Shannon English

Barter is Smarter with Tradebank

2011-02-17T10:58:00.001-08:00

She Knows Marketing

2010-03-22T18:29:00.001-07:00

Contact Shannon English with She Knows Marketing for all your marketing needs!

Shannon A English
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com
785-383-8139

Become a FACEBOOK fan: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Topeka-KS/She-Knows-Marketing/300085784961?ref=nf

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

Check out my website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more. (My facebook fan page has product sales and items uploaded all the time.) Do you need help with your Social Media & Marketing, ask me to set up a one on one or group meeting to help grow your business.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards
are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat.
We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we
have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your
marketing needs!

Jeffrey Gitomer's Sales Caffeine Issue 433

2010-02-25T07:57:00.001-08:00

Value First Selling
you can bank on!

I got a call from a bank who wanted me to present a seminar. I love getting incoming leads! My company is blessed with lots of them, but this one was different.

My seminars are usually conducted in front of a live audience at some gathering place: hotel, meeting room, or theater. I see the audience. They see me. I hear the audience. They hear me. I feel the audience. They feel me (emotionally). It’s part of the magic of a live performance.

This particular inquiry was about doing a webinar. It was, as they say in the talk-show business, a “first time caller.” But more interestingly, they did not want this webinar for themselves or internal purposes; they wanted an online video webinar for their customers. Cool.

As I got deeper into the conversation, I found out their business philosophy behind wanting to do this seminar, and it is for that reason I am sharing this information with you.

The customer, the bank, is the Nevada State Bank, with primary offices in Las Vegas and branch offices throughout the region. Their prime objective was to help, and strengthen their customer’s business in these economic times. In short they have poured all of their marketing resources, and most of their advertising budget, into providing value to their customers.

Why? Their strategy is help customers first and they will remain loyal. And because of their online banking capability, they are not limited to local customers. Favorable corporate laws and their Las Vegas location has attracted customers from all over the US.

Incredible, unheard of, unprecedented - and I jumped at the chance.

I will admit to you that it’s awkward giving a presentation to a camera. I will use slides and impromptu dialogue so it will be very similar to what I would normally do if I was face to face with the audience. But as you can imagine, a first time with anything has its learning curve, and the associated risks that go along with it.

To help me prepare and witness a run through, their two chief marketers, Tom Sweet and Robert Richardson, flew to Charlotte.

On a side note, I have spent double the amount of time preparing for this event to make sure that it will go off without a hitch, and that the information is transferable to each online participant.

But let me go back to my original WOW! Think for a moment what you are doing for YOUR customers. Think for a moment about how much money you are spending on advertising and sales promotion, rather than trying to help your present customers build their business.

My bet is you’re spending 100 cents out of a dollar on yourselves, and not a penny on the people who are providing you with 100% of your revenue. What Nevada State Bank is doing is a remarkable, precedent-setting process that every one of you should be employing. They are providing a seminar for their customers, not for their salespeople -- but their salespeople and the bank will benefit from it.

Now is the time for you to come to the aid of your customers. Now is the time when you can enact a value-based marketing strategy that will lead to a profit-based selling strategy as the economy (slowly) recovers.

The webinar will be broadcast this Thursday, February 25th, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PST. It will be loaded with information that will help you build your business. It is offered at no charge, with no catch. Just register and reap the rewards. To reserve your “seat,” go to: www.nsbank.com/webevent/

If you are interested in learning more about this marketing/sales strategy, go to www.gitomer.com and enter the words CUSTOMER WELLNESS in the GitBit box.

Shared by:
Shannon A English
Cell 785-383-8139
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2010-02-22T09:22:00.001-08:00

What to Expect: 2010 to 2023

Moses was 40 years old when he tried to lead Israel out of Egypt by the strength of his own arm. He failed, then ran from the anger of Pharaoh like a little girl. But who can blame him for trying? He was, after all, the only Israelite who lived in the palace under the protection of Pharaoh’s daughter: “I’m unique. I’m special. I was born for this.”

Moses at 40 was brash, confident, full of himself; the kind of leader who would stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier, look into the lens of a TV camera and say, “Mission accomplished.”

But Moses at 80 was a completely different man. In the book of Numbers we read, “Now the man Moses was very meek, the most humble man on the face of the whole earth.” Having lived 40 years as a shepherd on the backside of the desert, Moses had lost his hubris and developed a speech impediment.

Remember how many years the unbelieving Israelites had to wander in the desert before they became a completely different people? Bingo. 40 years.

That phrase - “40 years” - appears 25 times in the Bible and in virtually every instance it refers to a window of transformative change. Do we in fact become a different people every 40 years?

William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book about this 40-year phenomenon in 1991. Those authors never mention the Bible but focus instead on the historical record of Western society from 1584 to the present. That book, Generations, asserts that we go through a series of 4, approximately 20-year cycles or "generations" in a predictable order. (Think of a generation not as birth cohorts but as life cohorts. Everyone alive in a society is part of the same generation in that moment.)

Here’s how those 20-year cycles look when overlaid onto the story of Moses.

1. Idealist, marked by infatuation,
ending with full-of-himself Moses at 40,
“I’m special.” 1963-1983

2. Reactive, marked by disillusionment,
ending with Moses at 60 after 20 years in the desert,
“I’m searching for something better.” 1983-2003

3. Civic, marked by a power struggle,
ending with burning-bush/10 Plagues Moses at 80,
“I’m just a regular person trying to make it through the day.” 2003-2023 (and 1923-1943)

4. Adaptive, marked by reluctant acceptance,
ending with Israel-in-the-wilderness Moses at 100,
“I’m part of a team on a journey.” 2023-2043 (and 1943 to 1963) (In the middle of the last Adaptive cycle (1943-1963) a friend of Jack Kerouac, the poet John Clellon Holmes wrote, “You know, everyone I know is kind of furtive, kind of beat...” - Go, (1952) And from that Beat generation came the beatniks who inspired the idealist hippies of the 1960’s.)

When the cycle has gone full circle it returns to where it began:

1. Idealist
ending with Moses at 120, full of himself again, striking the rock to bring water instead of speaking to it as God had instructed. 2043-2063

Please note that each of these 20-year cycles is attended by sparkle and darkness. None of them is inherently better than the others.

Society hungers for individuality and freedom during the upswing of an Idealist cycle. Nothing wrong with that. But we always take a good thing too far. What begins as a beautiful dream of self-discovery (1963) ends as hollow, phony posing (1983.) And from that shining disco of lights and glitter our hunger falls back, feather-like, toward what we left behind: working together for the common good.

But this beautiful dream of working together to build a better tomorrow slowly hardens into duty, obligation and sacrifice. We become bound by rules and the expectations of others.

And we grow weary.

Finally, we begin to move toward what we left behind: individuality and freedom of expression.

“If you look at the history of youth cultural movements, they tend to go one of two ways. One is in the direction of individual expression and creativity; the best example is the '60s. The other way is to lose themselves in the collective, binding themselves into a gang…” – Jaron Lanier

The declining Idealist pendulum reached the bottom of its arc in 2003, right on schedule. We’re now in our 7th year of a new Civic cycle, “losing ourselves in the collective, binding ourselves into a gang,” as the pendulum swings toward another Civic zenith in 2023.

On the sunny side of a Civic upswing are transparency, volunteerism and authenticity. But in the dark you’ll find smug self-righteousness, legalism and bureaucracy.

If history can be trusted as a guide, we’re now entering the time of a power struggle. Everywhere it will be “us” versus “them.” And both sides will believe they work purely for the common good. "God is clearly on OUR side."

“You don’t care enough about global warming,
or free enterprise,
or civil liberties,
or the rights of the unborn,
or the downtrodden in Tibet.
You’re not committed to family values
and you don’t recycle.
You don’t support our troops.
Frankly, we’re disappointed in you.
You’re not doing your part.
Shape up.”

The coming zealot will want to make sure you’re doing your part for the team. You’ll be interrogated, evaluated and castigated. When you have capitulated, you’ll be authenticated, approximated and appropriated. In the end you’ll be assimilated.

Or you can hide out at Wizard Academy. As society becomes more sharply divided, we’ll remain committed to the insanity of open-mindedness. We'll listen and hear and understand what both sides are trying to say. We'll see things no one else notices.

And we will use this knowledge to make a difference in our businesses and our communities.

Come to Wizard Academy.
You’re going to like it here.

We know how to make money
and we remember how to have fun.

Roy H. Williams

PS – If you were wondering where I got my info about Moses...
file:///C:/DOCUME~1/EZ-PCC~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/fcctemp/Attach0%203.html

Shared by Shannon A English
She Knows Marketing
785-383-8139
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com
www.SheKnowsMarketing.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2010-02-15T08:46:00.000-08:00

The Power of Labels
Even When They're Wrong

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen was a young man interested in archaeology so when the Danish government of 1816 needed someone to climb into the attic of Copenhagen’s Trinitatis Church and sort through the rubble that had collected there, Thomsen was their man.

Upon entering the attic, Thomsen reported random items in “dust and disorganized disarray, hidden away in chests and baskets, among bits of material and paper. It was total chaos.”

Sounds like my attic. Yours too, I’ll bet.

The first thing young Christian Jürgensen Thomsen did was to organize the antiquities according to their material: stone in one pile, bronze in another, iron in a third. When the public was invited to an exhibition in that same church loft in 1819, this was the first time the false division of the past into three “ages” was ever used.

“So familiar has Thomsen’s tripartite division of the past into a Stone, a Bronze and an Iron age become, so complete the authority it has acquired, that we easily forget its comparatively recent vintage and attribute to it a degree of reality that it scarcely has a right to.” – Historian Robert Ferguson

Ferguson says “Stone Age,” “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” are false labels adopted by people looking for categories where none exist. Likewise, I believe “Baby Boomer,” “Gen-Xer” and “Millennial” to be false labels.

People are not imprinted at birth with values systems they carry throughout their lives.

Search the phrase “Attributes of Baby Boomers” and you’ll read some truly idiotic assertions that have come to be widely believed, such as, “People born between 1946 and 1955 are experimental, value individualism and are free spirited. People born between 1956 and 1964 are less optimistic, distrust the government and are generally cynical.”- Wikipedia

Stone, bronze and iron refer not to time periods but to materials. Likewise, Baby Boomer, Gen-X and Millennial refer not to people born during a certain window of years but to values systems that were popular for a while in our society.

New systems of values are first adopted by the youth. Later, when those values become mainstream and are embraced by the rest of society, the values continue to be associated with the birth cohorts that first embraced them.

In truth, the pendulum of Western society swings in a very predictable 40-year arc and all of us are carried along with it. When our societal pendulum is moving toward individuality and self-expression we live in a “Me generation.” When we’re swinging away from these virtues and begin working together for the common good, we live in a “We generation.” The move from one extreme to the other takes 40 years.

We’ve recently seen our pendulum reach the bottom of its arc (2003) as we shifted from “Me” back to “We.”

Next Monday I’ll tell you exactly what you can expect from the coming decade.

Roy H. Williams

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2010-02-08T06:58:00.001-08:00

How I Win the Ad Wars
Frankly, I Cheat. You Can, Too.

I became an advertising salesman so I could buy groceries. A college dropout with no financial safety net, I installed aluminum guttering on houses during the day and changed reel-to-reel tapes in an automated radio station at night. Our format was radio preachers who needed your money to pay for the airtime we sold them.

We were the number 23 station in a city of 23 stations. Our best ratings book showed us with a cumulative weekly audience of 18,000 people in a city of 1.3 million. We had between 400 and 800 people listening at any given moment. That sounded like a lot of people to me. One day I asked the manager why our station played no ads.

“You think you could sell some ads?” he asked.

I nodded like a bobblehead doll.

“Do it,” he said as he walked away.

I asked the back of his head how much I should charge.

“Whatever you can get,” he answered, without ever looking back.

When you sell ads on the tiniest station in town, you don’t compete with the other stations, you sell only those businesses with too little money to afford anyone else. In fact, the money my clients gave me every month was usually all the cash they had. If my ads didn’t work, I’d have groceries in my pantry but my clients wouldn’t. A man learns fast in that environment.

The first thing I learned is that people are bored by advertising for the same reason they’re bored by anything else: lack of relevance.

"If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot."- Emil Cioran

When ads are relevant, customers respond. Are your ads relevant, or are they answering questions no one is asking?

My job at the radio station paid $3.50 an hour plus 15 percent commission. Within 3 years I was making about $6,000 a month. That was doctor/lawyer money 30 years ago.

Strangely, I never made that many sales calls. Most of my clients called the station to ask if they could buy ads from me. Usually, a friend had told them how much money they were making as a result of the ads I was writing and they wanted in on the action.

"What does it cost?" they'd ask. These people didn't care about the radio station or its format. They just wanted to grow their businesses.

When the owners of my radio station sold it for 11 times what they paid for it, I decided I’d rather become a self-employed ad consultant than move to Los Angeles and become a station manager for them.

The second thing I had learned, you see, is that good ads work no matter how they’re delivered. I saw my ads work on virtually every radio and TV station in the city and with tiny variations these same ads performed as direct mail letters and fax machine blasts.

The secret wasn’t in reaching the right people. The secret was in crafting a message that would be relevant to the public.

My ads worked because I cheated: I insisted my clients let me deliver a message guaranteed to move the needle on the “Who Cares?” meter.

Ads fail when no one cares.

An extremely common mistake is to believe that discounting the price of a product is guaranteed to win the interest of the public. But I've seen that strategy fail dozens of times. A half-price turd is still a turd.

When a client belligerently demanded that I write some magic words to help him sell a load of crap that no one in their right mind would ever want to buy, I looked down at the ground, dropped a wad of spit on the toe of his shoe, then looked up into his face and said, “No.”

Yes, it was a rude and vulgar thing to do but I can assure you it shortened the argument. Word of my little stunt spread. Some saw it as the action of an egotistical lunatic. It’s possible these people were right. But others saw it as the mark of a young man who had the courage of his convictions. These people may have been right, too.

Every business owner is on the inside, looking out, and what they see is entirely different from what their customers see. Customers are on the outside, looking in.

Great ad writers remain on the outside, looking in. They are advocates, not of the business owner, but of the business owner’s customer. This gives them their great advantage.

Do you have the courage to learn what your company looks like from the outside, looking in? Would you like to know what your customer is thinking?

Twice a year I gather my Wizard of Ads partners from around the world for 2 days of continuing education in Austin, Texas. This year we’re looking for 7 business owners willing to be guinea pigs for us on February 25, the second day of class. These selected business owners will be responsible for their own airfare and accommodations. Since this is not a Wizard Academy event, we can’t offer you a room in Engelbrecht House. Sorry.

In return for your investment of time, travel costs and courage, you’ll receive 1 hour of focused attention from the brightest ad consultants on earth.

If you own a business and are interested, email PaulBoomer@WizardOfAds.com or call Paul Boomer at (573) 268-4109. Please, no advertising professionals.

I hope to see 7 owners of interesting businesses in Austin on February 25.

It is good to be a guinea pig.

Roy H. Williams

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Always ask for Shannon English when placing an order!
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
A cause that is dear to me: http://saveourshelteranimals.org/
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/

Make a great first, second or tenth impression...

2010-01-21T07:53:00.000-08:00

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* Educate customers about products and services
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Signs deliver for you time and again

* Can be up 24/7
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What are your signs doing for your business? Regardless of your company's budget, let FASTSIGNS® help you get noticed and make a great impression with effective, impactful signs and graphics.

Act now and save up to $100** on a new sign order
Between now and February 14th, take $50 off a $300 order OR $100 off of a $500 order.
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We'll help solve your challenges and make you look great! Call, click or visit us today.

Sincerely,
Shannon A English
Account Manager
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
A cause that is dear to me: http://saveourshelteranimals.org/
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2010-01-18T07:25:00.000-08:00

Blind Spot
Today's memo is a long one
But worth reading if you want to make money.

If you knew it was there, they wouldn’t call it a blind spot.

Hidden within your blind spot is your limiting factor, the thing that holds you back and limits your success.

Find your blind spot and stare your limiting factor in the face. Acknowledge the reality of it. Then decide whether or not you want to overcome it.*

That’s right. It’s entirely possible that your blind spot – and within it your limiting factor – is simply an extension of your fundamental worldview.

You may already know your worldview is wrong but you’d rather continue being wrong – and suffer the consequences – than change it.

I can respect that. I have no problem with a person who is willing to pay the price for their self-indulgence. What I can’t respect is:
1. a person who is wrong and can’t admit it.
2. a person who makes a choice and then whines about the price of it.

I don’t want to get all sappy and personal with you, so let’s move this discussion to the marketplace. Blind spots and limiting factors are easily observed in business.

Here are the most common limiting factors hidden within the blind spots of business owners:

1. Market Opportunity

(A.) Opportunity is staring you in the face and you can’t see it. SOLUTION: Open your eyes.

(B.) You’ve overestimated the potential of your trade area. Consequently, you’re bumping your head on the low, glass ceiling of a small population. SOLUTION: (a.) Expand your product offering or (b.) open in a second trade area.

If you’re doing okay but have been looking for better ways to target the demographic and psychographic profile of “your customer” and these efforts haven’t been paying off, your limiting factor is almost certainly
(1.) Market Opportunity or
(2.) Product Appeal. Keep reading.

2. Product Appeal

(A.) Your product is flawed and you can’t see it. SOLUTION: Find someone who has the courage to tell you the truth. Then correct the problem they show you. Don’t live in denial.

(B.) Your product has a characteristic whose appeal you’ve underestimated. SOLUTION: Promote the newfound characteristic.

EXAMPLE: My partner Peter Nevland recently bumped into the owner of a bottled water service who asked him for some free advice. Peter asked, “Why should the customer of another water service switch to yours?”

“We’re locally owned.” “Ten percent of our profits go to charity,” blah, blah, blah.

Peter was unimpressed.

Exasperated and grasping at straws, the man mentioned his water had recently been voted “Best Tasting” by the readers of an obscure, local business journal.

“Why do you think you won?”

The man hung his head, “We cheat.”

“How?”

“Our water is saturated with dissolved oxygen, twice the amount found in regular water.”

“What does that do?”

“Dissolved oxygen is what makes water taste good. It’s why cold water tastes better than warm water. Cold water contains more dissolved oxygen.”

“You’re saying your room temperature water tastes like cold water?”

The man nodded his head.

“Do you always saturate your water with dissolved oxygen?”

“Yes, why do you ask?”

SAD ENDING: Peter was unable to convince the man to promote his better tasting water with dissolved oxygen. I swear I’m not making this up. The man remained convinced his ads needed to say, “We’re locally owned and give ten percent of our profits to charity.”

3. Staff Competence

(A.) Your front-line people see opportunities and solutions you don’t see. You limit your success by not listening to your people. SOLUTION: Listen to them.

(B.) Your people aren’t nearly as smart as you think. You keep listening to them and they’re wrong, but dammit, they’re enthusiastic and they make sense and they’re just so sincere! SOLUTION: Make some executive decisions. Be the leader. Tell your employees what you want. If they can’t get on board with it, let them swim in the cold waters of unemployment. (If that suggestion horrifies you, then it’s almost certainly your limiting factor.)

4. Message Clarity

(A.) You understand the benefits of your product but have been unable to communicate them persuasively to the public. SOLUTION: Hire an experienced ad writer with a history of success. (I know a lot writers like Peter Nevland. You can meet them and read their stuff at AmericanSmallBusiness.com.)

(B.) You don’t understand how the public views your product category. Consequently, your ads are irrelevant to them. EXAMPLE: You’ve been saying, “We guarantee our work” when your customer’s real anxiety is, “Will these people show up on time or will I have to wait around all day?” SOLUTION: Speak to what the customer actually cares about.

5. Message Delivery

(A.) You have a song to sing, you just haven’t been singing it. (In other words you haven’t been advertising.) SOLUTION: Sing, little bird, sing!

(B.) You know who would be interested in your product, you just can’t figure out how to reach them.

EXAMPLE: You sell engagement rings and want to reach people who are about to get engaged, or you sell houses and want to reach people who are about to go house shopping.

SOLUTION: (a.) You can reach the online crowd with Google Adwords and/or use Search Engine Optimization to lift your website to the first page of search engine results. (I have 7 partners who specialize in this. Contact them through their posts at AmericanSmallBusiness.com.) (b.) Reach the general population with a memorable message using mass media and then wait for them, or one of their circle, to need what you sell. Become the solution people think of immediately and feel the best about. Build your reputation with ads that have a high Impact Quotient.

6. Competitor Strength

(A.) Your category has a strong leader and it isn’t you. SOLUTION: Use the leader’s reputation like a basketball backboard. Connect yourself to them through indirect acknowledgment.

EXAMPLE: Avis came out of nowhere to become a major contender to Hertz with the claim, “We’re Number Two. We Try Harder.” Burger King separated themselves from McDonald’s with the statement, “Have it your way at Burger King.” This statement would have made no sense if the public had not been acutely aware that McDonald’s made all their burgers the same.

(B.) Your category has never had a leader because it’s a category that makes people yawn. SOLUTION: Say something memorable. Do something ridiculous. Push far enough beyond the norm to get criticized. Just make sure they spell your name right. Choose who to lose as a potential customer. You can’t have insiders without having outsiders.

It’s not what you include, but what you exclude that defines you.

How are you defining yourself?

Most people limit themselves because of a blind spot. The things they exclude are excluded unconsciously.

The purpose of my note to you today has been merely to suggest that you choose consciously, rather than unconsciously, what you will exclude from
1. your business,
2. your reality,
3. your life.

Open your eyes. Look in the mirror. Make some choices. The clock is ticking.

Roy H. Williams

KUDOS to my Wizard of Ads partner, the lovely and talented MIchele Miller, for her Wonder Branding blog being named by Forbes magazine as one of the Top 5 Marketing Blogs in America. Read the Forbes interview of Michele before you dive into the rabbit hole.

* MORE ABOUT WORLDVIEW - As I said in the memo, many of us are deeply invested in continuing to see the world as we've seen it in the past. Example: a girl named Joy recently sent this tweet to her friends: When does "pushing the envelope" and "getting out of your comfort zone" become "breaking down your value system"? Here's my answer: Joy, you are correct. Both phrases refer to breaking down your value system. Question: Does your value system need adjustment or is your judgment already perfect? - RHW

Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
A cause that is dear to me: http://saveourshelteranimals.org/
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-12-28T07:23:00.001-08:00

Four People. Sort Of.
Read to the End and Find a Business Application

It’s entirely possible that today’s memo will make you think less of me.

Maybe not. We’ll see.

People fall into 4 categories in my mind:

1. People I owe.
2. People I know.
3. People Invisible.
4. People I must fight.

If you object to people being put in categories, please keep in mind I said we’re talking about the world inside my head, not yours.

People I Owe: When a person has been there for me and helped me when I was down, or gotten involved with something I was trying to do, I’ll always watch for a way to repay them. Some of the People I Owe have earned huge equity in my life and I’ll happily do things for them that no one else dare ask.

I’ll bet you’re like that, too.

So here’s my question for you: what did your “People I Owe” do for you that you’ve never forgotten? What was it that lifted them to such lofty heights in your heart and mind?

Do those same things for other people.

People I Know is a category that might have been labeled “friends and acquaintances” but it’s much broader than that in my mind. People I Know are the fabric of the social construct that exists within the scope of my limited vision. In essence, People I Know are the population of RoyWorld. I’m aware of their actions and I care about them.

Strangely, the population of RoyWorld contains no newscasters. They are, to me, Invisible. I’m being completely serious with you. Newscasters have no place in my mind. I don’t hate them exactly, but I have no use for them. They don’t matter to me. Consequently, newscasters don’t exist in my private world.

People Invisible are those who don’t count.

Who doesn’t exist in your private world? How many billions of people live beyond the edges of your peripheral vision? You might like to believe you care about all living things and value all human life equally but your mind isn’t big enough for that. You can’t wrap your consciousness around everyone and everything on earth. So there will always be People Invisible in your world whether you like it or not.

I’m suggesting only that you begin 2010 by choosing the populations of your categories consciously rather than unconsciously. Who will you owe? Who will you know? Who will be invisible? Who will you fight?

Last week Pennie and I listened to People We Know talk about their Christmas traditions. One man we know - I don’t know his name - watches each year for the sanitation workers who pick up the garbage in his upscale neighborhood. Walking to the curb, he gives each man a Christmas card containing a surprising large cash tip. He said, “It makes them part of our community. It proves we recognize them, know their value, and consider them to be part of us.”

The men on that garbage truck honk and wave and smile as they pass his home each week. The glow of his recognition stays on them all year. Our friend moved his service workers from People Invisible all the way up to People I Owe. And they have never forgotten it.

If you’re in business, your customers are People You Owe. If you let them slip down to People You Know, or worse, People Invisible, your business will definitely suffer for it.

But if that happens, don’t sweat it. You can always blame your advertising.

Roy H. Williams

(That ending was a little snarky, wasn’t it? Sorry about that, it was a tough week on campus. I’ll tell you about it in the rabbit hole.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-12-21T08:49:00.001-08:00

Deader Than a Bag of Hammers
Mini-Bikes, Tape Recorders, Leisure Suits and Yellow Pages

The Las Vegas Hilton, 2003: The stagehand said, “This is the stage where Elvis appeared when he played Vegas.” He was helping me set up to speak to the managers of all the local, county and state fairs in the English-speaking world.

When my stage buddy said we were good to go, the floor attendants opened the doors and the crowd washed into the room, thick streams of people jamming the aisles, then branching into little rivulets as they chose specific rows of seats. I went backstage to get last-minute instructions from my hosts.

