12 Life Lessons

Tonight I gave the graduation speech at the Leadership Triangle College Edition graduation that nineteen amazing local college students from Duke, UNC, NC State, NCCU, Shaw, Meredith, St. Augustine’s, and Peace college have participated in. In preparation for the speech I wrote down “12 Life Lessons” I’ve learned in the last ten years. I only mentioned a handful of them during the actual speech, but here are the prep notes…

1. Surround yourself with people you like and admire. You are who you surround yourself with. It pays to choose the people you surround yourself with carefully.
2. Put positive thoughts into your head. The internal message that you tell yourself over and over becomes reality. Thoughts become things. Don’t be insecure. Be confident. YOU ARE AMAZING! You are all here because you are brilliant. Life is a wonderful opportunity. Believe in your power to do good.
3. Laughter is the best medicine for stress. Laugh at yourself often. Find what is funny in whatever situation you’re in.
4. Take time to think about and write down your goals and frame them!!! Set bigger goals than you think are actually possible to achieve and try to hit about 50% of them. If you’re hitting more than 50% of your goals, they’re not ambitious enough!
5. Don’t worry about what other people think about you. Just be yourself.
6. Travel the world at every opportunity you get. Take an interest in what’s going on in the world. Know about the tremendous opportunities in Asia, Africa, Central America, and South America.
7. Build authentic relationships in which you give. Don’t build fake relationships.
8. To find a job, stop sending resumes out blindly! Just find 5 people who you want to be in 20 years who have accomplished what you want to accomplish and build an authentic relationship with them at least a year before you need a “job”. Start by offering to take them to coffee or lunch and keep asking 1x per month until they say yes .
9. Don’t take a normal job. Only take a job working with great people doing something you really enjoy doing.
10. Find something you’re passionate about that you love doing that you enter the “flow state” when you do it, then figure out how you can create value (and maybe make money) doing that!
11. Save and invest money whenever you can and never ever go into debt for something you don’t need. Make your money work for you.
12. Spend more hours reading than you do watching TV! Book recommendations: Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

What do you think?? What key life lessons have you learned in the last ten years?

Announcing iContact Free Edition

iContact is announcing iContact Free Edition today – a no cost version of our email marketing and social marketing tool designed to enable more individuals, community organizations, and small businesses to grow and succeed using the power of easy online marketing tools.

Here’s the video announcement…

For more info, take a look at the iContact Blog Post – Helping More Companies & Causes Succeed with iContact Free Edition.

iContact Free Edition:

• Is available for anyone with up to 500 subscribers on his or her list and who wants to send up to 2,000 emails per month
• Allows anyone to manage his or her list of contacts; use our professionally designed templates; send email and social messages; and track opens, clicks, and social views
• Includes 24 premium designer templates in addition to a library of basic templates
• Includes social media integration with Facebook and Twitter, free iPhone and Android apps, and a built-in survey tool
• Includes chat and email support

You can give iContact Free Edition a try at www.icontact.com.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog post Aaron and I wrote as co-founders on the iContact blog this morning…

“We want iContact to become a great global company someday–a great company that is passionate about customer success, building easy online marketing tools, and social responsibility.

And so today we have an exciting announcement that we believe enables iContact to help more companies and causes succeed.

We’re proud to announce iContact Free Edition, a no-cost version of our email marketing and social marketing tool.

We believe that everyone needs a chance. As two entrepreneurs who set out to build a company while still in college, we can’t count the number of people who helped us get started.

For individuals, community organizations, and small businesses that are just starting out, we believe email marketing and social marketing should be free, easy to use, AND backed by great customer support.

Whether you use iContact Free Edition, iContact, or iContactPlus, we’re passionate about your success.”

