I was whining to Clay Cary about the interest rate the bank was going to charge me to fund a real estate investment. I felt the percentage was way too high.

Clay asked, “Is the deal you’re about to make a good deal? How much money will you make from it?”

I answered his question conservatively. He said, “Now let’s calculate the total amount of interest that you will pay on the loan that makes this deal possible.”

We calculated the dollar amounts.

I was going to make hundreds of times more money on the real estate than I was going to pay in interest on the loan.

Clay said, “As a rule of thumb, if the interest rate you are paying determines whether or not the deal you are making is good or bad, you are definitely making a bad deal. Don’t judge according to percentages. Judge according to dollars.”

Here’s a thought.

Why do banks never get angry about the huge profits that YOU make on deals using THEIR money?

I have never heard a bank say, “We supplied the money, but you are keeping most of the profits. That’s not fair. You should give us more money than we originally agreed upon.”

Banks never say that because banks always remember that YOU found the deal and decided to let THEM make some money on it with you.

Here’s another example of how percentages can be misleading.

Woody Justice had been in business for 6 years when I met him in 1987. His business was circling the drain. Woody’s biggest year had a top line of $350,000. His goal was to someday sell $1,000,000 worth of jewelry in a single year. That would put Woody in the top 10% of jewelers nationwide.

I began working with Woody and we grew more than 100% a year for two years in a row. We blew past the $1,000,000 mark in the second year. About a dozen years later, Woody was grumpy. He said, “We used to grow by big percentages. But last year we only grew by ten percent. You need to get your shit together.”

“Woody, how many dollars did our top line grow last year?”

“We grew by a million dollars,” he said.

“Woody, when we first began working together, a million-dollar jump from $350,000 to $1,350,000 would have been a 286% increase. We would have nearly quadrupled your best year ever and you would have wet your pants. Evaluate yourself by dollar growth, not percentage growth. Percentages will lead you to believe that you are doing better, or worse, than you really are.”

Woody made a face but didn’t say anything, so I continued. “And by the way, we’re running out of people in this Dairy Queen town. If you want to grow by big percentages again, we’re going to need to open another store somewhere else.”

I could say those things to him because we were close friends.

Woody died unexpectedly 14 years ago but I still have his number on my cell phone. I tell myself that if I press that number, Woody will hear his phone ring.

As long as I don’t delete that number from my phone, Woody Justice will never be...

Pain is a signal that something is wrong.

Pain whispers, shouts, and screams, “Pay attention. Be careful. Something is wrong.”

Jean Marzollo wrote a children’s poem in 1948 that romanticized Christopher Columbus. It inspired a generation of children during the Captain Kangaroo years. Her proud poem begins,

“In fourteen hundred ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue”

Bill Bryson wrote an insightful summary of that famous voyage on page 205 of his book, “At Home.”

“Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States.”

We learn the meaning of pain as children, but we train ourselves to ignore it as adults.

Why do we do that?

I’m talking to you about the pain of your Google spend.

Is there a chance that you should pay attention – and be careful – because something is wrong?

Twenty years ago, Google inspired and electrified American business owners with their promise of “holding ad budgets accountable” by making advertising results, “identifiable, measurable, and scalable.”

Business owners romanticized Google by shouting,

“Hooray! Advertising will now become just another mathematical equation! Hooray! Hooray! To double my customer count, all I will have to do is double my ad budget!”

I watched a friend of mine raise his monthly Google budget from $20,000/mo. to $70,000/mo because he was convinced that he would get three-and-a-half times as many leads. When it didn’t work, I asked him to look closely at how many clicks he had purchased and compare that number to the total population of his trade area.

Have you done that math?

I watched another friend of mine elevate her Google budget until she was spending $90,000 a month. Her business was no longer profitable. I asked her to look at how many clicks she had purchased and compare that number to the total population of her trade area.

Have you done that math?

