- Seth Godin

Last week I told you about why my wife only lets me drink out of sippy cups. This week I want to tell you about patching cement.

Patching cement blows. Cement patch is basically gray silicone gel with sand and pebbles in it. In craft terms, it’s silver glitter glue.

After a rather horrific trip to a hardware store that shall not be named, I found myself staring at these cracks in our sidewalk feeling enthusiastic about doing something handy, if only because I’m a dude who knows more about glitter glue than cement patch.

I opened the tube of cement patch and loaded the caulk gun. *click* *click* *click* – the arm of the caulk gun ratcheted into place, another squeeze and the patch would flow from the tube. I squeezed the handle. *snap*

I turned the caulk gun over. Nothing makes a *snap* sound on a caulk gun that I know of (and contrary to what you’re thinking, I had used one before). I reset it and tried again and again – no patch, handle jammed. I pulled the cement patch from the caulk gun and realized I’d bent the whole fucking caulk gun by about 15 degrees just by squeezing the handle. I’d show you a picture except I threw it away. That *snap* I’d heard was the plastic cap in the bottom of the cement patch tube cracking open.

Not to be thwarted, I jammed a screwdriver into the bottom of the tube and started pulling out the cement patch by hand. I’d come too far, dammit, to be stopped by a broken caulk gun.

That’s right – I was fingerpainting with cement patch. And let me tell you – our sidewalk is now the nicest fucking sidewalk in the neighborhood. They’re glorious and awesome, and I never, ever want to talk about them again.

Now, I tell you this because you probably picture me as a smart, iPad-wielding, Klingon-speaking geek who got straight A’s in high school – and you’d be right. But that day, I felt like an idiot. I looked like an idiot. I mean, who applies cement patch with their fingers, honestly?

Mental patients, that’s who.

I realized that my struggle is identical to the one my clients face – we’re just using (or misusing) different tools. Where I am apprehensive about household handyman-style tasks, my clients are apprehensive about technology, or marketing, or social media.

We can all benefit from the services of a specialist.

Last week, I informed one of my instructional clients (a civil engineering firm) that their attempt to build and manage a website in-house would be akin to me programming the stoplights in an intersection (or, in this case – trying to patch my own sidewalks). You can do it, but it takes a bit of study – and to do it properly, is probably more work than it’s worth as opposed to hiring a specialist to help you.

You don’t pay your  friend to operate on you after reading WebMD, right? So – why would you operate on your website after reading an HTML book?

The world needs specialists with specialties. Mine are cross-disciplinary (like most professional specialists) – marketing, technology, community. Yours are probably similarly grouped, but when we try to group too many things  - or too many disparate things, your head tends to explode (and so does your talent).

What’s needed, in this case, is bridging. You need a librarian, someone who can curate collections of sources, not just point you to one website, but tens or hundreds on your topic. You need them to narrow your search and build bridges of support between ideas, frameworks, and experiences.

It’s one of the reasons why I love (and frequently speak at) Ignite Fort Collins. Tickets are on sale right now – there’s less than 40 left. If you live in or near Fort Collins, there is absolutely no reason to miss this event – first, you get to see me speak. Second, you get to hear a huge number of disparate ideas in 5 minute chunks – curated for maximum impact.

Build your bridges. Expand your specialty. Avoid looking like a psychopath finger-painting with cement on the sidewalk.

“If you grow up in a town with sidewalks, a suburb without them seems somehow wrong. Design instinct is cultural, not genetic.”

- Seth Godin

I’ve never liked Home Depot.

When I was younger, I remember feeling a sense of dread every time our family made a trek there. I always thought it was because I dreaded doing the hard work that was associated with a trip to that store.

I’ve since found out that I’m just wicked unhandy. See this? This is what’s left of my new showerhead.

I tried to install it. Something went terribly, terribly wrong and the base of the thing (where you attach it to the pipe coming out of the wall) shattered. Not split. Not cracked. Fuckin’ shattered like glass.

This is not the first time I’ve Nick-Hulked something in our house. Our THIRD set of glass tumblers can attest to that.

My wife makes me drink from a sippy cup now. I’d protest, except I kinda like it.

Even so, I still don’t like Home Depot. I didn’t fully realize why until yesterday when my wife mentioned that the entire store is set up counter-intuitively. She then proceeded to point out every single thing that she didn’t like about the store.

My wife hardly ever complains, until it comes to retail that is. Her biggest complaint: Home Depot has no sidewalks.

