Earlier this week, a team from the agency and I flew to Austin to conduct the 3rd annual Digital Marketing Summit. This year, we focused our content on Toyota dealerships, although the material could be applied to any dealer.

At the conference, there were more than 40 dealers and partners in attendance. It featured three speakers from Google, as well as presentations by our COO Gayle Rogers and myself.

We started these summits last year at Google’s headquarters in both Austin and New York. Each time we host one, our processes improve and the content is refined. It is important to learn from past experiences to improve your outcomes in the future.

I look forward to continuing the Digital Marketing Summit next year, and we plan to open the conference to even more dealerships.

In business, and especially in my kind of business, I have found that you either take control of a situation or it will take control of you. This is true of things as simple as conversations, meetings and personal interaction, but if you don’t start from the beginning and set the tone on something, then you could quite possibly wind up having direction given to you.

Recently, I found myself in a couple of situations that seemed to have taken control of me. Some involved work, others involved people outside of work where I felt like I was merely playing defense and was back-peddling like a defensive cornerback in a football game. These situations caused me to be a little edgy and took me out of my typical character and altered my behavior.  To put it bluntly – they were causing me to not be me.  Which is the beginning of a disaster in most cases.

There were a lot of nights with little or no sleep. I found myself waking up early in the morning and letting these thoughts dominate my mind and cause stress. And stress is really only good for Big Pharma Companies and the makers of alcohol. So, after seeking some wise counsel and talking to a few friends whom I trust emphatically with their guidance and direction, I decided to tweak some of the things I was doing each day to not allow myself to be put in this position.

My mind centered around – “When things don’t go your way… make a change so they can start going your way.” Here is some of what I did to work through it:

1. Increased my efforts in providing daily praise to people around me. I made it a goal to thank or encourage 2 people every day that I normally wouldn’t, and then to try to do a favor or something nice for someone else every day. Three moments like this in a day times 7 days a week means that is 21 positive interactions that occur each and every week.

2. Decreased my exercise routine. Ok, this sounds like the opposite of what you do when trying to alleviate stress, but follow my logic. By working out 1 less day a week, I now have 1 day a week where I can get up and out of bed at the same time, and rather than work out/recover/shower for close to 2 hours a morning, I can dedicate 2 extra hours a day to work, and doing it first thing in the morning means you get out ahead of your day.

3. Increased my proactive approach to everything. In the past, I would wait on a lot of things to happen or would have said, “let me think about it.”  Now, I have moved to the I would rather make a fast decision and have it possibly be wrong camp rather than make a slow decision (still with the chance of being wrong) just so I can have less to think about.

All of these minor modifications have made a huge impact on how I feel, my confidence level, and the results I am seeing from getting more out in front of things.

There is never a good time to miss a few days in the office to attend a conference. But for the last three days, that is exactly what I did. Being social and meeting new people is not always my favorite thing to do, which may surprise some people who read this, but it comes with the territory that I am in and is part of the life/job.

But, I pushed myself beyond my comfort zone to attend a series of meetings of a group of midsize digital agency owners to get a different perspective on how they run their operations. Leaving home on Sunday wasn’t easy either.  Normally a day I spend from sunup till sundown with my kids, which is also a rare occurrence, but I cut it short to catch a flight down to Florida to attend a meeting to see in what ways I could improve our company and myself.

Just like everything you do, you walk away with a couple of good lessons, and that is exactly what I did this week. There were no earth-shattering or ah-ha moments that blew my mind, but there were a lot of small incremental improvements that could better the businesses for my clients.

The best thing I realized while I was down there is that you can’t make the world stop for things you want or need to do. You simply have to adapt and work extra hard to push for things that you want to happen.  

And, as always, I got some good quotes and good sayings out of the week: 

“Some people are just coin-operated… Meaning, unless you are feeding them money, they are not interested.”

“Crying to someone who only agrees with your point is like forming a 2 persons’ victim group.”

“The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”

Every day.

Every day someone is out to get you.

