Gerard Boucher

Category: Business

  • Why we should welcome debate when working in teams

    Conventional wisdom says working in teams sucks. It doesn’t have to. Recent team experiences have taught me that teamwork can be quite beneficial – for the betterment of individual team members and their organization. The problem is that most teams and their leadership ignore what should be essential ground rules for all teams.

    Following these simple ground rules when working in teams allows you to have a healthy and productive debate, while avoiding tense, damaging relationships, and hindering the success of the team’s mission or project.

    Deal with conflict – in the open.

    Nothing hurts the short and long-term successes of teamwork like hidden, simmering conflict. I find it’s best to bring conflict out into the open, put it on the table, and try to resolve it with input from all team members. Hidden conflict leads to mistrust, and withholding of multiple opinions. It’s toxic.

    You must avoid groupthink.

    The easy way out, groupthink kills individual, innovative ideas in favor of what everyone is comfortable with. Being that teamwork should bring out new, creative ideas, groupthink must be avoided at all costs.

    Building trust

    Team members should trust each other – completely. Only then will they be able to tune out the rest of the world and focus on what’s important: the team’s mission and project. Trust helps team members work together calmly, while enjoying their team experience. Imagine that.

    Lead by example

    One of the most essential ground rules: as team leader, you must set a good example. That means a focused, results-oriented team environment. Produce exceptional work, and expect it from others. Team members will follow your lead.

    Learn from conflict

    See conflict as a learning experience. Learn from your mistakes – or those of other team members. Most importantly, don’t repeat mistakes which initially led to conflict. Conflict is inevitable, and cannot always be avoided. The best thing to do is avoid a repeat of the same old tension.

    Don’t get personal – ever

    Avoid holding a grudge against other team members. It will just make your life miserable – and put your team’s mission into jeopardy. Refer to Rule #1 -bring conflict into the open. Look at conflict through a team and project-oriented lens. Instead of worrying about one person, figure out ways to fix a given problem.

     

  • Becoming Lean

    New York City is an expensive city to start and operate a small business. My digital agency Boucher + Co. was recently reminded of this fact, after having pursued our first expansion this past June.

    We spent the better part of June searching for new, larger office space, and hiring approximately ten part and full-time team members. All sounded great – until it came time to pay for everything. Talk about sticker stock. Our overhead alone – through rent and personnel – more than tripled. Then came the headaches, second thoughts, and lots of stress.

    For the first time in a while, I didn’t love what I did every day. Our agency was in over our head – and something had to change. I decided to spend the weekend at the beach and evaluate things. That was the best decision I made in a while.

    The solution to our growing pains was simple: grow a leaner agency. One with less overhead. By the beginning of August, we had expanded our offices without greatly increasing our rent (a difficult, but possible feat in NYC), and changed our team structure once again to accommodate our employees and budget.

    Small businesses must watch their cash flow religiously. Failure to do so usually means a death sentence for the business sometime within 3-10 months. Overhead cannot consume a majority of a company’s funds. Funds must be available to make business purchases, meet payroll, or acquire vendors or partner companies. Growing a lean company ensures that it is strong, adaptive, and responsive without being expensive. Simply operating a business should not be a costly and stressful process.

    Boucher + Co. became lean, and that made all the difference in the world.

  • Should you buy a monetized website for extra income?

    When people think about ways they can make money on the Internet, they usually think of online advertising, product sales, or affiliate programs. Rarely do they think of purchasing or acquiring an already-existent website as a means of generating extra income. But purchasing a monetized website is a smart and safe option for many would-be small business owners.

    Why not online advertising?

    Online advertising is a good way to make some extra money online – but at a significant cost. It takes a really long time to see revenue rolling in. First, a website must be established and made credible before advertisers are willing to pay for ad placement. Additionally, most advertising programs offer relatively low payout rates – not enough to generate significant income.

    Why not product sales?

    A good salesperson can generate plenty of sales (and consequently, plenty of income). But you have to be a great salesperson with extensive knowledge in your particular industry or field in order to make significant money through product sales.

    Buying an existing website solves both the problems of time and expertise

    When purchasing a monetized website, there is no need to wait a long time until you see income generated from the site. This is particularly useful for those who want to use the purchase to generate extra, recurring income to supplement current income. This is in stark contrast to most advertising initiatives.

    Small business owners who purchase a monetized website may find that they can operate – and even grow – the website without much of any experience in the site’s associated field or industry. Usually, financially-successful websites are associated with robust and productive staff who handle much of the technicalities of operating such a site. That means almost anybody can buy – and continue operating – an already-monetized website.