Seriously. Ours has no sidewalks. Not one. Every inch of pavement from the door to the parking lot is filled with something: flowers, carts, displays, whatever. You step out of your car and you’re in the street. There’s no pedestrian areas. Kinda like Frogger – the home edition.

One does not simply walk into Home Depot.

One hauls ass to dodge impatient contractors in trucks.

This day in particular, I wanted to get a tube of cement patch. I wandered all the way over to the cement area (the far South side of the store. A hike of what had to be five nightmarish miles of contractors and tools away from where you enter). There’s something like eight different kinds.

If you asked me right now to name my six favorite programming languages, I could. Draw a near-perfect blueprint of the USS Enterprise-D’s bridge? OK. Create a marketing plan for a small business around FourSquare and Facebook? No problem. Recite Hamlet in Klingon? jIvanglaH

Ask me to pick out a cement patch that will work well in Colorado weather. I will make a face like this:

In the absence of an employee to help guide my decision, since the ones standing at the contractor desk too busy happily flirting away with each other to notice my patching product pickle, I pick the brand that looks like it was made special for small, handy children. If a six year old can do it, dammit, so can I. I’ll let you know if it worked next time. Here’s a hint: total fail.

To use the Kiddy Patch, I need a caulk gun, which is – wait for it – on the far North side of the store.

We zig-zaged across the store through the too-wide aisles that somehow, always, give you not enough room to avoid angry-looking homeowners who are here on a quest of their own. I’m sure we seem much the same to them as they do to us: lost souls. Damned to forever wander these corridors, never finding the one thing that will allow you to go ho- wait, here it is.

Caulk gun procured, we found our way to self checkout, where a 40-something woman is staring intently at her cell phone. We dutifully check out while she OMGs and ROFLs and DIAFs with her BFF. Meanwhile, I learn that you can pay with Paypal at Home Depot. She doesn’t look up as we walk past, “Have a good … ” she doesn’t bother to finish, since she no longer knows or cares what time it is.

Time has no meaning in the Depot.

As we prep for the second round of Frogger to get back to the car, my wife turns to me and says, “You know what I hate about this place?”

Which brings us back to sidewalks… and your website.

Believe it or not, websites are a lot like a house – a house with sidewalks. Just like a sidewalk allows people to walk past your house and take a browse, your content can stream all around the web – without you having to lift a finger. How are your website’s sidewalks? For that matter, how are the shingles? The gutters? The windows?

Could you use some help with that? I just might have the answer for you: I teamed up with my friend Annie Sisk of PJ Productivity to create Help My Awful Website.

Help My Awful Website brings two web pros – Annie and Me – and our combined twenty years of experience together, to audit your website.

Think of us as house inspectors – we poke, prod, climb into the attic, crawl under the subfloor – and then we tell you how to fix it. How? Well, we walk through your site, step-by-step, with a massive checklist of things we think are critical to a great business website and record this as a screencast you can watch later or show to your own web person. You also get the report of our findings along with our suggested fixes.

Interested?

The first 10 people to go to Help My Awful Website and ask us to audit their website get the service for $50 off (the normal price is $149 and once ten folks sign up, you’ll have to pay full price). Annie is sending out a notice to her list, too. But, I like you guys, so I sent out my post first. Her readers can suck it - Go Team Armstrong!

Want a taste of what we look at? Just go to http://helpmyawfulwebsite.com and snag our 7-page self-help checklist. It’s on the house and a great resource if you’re a DIY-er.

Use it to patch up your sidewalks. Hell, use it to make sure you have sidewalks in the first place. And stay tuned for the rest of the story next week when I tell you what happened with the Kiddy Patch.

(Header photo: Home Depot)

A year ago, I was part of a 3-person team organizing TEDxFoCo. We had 100 attendees, 10 speakers, and busted our butts to organize and get the word out to sell out the event – it was the first time TEDx had been done in Fort Collins or even Northern Colorado.

Funny thing is – a year ago, we couldn’t find a venue until two months before the event. Nobody who could host 100 people was willing to work with us – nor, for that matter, knew what TEDx was. We finally found one in April. I remember tearing up when I realized we had to charge for the event that I’d desperately wanted to be free. We had to fight to earn every last attendee and I distinctly remember filling out our budget and wondering where any of the money would be coming from after checking our attendee list three weeks out.

Thanks to some very hard work from all involved, we managed to sell out the event, pay our venue, and receive rave reviews.

