More than 40 studies affirm that this simple, practical technique doubles your chance of getting a yes, but surprisingly few people put it into use regularly.
If we're all in sales, as the old saying goes, then we're all in the persuasion business. And this is particularly true for entrepreneurs. Whether you're asking investors to hand over their money, potential customers to try your product, or employees to give their best, much of your day is probably spent persuading people. So how do you do it well?
There are a million hints and tricks out there--some more practical than others. A little swearing might help, suggest some studies, or if that's not appropriate for a given situation, how about simply adding a because statement to your request? Meanwhile, classic techniques like social proof, or convincing someone that everyone else is already doing whatever you're trying to get the person to do, or stressing scarcity are well known and frequently employed.
But for some reason, amid all this chatter about how to be more persuasive, one simple, practical, and well-tested technique had largely got lost in the shuffle. According to a recent post laying out the idea on PsyBlog, a whopping 42 studies with 22,000 participants have found the technique roughly doubles the chances of someone agreeing to a request.
What is it? Simply reminding people they're free. The blog calls it the But You Are Free technique, or BYAF for short:
This simple approach is all about reaffirming people's freedom to choose. When you ask someone to do something, you add on the sentiment that they are free to choose.
By reaffirming their freedom you are indirectly saying to them: I am not threatening your right to say no. You have a free choice…
People have been shown to donate more to good causes, agree more readily to a survey and give more to someone asking for a bus fare home.
The exact words used are not especially important. The studies have shown that using the phrase "But obviously do not feel obliged" worked just as well as "but you are free."
What is important is that the request is made face-to-face: the power of the technique drops off otherwise. Even over email, though, it does still have an effect, although it is somewhat reduced.
Are you using the BYAF and, if not, are you going to start?
Click link for full RFP.
Purpose: This is the latest round of funding designed to provide faculty and departments with funds for curriculum development so that concepts associated with entrepreneurship and innovation can be integrated into the curriculum. Grants provide support for faculty interested in enhancing an academic environment where risk-taking, built on solid academic scholarship, is encouraged and supported. Entrepreneurial thinking involves the skills necessary for recognizing and analyzing a problem and then designing and implementing a potential solution. Course proposals that involve entrepreneurship, innovation, and entrepreneurial skills are particularly encouraged. Creation of partnerships across the campus or in the wider community are also desirable, but not required. Funding is for course creation, revision, and implementation.
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Sure, you can get your own life relatively balanced--but what about managing an entire start-up full of workaholics?
As employers, we all know that the New Year causes our employees to rethink their priorities. This is especially true in small companies and start-ups, where the life part of work-life balance is often malnourished.
But you are a good boss: You want to be known for the stellar treatment of your employees. Maybe you dream of a day when Glassdoor names your company as one of its "Best Places to Work." Before you enact that telecommuting policy, start offering flexible hours, or buy that combination table tennis-foosball-pool table for the break room, here are five things you want to consider:
1. Make it official.
Don't just haphazardly start bending rules. Enact a formal work-life program or policy. Do this by first considering what kinds of work-life benefits would really be recognized as benefits to your employees. Examples of work-life program components include things like flexible work arrangements (such as flexible hours or a compressed workweek), allowing part-time schedules, offering telecommuting options, permitting "shift swapping" (for companies with around-the-clock work shifts), or providing discretionary leave, such as paternity, educational, community-service, or sabbatical.
2. Make it legal.
Understand that not all work-life programs work in all states. For instance, it is very difficult to offer a compressed workweek (such as 10 hours a day for four days a week) without running afoul of wage and hour laws regarding overtime. A work-life program that is properly planned and evenly implemented can provide employers a competitive edge in attracting and retaining a diverse, highly productive workforce. Otherwise, these programs can backfire and become a source of legal risk and low morale.
3. Understand and manage the risks.
Although these policies are enacted by the higher-ups in a company, they are often left to be executed by those in direct management. A typical process has the employee approach her or his manager with a specific request to take advantage of a work-life program. Then the manager decides to grant approval or not--approval is not guaranteed. This can lead to inconsistencies across managers and leave a company open to claims of foul play or favoritism. An employee and a clever plaintiffs' lawyer can always claim that denial was in fact discrimination based on a protected class (provided one exists, of course). My advice is to have a central place where such requests are made (like the HR department) and have it keep track of approvals and denials--so it can ensure fair application of program guidelines.