    What should you be cautious about when buying a monetized website?

    When purchasing an already-monetized website for extra income, you should ask yourself several questions in order to become more comfortable with the purchase, and make the purchasing process bearable.

    First, can you truly commit to the venture you are about to undertake? Operating a website does cost time and money, and you should be aware of the specific requirements for doing so on a case-by-case basis.

    Next, you must be ready to financially commit to the site’s purchase. Some websites cost thousands of dollars, while others cost millions. Do you have the initial capital needed to sustain the website and its operations for at least six months? This is perhaps the most important question to ask yourself.

    Finally, once you’ve purchased a particular website, you have to devise a strategy that will help the website grow and prosper in the long-run. You have to make the site’s particular business model work well. This can sometimes be easier said – and planned – than executed.

    So, what’s the verdict – worth it or not?

    Buying a monetized website is definitely worth the investment – the financial and time cost(s) of the purchase will reward you with potentially significant income for years to come if you carefully executive a site’s operations and marketing plans.

  • 3 tips for being a better marketer and closing more deals (hint: be a salesperson, too!)

    In the new economy, marketers frequently double as salespeople. After all, they have to. Marketers without sales experience miss out on an opportunity to channel a brand or product’s message directly to the client or customer. This is true of the team at my digital agency – every team member must be competent in sales, and if they aren’t, we provide comprehensive sales training to them. Educated and empowered talent is the best investment we can make.

    Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand, and it’s important to possess both skills when looking to get your brand out there and attract new clients or customers. But mastering sales can be confusing. Not sure where to start? Read these three tips for being a better marketer and closing the deal every time.

    1. Know what your client wants – every time.

    Sit back and ask yourself what any one of your clients want to accomplish using your skills. Could you come up with one sentence that truly describes their goals, aspirations, and long-term objectives? Chances are you can’t. After all, clients are sometimes overly enigmatic and lack a clear vision.

    How will you ever get to know your client, then? The key is for you to define what your client wants to accomplish for themselves. It’s up to you to ask the tough questions, get several answers, and work with your client to narrow down these various objectives into one, long-term goal. Define for them what they can’t define themselves. Your help will be highly valued and you’ll be viewed as an asset to their business.

    2. Skip the lingo, jargon, and other BS. Tell them how you’ll make things easier and more productive.

    I mention the importance of reducing web bounce rates and draw a blank stare from my client. Talk in simple terms to avoid making your clients think too much, or worse, confusing them.

    It may seem cool to talk in technical or specialized terms, but technicality confuses most people and turns off clients. It also opens opportunities for clients to ask plenty of questions, worry too much, and derail a deal.

    Talk and write for the average person, not for your industry. Avoiding overly used technical jargon, lingo, and other tried terms greatly helps the chances of a successful deal.

    Jargon is great – for those who have hours a day to research all those confusingly different terms.

    3. Be flexible and offer a true deal. There’s no such answer as no deal.

    Absolutism won’t close any deals. Not now, not never. You must be ready and willing to compromise and be flexible on key elements of your proposal. The best place is to start is with an enticing offer.

    Think of something you can offer clients to build confidence, save time and money, and give them long-term certainty. Business hates uncertainty – it’s a fact. Sometimes a great deal is the difference between a successful or failed deal.

  • A new approach to combating email overload in 2013

    I recently did some research on how much time was wasted going through our emails every day. Turns out that email is, in fact, suspect to us losing upwards of 8 hours of otherwise productive time per month. That’s a problem – not least because over time, we are embracing and consuming more data, and consequentially, more email. We have to start finding solutions to our email overload somewhere.

    Enter 2013. A new year, and a new opportunity to adopt a manageable email strategy for the foreseeable future. I believe, like many, that the email overload challenges we face today are complex problems resulting from a decade of rapid increase in information access. As a greater amount of “interesting and engaging” content becomes available, we seize the opportunity to read and archive all of it, often at a cost to our overall daily productivity. There will need to be broader solutions to the problem that will only be solved by advances in artificial intelligence and software. In the meantime, I’ve begun taking some common sense steps to reduce email overload and increase my overall productivity.

    Deleting unnecessary emails

    Taking the most obvious step towards reducing email overload, I began deleting any emails that weren’t considered necessary for the growth and survival of my business and professional brand. These included daily digests from websites, non-critical notification emails, and recommended content emails, among others.

    Some notes: critical notification emails should remain – they’re important. Don’t worry about missing out on useful content from your favorite websites – instead of relying on an email digest, bookmark the site and browse it periodically for content. Recommended content is great, but you feel obligated to view it immediately – that distracts you.