Have you ever raised your Google budget and had Google say to you, “We’re sorry, but it is not possible to spend that much money on your LSA. There simply aren’t enough people each day who are searching for what you sell.”

Do the math.

The past two decades have been the Captain Kangaroo years for millions of business owners.

Bill Bryson wrote that Columbus was, “convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset.”

How many years have you been believing that your big payday from Google was at the edge of every sunset? Have you been saying,

“All we need to do is tweak our plan a little. As soon as we figure out the Google algorithm, we’re going to be rich.”

A business owner from a major American city recently spent a day with me. He had been spending $100,000 on Google ads each month for the past few years because he was convinced that he could not afford mass media in his city.

His budget could easily have made his name a household word by using television or radio. I know the town well. I have had clients there for many years.

His budget would reach more than 2 million...

You want to succeed.

But will you recognize success when it happens?

What will be its indicators? How will you measure it?

Most importantly, how long are you willing to pursue it?

You probably overestimate what you can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what you can accomplish in ten years.

How many years have you been pursuing your dream?

Experience is the name you are allowed give to your mistakes, but only if you have learned from them.

1. Some people have ten years of experience.
2. Most people have one year of experience ten times.

Ninety-nine percent of business owners* will continue to defend their marketing beliefs and management practices even when those beliefs and practices continue to underperform year after year.

These business owners underperform because traditional wisdom often feels like common sense.

The problem with traditional wisdom is that it is usually more tradition than wisdom.

Here’s how that happens:

1. Your goal is lead generation.
2. You create an ad that mixes urgency – a limited-time offer – with a strong value proposition. The features-and-benefits of your limited-time-offer dramatically outweigh the price.
3. Your plan is to upsell the customer after they allow you into their home.

This is called “transactional advertising” because you are advertising a transaction.

Here’s the problem: Transactional ads don’t differentiate you. In fact, they blur you into your category, making you indistinguishable from your competitors.

This is Today’s Traditional Wisdom:

STEP 1: Give Google most of your profits and keep your fingers crossed. Keep a sharp eye on your cost-per-lead, your conversion rate, and your gross profit per sale.

STEP 2: Keep doing this, week after week, month after month.

STEP 3: Once a year, calculate how much your cost-per-sale has increased.

STEP 4: Contact the people in your peer group to see if their experience has been the same as yours.

STEP 5: Yes. Their experience has been the same as yours.

STEP 6: Tell yourself, “Everyone else in our category is experiencing exactly what we have been experiencing. This means that everything is under control.”

STEP 7: Continue to do this. In 9 more years, you will have had one year’s experience 10 times.

Roy H. Williams

PS – A smart person makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise person finds a smart person and learns how to avoid that mistake altogether.

A wise person discovers relational marketing.

*ADDENDUM

We gathered data from 64 reputable sources. It can reasonably be estimated that there are about 117,000 companies in the US that provide HVAC services, 132,000 provide plumbing services, and 252,000 provide electrical services. (117,000 + 132,000 + 252,000 = 501,000)

Let’s assume for the sake of this example that those numbers are elevated. A lot of home service companies offer two or more services.

Let’s further assume that a lot of them are going to be commercial, not residential. So we will reduce the aggregate estimate of 501,000 companies down to just 100,000 companies competing for the opportunity to serve homeowners across America.

Here is the fascinating part: we know for a fact that only 638 of those companies have a top line of $20,000,000 or more each year, and...

The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory.

They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.

This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.

When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.

A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.

A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.

Just now, my muse whispered to me,

“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman’s muse?’”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.

In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,

“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”

Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”

Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:

“Silvano Arieti’s book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti’s vast contributions to the field.”

Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world’s foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.

The other book he wrote was about creativity.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?

Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.

I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Roy H. Williams

Today’s rabbit hole is as wacky as today’s memo. You should check it out. I’m Indy Beagle.

Steven Gaffney’s client list reads like a “Who’s Who of America’s Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week’s amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

The Muses of Greek mythology were nine goddesses associated with the arts, sciences, and memory.

