Monthly Archive for July, 2008

When I tell people that I only wear white t-shirts and jeans, most people think I’m kidding, speaking in hyperbole, exaggerating, etc.  Rather, the statement holds true most of the time in the Summer, and all of the time in the cooler months.

Still don’t understand?

Every piece of clothing you see there is Banana Republic.  I’ve tried other clothes, they just don’t fit as well, last as long, or look as good on me.  The dark jeans?  They’re tailored.

What we have here, from left to right:

• 2 pair of older-style boot cut jeans.
• 5 pair of straight leg, dark wash jeans.
• 9 basic crew white t-shirts.
• 4 polo shirts, 3 different kinds. One of the kind, if they still made them, I’d buy 5 of them and be done with it.
• 3 kinds of long-sleeve white shirts.

For shorts, I finally found a pair I like at American Eagle, and bought 4 pair.  I have 12 pair of Puma crew socks, and 8 pair of white Hanes boxer briefs.

Aside from that, I have some “custom clothing” for things like working out, climbing, etc.  I’ll go ahead and put my suits and jackets in the “custom clothing” category…but all that is Banana Republic as well.

WHY???

It’s quite simple, and useful, really:

I used to buy a lot of clothes.  That took up space in my mind, so I freed up that space by getting rid of the clothes.

Since I pretty much only buy clothes from Banana Republic:

• I can ignore any and all other clothing advertising.
• I get deals by intentionally waiting for sales.
• By signing up for their mailing list, I never have to waste space in my head “remembering to look for sales,” they come to me…that’s when I know it’s time to buy clothes.

A Question of Style

Some people argue that dressing like this eliminates style from my wardrobe, holding the position that variety reinforces style.

I disagree.

I believe that this reinforces a different interpretation of style: My interpretation.

I used to buy a lot of clothes.  I was a “clothes horse,” if you will.  I know what looks good, and what doesn’t.  I generally have a more refined sense of style than the average man.

This is why I wear Banana Republic.  Not for the brand name, but because the clothes fit well and look like how I want clothes to look on me.  I’ve tried other brands of jeans, shirts, jackets, suits, etc.  I’ve tried it all.  Banana Republic is what works for me.

Efficiency

Wearing clothes with this kind of strategy is incredibly efficient.  I’ve been doing this, strictly, for over 6 months, and loosely for 2 months leading up to it.  It may not seem like it would free up your mind much, but it does…it’s certainly a few less things to worry about.

I never wake up in the morning, wondering what I’m going to wear.  I put on my clothes, I’m done, and I immediately get to work without going through the psychological waffling that comes with being image conscious…

“It’s dreary today, I’m going to wear gray.”

“It’s sunny out today, I’m going to wear brighter colors.”

If you think that doesn’t happen at some level, start recording the kind of weather each day and the colors that people in your office (men and women) are wearing.  I guarantee you’ll find a correlation.

Plus, this lets me live out of 2 suitcases for a year.  I won’t ever have to worry about my clothes going out of style or me being tired of any of them that may be of a certain style.  If something gets ruined, it’s a minor hiccup – Banana Republic isn’t hard to find and these are some of their classic clothes they’ll be making for quite a while.

Gentleman: You Just Look Good

I may know that I have a decent sense of style.  And I also know that most women have a much better sense of style than I do.

This Esquire survey further reinforces that jeans and a white tshirt does, in fact, look good.

So, I think that’s about it about that.

When I posted to Twitter asking for ideas for how to use AskSunday (look for a post soon of my experiences thus far), Ben Grossman came up with the idea that I should use them to setup a meeting with him.  Immediately, I knew this was going to be a good time.

We ended up meeting today at Andala Coffee House…one of my “offices” around town.

After about 15 minutes of talking and already hitting some great insights about social media, I had to ask him, “How old are you?”

Dude’s only 19 years old and has already done some really impressive work.  Where I tend more toward systematic forms of marketing, he’s more on the creative side of social media…you know…like, talking to people and things.

He told me about a project he did for AOL Instant Messenger that was a completely brilliant breakthrough in getting users to open up about their experiences with an IM utility generally perceived as antiquated.

Here are Ben’s words about what he’s worked on already, and what he’s working on right now:

When AOL challenged McMahon & Tate, a student-run marketing agency from Emerson College, to increase AIM Social Media’s brand favorability, brand awareness, and product usage it was no simple task.  After extensive traditional research, the agency pursued intensive AIM-customized non-traditional research, including creating the creation of www.TalkToRunningMan.com.  They reinvigorated an otherwise dead brand by tapping into heartfelt and reptilian feelings and emotions deep inside AOL’s 18-24 year old target.  With www.TalkToRunningMan.com as the impetus for an integrated campaign, McMahon & Tate proceeded to formulate completely new AIM product development, branding, promotional, interactive tactics.  The campaign won the Regional AAF National Student Advertising Competition and ranked 5th at the Nationals.

