Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker. – Seth Godin.

This statement is true in so many aspects. Look at politics, giant companies, churches, and non-profits. The more brilliant people in a room, the more no one can decide a single focus, direction and executable project.

Funny thing in life, Simple almost always wins.

• Myspace was complicated and too many things. Facebook is simple (kind of).
• Blackberry UI is complicated. iPhone is clear.
• Constant contact is deep in menus and pages. Campaign monitor is the good kind of shallow.

The more I use technology, the more I appreciate simple. I have owned way too many high priced bluetooth headsets. Funny thing is that the simple headphones / mic included with my iphone seems to just plain work, clearly, flawlessly, and without a need to keep a battery charged.

Where can you make simple cuts in your life, service, product and delivery.

P.S. Simple, not dumb, or lacking in core function.

People love fun. How can you take your product or service and have a little fun with it? You dont need to down play the power, seriousness, or delivery of the product itself, but the marketing and messaging can really make it that much easier for people to see you stand out out from the competition.

Example: Slick plan. Its a web app that we use to help plan out site navigations (boring right). But check out this email as a great example of having a little fun. Great Job Slickplan!

I was reminded again yesterday of some key ‘search-ability’ items while doing some research for rafting adventures. When I started my search I didn’t pre-think my criteria but they were there just waiting to be connected with each website I visited.

My Criteria

• Family oriented
• Ages for the participants (I have kids)
• Price
• Overall experience
• Time & days
• Pictures
• Safety

What I learned & remembered about what web searches

• The quality of presentation (right or wrong) gave me an overall impression of the reliability and professional nature of what I anticipated experiencing on our outing.
• Not so startlingly what helped me realize my criteria was the absence of the right kind of information or experiences.
• Typos on main pages & critical information really gave me an impression that a company wasn’t serious about their business. The same was true with websites, there was an direct correlation between the quality of the website and the experience I thought I might enjoy.
• An added feature that most failed on was mobile readiness of the site. While on vacation or traveling, I lean heavily on my phone searches. If you are in the tourist industry and your website isn’t mobile ready then you are ready to fail on the web related business.
• Also because I was on my phone I was only willing to click on 5 sites even though I am sure that there were more. Call me lazy or call my time important, but if you are good at your business that you should pay attention to SEO. Being less than 3rd in your specific market should be unacceptable.
• The last little quirk that jumped out at me on this specific search was if the CITY and RAFTING were in the website title some how I reasoned that the company was more dialed in on what I wanted over rafting companies that covered 3-6 different areas.

In recent months both Ryan (business development here at factor1) and I have been training hard. Ryan is training for an ironman and I have been training for a century road race. And as we talk about the process, the weekly plans and the pain, I see a lot of parallels in business as a owner, manager or leader of any organization.

You have to have a plan.

Training for a big event without a plan may realistically kill you. You cant go from the couch to the finish line without some sort of plan. Set some goals and milestones to reach for. They dont have to be money or sales related. Personally, my goal is to be the most efficient i can be, maximizing time, so I can possible spend more time with my family. I have a goal of a 4 day work week by the end of July.

Your plan needs rhythm and growth.

My plan is pretty easy. I ride some easy days, i ride some sprints and high intensity days, and i have pace days. This is true at the office too. Some days are nuts, with way too many things on the to do list, and too many fires to put out. Other days are normal, good, but not chaos, and some days are easy, like fridays after all the hard work is done. You must enjoy, plan and put in the effort to make them all work.

If you want all easy days, you probably need a new plan. One without a big a finish. All high intensity and you will burn out fast.

You need to grow with the plan.

Start small. A few miles at a time, gradually increasing the distance. Same at the office. Push your self to be faster, more efficient and better at your job. As they say, Rome was not built in a day.

Rest.

All training plans have rest days. Take days off. At least the weekend. Vacations would be great. I’ll let you know what they are like when I get to take one for real someday. One without a laptop and a few hours of working a day. Not sure when that will be.

What did I miss?

See, We told you we have been busy around here. Lots of new projects launching this season. SantaPhotos.com was a very cool project to be working on. Mall Santas are a big deal. Many families want to find the same santa year after year, to provide great tradition, and consistency to their family photos. We needed to build a great site to make managing and finding locations and santas easy.