They were the source of inspiration for artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. They were the goddesses of knowledge, embodying the wisdom and creative power found in poetry, songs, and myths.

This is the point: a muse is never an actual woman.

When a man chooses a flesh-and-blood woman to be his muse, she becomes the symbol of something deeper, wiser, and much more mysterious than herself.

A muse is a point of access that puts a man in touch with his feminine side while allowing him to pretend that he does not have a feminine side.

A muse is essentially the Jungian anima, the perfect woman who exists only in the imagination of a man.

Just now, my muse whispered to me,

“The reader will want to ask you, ‘What is a woman’s muse?’”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to ask a woman,” she said.

In his book, The Magic Synthesis, Silvano Arieti writes,

“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”

Arieti believed that perception is not just binary, with logic on the left side and pattern recognition on the right. He believed that our minds can blend rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious to create a third type of perception known as “creativity.”

Psychology Today begins their praise of Arieti with this paragraph:

“Silvano Arieti’s book Interpretation of Schizophrenia was awarded the 1975 U.S. National Book Award in the Science category. More than 40 years later, it remains the most significant contribution to the psychological understanding of schizophrenia since Kraepelin and Bleuler. Contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be wise to review Arieti’s vast contributions to the field.”

Silvano Arieti was born in 1914. When he died in 1981, Arieti was perhaps the world’s foremost authority on schizophrenia. He wrote an award-winning book about it.

The other book he wrote was about creativity.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But I am convinced that creativity is a mild form of schizophrenia. How else would you describe a marvelous blend of rational with irrational, sophisticated with primitive, conscious with subconscious?

Creativity is a wild and spontaneous act employed by artists, thinkers, poets, dancers, musicians, and philosophers. It is that conflicted insanity to which our Muses give us access.

I think that “mild schizophrenia” is the perfect description.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Roy H. Williams

Today’s rabbit hole is as wacky as today’s memo. You should check it out. I’m Indy Beagle.

Steven Gaffney’s client list reads like a “Who’s Who of America’s Best Corporations.” His clients include including Allstate, Amazon, American Express, Best Buy, Booz Allen Hamilton, and BP. And those are just the “A”s and “B”s. Steven Gaffney builds high-achieving teams that set brave goals and then exceed them. In this week’s amazing conversation with roving reporter Rotbart, Steven Gaffney shares big-picture insights and detailed actions that will help any business improve their results over the next 30 days. Get your running shoes on, because the race is about to begin at MondayMorningRadio.com

The greatest companies are the ones with the happiest customers.

To create happy customers, you need to be customer-centric.

Every company believes they are customer-centric. But while a great company keeps the happiness of their customer in the center of their thoughts, the average company puts their customer in the center of the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.

1. Great companies ask, “How can we give our customers the buying experience that they would prefer?” They work at removing the friction from the customer experience.
2. Average companies ask, “How can we get our customers to give us more money, more often?” Average companies tells their marketing teams, “Sales is just a numbers game. Bring us twice as many leads and we’ll make twice as many sales. You bring’em in. We’ll close’em.”

But no matter what those marketing teams do, a decreasing number of people will respond to their ads. A negative customer experience drives customers away faster than marketing can bring them in.

Do you want to see what real customer-centric thinking looks like?

A client of mine recently wrote this email and sent it to all the people who work in his company. He forwarded it to me only as an afterthought.

SUBJECT: Pricing Reflection — Serving the Everyday Working American

Team,

Today I had a realization around some of our pricing. I’m all for setting prices that protect our margins and keep the business strong – but I’m equally committed to making sure we have price point items that the everyday working American can actually afford.

Let’s take a simple example: a toilet. Right now, most of our toilet installs are priced over $1,000. If we assume the median household income is $85,000, divided over 26 pre-tax paychecks, that’s $3,269 per check. A $1,000 toilet install is over 30% of that paycheck. That’s significant.