I operate under the name of my consultancy: The Plenary Group (www.ThePlenaryGroup.com).  Currently I am specializing in a trifecta of services: Non-traditional Research, Social Media, and Brand Strategy.  I consult with a number of clients in a diverse set of industries (from hot online start-ups to a dog agility equipment retailer) and the services rendered are defined by each client’s specific needs.  One of my favorite parts of consulting is the opportunity to meet and work with a variety of different people and businesses in order to discuss how we can improve their entity together.

He and Marta Kagan (@mzkagan) are presenting at PodCamp Boston 3 this weekend on Sunday from 1:30-2:15.  The presentation is called “Making the Case: What the F**K is Social Media?”  Here is the description of that:

So you’re digging this social media thing. You’ve got thousands of followers, a huge network, and lots of… well… “friends.” The problem is that your clients and colleagues don’t “get it” (or don’t want to), and you’re left trying to explain “What the F**K is Social Media?” In this totally-not-f**king-boring session, you’ll hear compelling statistics, intriguing case studies, and simple ideas that will make answering the question a hell of a lot easier—and more fun. Join Marta Kagan (@mzkagan) and Ben Grossman (@BenGrossman) as we welcome everyone—from social media newbies to full-on Tweetalohics—and arm you with everything you need to make the case for social media.

Last week, I watched Robert Scoble interview Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek.  One of the topics, as expected, was about improving productivity.

Tim mentions a utility called RescueTime, which runs as an application on your computer and records what applications you’re using, and for how long.  It also goes so far as to look at the URLs of the pages you’re viewing in your web browser, so that you can see what websites you visit most often.  For some of you, you may not want that…but I digress.

I’ve been running it for about a week now, and finally have a decent dataset to work with.  Tim reminded me of a great quote by someone who has been an influence to me, Peter Drucker; “What gets measured gets managed.”

In case you’re curious about my experience, and if it’s something that might help you, here’s a screen shot of my activity charts:

I’m still digging in to the utility, but it already points out two things:

1. I spend a lot of time on social networking websites.
2. I spend a lot of time on e-mail.

I wonder if I can outsource parts of those?

What are your thoughts on having a separate email account for social networks (Twitter, etc), and having a virtual assistant manage those emails and account maintenance (following, etc), and letting me know when I need to take action?  What if I had a VA handle my Online Reputation Monitoring and monitored it in a similar manner?

At the least, this makes it very apparent that I should probably set aside time for e-mail and social networks, rather than keeping those tabs very readily available.

A friend of mine, Sara Lingafelter (@theclimbergirl) (check out her rock climbing blog for great insights into what it’s like to be addicted to climbing), recently pointed me toward a loose, conversational podcast called ConfabShow.

Out of curiosity, I listened to the show that she participated in, Confab #10.

Coincidentally, one of the hosts (once I get the person’s name, I’ll update this post) summed up the fundamental idea of outsourcing so elegantly, I relistened and typed it out so I could have it on hand.

If you look at almost any industry, you have low-end, entry-level type jobs.  You have middle-tier jobs.  You have high-end jobs.

The key to globalization is to recognize that if your job is one that can be reduced to something that can be described on a flow-chart, then it can be outsourced, and it will find the lowest cost of capital.

If your job is something that can not be done in that direction, or not be done in that way, then you have a form of comparative advantage, or competitive advantage.

…

I’m talking about the challenge and the nature of work.

That pretty much sums it up.

If I were to be honest about my experience with outsourcing, some form of the word “dabble” might be able to be used with some form of accuracy.

Last Fall, I hired GetFriday, a virtual assistant company for about $9/hr.  My experience was less than satisfactory, especially considering the level of my requests.  Later, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the fundamental breakdown in my experience.