In a partnership with Mindbogl Design, this was the final result. (click for larger view, or just visit the site: santaphotos.com)

About the build of this site.

Using WordPress, we wrote about a dozen custom functions to make some magic happen. Custom home slider tools using jquery were built out, custom content types for santas, locations, and home banners were all part of the plan. So now when SantaPhotos admins need to add a location, they simply log in, add a new location, fill in the name, address, url, map link, etc, and we do the heavy lifting. All without any wordpress plugins.

It really turned out amazing. With all the santas, locations, pages and blog posts, managing specific content types is a breeze.

So far traffic is up (300 – 600 unique visitors per day), and SEO key words are already helping the new site showing up in google. The staff at SantaPhotos.com was very excited to see the new site live.

I’m an avid mountain biker, road biker, and cyclist. I ride my bike to the office every day, to church on a regular basis, and anywhere I can. I have been riding a lot for the better part of 7 years. Even spent most of my childhood on a bike. Riding for recreation, exercise, fun, friendship, even racing, I love it all.

Over the years I have been riding with some new riders, and giving a lot of tutorials, tips, tricks, and explaining concepts to better help them as riders on the road or on the trails.

In thinking about these conversations, the ideas and concepts can really be applied to almost anything — Business, ministry, life, and maybe even marriage.
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Most artists make their money on concert sales and add ons. T-shirts, stickers, collectibles, etc. Not CD sales. But is this the future of music in a world of digital delivery?

http://modlife.com/angelsandairwaves/love

A free CD, with the request of ANY payment? Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have also tried their hand at the same thing. The Radiohead CD In Rainbows pulled an average of $2.12 per download. 3/5ths of 1.2 million users downloaded the CD for free. The remaining 2/5th paid an average of $6.

So is this the future of music sales? Will this be the future for other industries? books? magazines? Video games? I doubt it, but its worth thinking outside the box on.

How can you do what you enjoy, provide it to as many people as possible, and make up for it on the items that make you the most money?

Seth Godin call’s it the Dip. Others call it “knowing when to lay down your bet”. However, it shouldn’t take just a losing proposition to stop doing something that is ‘good’ in pursuit of doing something that is great.

In meeting with a successful leader the other day, I was challenged to not always think in terms of “life long time lines”. What if projects had shorter life spans? What if we had clear, short-term, small budget, in-n-out approaches to some of our objectives? What if new products, established teams, marketing budgets, fund-raising efforts, et-al didn’t always go on forever?

In WWII the U.S. Marines spent over a year preparing to take just one key island – Iwo Jima. It was a hotly contested conflict with thousands of lives laid at the alter of freedom, but they knew when and what victory looked like and it wasn’t about being in the marines forever or engaged in war in perpetuity.

The challenge before us for the greatest gains does not always have to include “doing this forever”. Don’t be afraid to cancel things that aren’t meeting you goals or your values or your stated outcomes. Just because you started something does not mean that you should always finish. See more of what you do as “experimental” and don’t get down when it doesn’t work out. Just try something else.

When we encounter change or challenge in our everyday life, it can be so easy to refer to the past and use it as the primary tool for decision making. But is it always the best tool?

We use tradition as our guide. “It worked then, why shouldn’t it work now?” “We always do things this way.” “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We use tradition as a source of pride. “like those before us who began this great movement/business/organization/family/church…” “… the RICH traditions of our past…”

BUT, we also use tradition as a crutch. “I know it’s an antiquated system, but we don’t have time to reinvent the wheel, just keep doing what you’re doing.” Instead of making decisions based on tradition, why not make them on intention? our intentions grow and change with the current needs of whatever movement we’re a part of. every day has an intention, a goal, a step towards the grander intention or goal. traditions are the oposite. they stay put. they are the result of achieving an old goal. although this is something worth celebrating and considering when encountering the future, it isn’t necessarily the best decision making tool, and yet it seems to be used in a disproportionate way.

When we come to the point of making a decision, our mindset shouldn’t be “what has worked in the past?” but “what will propel us into the future?” or “What will help us best fulfill our intentions/goals?”

[guest blog: Jason Shafer]