Today, TEDxCSU - organized by my friends Hannah and Brooke, is hitting the books with over 900 tickets sold – and I can’t help but marvel at how well they and their team have done. I cannot imagine the magnitude of challenges the TEDxCSU team have faced. I’m so very happy for the TEDxCSU crew – and you can bet your britches that I’ll take every opportunity I have to learn from their successes.

Which brings me to my point: you cannot do anything worth doing – alone.

The inherent danger of doing everything yourself is that your project will never get done. Your idea will never escape your head – even if you are ridiculously talented, even if you have all the time in the world – without help, your idea will only ever be a shadow of itself.

This is the most important thing I can teach any small business owner: you must have help. To illustrate my point, I asked my friend Erin Giles to answer some questions for me about her project.

Erin has committed to end sex trafficking. Not diminish it. Not make people aware. She wants to kill it dead. So she contacted 60 awesome folks to write 60 amazing essays about love, knowledge, and freedom – and every dollar from every book sold will go to benefit the Not For Sale Campaign.

And she needs your help. In Erin’s own words:

“I need help from people who can donate $20 or more, we have 3 days to raise $780 to meet our goal and ship, print, and bind our book that will benefit the Not For Sale Campaign. They can also promote our site on Twitter and Facebook. Or they can take a moment to educate their families and friends about the 30 million people enslaved, which is more than any other time in history.”

While Erin did a fair share of sourcing for help, sometimes you have tow the line on your own – when you wish you could have sourced it out:

“I wish I could have outsourced emailing around 100 people personally asking them to write for the book and waiting for their response.”

Even so, Erin had loads of help to accomplish her project – and rightly so, as it’s a massive undertaking:

“I had lots of help -

• from my husband who made the video
• from Alexandra Franzen who I asked to donate time to help me jazz up the video script (she usually charges $1500 for one day of web copy)
• from Erika Lyremark from Daily Whip who talked me into raising money to get End Sex Trafficking Day book published + connected me to the publisher
• from over 160 people who have donated
• from 59 people saying yes to writing an essay
• from one willing lovely unpaid intern who answered a tweet from me requesting help with an admin duties
• from dozens of people willing to blog and promote about EST Day

oh and maybe my mom for watching my two year old while I work hard ”

Erin’s legacy? Even if this book doesn’t kill sex trafficking dead – it’s a hell of a beacon to inspire change. Erin’s legacy from the moment anyone new learns about her project will be that she changed the world for the better. And she’s still going.

If you want to change the world – take action. Just don’t do it alone.

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This post is part of the Word Carnival – a series of posts by small business experts to help you learn and achieve in your own business. Check out the Word Carnivals website to see all of the posts on Outsourcing.

(Header photo: Alone)

My friend Erika just wrote a book on The Power of Unpopular. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, considering my business name is WTF Marketing.

I know very well the impact that unconventional names your business or uncompromising principles (like no faxes) can have on your revenue stream.

I’d estimate that about 25% of the potential clients I have access to tuck tail and run when they hear the name of my business (or when they see an un-filtered four letter word on my blog). That’s just how some folks are – skittish. Just today I was on the minority of an argument on whether or not a friend should fire a client because they insist on doing most communication through the fax machine. If you’re wondering – I was for firing the client.

I don’t fax. My reasoning: in the time it takes me to go find a fax machine somewhere, I could have created a kick-ass strategy for some element of your marketing. In the time I’d be standing around, twiddling my thumbs, I could have boosted your social ROI. Instead, I’m waiting for a slower, stupider email. I could have designed something out of this world cool in the time it took the damn thing to go through.

No faxes. Period. The user experience suffers because of ‘em.

And yet… there are freelancers who can make a living off of providing services exclusively to the folks who like to fax. Because it’s a market I refuse to touch – and they don’t see it as an annoyance – there’s a lot less competition for those particular clients.

Just because I hate to fax anything doesn’t mean there’s not money in it. But hate is such a loaded word – because there’s a few different kinds of hate we have to address if we’re talking about marketing.

Let’s take a look at three brands: Old Navy, Grapple, and Ash Ambridge’s The Middle Finger Project.

OK, so what about Old Navy? Well, first of all – I cannot watch an Old Navy commercial without a 20% chance of an aneurism. Even though they’re created by the incredibly talented team at CP+B – the same folks who created Kickin Chicken and those hilarious Hulu ads, I can’t wach Old Navy commercials without spiraling into some sort of TV commercial rage and foaming at the mouth. My hatred here stems less from my worldview than it does my particular appreciation for humor.

