wrest control. Again, as a speaker,I have forced the re-arranging of stage set-ups and even entire ballrooms,sometimes at last minute. As a salesperson, I’ve avoided conducting important business calls on a cellphone while driving, eating, peeing or combinations thereof – and on more than one occasion, on phone and in person, when it was clear I did not have the client’s undivided attention, I suggested we terminate the call/meeting and re-schedule when he was able to give it and me the priority we deserved. As a business owner – and as a consultant – I tell vendors and clients alike how they must work with me (for their benefit as well as mine).
3. Accept them, give up all your power to them, and come away with some terrific excuses for failure. For some people, that is profit,and that’s precisely why they keep putting themselves in such circumstances and refusing to alter their behavior. As Eric Hoffer observed, the majority prefer convenient excuses to difficult achievement.

If somebody doesn’t really, really, really HATE not doing well, I can pretty much assure you there’s little risk of them ever doing well. What you accept and excuse is what you get. And get more of. Personally, I am usually enraged when I don’t do well at something. Mad at myself. In a truly black mood. Not anybody you want to be within fifty feet of – nor are you welcome.

It may take hours or days or weeks depending on the severity of the situation before I have reconciled it in my mind. (I can compartmentalize, concentrate and function if need be, but I’ll keep pulling The Ugly Thing back out of its lockbox and getting pissed off all over again, until I’ve chewed it thoroughly.)I’m a very sore loser – but sore at myself. Since I hate not doing well so very much, I do quite well more often than not.

There is a tendency amongst authors writing about “success” as well as entrepreneurs, small business owners and CEO’s telling their success stories to be warm ‘n fuzzy and present classically popular ideas palatable to the largest number of people. To say that nice guys win. That having a positive attitude and drawing little smiley faces above the i’s you dot will not only endear you to people but actually attract prosperity.

In truth, there is little evidence of this. None of it is harmful in moderation, but it conceals fundamental truth about ultra-high achievers: they tend to be tough, intolerant, hard-driving, demanding, competitive people often viewed as difficult, mean and ruthless by others. And they tend to have a profound sense of superiority usually viewed as arrogance. It sometimes gets them in trouble, but it is also an essential factor in their success.

Quoting a Forbes reporter:

Donald Trump has a dim view of the world. To the real estate mogul and TV star most people are either “enemies”, “bastards”, “sleazebags”, or “stone-cold losers.”

Bill Harrison recently gave me a phenomenal book by one of the richest Europeans you’ve probably never heard of, Felix Dennis, “How To Be Rich”, which has much to say about this, and should be read by anybody who thinks they sincerely want to be rich. (It’s also a fun read.)

These individuals who raise themselves to great wealth and power exhibit messianic beliefs from the beginning.

Gene Landrum writes about this extensively in his must-read books on the high achiever’s psyche. He cites countless examples; one, Napoleon being told by his mother while still in the cradle that he was born to rule the world.

Andrew Carnegie spoke of having a sense of enormous superiority over ordinary men. In the book “The Alexander Complex: The Dreams That Drive Great Businessmen”, its author notes that great business empiricists believe in the grip of a vision. Because they are convinced they can change the world, they often do.

With this sense of superiority comes the unavoidable conviction that most others are profoundly inferior. These individuals see themselves as strong and disciplined, others as weak and undisciplined; themselves as independent and in control, as kings, others as dependent and in need of constant supervision, as pawns to be moved about as necessary.

These individuals have a centric vision, demanding that the world revolve around them. They see their rightful place as atop the hierarchical pyramids because of their superior studiousness, tough-mindedness, discipline, determination and resilience. (NOT superior intelligence, as Dennis points out, and as I have frequently stated.) While they may say that there”s nothing significantly different between them and other men on the street, because humble plays well, they privately know the opposite to be true, and have disdain for all those who could but don”t.

Further, these people take (legal) advantage when and where they can.

Sam Walton cultivated an image as the folksy fellow in the battered pick-up truck, but Andy Griffith he was not. Walton’s success formula focused on minimized labor costs, grinding vendors down on price repeatedly, and forcing manufacture of most goods overseas. Wal-Mart has always been run with an iron fist: wage caps; extensive electronic surveillance of employee phone calls and workplaces; prohibition of purchasing agents accepting so much as a cup of coffee from a vendor; an internal security force investigating every deviation of company policy.

