Tag Archive for: Iron Mindset

Lies Lies Lies!!

/2 Comments/in /by

I’m in the mood for a good rant today…

Tell Me Lies, tell me sweet little lies
~Tell Me Lies, Tell me tell me lies~
Oh no no, you can’t disguise
~You can’t disguise, no you can’t disguise~
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

It’s a song by Fleetwood Mac called “Tell Me Lies”. Maybe you’ve heard it? Catchy tune. (if you know it, bet you’re singing it in your head!)

So what does it have to do with anything?

I’m fed up with the lies, the pure garbage that is being fed to people and unscrupulous marketing.

… let me tell you a story…

I stepped into the world of touch screen phones. Yep, I got tired of waiting for Blackberry to come out with a new phone for T-Mobile and upgraded into the new HTC Sensation. It’s a touch screen, big display, 4G, has all the bells and whistles, android, easy to use – I love it and so does my wife. My kids love “Angry Birds” – wow what an addictive waste of time that game is eh?!!

I get my first bill and trying to be a good steward I review it to make sure there are no surprises.

Wrong.

2 bogus charges. Ugh. That means I’ve gotta call customer service. Fortunately T-Mobile has great customer service. I usually get a cheery, delightful person who is happy to help. Today was no exception. I got Jessica, a pure delight. She reviewed the charges in question with me.

The first was for insurance. When I got the phone, the sales guy pushed this hard on me. I declined several times and he persisted like a battering ram taking out a castle door. He said “it’s free for 30 days” so I relented and said ok.

Guess what? … it wasn’t free. Not only that, the T-Mobile rep said they have no authority to do that.

My Blood Starts To Boil

The second bogus charge: there’s a monthly charge of $9.99 to allow us to download ringtones from a 3rd party. Neither me or my wife signed up for it. Some cheesy 3rd party company bogussly (is that a word?!!) spammed us some cryptic texts. Irritated, we replied for them to stop.

Well, I guess they didn’t and instead they signed us up for their service and we got dinged for it. Purely unethical in my books. I’m sure they make a tidy profit, afterall how many people have cell phones and how many times do people check their phone bills? The T-Mobile rep said that this kind of stuff unfortunately happens a lot. And to cancel this bogus service, we have to contact the 3rd party and have them remove it. You can be sure I’ll check my bill next month!!

Happy Ending to This Story

Jessica “Your Friendly Neighborhood T-Mobile Rep” to the rescue!! – she reversed both charges and got us all squared away. She made it such a pleasant experience. And I’m grateful for her.

Thank you Jessica.

What Does This Have To Do With Marketing?

I have clients come to me time and time again looking for advice. I get contacted out of the blue by clients, some have gone months without reaching out to me and suddenly they want advice on a variety of topics – internet marketing, SEO, Social Media, Facebook, website design, landing pages, USP’s, the list goes on.

Why do they contact me?

Just like the garbage I had to deal with on my phone bill, there’s so much crap being thrown around out there about marketing. There are a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

YOU MUST KNOW THIS AND BEWARE

I’ve had clients Adwords accounts turned off because they were seduced, I’ve had clients waste THOUSANDS of dollars changing their site to appease someone jibber-jabbing about SEO (I’ve got a great story about a test we did where we got multiple listings on the first page of Google for a term that has over 4,100,000,000 – yes, you read that right, multiple first page listing out of OVER 4 BILLION SEARCHES!! – there were some radically strange things going on that we uncovered but I’ll save that story one for another day.)

I’ve had clients come to me that have wasted tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on “guru’s” and other consultants. And within the first few minutes we could identify the problem.

Bottom line: you must be able to decipher fact from fiction and the truth from fantasy and seduction. If you can’t you’re doomed and will waste money, and even worse, massive amounts of time.

With the exhaustive expansion of online media and ways of getting traffic, if you can’t decipher this on your own, then I suggest you have a trusted adviser you can turn to. The bible says there’s safety in a multitude of counselors. Whether you read the bible or not, this is good common sense. Who are your trusted advisers?