    Pass the relevancy test: are old emails still important?

    I had emails in my inbox from last November. Emails sent then by brands, advertising or otherwise, should immediately be deleted – they’re no longer relevant, and distracting. Daily digests, newsletters, and recommended content emails that are more than a month old are irrelevant, too. I deleted, and watched in awe, as dozens of unnecessary emails that once seemed urgent disappeared from my inbox.

    Old conversations – are they necessary?

    As I browsed through my inbox, I came across a handful of conversations between my team and people or companies we no longer communicated with. That list included clients, prospects, vendors, and acquaintances of the past. It made perfect sense to delete most of those emails, as they were no longer relevant to the big picture: growing my business or professional brand. Worried that you won’t be able to reach them in the future? Don’t be – if there’s anything important to be said, they’ll reach out to you first. Instead, relax and enjoy the fact that your overcrowded inbox continues to shrink in size.

    Of course, there were some older emails that deserved to be part of my inbox – receipts, login/user information, and vital correspondence that affects the client-agency relationship are all important emails that shouldn’t be deleted. But you’ll find that the vast majority of older emails are no longer necessary.

    Important conversations that got ignored

    It happens to everyone – sometimes, important conversations that should have been answered fell through the cracks and went ignored. Have they been sitting in your inbox for six months collecting dust? Time to delete them, as they’re not considered so important anymore.

    Don’t spend hours beating yourself up over a missed opportunity for a timely response. Regularly practicing the email management tips highlighting throughout this blog post will decrease the chances that important emails are ignored in the future.

    You don’t have to keep all correspondence

    I had email correspondence between clients, vendors, friends, and others from almost three years ago in my inbox. It’s time to delete non-necessary correspondence, and make room in your inbox. As a general rule, if emails were exchanged more than a year ago, it’s okay to delete the correspondence. Some exceptions include important legal and compliance correspondence, or information that is critical to the client-agency relationship.

  • Blogging 101: Starting a Blog Takes Hard Work & Dedication

    There are tens of thousands of blogs on today’s Internet. So, doesn’t that mean it’s REALLY easy to start a blog and make it successful? In short: nope, far from it.

    Starting a blog requires a lot of time, dedication, and hard work. Most blogs fail simply because of a lack of dedication by the founder/blogger.

    Staying the course – why consistency is the key to gaining visibility and bringing traffic

    Most blogs fail because the owner becomes discouraged. Discouragement is usually the result of stagnant – or sometimes non-existent – website traffic. As many business owners know, website traffic does not appear magically. It is built up over time, often through hard work and perseverance. Over time, good website management practices and effective marketing ensure that a particular website is found and receives regular traffic.

    The same principles of hard work and perseverance apply to blogs. A blog that is under six to eight months old will likely not see much traffic without a substantive marketing effort. And because blogs are not very profitable in their infancy, bloggers do not usually dedicate a lot of time to blogging. This is a recipe for disaster, as blogs become visible and well-known as bloggers consistently keep their blog active and fresh.

    The bottom-line: don’t give up. Stay the course. KEEP POSTING REGULARLY! If you don’t see lots of traffic (“results”) immediately, that doesn’t necessarily prove you’re doing something wrong. Give it time, be patient, and evaluate your progress monthly. Don’t stop posting regularly – at least two blog posts a week.

    Timing is everything – the number of blog posts made matters big-time

    Look, it’s tempting to be lazy and make one blog post a week. “Well, at least my blog is not dead like some blogs!” the saying goes. Guess what? To many visitors, it is dead. People want several blog posts  a week, and anything less annoys them. I conducted a survey of a random sample of “plugged-in” New Yorkers last month, and found that 78% of them will ignore blogs that appear abandoned. That’s a lot of people – and it should be a wake-up call to webmasters and bloggers alike. MAKE MORE POSTS.

    We all feel lazy at one point or another, but we must get up and aggressively overcome our laziness. Failure to do so may mean we are writing off a large portion of potential website visitors who are discouraged by the lack of blog posts made. Do yourself – and your visitors – a favor by blogging at least twice a week.

    Blogging 101 is a series of blog posts that highlights the best practices for bloggers, webmasters, and marketers alike when starting or managing a blog.

  • Building a Leaner Company – Sometimes Less Really IS More

    More is better – right? Wrong.

    In today’s hyperactive consumption economy, its easy to believe that. After all, we are bombarded with ads for nearly everything. Not too long ago, I was a adamant follower of the more is better doctrine. I wanted to try everything. From a consumer standpoint, this was never necessarily a bad thing. The problem, however, was that this doctrine didn’t stop at consumerism. It was brought to the workplace.