In short, Old Navy commercials are a bit like hiring Penn & Teller to do your birthday party and them doing nothing but poop-joke filler for two hours and then drinking all your booze. Stuff that should be legitimately funny is lost in a haze of intentionally obscure/weird/stupid references. Remember the sweater commercials with the dog and the old lady? Ugh.

This type of hatred is about niche pandering. Niche pandering is all about the lowest-common denominator. This is usually how political ideas spread and how racism gets played off as acceptable politics. Niche pandering is dangerous – it results in a flavor of the week kind of promotion that has to be continuously regenerated. You use these tactics to scrape the bttom of teh barrel because chances are once you find those customers, they become long-term customers.

Grapple is a kind of apple that tastes and smells like those grape crayons you had in elementary school. My wife hates ‘em. I love ‘em. My wife’s dislike stems from the fact that it’s unnatural for an apple to reek of grape from across the room (grapples are not GMOs, if you were wondering – they ARE processed, however). I love ‘em for the fact that they make me crave fruit – grape jolly ranchers were always my favorite, and this is a more nutritious way for me to satisfy that craving.

The very thing my wife hates about Grapples is the thing I love. This kind of hate has to do with worldview about product attributes – admittedly odd and unique product attributes, but attributes nonetheless. Consider those who drink Coke over Pepsi, 7up over Sprite, or Dr. Pepper over Mr. Pibb. Effectively, very little difference exists between one cola and the next. But don’t tell that to a Coke person. A cola, to someone from the south, should be ice cold and come in a bright red can. An apple should be an apple and not taste like a grape jolly rancher – according to my wife.

Finally, let’s look at Ash Ambridge’s The Middle Finger Project. Ash takes two dissimilar things and melds them: swear words and a heart of gold.

The thing about Ash’s business that makes so few people run in fear is pretty deep: the fear of missing out on something utterly amazing just because one of her navigation links is Your Mom. This actually translates to the hatred of missed personal growth opportunity. One only has to read one of Ash’s stories to realize she’s on the mark. Afterward, forgiving the occasional swear isn’t an exception for her, but like that second helping of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving – something you reward yourself with over and over again each year.

So what does all of this have to do with finding what your customers really want? The opposite of hatred is delight. Garnering a pure, focused, extreme niche group of people delighted with you and your product – that’s awesome, right? Better than people who are kind of meh about you and your product… right? So how does it work?

Old Navy works on the premise that their ads will either make you giggle (morons) or their ads will be so annoying that when you drop in to give the store manager a piece of your mind, you’ll also notice that absolutely adorable sweatervest that goes so well with your capris you could die. Least Common Denominator niche – love us or hate us, you’re still buying.

Grapple works on the premise of “this is our product, take it or leave it”. They don’t care if you don’t like grape. They unapologetically continue making them – grossing people like my wife out and delighting people like me. They don’t waste time marketing to people who aren’t impressed – because their customers do it for them. Every time I see ‘em in the store, I think about someone new who I’d like to introduce to the Grapple so I can ensure they’ll be around another year (as, I would suspect, do so many other Grapple eaters – it’s our cross to bear). Love us or hate us – we’re still in your face as yet another superfan tries to convince you an apple should taste like a jolly rancher.

Finally, The Middle Finger Project works on the premise of daring you to not like it. “You can hate me, but you’ll regret it.” Like dating the super-hot but super-crazy girl in high school, you’ll kick yourself for the rest of your life if you don’t give it the chance. Ash’s testimonials speak volumes about just how very good she is – but to get to ‘em, you have to get past her edgy branding, past her “Your Mom” link, past the title of her site… each one daring you not to proceed. You can try to hate it, but you know deep down – like that secret candy bar stash at the office you found – that you’ll be back.

When I develop my own projects, I immediately seek out folks who absolutely hate it and try to find out why. Not so I can convert them, but so I can understand who I’m delighting and who I’m forsaking.

(Photo credit: Love and Hate)

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This post is part of the monthly Word Carnival – a group of bloggers joining forces in the name of infotaining the crap out of you around a certain topic. This month – Finding Out What Your Customers Really Want. Click the link to see more Word Carnival awesomeness from my fellow bloggers!

I was experimenting with Google’s Auto Closed Captioning in YouTube. Turns out, Google thinks I’m some sort of beat poet. Some of the best lines:

“It would be great to have a happy birthday to you gesture” (I’d love to know what that is, btw).
“The state of the head of mom’s house”
“Part-Time Lady Gaga”

Here are my favorites. Found any good ones yourself?

Explain how that happens, please? How many people were standing between me and my soap? I’ve been called a douchebag before – I’ve never had to hand proof that I was one to a cashier.