NIKE founder Phil Knight made his fortune in shoes by paying Indonesian factory workers less than a dollar a day – eventually admitting that his company had become synonymous with slave wages.

Bill Gates an elephant eagerly stomping mice.

Opportunism, even predatory opportunism is heavily in play. One rich client of mine, I won’t name, recently told me gleefully that economic slump in his industry prompted him to open up his piggybank, because it was the ideal time to steal the competitors best employees and advertise more aggressively than ever to build market share. Rockefeller famously said, I buy when there is blood in the streets.

Is there enough blood in the streets to prompt you to take action today?

Share your story below.

I had a recent consulting call with a client. I asked him about his progress on what we talked about during our past call and he reported that hardly anything got done because he had a lot of other things to do in running his business and was constantly being interrupted by employees with questions or who required advice.

That’s when I went into my rant that…

“What we talk about and agree to get accomplished should NEVER take a backseat to anything else he needs to get done. I reminded him that his #1 job as the owner and President of the company was the MARKETING!”

After all, it’s the marketing that’s driving sales and withOUT sales there is no need for anyone else to work in the company. No need for an accountant, customer service representatives, buyers … no one.

Now I’ve probably just offended a bunch of people with this and I truly appreciate all of the people I work with in any company I’ve owned, but you need to never forget this message: MARKETING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ANY ORGANIZATION.

After I gave my client the tongue lashing, he told me he needed that wake up call to remind him what his priorities were and the next time that someone interrupted him, he would put them on hold until he worked on the marketing.

I informed him that people he worked with won’t like it and will resist. After all, everyone thinks their job is the most important job in the company. It’s up to you to not let these people run your life. In fact, it should be their job to make your life easier, not harder.

IF YOU ALLOW OTHERS TO RUN YOUR
LIFE (and consume your time) THEY’LL DO IT!!

Lee Milteer talks a lot about not allowing your business to run your life (and suck up all your time) in our Peak Performers Coaching group. Another great resource for you is Dan’s book entitled: No B.S. RUTHLESS MANAGEMENT OF PEOPLE & PROFITS (available at http://www.ruthlessmanagement.com/ruthless.)

FINAL COMMENT: Speaking of Dan’s book, several posts back I shared with you the three traits that successful entrepreneurs have in common and I reported that that #1 trait was reading.

Any moron can make money with new media where only little folks play.

But when the big, dumb, brand advertisers arrive – as they have in PPC advertising – the media cost skyrockets and that’s that. This should never be a sudden surprise – or a gradual one, either – to anybody with even small quantities of small business marketing knowledge, historical perspective and common sense.

The Big Lesson is what immature, under-priced media giveth, mature, over-priced media taketh away.

For a while, independent specialty retailers in jewelry, handbags, shoes, spicy foods, even electronics had this space to themselves, so search ads that popped up when someone typed “diamond necklace” or “DVD player” worked.

Now that BestBuy, Zales’ Jewelers, etc. have arrived in those categories, buying with little regard to direct ROI, the price per click on such ads has risen to unprofiable numbers. And that will continue to worsen as even bigger, dumber companies cheerfully pay more.

Google’s not worried. While the small fry search advertisers may be leaving them, General Motors and Wal-Mart are moving in, and that gold glitters brightly to owners of media. Little does Google know how that can eventually destroy your media prices and margins; when a media becomes dependent on a small cadre of giant ad buyers, the power shifts and the buyer sets price, not the seller. The big fish will eventually refuse to pay per click at all and insist on fixed rate advertising – once the small fish are gone.)

But the Bigger Lesson here is NOT about search ads and pay-per-click advertising or the Internet. It isn’t even about the ways of media.

The Bigger Lesson is about the utter foolishness of operating a business (or living) as if things are going to stay the same.

They aren’t.

Not globally, not locally, not in any way whatsoever. Certainly not with whatever means you use of acquiring customers that is generous to you at the moment.