We need to remember who we’re here to serve – the nurse, the police officer, the office worker, the firefighter. These are people raising families, keeping their homes together, and doing the best they can. We cannot price them out of basic service. If we do, we risk not only losing today’s job – but any future relationship with that customer.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to run a low-margin business.

But I do want to make sure we have real options for real people. Today’s pricing structure on some of these essential services is a barrier – not just to customers, but to our own techs who are trying to present them.

Because of this realization, I immediately asked Jacob to find a toilet that we could install at a price point of $699. Well, guess what – we found one today. And we’re bringing it in and adding it to the price book at $649.

This one change will give our team more confidence to present a basic toilet option. What I’ve heard from Will – and it’s been consistent – is that this has been a never-ending battle. Technicians don’t feel comfortable presenting a $1,000 toilet to customers, especially when many of them wouldn’t pay that themselves. That lack of confidence translates to lower conversions and frustrated customers.

This reminds me of what we went through in HVAC when we had no system options below $15,000. We lost installs constantly – not because we weren’t good, but because we didn’t have a simple, no-frills option for people who just needed heating and air. Once we corrected that, we started closing more jobs and rebuilding our pipeline.

We need to apply that same logic here. During times like this, let’s price effectively so we can keep building our customer base and generate revenue day by day. When the tide turns – and it will – we can always maximize margin percentage where appropriate.

There’s an opportunity here. We can maintain strong...

The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all.

A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.

Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.

Brands are like that.

Two people are now going to tell us about books.

Dear Person Reading This,

A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.

You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.

You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…

Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.

Go look for it.

Neil Gaiman

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22

Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.

Here is the second person.

Dear Reader,

When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl’s school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.

In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book’s heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!

That’s what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she’d looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn’t just offer escape; it offered connection!

All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.

Emily Levine

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52

A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.

Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?

That’s like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.

For us to agree upon “Who was the...

“Around the swimming beagles, bright stars danced on rippling waters like a thousand little fishes of light scurrying in a sea of darkness.

Can there be a more beautiful sight than when sky meets ocean in the black of night?” The lawyer whispered to himself, the beagles, and the sea as the soft blanket of summer wrapped them all in her warm embrace.

Night is a time of reflection. Not of stars in water only, but of times past and times to come. And such a night was this.”

– Beagles of Destinae, chapter 4

Ideas pour into the dark waters of the unconscious mind, sparkling like reflected stars. As above, so below. The natives always said it was so.

But as Gemini sat on the throne of Aquarius, a dragonfish was born. And thus our story begins.

The twins did not mean to unleash a dragonfish, but they had never promised not to, either. And besides, a dragonfish is an adventure.

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea,

and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.

Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,

And brought him strings, and sealing wax, and other fancy stuff.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail,

Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s gigantic tail.

Noble kings and princes would bow whenever they came,

Pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name.

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,

Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.

One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more,

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

“Puff the Magic Dragon” with lyrics by Leonard Lipton and music by Peter Yarrow appears on the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary album, “Moving.” An urban myth soon arose that the song was about drugs. It’s really a backward look at childhood, and all that was left behind.

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart. All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“He saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. When He had stopped speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.'”

– Luke, ch. 5

The book “Peter Pan” was written only after the 1904 play became a huge success.

On opening night, Mrs. Snow spoke to the playwright and author, J.M. Barrie about her late husband…

“And he would so have loved this evening. The pirates, and the Indians; he was really just a boy himself, you know, to the very end. I suppose it’s all the work of the ticking crocodile, isn’t it? Time is chasing after all of us. Isn’t that right?”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old; they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“The secret of The Muppets is they re not very good at what they do. Kermit’s not a great host, Fozzie’s not a good comedian, Miss Piggy’s not a great singer… Like, none of them are actually good at it, but they love it. They’re like a family, and they like putting on the show. And they have joy. And because of the joy, it doesn’t matter that they’re not good at it. That’s what we should all be. Muppets.”

– Brett Goldstein

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust…

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up.”

– Peter