The same company who brought you some of the most brilliant, endlessly quoted commercials any of us have ever seen – executed so well, they defined their own category of social ads. Behold:

*|YOUTUBE:[$vid=owGykVbfgUE]|*

Who’s buying your product? Is it the same folks who are doing your marketing? Do those people have any sort of representation on your marketing team besides, you know, focus groups?

Cuz, you know – if they aren’t there, stuff like this happens:

The arrow is pointing to a racial slur (in case you’re one of those innocent people who don’t know things like that). I’m sure the people toward whom the slur is usually directed also eat Spicy Pickle sandwiches. It’s an innocent enough mistake, until it’s not.

Imagine if this happened in social media? It has, and for much smaller offenses. Behold, again:

*|YOUTUBE:[$vid=XO6SlTUBA38]|*

This sparked a massive outrage on Twitter and throughout the Mommyblogosphere (yes, I said it).

My point is, if big brands can screw up – small businesses really need to watch their step. It’s so easy to screw up your brand, and if you’re the only one helping yourself (or hurting yourself) – it can be tricky to know what to do.

If you can’t afford to have people on staff to help you with social media, just be careful. Double-check your work, be quick to admit your mistake, and even quicker to fix it. And for god’s sake, don’t go around calling your customers douchebags!

(ps – they’re the five most important things you can learn about business)

I remember back in the day, I gave my “first” girlfriend Kathy a ring pop to ask her out. We were in 1st or 2nd grade. It totally worked. One problem – I had no idea what to do with a girlfriend once I had one. I just knew that it was an important social mandate since my friend Drew picked up his own girlfriend, Laura.

Later that week, I gave Kathy a bunny stuffed animal (because she reminded me of a bunny – big ears, small nose). She promptly broke up with me, whereupon I enacted my own form of “The Bachelor” and asked out and was rejected by every single girl in my Kindergarten class, one by one, right after the other – all on the same day.

Fast forward a few years to college, when my then-girlfriend broke up with me because I gave her a stuffed duck. Duck Drama, she called it – wherein my giving her a stuffed duck signalled some sort of overcommitment on my part.

You’d think I’d have developed an aversion to stuffed animals by now, but in truth – I thrive on random human decisions.

All my life, I’ve been a “social tinkerer”. I enjoy knowing how and why a social situation goes well or poorly, and since that day back in 1st grade, I’ve analyzed every single social interaction for clues as to why it went the way it went. I even went out of my way for an entire year to make every interaction an awkward one – just to learn how to diffuse an awkward situation and angry people.

The Bachelor provides a huge, shallow window into other people’s interactions – like people-watching at the mall on steroids. This season’s Bachelor is particularly interesting because most of the things we’re learning about Ben and his Bachelorettes can be applied to business.

Go Big Like Courtney

Fans of the Bachelor will cringe when I say that, but Courtney has so far:

• Shown Ben the goods on multiple occasions – including skinny dipping!,
• Gotten married to Ben in a mock wedding during Ben’s visit to her hometown,
• Alienated almost every girl into hating her, leaving them so distracted that she can focus just on Ben,
• Gotten Ben to profess his love -first-

Care Like Kacie B

Everybody knows a girl with a heart as big as Kacie is gonna get her heart broken over and over and over again until she finds somebody worth her time and effort. She’s the mom and pop store you desperately want to see survive the recession – and not out of pity, but pure, unadulterated admiration of how much she cares.

Kacie is so passionate about what she’s doing that she gets lost in the moment. In most situations, it’s a beautiful thing – except that she didn’t strategize. Kacie was so caught up in having Ben there that she forgot her family might not have been behind her. And they weren’t.

Ben didn’t get her father’s permission to propose. Her mother didn’t want her to move away. Kacie’s own nature made others protective of her – even when she wanted to change on her own right, she was held back by people who thought they knew better.

Think about that – she wanted to change, but her fans wanted more of the status quo. Oh snap!

It’s OK to care like Kacie – about your work, about your clients, about your projects, and customer service. It’s OK to be Zappos. But be willing to assert your independence when you see resistance – when Kacie’s dad objected, she didn’t have the necessary conversation with Ben to stay in the game. She didn’t tell him that she’d have done whatever it took to keep him – and she ended up losing him.

Kacie’s lesson: Care – immensely, but be strong enough that you can take care of yourself.

Call It Like You See It Like Emily

Emily made what most would consider a fatal flaw – she told Ben about Courtney’s vindictive side while on a one-on-one date. Instead of going, you know, skinny dipping or making out with Ben or something.