The chairman of the board looked at me and said, “You’ll be speaking to about 16 hundred members and delegates from the US, Canada, England and Australia. They’re looking for ways to boost attendance at their fairs.”

The board of directors then filled me up with everything they felt I needed to know. When they had finally spent themselves, I asked, “What does your organization do, exactly?”

The chairman answered, “The main benefit we offer our members is a monthly magazine that reports the gate attendance of all the different fairs. We also report which performers and attractions were the biggest draws. The manager in Des Moines whose fair is about to begin wants to know what happened at the Chicago fair that just ended.”

We started walking from the green room toward the wing of the stage when we heard the emcee begin to welcome the crowd.

“But doesn’t it take a long time to gather all the information, print it and get it to the members?” I asked.

“Yes, and that’s a big frustration among the membership. They say the magazine is mostly old news by the time it arrives.”

“You don’t have a website?”

“Son,” he said as he stopped abruptly, “the average age of the people you’re about to address is 72 years old. Many of them are over 80. There’s no one in the house younger than 65. These just aren’t internet people.”

At that moment, the emcee flung his arm toward me and shouted, “Roy H. Williams!” With a final glance at the chairman, I walked onto the stage and quietly took off my shoes. Standing there in my socks, I studied the crowd a minute. They looked at me as I looked at them.

Then I raised my hand and said, “How many of you have used a search engine in the past 7 days to research a purchase you were considering?” Sixteen hundred hands went up simultaneously.

I looked offstage at the chairman. The man was openly stunned. I think he may still be standing there.

Pennie and I found a plastic bag at the end of our driveway last Tuesday. In it were 3 different Yellow Page books. This triggered a discussion between Pennie and me about icons of the past. We recalled the famous Yellow Pages ad of 1962, “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking.” We talked about all the different tape recorders we’d owned. I told her about the J.C. Penney Golden Pinto mini-bike I coveted in 1970. And then I dropped the bag of books into the garbage.

The next morning I received an email from my client and friend, Vess Barnes:

Roy,
When do you predict the demise of Yellow Pages and their brand-associated websites? Is money spent there basically wasted? Have a great week.

Aloha,
Vess

Short Answer: Yes, money spent in the Yellow Pages (and their associated websites) is basically wasted.

Have you ever Googled a product or service and had the search engine direct you to the online Yellow Pages listing for a company? I’ve never once experienced it. Search engines elevate the most commonly clicked links. Think about what this implies. (Okay, I'll spell it out for you: if people were using the digital Yellow Pages, those online Yellow Page ads would rank higher on Google and the other search engines. The ads don't rank high on Google because most people never see those ads.)

During the past few years, a number of our service company clients (foundation repair specialists, plumbers, HVAC companies, etc.) have taken our advice and abandoned the yellow pages completely, moving virtually 100 percent of their ad budgets to the radio. They already have websites, of course. These businesses, without exception, are outdistancing their competitors in the area of new customer acquisition.

I’m fairly certain my position will generate a firestorm of emails from people who feel passionately that I’m wrong. But there are others who will know I’m right.

Are you in that second group? Do you have the courage to slash your Yellow Page budget? Would you like to learn how to craft ads for radio and the internet that will gain and hold the attention of a far-too-busy public?

Join Chris Maddock, Jeff Sexton and me for a business-altering 2-day course at Wizard Academy, January 27-28: How to Write Ads for Radio and the Internet.

Early birds will get the last of the free rooms in Engelbrecht House, Wizard Academy’s spectacular student mansion. Birds who are slow to decide will have to stay in a hotel. But don’t worry, we’ve got a list of good hotels nearby. Get details from Tamara at (512) 295-5700.

It is within your power to make 2010 a much better year than 2009. Are you going to do it?

Do it. Come to Wizard Academy.

Roy H. Williams

Do you have Christmas cards featuring the wise men? As you know, Wizard Academy is named for the wise-ards (wisards, wizards) mentioned in the Christmas story, the ones who followed the star. Would you be willing to send us any wise men you might have? We're going to put them in an album that will lie on a coffee table in the library of the tower at Wizard Academy.

Send what you've got to:
Wizard Academy
attention: Tamara
16221 Crystal Hills Dr.
Austin, Texas 78737

THIS WAS SHARED WITH YOU BY:
Shannon A English
www.SheKnowsMarketing.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-11-30T08:33:00.000-08:00

Selling: Civic vs. Idealist
You want an example?

Romulus Whitaker is saving the rainforest in Tamil Nadu, and with it, dozens of species of animals. The problem is complex, but so is Romulus Whitaker.
Tim Bauer is fighting air pollution in the Philippines with a 2-stroke cylinder head that reduces hydrocarbon emissions by 89 percent. Thousands of engines must be retrofitted. The work is rugged, but so is Tim Bauer.
Gomel Apaza teaches villagers about sustainable food production high in the Andes Mountains of Peru. His techniques are reliable, so the villagers live happier lives.
Reliable. Rugged. Complex. Apaza, Bauer and Whitaker: making a difference.
Making the world better for everyone.
And the watch they wear is a Rolex: Reliable. Rugged. Complex.
Because time is important to people who get things done.
Your Rolex is waiting patiently for you to come and pick it up at Nevland Jewelers. I’m Dave Nevland and I’ve got a Rolex… for you.

I wrote that ad for the "we" generation of 2009. Spotlighting the selfless servant as modern hero, the ad begs two questions:
1. "Do you want to make the world a better place?"
2. "Are you the kind of person who gets things done?"

If so, you should be wearing a Rolex. Hand Dave Nevland some money.

You might remember a quite different ad I wrote for the "me" generation 14 years ago:

You are standing in the snow, five and one-half half miles above sea level, gazing at a horizon hundreds of miles away. It occurs to you that life here is very simple: you live or you die. No compromises, no whining, no second chances. This is a place constantly ravaged by wind and storm, where every ragged breath is an accomplishment. You stand on the uppermost pinnacle of the earth. This is the mountain they call Everest. Yesterday it was considered unbeatable. But that was yesterday. As Edmund Hillary surveyed the horizon from the peak of Mount Everest, he monitored the time on a wristwatch that had been specifically designed to withstand the fury of the world's most angry mountain. Rolex believed Sir Edmund would conquer the mountain, and especially for him they created the Rolex Explorer. In every life there is a Mount Everest to be conquered. When you have conquered yours, you'll find your Rolex waiting patiently for you to come and pick it u p at Justice Jewelers. I'm Woody Justice and I've got a Rolex... for you.

This ad features the individualist as hero and asks very different questions:
1. "Are you the kind of person who wins against impossible odds?"
2. "Can you take a minute to come pick up your trophy?"

That Mount Everest ad was hugely successful 14 years ago, but We, the People, have changed. Have you noticed?

Our transition from the Idealist "me" mindset to our current, Civic "we" way of thinking began right on schedule in 2003 and was essentially complete by the end of 2008.

Right on schedule? Yep. We shift from one mindset to the other every 40 years and we've been doing it with the precision of a metronome for more than 4 centuries.

Want to make your ads work better? Abandon the idea that your customers should reward themselves. Quit saying to them, "you deserve it." Tell them instead that your product "makes a difference," that it "helps," and use the word "give" in a variety of applications, such as, "Give it a chance."

Sadly, the Apaza, Bauer and Whitaker ad won't be given a chance.

Rolex didn't approve it.

Sigh.

Roy H. Williams

PS - The composite photo at the top of the page is (L to R) Apaza, Whitaker and Bauer. In the photo below, the Cervantes Society of America holds their annual meeting in Tuscan Hall. These professors of Spanish literature came to Wizard Academy from many of the most important universities in the United States. We were honored to be their hosts.

~~ This article came from: file:///C:/DOCUME~1/EZ-PCC~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/fcctemp/Attach0.html ~~~

Shannon A English
Account Manager, Fastsigns
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
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Monday Morning Memo

2009-11-17T07:41:00.000-08:00

My Holiday Gift to You... For Real

Tom Hennen has a line in his poem, The Life of a Day, that says,

“We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, ‘no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for,’ and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real.”

That line is a little bit frightening because you read it and realize you’re guilty. You’ve been waiting for that day when your life will start “for real.”

The trouble with life is that it’s just so daily.

I share this with you because I’ve been thinking about my two grandfathers who are dead and my father who is likewise and I’ve come to the obvious conclusion:

Live while you have the chance.

“Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home…”
- The Temptations, 1971

In the final moments of his life, my father scribbled a note for me to find. In barely legible pencil he scrawled, “All the little things in life add up to your life. If you don't get it right then nothing else matters. It gets lonely in the promised land by yourself.”

My Dad died lonely, I think, because he never made deep commitments. My father’s confession of his loneliness makes me sad, but his scribbled note tells me he wanted me to learn from his mistake.

I meet a lot of people who sigh deeply and say they’re looking for their passion, something to set their souls on fire and send beams of light shining out through their eyes.

But the people with light shining from their eyes know this:

Passion does not produce commitment.
Commitment produces passion.

Solomon, that wise king, spent years of his life searching for passion. In chapter 9 of the chronicle of that search, the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.”

People read that and think Solomon is saying, "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die," but that's not it at all. He's saying, "Throw your whole heart into whatever you do. Live while you have the chance."

This is my Holiday gift to you,
I hope you will receive it:

Find something that needs to be done
and throw yourself headlong into it.

Let today
be the day
your life begins
for real.

Roy H. Williams

"May you live all the days of your life."
- Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels

Shared with you by:
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows MArketing
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
A cause that is dear to me: http://saveourshelteranimals.org/
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Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-11-09T10:56:00.000-08:00

What Do Your Customers Care About?
Peg the Needle on the Relevance Meter If You Want to See Results

Ads are often written under the assumption that we can get people to care about things they don’t really care about. But this approach rarely succeeds.

Traditional ad-think says:

1. Target the right people
2. Leverage the right media (visual media for visual products, etc.)
3. Use creativity in delivering your message.

But nontraditional ad-think gets far better results:

1. What you say matters most of all. Speak to a felt need. Good advertising isn’t about the product or the company that sells it. Good ads explain how the customer’s life will be different.
EXAMPLE:
Don’t say, “Dr. Bill Dipweasel was voted gentlest dentist in Saginaw County.”
Say, “Get your teeth fixed. You’ll be more attractive and your confidence will skyrocket. People will treat you differently.”

2. How you say it is critical. Clarity is more important than creativity. Talk like people. People don’t say, “I’ve elected to have cosmetic dentistry.” They say, “I’ve decided to get my teeth fixed.” (Dr. Bill Dipweasel will give you push-back on this because he doesn’t think “get your teeth fixed” sounds professional. Also, he wants the ad to be about him.)

3. Deliver your message using whatever media offers the best psychological environment. In what moments would a candidate for cosmetic dentistry be most open to the message we crafted about being treated differently?

Advertising works best when it speaks to what customers already care about. This is called “speaking to a felt need.” I've never met anyone that's had a secret, unmet desire to go to the dentist. But tens of millions of us secretly wish we were more attractive, more confident, and that people treated us differently. Capiche?

Good ads aren’t about the company that’s paying for the ad. Good ads are about the reader, the listener, the viewer of the ad. This is especially true when writing classified ads for employment.

A man attending a class at Wizard Academy confessed that, working part time, he had made more than $850,000 in employee placement fees as the direct result of a single chapter he had read in my second book. I congratulated him on having had the perception to recognize the potential in that chapter.

Last week I received an email about that same chapter in my second book from William, an Acadgrad living in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Dear Roy,

I received an email from my business partner (Thatcher) earlier today, telling me that we had found the perfect applicant for an opening we have in our company. I crafted the job ad based on one of your chapters in the second Wizard of Ads book.

This is what I replied to him: "She's perfect. The Wizard of Ads is a genius, and this girl is just what we want, don't you think? I mention the Wizard because I used an article of his on writing job ads for that one. He said the person we were looking for would recognise themselves in the ad, and we wouldn't be swamped with tedious junky mass-applications. And indeed that's what happened."

So thank you, Roy, for all your amazing free advice; I have yet to meet this girl, but judging by the application, I think she should fit in well.

Eternally gratefully yours,

William

That chapter, by the way, is called "Writing Classified Ads for Employment." It's chapter 76 in a 101-chapter book called Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Here's an example of the strange type of classified ad that always gets superior results.

William, I'm glad you found the perfect employee. I look forward to your next visit to Austin.

Yours,

Roy H. Williams

Shared by:
Sincerely,
Shannon A English
Account Manager
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
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Fastsigns Helps with Event Planning

2009-11-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

Event Planning

Let FASTSIGNS® be your reliable source for complete event planning advice and information. Here our tradeshow experts have compiled a wide variety of resources to help you plan, market, and create displays, goals and budgets for your next tradeshow. From pre-tradeshow planning to exhibit setup and takedown, we hope you’ll find everything you need to succeed.

* Tradeshows
* Tradeshow Goals
* At the Tradeshow
* After the Tradeshow
* Tradeshow Graphics Checklist

Shannon A English
Account Manager
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
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Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-11-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

The Booty Call Incident
Big Brother is Alive and Well

My son’s cell phone rang. He answered, “Hello?”

“I’d like to speak to Booty Williams, please.”

“This is Booty.”

[long pause] “Is your name really Booty Williams?”

“That’s right. Booty Call Williams.”

“That’s awesome.”

The call was from a telemarketing firm that had purchased my son’s contact information from a magazine to which he had subscribed. My son is among the millions of Americans who see questionnaires as an opportunity to create prize-winning fiction.

That incident happened 14 years ago, yet Pennie and I continue to receive mail addressed to Booty C. Williams. Booty’s evidently-Irish twin brother, Shenanigans Williams, also resides at our address.

According to the data purchased by the telemarketers, Booty and Shenanigans are both are highly educated and incredibly wealthy.

I finally signed up on Facebook. Sort of. Do you remember giving Facebook your cell phone number? In return for giving it up to them, you no longer had to type those twisted, hard-to-read security words, proving that you were a person and not a computer. Call me paranoid, call me crotchety, call me Rod Wilson (Facebook does,) but don’t call me on my cell phone. I trust the privacy policy of Facebook about as far as I can kick a watermelon.

I will, therefore, continue to type those twisted security words, thereby proving that I, Rod Wilson, am a person (albeit an imaginary one,) and not a computer! God bless America.

What happens in Vegas no longer stays in Vegas.

In the futuristic society described by George Orwell in his book, 1984, everyone is under constant surveillance by the authorities. Citizens are reminded of this by the phrase "Big Brother is watching you." Immediately upon publication of that book in 1949, the term "Big Brother" entered into general usage to describe any overly-inquisitive or overly-controlling authority figure or attempts by the government to increase surveillance.

Friend, Big Brother is alive and well. And he is us.

Who needs private investigators and background checks when you can gather eyewitness accounts, signed confessions and photographic evidence with just a few clicks?

Kirsten Valle writes, “The line between private and work lives is blurring in an era where blogs, social networking sites and party photo sites are increasingly popular. Employers are scanning the Internet for information on job applicants and even checking up on existing employees. Companies worry about photos showing drug or alcohol abuse, racially offensive comments and revealing clothing – anything that could damage a company's reputation.”

People are losing their jobs and their marriages because of things that are posted on social media websites.

On a more positive note, I mentioned in last week’s memo that Twitter and Facebook had lifted online research to a whole new level. Here’s a bit of Twitter eavesdropping I did – without even meaning to – while researching Facebook’s highly touted, hyper-targetable online ads:

RT @danmartell: Facebook has a crazy awesome TARGETED ad platform. If you don't use it - you're kind of crazy! http://www.facebook.com/ads

Drewmack responded:

Facebook ads are a great way to invest your ad $ if you aren't one of those people who care about results. http://bit.ly/2Nb50q

That link provided by Drewmack proved interesting. You should click it later.

Advertisers are hungry for trackable, direct-response “cause and effect” advertising. Deep down, their fantasy is to be able to say, “Every time I spend (x) dollars on advertising, I make (x) dollars in profit.” Advertisers like to think of advertising as a giant gumball machine: “You put in your ad budget, you crank the handle, and out come the results."

And advertising salespeople have convinced most advertisers that "reaching the right people is the key."

But success is more often determined by how you crank the handle.

Specifically:

(1.) How relevant is your message?
Are you talking about what people actually care about, or only what you wish they would care about?

(2.) In what psychological environment was your message delivered?

EXAMPLE 1: Everyone knows that more people listen to the radio during morning drive than at any other time during the day. But people during morning drive are thinking about what awaits them at work. It’s during the drive home that they’re thinking about what awaits them at home. Consequently, radio ads tend to work better during afternoons and evenings.

EXAMPLE 2: Facebook ads allow you to target with laser-like precision the customer profiles you want to reach. But you’ll get better results with keyword-targeted Google adwords because Google ads appear when the imperfect customer is in looking-for-answers mode. Facebook ads appear when the perfect customer is in connecting-with-friends, wasting-time mode.

I realize it’s counterintuitive, but “When” is often more important than “Who.”

Quit looking for the right people. Instead, dig deep for a message worth shouting from the housetops. You'll be surprised how many people become the right people when you finally begin saying the right thing.

Roy H. Williams

Source: file:///C:/DOCUME~1/EZ-PCC~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/fcctemp/Attach0%202.html

Shannon A English
Account Manager
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english
XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/blog/shannonenglish
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Services of Fastsigns...

2009-10-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.fastsigns.com/Services.aspx

All-Inclusive Business Sign Services
Rely on FASTSIGNS® for comprehensive sign and graphic services. By making the most of the latest technologies, we can design, create and install virtually any type of sign. From concept to completion®, we streamline the sign buying process for you with:

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•Signs in any size and on virtually any surface or material, including vinyl, wood, windows, walls and vehicles
•Versatility to handle any sign project, large or small—from day-to-day signs to major, multi-site projects
•Fast, easy online tools—including our web site, high-speed file transfer, request for quote and web proofing
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Monday Morning memo - Social Media - Right up our ally...

2009-10-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Social Media: Myth or Miracle?

Back when I was an advertising salesman, business owners would often dismiss me by saying, “I believe in word-of-mouth.” Then with a smug, self-satisfied look, they’d say it again, as though the words made them feel fine and righteous. “Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.”

I almost opened The Word-of-Mouth Advertising Agency in 1984. My plan was to hire people to ride up and down in elevators of tall buildings and say things like, “Have you tried that new café over on Third Street? I hear it’s really good.”

My fantasy response was to say to business owners, “You believe in word-of-mouth? Great! That’s what I sell!”

Today you can invest in a form of quasi-advertising similar to my elevator plan. We hear about it everywhere we go: “Social media is the new marketing.”

But it isn't true.

I just now googled “social media marketing” and clicked the uppermost link. It opens with these words writ large: “(CompanyName) creates and leads powerful social media campaigns that will intelligently rocket your traffic, promote your brand and grow leads and sales with maximize (sic) ROI to give you a feeling of power and importance in the marketplace.”

Really? You’re going to intelligently rocket my traffic and give me feelings of power and importance? Can you add a little something to my biceps while you're at it? (That made me sound petulant, didn’t it? I’m sorry. HypeWeasels bring out the worst in me.)

Lest you think me out of touch, let me remind you that I accurately predicted the impact of social media in my "40-Year Pendulum of Society" presentation in December 2003, long before Facebook, MySpace and Twitter came into being. In January, 2004, I made the same presentation in Stockholm, Sweden, to the great advertising agencies of Europe. From there I took it to Sydney, Australia, then on to Canada and the United States.

Social media is not "the new marketing."

Now before you get all worked up and send me an email explaining why you respectfully disagree, give me a moment to share my definitions for 3 commonly used terms: (I've learned over the years that many disagreements revolve around the lack of any definition of terms.)

1. Advertising is what you buy from the sales department of any media.
2. Public Relations are what you get for free from the news department of any media.
3. Social media is word-of-mouth empowered by internet and cell phone technologies.
(Based on these definitions, the purchase of targeted ads on Facebook would be classified as advertising, not as social media.)

REUTERS – Oct 8, 2009: “Three-quarters of small businesses say they have not found sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn helpful for generating business leads or expanding business in the past year, according to a survey conducted for Citibank Small Business of 500 U.S. businesses with fewer than 100 employees.”

If you haven't yet invested a few hundred hours in a social media campaign for your business, let REUTERS and me save you the time: Three-quarters of the businesses who have tried it were disappointed in the results. (except for me I guess, I get lots of leads and orders from Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn. Haven't gotton much from Myspace & Twitter though. - Shannon)

Are there business examples of success using social media? Of course there are:

1. Using Twitter, businesses are building lists of bargain hunters who want to be the first to know about new offerings. Announce a highly desirable product at a highly desirable price - or free - and you can draw quite a crowd. But that’s always been true, hasn’t it?

2. Barack Obama’s skillful use of social media helped propel him to the presidency. His secret? From the beginnings of their campaigns, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both sending tweets on Twitter. The difference is that when Obama had 44,596 subscribers following his tweets, he was following 46,252 others. Hillary was following no one. Imagine how those 46,252 people felt: “Hillary Clinton wants me to hear her opinions. Barack Obama wants to hear my opinions.”

3. Feasibility studies are hugely enhanced by social media. A single question, “Who likes the flavor of bacon?” resulted in 35,000 possible customers, 10,000 inquiries and 3,500 sales of Bacon Salt.

4. Entertainment has always triggered word-of-mouth. People will stand in the lobby and text their opinions to their friends before ever leaving the theater. Hollywood studios are realizing that opening day is the only day that can be helped by advertising. After that, the movie's future is in the hands of the viewers. Are you in the entertainment business?

Bottom Line:

1. Not every business is equally suited to leverage social media.
2. Many businesses are jumping onto the social media bandwagon without understanding the limitations of the vehicle.
3. Social media is not a replacement for advertising.
4. The most universal benefit of social media is that you can search your own company name (on Facebook, etc.) and find out what's being said about you.
5. The business benefits of social media often fall short of an acceptable return on the time invested.
6. Create ecstatically happy customers and they’ll spread the word through social media. Create disgruntled customers and they’ll spread bad word even faster.
7. Focus your attention on your customers. Social media will take care of itself.
Now go get ready for Christmas.

Roy H. Williams
PS - If you think social media might provide a marketing miracle for you, here's my advice: Search for success stories. Ignore the philosophical treatises, the detailed conceptual explanations and the myriad articles containing tips and advice about how to use it. Look for detailed stories of how actual people have actually used social media to trigger the kinds of results you need. I believe you'll find, as I have, that most of the success stories fall squarely into the 4 categories of success I've listed above.

I love this guy! :) I have subscribed to his Monday Morning Memo for quite some time now and shared it as well. I think he always has some great information to share and has taught me a thing or two. Hope you enjoy the information brought to you by Roy H. Williams. You can go to his website at: http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/?ShowMe=Home
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And just so you know I have had a lot of sucess with social media over the last few years. That being said Roy is absolutly right, it can not be your only form of advertisememnt. It is never wise to throw all your eggs into just any one basket. Use several types of marketing techniques to help your business grow. I always recommend great signs, promotional items and business cards. Also talk to your local radio representtives, news papers and send out some direct mailing pieces. Look about budgeting for a commercial as well. All these things can help grow your business. And through great service and a great product, word of mouth can also help you a lot.
Shannon A English ~ Your Creative Services Friend!
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

www.fastsigns/304 - when contacting me through our website please put attention Shannon English in your notes.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

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FASTSIGNS® sends local children to Farm

2009-10-19T11:13:00.001-07:00

Posted on October 19, 2009 by FASTSIGNS
With this blog we enjoy highlighting the various projects that our FASTSIGNS® centers participate in or help benefit, especially those that are outside of the typical sign and graphics realm. A perfect example is the FASTSIGNS center in Sheffield, England, which recently sent a group of children to the Whirlow Farm Trust for two days of hands-on farm life experience.

This is not the first time the center has helped send local children to the farm—FASTSIGNS of Sheffield is a member of the ‘480 Club’ which coordinates donations from local businesses with visits for local schools. The Club especially targets schools that are in special needs groups, or where more than 25% of children receive free school meals.

In October, 12 children from Woodhouse West Primary School spent two nights at the farm, courtesy of FASTSIGNS of Sheffield. While there the students learned about animal care and carried out regular farm jobs such as feeding goats, collecting eggs and grooming the horses.

http://fastsigns2542highlander.wordpress.com/

“We’re especially pleased that Woodhouse West Primary has benefited because we know that ecology, food and green issues are hot topics for the staff and pupils there,” explained Paul Allison, owner of FASTSIGNS of Sheffield.

“This is the second group of children from our school to benefit thanks to FASTSIGNS’ support. The children love staying at the farm.” said John Bennett, Head Teacher at Woodhouse West Primary. “We don’t have the resources for special trips like this so everyone’s thrilled that we’ve had this opportunity.”

What can your business do to help people in the community?

Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
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Monday Morning Memo

2009-10-19T11:10:00.001-07:00

Trigger Emotions with Light and Color
A tiny bit technical, but extremely valuable.

In 1869, Monet was painting at La Grenouillere when he realized that the color of an object is modified:

1. by the light in which it is seen,
2. by reflections from other objects, and
3. by contrast with juxtaposed colors.

Monet translated his observations into the glowing phenomenon we know as French Impressionism.

Remember: “The color of an object is modified by the light in which it is seen.”

Sunlight contains the full spectrum of visible light waves. When full-spectrum light falls on an object, the pigments in that object absorb (subtract) all the light waves except the ones you see. An orange appears orange because the orange light alone is not absorbed, but reflected back to your eyes.

The primaries of Subtractive Color Theory (reflected light) are red, yellow and blue. This is useful when mixing paints, pigments and ink. CMYK is Cyan (blue) Magenta (red) Yellow (yellow) and K (black.)