I’ve always heard that when you are ahead is when you are the most vulnerable, and after feeling ahead for quite a while, it definitely feels that way some days. Most days, I relish in the fact that when I walk into a dealership for a meeting that I instantly get to turn my phone to the “off” position and leave it in my bag. That feeling of being one-on-one with a client and that your time and attention gets devoted to them means that you now have the ability to shut off the rest of the world. It’s a really good feeling.

But, just as all good things must come to an end, so does every meeting.  That time when you are in solitude working to better someone’s business must come too, and you have to be on to your next place. This is the time when you have a very short gap to turn your phone back on and see all the emails and text start to come through as you get in a car and aim toward your next destination.

While sometimes, only for a few short minutes that you have out in the open, this is the time when the problems of the day can prey on you. But even in these spans between meetings and in between cities, I often think to myself, “they have to be able to catch me to be able to kill me.”

That may, in itself, be the very essence of this blog’s title. I have always believed that I am not the smartest, not the most talented, not the most athletic, and even on my best days have a hard time being a true people person. But I have always believed and practiced the method that nobody can outwork me and nobody can outrun me.

I was once told that 85% of success is just showing up and the rest of it is how hard you work at it. Not sure how much of that is true, especially in a career in automotive marketing, but being able to work like there is no end in sight is something that really drives me day after day.

There are a lot of people who don’t like me. Competitors being one, past associates and employees being another, and even vendors who try to sell me something (most of which don’t understand I have a double name and insist on calling me “John”) that I will not buy anything from being another, but I never think about any of these people. I am usually too busy moving so fast that there isn’t time to look in the rearview mirror, so they are just like the whitewash that falls into the wake of a really big boat.

This isn’t about having an ego. There are plenty of people in this world who outwork me any day of the week. I’m just lucky enough that they aren’t in my industry, which leaves me the ability to keep living – because I can’t be caught.

“Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.” That is the title of a book my father gave me, and I’ve thought about it a lot lately. There are many things going on in my life that create pressures and spur on anxiety that will bring even the toughest people to their knees.

These are the kind of things that really used to get me down and tear me up for days and even weeks. They are the kind of things that created a lot of issues in relationships for me and with people who I was close to in life. Then, one day I realized that there really wasn’t anything in business that could kill you. Severely wound you? Yes… But nothing in my business can cause something so serious that it is life or death.

That is the point in time when I stopped trying to worry about or “sweat the small stuff.” Sure, details getting missed, costing you money, the loss of an account is just going to happen. This is not a way of being flippant about mistakes and errors, but more of a statement of reality that it’s not about how many mistakes that you make, but how much you grow from them and how fast you recover from them mentally.

A man is exactly who he thinks he is.

And that is probably the most meaningful advice I give myself on a daily basis regarding staying positive and picking yourself up time and time again when the small things don’t go your way.

While reading a book over the last week about Generation Y – aka Millenials – there was a lot of information about this particular age group and their loyalty to everything from the favorite household brands they used to their loyalty to a career and a particular employer. While this is the most digitally savvy and information based generation ever to walk the earth, they are far more interested in looking out for number one and making the best decision that benefits them.

There was a ton of good information in this book, but the one phrase that jumped out to me and then took my mind down a rabbit hole was where the author wrote: “Gen Y has to be loyal to their employer before they will be loyal to the client that their employer services.” What a profound statement, yet so simple in nature and meaning. A person of Gen Y needs to feel compelled to the company and the mission at hand before they can really commit mentally to what they are doing or accomplishing.

Then, my mind wandered over to thinking not about our employees, but about our clients. Because, with a few exceptions, there are none of our clients who are “Gen Y.” Most are all baby boomers with some “Gen X” sprinkled into the mix. I think the same is true about these generations in present day as it turns to loyalty as I think deeply about my own business. This has always been a “what have you done for me lately business” of automotive marketing, but it seems now that the shreds of loyalty that used to exist in a lot of long-term, tenured clients is gone and that you are only as good as your last phone call and last month’s performance.