Emily’s honest intent was incorrectly shunned by Ben – when someone tries to help you, you should listen. While Emily’s straight-out honesty should have endeared her to Ben, he was threatened by it instead. It ultimately cost her Ben, but she did the right thing.

Emily’s lesson: Your customer will not always want to hear the truth; be prepared to lose a few folks when what you say doesn’t jive with the “truth” as they know it.

Know Who You Are Like Jamie

Jamie was an interesting case. She’s shyer than most and having refrained from kissing Ben at all after several dates, knew she wasn’t meeting Ben’s “man-needs”. She decided on rose ceremony night (the night Ben picks which girls get to stay and which get the ax) that it was time to spice things up.

What ensued was the most awkwardly endearing makeout scene in televised history.

Jamie full-on straddled Ben and proceeded to give him a minutes-long instruction manual in how to hit that. And it was awkward. But it was also awesome and sweet.

Even so, nobody likes to be told they’re not good at something they think they’re good at. Jamie made Ben feel like he needed a kissing instruction manual – and if you need an instruction manual for step one, step two and three will probably involve a sherpa and GPS coordinates.

Jamie’s lesson: If something that should be stupid simple – like kissing you or paying you – is harder than it ought to be from the customer’s perspective,  you’re hosed.

Be Unapologetically Decisive Like Ben

Ben has repeatedly sent girls home before the end of the night. He’s sent home girls who he had the slightest doubt about, which makes some of us wonder why Courtney is still around. He’s said no -twice- to bringing back girls who he had feelings for.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m one of the final two Bachelorettes, I’m feeling pretty good that I really am Ben’s choice. He’s never hesitated to act on his intuition on who should be there and who shouldn’t.

Ben makes a decision and goes for it – then lives with the consequences.

Ben’s lesson: As a business owner, if you aren’t decisive in the face of amazing alternative choices, if you can’t stand behind your decisions and the consequences they bring – you might as well go home.

So there you have it – five lessons in running your business (that also happen to be the most important business lessons I know).

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By the way, this post is part of the monthly Word Carnival series! What’s a Word Carnival? Check out our Word Carnivals site for more on the fabulously awesome Carnies bringing you small-business magic on the digital fairgrounds today!

Meet Moriah. Geek. Comic book artist. Derby girl. She’s in red, in the middle above.

Here in Fort Collins, we have our very own Roller Derby league, FoCo Girls Gone Derby. Girls form all walks of life come out to play and the community knows their Derby names by heart – Moriah’s is The Original Skankster.

In the game and beyond, they add a lot of value to our community. Every 3 months FoCo Girls Gone Derby picks a different charity and gives a portion of their bout sales to them. In Moriah’s words, “It’s just something we do to provide more support for our community.”

Tonight (Monday) at 7PM, you can come out to Rollerland Skate Center and support their Skate-A-Thon by sponsoring your favorite derby girl.

I didn’t know they did so much, so I interviewed Moriah about her thoughts on community. Below is our interview:

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Nick: What can local charities do to connect more with their local community?

Moriah: It’s definitely hard right now because so many businesses are hurting, but Foco Girls Gone Derby is a little bit different than other non-profits because we can offer advertising in exchange for donations/sponsorship. I think local charities can connect more with their community by being more present. So many charities go unnoticed because their main focus is on what they provide for the community (which is good), but they need to spend so much time making sure people know they exist. I think local charities should spend a lot of time getting their name out there. People don’t give money to charities because they don’t know they’re out there, and therefore don’t matter enough to get money. It’s hard to say what each specific charity should do, but if you think you’ve marketed enough; you haven’t.

(Post-interview aside from Nick: social media for charities is a start, but connections create so much more leverage – Moriah is on-point here.)

Nick: How can you incentivize charitable individuals to make connections between local groups and local charities?

Moriah: The more information you have the better, so I think collecting some demographics from your supporters is very important. Find out where they eat out, where they shop, and what they believe in. If you know what they are passionate about, then you can team up with other charities in order to capitalize on donations.

Nick: How do you associate your local group with a charity without “charitywashing”?

Moriah: In terms of roller derby we feel like we don’t charitywash because we have an actual fan base, offer an actual service (or product if you will), and we are a non-profit. Everything we make gets put back into the league to make it better; no one makes a salary or pockets anything. We sponsor a local charity every quarter because we want to be involved in the community. We do this by being sponsored by businesses and advertising, but we also want to support our charities by giving them a portion of all of our proceeds.