So why do televisions and computers have adjustments for red, green and blue? What happened to the yellow?

Projected light doesn’t use pigments, but creates color by adding light waves together. Red light and green light combine to make yellow light. Go figure.

The primaries of Additive Color Theory are Red, Green and Blue. (Click the thumbnail of the RGB wheel to see enlarged RGB and CMYK color wheels along with a short, introductory video on color relationships.)

Pennie and I met Nathan Bludworth while we were climbing a mountain of boxes at a wholesale electrical supply company whose owner had skipped town. If we could just figure out what we needed for the academy's new tower, we could buy it from the landlord for pennies on the dollar. But we had no idea what we needed.

Noticing our confusion, Nathan - the only other customer in the place - said, "Do you guys need some help?"

He looked friendly enough and he seemed to know what he was doing, so I blurted it out. "There's a certain kind of light above the tables at Houston's Restaurant that put a pool of light on each tabletop, but leave the chairs mostly in the dark. Those lights create an an amazing atmosphere we've never seen anywhere else. We're just trying to figure out how they did it."

Nathan smiled and stuck out his hand. "I'm Nathan Bludworth. I designed and installed the lights at Houston's."

Nathan Bludworth paints with light, just like Monet painted with color.

The Color Rendering Index (CRI) measures color rendering from light sources with respect to natural sunlight. Natural sunlight equals 100 CRI, the best light available. So the closer the CRI number is to 100, the more closely colors will appear as they do in sunlight. Lights with the highest CRI numbers produce the clearest, most vibrant and natural-looking colors.

Electric lights can vary in “color temperature” between 2,000 degrees Kelvin (warm) and 9,500 degrees Kelvin (cold.) Low-temperature lighting is progressively warmer (more red/yellow), while high-temperature lighting grows progressively colder (more blue). Natural sunlight – 100 CRI – is 5,000 degrees Kelvin.

If the light contains no red wavelengths, the objects on which that light shines will not be able to reflect red back to your eyes...

Monet was right. “The color of an object is modified by the light in which it is seen.”

By using different bulbs – 2700 K, 3500 K, 5000 K and 6400 K - and shining them from different angles, Nathan Bludworth makes nature dance and glow and change colors as you move through it.

Nathan is one of those people that Wizard Academy Cognoscenti call, “our brand of crazy.”

You might meet Nathan during your next trip to Wizard Academy. If you're lucky, he'll teach you how to use light to give your customers whatever feelings you want them to have.

Do we have the coolest business school in the world, or what?

Roy H. Williams

Shared by Shannon English of Fastsigns Topeka 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com
Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
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Monday Morning Memo

2009-10-12T08:01:00.001-07:00

Competitive Environment

1. “How good am I?” is the second question that every business owner must answer. “How good are my competitors?” is the first.

Like it or not, your competitors set the height of the bar you must jump. The key to success? Choose a town with weak competitors. I’ve met heavyweight businesspeople who would be featherweights in any town but their own.

It’s a weary old saying, but true, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

2. Choose the right town, then choose the right location in that town. Expensive rent is often the cheapest advertising money can buy.

Last week I wrote, “The person who selects a company’s inventory is the most important person in that company.” The second most important person? The one who chooses the locations of the company's stores.

Sell the right stuff at the right price from the right location and the job of the ad writer gets incredibly easy.

3. Want to make money, really big money? It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence.

"Do not be fooled into believing that because a man is rich he is necessarily smart. There is ample proof to the contrary."
- Julius Rosenwald (Rosenwald wasn’t a poor man taking a cheap shot at the rich. He grew Sears Roebuck from $750,000 in annual sales to more than $50,000,000 during the first 12 years of his leadership, 100 years ago.)

Paul Graham invests in startup businesses. “We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed. It makes a better story that a company ‘won’ because its founders were so smart. The PR people and reporters who spread such stories probably believe the stories themselves. But while it certainly helps to be smart, it's not the deciding factor. There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing.”

4. Making money is easy:

1. Sell what people want to buy
2. Offer it at an attractive price
3. Occupy a high-visibility location
4. Wave your arms and draw a crowd
I’ve never seen it fail.

(Sounds simple, right? If you try it and bloody your nose, come to Wizard Academy. We'll teach you how to avoid walking into walls.)

Roy H. Williams

A Sign Makeover that will Floor You

2009-10-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

Posted on September 22, 2009 by FASTSIGNS
“What do your signs say about you?” That is a question that we at FASTSIGNS® often ask. Too many times a business’s signs say the wrong thing, or don’t say enough, about the products or services offered.

Recently, FASTSIGNS® provided sign and graphic makeovers to several small businesses. In the case of a California floor retailer that received one of these sign makeovers from FASTSIGNS of Culver City, their current signs simply weren’t working hard enough.

Prior to their new signs and graphics, the staff at Carpets Direct were used to hearing patrons say, “I didn’t even know you were here—have you been at this location long?” Now, according to owner Max Doheny, they are noticing more customers coming in and clients are more informed about what Carpets Direct offers.

The sign makeover consisted of vivid, attention-getting window graphics applied to the store-front windows. Not only do the new graphics more accurately portray the modern, fresh image of the retailer, but they outline the different flooring services offered. Now when passersby look at the windows of Carpets Direct, it is crystal clear what services and products are offered.

Contact SHannon English to update your signage! 785-383-8139 Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Business cards are offered in a variety of sizes and finishes which are printed on premium card stock. Your customers will be impressed with the vibrant, accurate colors and the lasting impression the business cards will leave. LOW PRICE 2" x 3.5" 16PT Business Cards UV on Full Color on one side or two sides. 1000 for $81 ~ 2500 for $130 ~ 5000 for $171 Doing a tradeshow? You do not want to run out of business cards! Contact Shannon English 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com We can design a new card or match an existing card! And I ship anywhere in the United States!
Postcards are printed on premium quality card stock. Use postcards to reach new markets, maintain contact with customers, or thank and reward loyal customers. Production time 6 Business Days after Proof is approved. 1000 for $144.12 ~ 2500 for $232.7...

100% USA-made custom silicone wristbands. Our bracelets are made from 100% silicone so they are stronger and more durable than regular rubber bracelets. The design is deeply debossed (melted into the material), allowing for high precision and detail. We can use your provided graphic and/or text and apply it to your choice of colors! 785-383-8139 ~40 for $2.00ea ~ 300 for $1.25ea ~ 500 for $0.95 ea ~ 1000 for $0.75 ea ~ Available Colors: Black; Blue; Forest Green; Green; Hot Pink; Light Blue; Lime Green; Maroon; Navy; Orange; Pink; Purple; Red; Turquoise; White; Yellow ~ Contact Shannon for more details! Product # CSB-1

It’s that time again… order your calendars for 2010 to give to your customers! We have several styles to choose from Landscapes of America, North American Wildlife, and Dream Girls 200 for $1.05 ea order 1000 get them for $0.99 ea. Super Cars are 200 for $1.29 or 1000 for $1.24 ea. No Set up Charge! Contact Shannon to get your Calendars! 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

We do custom Christmas cards for home or office. You can have pictures of your staff or family. We also do signatures of all your staff so you do not have to sit and sign each card. With unique attributes printed on the highest quality paper, Greeting Cards can be the perfect thank you cards, birthday cards, Christmas cards and an invitation to your grand opening or party. With limitless possibilities get the word out there with these remarkable Greeting Cards. 5" X 7" (when folded) Greeting Cards on 100LB Gloss Cover with NO AQ, Scoring Included. ~ 100 for $152.76 ~ 250 for $237.62 ~ 500 for $309.08 ~ 1000 for $490.52 Production time is approx 8 days after proof is approved. Let us custom design your next card! Always contact Shannon English 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Complete your business package with 70lb Premium Uncoated Text letterhead. They are printed on bright white, heavy bond paper. All Letterhead stock is 10% recycled and Green Seal Certified. 8.5" X 11" LETTERHEAD on 70lb Premium Uncoated Text ~ 500 sheets for $217.36 ~ 1000 sheets for $256.72 ~ 2500 sheets for $482.44 ~ 5000 sheets for 534.88 ~Always contact Shannon English for the best prices on all your promotional needs! 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW Updated 10/20/2008:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=531794ab.pbw
Learn about businesses who have the reputation for being the THE BEST because they strive to be THE BEST! http://www.innovativenetworkinggroup.com/
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Monday Morning Memo - Turn Turn Turn

2009-10-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

Turn, Turn, Turn
The Mark of a Remarkable Business

Business midgets focus on profit margin, “I can sell these for double my cost!” But business giants focus on turn, “How many more would I sell if I lowered my price?”

Retailers call it “inventory turn.” Restaurateurs call it “table turn.” Either way, it’s a measurement of how efficiently a business uses its assets.

Inventory turn tells the retailer how many times he sold and replaced his inventory over a period of time. Table turn tells the restaurateur how many times he emptied and filled his restaurant during a single mealtime.

Turn is Sales divided by Inventory.

Bob and Samantha are competitors. Bob makes a 100 percent markup on everything he sells. Samantha adds only a 50 percent markup. Which of them has the better business?

Your instincts tell you Bob makes more money but actually, it’s Samantha.

Bob carries an average inventory of 6 million dollars and sells each of his items an average of once a year at twice the price he paid for it: 12 million dollars in sales with an annual gross profit of 6 million dollars. Bob “turned” his inventory once.

Samantha carries an average inventory of just 1 million dollars. She sells and replaces each item an average of 12 times a year, adding only a 50 percent markup each time. Samantha does 18 million dollars in sales and her annual gross profit is 6 million dollars, exactly the same as Bob’s.

But Samantha turned her inventory 12 times.

Both retailers made 6 million dollars but Bob is slowly going broke. Samantha is quickly becoming rich and powerful.

Bob invests 6 million to make a gross profit of 6 million a year. This means Bob has to make a 6 million dollar investment every time he wants to open a new store. And Bob’s inventory is getting out-of-date because he has to sit on it for a whole year before he can replace it. This problem compounds itself each year.

Samantha invests just 1 million dollars to make 6 million. She can open a new store with just a million dollars invested in inventory. But wait, it gets better.

Bob bought only 6 million dollars worth of product last year. Samantha bought 12 million. And Samantha is opening new stores. Lots of them. This is what makes Samantha powerful. Soon the suppliers will be charging Samantha lower prices than they charge Bob because Samantha is a much better customer. And the suppliers will give her 90 days to pay but Bob must continue paying immediately.

Do you realize what just happened? Not only can Samantha open a new store with an investment of just 1 million dollars in inventory, she can sell that inventory for 1.5 million dollars each month for 3 months – putting a total of 4.5 million into her bank account – before she has to pay the first million dollars for the first month’s inventory. This leaves 3.5 million dollars sitting in Samantha’s bank account, allowing her to inventory 3 new stores, each of which will be able to fund 3 additional stores in just 90 days.

Samantha has opened 12 stores in just 6 months. If she keeps it up, she’ll have 432 stores at the end of the year. And Samantha started with just 1 million dollars in inventory while Bob started with 6 million.

Bob likes to boast that he offers “6 times the selection,” but the public knows Bob charges $100 for the same item Samantha sells for just $75.

Care to make a guess how this is going to turn out?

The moral of the story is this: you can’t get a high inventory turn without offering the public what they really want. In my opinion, the person who selects a company’s inventory is the most important person in that company. I could be wrong.

But I don't think so.

Roy H. Williams

Wizard Academy is a nontraditional business school. To understand what we mean by nontraditional, just Google “inventory turn” and compare the dozens of definitions you’ll find to the one we’ve offered above.

We’ll see you when you get here. - RHW

https://wizardacademy.org/scripts/default.asp

Monday Morning Memo

2009-10-05T09:44:00.001-07:00

Wealth

Every life has a scoreboard and how you choose to keep score is up to you.

How are you measuring success?

I’ve known men and women who measure success by their ability to attract the opposite sex. You’ve met these people, too, haven’t you?

Some people measure success by their ability to inflict pain in the lives of others. Bullies, vandals, website hackers, internet virus creators and bad policemen are tragic examples. The fact that they momentarily control our time, emotions and energy gives them a perverted sense of power. I know of no cure for this sickness.

And then there are the many who measure success by the acquisition of things that cost money. I think this definition covers most of us.

John Steinbeck gave us a way to identify the scoreboard we’re using to measure our success. All one needs to do is ask oneself, “What are my plans for the future?”

“A rich life is rich in plans. If they don't come off, they are still a little bit realized. If they do, they may be disappointing. That's why a trip described becomes better the greater the time between the trip and the telling. I believe too that if you can know a man's plans, you know more about him than you can in any other way."
– John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

Today I submit these additional measurements of success for your consideration:

1. Am I sufficiently curious?
“Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
– Albert Einstein

2. How little do I need to be happy?
“It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor.”
- Seneca the younger, (3BC-65AD)

3. Have I proven that I care?
"That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger."
– Aimee Bender, from her short story, Tiger Mending

4. How many lives have I made better today?
“In a completely rational society, teachers would be at the tip of the pyramid, not near the bottom. In that society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. The job of passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor anyone could have.”
– Lee Iacocca, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? p. 217

Are you satisfied with the scoreboard you’ve been using to measure success? Remember, you alone get to choose. To measure success according to a scoreboard thrust upon you by another is tantamount to psychic slavery.

Don’t be anyone’s slave. Measure success by your own scoreboard. The point of today’s memo is to encourage you to choose your scoreboard consciously rather than unconsciously.

When you’ve identified your personal scoreboard, come to Wizard Academy and we’ll help you run up the score.

Roy H. Williams

Sticky pads, Note Pads & Pen Specials - Great Prices Contact Shannon 785-383-8139 Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

2009-09-23T07:20:00.001-07:00

Maximize your 4 to 6 seconds to get someone's attention and make a great impression

2009-09-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

You only have a few seconds to grab a passerby's attention (1). FASTSIGNS® can help you add a "wow" factor to your presentations, exhibits and displays with signs and graphics that effectively communicate who you are and what you do.

Did you know that adding photos to your exhibit can enhance attendee recall by 26% (2)?

Whether you need a portable table top display, a banner stand, a panel display or a pop-up, FASTSIGNS® can help you get noticed.

Discover how FASTSIGNS® combines technology with innovative ideas to solve your unique presentation challenges. Contact us today to find out how.

Shannon A English 785-383-8139 Shannon.English@fastsigns.com
Our Website: http://www.fastsigns.com/304 Please put attention Shanon on anything you send through teh website. Thank you!

You know FASTSIGNS® as your quality source for "Sign & Graphic Solutions Made Simple®" - we're also your best source for trade show displays and graphics.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We've created this on-line Trade show Learning Center to help make your next exhibit more memorable and productive. Browse these pages at your convenience and make use of any information you find. Many of the pages and worksheets shown here can be printed to hardcopy or downloaded directly to your own computer.

http://www.fastsigns.com/trade-show-displays.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Benefits of Exhibiting

Trade show selling can work for any company and can be used to:
Produce immediate, at-the-show sales.
Generate low-cost, high-quality sales inquiries.
Successfully launch new products or services.
Improve and extend your company's image.
Keep you in touch with customers.
Provide valuable insight on your competition.
Support your overall sales and marketing goals.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call on FASTSIGNS®! 785-383-8139 Shannon English Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

For a free consultation on trade show exhibits and graphics, visit your local FASTSIGNS® store center. (Make an appointment with Shannon English)

2009-09-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

Contact Shannon English to order your bag!
785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

CrAzY pEn SaLe

2009-09-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

To order your promotional pen contact Shannon English:
785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Monday Morning Memo - How to make money.

2009-09-21T08:17:00.000-07:00

How to Make Money

If it takes money to make money, how does one make money when he has no money at the start?

A person without capital has nothing to leverage but his or her time. This is why millions of Americans wear the handcuffs of hourly wages.

When I was 14, my life sold for $1.60 an hour. At 18, an hour in the life of Roy H. Williams was selling for three dollars and thirty-five cents. People all around me talked about “the security of a steady paycheck” as though steady and unchanging were a good thing.

But I found a way of escape.

"There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls."
– Howard Thurman (1900-1981)

If you want to slip the handcuffs of hourly wages, you must figure out how to be paid according to your accomplishments. “How long did it take?” isn’t the question you want to answer, but rather, “What is the value of my achievement?”

People paid by the hour are paid for their activities. People paid royalties, license fees, or sales commissions are paid for their accomplishments.

Average people are average because they cling to an avoidance of discomfort. There is a truth – a profound, 4-word truth – known to every successful person: “Pain is my friend.”

Pain is an informant, a sentinel, a lookout blowing a bugle. Pain tells us when something is wrong and indicates the location of the problem.

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr

“Mediocrity has a way of keeping demons from the door.” - Marie Arana

Comfort leads to complacency. Solomon spoke of the dangers of going with the flow when he said,

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”

Solomon followed that statement with an immediate, sharp contrast:

“The laborer's appetite works for him; his hunger drives him on.” (Proverbs 16:25-26)

Wait a minute. Solomon warns us the direction most easily taken - "going with the flow" - is a road that leads to nowhere. Hunger, according to Solomon, is your ally.

For what do you hunger?
Are you willing to risk embarrassment?
Financial loss?
Damage to your reputation?
Let your hunger lead you. Let it drive you on.

People stay in the box because it’s safe there. And then they talk about needing to think “outside the box.”

“There be tigers outside the box, matey. And ogres and monsters and people who might laugh at ye. Are ye sure ye be wantin’ out o’ that box?”

I have no idea where that pirate came from.

Here, after much rambling, are my points:
1. The times cry out for change.
2. We know change is needed because we feel pain.
3. Change makes us uneasy because we cannot see the future.
4. Financial death is the destination of those who refuse to change.

If you have no problems, if you feel no pain, carry on. Good job. Well done. As you were.

If you need to make changes but you’re not sure what to change, when to change it, or how to implement that change, consider a trip to Austin to spend a day with the Wizards.

Change opens the door to a brighter future.

Are you willing?

Roy H. Williams
______________________________________________________________________________
Shannon A English
ACCOUNT MANAGER / FASTSIGNS
785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

UK FASTSIGNS® Joins in Welcome of Local Champion

2009-09-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

Jessica Ennis, the 23-year-old heptathlete from Sheffield, recently won Britain’s first-ever World Championship heptathlon gold medal at the 12th IAAF World Championships Athletics, held in Berlin.

The entire city of Sheffield proudly welcomed her home with celebration. Joining in, FASTSIGNS of Sheffield made sure to hang special banners in Jessica’s honor. From a local highway bridge, to the outside of the Sheffield sign and graphic center, the colorful banners sport a photo of Jessica in victory, and congratulating her success.

“Jessica’s achievements mean a lot to the people of Sheffield,” explained Paul Allison, owner of the FASTSIGNS in Sheffield. “We wanted to give her a warm welcome home on behalf of the whole community.”

The webiste for Monday Morning memo...

2009-09-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Hello, each week I post a blog about the Monday Mormning memo with Roy Williams. Great stuff he writes and sends out to all that wish to read. I realized on my google blog, that it does not share the links to his page, so I wanted to share that information with you today.

http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/?ShowMe=Home

Thank you for reading my blog, have a great week!

Sincerely,
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows Markleting
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english
XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/blog/shannonenglish
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/
My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/

Mondat Morning Memo ~ Urban Legends about teh internet... Good Read

2009-09-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Problem Solved
After 4 Years of Fighting It
Did you recently – finally – begin to receive the Monday Morning Memo after having subscribed some time ago? We’ve been trying to get it to you, really we have, but the internet gods have not been kind to us.

We've known for 4 years that thousands of you have been unable to receive the Monday Morning Memo through no fault of your own.

Today I’ll tell you how we gained the gods’ good graces. Perhaps we found answers you can use.

If you manage a business, two things are certain:
1. You have someone in your life you consider to be an expert in all things internet.
2. That person doesn’t know nearly as much as you think they do.

You and I (and most other people) believe urban legends about the internet because the legends make perfect sense. Here are a few we were told:

“The ISPs have you blacklisted. You need to get white-listed.”
Reality: We never found an ISP that maintains a list of any color. Email rejections are based on codes within an ISP’s system and are mostly automatic and unmonitored. The ISPs rejecting us didn’t know they were rejecting us.

“Someone turned you in as a spammer to one of the SpamCop services.”
Reality: Never in 15 years have we sent an unsolicited email. Nonetheless, to keep an enthusiastic subscriber from adding a friend’s address without that friend’s permission, we implemented a double opt-in system 4 years ago to make it impossible to subscribe any address other than your own. Consequently, spam cops love us.

“Your emails contain too much promotional language.”
Reality: The language of our emails was not the problem.

“Your emails contain too many hyperlinks.”
Reality: The hyperlinks were not the problem.

“You’re using .jpg images. You need to switch to flash images.”
Reality: jpg images were not the problem.

“You need to use rotating servers.”
Reality: True spammers use this technique to periodically change identities. We were able to solve our problem without having to resort to this extreme technique.

Urban legends will keep you as confused as a termite in a yo-yo. My head was spinning. I felt like throwing up. I needed to find an outbound internet marketing tool similar to On Target, Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg’s inbound internet marketing tool that tells you exactly where the problems are on your website.

Jeff and Bryan were unaware of any such outbound tool. Likewise, Paul Boomer was unaware of any outbound tools. Dave Young, Jeff Sexton and Craig Arthur – along with the rest of my Wizard of Ads partners – had never heard of any concrete, outbound marketing tools.

When I tell you what the problem was, you’re going to say, “Of course, I could have told you that.” But hindsight is 20/20. The truth, once revealed, is always simple.

If you think you know the answer, write it down. Seriously, write it down. The clearest memory is no match for pale ink. In a moment I’ll give you a link to the answer and you can compare it to your guess.

I’ve written New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling business books but I was powerless to solve my email dilemma until someone finally came along with a tool – a software system – for identifying and fixing email deliverability problems. BANG. Facts and details to the rescue. No hearsay. No guesswork. Problem solved.

I fell into the answer when Sean Taylor walked into my office and asked if he could buy the hot, new 1-page shopping cart for WizardAcademyPress.com. Sean said he’d been researching ecommerce software for a long time and the hands-down winner was from a New Zealand-based company called Interspire. I told Sean I wanted someone from Interspire to come and spend a few hours with us. Sean said I was being ridiculous; the software was only a few hundred dollars. I told him to make the call anyway.

“Your boss is being ridiculous,” the consultant said. “This software is only a few hundred dollars.”

Sean said, “I know, but I need you to ask your boss anyway.”

The CEO of Interspire – Eddie Machaalani – just happened to be visiting his U.S. sales office that day and when he heard his sales consultant telling his manager about my request, Eddie said, “I was in the audience when the Wizard of Ads came to Sydney, Australia, 5 years ago. I’ve always wanted to meet him. Ask this Sean fellow what day Mr. Williams would like us to be there.”

If you want to know our problem and its solution, click here.

If none of this has interested you, I promise to make it up to you in the rabbit hole. You can go there now by clicking the image of the beagle and the dice at the top of the page.

Aroo.

Roy H. Williams

2009-09-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

Boxes to Go – Sign Placement
Posted on November 14, 2008 by FASTSIGNS
There is a place in Dallas, TX just off of Hwy 75 where there is a Casket Store with a sign that reads Casket Store and right next to it is a restaurant with a sign that reads Boxes to Go. The first time I passed by this area, I couldn’t help but laugh. The placement of those two signs next to each other deserves a spot on Jay Leno.

Those two signs, side by side, certainly got my attention. So, let’s talk about more common methods of drawing attention to your signs.

Banners are an inexpensive way to keep your marketing fresh. Changing out your banner monthly can draw attention to the specials and services you are providing. How many times have you driven the same route every day? You typically become so familiar with the scenery, you probably don’t notice all of the signs you pass by, but when there is a change, such as a new banner, you will probably take notice. Consider talking with a sign expert at a FASTSIGNS® (http://www.fastsigns.com) center near you for other ideas on how to make your business signs more noticeable.

That is my sign tip for today. Have you seen any funny sign placements out there? If so, feel free to share Shannon.English@fastsigns.com.

When contacting Fastsigns, always ask for Shannon English 785-383-8139, I can't wait to help you on your next sign, promotional item or business card project! Ask me what else Fastsigns can do for you!

Sincerely,
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english
XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/blog/shannonenglish
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/
My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/

Monday Morning Memo ~Why Everyone Should Grow Up Poor

2009-09-08T08:37:00.001-07:00

Why Everyone Should Grow Up Poor
The 2009 Labor Day Message of the Wizard of Ads

When I was a boy, I noticed that people often remember things as having been better - or worse - than they really were. I would listen to friends and family and think, “That’s not what happened at all. I was there.”

Call me jaded, but I came to believe that the average American is mildly self-delusional, forever attempting to sculpt a reality that matches their view of the world.

"It is a wonder to see how, when a man greatly desires something and strongly attaches himself to it in his imagination, he has the impression at every moment that whatever he hears and sees argues in favor of that thing."
- Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566)
Most people believe, deep in their hearts, that wealthy people are happy and poor people are sad. Am I right? So one day when I was twelve, I looked at my circumstances - broken home, no father, no money, bad neighborhood - and realized that people in the future would assume I had an unhappy childhood. So I looked into a mirror and smiled as I said out loud, “Never let them convince you of it.”

Growing up poor gives you marvelous advantages. The people who love you are unable to hand you the things your friends take for granted, so you develop quick resourcefulness and humble audacity. Picking up pop bottles for the return deposit. Auctions. Auto salvages. Garage sales. Odd jobs. Bartering, trading, learning from your mistakes.

Resourcefulness and audacity. Priceless.

