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Taking Advantage of the Time Difference

12 years ago I created my first company and ever since then I have had to deal with time differences.
I live in Israel and my clients have always been mostly in the US, Europe and Asia.

In my early days doing business online I was up half the night personally handing client concerns – many of the clients didn’t even know I was overseas. Thanks Vonage!

Now, 12 years later, Five Blocks is a company with more than 20 employees – most of whom are in Israel at any given time.

We have started traveling a lot more than before. In the past year I was in the US at least 10 times, as well as business trips to Puerto Rico, Moscow, Zurich, London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Baku.

Often I am asked about the time difference – isn’t it hard to work with people when they are 7 hours behind or 5 houris ahead?
Lately we have gotten into a groove that works extremely well.

We are GMT+2 so working with Europe is easy. New York, Boston and Washington – where more than half of our clients are located – is 7 hours behind. We try  to do our calls with them from 9-11AM (4-6Pm for us). This gives us all day to work without getting too many emails or phone calls from those clients.

Hong Kong and Singapore are 5 hours ahead of us – making morning calls work really well for us – it’s mid afternoon for our clients and partners in Asia.

The time difference forces us to schedule our calls at the beginning and end of the day leaving a big chunk of time for getting the work done – with far less distractions!

Turning a disadvantage into an advantage – that’s Antifragile!

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Setting Goals, again

Goal setting has an almost magic power for me.
In January 2014 we set a rather aggressive goal for 2014 revenues.
We reached the magic number on Dec 30th and went a bit over as we got a number of wires and checks on the last day of the year.

While this goal was in the back of our minds all year it cant be what caused us to bring in precisely that amount of money.
Somehow knowing that we have a number in mind guides us to the activities that help create those numbers.

Five Blocks has a tremendous amount of opportunities – the revenue goal may end up serving more as a way to focus efforts.

Who knows? In any case it works.

One more thing. After I created the goal I opened excel and mapped out exactly how many clients we need to sign up each month and at what price point.
Reality didn’t map exactly to my spreadsheet – we got many clients all at one time and fewer than expected at other points. In the end the numbers added up as we had hoped!

Now to do it again….

Wishing everyone a successful 2015!

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Details Details.

I have been thinking a lot about Details recently.
It seems that to be successful as an entrepreneur, inventor, builder, etc. you need to care about even the most minute details. They really do matter. even the small ones.

Google Adwords has put together a few really nice commercials for the Israeli market – really compelling. And success in Google Adwords, as we have learned over the past ten years or so, really depends on getting the details right.

So I was amused (and slightly unimpressed) that they missed some details in their otherwise well-executed ads.

The ad can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I5aQX-lMUk

You can see some errors on this screen:

adword-flub

Note the spelling of the word Malaysia and the switched flags for UK and Australia..
The numbers and percentages also don’t match…

Details, Details, I guess..

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When you come late to the party…


Here’s the deal. When you come late to the party – like really late –  you should do one of these:

1) Ride in on a motorcycle

2) Bring some good booze

If you don’t do either of these – or something else that sets you apart or provides enormous value – you’re not going enjoy the party – and you’ll probably go home early and alone.

The same is true with online marketing.

One of the questions I get frequently is how to best promote a new website in an existing field. For example you want  to sell baby clothes online or sign people up for a new credit card – and you are just now ready to launch  your new site.For some perspective make sure you look at all of the competitors and especially how long they have been in the market. (note that you dont even see all

Typically the question is asked by someone who is just now ready to launch, but whose most significant competitors have been in the market for 10-20 YEARS!

So my advice is, if you want anyone to notice you – make a big splash and ideally bring some real value!

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People like coming to their own conclusions

Somehow we are much happier with a conclusion if it wasn’t spelled out for us.

This principal also impacts how we address digital branding and online reputation management.

The ideal online reputation is the one that gets pieced together by a stakeholder during their discovery process.

The way online reputation appears is often  a product of content presented by the brand itself, experts and news sites, social and review sites.

One thing is clear to us at Five Blocks – An online reputation made up  of manufactured vanilla content does not allow people to come to their own conclusions.

And people don’t like that.

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Connecting Under Water

Last summer we wanted to do something with our two teenage boys.

Something that they would enjoy (aside from sleeping all day).

I offered a week-long hiking trip – not interesting enough.

A few days of sun and sea in Cyprus? no takers.

When I suggested a scuba diving course in Eilat – they were into it!

So we did the 7-day course – great – exciting – and a really great way to spend time with my kids.

In the winter we did some diving – the water is the about the same temp all year in Eilat!

Yesterday we drove down  to Eilat (about 4 hours) and did some more diving together – another successful trip!

I recommend a diving course if you want to have a great time and find a great way to spend time together with your teenagers!

scubaJuly192013

 

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Mean Guys & Good Guys

A few years ago when my two eldest sons were little kids my mom once commented that when they were playing they were talking about ‘Good Guys’ who were fighting ‘Mean Guys’. She commented that usually kids talk about Good Guys and Bad Guys.

I always thought Good and Mean were good opposites.

A few days ago I realized why.

Calling them ‘bad guys’ doesn’t give you enough information – it implies that perhaps its not their fault, maybe it’s just an undeserved label.

‘Mean guys’ on the other hand, deserve what they get. Their crime is in their poor behavior.

So we’re sticking to Mean Guys – seems like they deserve whatever the Good Guys dish out anyway…

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Israel’s Pillar of Defense – An example of Israel’s Antifragile strength

Israel’s recent conflict lasting 8 days ended about as quickly as it began.

From my perspective as an Israeli, I felt we came out stronger for having had the conflict.

The IDF achieved the main goals of the mission – which was to stop the firing of missiles at civilians.
Iron dome was tested and perfected in ways that lab tests could never have done.

Our politicians worked their way through flash visits from Hillary Clinton and Ban ki-Moon and came out in pretty good shape.

But the biggest gain may have been to the millions of people who experienced many unexpected situations.

  • Kids who had to learn about bomb shelters,
  • families who suddenly needed to take roll to make sure everyone was safe when the siren went off,
  • soldiers who hadn’t been under missile threat – learning to work under this new condition

It all made me think of Nassim Taleb’s new book Antifragile – where he describes systems, organizations, and people who benefit from stresses – coming out stronger and more versatile for the wear.

Israelis are Antifragile – Low to mid-level conflict has made us stronger – more resilient and able to handle bigger challenges.
This means that the bet that our enemies have made on ongoing terror has become a stressor that has actually made Israel and Israelis stronger.

Though I certainly don’t wish for conflict – knowing that it makes us stronger is a consolation.

 

 

 

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What do Reputation Management and Snorting Nutmeg have in common?

Strange question, perhaps.

It turns out they have a great deal in common!
Over the past couple of days I have been experimenting with Google Correlate , a tool I recently discovered.

Basically, Google Correlate looks at the search volume patterns for any keyword and identifies other keywords whose patterns match.

So in addition to finding useful patterns, Correlate finds patterns that seem utterly meaningless (though perhaps they are statistically significant).

Google Correlate

So it seems the connection between Snorting Nutmeg and Reputation Management is that at both had a huge rise in search volume around the end of 2010, followed by a similar increased interest on an ongoing basis.

Using this tool, we have discovered some interesting patterns related to some of our clients – though there is a lot of chaff to work through!

Meanwhile snorting nutmeg is not recommended, while reputation management is!