(Post-interview aside from Nick: honest intent is a very powerful connecting tool. These derby girls have it in spades.)

Nick: Is there a special connection for you with the Boys and Girls Club?

Moriah: There’s no “special” connection. We’ve sponsored the bike co-op, the battered women’s shelter (which is something personal to all of us) but we pick charities that have a significant influence in the community.

Nick: What can people do to support you and donate?

Moriah: Come to our bouts! We love donations but we love fans for life way better. Come to our bouts, buy something from the bake sale, maybe buy a button, and bring your awesome energy! People can sponsor me for the Skate-A-Thon by coming tomorrow to Rollerland Skate Center at 6:45pm and asking for The Original Skankster. Admission is $3 and even if they don’t want to donate we would love it if they came.

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Lots of great ideas for charities or businesses wanting to connect more with their community, and it all starts with associations.

Good luck to The Original Skankster and all the FoCo Girls Gone Derby girls tonight!

This is a tale of woe – a long one. More accurately, it’s a tale of WHOAOMGWTF. And it’s one of the reasons I’m no longer officially providing website development services.

I’m sharing it now because I want it to serve as a learning experience.

Back in April 2011, I was contracted to build two websites for a client. It was one of the first few contracts I’d landed after making the decision to trek out on my own on Christmas Day, 2010. After being under the wing of a single client for so long, it was good to have my choice of work.

I’d guessed the creation of two websites – one pretty easy, one deceptively complex – would take about 20 hours of my time. Normally, I’d bill that out at $75/hr – or $1,500. Keep in mind, I was just back on the beat as a web designer – so, as many of you can guess, I severely underbid the project. I offered the project for $1,250, a discount to an hourly rate of $62.50 for 20 hours. Here’s the kicker – I did this because, and I told the client this as well – I thought it would be a fun project to try. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it, but my contract indicated he’d have the choice to accept any budget increases or not.

Keep that project rate of $1,250 in your mind for later. There’ll be a test.

I realized after quite a bit of tinkering, research, trial-and-errors, and trying to build my own code on top of WordPress, that I could not complete the more complex of the two websites. I offered the client a refund or the choice to work with us to get the project developed through a third-party coder. I’d pay the coder the difference from my project fee of $1,250 after I developed the second site. The client chose to keep working.

After meeting with the coder I knew could build it out, I discovered they were already committed to several projects, and ultimately, couldn’t begin to work until November. But, there were things I could do to speed up the process. Again, I informed the client, and asked to start in on the other site. A while went by and the design was finally issued for the other site, which I coded out immediately. Total billable coding time, plus two rounds of revision time, came to 12 hours, or $750 of the budget. I delivered the site and the client seemed to be pleased.

I started in on those things I could do to speed up the project – to compile all the information that the third-party coder would need to develop the site. Getting the full functionality outlined, gathering bits of code, recommendations for what modules to use, lots and lots of research to see what might exist out there to help this project go smoother. In all, I’d spent four hours gathering information to get the site organized. This amount, $250, also came out of the budget.

Last week, I received an email from the client asking if the full $1,500 of development fees were available to put toward the third-party developer’s rate. I was taken aback by the question, considering I’d already delivered one of the two websites in the contract. I hadn’t noticed the mistakenly inflated project budget (the client had paid $1,250 for the project).

I outlined the budget, how it’d been used so far – all in line with what the contract stated. By my math, if the contract was $1,500 (whoops) and $750 had been put to use to develop one of the two websites and $250 had been used toward the second - we had $500 left for the developer to work with.

The client was outraged the full project budget didn’t remain. The client demanded an immediate refund of their $500.

I gladly complied – it was my mistake. I didn’t charge my cancellation fee I’d built into the project. I didn’t charge for my unbilled time at the start of the project, the time invested before I figured out I couldn’t do the second site. I just issued the refund because I felt it was the right thing to do.

In my mind, I’d underbid the project. It had drug on for months because I’d chosen a busy developer to continue the work – in my opinion, the only one who could complete the project as requested and for a reasonable budget. And, apparently, I’d been so eager to take on the project, that I hadn’t fully explained the contract to the client – that it did in fact, cover both sites we’d talked about at our meeting. That my work was valuable and that my time cost money – and when I was working, it would come from the project budget. That they’d be paying $1,250 total and that it wouldn’t turn into $1,500 total down the line when they wanted to see what was left for the developer. Those things, I guess, weren’t explained… even though I remember explaining those things (except for the last one, because it’s just absurd).

I’m not sure how the client became so… confused… but in any case, I was doing the right thing by issuing the $500 refund.