The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur is a recently published study of the personality traits of the founders of 549 high-growth companies. Funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and conducted by researchers from Duke University, USC and the University of Akron, the study found that 94 percent of those high-growth entrepreneurs came from middle-class, lower-middle-class, or “upper-lower-class” backgrounds.

Hah. Told you so.

Money, stability, and family connections will help you get into the best fraternities at the best schools. Then, if you’re lucky, you can graduate and go to work for someone who had the advantage of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks.

"I felt I would live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed…This is what happens to the overachieving but essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well on tests but failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition."
- Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library, p.5
Would you like to give your children the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition? Would you like to use your own spurs to climb the slippery mountain of Success?

I’ve spent the past 30 years working exclusively with self-made men and women; rule-breakers, innovators, rocket riders. Several of these have built empires worth tens of millions of dollars. They look like everyone else. But they don't think like everyone else.

Want to learn how high-growth entrepreneurs think? [ http://newsletter.mondaymorningmemo.com/click.php/e618576/h27/?id=1319 ]Come to our 3-day Bootstrap Business Boot Camp, Sept. 22-24. We've priced it cheap because you're not rich yet. (We're counting on you remembering the difference we made when you ride your rocket to the sky.)

The campus of Wizard Academy has been built entirely through the gifts of grateful alumni. We've never sought or accepted government money or grants from big foundations. This is a family thing.

[ http://newsletter.mondaymorningmemo.com/click.php/e618576/h27/?id=1323 ]And you are family.

We're with you all the way.

Roy H. Williams

Pen om Sale

2009-08-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

Signs Carry Messages to More People Per Dollar Invested

2009-08-31T07:21:00.000-07:00

Times are tough and we are all trying to save money where we can. Signs, because of their relatively low cost, long life, and 24-hour-a-day work ethic, can carry a marketing message to more people per dollar invested than almost any other medium. Signs can generate hundreds – and even thousands of impressions per day for months or years at a time! Depending on your type of business and the type of signs you use, a sign could potentially pay for itself with the first few customers it attracts.

Want to improve your advertising with signs while watching your expenses? Signs are especially valuable to businesses that cannot afford to mount major advertising campaigns like large national corporations. Regardless of the economic situation or company size, signs help consumers remember your business’s location and offerings, prompt purchases, change purchase decisions and build brand equity.

Advertising during a slow economy can create a competitive advantage. In these tough times, consider the many signage options available, which are cost-effective and easily changeable. Studies show by rotating among several designs, you can keep your message fresh and your customers attentive.

Consider signs like these:

Custom banners
Banner stands / exhibits
Labels and decals
Vehicle graphics
Site signs
Point of purchase posters
Window, floor and ceiling graphics
Backlit displays
Yard signs

How has your sign buying changed during these tough economic times? We are interested in hearing from you. We, at FASTSIGNS® want to understand your sign needs and we want to help you with your advertising efforts. Share your thoughts and experiences with us.

Contact Shannon English for all your sign and promotional item needs! 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
LinkedIn:http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english
XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/blog/shannonenglish
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/
My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/

Monday Morning Memo

2009-08-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

Fatal Optimism
The Alligator and the Mockingbird

Few people are as tiresome as the person who lives life in a minor key. Pessimistic people remind me of Eeyore the donkey:

“I don’t think we can do it.”
“This idea will never work.”
“It’s probably going to rain.”

On the other hand, few people are as terrifying as Eeyore’s opposite.
Have you ever known a person with Fatal Optimism?

“If we just think happy thoughts, everything will turn out okay.”
“I am a child of the Universe. I have a right to be here.”
“I’m a winner. I can do it. I’m special.”

I’m a proponent of boldness. But I also believe you should count the cost and be willing to pay the price. The comedians at Despair.com spoke the truth when they said, “FAILURE: Because sometimes your very best just isn’t good enough.”

In her essay, How Positive Thinking Wrecked the Economy, Barbara Ehrenreich writes,

“Besides greed, another habit of mind should get its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking.” Barbara writes, “Everyone knows that you won't get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you're a ‘positive person’ -- doubt-free, uncritical, and smiling -- and no one becomes a CEO by issuing warnings of possible disaster.”

How do we become infected with Fatal Optimism? Malcolm Gladwell says it happens slowly.

“As novices, we don’t trust our judgment. Then we have some success, and begin to feel a little surer of ourselves. Finally, we get to the top of our game and succumb to the trap of thinking that there’s nothing we can’t master. As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgments, especially when the task before us is difficult and when we’re involved with something of great personal importance.”

In the early part of WWI,
the British thought:
1. The Turks would lose at Gallipoli,
2. Belgium would be an obstacle to Germany’s advance and
3. Russia was sure to crush the Germans in the east.
The French believed their army would be at the Rhine within six weeks of the start of the war. Meanwhile the Germans were predicting the same amount of time would take the German army to the outskirts of Paris.

Each of these predictions was horribly, tragically wrong.

Do you remember all the people who claimed we would be "out of Iraq" within 30 days of the invasion? I knew it was politically dangerous and that it would cost me friends, clients and money, but I responded by voicing my concern that we were launching the next Viet Nam. More than a few people snorted and said to me, “You’re a fool if you think we’re going to fight this war with men. This will be a pushbutton war.” And then they accused me of “not supporting our troops.” That was six and a half years ago. I wonder how many of those troops wish I had shouted louder, longer, sooner?

But today’s memo isn’t about politics, it’s about business. I included the Iraqi War memory because, other than the recent mortgage meltdown, I couldn’t think of a more stinging example of overconfidence than our invasion of Iraq. (Yes, I’m fully aware this comment will anger some people. But when a man volunteers to wear the handcuffs of public opinion, his words become flaccid and his advice becomes suspect. I don’t want to be that man.)

In 2004, Oxford University Press published a book by psychologist Mark Fenton-O’Creevy. Too few people read it. [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1298 ]That prophetic book was the result of a 3-year study O’Creevy conducted involving 118 managers and traders at four leading investment banks.

One of O’Creevy’s tests involved a computer program that mimicked the ups and downs of the stock market. As the line moved across the screen, the traders were asked to press a series of buttons, which, they were told, might or might not affect the course of the line. At the end of each session, the traders were asked to rate their effectiveness in moving the line upward. Keep in mind the buttons had no effect whatsoever on the line. But each of the stock traders was convinced he had figured out exactly which combinations of buttons made the line go up. (Psychologists call this "[ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1317 ]magical thinking" and it's often associated with schizophrenia.)

Overconfidence is the rocket fuel of incredibly dumb decisions.

As my older and wiser friend Loren Lewis used to say when I was 17, “Don’t let your alligator mouth overload your mockingbird ass.”

Be bold, but count the cost.
Never assume you can't lose.

And remember:
Failure is a temporary condition.
So don't let it scare you.

Roy H. Williams

Facebook Fan Page

2009-08-25T08:39:00.001-07:00

FASTSIGNS TOPEKA on Facebook

Band-Aids for Cars?

2009-08-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia, a Band-Aid is “a genericized trade mark for any adhesive bandage among consuming public in the United States, India, Canada and Brazil.”

Apparently at FASTSIGNS® a Band-Aid is a quirky vehicle graphic that can be used to cover up the dent on a car door!

A woman came in to a Dallas FASTSIGNS center with a unique request: a 3′ by 5′ Band-Aid sticker for her car door, which was dented in an accident. Seriously!

What can we say? It’s requests like these that make providing custom sign and graphic solutions lots of fun!

http://fastsigns2542highlander.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/311/

Contact Shannon English with your next custom job!

Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english
XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/blog/shannonenglish
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/
My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/

You Know You Need New Business Signage When…

2009-08-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

your sign is not reaching it’s intended target market…

or gives the wrong impression of your product or service.

To see more examples, you can watch a fun video by clicking here.

Special thanks to Kim Walsh and Inside Out Creative for putting this video together, just for FASTSIGNS®.

What are your signs really saying about you?

CONTACT
Shannon A English
FASTSIGSN, Account Manager
785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Let me help you with all your marketing needs!

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-08-17T08:24:00.000-07:00

Carve Your Important Things In Stone.
For Free.

"Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business... ‘Free’ has the power to create a consumer stampede.”
– Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price

A few weeks ago I announced that Bard Press - America’s most successful publisher of non-fiction books - had decided to give away 20,000 advance-reading copies of The Full Plate Diet.

Here’s how that experiment turned out: 5,279 of you requested a free book during the first 6 days. After those books began to arrive, we saw a second surge of requests that continued to build until finally, just before Ray pulled the plug on the computer, he was receiving more than 200 orders per minute.

Yes, I said “per minute.”

The term “going viral” refers to that moment when word-of-mouth reaches critical mass and begins to grow exponentially.

New Experiment: You liked the $20 freebie. So today we’re doing a $50 freebie. Keep reading.

Last month, NASA learned their original copy of the moon landing video was nowhere to be found. Perhaps you heard about it.

This historic footage was recovered when NASA scrounged four badly degraded, barely viewable copies from around the world, then painfully stacked, merged and recompiled them to recreate the video. At the time of this writing - 3 weeks into the project - $230,000 has been spent and only 40 percent of the work has been done.

You thought magnetic tape lasted longer than that?

Evidently, so did NASA.

Now for the Bad News: The DVDs you and I burn have a shorter lifespan than videotape. Homemade DVDs last only 6 to 8 years. And the faster your burning speed, the shorter the life of your DVD.

“Six to eight years? That can’t be true. I bought a Dances With Wolves DVD back in 1996 and it still plays fine.”

Mass-duplicated DVDs are made using an entirely different process known as “glass mastering” that’s viable only when making a large number of copies.

Oh, you bought a "gold" DVD so you think your photographs, videos, important documents and creative work are safe?

UPDATE: When the information on DVDs began to disappear, we assumed the reflective backing was becoming tarnished so "gold" DVDs were introduced because gold doesn’t tarnish. But these gold DVDs are degrading just as fast as the silver ones.

The tarnishing of the reflective surface was only a small problem. The big problem is the fading of the laser-sensitive ink in the sandwich layer between the clear plastic and the reflective surface. Remember when fax machines used rolls of thermal fax paper and the faxes they made would fade after a year or two? Same problem.

Photographs, videos, important documents and creative work should all be carved in stone. I mean that literally, by the way, not metaphorically.

A Cranberry disc is a DVD made of high-tech, man-made stone and the data carved on a Cranberry will likely last longer than the pyramids. No ink layer. No fading. Problem solved.

David McInnis is a wild-eyed entrepreneur and a good friend. And he’s going to give you a $50 Cranberry if you want it.

[ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1302 ]Do you want it?

I’ll give you the results of today’s experiment in a couple of weeks.

Roy H. Williams

PS - Don't fo'get [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1303 ]the rabbit ho', Bebo.

Two Awesome Classes start soon:
Sexton and Maddock teach Writing for Radio and the Internet.
Give them two days next week (Aug. 25-26) and they'll give you a lifetime of more effective ad copy. Believe it or not, there are still 5 rooms available in Engelbrecht House, the academy's student mansion. [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1307 ]Sign up now and you'll have a room for 2 days and 3 nights, meals included. This is going to be a small class, so you'll get lots of personal attention. I'd do it if I were you. Aroooo!

Why do we believe
some statements and disbelieve others?
Join the fascinating Tom Wanek (WAY-nek) on a telephone-and-computer-bridge for 1 hour each week beginning Friday, August 28, and he'll answer that question as no one else can. You'll meet with Tom and fewer than 10 other students to undertake a detailed investigation of the Six Currencies of Credibility. At the end of this 5-week class you'll be able to accelerate the credibility of everything you claim. Yes, you can buy the belief of others. Tom will tell you how. Machiavelli would be proud. [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1309 ]New students, $700. Acadgrads, $350. New students: graduate from this live, online course and you'll become an Acadgrad, able to register for other classes at half price. (We are very preferential toward our graduates. You really should become one.)

Wizard Academy is a nontraditional business school.
We teach secrets you won't learn anywhere else.

- Shared by Shannon English Account Manager at Fastsigns Topeka
785-383-8139 Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Monday Morning Memo

2009-08-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

How Do You Want to Feel Right Now?

We've invented a machine that lets you select your mood. This astounding device can be adjusted to make you feel however you’d like to feel. It’s called a radio.

The distinct advantage of humans is our ability to attach complex meanings to sound. The most important sounds are called words.

NOTE: The written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. How many times have you been lying in bed reading a book when it occurs to you that your eyes have been scanning the same paragraph over and over, but you still have no idea what it says? Falling asleep, your eyes continue to take in the written words, but the visual symbols are no longer being translated into their corresponding sounds. Consequently, no comprehension.

Pitch, key, tempo, rhythm, contour and interval are elements of music, another language of sound, to which we attach complex meanings.

Control the music and you control the mood of the room.

Not even a chimpanzee can clap in rhythm to music. Conscious rhythm is uniquely human, a function of Broca’s area. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That same region of the brain that coordinates diaphragm, larynx, lips and tongue so that we can articulate stored sounds called “words,” also coordinates the muscles that allow us to clap, tap, and dance to a rhythm. Animals can't clap in rhythm for the same reason they can't talk. No Broca's area.

Imagine an auditorium of chimpanzees clapping in unison to Elton John’s [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1294 ]Bennie and the Jets. Pretty scary, huh?

In all its variations – iPod, CD player, etc. – a radio is a mood selection device, a delivery system for the complex sounds that so greatly alter our mood. How do you want to feel right now? Just press the button.

Faint traces of music drift
To my ears in the lonely night
Words barely audible yet familiar
A little too familiar this time
Taking me back to times and places
I never knew I had left behind.

Intending to turn the radio off
I only manage to increase the volume
Hoping you will somehow hear
And miraculously return
To sing each broken phrase with me

These opening lines of Memory Radio by Jenny Leigh were written in non-rhyming meter, also known as free verse. Meter is achieved when words are arranged so that a predictable rhythm is created in their pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Iambic meter is soft/hard (x /)
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”

Trochaic meter is hard/soft (/ x)
“Tell me not in mournful numbers”

Spondaic meter is hard/hard (/ /)
“Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!”

Anapestic meter is soft-soft/hard (x x /)
“And the sound of a voice that is still”

Dactylic meter is hard/soft-soft (/ x x)
“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock”

Meter is magnetic.
“Bounty. The quicker picker-upper.”

Meter makes slogans sticky.
Where do you want to go today? - Microsoft
It's everywhere you want to be - VISA
The ultimate driving machine. - BMW
When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. - Federal Express

Meter makes words musical.
"Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring..." - Clement C. Moore
"Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered..." - Edgar Allen Poe
"My client would not, could not, did not commit these crimes." - Johnny Cochran

Think of stressed and unstressed syllables as hard and soft drumbeats. Use meter to weave a musical rhythm into your message and it will, like a song hook, get stuck in the phonological loop of working memory in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of the listener's brain. Additionally, you'll have moved your message from the suspicious left hemisphere - the half of the brain that interprets words - into the open-for-anything right hemisphere responsible for interpreting music.

The right hemisphere of the brain isn't suspicious. In fact, it doesn't know right from wrong, true from false, or reality from fantasy. Hmm. This could be useful...

One last thing: I've always wanted to see a billboard featuring the giant buttons of a car radio. Above those buttons are the words, "How Do You Want" and below the buttons, "To Feel Right Now?"

I'm betting it would cause millions of drivers to turn on their radios.

But what do I know?

Roy H. Williams

Cash for Clunkers

2009-07-30T11:09:00.001-07:00

3ft x 10ft Banners $150

Contact Shannon English 785-383-8139 Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
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My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/
FASTSIGNS Website: www.fastsigns.com/304

Signs Carry Messages to More People Per Dollar Invested

2009-07-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

Times are tough and we are all trying to save money where we can. Signs, because of their relatively low cost, long life, and 24-hour-a-day work ethic, can carry a marketing message to more people per dollar invested than almost any other medium. Signs can generate hundreds – and even thousands of impressions per day for months or years at a time! Depending on your type of business and the type of signs you use, a sign could potentially pay for itself with the first few customers it attracts.

Want to improve your advertising with signs while watching your expenses? Signs are especially valuable to businesses that cannot afford to mount major advertising campaigns like large national corporations. Regardless of the economic situation or company size, signs help consumers remember your business’s location and offerings, prompt purchases, change purchase decisions and build brand equity.

Advertising during a slow economy can create a competitive advantage. In these tough times, consider the many signage options available, which are cost-effective and easily changeable. Studies show by rotating among several designs, you can keep your message fresh and your customers attentive.

Consider signs like these:

Custom banners
Banner stands / exhibits
Labels and decals
Vehicle graphics
Site signs
Point of purchase posters
Window, floor and ceiling graphics
Backlit displays
Yard signs

How has your sign buying changed during these tough economic times? We are interested in hearing from you. We, at FASTSIGNS® want to understand your sign needs and we want to help you with your advertising efforts. Share your thoughts and experiences with us.

Contact:
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
Do you travel? Great rates on all your travel needs and group packages http://sheknowstravel.rovia.com/
Check this out: http://sheknowstravel.worldventures.biz
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
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Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
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My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/

A Husband, a Wife, Arthritis and Signs

2009-07-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

In the face of foreclosures and businesses going bankrupt, it seems as though we no longer hear about those who are still trying to make a difference…

John and Peggy Ray are a husband and wife team who own a FASTSIGNS® in Broomfield, Colorado. Peggy lives with arthritis and the Ray family have volunteered with the Arthritis Foundation for several years. Since opening their FASTSIGNS in 2007, they have tried to figure out a way they could use their new, small business to benefit this cause that is close to their hearts.

Then they came up with the idea that they put into reality June 17. They committed a day of business operation to the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation by donating to them 30% of all sales completed that day. Thanks to the prior months they spent organizing and marketing, and then working to sell as many signs as possible on June 17, the Ray’s will be able to donate almost $1500.

After seeing the success of their event, they hope to make it an annual fundraising event for their business and family.

The Arthritis Foundation is the only national not-for-profit organization that supports the more than 100 types of arthritis and related conditions. The Foundation helps people take control of arthritis by providing public health education; pursuing public policy and legislation; and conducting evidence-based programs to improve the quality of life for those living with arthritis. The Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation serves Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. To learn more visit www.rockymountainarthritis.org.

Good Job FASTSIGNS Team! If you would like to contact a fastsigns representtive, contact Shannon English 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns. What can Fastsigns do for you?

Connect with me...

2009-07-21T07:34:00.001-07:00

Internet Marketing

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english

XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1

Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/
Create a google account and start your own blog

Create a slide show of your work on www.photobucket.com and put it in your signatures of your emails:

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw

Become part of a few networking groups, I am in:

Topeka Chamber of Commerce
Apartment Council of Topeka,
American Woman's Business Association
BBN – Small Business Networking Group
Innovative Networking Group – I created my own and am the president of this group. (see my card.)
C5 – Christian Chamber of Commerce

Shannon A English
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
Shannon@SheKNowsMarketing.com
Shannon.English@Fastsigns.com

Do You Travel: http://sheknowstravel.rovia.com/
Check this out: 1 2 3 http://sheknowstravel.biz.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-07-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

Spend Not a Penny
and Get Real Skinny

The Full Plate Diet is an incredibly cool book. And because you’re a friend of Wizard Academy, you can have a no-charge advance copy. That’s right. No charge. Nada. Zero. Zip. The publisher – Wizard Academy board member Ray Bard of Bard Press – is giving away 20,000 pre-release copies to trigger a nationwide buzz. The Full Plate Diet will be in every bookstore in America in January but you can have your advance copy today.

It’s even okay to tell your friends how they can get a no-charge copy, too. I highly recommend it.

FLASHBACK: A young man starts a newspaper that becomes extremely successful. He sells the company and then he dies. His last will and testament stipulates that the money – a mountain of it – is to launch a non-profit organization whose only mission will be to create a healthier, happier, slimmer America.

The man’s dying wish became the Lifestyle Center of America. Its board of directors built a multi-million dollar medical facility and hired the Who’s Who list of medical research doctors in America. The chairman of the board is Dr. House. I’m not making this up.

The first thing the medical marvels created was a diet that reverses Type 2 diabetes. But that didn’t fulfill their mission. The newspaper mogul’s dream was to touch every American, not just diabetics. So the Lifestyle Center contacted Corrine Taylor and mailed her some money to set up a meeting with me.

My team and I spent a day talking with the Lifestyle Center people and then agreed to work with them. That was a little more than a year ago. Toward the end of the day my 290-pound media analyst, Joe Hamilton, asked, “Would the diet you talked about work for someone who isn’t diabetic?” The doctors said, “Absolutely. It’s how human beings were meant to eat.”

A few days later I told Ray Bard what the doctors had said. He seemed mildly interested. And I mentioned it to a couple of my out-of-town partners.

A couple of months later I was pouring a cup of coffee when Joe Hamilton walked into the room. I looked up and said, “Joe, you’re losing weight.”

Joe said, “I’ve been doing what those doctors talked about and I’ve lost 35 pounds.” By the end of that year, Joe had lost 90 pounds. No exercise. And he hasn’t gained a bit of it back. (See before-and-after photos of Joe at the bottom of this page.)

A couple of weeks after I saw Joe Hamilton I saw Ray Bard and he had never looked better. “Roy, I did what you said those doctors talked about and I’ve dropped 30 pounds. I'd like to meet them.”

Then, at the partner meeting, one of the partners I’d told about the diet said he had done what I described and lost 20 pounds. The other partner had lost 24.

The Full Plate Diet is not a deprivation diet. There’s nothing you “can’t have.” And you’ll never go hungry.

I use the Monday Morning Memo to promote classes at Wizard Academy, a 501c3 [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1283 ]nontraditional business school, but I never use the memo to sell things and I’m not selling you anything today.

But you really ought to look into this diet.

You can meet 3 of the doctors in a fun, online video produced by Sunpop Studios and request your no-charge advance copy of the Full Plate Diet at [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1282 ]FullPlateDietBeta.org

Next week I’m going to tell you a true story that will blow your mind.

Your mind will be blown. You’ll be walking into walls. Boy Scouts will have to hold your hand when you cross the street. After hearing this story you'll need to lay down and put a cold rag on your head.

The story begins in 1519 and it involves Wizard Academy.

And you.

Roy H. Williams

Post & Panel Vinyl Signs

2009-07-16T07:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes these are also called site signs. Let a site sign show your customers what you’re offering. Large site signs provide the information prospective tenants or purchasers need. Ideal for construction sites or commercial businesses, large site signs convey your message and inform prospective clients of availability.

- Use Full Color Digital Graphics to create interest and show off your property before and after your construction has been completed.
- High impact, high visibility signs draw attention to your property.
- Site signs can direct your customers to your property or sales office.

Vinyl sign frames combine virtually no-maintenance, vinyl with an elegant and eye catching style to bring attention to your design. These are just a few ways we can help our customers:
- Real Estate - Libraries
- Business Entrance - New Locations
- Directional - Neighborhoods
- Change of location - Retail
- Churches - Service Entrances
- Construction - Special Events
- Golf Courses - Schools
- Hospitals - And More

For more information, please contact me!

Your order has been received, thank you for contacting me. I will have our artist work on a proof for you and e-mail or fax it to you as soon as it is ready to send. I have attached an invoice for your records. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you for choosing FASTSIGNS, have a great day!

Sincerely,
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

Connect with me:
Our Own Networking Site: http://www.SheKnowsMarketing.ning.com
Do you travel? http://sheknowstravel.rovia.com/
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish
Plaxo : http://fastsignstopeka.myplaxo.com/
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka
http://www.myspace.com/tradebanktopeka
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/shannon.english
XING: http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/
My Personal Website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-07-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

What Time Is This?

A close friend told me last week why his wife doesn’t like me: having seen me speak before a crowd, she is convinced I lack humility. I am a boastful man, arrogant and unprincipled, merciless and cold.

She’s not the first to have said these things.

I see her point and I make no argument. Marketing is a high-stakes competition for the time and attention of the public. Every business asking for time and attention is in a wrestling match with every other. The same is true of public speaking. It is survival of the fittest. “And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For I am the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley.”

Yes, I definitely see her point.

In 2006, one of my longtime clients told me his principal competitor had filed bankruptcy and all his assets were being auctioned. I said, “Great. I’ve been trying to break that man for years.” My client was appalled until I reminded him that it was my job to plan the battles in which good men die. “Do you really want me to adopt the attitude that there’s enough business out there for everyone? ‘Be happy with what you’ve got? Don’t push for more?’ If that’s what you want from me, just say the word and my job will get a whole lot easier.” I reminded him of a statement by General George S. Patton, “You don’t win wars by dying for your country. You win by making the other poor bastard die for his.”

My client, a kind and generous man, finally understood my role as a marketing consultant and we never spoke of it again.

Strangely, I’m not a natural competitor. Nobody wants me on their side in sports because I don’t care if we win or not. My daily vehicle is an 8 year-old pickup truck without electric windows and when I’m not speaking before a crowd, I wear clothes I’ve owned for more than a dozen years. Privately, I'm so boringly average as to be perfectly invisible.

But yes, when someone plunks down $25,000, a whole other fellow shows up. "It's Showtime! Prepare to be amazed!"

The Magical Worlds Communications Workshop begins with an investigation of duality in which we study the open contradictions of life, those equal-but-opposite realities that are the basis of all existence. “When confronted with a duality,” I tell the class, “a poor student will choose one side and disparage the other. But a brilliant student will bring both sides of the duality into close proximity and feel the electricity that passes between them.”

Protons are contradicted by electrons. Inhalation is undone by exhalation. Ice and steam are both water? Really?

In the third chapter of his Ecclesiastes, Solomon puts it this way:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

What time is this? For you, I mean.