4. Keep good records.
One way to reduce the risk is to keep accurate documentation that clearly articulates the reasons why a work-life program was authorized or not authorized. This will allow you (or your HR manager) to make sure that the rules are being applied fairly. If a problem comes up, then be sure to investigate and take appropriate action based on the result. Be sure to train or reprimand managers that fail to keep accurate records or fail to apply their discretion consistently.
5. Recognize the FMLA or ADA.
Some requests for a work-life program are actually veiled requests for a protected leave. If an employee wants to work part time to take care of an ailing spouse or a sick child, this should be treated as a "demand" for FMLA leave (Family and Medical Leave Act) and not a "request" for a flexible schedule. Likewise, if you suspect that an employee is requesting a flexible work arrangement because of a medical condition, be sure to first analyze the request according to the definition of "reasonable accommodation" under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Even though work-life programs offer real advantages to employers and employees, it is necessary to understand the risks that are associated. This is especially relevant when it comes to employment law--an area where the law is both state specific and always changing. Be sure to work closely with employment counsel to reduce your risk to a level that is right for your organization. The time to do this is not after you get in trouble--so be sure to get legal review before you launch the program, and get advice during program implementation. Then you can be safely on your way to that coveted "Best Places to Work" list.
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When you speak of analytics, you visualize data presented as numbers, bars, graphs, pie charts and more. I wrote on why every startup needs analytics but with the diversity of available options, what kind of a dashboard you choose can decide where you’re headed.
Monitoring your startup’s progress is quite important but it’s equally important to make sure you’re tracking the right things in the right way.
Dashboards can be pretty enticing at first. You’re looking at real, fluctuating numbers that indicate traffic, time on site, conversions, comparisons to past performances, number of followers, social signals, results of an A/B test you ran, revenue generated so far, per-user stats etc.
But information can be useful or useless depending on what you do with it.
We’ve come a long way since counting hits to a webpage and how you read and “act” on your data can be game-changing for your startup endeavor. How?
The internet is inundated with a wide range of analytics services. The diversity is so enormous that you can literally spend years trying to decide on the right one.
Fortunately, though, you select a dashboard that will take you towards your goals.
Choosing the right dashboard ultimately depends on:
It would be a waste of time to have a dashboard that shows number of users at a given instance when that data is of no significance to you.
I tend to think that dashboards are of two kinds.
Nothing explains things better than examples so here we go:
ThinkUp is an action-oriented dashboard. Anil Dash wrote about it (you probably saw it on HN) extolling such dashboards (naturally) and the need for such dashboards. The way it works is it communicates information about the activity around your social profiles in an “actionable” way. Labels connected to data (numbers) tell you where you are headed.
But think of Google Analytics and it’s a whole different ball-game. GA does communicate information to you as charts and numbers but it lets you decide what to track, what to fix as goals, what data to use for triggers etc.
And then think of Geckoboard. It’s a beautiful dash but it’s numbers and graph again which you can configure to a large extent. Ultimately, though, you are in charge of how you “act” on the data or how you are motivated to act upon the same.
Conclusively, all of this depends on what you actually need to do. In most cases, you’re looking for data that can help you push your project towards something: more traffic, more engagement, more conversions, more subscribers, more revenue etc.
What I do recommend is this: if you have time to analyze data, filter the fluff out and assign particular triggers/actions to the data by yourself, go for generic and larger dashboards that feed you all the numbers and charts you need.
If you don’t have the time or manpower, you choose dashboards that are “smarter” and get the work done for you. Dashboards that will tell you exactly and explicitly which landing page works better, what time of the day your email has better open rates etc. will fit your bill.
Interesting Read:
Image by Flickr user: Jacob Bøtter
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The CEO of Tough Mudder is obsessed with company culture and strategy. And with finding new ways to make his customers uncomfortable. (Electric shocks, anyone?)
Conventional wisdom would suggest that forcing your customers to endure electric shocks is probably a bad idea. But it seems to be working out for Will Dean, CEO of Tough Mudder, a $70 million company based in Brooklyn, New York. Tough Mudder hosts extreme events, in which participants work in teams to complete a 10- to 12-mile course. They jump into Dumpsters filled with ice, crawl under barbed wire through puddles of mud, and, yes, dash through live wires carrying up to 10,000 volts. In 2012, nearly 500,000 participants shelled out $95 to $200 to compete in 35 events in the U.S. and overseas. A native of Sheffield, England, Dean, 32, worked in British counterterrorism and then attended Harvard Business School. In 2010, he co-founded Tough Mudder with his friend Guy Livingstone. Now, Dean spends his days teaching Harvard case studies to employees and dreaming up new ways to leave his customers bruised, bloody, and begging for more. --As told to Issie Lapowsky
Running a growing business is a lot like playing pool. In the beginning, it's like you're playing without a cue ball. Then, you have a small team, and you need the cue ball. Suddenly, you have a lot of employees, and it's like you're hitting seven balls in a row. You have to hit that first ball very carefully to get that last one where it needs to go. That's my job now.