It really begs me to ask the question: does loyalty exist anymore in the manner that it used to?  And, why does it seem so difficult to create a culture of loyalty among a client base? There used to be loyalty to your family, loyalty to your friends, faith and all things important to you, but it seems that there is a drift occurring right now in the present day that makes loyalty seem a little bit like a thing of the past.

As a follow-up to last week’s post on making Great Impressions, I would like to share the following tips that came out of a recent training session with some of our employees.

1. Don’t take all the credit – You look bad when you appear too self-serving or embellish your accomplishments. (Contrary to what we like to think, we are not the most important or smartest person in the room)
2. Great Impressions aren’t tier-level things. It is as important to make a Great Impression with the person standing behind the counter at a fast-food restaurant as it is the president of a bank sitting behind his desk
3. Acting more raw and vulnerable and honest can be a good thing
4. At the end of the day, if you are the person who made a Great Impression, you feel great. And, if you’ve done it right, so does the person on whom you’ve made a Great Impression.

What You Can Do Right Now

To make a Great Impression, for a period of four weeks, take five minutes each morning to speak with someone in your workplace who you normally would not have contact with. How? Start by saying hello!

Read Part One

August may be one of my favorite months of the year. It’s hotter than hell and can almost be unbearable, but things besides the weather are hot. It is typically one of the best retail car selling months of the year. That creates a time when the work I do is the most fun.

Having the ability to be over multiple organizations, it is fun to watch the action. It is fun to see people hard at work with a lot of different task flying around all at the same time. Somewhere deep down, I love it when it is the busiest. It makes the time pass faster and just seems more fun overall. August is a very rewarding time for me because it makes me stop and take a look back over all I have built and worked so hard for and see true benefits from years of exhausting work.

It is rewarding when I call a client, like my good friend James Farrell who runs a Toyota dealership, and he tells me how great his month is going and what a difference I made for him with the direct mail that I sold him. It is rewarding on a Saturday night to get a nightly sales report from a newly purchased BMW store that one of our clients bought and see they had a great sales day. It’s rewarding when I see that my own little print company in North Carolina printed 517,118 pieces of direct mail. It’s just overall rewarding and gives you a great feeling even if you are on the brink of exhaustion.

Keeping this kind of pace isn’t for everyone. But for me, I love it and will take the rewards any way that they come – as long as they keep coming.

Monday, it was a trip up to Washington DC. Tuesday, it was over to Southern Michigan, then on to Minnesota by the end of the day. Wednesday, it was Minnesota to Madison, Wisconsin and getting into Cedar Rapids, Iowa by nightfall. Thursday, it was Iowa to Atlanta. Friday it is Atlanta, then to my favorite spot to rest at the lake. Sunday it will be a drive back home from the lake to start it all over again.

As I travel at a faster rate of speed, my life truly has become all about connecting the dots. Connecting the dots is what I like to call moving from point A to point B. Some people read the above travel schedule and are amazed at how it can be accomplished. But for me, it has truly become the standard for a way of life. While connecting the dots, the phone doesn’t stop ringing and emails don’t stop beeping, and the problems tend to find you no matter where you are, but it is sure a fun way to get to live.  

The towns are all unique, and to me, there are no two that look the same.  This high-rate-of-speed lifestyle has allowed me to see a great deal of the country, but more importantly, it has allowed me to meet a lot of really fine people. Jeff, Ken, Dan, Kelly, Don, Andy, Matt, Shawn, Bob, John, Mark, Nate, Pat, Orrin, Gavin, Cory, Brad, Lindsay, Jamie, Murphy, Tyler, Wayne, Chris, Omar, Jim and Victor are the names of the people running or owning dealerships that I had the privilege of meeting with this week. I enjoyed my time with each of them, not just because they pay me money for my services but because I am genuinely invested in their success. While walking back to my hotel room after working out before 6 a.m. this morning, I thought about my day ahead. A quote I have heard before resonated with me that “if you truly love what you do, you will never work a day in your life.” That is very true because to me this isn’t work. It is just a series of connecting all the dots, helping people and having fun while in the process.