In retrospect, I believe it was because of two things:

1. At the time I used GetFriday, I believe they were experiencing significant growing pains.  I believe that my VA was relatively new and untrained.  The VAs willingness to serve, follow up, and keep communication was impeccable.  However, the ability to fulfill on my requests fell short.  For those interested, I provided my assistant with a set of specific queries to use on Google which would provide results of only PDF files.  I asked that the top 20 resulting PDF files be downloaded, zipped, and sent to me.  When I got the files, they were not PDFs, were not at all the search results that would have come up for those queries, and I received less than 20 files per request.  It was obvious that my request – despite being very specific and precise – was simply beyond the capacity of my VA.
2. My requests were highly specific, but I realized that I would significantly benefit by finding VAs with specialized skill sets that matched the demands of the task.  I had a range of tasks that I wanted completed, and the experience brought forth the idea that specialization, rather than working with a generalized assistant, might be the best way to go.  This realization came after speaking with someone here in Boston who has had great success with teams of developers, designers, writers, etc.

Over the past few days, I have jumped back in to the idea of outsourcing from a new perspective.  If you have any thoughts or experience with the plan I’m about to lay out, I’d love to hear them.

Step 01, Discover What’s Possible

As I was browsing eLance, I began to see that not only were people accessible who had very specialized skills to match my tasks, but it also began to give me ideas for other projects to outsource.

An example of this is copywriting.  I’d always known that I could generally find inexpensive copy for $15 a page (300ish words).  But, here I was, finding copywriters for less than $5 an hour.  Editors?  Same price.

One of the projects I’ll be outsourcing is full website development, content writing, design, etc.  I have specialized skills that I’ll be inserting into the project, but no one wants to read ecommerce copy that I write.  (People love reading my blog posts, though.)  The fact that I could get content written and edited for such a low price catalyzed a whole slew of ideas for where to go with it.

It also opened up the idea that….maybe I could get a designer, too?  What about someone to update and manage/ghostwrite a Wordpress blog?  Write an ebook?  Check out the content section in eLance…you might be surprised.

Step 02, Find Available Resources

It’s become a part of my developed nature to research the crap out of things.  I blame it on Science Fair.

So, when I saw such a great opportunity with eLance, I looked around for other resources.  For this, I went to…Twitter?…for the first time.

I actually used Summize, and queried “elance,” reading peoples’ experiences, etc.  Here, I also saw another resource mentioned on occasion: oDesk.

oDesk is a very similar platform for matching providers to jobs/tasks, but with some differences in how transactions are structured, etc.  I won’t go into it, but in some ways, it seems like a more “trusted” system with nearly as many freelancers.

Finding oDesk, I tooled around there for a bit as well, and ended up getting even more ideas.

Step 03, Systematize Your Operations

Do you know all of the steps that happen in your projects?  Do you know what specialization is needed for each step?  Do you know what things that person needs to do the task?  What they’re supposed to output for the next part of the process to work?  What can run in parallel, and what must run in series?

Realizing that I had to get completely anal (not difficult for me) with my processes and how I broke them down, I got right to it.

In generalizing the idea of Projects and Tasks, I found that Tasks had their own generalization method and, thus, certain necessary components.  For a Task, I found that it should be defined with the following properties.  You may find otherwise, but this is what I found useful:

• Task Name
• Owner – Who’s responsible for this?
• Worker Skill - Skill needed. (This will help when posting job/task descriptions)
• Input – What document or information is needed before working on this task?
• Action (Task description) – What work is to be completed?
• Output – How should the work be formatted when it’s completed?
• Document Naming Format – How should the document be named, and where should it be stored? (This will save so much time for organization)
• Cost/HR – Cost per hour (For your records)
• Hours – Hours to completion. (You may want “Predicted” and “Actual” for performance measurement)
• Notes – I always find a general notes section to be useful.  You might, too.

One thing I discovered: To launch a new website from scratch requires at least 8 specialized skill sets, including a project manager.  Until I wrote everything out, I would have thought it was very much less.

Step 04, Write Job/Task Descriptions

FYI, this is where I am in my own process.

This is the step where, for each of the tasks, you write out a specific job description for the task that is completed, utilizing each of the task properties outlined above.  I’ll be doing this in MS Word documents.

Step 05, Post and Fill the Job

So, I’m going to stop this post here.  I feel like my understanding from here on out is distant enough that I will learn quite a bit through the experience of going through the process, so I’m not even going to try getting into it

Final Notes

Hopefully, this gives you some ideas for figuring out how you can outsource some of your own work.  I feel like outsourcing is one of those things that people generally look at as a big black box that they think might be valuable, but just don’t know how to use it.

Jump in.  Figure it out.

And on that note, I’m going to wrap up some things before meeting with Ben Grossman at Andala…a meeting setup by my assistant at AskSunday, who also helped me reorder my business cards that were shipped to the wrong address (again).

Outsourcing Resources:

• eLance
• oDesk
• Guru.com
• AskSunday
• Mechanical Turk
• GetFriday