I get up early, typically around 4:30 a.m., and I try to get most of my work done by 10 a.m. I clear out emails and get my reading out of the way. I commission about two or three reports a week from my staff on things like what our price structure should be next year or what it costs to cancel an event.
By 10 a.m., I ride my bike about five minutes from my house in Brooklyn Heights to our offices. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the days I'm usually in the office. Otherwise, I'm traveling. We have 110 employees, and it's probably been more than a year since we were all in the same place together. We have operations in Australia and the U.K. now, and we're opening an office in Germany this year. We're always setting up a venue somewhere. Like it or not, when your company gets to a certain size, the way you manage changes. You go from being a manager to a leader, and in my mind, there are only two things a leader should worry about: strategy and culture. Those two things take up most of my time.
Tough Mudder has a quirky culture. Once a month, we have something called Tough Mudder University, which everyone who's in New York attends. It's an 80-minute discussion of a Harvard Business School case study, based on a theme that's pertinent to Tough Mudder. For example, we did a case about Starbucks in the late '90s, when the core customer was a woman in her 30s. But by the turn of the century, it was becoming a wider national brand, and that created challenges. It's the same with us. Our early adopters were very fit 30-year-old guys. Now we have participants in their 80s, and we need to figure out how to serve those people, too. The case method is great from my perspective, because I get to interact with everyone, and it's a great assessment tool.
Every Tuesday, we have a staff meeting and give out awards. Our Kaizen Ninja Award, which is based on this Japanese concept about making constant improvements, goes to anyone who comes up with a great innovation. We also give out a Credo Award every week to someone who really embodies the values of the company. For example, Antonia Clark, our head of social media, won a Credo recently when she went above and beyond her job description and helped out the events team on many of the fall events. Tough Mudder is all about pushing your boundaries.
I spend a lot of time interviewing potential hires. We're growing so quickly that I probably do two or three interviews a day. I consider it a mental challenge to get someone to give an honest answer. I always ask, "Are you a hunter or a farmer?" It's amazing how many people take that question literally. If you take it literally, you've probably already failed. I also ask people what they would do if they had a month off. A central philosophy at Tough Mudder is that experience is the new luxury. Unlike an iPhone, which depreciates over time, memories and experiences actually appreciate over time. So, the applicants who tell me that with a month off they'd go to this festival and that festival tend to be pretty good cultural fits here. That's what we're really testing. Do you have intellectual curiosity, a natural sense of fun, an adventurous nature? Do you not take yourself too seriously?
I came up with the idea for Tough Mudder in business school. I noticed that people were bored with marathons and triathlons. Running's a bit boring. In what other sport do you have to listen to music to make it passable? I wanted to make something that was Ironman-meets-Burning Man, a test of all-around fitness, but in this fun, slightly quirky environment.
We aspire to become a household brand name, so mapping out a long-term strategy is crucial. I speak with Cristina DeVito, our chief strategy officer, every day, and I meet with the entire five-person strategy team once a week. We just started a new business division to try to figure out what Tough Mudder will look like in five years. I imagine we'll have several types of events related to fitness. I can see us having Tough Mudder gyms and boot camps. Eventually, Tough Mudder events will be just one business unit within an overall event planning and fitness brand.
We go on retreats every quarter to a house in the Catskill Mountains. There's no phone coverage, and the Internet connection is slow. We started the retreats to get everyone thinking about the future. We always have an event coming up, but we also need to think about how we're going to run events in 2014. If you're not answering these questions now, you're just getting less and less efficient and letting things fall further away from you. We've also come up with cool obstacles for our courses during the retreats.
Right now, we prototype the obstacles at our warehouse in Brooklyn, but we're moving into a new 48,000-square-foot office this year, which will have room for a testing facility. Alex Patterson leads our obstacle innovation team. My meetings with him are always about organization. We'll discuss how many obstacles we have at different stages of development, how people are reacting to new obstacles, and what our action plan is for changing obstacles that weren't successful.