My family adopted a homeless mutt when I was in the third grade. She slept in my bedroom until the day she died, 10 years later. Pearl was a mellow dog, laid-back and lazy, playful and fun; unless you acted as though you were going to hurt me. Then, in a horrible flash of fur and teeth, playful Pearl became a bloodthirsty beast that hungered only for your throat. People who witnessed this transformation were stunned. My happy little dog had the soul of a tiger. Pearl understood the difference between playtime and wartime.

What time is this? For you, I mean.

“In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.”
– William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act iii. Scene 1

The Jesus of Sunday school is a passive, Gandhi-like man who urges us to turn the other cheek. But the Jesus of John chapter 2 is a man of premeditated violence who "made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.”

Will you turn the other cheek today, or make a whip of cords?

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity.”

What time is this? For you, I mean.

Roy H. Williams

Why FASTSIGNS®?

2009-07-06T08:37:00.001-07:00

When you trust your project to FASTSIGNS®, you'll be working with the most experienced professionals in the industry - people who understand that your signs and graphics are the face your business presents to the world. We'll review the principles and priorities that drive your business and work with you to execute your project accurately, on time and on budget.
FASTSIGNS® brings you a wide variety of products and services, including virtually all types of signs, graphics and exhibits. We also serve as your central-access point to the sign industry's most powerful resources. Whatever kind of sign you need, from a single banner to a series of sign installations in dozens of locations across the country, FASTSIGNS® is your source.
FASTSIGNS® has the ability to work with almost any computer format. Bring us your text, logo, artwork and photographs and we'll make your signs quickly and accurately.
FASTSIGNS® owners and operators are personally committed to building long-term customer relationships. By maintaining each customer's logos and graphics in digital format, along with detailed records of past orders, preferences and special requirements, we work to make sign buying simple.
Total sign project management is our specialty. From concept to shipping, delivery and installation, FASTSIGNS® functions as your partner in the sign and graphics industry, giving your team instant access to the knowledge and power of our worldwide network. We make getting the signs and graphics you need as simple as a phone call or a visit to our Web site.
Our private intranet links our store locations, as well as our corporate headquarters, research and technical support center and our key suppliers to each other. This level of connectivity ensures fast, accurate execution of even the most complex projects.
FASTSIGNS® applies its unique depth of expertise to every project, building on twenty years of experience and research to make your signs and graphics more attractive, durable and effective.

Magic of the Elbs

2009-07-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Did you know I’ve been writing these Monday Morning Memos for 15 years now? (ROY WILLIAMS HAS BEEN WRITING THESE, JUST CLARIFYING.) And in all that time:
1. There’s never been a Monday when I didn’t send a Memo.
2. I’ve never repeated a Memo that had been previously sent.

I’m going to break that second rule today because I think it’s what you need.

Last week the Wizard of Ads partners gathered for 3 days of planning and training. When Paul Boomer told me he hadn’t made any progress on his book since our last meeting, I told him about the magic of the elbs.

Later, as I was preparing my opening comments for the upcoming class at Wizard Academy, Checklist for Your Journey of 1,000 Miles, I realized that what the attendees would need most is the magic of the elbs.

Then, when I was reading a play-by-play analysis of how America was sucked into a whirlpool of economic doubt by subprime lending, it occurred to me that nothing can reverse a whirlpool like the magic of the elbs. That sucking downward into darkness is reversed to become a fountain into the sky.

“Hey Stupid,” I said to myself, “you need to resend that memo. It’s been 7 years and the people who read it have mostly forgotten it. This is the magic America needs today.”

So here it is, repeated from October 27, 2002:

Makers of miracles have magical little helpers. Is there a miracle you'd like to make?

Would you like to learn the magic of the elbs?

Elbs are Exponential Little Bits, tiny but relentless changes that compound to make a miracle. The power of an elb lies not in its size, but in its daily occurrence. For an elb to work its Exponential magic, the Little Bit must happen every day... every day... every day.

Every day.

Funny thing... When daily progress meets with progress, it doesn't add, it multiplies. To harness the magic of Exponential Little Bits you must learn to ask yourself, "What difference have I made today?" And never go to sleep until you have done a Little Bit to move yourself closer to your goal. But you must do a Little Bit every day, no matter how tiny the thing might be.

Exponential Little Bits work both ways. They can lift you up or hold you down. There is much power in the ELBs.

Start with a dollar. Double it every day for just 20 days and you'll have 2,097,150 dollars. But if you diminish each day's total by just 10 percent (a Little Bit) before the next day's doubling, you'll amass only 793,564 dollars. Diminish each day's doubling by 35 percent and you'll have only 56,784 dollars - a holdback of 95.83 percent.

There's a line in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" that says, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down! I could say 'Elves' to him, but it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself."

Is there a wall between you and your miracle?

I could say how to bring it down.

But I'd rather you said it for yourself.

Roy H. Williams

Grin of the Cheshire Cat

2009-06-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

Grin of the Cheshire Cat
What will be your customer's memory of you?

“It [the Cheshire Cat] vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.” – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

I never ask the graduates of Wizard Academy, "What could we have done differently? How might we improve?" To do so would be to ask them to search their memories for disappointing moments. These are not the images I want to cement in their minds.

Instead, I ask, "What was your favorite moment during your time with us?" This causes the students to recall each of the high-impact moments during of their time on campus and relive those moments in their mind. It doesn’t matter what they choose as their favorite, I just want to flood their minds with happy memories.

The grin will remain after the rest of it is gone.

It is important to control the Last Mental Image (LMI.) What procedures do you employ to make sure your customer has a positive LMI of their experience with you?

Today the world is forming its LMI of Michael Jackson. So far, the stories and comments have centered on his impact as a performer and his contributions to music. The foibles and flaws that interested us yesterday no longer seem important. Michael Jackson is dead and the world seems a tiny bit smaller.

Want to hear something bizarre? A few hours before Michael Jackson died, I woke in the night with an itch in my brain. The scratching of that itch became the subject of a rabbit hole far deeper than any I had ever created. When I finally realized the depth of the project I had begun, I said, “No one will ever click to even the halfway point. This is going to be the rabbit hole to China.”

The itch in my brain made a lot more sense when I heard Michael Jackson had died.

He and I were exactly the same age.

Roy H. Williams

Calendar Sale

2009-06-25T07:12:00.001-07:00

The Results Are In: Signs Attract Customers

2009-06-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the average business gets up to 50% of its sales from signage, 85% within 5 miles?*

Signs often make the first impression about your business and are one of the most affordable and effective methods of advertising.

Signs Make An Impact

Signs can attract new customers-13% of impulse purchases occur because a customer saw a sign promoting an item.**

Your company vehicles are another effective and affordable way to attract customers. By displaying your advertising message on your delivery truck or van, you can generate over 600 visual impressions for every mile driven.***

Signs for Every Type of Business

Signs come in all shapes and sizes - some of the most impactful and economical include banners, posters, vehicle graphics and window graphics. Site and exterior building signs can also serve to identify a business, attract attention and extend your image.

FASTSIGNS® has the expertise and technology to match your image and message to the surrounding environment and create signs and graphics that will stand the test of time. Our full service offering includes consultation, design, production, file transfer, installation and delivery of all types of signs and graphics.

Make Every Opportunity Count

Don't miss a chance to get in front of a prospective customer. Help ensure that they choose your business by getting the right message and professional image in front of them. Contact us today to put signs and graphics to work for you.

Shannon A English
785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

What Are Your Signs Saying…Really?

2009-06-22T07:43:00.000-07:00

What Are Your Signs Saying…Really?

A FASTSIGNS® owner in Texas spotted this post and panel sign in front of a restaurant, advertising it’s prices.

Hopefully you noticed that the word “Height” is misspelled. Secondly, you may have wondered what exactly they meant about a kid’s height. If your first impression was the same as mine and many others, then you thought, “How do they serve these children, grilled or fried?!”

Signs like these force us to again ask our favorite question: What are your signs saying about you?

Let me help your signs say really great things! Contact:
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
785-383-8139 - direct line
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-06-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

Why I Have No Goals

Maybe it’s because I was a young adult in the Dress-for-Success, go-go 80’s and retain vivid memories of those hollow days.

Maybe it’s because Pennie and I had close friends who stepped on the landmines of “Get Rich in Real Estate With No Money Down,” “How To Make Millions Selling Soap,” and other glistening schemes promoted by effervescent conmen with perfect teeth who said, “You can do it. You’re a winner.”

Maybe it’s because the positive-thinking cult believes Man is God and this disturbs me to the core of my soul.

Or maybe I’m just a Grinch who doesn’t like to hear the singing of the happy Whos in Whoville. You be the judge. But the truth is that I have no goals and I’m annoyed by conversations about them. Does this shock you?

“Goal,” in my experience, is a favorite word of people who talk and dream and dream and talk. And then they get together to “network” with other talkers. There’s always a lot of noise in these meetings but it’s unlikely than anything of consequence is going to happen. People who chatter about goals are rarely willing to die on that mountain.

I have no goals. But I do have plans.

A plan puts you in motion toward a destination. The destination you choose is irrelevant. It is (1.) motion, (2.) determination and (3.) commitment that separate destination-reaching explorers from goal-setting chipmunks.

Count the cost, explorer. “Am I willing to die on this mountain?”

There are laws against discharging firearms. They’re loud and noisy and someone might get hurt. But discharging a firearm isn’t the same as “shooting with intent to kill.”

“Intent.” That’s the word. Plans have intent. Goals do not.

A goal without a plan is wishful thinking.
A plan without action is self-delusion.

Wizard Academy helps people get where they’re trying to go. We teach people of action. We have little time for drifters who just want to talk and dream and sigh.

Do you remember the 3 questions I asked you to answer in [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1270 ]a recent Monday Morning Memo about my friend, David Rehr?

1. What are you trying to make happen?
2. How will you measure success?
3. What’s the first thing you need to do to get started?

I asked 43,000 readers to send me their answers to these questions. Doubtless, everyone who read the memo thought about doing it. But only 0.7 percent – 307 people – actually pulled the trigger and rode the bullet.

Here’s where that bullet will take them:

Thursday, July 9th at Wizard Academy, a 1-day workshop.
Checklist for Your Journey of 1,000 Miles:
Things You’ll Need Along the Way.

This 1-day workshop is $750 and a bargain at that price.

The 307 riders of the bullet whose names appear on [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1273 ]this list will be allowed to register for only $50 (approximately what it costs the academy – per person - to cater lunch and dinner.) Normally we’d be magnanimous and pick up the tab for everyone, but tower construction has squeezed the bank account dry. Sorry about that.

Twenty-six hundred years ago Lao-Tzu said, "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."

Take that first step. Be in Austin on July 9th as we create the Checklist for Your Journey of 1000 Miles. It's going to be a challenging, disturbing, inspiring, life-changing day.

Are you coming or not?

Roy H. Williams

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-06-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

Portals, Reveals, and Partial Reveals
How to Get Customers to Give You Their Time.

Portals create intrigue in paintings, photographs, literature and movies. Architects use them to lengthen the time we spend in landmark stores and theme parks. Portals say, “Come on in. Stay awhile.”

Dr. Nick Grant, a close friend, was examining a group of photographs in my Accidental Magic collection when he said, “Oh! You’re a portal person. I should have known.”

“A what?”

Pointing with his finger to each of the portals in the photographs, he explained, “Portals in art help us move from one state of consciousness to another.” Dr. Grant, I should mention, is a clinical psychologist.

And thus my study of portals began.

Doorways, windows, tunnels, bridges and stairs are portals. Each of these whispers a promise of change, “Things beyond here are different than where you are.”

I’m teaching you about portals and partial reveals because customers prefer to spend their time in places where there’s more to explore, the lure of discovery, a promise of adventure.

Do you offer these things? In your store, your offices, your landscaping?

Go to the mall and you’ll see that most of the stores have no entry portal, no doorway. They stand wide open, naked, with nothing hidden or obscured. This makes it easy for you to wander into them and just as easy to wander out. Stores without doors see a lot of traffic with low curiosity and no commitment.

A door creates a threshold barrier, but once you’ve passed through it you’re insulated from the world you left outside. Customers spend more time in stores with doors.

An open portal offers a partial reveal. Notice the image at the top of this page. If the window were closed it would still be a portal though it would no longer offer a partial reveal.

A partial reveal is a glimpse, an enticement, a tease. Occasionally it’s offered through an open portal, but more often through a space between impediments. The more partial reveals you display, the longer the customer stays in your store.

Curiosity is stimulated by a partial reveal. If this were not true, there would be no long skirts with slits up the side and men would not buy their wives negligees.

A full reveal delivers the promise of the partial reveal. You catch a glimpse - the partial reveal – and are drawn toward the carefully crafted full reveal. BAM! Your world is rocked.

Water, music, and spirals are soft portals - shadow portals - but we’ll leave any further discussion of these for the upcoming class on Enticement: Visual Cues and the 12 Languages of the Mind I’ll be teaching August 18-19. We'll study in depth all the things I've written to you about in [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1265 ]the past 4 Monday Morning Memos.

Come and you’ll see multiple examples of how a series of partial reveals – created by multiple piercings of the horizontal plane through the careful placement of display artifacts – will elevate interest in your store, office, home, garden or artwork. You’ll also see dozens of examples of how illumination affects the customer’s perception of value. Then we'll look at the foundation of all these effects – the 12 languages of the mind.

Don’t worry, once you’ve seen some examples you’ll realize this stuff isn’t nearly so complicated as it sounds.

The only way you can attend this class is to purchase a portal for the Tower. Yes, it’s time for us to pay for the doors and windows and Wizard Academy needs your help. This class should be at least $2,500 but it's not. You can fund a window for as little as $400 or put your name on a fabulous feature door for as much as $7,000. [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1266 ]Take a look.

It’s going to be another unforgettable class. (If you can't come to the class but would still like to fund a door or window, you will forever be remembered as a leader of your people. Thanks.)

Roy H. Williams

PS - The concrete floor of the McInnis Stardeck has been poured at the top of the Academy Tower. Now you can walk up the stairs in the stairwell, stand on the Stardeck, and see the edge of the world. At night you can reach out and touch the stars. (They make your fingers tingle, like touching an electric fence. I don't recommend it.)

UK Business Woman Shows Signs of Positive Thinking

2009-06-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

Jenny Boreham, who owns and operates a FASTSIGNS® in Chelmsford (Essex, England), has been pushing through the dreariness of current economic conditions with positive action. Over the last few months she has served as an example of how one person can make a difference for an entire town.

During a local networking meeting, after discussing the credit crunch and its effects on the local business community, Boreham came up with the “Team Essex” idea. The goal is to keep business dollars in Essex by using local suppliers and vendors whenever possible. With the help of other local businesses and organizations, members of Team Essex have begun lobbying the public sector to better achieve these goals.

In other efforts to cast a more positive light, Boreham recently worked alongside the Chelmsford Borough Council Town Centre management team to have large graphics installed on the windows of recently vacated stores. The new graphics display colorful advertisements and reminders of the local shopping and attractions available, in an effort to minimize the negative effect of seeing empty shop windows.

How are you staying positive?

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-06-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

How Will You Measure Success?

The keeper of my calendar told me a few weeks ago that David Rehr had called to schedule a day with me in Austin. I scratched my head and wondered why.

David served as a congessonal aide on Capitol Hill when he was young, then he took a broken-down trade group, The National Beer Wholesalers Association, and turned it into one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.

So dramatic was his sucess that the National Association of Broadcasters, the trade group for every radio and television station in America, asked David to come and take the helm in 2005.

On May 6, 2009, shortly after scheduling his appointment with me, David Rehr resigned as President and CEO of the NAB. Then he showed up at Wizard Academy, right on schedule. We had never met or corresponded. I was curious what he knew of me and why he had come.

“Roy,” he said, “a lot of people really like you and a lot of people really don’t but I usually agree with what I read in your books and magazine columns.”

Curiosity made me ask what David had been told by the people who dislike me. Most of the stories he'd heard were true. Guilty as charged.

Thirty years as a consultant give me deep respect for an observation made by Mark Twain, “I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”

“David, what do you plan to do with the rest of your life?”
I never suspected he might have an answer.

“I want to be President of the United States Chamber of Commerce.”

The clarity of that answer told me:

1. how David Rehr became successful.
2. that he and I were going to be friends.
3. why he'll someday be President of the United States Chamber of Commerce.
We spent the rest of the day discussing David’s ideas for stimulating the economy of the United States and then I got him to agree to teach a class at Wizard Academy.

David Rehr was able to state his goal in a single sentence of just 12 words.

Can you?

1. What are you trying to make happen?
2. How will you measure success?
3. What’s the first thing you need to do to get started?

I'd like you to answer each question using no more than 12 words per answer. This means the email you send me cannot exceed 36 total words, plus your name and contact information.

Yes, there will be prizes.

The biggest prizes will be the ones received by every participant: clarity of thought and purpose. There will be other prizes sent by my office.

You're at a turning point.
Which way will you turn?

Roy H. Williams

All Participants will receive advance notice of David Rehr's class as soon as dates and a course description are available. This gives you first shot at the 14 rooms in Engelbrecht House.

Craft your 36 words. Send them to Tamara@WizardAcademy.org. Don't put it off. Do it now.

Monday Morning Memo

2009-05-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

MondayMorningMemo©
of Roy H. Williams, the Wizard of Ads® The Monday Morning Memo for May. 25, 2009

How to Make Your Store Interesting
Romance of Shadows, Curiosity of Vertical Planes

Illumination and Proximity are 2 of the 12 languages of the mind.

Your feelings about an item are affected by the way it’s illuminated.

Feelings of romance, intimacy, prestige and adventure are triggered by the hot spots and shadows of a campfire, a fireplace or a candle in a dimly lit room. Hot spots and shadows send signals that are rich, textured and varied. Upscale retail stores and restaurants, museums and cathedrals are filled with hot spots and shadows.

Feelings of drudgery, routine, commodity and bureaucracy are triggered by the homogenized light that fills every corner of a room equally. Discount stores and cafeterias, elementary schools and post offices are filled with homogenized light. Homogenized light is the same all over. No hot spots. No shadows.

Feng Shui – the ancient Chinese practice of arranging rooms and furnishings to create specific moods and feelings – is built upon an intuitive understanding of the language of Proximity.

The arrangement of furniture and fixtures within a room can pull you along a specific path as surely as if you were walking within a labyrinth.

A boring store has 3 horizontal planes. The bottom one is the floor. The top one is the ceiling. The center one in a clothing store is the top of the clothes racks. In a large jewelry store, it's the tops of the showcases. In Best Buy, the tops of the shelves.

To make a big room feel interesting and intimate, all you have to do is pierce that center, horizontal plane with a series of vertical planes rising to varying heights. If your view is partially obscured by three tall pots standing 9 feet tall, you'll feel drawn to take a look at what’s behind them. But if you can see everything from a single vantage point, the brain says, “Nothing here to see.”

By the way, these techniques work just as well in homes and offices as they do in retail stores.

I confess we took only a shallow look into a deep subject today, but if enough people thought today’s memo was beneficial, we’ll schedule a class and a field trip to investigate detailed examples of how the careful placement of selected fixtures can cause customers to visit you more often and spend longer amounts of time.

We’ll also look at how shadows can change the mood of a room and increase the perceived value of inventory. We might even investigate the language of color and how visual portals can be used to move people from one state of consciousness to another.

But now I’m rambling.

Wizard Academy is a new kind of business school. We study what gifted people do when they’re feeling inspired so that we can reverse engineer their unconscious methods.

What are you trying to make happen? [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1251 ]Let us help you.

Come to Wizard Academy.

Roy H. Williams

Monday Morning Memo

2009-05-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

Dream the Impossible Dream

The Tinkerbell Effect describes things that exist only because people believe in them. Remember Tinkerbell, the fairy in Peter Pan who is revived from near death by the belief of the audience?

[Tinkerbell has drunk the poison meant for Peter Pan.]

PETER PAN: Her light is growing faint, and if it goes out, that means she is dead! Her voice is so low I can scarcely tell what she is saying. She says—she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies! [He rises and throws out his arms to the audience.] Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!

And all over the world, children clapped with all their might.

The Tinkerbell Effect is responsible for the rule of law. If enough of us quit believing in it, the rule of law would cease to exist. Likewise, the value of money. A dollar has value only because we believe it does. Without our belief, dollars would be scraps of paper.

Much of who and what we are is owed to the Tinkerbell Effect.

Tinkerbell would be proud of Tommy.

Tommy is a young man who sees possibilities. Few people understand him. His home is littered with his strange inventions.

When Tommy is 28, he writes a letter to his friend, Robert Skipwith, about The History and Adventures of the renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha, a book that has captured his imagination.

In that book, Alonso Quixano sees beauty where others see only dust and grime. Then, like a little boy tying a bath towel around his neck and pretending to be Superman, Quixano dresses himself as a knight and pretends to be Don Quixote. And then he sets out to right all the wrongs of his day.

Tommy, too, becomes a sort of Don Quixote, seeing always a world that could be, should be, ought to be. His fascination with Don Quixote will continue throughout his life and he will mention Don Quixote in dozens of letters to his friends.

Finally, when Tommy is 78 years old and looking back across the years, he writes to Benjamin Waterhouse, “Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily wrongs of the world…”

Inspired by Quixote, Tommy likewise undertook to redress the wrongs of the world.

It was a single, glittering statement for which there was no evidence in all the world: 32 year-old Tommy, that incurable dreamer, flung the Tinkerbell Effect hundreds of years into the future and across millions of lives with 14 words full of pixie dust, “We Hold these Truths to be Self-evident, that All Men are Created Equal…”

And a nation sprang into existence.

Do you have an impossible dream? Come to Wizard Academy. The Cognoscenti will believe it with you and together, we'll make it happen.

Roy H. Williams

Monday Morning Memo-Marketing Outrageously

2009-05-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

How to Make Big Things Happen Fast

Marketing Outrageously is fun.
Marketing Outrageously is politically incorrect.
Marketing Outrageously is using your imagination.
Marketing Outrageously is being willing to be laughed at.
Marketing Outrageously is putting revenue first and everything else second.
Marketing Outrageously is dropping your assumptions and starting all over with a fresh point of view.
Marketing Outrageously is the opposite of marketing safely – but it may be the only truly safe way to market in 2009.

A half-hearted marketing strategy is like buying a ticket halfway to Europe. Don’t do things halfway. Jon Spoelstra doesn’t believe in small ideas, small plans or small results. And after attending this class, neither will you.

One of my favorite Jon Spoelstra stories happened when Jon worked with the New Jersey Nets back when that team was at the very bottom of the NBA roster. The Nets had no star players, no up-and-comers and no loyal fans, but he made them the most profitable franchise in all of basketball. And he did it without winning games.

Jon says, “I’ve got a warped perspective on advertising: I think advertising should get results you can feel. Don’t give me any of that image or identity stuff; I want revenue that I can track to the ad. Anything less is, to me, like throwing money into a tornado and hoping for the best.”

In just three seasons, the revenues from paid ticket sales went up from $5 million to $17 million. Local sponsorships ballooned from $400,000 to $7 million. And the market value of the team grew from $40 million to $120 million.

[ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1233 ]Read the course description. This class is going to be amazing.

This 1-time-only event will be strictly limited to 100 attendees, all of whom should expect a significant jump in revenues upon returning back to work.

Could you use a significant jump in revenues?

Roy H. Williams

Contact Shannon English for your next Marketing Project
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, www.SheKnowsMarketing.com
785-383-8139

Boxes to Go - Sign Placement

2009-05-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

There is a place in Dallas, TX just off of Hwy 75 where there is a Casket Store with a sign that reads Casket Store and right next to it is a restaurant with a sign that reads Boxes to Go. The first time I passed by this area, I couldn’t help but laugh. The placement of those two signs next to each other deserves a spot on Jay Leno.

Boxes to go and Casket Store

Those two signs, side by side, certainly got my attention. So, let’s talk about more common methods of drawing attention to your signs.

Banners are an inexpensive way to keep your marketing fresh. Changing out your banner monthly can draw attention to the specials and services you are providing. How many times have you driven the same route every day? You typically become so familiar with the scenery, you probably don’t notice all of the signs you pass by, but when there is a change, such as a new banner, you will probably take notice. Consider talking with a sign expert at a FASTSIGNS® center near you for other ideas on how to make your business signs more noticeable.

That is my sign tip for today. Have you seen any funny sign placements out there? If so, feel free to share here by posting a comment.

T-Shirt Sale

2009-05-01T09:01:00.001-07:00

10 Surefire Ways to Tick Off Your Co-workers

2009-04-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

10 Surefire Ways to Tick Off Your Co-workers
Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com Editor

Let's face it, not everyone gets along perfectly. To be successful in your work, you at least need the respect and support of others -- your customers, suppliers, co-workers and management. But sometimes, despite your best efforts to win their support, bad habits creep into your daily work life and drive others crazy.

Here are 10 surefire ways to make sure your efforts to win their support don't backfire. If any sound familiar, you could be leaving your co-workers fuming.

1. Is it always all about you?
Are you preoccupied with your own career path and looking good at the expense of others? Do you put others down while you pump yourself up? Instead, conduct yourself in such a way that other people will want to see you succeed -- let their genuine support and admiration of who you are pull you to success.

2. Answering cell phone calls during meetings.
A surefire way to aggravate people is to consistently respond to calls, e-mails and pagers when in conversation with others. This sends a message that they are less important than the caller. Let the calls go and return them when your current conversation is over. If you are expecting an urgent call, alert those present. They will appreciate that you value their time and that you stay focused on matters at hand.