Finally, here’s an awesome photo from a helicopter yesterday afternoon of our employees preparing to announce iContact Free Edition to the world by spelling out the word ‘free’ in our courtyard…

CEO Role #1: Setting the Mission, Vision, & Purpose

Here’s a short except from the article “The CEO Job Description” that I’m slowly writing over the course of a couple months whenever I have a few moments…

CEO Role #1: Set Your Mission, Vision, and Purpose (MVP Statement)

Why does your company exist? What is the problem you are trying to solve? Where are you going in the future? In order to keep your growing team on the same page you should define (and put up on visible flat screen monitors if you can) your purpose, mission, and vision.

What’s the difference between a purpose, mission, and vision. Mission is the WHAT, the vision is the FUTURE, and purpose is the WHY.

Mission – Your company’s mission is the WHAT you are trying to achieve

• iContact’s Mission: Making online marketing easy so companies and causes can grow and succeed.

We also have a “specific what” that is a quantitative mission. We call this our 2020 mission, which is “to become the largest global provider of software and services that make online marketing easy so companies and causes can grow and succeed.”

Vision – Your company’s vision is the description of the FUTURE

• iContact’s Vision: Build a great global company, based in North Carolina, for our customers, employees, and community.

Purpose – Your company’s purpose is the WHY behind what you do what you do.

• iContact’s Purpose: Create value for our customers, employees, community, and shareholders while having fun and serving as a model for what a high-growth venture-backed company can become in terms of social and environmental responsibility.

CEO Role #2: Defining the Culture

Here’s an early excerpt from the article “The CEO Job Description.” It’s an early “unfinished” version that I’m just getting out there because I can’t stand writing sitting on a computer doing nothing . Enjoy!

On the topic of building culture, take a look at this News & Observer article on iContact’s office space if you haven’t seen it yet… http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/16/1056612/going-all-out-to-make-the-office.html

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Excerpt from “The CEO Job Description” by Ryan Allis

CEO Role #2: Defining Your Culture

One key role of the CEO is to set the tone for the culture of the organization. Fish rot from the head down. How you act and the words you use will have a big impact on your ability to recruit the best and brightest and create an unforgettably wonderful work environment to retain your superstars. So will how your senior team acts and the words they use.

So, what the heck is culture anyway?

A culture is the set of unique activities that a group of individuals do that differentiate them from another group of people. These groups could be called tribes. So what it is that your tribe does that differentiates them from your competitor’s tribe? What are your unique tribal traits (UTTs)?

Culture (n.) - the set of unique activities that a group of individuals do that differentiate them from another group of people.

Defining your company culture clearly can attract the type of people to your tribe that you want, in turn creating a more passionate team who then create wow products and provide wow service to your customers, ending the cycle in creating a base of loyal customer evangelizers.

Culture is something that must be authentic. It can’t be faked. But it can be guided over time by hiring people that align with the values you hold dear and holding them accountable to living these values.

There is a three step process to begin to define your culture as CEO:

1. Define your unique tribal traits
2. Define your values
3. Define the actions you take to support your tribal traits and values

Step1 in Building Culture: Define Your Unique Tribal Traits (UTTs)

Step one in defining your culture is defining the words that you want to describe your culture that are inherent in your team DNA. In August 2010 we went through an exercise during a monthly Culture Committee Meeting at iContact. We asked a cross-section of our employee base to write down the five words that they would use to describe our culture. The five words that came up the most frequently in the group of employees were:

• Fun
• Creative
• Energetic
• Challenging
• Community-oriented

Great. Now we knew how team members described our company culture. At least according to our tribe, we were MORE fun, creative, energetic, challenging, and community-oriented than most other companies. These were our Unique Tribal Traits, our cultural DNA. This process gave us critical knowledge about our culture and how to invest in it.

What are your company’s UTTs?

Step 2 in Building Culture: Define Your Values

Step two in defining your culture is defining the values you and your company holds dear.