The smartest entrepreneurs I’ve ever known react to something working wonderfully with nearly instant fear and even loathing, as the success is their mandate to urgently seek its replacement for the day when it comes apart at the seams. Worse yet, they are so visionary they can see why and how it will, that others cannot.

If you can’t stand the thought of living with such extreme paranoia, then the only other intelligent option available to you is the one I usually preach: profit from having many doors open through which customers walk, be dependent on none of them. If you now get more than 20% of your customers from any one source or any one ad media or any one anything, you should be very afraid, very, very afraid. And doing something about it, before it’s necessitated by a sudden surprise.

The savvy retailer or restaurant owner who finds he’s in an exceptional location immediately strives to extend his lease for a longer term at the fixed rate or buy the building or buy a building near-by, because he can see the big chains and development arriving to skyrocket rents. (Ask Bill about the financial value of very long leases and getting paid just to leave.)

The company with success in infomercials does what Guthy-Renker did; invests profits in developing non-TV methods of selling the same products; moving from one category to a different one where continuity can be had.

The successful online merchant does as 1-800-Flowers did; seeks success offline. The successful offline merchant, vice-versa. For the smart, these moves are not just opportunistic; they are paranoid. For the real leaders, every celebration is marred by the guy marching around with ‘The End Is Near’ sign observed out the corner of one eye, through the distant window.

The moral of Earl Nightingale’s greener pastures story is, nobody’s business or life is perfect, and the most perfect of another’s situations is rarely as good as it seems from afar.

It would be dangerous to trade, even with the person you might envy most, based only on observations from a distance. It’s usually better to work at making your own “house” better and more to your liking than to envy or swap for another.

Lately, most of my clients, coaching members and I have had most things going our way. We’re all pretty fat ‘n happy. Some of us are deluged with business, using shovel and wheelbarrow to handle the money.

For me, horseracing is the constant reminder that things don’t always go as planned. Actually, with horseracing, they rarely go as planned. Owning ‘em isn’t a business for anybody who can’t handle disappointment. Driving ‘em in races is at least as frustrating as golf, with the added virtues of rain, sleet, hail, mud, snow, ice and physical danger.

I’ve had about 70 drives so far this year, only 4 worth bragging about, another 10 or so satisfactory and satisfying. Oh, we own the fastest pacer at the track, who is racing well, and has made $30,000.00 so far. We own a solid 3-year old trotter. But we also have a 3-year-old we thought would burn up the track, and that we paid to stake to special races, who has stopped his improvement dead.

This morning, I took a call from my trainer in which we decided to sell two woefully under-performing, disappointing horses I drive personally for thousands of dollars less than we paid for them, putting fewer dollars into the kitty than had come out, and leaving me in need of two good horses to drive.

When you sell something you paid $8,000.00 for and had high hopes for, for $1,500.00, it’s not a good day. But by comparison to lots of people with serious troubles, it’s not much more than a mosquito bite, either. Of course, perspective’s never easy when you’re being bitten.

The ways most people react to disappointment, frustration, loss, to things not going as planned are (a) moping around, (b) poor-me’ing, (c) sympathy-seeking, or (d) being mad at other people, God, or the world. As far as I know, none of those responses will cure or treat whatever disease you’ve been diagnosed with, fix whatever business problem has presented itself, or replace those two horses.

Successful small business owners usually respond differently. They may indulge briefly in (a)+(b)+(c)+(d), but then they “re-calibrate” to either doing something constructive and productive to repair or improve the offending situation, or to working on something else they can affect positively. Really successful people “re-calibrate” quickly and automatically. Pigs wallow in mud and shit. Successful people do not permit themselves to wallow, no matter what.

Successful RENEGADE MILLIONAIRES respond even more differently. They too may ever-so-briefly indulge in (a)-(d), but then they start the diligent, determined hunt for the opportunity in the adversity.

We don’t just mouth the platitude of every cloud has a silver lining; we believe Hill’s “in EVERY adversity lies the seed of equal or greater achievement” as religion. And we understand the key word is ‘achievement.’ The silver lining may not already be woven, lying there to be found; it has to be made.