Word of mouth. We hear about it, we think about it, but do we really practice about it as founders? Ask your self what was you best word of mouth strategy, if any?

In business, story telling is a performance art. For your business to perform well, you need to know how to tell a story. I was always amused by the moniker "truth well told" a startup in 1912 coined the term. That startup business was known as H. K. McCann Company.

McCann received copyright protection for the “Truth Well Told” slogan and emblem the agency had been using since 1912 , the first time the U.S. government granted such “brain power” protection for any professional services company. In 1921, McCann would register the slogan and emblem with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

That brings me to word of mouth concepts that have always surprised me, not because they work so well but because not many people embrace them, but should.

1) The Doubletree Cookie

On check-in at any Hilton Doubletree hotel, every single guest gets given a warm chocolate chip cookie. 75,000 are given out each day. 34% of guests tell their friends. That's 25,000 stories being told about Doubletree, every single day. The unit cost of a cookie is $0.20.

2)Skip's Kitchen

Skip’s is a classic Californian burger restaurant. Except just before you pay the waiter pulls out a deck of cards. If you pick the joker your meal is free. 2% of customers win. The financial cost to Skip's is just $2 for every $100 spent. They've never spent a single penny on advertising.

Your outcomes are what you make of them. It's ok to want to make money, it is ok to do some thing that pays the most (to accumulate funds to do what you really want to do). It's also ok to not know today what will eventually interest you. But whats not ok, is to sit on the side lines hoping for some one else to do things for you or tell you what to do. I recently came about a fantastic story, of some one who took what ever the highest paying job was to make money to fund some thing completely different. The moral of the story, you must do some thing to get some thing(else).

Nikola Tesla once worked for Thomas Edison but left due to a disagreement over payment for his work on improving Edison's DC power systems. Tesla went on to develop AC power systems, which became the basis for modern electrical grids. Its ok to explore options and to believe in ones self for better outcomes. 

Gatorade

The University of Florida football team is losing games left and right & players are constantly complaining about the hot Florida sun. Why? Coaches thought water made players slow and sluggish. So outside of the occasional salt tablet and gulp of water, no hydration was allowed. This caused severe dehydration — and it got so bad that Florida football coach Ray Graves went to the school's laboratory for answers. 

So a coaches quest to solve a seemingly boring problem resulted in a billion dollar outcome. Here is the story.

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit secretly films officials in Namibia demanding cash in exchange for political favours. It’s a story of how foreign companies plunder Africa’s natural resources. Using confidential documents provided to Al Jazeera by Wikileaks, . “Anatomy of a Bribe” exposes the government ministers and public officials willing to sell off Namibia’s assets in return for millions of dollars in bribes. Al Jazeera journalists spent three months undercover posing as foreign investors looking to exploit the lucrative Namibian fishing Industry. The country’s Minister of Fisheries is shown willing to use a front company to accept a $200,000 ‘donation’. Exclusive testimony from a whistleblower who worked for Iceland’s largest fishing company reveals that his employers instructed him to bribe ministers and even the president in return for fishing rights worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is why corruption is never some thing we should accept. It destroys ecosystem and countries. Take a stand, say some thing, else there will be nothing left to say.

By making an action plan for your self. I read a profound thread, that has some of the best advice some one could give you in your 20s. But it applies at any age. Keeping with the theme of being accountable for your own outcomes, you must understand what it takes grow and flourish as a person before you can apply it to business. Here is the thread.

Dreams. Ambition. Do not trade it for some one else's definition of what you should be doing and how. Heres my take at the Ambition tax developing market businesses put on young professionals. The countries may change but the underlying premise remains the same. Think for your self and be the change you want to see.

May sound cheesy, but its your friendly Friday reminder, get out of your comfort zone. You know who you are. Take the leap of faith, invest in your self, believe in your self, try to incrementally add change to your "usual". Cant think of any examples of greatness that happened because usual was good enough.

So far this has been a passion play. Zero commercial interest. The only interest I have is having potentially the ability to have a marginal effect in changing some ones thinking so they invest in their own outcomes. I got this last week(shared with consent), this likely fuels the next 200 editions:). A shout out to Ayo! You rock !