Values – Your company’s values are the unique precious behaviors you want your team members to hold dear and go above and beyond in bringing to life. For a value to be a company value you must be willing to fire someone if they didn’t display that behavior. You should have no more than five values so they can be remembered. Ideally you’d have an acronym that can be pronounced to correspond with your values. Avoid generic values that everyone uses that don’t actually differentiate (honesty, integrity) and ensure your values start with verbs and not nouns. Most people think values are things. Values aren’t things they are behaviors.

iContact’s Five Values (WOWME):

• Wow the Customer
• Operate With Urgency
• Work Without Mediocrity
• Make a Positive Wake
• Engage as an Owner

Step 3 in Building Culture: Define The Actions You Take to Support Your Tribal Traits & Values

Step three in building your culture is defining the actions that you take as a company that support your cultural descriptors and values.

We’ve learned a lot about consciously building culture as the company has grown from awesome companies like Zappos and Google.

Here are some of the things iContact does to help us live up to our tribal traits:

Fun, creative, & energetic:

• We have Cool benefits like monthly massages for employees, free drinks, monthly lunches, annual car washes (along with the standard health, 401(k) matching, and options)
• We hold a quarterly high-energy team kick-off with costumes to share, align, and celebrate
• We hold new employee graduations in full regalia with pomp and circumstance
• We have a 17′ slide that goes from the game room to the product and marketing area
• We divided our two floors into the northern and southern hemispheres (with the slide between them). The continents of Africa and South America are on floor two and Europe and North America are on floor three. Each continent has four region. Each region has a team leader. Each regional area has designed their space and conference rooms to be representative of their region of the world including turning cubes into African huts in the Serengeti and mounting taxidermied moose in Eastern Canada.

Challenging

• To work at iContact you must be passionate about serving the customer and working hard. We are a high-growth internet company and recruit the best and brightest. We very much are a performance-based meritocracy and those who perform well stay and grow.

Community-oriented

• We are a purpose-driven company and B Corporation
• We have a 4-1s Corporate Social Responsibility Program. We give 1% of equity, 1% of product, 1% of payroll, and 1% of time back to the community.
• We give each employee an added 2.5 days off every year to volunteer in the community, tracked via a tool called VolunteerForce

Define The Actions That Support Your Values

In our annual performance review process and in every coaching conversation we refer to our values and give each employee a 1-4 ranking on how they are doing in living up to the value. (1=red, 2=yellow, 3=green, 4=supergreen).

Noting that some of these are aspirational and still being perfected, other actions that we work on taking at iContact to support our WOWME values are:

Supporting Actions to Wow the Customer

• We work to create an unforgettable overall customer experience.
• We take complicated things and make them simple through design and UI.
• We make the product experience unforgettable.
• We make the service experience unforgettable.
• We work to highlight the customer’s success in everything that we do.

Supporting Actions to: Operate with Urgency

• We use the agile development methodology on a ten week release cycle so we can get new features to market quickly.

Supporting Actions to Work Without Mediocrity

• We put out quality work that is engineered for scale.
• We put every new team member through company training and product training to share with them our values.
• Every year all new managers go through our Managerial and Leadership Training (MALT) Program.
• We don’t accept mediocrity as leaders and managers.
• We move people out of the organization that are not performing well.

Supporting Actions to Make a Positive Wake (similar to actions to making us community-oriented)

• We ensure team members build people up
• We are a purpose-driven company and B Corporation
• We give back through the 4-1s and VolunteerForce
• Our employees receive an extra 2.5 days of PTO for volunteering each year
• Our internal and external communications are fun, creative, and energetic
• We have a slide in the office and decorate the office like our sixteen geographic regions to further creative thinking

Supporting Actions to: Engage as an owner

• Every employee receives options to be able to become a shareholder
• We act like owners because we are owners.

So what actions will you take to ensure you and your team members live your values?

In Summary

So, in review, the three step process to begin to define your company culture as CEO is:

1. Define your unique tribal traits (UTTs)
2. Define your values (precious unique behaviors)
3. Define the actions you take to support your tribal traits and values.

What is your company culture like? What are your unique tribal traits? What are your values? And what actions will you be taking to define and build your company culture as you grow???