And with all the seduction and wolves in sheep’s clothing out there, sometimes messages like this get missed.

A problem I have is I don’t have a bright shiny object I pitch.

What I do have is:

  • time tested and proven, yet cutting edge and radically different methods for increasing sales
  • what’s working now
  • and straight answers for today’s problems

I guess that’s why people keep coming back to me for advice and allow me to help.

In your business, your clients and prospects are getting pitched garbage and B.S. too. If you help them decipher what’s real and what’s fantasy, they will keep coming back and refer more business to you.

Blessings,

P.S. Amazing how a good rant can improve your mood!

 

Ever have one of those days?

/0 Comments/in /by

I’m changing gears today. Normally I write about cutting edge, yet proven strategies and tips for growing your business and today I’m deviating from that. You see things in life and business are not always rosey and cheery. Things don’t always go well.

Happens to the best of us doesn’t it?

Sometimes it’s for a day, sometimes a week, sometimes a season. However long, it happens to us all. It’s inevitable.

I had a business client come to me recently telling me how his business fell apart and how his marriage collapsed at the same time. Brutal. He’s a good guy and an intelligent and hard working man. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

So, let me ask, have you ever had one of those days where it’s excruciatingly painful to accomplish anything?

I had one of those this morning. Things don’t go as planned. In fact, they don’t go anywhere as near as planned?!

As you may know, I love doing endurance events – Ironmans, 100 mile bike rides, marathons, you know long distance stuff that only crazy people do. (I had a friend ask me why I just didn’t drive 26.2 miles instead of running it, said I would get there much faster! – he does have a point!!)

And when you do endurance events you have to train. And sometimes there are great days – like the 18 miler I did a couple weeks ago where the weather was perfect, body felt fresh and fast and there was plenty of deer on the trail – and sometimes there are crappy bad days.

That was today. I had a 20 miler planned. I have this wacky notion of doing an ultramarathon and need to get some longer miles in. Figured I would do only 2 more miles than my last long run of 18. Should be no problem. Had the run planned out, would be a nice trail run where there is usually plenty of wildlife to keep me entertained. Weather was supposed to be great – 65F, sunny and breezy. Figured it would be fun.

Instead, here’s how the day unfolded:

  • horrible sleep last night and woke up tired (no problem, this has happened plenty of times before)
  • body was sluggish
  • legs were mush from the beginning and progressively got worse
  • head was out of it – “this sucks stinks, why didn’t I just stay in bed”
  • no deer on trail
  • ran out of water & started getting dehydrated
  • stomach didn’t like PB&J – without taking in fuel on long runs you are a gonner
  • and to top it off I bonked with 3 miles to go! … I walked the last 3 miles repeating the thought “this really sucks, I’m done, I just want to get home”

Everything was out of whack. Ugh.

Oh, since I was feeling so bad, I thought I should push myself to overcome it and ran walked up this nasty hill. It was so steep that mountain goats wouldn’t climb it. So off I went. Thought that would snap me out of it – nope but it did make me hotter and used up lots of my water and only took me 45 minutes to go 1 mile!

… seriously, what was I thinking!

Ok. I got done my run/walk. Was miserable and hated it.

Sometimes you just have those days.

Here’s the point of this story. Because it happens to people all the time. I see it all around me. So what do you do when you have a bad day/month/year/season?

… you just keep moving your feet

I had to get done. The distance was not going to get shorter if I didn’t move. I could wine and complain and say how much I hated it and how I just wanted to get it over with (all of which I did). But the fact remained that I had to cover the distance and get it done.

So I just kept moving my feet.

You can apply strategies, best practices, cutting edge technologies, you can do a lot of things. And sometimes things just get hard. And when they do, just keep moving your feet.

If it happens a lot, then get some help. There may be something you are missing. If I experience consistent bad days (like today) I will get with my coach and work through it with him.

In the meantime, I will keep moving my feet.

And you, if you have bad days, whether it be in your marriage, your business, with your kids, or the relentless mind games that go on in your head, if you have bad days where you feel like throwing the towel in, just keep moving your feet.

Blessings,