Can you see the problem here? Let me outline the math: a $1,250 contract, minus $1,000 in work leaves… $500? Whoops.

Fast forward to the end of the story – the client, despite numerous requests to return the overage, has opted to keep the extra $250. Because they felt like it would teach me a lesson. Despite my explanation of the mistake. Despite being shown a manifest of how the budget was used. Despite the contract being explained. The client, indignant, decided they were OK with being a thief – exploiting an honest mistake by someone trying to do the right thing.

Did I screw up? Sure. Lots of times. Does that give the client the right to become a thief? Well… Do you know that $250 can pay for 50 kids to have memberships at the Boys and Girls Club for a year? Or pay for 1,000 meals for local families at the food bank?

So you might wonder what my lesson is here. Am I about to tell you to not try? To, you know, stop being ethical because apparently most folks don’t give two shakes about your morals, doing the right thing, or being honest?

Nah.

It’s hard to be ethical when it seems like unethical behavior is rewarded more often. Just remember, being unethical pays off immediately – but the rewards dwindle just as fast. Those unethical kinds of folks damage their community – and there’s lots of them. Every freelancer I’ve ever met has a list as long as their arm of clients who owe them money, undercut them on a project, or behaved unethically.

I could have been unethical, too. I mean, I own the hosting that the client’s domain is pointed to. I hear the Tijuana Donkey Show has a website now. It would be really easy to redirect the client’s site to that less than reputable website until they returned the $250.

But I didn’t. And I won’t. I just put up a simple “under maintenance” sign instead, at their request.

I have a long list of clients whose projects I did my very best on, folks who speak well of me. Each time, I bent over backwards to make them happy, just as I tried to do in this case. I just bent a little too far. My friends that I do business with – the very, very good business people I’m pleased to count as mentors and friends – they have similar experiences.

One oddball, dishonest client out of a bunch of awesome clients is pretty small fry. I doubt folks who act unethically – even occasionally – are aware of that kind of peace of mind. It doesn’t come from redirecting bad clients’ websites to bestiality blogs.

Doing the right thing is usually a bitch – and sometimes it bites you, but it’s still worth doing. The effort proves you care. Being ethical pays off slowly – in that you grow the community for your efforts. That’s when being truly ethical pays off – because the community values your input.

The gray area exists for a reason; everybody thinks they’re in the right, even if they’re not. The only real question is – how much does your community value your input?

(Header photo: Community)

About April of 2011, I was putting together my first TEDx conference.

Organizing your first TEDx conference is one of the most stressful (and rewarding) things a human being can do, I suspect. Because it was the first one in our area (Northern Colorado), we didn’t have a lot of clout. Or a lot of guaranteed funding, either.

So I had to ask for favors.

If you know me, you know how much I hate asking for favors. I think if you’re doing work, you should get paid that work’s worth and not a cent less.

That being said, barter can be a good idea when you know you need help and you won’t waste the other person’s time. Or when you can offer a trade equal to or greater than the favor. When you’re asking for a favor, understand exactly the value that the other person is being asked to provide – and respect that. You might not agree with their value, but if this person is willing to help you – don’t argue.

Back to TEDxFoCo, I asked two videographers for their help. The first one turned us down outright. The second one… didn’t. In fact, they filmed the event, produced it, and delivered videos in the right format.

Videographer #2 was pure awesome. And now that I’m planning the next TEDxFoCo, I’m keeping them in mind for paid work. With a decent budget, I can pay them what they’re worth. This videographer also gets mentioned every time one of my clients needs video work.

The other videographer? I don’t actively campaign against ‘em – because I get it. The drive against doing free work for any reason is huge. Maybe it wasn’t a good time to ask. Still, this person is not my first choice for paid videowork. I can’t promote them to friends, clients, whatever – because I couldn’t count on ‘em when the cards were down.

When you’re being asked to barter, do work pro-bono, or donate time of any kind – always temper that instinct to say no against who’s asking you and what the opportunity is. Unless they’re a complete slouch or dirtbag, if someone’s asking you a favor – their butt is probably on the line.

Just don’t get overbooked.

(Header photo: Trading by Eddy Van 3000)

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This post is part of the January Word Carnival — a monthly group blogging event specifically for small business owners. (It’s the most fun you’ll have all month!) Check out the rest of the fabulous carney work here. And don’t forget to join us for our Twitter Chat on Thursday (Jan 26) at noon (Pacific). We’ll be tweeting up a storm under the #WordCarnival hashtag.