3. Sending voice mails that go on and on and on.
At the end of a voice message, replay it and hear how you sound. Difficulty in getting to the point? Just like giving a speech - state your objective or main message first and follow it with brief, supporting sub-points. Some people prefer voice mail, some e-mail - each workplace has its own expectations.

4. Acting like a bureaucrat.
Do you drag out turnaround times and play control games? Do you create obstacles or barriers for others to do their work? Making mountains out of molehills is another surefire way to alienate people. Teach people how to navigate your organization efficiently, knowing when to stick with the rules and when to break them.

5. Reading the newspaper or hammering on your laptop during training sessions or meetings.
Yes, there are way too many meetings and you've got more important things to do. Yet doing non-relevant tasks when there is a set agenda sends a clear message that this event or these people are unimportant to you. Instead, be fully focused - chances are if you completely engage, you will make important contributions while you show you are a committed team player.

6. "I'm like, ya know..."
You are your words even more so in virtual relationships. You may be communicating with people worldwide who know you only by the sound of your voice or the tone of your e-mails. Become conscious of how you use language and stop communicating in ways that cause you to sound inexperienced or unprofessional. Ask those you trust and respect for feedback.

7. Doing your bills at the office.
Whether you are paying your bills, planning your wedding, or placing an online order for a special gift, avoid doing them on office time. People understand short personal calls and respect emergencies, but they don't appreciate seeing you get paid to manage your life.

8. Skirting around the dress code.
Ask 10 companies to define business casual and you have 10 different definitions. Dressing for work has never been more complicated - especially if you work at multiple locations. Prioritize matching your customer's dress code and if visiting more than one on a given day and the codes conflict, go for a classic, neutral look and be prepared to flex - adding or losing a jacket or tie between locations.

9. Taking it too easy on telecommute days.
Run a few errands and throw in a load of laundry? Hey, you're a hard worker and deserve work-life balance. Telecommuting can be a tremendous win-win but if you stretch it to its limits, you may blow the policy for yourself and others. Meet your deadlines, be readily available during business hours and do great work -- skip the temptation to make it appear like you are working but you're really not.

10. Acting unethically.
Make sure you are clear on your organization's ethics policies and have the courage and conviction to uphold them. It's easy to draw the line on major violations but watch for the subtle ways you may be pulling others in the wrong direction to achieve goals -- massaging numbers or data, violating copyright, or providing misleading information. Raise the ethics bar high and hold yourself and others to it.

- This was not writtemn by me but i had to share, I think sometimes we may do things or see others do things liek this. Maybe you will find this helpful to share with your friends....

Shannon A English
785-383-8139
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com

Industry Sign Ideas

2009-04-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

Sign Ideas For Your Business

Adding a sign may increase your revenue by as much as 15%*.

A sign is a great way to make your business grow. In fact, a study by the University of San Diego School of Business found that a needed sign can create a significant increase in traffic and sales.

A sign, whether it’s on your building or on the curb, announces who you are, what you do and attracts visitors to your business.

You only have about 3 seconds to catch the eye of the drive-by motorist, and about 11 seconds for walk-by traffic to notice your sign. You need to make the most of your business signage. Your signs need to get the message out quickly and attractively.

At FASTSIGNS®, we make it our business to know yours. We create custom signs to help you increase new business and to help grow your existing business. To discover what types of signs are often used in your industry, please see the categories listed.

*Economic Value of On-Premise Signage, 1997

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Window lettering identifies locations and can help create a positive impression as people enter your business.

Banners make a big impression and let customers know you mean business. Whatever your business, FASTSIGNS® knows it. Your industry has particular sign needs that FASTSIGNS® understands. From point of purchase signs and displays at checkout to illuminated monument signs at the entrance to your property, your specific business is a specialty at FASTSIGNS®.

Let us take our experience and apply it to helping you grow. You want the eyes and attention of potential clients. Our expert staff will work with you to accomplish your goals, building awareness and increasing traffic for your business.

According to the Small Business Administration and the Signage Foundation, a number of factors must be considered when deciding what type of sign will work best for your business.

Choose a sign that will attract the most customers and project the image you desire.
Choose a sign that is visible and easy to read for people who are driving and walking past your business.
Choose an attractive sign that is appropriate for your type of business.
Your sign will serve to remind existing customers of your business and location, and provide new customers with a valuable visual indicator about the products or services you offer.
Your sign should be as large as allowable for your location

Contact Shannon English at FASTSIGNS to help you with your sign needs...

Shannon A English, Account Manager
785-271-8899 ext 13 ALWAYS ASK FOR SHANNON
Cell 785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

2009-04-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

How to Choose Colors

Things communicated in numbers can be spoken in no other language. And because numbers are language, numbers can lie.

Color, too, is a language.

We use the language of color to reinforce – and contradict – statements made in the languages of shape and symbol, illumination and proximity. Hues, shades, tints, and intensities of color work together to create a mood, an ambience, an attitude.

Yes, color is a language and I am fascinated by it.

Colors are chosen for websites, logos, furniture, offices and art.

The question is, “How do you choose?”

Wizard Academy studies what gifted people do when they are feeling inspired. We investigate the greatest accomplishments of great men and women so that we may reverse engineer their unconscious methods.

We teach you how to do consciously what a gifted person does unconsciously when they are feeling inspired.

How would you like to be able to say, “The color palette of this website was selected by Claude Monet?”

Imagine the impact of a color scheme that was the basis of a Gustav Klimt painting that sold for more than 100 million dollars.

“The colors in this church were chosen to match the mood of ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo DaVinci.”

Do you suppose the color scheme of ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch might create a similar mood of disquiet even when separated from the painting? After all, Munch chose the colors to reinforce the scene. We can safely assume the colors are saying the same thing as the painting.

Colors sing most eloquently in chorus. Rarely does one color say much alone.

I have said enough today in the language of words. It's time to let the colors do the talking.

Just click the beagle at the top of today's memo to begin your instructional journey down the rabbit hole. Each painting clicked will take you one step deeper. There are also a couple of strange side tunnels. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of each page.

What colors might one find in a minor key rainbow?

I'll tell you next week.

Roy H. Williams

Signs carry messages

2009-04-06T08:32:00.001-07:00

Signs carry messages to more people per dollar invested almost more than any other medium

Times are tough and we are all trying to save money where we can. Signs, because of their relatively low cost, long life, and 24-hour-a-day work ethic, can carry a marketing message to more people per dollar invested than almost any other medium. Signs can generate hundreds – and even thousands of impressions per day for months or years at a time! Depending on your type of business and the type of signs you use, a sign could potentially pay for itself with the first few customers it attracts.

Want to improve your advertising with signs while watching your expenses? Signs are especially valuable to businesses that cannot afford to mount major advertising campaigns like large national corporations. Regardless of the economic situation or company size, signs help consumers remember your business’s location and offerings, prompt purchases, change purchase decisions and build brand equity.

Advertising during a slow economy can create a competitive advantage. In these tough times, consider the many signage options available, which are cost-effective and easily changeable. Studies show by rotating among several designs, you can keep your message fresh and your customers attentive.

Consider signs like these:

Custom banners
Banner stands / exhibits
Labels and decals
Vehicle graphics
Site signs
Point of purchase posters
Window, floor and ceiling graphics
Backlit displays
Yard signs

How has your sign buying changed during these tough economic times? We are interested in hearing from you. We, at FASTSIGNS® want to understand your sign needs and we want to help you with your advertising efforts. Share your thoughts and experiences with us.

Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-04-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

This is some really good stuff...

Bad Math and You
Activity-Based Accounting, Part Two

The key to Activity-Based Accounting is never to separate the numbers from the activities of the people represented by the numbers. When numbers in a business lose their connection to people and their actions, the numbers are no longer trustworthy.

Never forget these 3 things:

1. Not all facts are helpful.
2. You lose sight of the big picture when you get too close.
3. It’s easy to tell lies in the language of numbers because most people believe numbers never lie.

Here are a couple of facts taken from the 2000 Census:

The average American family size is 3.14 persons.
The average number of children per household is .90 children.

Problem: Let’s say you want to move to a “family” town, a place where lots of people are married with children still living at home. You’ll need to find a city with more than nine-tenths of a child per household, right?

Using the logic of traditional Cost-Based Accounting, you’ve narrowed your search to 3 towns with 50% more children than the national average of .90 per household. Riverview, Prairieville and Mountaintop each have 1.35 children per household. On paper, the 3 towns look equal.

But Activity-Based Accounting would reject the 1.35 children per household average and look at the raw data behind the numbers. Here’s what Activity-Based Accounting would discover:

The people of Riverview dislike children. That’s why
90 percent of all Riverview households have no kids.
But Riverview has a Polygamous religious group, so
5 percent of Riverview families have 13 children each and
5 percent have 14 children each. Welcome to Riverview, where tension hangs thick in the air.

Prairieville is composed largely of immigrants from an overpopulated nation. Consequently, the people of Prairieville believe it’s immoral to have more than one child.
8 percent of Prairieville households have no children.
74 percent of Prairieville households have 1 child.
5 percent have 2 kids.
5 percent have 3 kids.
4 percent have 4 kids.
4 percent have 5 kids.
In Prairieville, 82 percent of the population looks down on the 18 percent with more than one child. “Breeder” families like yours are social outcasts. You and your 2 kids are just going to love it here.

The people of Mountaintop are happy to be alive. The town motto, “Live and Let Live,” is painted on the water towers and the police cars.
33 percent of all households in Mountaintop have no children.
22 percent have 1 child.
33 percent have 2 children.
7 percent have 3 children.
2 percent have 4 children.
1 percent has 5 children,
1 percent has 6 children,
1 percent has 7 children.

Did you notice in the raw data that none of the children were fractioned? In Activity-Based Accounting, any step that creates a fractional person is a false step.

Although it’s true that each of these 3 towns has 1.35 children per household, it’s a completely irrelevant fact and

(1.) Not all facts are helpful.

We took one step too many when we calculated the number of children in the average household. This illustrates the fact that

(2.) You lose sight of the big picture when you get too close.

I’m sure you would agree that we learned more about Prairieville, Riverview and Mountaintop from the raw data than from their identical averages of 1.35 children per household. Now that you've taken a step back from the misleading "average" and looked at the raw data, Mountaintop is obviously your best choice.

Advertising professionals, you realize I’m talking about Gross Rating Points, don’t you?

Reach (the number of different people being reached)
times Frequency (repetition)
equals Gross Impressions.
Gross Impressions expressed as a percentage of population equals Gross Rating Points. (One million Gross Impressions in a city of one million people equals 100 Gross Rating Points.)

The Cost-Based Accounting logic that created Gross Rating Points isn’t just plain stupid; it’s fancy stupid. (Stupid with raisins on it.)

An advertiser is considering 5 different plans. All he knows is that each plan delivers 100 Gross Rating Points. An Activity-Based study of the raw data tells us Plan One will reach 100 percent of the population once. Plan Two will reach 50 percent of the population twice. Plan Three reaches 10 percent of the population 10 times. Plan Four reaches 5 percent 20 times. Plan Five reaches 1 percent of the population 100 times. But with “100 Gross Rating Points” hovering before his eyes, there’s no way for the advertiser to see the varying effectiveness of these schedules because when he multiplied reach times frequency he took one step too many.

Gross Rating Points are valid only if you accept the false premise that reach and frequency are interchangeable.

Do you believe reach and frequency are interchangeable? If so, you’d be just as happy in Prairieville or Riverview as in Mountaintop. After all, they each have 50 percent more children than the average American town.

And real estate is so much cheaper in the first two towns than in Mountaintop! I wonder why? Oh well, it doesn’t matter. Because the numbers are the same.

And numbers never lie.

Roy H. Williams

If you would like help with yuor visual marketing, signs, promotional items and printed items. Please contact me for a one on one consultation. Free of Charge...

Shannon A English
Account Manger, FASTSIGNS
785-383-8139

End of Excess in Time Magazine this week...

2009-04-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

Don't pretend we didn't see this coming for a long, long time.

New column: Bob Shiller’s plan to fix things
In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street's great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the '80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%. (See TIME's top 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

The same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late '80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It's as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life. And we started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house increased by about half. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least 20 lb. heavier than someone the same age back then. In the late '70s, 15% of Americans were obese; now a third are. (Read "What's the Best Diet? Eating Less Food.")

We saw what was happening for years, for decades, but we ignored it or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really headed over the falls. The U.S. auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter-century. The median household income has been steadily declining this century ... but, but, but our houses and our 401(k)s were ballooning in value, right? Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies.

The popular culture tried to warn us. For 20 years, we've had Homer Simpson's spot-on caricature of the quintessential American: childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy. And more recently we winced at the ultra-Homerized former earthlings of WALL•E.

We knew, in our heart of hearts, that something had to give. Remember when each decade, not long after it finished, assumed a distinct character? We all knew and know what "the '50s" mean, and they definitively ended with the Pill, J.F.K.'s assassination and the Beatles — just as "the '60s" ended when Americans got tired of being alarmed and hectored, and "the '70s" ended when stimulants became more popular than depressants and AIDS appeared. But in all salient respects, "the '80s" — Reaganism's reshaping of the political economy, the thrall of the PC, the vertiginous rise in the stock market — did not end.

The '80s spirit endured through the '90s and the 2000s, all the way until the fall of 2008, like an awesome winning streak in Vegas that went on and on and on. American-style capitalism triumphed, and thanks to FedEx and the Web, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary. So what if every year since the turn of the century the U.S. economy grew more slowly than the global economy? Stuff at Wal-Mart and Costco and money itself stayed supercheap! Even 9/11, which supposedly "changed everything," and the resulting Iraqi debacle came to seem like mere bumps in the road. Even if deep down everyone knew that the spiral of overleveraging and overspending and the prices of stocks and houses were unsustainable, no one wanted to be a buzz kill.

But now everything really has changed. More than a year into the Great Recession, we still aren't sure if there's a bottom in sight, and six months after the financial system began imploding, it's still iffy. The party is finally, definitely over. And the present decade, which we've never even agreed what to call — the 2000s? the aughts? — has acquired its permanent character as a historical pivot defined by the nightmares of 9/11 and the Panic of 2008-09. Those of us old enough to remember life before the 26-year-long spree began will probably spend the rest of our lives dealing with its consequences — in economics, foreign policy, culture, politics, the warp and woof of our daily lives. During the '80s and '90s, we were Wile E. Coyote racing heedlessly across the endless American landscape at maximum speed and then spent the beginning of the 21st century suspended in midair just past the end of the cliff; gravity reasserted itself, and we plummeted.

In the Road Runner cartoons, after each fall, the coyote is broken and battered but never dies. America isn't going to expire either. But unlike him, we will be chastened and begin behaving more wisely. For years, enthusiasts for unfettered capitalism have insisted that the withering away of enterprises and entire industries is a healthy and necessary part of a vibrant, self-correcting economic system; now, more than at any time since Joseph Schumpeter popularized the idea of creative destruction in 1942, we must endure the shocking and awesome pain of that metamorphosis. After decades of talking the talk, now we're all obliged to walk the walk.

We cannot just hunker down, cross our fingers, hysterically pinch our pennies, wait for the crises to pass, blame the bankers and then go back to business as usual. All that conventional wisdom about 2008 being a "change" year? We had no idea. Recently Rush Limbaugh appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, panicking not so much about the economy but about how the political winds are blowing as a result. If we finally manage to achieve something like universal health care, Limbaugh warned, it would mean "the end of America as we know it." He's right, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is the end of the world as we've known it. But it isn't the end of the world.

Yin and Yang
You know the story of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant is disciplined, the grasshopper parties as if the good times will last forever — and then winter descends. Americans are, bless us, energetic grasshoppers as well as energetic ants, a sui generis crossbreed, which is why we've been so successful as a nation. Our moxie comes in two basic types. We possess the Yankee virtues embodied by the founders: sobriety, hard work, practical ingenuity, common sense, fair play. And then there's our wilder, faster and looser side, that packet of attributes that makes us American instead of Canadian: impatient, hell-bent, self-invented gamblers, with a weakness for blue smoke and mirrors. A certain fired-up imprudence was present from the beginning, but it required a couple of centuries for the most extravagant version of the American Dream to take hold: starting with the California Gold Rush in 1849 — riches for the plucking, with no adult supervision — we have been repeatedly wont to abandon prudence and the tedium of saving and building in favor of the fantastic idea that anybody, given enough luck and liberty, can make a fortune overnight.

It's time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant, to be more artisan-enterpriser and less prospector-speculator, more heroic Greatest Generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based again.

Just as our two-sided national character has always toggled back and forth between its steady and skylarking aspects, so does our national history run in cycles, as writers have noted almost from the beginning. And so once more we are making the periodic shift from an unfettered zeal for individual getting and spending to a rediscovery of the common good, from "the business of America is business" seeming inarguably true to sounding narrow, callous, a little crazy.

But in fact, there are two cyclic waves in American history: one for politics and the general national spirit, the other for economic growth and contraction. Think of the two wave systems as running along the same timeline but perpendicular to each other — politics on the horizontal, weaving left to right; economics on the vertical, weaving up and down. Each affects the other, but unpredictably. A political or economic era can be as brief as 10 years or as long as a quarter-century, but the politics and economics don't move obviously in sync. Prosperity, for instance, can reinforce the "natural" political shift toward the right, as it did after World War II and for most of the past 25 years, but it can also accelerate a turn to the left, as it did in the early 1960s. Or the social discombobulations provoked by a given zig, as with the late '60s, can make the zag that follows more extreme; thus the long political period we've just been through.

Every now and then, the drastic end of flush economic times happens to coincide with the natural end of a conservative political era. Such was the case in the 1930s — coming after three straight conservative presidencies, a period of whizbang technological progress (electrification, radio, aviation) and a culture of bon temps rouler — and such is the case now.

We'll see soon enough how well President Barack Obama copes, but long before the collapse, he clearly sensed the nature of the historical moment. His Democratic opponents were all over him a year ago when he gave the Reagan Revolution its due, but he was exactly right: "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America ... He tapped into what people were already feeling ... [He] transformed American politics and set the agenda for a long time ... In political terms, we may be in one of those moments where we can get a seismic shift in how the country views itself and our future. And we have to take advantage of that."

Work the Program
Given that we've brought on the current crises through a quarter-century of self-destructive financial excess and overdependence on debt and fossil fuels, during the same quarter-century we've all become familiar with a way of thinking about self-destructive excess and dependence. The vocabulary of addiction recovery could come in handy just now. We are like substance abusers coming off a long bender, hitting bottom (we can only hope) and taking the messes we've made as a sobering wake-up call. I've always thought many of the 12 Steps were superfluous, so here is a streamlined, secularized Three-Step Program for America — Bubbleholics Anonymous? — to start getting back on track:

• Admit that we are powerless over addiction to easy money and cheap fossil fuel and living large — that our lives had become unmanageable.

• Believe that we can, individually and collectively, restore ourselves to sanity and normal living.

• Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and be entirely ready to remove our defects of character.

Of course, when addicts finally quit, it feels awful for a while, and that's where we are right now. The recession, provoked by the sudden, essentially cold-turkey abandonment of spending, lending and borrowing, is something like our national equivalent of the jitters, sweats and seizures that addicts experience right after they give up the junk. Actually, the applicable addiction trope is more like food (or sex) than drugs or booze, since as economic creatures, we can't quit; we just have to teach ourselves to buy and borrow in moderate, healthier ways. The new America must be about financial temperance, not abstinence.

Our great national rehab won't be easy. But it wasn't only in olden times that Americans have coped with breathtaking flux and successfully undertaken dramatic change. In fact, we've just done it. During the era recently ended, we adapted to hundreds of TV channels and multiple phone companies and airlines that arise and disappear as fast as strip-mall stores. Women have come close to achieving real equality; being gay has become astoundingly public and unremarkable. And speaking of shaking off addictions, half again as many of us smoked cigarettes in the early '80s. We watched (and helped) the Soviet Union and its European empire collapse and watched (and helped) China change from a backward, dangerous Orwellian nation into a booming, much less Orwellian member of the global order. During just the past 15 years, we've managed to reduce murders in New York City by two-thirds; grown accustomed to the weird transparency and instant connectedness of the new digital world; sequenced the human genome; and inaugurated a black President. That's change.

This time around, though, in contrast to the early '80s, it's much clearer from the get-go that one era has ended and a new one is about to begin. A lot of the change will be the result of collective political choices, as we clear away the wreckage, consider the bad habits and ill-advised schemes that got us here and try to refashion our economic and health-care and energy systems accordingly. But at least as much of the new America of the 2010s and beyond will be the result of transformed sensibility, changes in our understanding of what's important and sensible and attractive, and what feels hollow or silly or nuts.

Begin Again
The reset button has been pushed. So what will be the protocols and look and feel of the America about to emerge?

Only six months ago, we thought we might be on the verge of a remarkable new era — thanks to the possible election of Obama. It is bizarre how secondary that epochal change now seems. It's as if Jesus had returned — but just afterward extraterrestrials landed, and as a result everybody stopped paying much attention to the holy dude. But it's also a perfectly apt and gratifying turn of events: candidate Obama positioned himself as a smart, steady character who happened to be black, and the economic emergency that helped ensure his election has pushed the fact of his race and its heavy symbolic freight into the shadows of public consciousness. Once the crises have passed, however, I think we'll rediscover the ramifications, small and large, of the enlightened national turn we made last Nov. 4 and start enjoying the dawn of a new era of racial reconciliation.

A big reason for Obama's election and high approval ratings is his privileging of the empirical and pragmatic ahead of ideological reflex. We have not, of course, arrived in a golden age of fair-minded, intellectually honest postpartisanship, as proved by the congressional votes on the stimulus package and the redoubled ferocity of brain-dead partisans. But a majority of Americans out in America are dialing back or turning off their ideological autopilots, thanks to the economic crises, Obama's approach and the post–Cold War realities. With the Soviet Union gone and China socialist in name only, the specter of communism is no longer haunting us, and charges of socialism have lost the political power they had for most of the past century. Rather, it's suddenly capitalist piggishness that provokes genuine rage. When nearly half the House Republicans vote for a confiscatory 90% tax on Wall Street executives' bonuses, the old "class warfare" lines seem moot.

We haven't come to the end of ideology, as Daniel Bell asserted in 1960 and Francis Fukuyama restated in 1992, but the familiar polarities of right and left are losing their salience. For a while, America will be in a state of ideological flux — which means we'll be unusually free to improvise a fresh course forward. We can have universal health coverage and public schools unbound from the stultifying grip of teachers' unions. We can tax fossil fuels so that solar and wind become more economical and commit seriously to nuclear power. We can impose sensible regulatory mechanisms and enthusiastically promote free markets and free trade. We can grow the armed forces to fight all necessary wars but also forgo pork-barrel weapons systems.

It's not that disagreements about government intervention won't disappear — and we'll continue to have true believers on the left and the right. But with the economy in uncharted territory, we'll come to recognize that party-line adherence to old political convictions won't provide any easy way out. Given that it was our unthinking trust in the unthinking certainty of "experts" that got us here — securitized debt? credit-default swaps? uh, sure, whatever — Americans can now revert to their ruthlessly pragmatic, commonsensical selves. Admitting that we aren't certain exactly how to proceed is liberating, and key. Hyperbolic rants and rigid talking points, in either Limbaughian or Olbermannian flavors, now seem worse than useless, artifacts of a bumptious barroom age.

The utterly international nature of our present economic hell makes it all the scarier. But in the long run, I think we will also see an upside: the meltdown amounts to a spectacular moment of global consciousness, this generation's version of the Apollo astronauts' iconic 1968 photograph of the earth from the moon — an unforgettable reminder that all 6.7 billion of us are in this together, profoundly and inextricably interdependent. (The sublime always has a bit of terror mixed in.)

If you want to feel encouraged about our economic near future — not this damned decade but the one to come — ignore the stock traders and go talk to some venture capitalists. They aren't quite giddy (after the '80s and '90s and '00s, beware all giddiness), but they are optimistic about an imminent tide of innovations in technology, energy and transportation. Recall, please, the national mood in the mid-'70s: after the 1960s party, we found ourselves in a slough of despondency, with an oil crisis, a terrible recession, a kind of Weimarish embrace of decadence, national malaise — and at that very dispirited moment, Microsoft and Apple were founded. The next transformative, moneymaking technologies and businesses are no doubt coming soon to a garage near you.

The present chastening can't mean turning into a nation of overcautious, unambitious scaredy-cats. This is the moment for business to think different and think big. The great dying off of quintessentially 20th century businesses presents vast opportunity for entrepreneurs. People will still need (greener) cars, still want to read quality journalism, still listen to recorded music and all the rest. And so as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings — that is, the people burning to produce and sell new kinds of transportation and media in new, economic ways — will have a clearer field in which to grow.

The ecology of business and employment at the high end has already been transformed by the Wall Street crash. The end of the boom in the financial industry means that careers manipulating money will no longer be so seductive to such a disproportionate share of our best and brightest. Among the 2007 graduates of Harvard College who went straight to work, half the kids heading to banks and consultancies said that if money weren't an issue, they'd be embarking on different career paths, and the 20% of the class that went to work in public service, politics, the arts and publishing would instead be 39%. In the postbubble economy, plenty of smart and ambitious young people will still pursue financial careers, God bless them, but other fields will get a bigger share of the cream.

The baby boomers were historically fortunate: they missed the Great Depression and World War II, and though they grew up with the hideous ambient hum of potential nuclear Armageddon, until they reached middle age, the only great national trauma was the one — the '60s and Vietnam — in which they were the self-regarding stars. The so-called millennials, on the other hand, have come of age during a period defined by the digital revolution, 9/11, financial bubbles bursting, a possible depression and the election — possibly their election — of an African-American President: the makings, frankly, of a healthier, more useful generational creation myth than assassinations, antiwar protests and countercultural bacchanalia (which, by the way, enabled the risk-taking, party-hearty, quasi-utopian paradigm of the past quarter-century). In other words, the kids are all right. (Read stories from people who lived through the Great Depression.)

