Category Archives: Business stuff

Darren: Welcome to Gogo. My name is Darren.

 Scott Sambucci: Hi Darren

Darren: Hi Scott. Sorry to hear you are having some issues with the service today. I would be happy to assist you with this.

Scott Sambucci: Thanks.

Darren: What content have you attempted to access?

 Scott Sambucci: gmail mostly.

 Scott Sambucci: also Quora.com and southwest.com

Darren: I’m sorry the service is not working as well as you’d like it. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to send you a free session code for your next flight. Would you like that emailed or provided now in the chat?

Scott Sambucci: email would be great thanks.

 Scott Sambucci: I’ll tell you this from a customer perspective…

 Scott Sambucci: while the free pass is nice, I don’t care about the money. It’s the lost productivity. I depend on the Internet to work for these cross-country flights so I can get work accomplished

 Scott Sambucci: I drive from Sacramento to SFO specifically to fly Virgin b/c its a direct flight with Internet.

 Scott Sambucci: That’s instead of taking a direct flight from Sac to DC on United or JetBlue

 Scott Sambucci: If you advertise high-speed and charge $26, it needs to be highspeed. Heck – I’d pay $100 if it was highspeed b/c my time is worth more than that.

 Scott Sambucci: Just my two cents. Thanks for listening, and thanks for the code

 Communication with the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Chat service has been lost.  Please wait while attempts are made to restore the connection.

 Disconnection in 240 seconds.

Lots of travel and developing new work patterns in the past couple of weeks. Two days in Seattle, two days in Portland, two days in LA, back-and-forth to San Francisco to rock-and-roll with our big, important advisory client (which is going along swimmingly at the moment. :-). The disjointedness took me out of my preferred pattern of early rising then sitting at the kitchen table to read and write. I’ve worked in blog posts from hotel rooms and shared workspaces. All well and good, and this morning I was giddy to wake up at home and jam on a new book.

I bought a copy of Tina Seelig’s “InGenius: A Crash Course to Creativity.” I saw Tina speak at UC-Davis a couple weeks ago. Very energetic. Lots of great ideas in her book.

Did lots of filming on Wednesday, and more on the slate today. Feeling good and energized going into the next stretch.

I care about two things, and only two things right now:

1. That our advisory client has an excellent experience
2. That we continue our learning march in developing our online course.

We’re doing both, and while the first week seemed to move in discrete steps, last week moved quickly with decisions, time pressure, and deliverables on the edge of tolerance. Airplanes are rated for certain speeds, wind conditions, and weight. The stall speed for a Cessna 152 is 42-48 knots. The weight tolerance is 400-500 lbs. Even these scientifically derived ratings have ranges and conditions may vary. And here I am in a vehicle not yet rated without any scale or testing mechanism trying to figure out what speed, conditions, and tolerances we we have.

I consider last week successful because we marched forward on these two goals. Made significant progress with a potential sales opportunity with our client and I spent a good chunk of time on Sunday focusing on meetings for an upcoming conference to which we’re traveling.

For the course, we got the cameras up and running, talked with support personnel at our course-hosting company, shot some good segments, and made progress on our marketing plan.

And with all of this, there’s still that feeling of being behind. Always behind. A growing to-do list and distractions – website update, taking a day this week for my quarterly executive coaching planning day, developing new ideas, operational tasks. That’s where I’m just focusing on now now and later later. Whatever falls through probably wasn’t that important anyway.

Spent the day in Portland yesterday. Mark Grimes at NedSpace hosted me and filled the room with 60+ people listening to me teach “Build-Measure-Learn Your Sales Process.” Had a great time once I got rolling. Photo here: instagram.com/p/fjLaFTLM3a. Crashed at my sister-in-laws who picked me up from downtown, cooked dinner, had food for breakfast, then arose at 5:30am to take me to the airport. T-bone – you rock!

Flew back to Sacramento in the AM and skipped a pretty big sales conference in San Francisco to knock out some more video. Came back with lots of energy and ideas from the travel and speaking. Very happy to make good progress and starting to hit a flow.

Also happy about the decision to skip the conference because:

1. I chose to worry about me, not the conference
2. I got home and went for a run, paying attention to my body telling me I needed exercise
3. I was able to spend time at home tonight playing with my little boy instead of crawling home at 9pm, only to turn around to catch the 4:45am train back to SF in the AM (which yes, I am doing)

Things are well with our big, important advisory client. Huge day planned in the office there tomorrow, and now focusing ahead to a big, important industry conference less than two weeks away.

Feeling good, feeling tired, feeling challenged, feeling urgency, feeling kind of in control, and feeling happy.

It’s irrelevant now. I’m in the thick of it now, and yesterday I stepped into a pile of video production crap I never expected.

The day started positively, and ended positively, and I mostly kept my cool throughout the rough patch. Robert and I learned that we can work together under stressful conditions like:

1. The room we booked for video filming was too dark. Even with the 3-point lighting kit. Not to mention that we booked the room starting at 9am and no one showed up to open the place until nearly 9:30.
2. Said lighting kit and testing took more than an hour.
3. We audibled and heading over to SARTA, who graciously offered their conference room free of charge. Again.
4. On the way, we stopped to do a 15-minute call with an “expert” on Clarity. He charges $3.33/minute, and was expected to be a sales & marketing expert. We did not get our money’s worth.
5. The new Sony handycams do not come charged (expected) and also do not come with a power cord. (Huh?) You can only charge with the USB, which when connected to one’s laptop, expects that you will be shooting the video directly to said computer instead of the memory card. When you film to the memory card, the USB does not charge. This is by design.
6. If you found #5 confusing, imagine our consternation at 12:45pm after arriving and setting up at our second location for the day, on the only day in two weeks where my schedule allowed for filming.