    The idea that more is better is dangerous in the workplace. Late last year, my digital agency Boucher + Co., was preparing to move to a new office space in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. This was an exciting time for us, and we sought to expand the company in many ways simultaneously. At first glance, this did not seem like much more than daunting problem. We had the cash flow, the manpower, and the space to complete our company to-do list. We were good to go.

    Shortly after we moved into our new offices and were settled in, several team members pitched me the idea of hiring extra staff to handle what would surely be a new influx of business. All those new clients would need better servicing, they argued. I liked the idea, so we hired. Then we hired some more. Soon enough, we filled up almost every desk in our office.

    Things went well – for a week or so. After that, our entire team was overcome with too much stress. Instead of performing their stated functions, new hires tried to involve themselves with radically different tasks and overly engage other team members. This was distracting for existing team members and caused us to veer from our original mission – providing really good marketing services. I was distracted from my task of growing the company. Though we strive for a team culture each day, there is a line that should not be crossed when delegating team member functions.

    I wound up making a tough decision – to downsize the very team we had just expanded. I truly believed in our original team to deliver our mission in a timely and effective manner. And I believed that when pushed enough, compensated enough, and when under pressure, our team would deliver. They did. After downsizing our team, we expanded our output and wound up doing less with more.

    The decision to downsize our team – and “trim” the excess staff from our agency was a tough one. I took a lot of criticism from within my own team. But in the end, we downsized for the long-term. We’d rather be a (very) sustainable agency that delivers great marketing services for years to come, rather than a bigger one that loses out on its main goal.

    Sometimes, less really IS more. And sometimes, it makes all the difference.

  • Knowing When & How to Part Ways with Bad Clients

    Knowing When & How to Part Ways with Bad Clients

    Clients are the basis of all business operations – and in many cases, business success. Without a client base, businesses cannot survive. For this reason, business owners often seem completely consumed by our clients. They call, we answer. They invite, we come. Sometimes, without thought, we drop everything for our clients.

    But not all clients are created equal. They are human, too. And humans are sometimes irrational or overly demanding. As a business owner, I’ve been in situations where clients have asked too much of us and made irrational demands. At first, I responded by fulfilling every client need. My clients were happy. Then, they asked for more. And more. Soon, I was in over my head. Worst of all, I wasn’t getting compensated in return. I was taking phone calls on Sunday at midnight, but my retainer was non-existent. Something had to be done – but what? I was torn between sacrificing my income and peace of mind.

    Time to part ways with the bad ones

    Eventually, I realized there were good and bad clients, and it was time to rid of the bad ones. Clients who regularly stressed me out to unhealthy levels were bad clients. Simple as that. Clients who made me not want to go to work each morning were bad clients. Clients who didn’t believe in fair compensation for good results were bad clients.

    I compiled a list of my bad clients, and began parting ways. As expected, no client put up a fight. After all, there were plenty of other marketing agencies for them to choose from. Naturally, some within my marketing agency thought this to be business suicide. But I strongly believe it was the right thing to do. Bad clients are not worth your time. They waste your time, money, and other resources. Your time and money are better spent on those who actually care about you – and the positive results you can deliver.

    Some clients from hell

    It wasn’t difficult to find some recent client horror stories to talk about. Let’s start with the catering professional who had unrealistic expectations for their organization’s growth. They barely paid me each month, yet expected full marketing services. I am a strong believer that you have to spend money to make money. And marketing was a good investment for this client, who barely had a customer following. The client ignored the fact that good marketing results cost money, and as such, did not value their investment. Eventually, I parted ways with the client, and had no second thoughts.

    Another – an e-commerce boutique with no customer following – is another example of a bad client. The boutique lacked a customer base, yet did not want to pay for marketing services. I had initially designed a full e-commerce website – worth well over $5,000 – for a fraction of the cost because I believed in the boutique’s business plan. My time, they argued, was enough to grow their business. I disagreed and refused to provide marketing services for free. Shortly after, the client asked me for a refund for their website. It was clear they didn’t understand the value of their website investment. They were impossible. I told them I didn’t want to work together anymore.

    How to part ways without burning bridges

    Clients are generally angry when you decide to part ways with them. They see it as simply “dumping” them. An easy fix for this is to offer up alternate professionals or agencies for the client to work with in the future. Give them several options, explain why they are a better fit, and move on. If needed, even schedule a meeting between your replacement and the client. At the end of the day, you’ll be perceived as caring about your (now former) clients’ needs.