A lot of our best obstacles started in different incarnations. Take Everest, our quarter-pipe obstacle. Our original idea was that it would be a ramp, and you'd have to take a running jump to get up. The trouble was, it was just too damn steep. People would run up and go straight back down. The next time, we built it too flat, so people just walked right up. The third time, we came up with this quarter pipe. It's perfect. You get part of the way up, and then you have to jump, and your teammates pull you up.
It's one thing to test an obstacle with 50 people in our warehouse and another to test it with 10,000 people on a course. The crowd mentality takes over. With Funky Monkey, our monkey-bars obstacle, we never considered people would climb up and walk across the top of it, but at the event, for some reason, they did. Our engineers built it so that you can dangle 500 people off it, but just like cars with good braking systems, it doesn't help if the driver's drunk. Now, we've reengineered it so you can't physically get up there.
Safety is a huge concern. We invest phenomenal amounts of money on safety. We have a medical staff at each event. We probably have more lawyers on staff than some law firms do. We have a book of contingency plans that every employee reads and takes a test on. If you don't pass, you have to go through training and have a discussion with a senior manager.
We've sold more than 500,000 tickets, and somehow, we've had no deaths. Statistically, it's amazing. You take that number of people, and if they were sitting at home that day, statistically, we should have had a few heart attacks. I have to tell the team, it's coming. We have to accept that it's going to happen at some point and work to ensure it never does.
My co-founder, Guy, and I don't spend that much time in meetings one on one, but we do have dinner together at least once a week. Guy and I have been friends since high school, and I think that's the most important thing in a partnership--having someone you know really well. You know each other's strengths and weaknesses, and Guy has many strengths that I don't. He's far more patient than I am.
Usually, by late afternoon I'm wiped out. I can probably do four or five hours of meetings a day. Then my attention span's gone. I don't let anyone invite me to last-minute meetings anymore.
I normally head home around 7 p.m. My fiancée, Katie Palms, will typically be home by then. She was at Harvard Law when I was at Harvard Business, and she's now a corporate lawyer. We met at a house party. I was pretty drunk, but she begrudgingly gave me her number anyway. I called her three or four times, and she was having none of it. Eventually, she gave in, and the rest is history. Usually, we have dinner together, and if I don't have some kind of work event, I'm in bed by 10 p.m.
I always tell people I'm probably fundamentally a bit lazy. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but it's true. I frequently gravitate toward slightly easy things, but now, the only things that come to me as CEO are really damn complicated. The great thing is, on a really frequent basis, you're reminded why you're doing this. Occasionally, I'm in a situation where people don't know what I do for a living, and Tough Mudder comes up, and they're talking about how awesome it is. There's nothing like it.
"Groupon clone" is perhaps the biggest Silicon Valley meme of the decade. News of a company merger illuminates why you should avoid getting anywhere near the clone wars.
Joking about the cancerous decay of daily-deal marketplace companies has become something of a Silicon Valley past-time, so we hardly need to point out just how insipid the online-coupon business has become. But news today may provide a slightly different teaching moment for entrepreneurs: Clones are bad. Really, really bad.
Today, AllThingsD reported that CrowdSavings, a discount marketplace start-up founded in Tampa, Florida, in 2009, will be acquired by Half Off Depot, a coupon start-up founded just a year earlier. The two companies will be rebranded as "nCrowd," and will be headquartered in Atlanta.
What's remarkable (and sort of depressing, really) is that the merger of the two companies ends the culmination of 19 previous acquisitions, a disproportionately massive share of total recent M&A activity in the United States.
But even now that newly-formed nCrowd has become the ultimate matryoshka doll of Groupon rip-offs, the entity will only represent a "fraction of the size of Groupon or LivingSocial."
That's not particularly suprising, but this is: According to the CEO of CrowdSavings, which acquired 15 daily deal companies over the past three years, most acquisitions cost him only "$100,000 to $400,000 apiece." The acquistion of CrowdSavings itself only netted the founders some $6.4 million in cash and stock. Probably not a very good ROI for a 29-person company that raised $1.3 million in debt.
The lesson here for entrepreneurs seeing dollar signs in copycatting the dailly deal market--or, really, any other already-duplicated-to-death space is obvious: Clones suck. They don't just suck because they're "stifling for innovation" and bad for consumer (which, of course, they very often are), but they suck for simpler reasons that should be more obvious--but that we don't always consider in the current buzz-heavy start-up ecosystem.
Start-up clones rarely, if ever, become fast-growing businesses, create sustainable jobs, or help push GDP forward. They are also not to be confused with late entrants into the market, as Google was with Yahoo. They are simply copycats, the result of irrational start-up froth, and they serve little use in our economy.
And, well, that sucks.