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Conversations regarding how consultants and other expert service providers cultivate collaborative communities in order to maximize client relationship value.
79 Episodes
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Fabian Pfortmüller is a Swiss community builder based in Amsterdam. He's an experienced entrepreneur, acknowledged innovator, and prolific writer. I had the opportunity to speak with Fabian about cultivating communities from the inside-out at the speed of trust.
Gareth Pronovost of GAP Consulting is the expert I turn to for help with Airtable, the no-code database application. If you are hosting a membership community, you should be considering how to use Airtable and other no-code tools to streamline and automate your workflows. I spoke with Gareth about process automation, the no-code movement, his Airtable Mastermind community, and working through the suck when creating content that demonstrates your consulting expertise.
The degree to which status and one's ability to contribute are perceived to be coupled can inhibit the participation of relatively low-status persons in collaborative communities. That's a problem because complex challenges are best tackled by cognitively diverse teams. That suffers when the conversation is limited to people who are high-performers along similar dimensions. If we wish to cultivate valuable and equitable communities, we need to find ways to help people identify and articulate the unique value they bring to the conversation.
What if business meetings were something you looked forward to? Maggie Chumbley explains how small shifts in how you approach meetings can yield big differences in outcomes.
If you wish to scale your business, listen to how Kevin Pasco set out to make Nested Naturals a "real" business. The company's accumulations make it real.
Shooting on location is much more complex than shooting in a controlled studio space. Consequently, location shoots require much more planning and management. Nevertheless, as Patrick Pitman says, “A white background and a tabletop just don’t do justice to a lot of products.”
Whether you make your own or oversee the outsourced production of your videos, you are going to learn through experience. Your videos are going to get better, and you will be able to make those better videos faster.
Patrick Pitman advises, “Think about the video production process in a batch.” It takes some time to get your talent ready, get the lighting just right and set up the camera and sound. It’s a lot more economical to bang out several videos than it is to spread the process out over several days or weeks.
Under what conditions should you do-it-yourself or outsource your video production? Patrick Pitman sees the question as having a straightforward answer: If time is what’s holding you back from creating product videos for your e-commerce website, then outsource. Otherwise, do it yourself. In any case, just get to it.
Remember that your product demonstration and other videos will usually be presented in the context of your website and other marketing communications. That context relieves your videos of the need to elaborate beyond their narrow purpose.
Talk to just about anybody who has done work in film, and they’ll tell you about how critical good sound is to video. Although the viewer might forgive poor lighting, they’ll balk immediately at poor sound.
Patrick Pitman has identified four types of videos most relevant to e-commerce companies: product demonstration videos, product comparison videos, brand building videos, and on-location videos.
Human Scale Business discusses why product videos are imperative for e-commerce with Patrick Pitman, the E-business Coach.
As CEO and co-founder of Rumbleship, Alex Lugosch became a banker in order to make life easier for B2B e-commerce sellers and their buyers. Recently, I spoke with Alex about how Rumbleship can help B2B sellers solve their accounts receivable management challenges.
"It's time to save capitalism together," according to Wefunder. It's a sentiment that resonates with me. I believe in the value of market-based economies. That said, capitalism could use some work. Jonny Price and his colleagues at Wefunder believe that "regulation crowdfunding" will do much to democratize capitalism. In the process, they aim to do good for entrepreneurs, investors, employees, and communities while doing well themselves.
The business-to-business (B2B) sector is the sleeping giant of e-commerce. Cloud-based e-commerce operations platforms such as Jazva are helping to awaken the massive potential of modern B2B selling. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ryan Elich about how Jazva is helping make life better for B2B sellers.
Business buyers want payment terms from their vendors, and B2B sellers want to offer them. After all, extending a line of credit to a customer can lift sales and promote loyalty. Michael Noble, the founder and CEO of Apruve, says, "We see about 2.2 times more order frequency and about 3.3 times more line items per order for customers that are given a line of credit versus asking them to pay with a credit card." It's no surprise that upwards of 80% of B2B transactions involve customer credit. That said, offering payment terms has a downside, which Apruve seeks to mitigate by offering credit management as a service (CMaaS) to B2B sellers.
Many human scale businesses would like to augment their direct (business-to-consumer or B2C) marketing channels with complementary, indirect (business-to-business or B2B) channels—commonly known as wholesale distribution. The problem with wholesale is that it can devolve into an order-processing hairball. Absent better alternatives, wholesale customers submit orders by phone, email, and even fax. Every relationship is unique. The resulting overhead can be prohibitively expensive. Roger Kirkness at Convictional wants to help automate B2B e-commerce to allow sellers to grow their wholesale channels profitably.
Dave Bayless spoke with Justin Cooke, a founder of Empire Flippers, a business broker, about buying and selling online businesses, the evolution of e-commerce, and building a business that serves his goals.
Jen Nord (CPA and CMA) explains what "closing the books" means to the owner of a small business. With modern accounting systems, the process is less daunting than it sounds. In the end, closing the books is a discipline that helps ensure timely, accurate, and useful financial information.
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