My wife is awesome. When I finally got home, she was super – told me that everything will be fine. And it will be. Then I was off the coach soccer which really helps recenter my brain. At least there I can see progress and know that I’m helping the players and parents.

I finished the day with a flurry of positive outcomes, so the oft-mentioned roller coaster analogy holds. Started high, hit some bumps, finished high. Got less sleep than I like because I’m on a train to San Francisco for meetings and a very full day (a good thing and a result of my planning and process last week).

And so it goes…

Last week, we turned the ship to a heading. In my weekly summary:

Now we take off the training wheels. Over the past two years, I took a very deliberate strategy to get to this point – a revenue-generating free-standing company that is a full-time endeavor. To get there, we marched up the revenue stack from small consulting engagements (empowerkit, Canogle) to larges one (Blend Labs). We’ve got that proven. Whilst developing that channel deliberately, we’ve taken an emergent strategy to the rest of the business – workshops with various partners (Lean Meetups, PARISOMA, SARTA, Venture Greenhouse, etc), Sales Meetups, recruiting, experimenting with marketing the books, developing the Opp Canvas.

Now it’s time to move back to a deliberate strategy over the next two months to build product and figure out how to scale this sucker. Once we get that rolling, we’ll go back to the remaining ideas, plus new ones I’m sure we’ll think of.

The SQ website + UDemy is our only focus right now. We need to test the scalability of the company sooner than later. The recruiting business and BarCamp need to go on hold.

Funny thing is – the more we focus on just a few things, the longer the to-do list gets. I think this is a good sign that we’re really focusing, not just saying that we are.

As a side note, I’ve now made the transition to a “regular” at the coffee shop – Old Soul in midtown Sacramento. On Mondays, I meet with Robert for our weekly planning session. Been doing this every Monday since July. Last week, Sarge asked me if I was sending out interference signals from my Mac because every time I’m here, his World of Warcraft slows down. He can move his character.

I met Richard this morning. He’s part of a group that huddle around the leather couches and talk about life’s minutiae. Today he held open the door as I entered and told me he works for tips. We joked back and forth about a few things and he asked me my name.

Woke up thinking about marketing so I spent the AM planning marketing for our Udemy course. That went well. Then got in a 5+ mile run to maintain sanity. Second run in as many days and third in four days. Very happy about that.

Filming lots more on Monday and need new cameras for that. Buying a Sony 220 camcorder. BestBuy supposedly had what I needed. So off to Woodland I went. Not so bad – only 15 minutes from home, but ugh… a retail store.

Customer experience is everything. I eventually got what I needed. It’s just that it’s not about the product I bought – it’s about the customer experience.

Quick roll call of #fails:

• Waited for help when I arrived at the camera area – manager had to retrieve someone
• Showing one in stock but I needed two – “we can order it for you” Yeah. So can I. From Amazon. I’m here because I need it today. This is a best-selling camera because of its capabilities at this price.
• They did have the next model available – the Sony 230. The rep didn’t know difference between the 220 and 230. He said – “They’re pretty close.” Yeah, except one is $50 more than the other. How are they different.
• Once we figured out that the Natomas store had the cameras in stock, I asked about 64GB memory cards. The rep wasn’t much help here. As I was Googling the SanDisk on my phone, he seemed a little peeved watching me.
• Once I had that settled, I asked about an adapter cord for the camera to upload directly to an external hard drive. I had the product I needed pulled up on my phone via the Amazon website. None of the three associates knew about the cable adapter. I mentioned – “Maybe Radio Shack will have it” – one rep said “I don’t know” while smiling, suggesting that he wasn’t going to help me shop at another store. The other rep walked away. The last one said – “I thought they closed.” thanks for helping me out after I’ve committed to spending $500 with your store.
• We went to the front desk  to call the Natomas store to make sure they pulled their stock for me. The rep said – “Do we have the number for Natomas or do I have to Google search it? Oh wait, here it is…” on a post it note on the wall between the register and half wall. Jeez – that shows real organization.
• The sale rep passed me off to the customer service rep (I was exchanging  one product for store credit to partially pay for the cameras.) One guy working exchanges. Waiting 10 mins with only one person in front of me. I finally asked another rep – “Can you help me out? I’m ready to spend $500 with you guys and I’ve been here waiting.”
• Turns out the store can only do returns on two registers. Oh. That makes sense. Huh?
• Finally this second customer service rep – Kara – helped me out. She had to call the manager twice for approval of the return and exchange.
• Finally took 30+ minutes from the time I was ready to buy to walk out of the store to get in my car to drive to Natomas, which is 20 minutes away, and now 30 minutes from my house.

At least Kara was nice and finally plowed through the transaction, and at the Natomas store, Phoenix (Sales Operator there) was very helpful in picking up the cameras I needed. She was a champ and apologized for my troubles in Woodland.

I really don’t have time for this post. Focusing efforts on three things – 1) awesome outcome with our consulting engagement, 2) building our Udemy course, 3) website & marketing.

Problem is… beneath the surface of each lies a root system that meanders – all of it important to make the tree grow.

Spent much time, with more to go, writing thank you notes to people I’ve met and who’ve attending recent workshops. I let this go much longer than I’d like, and regardless of how busy I am, this action is something I refuse to give up.