Whether or not Congress passes some kind of carbon-taxing scheme that ushers in a true alternative-energy era, "sustainability" is going to be shaping individual and public-policy decisions. And I don't just mean eating locally grown foods, driving more fuel-efficient cars and using weird lightbulbs. Annual increases of 10% and 15% in real estate prices were not sustainable; endlessly lowering taxes and expanding government isn't sustainable; Medicare and the war on drugs as currently constituted are not sustainable. Sustainability in this sense is as much old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicanism as it is newfangled kumbaya-ish green talk, and achieving it will require partisans on both sides to face facts and make unpleasant choices.

Yes, we must start spending again, and we will. But we've all known people who, having survived the 1930s, never lost their Depression habits of frugality. And so it will be again. We don't need to turn ourselves into tedious, zero-body-fat, zero-carbon-footprint ascetics, but even after the economy recovers, deciding to forgo that third car or fifth TV or imperial master bathroom or marginally cooler laptop will come more naturally.

The housing industry is comatose, yet even that has a silver lining. We have a moment to pause and reflect before we begin building again. When big-time real estate development resumes, we can move beyond the incoherent, anything-goes paradigm of the postwar era and produce more places to live along the lines of the towns and cities everyone instinctively loves, communities designed to become true communities. "The days where we're just building sprawl forever," Obama said in February in South Florida, "those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats — everybody recognizes that that's not a smart way to design communities."

Although certain self-parodying epiphenomena of the Age of Profligacy — so long, Paris Hilton! — are about to disappear, fun will endure. Hollywood is doing fantastic box-office business, thanks to insanely unserious movies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Madea Goes to Jail. The Colbert Report has been a special haven of sanity amid the sky-is-falling hysteria. And again, history is encouraging in this regard: Saturday Night Live and modern comedy were born during the malaise-y '70s, just as wit and humor — the New Yorker, the Marx Brothers, screwball comedy — flourished in the '30s. I'm even hopeful that the meltdown and resulting reset might jar the culture in deeper ways. For three decades, too much of art and design and entertainment has seemed caught in a cul-de-sac, almost compulsively reviving styles and remixing the greatest hits of the past. (Think: post-Modern architecture, pop music based on sampling, '60s-style shift dresses, pseudo-midcentury home décor.) Since we're now finished with a 25- or 30-year-long era in both politics and economics, maybe a new cultural epoch will emerge as well. Maybe more of the next big things will be actually, thrillingly new.

Second Verse, Same as the First
Sixty-eight years ago, a founder of this magazine, Henry Luce, published an essay in LIFE celebrating a national history that had "teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes ... It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century." And so we did. The question now is how far we can extend our heyday of manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Golden ages and empires do come to an end.

"History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "but it rhymes." Does America in 2009 rhyme with the Britain of 1909? Back then, the British were finishing a proud century as the most important nation on earth — economically, politically, militarily, culturally. But the U.S. was coming on fast, having already overtaken the Brits economically. Between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, as America turned into the unequivocal global leader, Britain became an admirable also-ran, radically diminished as a global player. If the 21st century rhymed, China would be the new us — feverish with individual and national drive, manufacturer to the world, growing like crazy, bigger and much more populous than the reigning superpower. And our next half-century would, according to the analogy, unfold like Britain's in the first half of the 20th century, requiring a downsizing of our national ambitions and self-conception.

In fact, we surely will have to adjust the ways we think of ourselves. Still an exceptional country, absolutely, but not a magical one exempt from the laws of economic and geopolitical gravity. A nation with plenty of mojo left, sure, but in our 3rd century, informed by the wisdom of middle age a little more than the pedal-to-the-metal madness of youth.

The same goes for our individual senses of lifestyle entitlement. During the perma-'80s, way too many of us were operating, consciously or not, with a dreamy gold-rush vision of getting rich the day after tomorrow and then cruising along as members of an impossibly large leisure class. (That was always the yuppie dream: an aristocratic life achieved meritocratically.) Now that our age of self-enchantment has ended, however, each of us, gobsmacked and reality-checked by the new circumstances, is recalibrating expectations for the timing and scale of our particular version of the Good Life. Which, of course, fuels the ferocious anger at the Wall Street rich even now getting richer with subsidized eight-figure bonuses.

However, if most of our hypothetical individual futures don't look quite so lavish, as a nation we have two not-so-secret weapons that, managed correctly and given a little luck, could allow us to remain at the top of the heap for a long time to come: technological innovation and immigration.

For our past two centuries, a key to national prosperity and power was the extraordinary physical scale of our land, our population, our natural resources. China has similar advantages today, and partly because we have already been there and done that, paving the way, it has been able to develop in fast motion, cramming 100 years of development into 30. But I'm reminded of Philip Johnson's apt, bitchy description of Frank Lloyd Wright during the forward looking 1930s "as the greatest architect of the 19th century." Twenty-first century China is the greatest country of the 20th century. Muscular industrialism gets you only so far. Further increases in productivity and prosperity require ingenuity and enterprise applied at the micro scale — digital devices and networked systems, biotechnology, subatomic nanotechnology. As China and other developing countries finally achieve the industrial plenty that we enjoyed 50 years ago, the U.S. can stay ahead once again by pioneering the next-generation technologies that the increasingly industrialized world will require. (Read "Will China's Stock Market Rebound Before the S&P?")

And no other nation assimilates immigrants as successfully as the U.S. The sooner we can agree on a coherent national policy to encourage as many as possible of the world's smartest and most ambitious people to become Americans, the better our chances of forestalling national decline. The waves of exotic foreigners who arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries were unsettling, but previous generations got over it, luckily, since those newcomers were instrumental in forging the American Century.

The next new America that hatches will not be some bizarro world opposite of everything that came just before. History proceeds dialectically. The New Deal era ended, but its basic social and economic underpinnings have endured. Notwithstanding the backlash against the 1960s, the changes born of that decade's sharp left turn — civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll — became part of the American way of life. In the same way, even as we now rediscover the need for sensible regulation and systemic fairness, the fundamentally good lessons of the Reagan age — entrepreneurialism mostly unbound, proud Americanism — will endure. The babies will not be thrown out with the bathwater.

We are in a state of shock. In a matter of months, half the value of the stock market and more than half of Wall Street's corporate pillars have disappeared, along with several million jobs. Venerable corporate enterprises are teetering. But as we gasp in terror at our half glass of water, we really can — must — come to see it as half full as well as half empty. Now that we're accustomed to the unthinkable suddenly becoming not just thinkable but actual, we ought to be able to think the unthinkable on the upside, as America plots its reconstruction and reinvention.

Andersen is a novelist of (Heyday, Turn of the Century), the host of the public-radio program Studio 360 and a former columnist for TIME

I did not right this it was in Time Magazine this week, and I had to share.

Shannon A English
785-383-8139

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

2009-04-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Activity-Based Accounting
How Wal-Mart Killed K-Mart and Best Buy Beat Circuit City

I spoke to a small auditorium full of business school grad students at the University of Texas last month.

They were fascinated by my case study of Transactional vs. Relational customers. I saw their eyes widen and their heads move up and down slowly as I explained how the Relational shopping mode is the foundation of all branding. But then they all dropped their heads and started taking notes like crazy when I began to talk about Activity Based Accounting.

I was startled by their reaction. I paused, then said, “You guys have heard about this, right?” They shook their heads no. These young men and women will receive their MBAs in May.

I stared at them in disbelief.

A man from India spoke up, “For a moment I thought you were talking about activity-based costing but then you took it a whole different direction.”

I was incredulous. “You’ve never heard of Activity-Based Accounting?” Again they shook their heads no. Then it hit me. Joe Romano invented this and taught it to his students 20 years ago without ever mentioning that it was his own invention.

I smiled. Joe has always been like that.

As the years have passed, I’ve seen countless real-life examples of Activity-Based Accounting in action. I just always assumed it was common knowledge and that everyone else was seeing what Joe taught me to see.

In a nutshell, Activity-Based Accounting is highly sensitive to trends in customer behavior. It sees the people behind the numbers.

Traditional cost-based accounting reduces customers and their behaviors to an “average” or a “percentage.”

If a hole is 12 inches deep, how deep is half a hole? Cost-based accounting will answer “6 inches.” Activity-Based Accounting will answer, “There’s no such thing as half a hole.”

Have you ever met the family with 2.3 children?

Analysts who study Wal-Mart will tell you that the secret to their success is inventory management. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Wal-Mart’s inventory management is highly responsive to the activities of the customer.

Wal-Mart has a men’s clothing department. So does K-Mart. Let’s assume they sell exactly the same clothing. K-Mart can tell you that the month started strong, then slowed down, so they pulled out their little stainless steel cart and the store manager got on the intercom and announced “a flashing blue light special.”

Wal-Mart, on the other hand, knows it sold 5 Dave Hogan sport shirts within the first 8 hours they were on display and that all of them were blue. The red ones aren’t selling. The next day they sell 4 more blue ones and only 2 red. Wal-Mart’s sales aren’t going to slow down like K-Mart’s, because Wal-Mart is going to make sure they don’t run out of blue, Dave Hogan sport shirts.

K-Mart went bankrupt. Wal-Mart became the most successful retailer in the history of the world. That’s the power of Activity-Based Accounting.

Likewise, Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson implemented a decision-making technique back in 2004 that I immediately recognized as Activity-Based Accounting. One year later the success of his endeavor was trumpeted in the Wall Street Journal. Four years after that, rival Circuit City was driven into liquidation because they never quite caught on to what Best Buy was doing.

Would you like to talk more about it?

Activity-Based Accounting dovetails nicely into the principles taught by women’s marketing expert Michele Miller, so I’ve asked her to give me a couple of hours during her upcoming Wonder Branding class April 15-16 at Wizard Academy. You don’t mind a little extra class time, do you?

Rooms are still available at no charge in Engelbrecht House. [ http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/mmmredirect.asp?id=1210 ]I’d snag one right now if I was you. A couple of days in Austin will make 2009 turn out a whole lot better for you. Just look at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. (Best Buy retained Michele Miller. Those guys aren’t stupid.)

"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance."
– Sir Claus Moser

The Wizard Academy campus is beautiful this time of year. Come.

Roy H. Williams

Bumper Stickers Refuse to Participate in the Recession

2009-03-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

Bumper Stickers Refuse to Participate in the Recession

Everywhere we turn it seems that the news headlines continue to get worse. The economy is sluggish and now bailout recipients are under scrutiny. Like many of you, I am ready for a change - something POSITIVE. That’s why when I found out what some FASTSIGNS® centers have been doing-or rather, not doing-in response to the recession, I wanted to pass it on.
The FASTSIGNS center in Vancouver, WA, owned by Teresa Kung and Barry Leung, decided to make a serious resolution-they are refusing to participate in the recession. To motivate others in adopting a similar attitude, this wife and husband business team began printing “Say No to the Recession” bumper stickers in January, and offering them free of charge, to any interested customer.

Anti-Recession bumoer stickers made at Vancouver FASTSIGNS.

Kim Gilpin and his FASTSIGNS center in Grand Rapids, MI, are doing something similar. They have been printing bumper stickers that read: “Be Positive. Refuse to participate in the Recession,” and passing them out to friends, family members and customers.

"Be Positive" bumper stickers from Grand Rapids FASTSIGNS.

While each FASTSIGNS team doesn’t take credit for coming up with the motto, they do believe in it very strongly. “This isn’t about promoting our name; it is about encouraging people to see past all the negative media and take steps toward turning our economy around,” explained Gilpin.

The goal for each was to create positive thinking and encourage a united front within their local communities. Both say the feedback they have received so far has been all positive. Who knew? Something as simple as a bumper sticker can actually have a positive effect, even in these trying times. It just goes to show, change has to begin somewhere, regardless of how small it may seem.

Send us a comment about what you are doing to stay positive!

Who Answers your Phone

2009-03-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine sends me a letter every Tuesday, called Tuesday's with Tim. Tim Kolling with WIBW that is. And his letter today really struck a cord with me. The title was Who answers your phone? And I have often called companies myself and wondered if the person on the other line was having a bad day. I myself may have done the same thing while dealing with one problem the phone rings, and next thing you know you are hearing yourself thinking, wow take a breath don't take out my bad day on this poor soul on the other end.

Tim's Take:
"Don't take it for granted that you already know who answers your phone. Investigate. If you find that you have people who aren't or who can't be superb on the phone, don't let them answer it. They are doing serious damage to your business that you may not even be aware of." (Hmm makes me think we really need to pay attention to how we may sound on the other end of the line to the potential customer on the phone as well as our customer service representatives.)

Everyday I spend a lot of time setting up projects with my clients as Tim does too. We have to go through a few people sometimes to get to the person in charge of projects, the "Gatekeepers" as Tim has called them. And for the most part, most are pretty good, but there are some that could really use some work.

Just remember they (maybe you) are the first impression people have of your business...make sure it is a good one.

This little tib bit was brought to you by Tim Kolling of WIBW tim.kolling@morris.com or 785-228-7228. He is always a pleasure to work with.

Sincerely,
Shannon A English
ACCOUNT MANAGER, FASTSIGNS
Always ask for Shannon 785-271-8899 ext 13
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

XING Global Letter sent...Interesting Stuff

2009-03-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Dear member of the XING Global Business Group,
Thanks very much for all your feedback on my last newsletter. I was delighted to see that so many people are tackling the challenge of the present economic situation so positively and continuing to focus on moving forward. I have drawn up a list of rules from all the answers I received which I would like to pass on to you:
1. Innovative products/services and global thinking
Many of the developments in the current crisis haven't come from nowhere, but have evolved over months and years. Inefficient products or services, high energy-consumption machines/cars, and paper-laden administrative processes are a big problem for many companies, especially at the moment. Similar to sports, companies need an ongoing fitness program. Good can always be better. Energy costs can often be reduced even further. Use your creativity! Have a good think about how you can improve your products and/or services. A crisis may be a regular occurrence; its length, however, is limited. After it, those companies with good products and/or services are always the winners.
2. Avoid paper
Avoid using paper in your company processes wherever possible. This will save you money, speed up your business procedures, and improve services for your customers. This is turn results in additional profits – and protects the environment. Exchange product data electronically, for example. Orders, delivery notes, invoices: all of these can be processed electronically. Just send me an email (peter.pick@velitabula.com) if you need further details.
3. Staff cuts – a wise move?
Think long and hard as to whether it's a good idea to dismiss employees or not. Announcing that your company is about to layoff a set number of people often results in your good employees quickly looking for another job – and you lose valuable resources. Maybe you could consider using the creativity of your personnel to greater effect. Set up teams for optimization and brainstorming. Rely on the ideas of your employees – the most valuable asset any company can have. You'll desperately need a well-trained workforce when the crisis is over.
4. Pay suppliers' bills on time
Are you having financial difficulties? Do you thus try to settle your suppliers' bills as late as possible? Do you then wonder why your customers are doing the same to you and that in the end your financial pressures are not getting any less? My appeal to the companies of the world is to pay all of your suppliers' bills on time – and in our present, demanding climate earlier rather than later. Your suppliers will thank you for it. And when this message also gets through to your customers, you'll continue to have your accounts settled on time. Easy, isn't it?!
5. Be of good cheer!
For some, the present challenges are very hard. Whatever happens, be of good cheer! Free your mind so that you can use it to look for – and find – new opportunities. Maybe new products and/or new services are the answer for you, or a new job or even self-employment. If possible, try to find ten alternative solutions to the challenges you face. The number ten is easy to remember – just count your fingers :-) I wish you much success, courage, and happiness on whatever path you choose. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Enthusiastically yours,
Peter

I thought this was worth sharing... Shannon A English
Came from my exign news letter
Connect with me on www.Xing.xom
http://www.xing.com/go/invite/11911626.899bb4

Shannon A English
Account Manager
785-271-8899 ext 13
Cell 383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com
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Monday Morning Memo

2009-03-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

Never, Never, Never

1. Never promise everything you plan to deliver.
Leave something to become the delight factor. That unexpected, extra bit you deliver "because we love you" will go a long way toward helping the customer forgive and forget any areas where you may have fallen short. Great ads are written in three steps: (1.) How to End. What will be the Last Mental Image your ad presents to your customer? Begin with the end in mind. (2.) Where to Begin. A clear but interesting angle of approach will gain the customer’s attention. (3.) What to Leave Out. Surprise is the foundation of delight. What will you intentionally leave out of your ad so that you can deliver a delightful surprise? What will you leave out so that the imagination of the customer is engaged?

2. Never begin a sentence with the word, "Imagine…"
If you’re planning to take your customer on a journey of imagination, plunge them into it. "The wheels of your airplane touch down, but not in the city you were promised…" "You must now choose between two good things…" "If you had more enemies like these, you wouldn’t need friends…"

3. Never include your name in an ad more often than it would be spoken in normal conversation.
Cramming your name where it doesn’t belong is AdSpeak. Back when Americans encountered one thirtieth as many ads each day, the rule was to repeat the name of the advertiser as often as possible. Do this today and your ads will sound like they were written in the 1940s.

4. Never conjure an unpleasant mental image.
Fear and disgust work face-to-face, but they often backfire when used in mass media. Conjure these unpleasant emotions in the minds of the masses and you’ll leave your listeners with a vaguely bad feeling attached to your name. They’ll want to avoid you, but they won’t be able to recall exactly why.

5. Never respond to a challenge from a competitor smaller than you. Drawing attention to a smaller competitor makes them larger in the eyes of the public. Conversely, if someone bigger than you is foolish enough to shine their spotlight on you, dance in it.

6. Never claim to have exceptional service.
Most people won’t believe you. And those who do believe you will expect more from your staff than they can possibly deliver. It’s a lose/lose proposition. Rather than promise exceptional service in your ads, tell the public something objective, factual and verifiable that causes them to say, "Wow. Those people really serve their customers." Never praise yourself. Do things that make the customer praise you.

7. Never mention the recession.
I understand how tempting it is to say, "In order to help you combat the recession we’re offering…" But all that really does is remind the customer that now is not a good time to be spending money.

8. Never make a claim you don’t immediately support with evidence.
Unsubstantiated claims are the worst form of AdSpeak. Give the customer facts, details and objective proof if you want to win their confidence. Specifics are more believable than generalities.

9. Never use humor that doesn’t reinforce the principal point of your ad.
Here’s the litmus test: If remembering the humor forces you to recall the message of the ad, the humor is motivated. Good job. But if recalling the humor doesn’t put you in memory of the ad’s main point, the humor is unmotivated and will make your ad less effective. Sure, people will like the ad. They just won’t buy what you’re selling.

10. Never say things in the usual way.
From billboards to storefronts to packaging to messages on T-shirts, ads whisper and wheedle and cajole and shout to win our attention. A 1978 Yankelovich study reported that the average American was confronted with more than 2,000 advertising messages per day. But that was 30 years ago. When Yankelovich revisited the study in 2008, the number had jumped to more than 5,000 messages per day. The mundane, the predictable and the usual are filtered and rejected from our consciousness. Win the customer’s attention with words and phrases that are new, surprising and different.

Roy H. Williams

Just something to think about... A little Poem

2009-03-23T09:58:00.001-07:00

(I did not write this, my grandma sent it to me.)

A Birth Certificate shows that we were born.
A Death Certificate shows that we died.
Pictures show that we lived!
Have a seat . . . Relax . . . And read this slowly.
I Believe...
That just because two people argue,
doesn't mean they don't love each other.
And just because they don't argue,
doesn't mean they do love each other.

I Believe...
That we don't have to change friends if
we understand that friends change.

I Believe...
That no matter how good a friend is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.

Believe...
That true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance.
Same goes for true love.
I Believe...
That you can do something in an instant
that will give you heartache for life.

I Believe...
That it's taking me a long time
to become the person I want to be.

I Believe...
That you should always leave loved ones with
loving words. It may be the last time you see them.

I Believe...
That you can keep going long after you think you can't.

I Believe...
That we are responsible for what
we do, no matter how we feel.

I Believe....
That either you control your attitude or it controls you.

I Believe...
That heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.

I Believe...
That money is a lousy way of keeping score.

I Believe...
That my best friend and I can do anything, or nothing, and have the best time.

I Believe...
That sometimes the people you expect to kick you When you're down, will be the ones to help you get back up.

I Believe...
That sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry,
but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

I Believe...
That maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had,
and what you've learned from them.....and less to do with how many
birthdays you've celebrated.

I Believe...
That it isn't always enough to be forgiven by others.
Sometimes, you have to learn to forgive yourself.

I Believe...
That no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn't stop for your grief.

I Believe...
That our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are,
but we are responsible for whom we become.

I Believe...
That you shouldn't be so eager to find
out a secret. It could change your life Forever.

I Believe...
Two people can look at the exact same
thing and see something totally different.

I Believe...
That your life can be changed in a matter of
hours by people who don't even know you.

I Believe...
That even when you think you have no more to give, if
a friend cries out to you ........you will find the strength to help.

I Believe...
That credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.

I Believe...
That the people you care about most in life are taken from you too soon.

I Believe....
That you should send this to all of the people that you believe in. I just did.

The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything;
They just make the most of everything.
Thank you God for all the wonderful people who help us throughout the journey of life..
May Angels guard you and guide you

Metro Voice News Paper - Free Employement Ads

2009-03-23T07:32:00.001-07:00

April issue to feature New Businesses! Ads now cheaper than ever!!

AFFORDABLE ADVERTISING - TELL HIM SHANNON ENGLISH SENT YOU!

Place your New Ads & FREE Calendar entries now for April’s Metro VOICE! Deadline: Mar. 25, with possible extension to Mar. 30 if needed. (Late additions on space available basis) Print Date: Apr. 1.

Get a HALF-PAGE AD FOR $48 when you sign up for 12 months of any size ad. Our SPRING SALE for new ads is also in force! If you’ve been waiting to advertise, DO IT NOW while others are pulling back – it’s your chance to stand out! Call 640-6399!

HALF-PRICE WEBSITE ADS WITH ANY PRINT AD! Advertise your business on www.MetroVoiceNews.com (Updated Daily!) for less! Get more for your Buck! Call 640-6399.

Free employment ads: During these troubled economic times, we’re helping brothers & sisters in Christ find each other, whether they’re looking to hire or looking for employment. All businesses, churches & individuals can submit employment-related ads FREE in our April edition. (25 word max)

News and Events -- Featuring new and expanding businesses: If you have expanded or opened a new business in the last few months, we want to help spread the word! Submit your news & event info and pictures to voice@cox.net! We also list events in our Event Calendar - Free!

Try our Focus on Business page – Promote your business with an ad plus a short article about it, including a color photo! Call for details: 640-6399!

"Dollars & Sense" Financial Page – Place your ads and articles of financial interest!

Of course, we’ll also have all the news of Faith, Family & Community you’ve come to expect, such as:
Church & business news • Outreach & Missions news • Movie, Music & Book Reviews • Financial strategies • Inspiring stories of Faith • Pro-Life news • Prayer Initiatives
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let us promote your organization through an ad! You’ll also be supporting a family-friendly newspaper for the community! We pray for our advertisers every month as well, and ask our readers to support them! Let’s help each other! Our rates are as low as $48 for a business card-size ad, or $192 for a quarter page! It’s a good way to reach an estimated 40,000 readers through over 500 church, business & retail outlets!
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

P.S. - Churches can list their service times and other info in our New Resident Church Guide for only $12 per month. Newcomers and people relocating use our directory to find a church.
Best of all, churches then become eligible for our best price on any ads placed thereafter!

To those who have been partnering with us: Thank You and God Bless!
For those who haven't been a part of it.....Why not partner with us now? We believe God will bless us both if you do!

~ Please forward this notice to any other persons that may be interested. ~

Please tell him Shannon English sent you!
For more information call: Lee Hartman, Managing Editor, Metro Voice
2850 SW Mission Woods Drive (29th & Urish Rd.), Topeka, KS 66614
785-235-3340 office; 785-640-6399 cell; 785-215-6627 fax
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Whet Your Appetite with Signs

2009-03-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

News stories about our eating habits are very common these days. Meals are getting bigger, and so are our waistlines. On the flip side, belts are tightening when it comes to spending, affecting the number of people who frequent restaurants or fast-food establishments, or have events catered.

Now more than ever before, it is important to show potential and current patrons what differentiates one restaurant from another—and signs and graphics are the medium to get the point across. “While most forms of mass awareness media appeal to many restaurant owners, more restaurateurs are moving towards signs and graphics because of their cost effective price tag, flexibility and eye-catching options,” said Drue Townsend, senior vice president of marketing for FASTSIGNS International, Inc.

Signs have three general purposes: to inform, direct and sell. Signs inform patrons what type of establishment they’re entering or the culinary specialties. Signs direct customers to a restaurant through innovative way-finding displays. Selling the product is the end goal for restaurateurs. Whether promoting daily specials, “kids eat free” or unique dining experiences, such as wine pairing dinners, in today’s uncertain economy, signs have the power to sell a business and bring the customers inside. .In order to enable customers to identify with a restaurant, consider the following signage suggestions:

Ask “Who are we as a restaurant” and does that come across in the signage?
What do you want to promote? Specials or our most profitable items?
Are we maximizing our use of photos and images in our signs and graphics?
What image do we want to project—an upscale, elegant feel or a more casual, down-home atmosphere?
What is the viewing distance for each sign and how much time does a viewer have to read each sign?
What is the viewing environment? Does the restaurant have prominent street frontage or is it hidden behind another establishment? Inside, how could signs be used to communicate features, promote catering or direct traffic around the location?
Are there local sign ordinances or restrictions that would prevent you from displaying certain types of signs?

This really holds true for all industries, people are wanting to cut back their budgets and the last place you want to do this is on your marketing! I can help you with all your marketing needs. From promotional items, printed forms to your signs, I will be there from start to finish. Don't forget to ask me about internet marketing as well.

What is your budget? FASTSIGNS® sign and graphics centers use innovation and technology to make the sign buying process simple by offering consulting, design, production, file transfer, delivery and installation for a full range of custom sign and graphic products. For more information, contact:

Shannon A English
785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Fear Is Contagious

2009-03-16T11:09:00.000-07:00

Fear Is Contagious
I am reminded of what Michel Eyquem De Montaigne said with tongue in cheek during the French Renaissance 450 years ago, "My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened."

As expected, we received a firestorm of email 2 weeks ago as a result of the Monday Morning Memo of March 2 in which I said I had chosen not to be fearful about the future. It seems that a lot of people take pleasure in fretting and they want me to get on board.

But a frightened person frightens other people. And these newly frightened people will frighten still more people until finally no one is spending any money. Fear is the fuel of recession. I understand perfectly what’s happening in the world. I simply choose not to be afraid.

You can choose, too. We are worth more than many sparrows.
Warren Buffett agrees with this outlook.
"Fear is very contagious. You can get fearful in 5 minutes, but you don’t get confident in 5 minutes." - Warren Buffett on CNBC, Monday, March 9, 2009

CNBC: "We’ve been getting thousands and thousands of emails from our viewers. Warren, we’d like to start with one that echoes a theme we heard again and again. This one comes from Terry in San Antonio, Texas, who asks, ‘Will everything be all right?’"

BUFFETT: "Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created. We started with 4 million people back in 1790 and look where we’ve come. And it wasn’t because we were smarter than other people. It wasn’t because our land was more fertile or we had more minerals or our climate was more favorable. We had a system that worked. It unleashed the human potential. It didn’t work every year. We had 6 ‘panics’ in the 19th century. In the 20th century we had the Great Depression, World Wars, all kinds of things. But we have a system – largely free market, rule of law, equality of opportunity – all of those things that cause the potential of humans to get unleashed. And we’re far from done. Your kids will live better than mine. Your grandchildren will live better than your kids. There’s no question about that. But the machine gets gummed up from time to time. If you take the bulk of those centuries, probably 15 years were bad years. But we go forward."

Did you notice the quote the twitchy news people of America lifted from Buffett’s very upbeat, 3-hour interview? They filtered out all kinds of affirming, positive statements (such as the one above) to create the headline, "Warren Buffett Says ‘The Economy Fell Off a Cliff."
Slippery Wall-Streeters triggered this recession but the twitchy news media seems committed to making sure it progresses.

And now for happier news: Wizard Academy has contacted the person I consider to be the best in America at making BIG things happen quickly. Within the next few weeks I hope to announce the dates of a special, 2-day workshop that will allow you to interact with this marketing giant in person. I’ve never met him but I’ve read his books and I look forward to having him on campus. Are there any big things you'd like to make happen quickly?

When that announcement is made, you’ll want to act quickly. There are only 100 seats available in Tuscan Hall and many more than that will want to attend this event. It will likely be the most profitable thing any of us do in 2009.

And now for a final thought: Fear is contagious. Don’t spread it. And if you meet any twitchy, fear mongering news weasels, slap them and say, "Stop it. Stop it right now."
They’ll know what it’s for.
Roy H. Williams

Monday Morning memo with Roy Williams

2009-03-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

Wobble
The Beagle Sings with Buble
My staff can hardly get any work done. It seems the whole world is calling to ask what I think will happen with our economy.
The President of the United States made a primetime speech last week.
The press is an interesting animal. The Chicago Tribune predicted the president’s speech would "live among the annals of man," while its competitor, the Chicago Times, editorialized that "the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances of the president." Those papers were talking about Abraham Lincoln. The speech was the Gettysburg Address.
Before I go any further, let me acknowledge that I’m aware of how dangerous it is to speak of politics or religion. No matter what I say on either subject, I’m going to get a firestorm of emails correcting me.
Even so…
All indications are that President Obama’s speech lifted the mood of the nation.
When the mood of the nation is optimistic, our economy sings like Michael Bublé and money flows like water in the street.
More than one friend has told me that Obama’s plan will end in disaster. I choose to believe otherwise.
I choose to believe.
I choose.
A jet is low over New York City. Both engines have failed. Any idiot can see that everyone on the plane is going to die. The pilot can fly into a building and kill all the people inside, or he can line up on a street and kill unsuspecting motorists instead. These are his only options.
Well, I’m on that jet and I say this pilot is going to land on the Hudson River and the plane is going to float long enough for everyone to get out safely and then we’re all going to hop onto some big passenger ferries that will be exactly where we need them to be.
Don’t laugh. It could happen.
By the way, you’re on this jet, too.
I bought a book at the airport the other day. Barack Obama wrote Dreams From My Father fifteen years ago. As a writer, I was deeply impressed. If a man can be judged by what he writes when he is young, we have an extremely intelligent president.
A history book of ancient Israel tells of a starving city surrounded by an enemy army. "Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, "Why stay here until we die? If we say, 'We'll go into the city'-the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So let's go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die."
That story ends happily. Not just for the lepers, but for everyone in the city. Well, not quite everyone. There was one man who insisted that God himself couldn’t save the city. Interestingly, everyone made it safely onto the ferryboats except for that guy. He was the moron screaming hysterically ‘We’re all going to die!’ while the pilot was trying to land the plane on the Hudson.
It’s really an interesting story. You ought to read it.
Roy H. Williams

Posted by Shannon English, I just love his stuff and think everyone should read it... stay tuned till next Monday :)

Shannon A English
785-271-8899 ext 13 or 785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Chat to Text

2009-02-26T13:56:00.001-08:00

Ok, you have to check this out:
http://www.chattotext.com/amember/go.php?r=11440&i=l0
It's a 5-minute video about a brand new tool you can add to your social network page (works now with Facebook and Bebo, and soon MySpace). You just add it to your profile page and your friends can send you a private text message to your cell phone, and you can reply with your cell phone and they'll get it while they're still on your profile page!
It's called Chat To Text.
It's all explained in the video:
http://www.chattotext.com/amember/go.php?r=11440&i=l0
I've installed it on my profile page - look for the 'Text Me' box on my page and send me a text message to my cell phone...too cool!
Let me know what you think!
Shannon

Employee Appreciation Day

2009-02-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

March 6th is Employee Appreciation day! Don't forget to tell the people that help your business grow and run smoothly how much you appreciate the hard work that they do. With things changing and the economy the way it is, it is very important to keep a good team on your side.

Take the time to tell your employees everyday how much they mean to you and what a good job they are doing. It will make a world of difference in their performance and how loyal they are to your company. Employee Appreciation Day should not just comne once a year.

Shannon A English

There they go again...

2009-02-23T13:42:00.001-08:00

There they go again! The House and Senate have buried us in yet another bailout-stimulus heaping pile of fiscal dung -- a $789 billion loan that has been tacked onto our children's (and children's children's) already staggering $10-plus trillion deficit. Are you just going to sit there and take another one up the tailpipe? Though President Obama emphatically declared that this 1100-page piece of legislation does not contain "a single pet project, not a single earmark," it's full of some type of financial fluff. Call it what you will, but few knew recessionary needs included $2 billion for battery companies, $2 billion for the National Parks Service, $2.3 billion for NASA and the National Science Foundation, $1.1 billion for airport improvements, $850 million for Amtrak, $800 million for federal prison construction, $300 million for additions to the federal fleet, $200 million for new Department of Agriculture buildings, $165 million for fish hatcheries, $100 million for the FBI, $100 million for shipyards, $50 million for an arts endowment, etc. (A detailed list of the stimulus package expenditures can be reviewed on the website of Patton Boggs legal firm at www.pattonboggs.com.)Should I just shut up and be grateful that Republicans squashed the $200 million to re-sod the National Mall in Washington and purchase a new Coast Guard polar icebreaker? Sure tastes like the same ol' partisan and political punch to me. (Remember when, in 1988, President Reagan vetoed a bill because it had six earmarks in it?)
And what about you? The average hardworking American citizen? The middle-class blue-collar worker? You'll get a whopping $13 increase to your paycheck. Now there's change (as in coins) we can believe in. And we'll have to believe, because only faith and a miracle will turn that $13 increase into a catalyst to jump-start the economy. Is that the change you were hoping for? How does one fight an administration and a Congress that believe "only government" is the answer? Is it really true that in the absence of government intervention and doling out another trillion dollars of debt our nation would certainly experience an economic holocaust? Former President G.W. Bush pushed the first trillion-dollar bailout upon America. Nothing happened. Obama now has pushed the second trillion-dollar bailout upon America. Why should we believe there won't be a third, fourth, fifth or sixth so-called government stimulus? What other recourse do they have? We're in the tank for trillions. And Congress' only solution is to print more money and make more loans. The House is constantly telling the American people to spend, spend, spend, while saying nothing about living within their means. The Senate tries to save every financial institution, rather than allowing the reasonable death of some under a diminishing supply and demand. Our presidents repeatedly attempt to jump-start the last and highest revolution of the credit merry-go-round by refilling the gas tanks of financial institutions for one more go-round. But why? To lend to those who are already maxed out on monthly payments? Or is it the unemployed who are now supposed to borrow the big bucks? We must quit bailing out what we've borrowed. As George Washington said, "To contract new debts is not the way to pay for old ones." There are only two things that are going to get us out of this particular financial mess, and only Americans (not "only government") can implement those solutions. Both come down to one word: restraint. We must restrain our government, and we must restrain ourselves. Feeding the money monster will not reduce its size -- it will perpetuate the problem. We must tame the money monster. We must return it to its cage. We must return to a time when we put a bridle on the spending of government and of our households. We've got to simplify our lives. We've got to learn to be happier with less. We've got to get out of debt. The late financial guru Larry Burkett prophesied almost 20 years ago in his book The Coming Economic Earthquake that an economic calamity was coming upon the U.S. unless a drastic effort was made to curb massive federal spending and the soaring deficit. Burkett was right. And he gave one basic principle to avoid the future market meltdown: "Don't be a slave to debt! Get out of debt!" Burkett is still right today. That is why I devoted the entire economic chapter in my book Black Belt Patriotism to how to "Stop America's Nightmare of Debt," both nationally and personally. In my wife, Gena, and my most recent interview, I explained that if we are going to reawaken America, we have to return to our Founders' principles, which include fiscal prudence. We must follow the advice of those like Thomas Jefferson, who warned long ago, "To preserve (the) independence (of the people), we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." (Now read that again, then one more time.) How do we do that? We cap our spending and allow the supply-and-demand levels to lower to points commensurate with our incomes (not credit lines). We must learn to downsize and live within our means, and not borrow excessive amounts, even for investment debt like a home or business. We must cut spending, reduce our budgets, pay down our debts, and stabilize our homes and nation.As for that clueless Congress, we must demand our representatives seek a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, which will keep the government living within its means. We must return to a pay-as-you-go government and nation. It's our last resort for an out-of-control economy. Thomas Jefferson once said, "The maxim of buying nothing but what we had money in our pockets to pay for (is) a maxim which, of all others, lays the broadest foundation for happiness."If our country is to survive, we must elect only those who show proof of fiscal discipline, refuse under all circumstances to increase our national deficit, and commit to pass and live under a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. And if our incumbents voted for the bailouts or bail on their fiscal frugality, then vote them out of office the next chance you get.

Monday Morning Memo

2009-02-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

The New Magic
of the Wizard of Ads

Ten years ago I taught you how to create relational ads that target the right hemisphere of the customer’s brain. Advertisers who learned this technique made a lot of money.
Five years ago I taught you that 2008 would be the final year in a series of 40-year cycles and that the position and direction of society’s pendulum meant 2009 would likely be 1929 all over again. If you haven’t been a little freaked out by the accuracy of that prediction, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Today I’m offering you another chunk of glittering gold:
A high percentage of relational customers
have shifted to a transactional frame of mind.
In other words, the rules of marketing are changing.
What I teach about writing ads today is quite different from what I taught as recently as 1 year ago. Today, in addition to giving your customer a feeling of connectedness, you must infuse your ads with facts, details, logic and information.
NOTE TO THE COGNOSCENTI
OF THE MAGICAL WORLDS

The buying mode and mood of the general public has moved from Intuitive and Feeling (NF, right brain/right brain, pattern recognition) to Sensing and Thinking (ST, left brain/left brain, sequential reasoning.) Frosted Frank, not Monet, will win the heart today. Abandon fuzzy angles of approach. Be direct, clear, concise. Clarity is more important than creativity. But it’s also more difficult to achieve.
Consider
The Economy,
accelerated by
Access to Information (Google,)
moving in unison with
The Direction of Society’s Pendulum
and you’ll understand why consumers have begun buying with their heads instead of their hearts.
The irrational right-brain remains powerful, but the logical left is winning the tug-of-war more often than ever before. Impulse purchases are becoming more restrained. We crave romance but we do not trust it.
Ad writers, you’re going to have to work harder than ever but so are your clients.
Money is tight.
Unemployment is rising.
People aren't shopping.
Traffic is King.
To drive traffic,
select – in unison with your client – an exciting item or service at a
popular price point. Selecting the right item is critical.
feature that product or service with a vivid ad full of details and benefits.
Q: How is a "featured product" ad different from the price-and-item ads of yesteryear?
A: Price-and-item advertising was about offering the lowest price on a common commodity. Featured product ads require new and surprising information. A featured product is an exciting, uncommon item at a popular price point. The ads cannot be hype. Many businesses will resort to Sale! Sale! Sale! Resist the temptation of this cocaine. Featured product ads must contain new information your customer will be glad to know. The selection of what to feature is critical. This is where the business owner is going to need help from the ad writer. Use logic, details, facts to entice the customer to "come and take a look."

We live in exciting times.

Brought to you by Monday Morning memo with Roy Williams - Great stuff!

Shannon A English
FASTSIGNS, Account Manager
She Knows Marketing, Owner

785-383-8139

How do people learn about your Business?

2009-02-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

All of my life I have been a sign reader. I used to read signs out loud throughout town and in those early years it was really just about learning to read. As I got older, those signs became informational tools and that was how I learned about new businesses and services in my community.
When my children got older I found myself encouraging them to look at signs around us so they could research theses businesses as a potential employer. Apparently, I’m not alone! According to a survey by the US Chamber of Commerce, 50% of those surveyed learned about a business from their on-premise sign. 2,475 shoppers were asked how they learn about a business.
Here are the results of that survey.

How do people learn about a business?

How do you learn about a business?
Television

Radio

Internet

Newspaper

Word of Mouth

Yellow Pages

On-Premise

Sign

Other

Shannon A English

FASTSIGNS, Account Manager'

785-271-8899 ext 13

Cell 785-383-8139

www.SheKnowsMarketing.com

Find me on twitter, linked in, myspace....

2009-02-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

FIND ME ON www.TWITTER.com : ShannonHappy1 or http://twitter.com/ShannonHappy1

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view&current=d651bac8.pbw

Ask Shannon about networking with Innovative Network Group of Topeka.
http://groups.google.com/group/innovative-networking-group?hl=en

www.innovativenetworkinggroup.com

CHECK OUT SOME SIGNS WE HAVE DONE ~Add me as a friend~ http://www.myspace.com/fastsigns_topeka

Or Look me up on Facebook, search for FASTSIGNS TOPEKA
Or Shannon English - only add the one with the red shirt

Visit me on Linked: http://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonenglish

To learn more about FASTSIGNS®, click here: www.fastsigns.com/innovation

Shannon A English
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com
785-383-8139 and yes I text... :)

What is America? by Roy Williams

2009-02-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

What Is America?
America, I think, is not a place. If another people lived here, the geography would be the same but it would not be our nation.
America, I think, is not a government. Our pendulum swings from one extreme to the other and our politics are not unique.
America, I think, is not an economy. Free markets exist in other nations and we hold no patent on capitalism.
America is a people, an outlook and a family. (A dysfunctional family, yes, but aren’t they all?)
Eighty-three years ago the American son was a swaggering youth with glinting eye, proud of his muscle and chin held high. Mark Twain wrote about his American strut in a 1926 letter from Europe to President Calvin Coolidge: "We, unfortunately, don't make a good impression collectively... There ought to be a law prohibiting over three Americans going anywhere abroad together."
Saul Bellow, in his Adventures of Augie March, gave our American boy a voice during the Great Depression: "I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make a record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent."
America. Land of Opportunity. A chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Hard work never killed anybody. Cream rises to the top. Second place is the first loser. You can do it.
And we did. "Leaders of the free world, liberators of the oppressed," we’re less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet consume 26 percent of its energy and 30 percent of its resources.
A few years later Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of that ocean-crossing hero, began to worry that things were getting out of balance: "America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future."
John Steinbeck echoed Anne’s words. "Then there is the kind of Christmas with presents piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents are thrown down and at the end the child says – ‘Is that all?’ Well it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy
and sick."
John Steinbeck was immediately accused of being a Communist sympathizer.
America didn’t listen to Anne or John but became more intense in the pursuit of whatever it was we were chasing.
"Go to college. Get good grades. Go to college. Rise to the top. Go to college. Enjoy the good life."
Eighteen years ago Faith Popcorn wrote in her famous Popcorn Report, "The trouble in corporate America is that too many people with too much power live in a box (their home), then travel the same road every day to another box (their office)."
Charles Osgood spotlighted this disconnection on CBS Sunday Morning, March 30, 2008, "The average urban dwelling American sees up to 5,000 advertising 'messages' –from T-shirts to billboards – every day. That compares with 2,000 thirty years ago." [Source: Yankelovich, Inc.]
Wow. No wonder we’ve become a nation of consumers. With 5,000 messages hammering us every day, we hardly have time to think about anything else.
And now it’s 2009. The whole planet waits to see whether America has the strength, the wit and the will to correct our mistakes. They wait because the economy of the world depends on whether we're able to buy the stuff they need to sell us.
The solution appears to be that the world needs better ad writers.
Roy H. Williams

Giant Banner Sale

2009-02-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

Understanding Sign Materials

2009-01-29T13:36:00.000-08:00

AcrylicAn extremely versatile, highly durable plastic sheet that comes in a variety of colors. Acrylic is primarily used for long-term interior and exterior signage. Some common uses are internally illuminated signs, architectural signs, wall directories, permanent retail signs, menu boards and trade show signs. Acrylic is an excellent product if you desire a high quality gloss finish.

AluminumAluminum is designed primarily for outdoor applications. It is stocked in a variety of colors and will not rust. Aluminum is lightweight, yet sturdy. It is the ideal choice for real estate and traffic signage.

BannersOur banner material is a very durable 14 oz. Nylon-reinforced vinyl. It is well suited for interior and exterior usage because of its flexibility and weather resistant capabilities, which make for easy storage and shipping. The material's strength allows it to be cut into almost any length or dimension. Many colors are available to meet your needs for special events, promotions and grand openings.

Corrugated PlasticOffering a variety of colors to complement your sign message, this lightweight versatile product can be used for both short-term indoor and outdoor signage. It is a cost effective choice for special events signage, indoor point-of-purchase, trade shows, service companies and temporary real estate signage. Corrugated Plastic can be cut to create collapsible signs. This product can be pre-cut into many shapes such as specialized golf ball shaped signs.

Expanded PVCExpanded PVC, also known as Foam PVC, may be used indoor and outdoors for limited amounts of time. Its matte finish reduces glare and makes for easy readability. Expanded PVC can be shaped and is lightweight, yet sturdy. It is an excellent product for trade shows signage, menu boards, point-of-purchase displays and architectural graphics. PVC is available in a variety of colors.

Foam Core Foam core board is made by adhering two sheets of paper to both sides of a foam core. Foam core board is lightweight yet sturdy. It is ideal for all indoor mounting applications. Easy to cut and customize, foam board is clay-coated for an extra smooth surface. Foam board comes in a variety of colors and is well suited to trade show applications and many other indoor uses. Foam board accepts ink jet and full color printing very well. Standard foam core board is an economical product for temporary and short-term use.

MagneticMagnetic signage is flexible, easily removable and perfect for signs on multi-use vehicles. This product is perfect for when you do not want letters permanently affixed to your vehicle. Magnetic signage is weather resistant and, with proper care, suitable for long-term exterior use. It allows your vehicle to be used as an advertising tool for your business and/or service.

PolystyreneThis resilient, lightweight material can be used for short-term exterior or interior signage. It is ideal for low cost point-of-purchase, directional and informational signage, menu boards, trade show signage and temporary real estate signage. Polystyrene's smooth surface comes in white only.

Wood and Composite MaterialsWood and composite materials will give you years of outdoor service. They are suitable for large format signage, are weather resistant and have a rigid, flat surface. Wood products can be painted to match custom colors for signage use in commercial real estate, construction firms and property leasing companies. Some composite materials come in a wide range of colors. Others are only available in white.

Contact Shannon English to help you with your next sign project! 785-383-8139 or Shannon.English@fastsigns.com

Site Signs

2009-01-27T10:51:00.001-08:00

Let them see what you’re offering with a site sign. Large site signs provide the information prospective tenants or purchasers need. Ideal for construction sites or commercial businesses, large site signs convey your message and inform prospective clients of availability.

Use Full Color Digital Graphics to create interest and show off your property before and after your construction has been completed.

High impact, high visibility signs draw attention to your property.

Site signs can direct your customers to your property or sales office.

Monday Morning Memo

2009-01-19T11:57:00.000-08:00

Another good one by Roy Williams...

Please Don't Throw Me in the Briar Patch!
Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. *

We’re living in a time of tumultuous change. A misinformed president declares a war. The value of homes – which were never supposed to fall – fell. The SEC can’t make Wall Street color between the lines and 700 billion dollars goes missing. A 50 billion-dollar Ponzi scheme is perpetrated by one of the most respected men on Wall Street. A governor tries to sell a seat in the Senate. I saw gasoline sell for a dollar a quart and watched General Motors become insolvent.

But I’m not worried. I was born in a briar patch.

Pennie and I began our lives together during the term of another president who wasn’t quite up to the job.

It’s 1976. Mortgage interest rates are 18 percent and jobs are scarce. If you see a line of cars at a gas station, get in it. Gas stations don’t always have gas. The middle-eastern boogeyman of that era, the Ayatollah Khomeini, brazenly invades a U.S. embassy and kidnaps 52 U.S. diplomats. Newscasters remind us nightly of our shame. When we send our best and brightest soldiers to rescue our diplomats, we crash two of our aircraft, eight soldiers die and we return home empty-handed. The Ayatollah holds us hostage for 444 days.

“Elected largely on his promise to never lie to the American people, Carter soon seemed out of place in the vastness of the presidency. Events conspired to further impede his progress: rising energy costs, high unemployment, Americans held hostage in Iran, Soviets in Afghanistan. A man of peace who took pride in bringing together age-old antagonists, Carter was finally viewed by his countrymen as lacking presidential stature.” – American Experience, PBS

And the whole time, it seems the only thing we needed was a head cheerleader with a more beautiful dream. Ronald Reagan took office with a sparkling smile. “Things are fine. Expand your business. All is well. Go out to dinner. Life is good.” And we believed him.

Economy rebounded, cold war ended, Mary Lou Retton vaulted a perfect 10 and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Barack Obama has a good smile, too.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed. In defiance of the current recession, Wizard Academy is moving forward with the construction of its new classroom tower. Perhaps we’re being foolish. Maybe the right thing would be to hunker down and cover our heads with our hands. But did you ever notice how “hunker" sounds like clunker, junker, lunker and dunker? I prefer “dream,” as in team, gleam in the eye, beaming smile and cream of the crop."

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." – T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia)

Hunker down or dream. It's your call.
The 7 Steps to Hunkering Down:
1. Stay scared. Call it "street smart."
2. Cultivate cynicism. Call it "straight talk."
3. Praise pessimism. Call it a "reality check."
4. Believe you are wiser than everyone else.
5. Feel secretly superior.
6. Take no action that might improve your condition.
7. Crow "I told you so" when things get worse.

The 7 Steps to Pursuing Your Dream:
1. Know what you're trying to make happen.
2. Expect good things to happen for you.
3. Plant seeds of good things daily.
4. Trust that some of your seeds will grow.
5. Measure success by your own criteria.
6. Make progress daily without fail.
7. Believe in the power of the Elbs. (Exponential Little Bits)

Do you believe in your dream, or do you think it's only a fantasy?

Moving forward with just a thousand dollars: I showed today's memo to 5 of my most successful friends and said, "Talk is cheap and I don't want to be seen as one of those pollyanna happy-talk motivational goobers without substance. Action makes things happen, but not everyone is free to attend classes at Wizard Academy. If a business person is ready to begin taking action, what would you be willing to do for just a thousand dollars to help them make progress toward their goal?" I was blown away by their generous offers.

Would you like to see what they said they'd be willing to do?Good things happen to dreamers who remain standing with open eyes.

Stand up.

Roy H. Williams

* I've seen this quote attributed to Walt Disney, John Maxwell, Hedria P. Lunken and Tavis Smiley. I try to attribute elegant phrases to their originators but in this instance your guess is as good as mine. – RHW

I did not write this Memno, but read them every Monday Morning. Great stuff!

Shannon A English
785-383-8139
Shannon.English@fastsigns.com