http://activerain.com/blogs/chrishendricks I'm a seasoned sales and marketing professional with business development expertise in the real estate vertical. en-us http://activerain.com/blogsview/440277/bookstores-theaters-newspapers-and-neighborhoods-the-new-urban-bland- <p><img title="Bonanza Books" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/5/8/7/9/3/ar120654954039785.jpg" height="169" align="right" alt="Bonanza Books" width="288" />My bride and I were discussing the changes in our town, in our neighborhood, and in the way kids grow up these days over our coffee this morning as she bemoaned the fact that Bonanza Books is going out of business.&nbsp; Bonanza-- long the independent new and used book store in downtown Walnut Creek--&nbsp;is a symbol of our small-town past <strong><em>when people actually went downtown and browsed for goods [like books] instead of browsing for them on&nbsp;their laptops</em></strong>.&nbsp; Unlike some other shopping,&nbsp;the used bookstore phenomenon&nbsp;specialized in that feeling of elation at actually&nbsp;<em>finding something worthy</em> of buying.&nbsp; Browsing for a $4 treasure became an art form for the married and the single crowd alike [though few marrieds gathered for a cup of coffee after bumping into each other in the Saturday evening stacks and deciding time together was better than time alone].&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>I&#39;m convinced that some master urban planner [in a grey fabric cube somewhere]&nbsp;is secretly plotting to have ALL symbols of our formerly small-town, agrarian, and somewhat &quot;Leave It To Beaver&quot; neighborhood past erased in favor of the homogeneous, franchised, cookie-cutter blandness of Gaps and Starbucks and Chipotles and Barnes and Nobles and, well... you get the idea.&nbsp; But the beauty of a Bonanza Books was really more a testament to how life used to be more interactive in general.&nbsp;&nbsp;We had the <a href="http://activerain.com/blogsview/35524/Where-Did-Anaheim-My" title="Fox Theater" target="_blank">Fox Theater</a> when we were kids.&nbsp; One screen and the movie ran until people stopped showing up.&nbsp;&nbsp;Our kids had the 4-screen megaplex that grew into the 16-screen micro box &#39;theaters&#39; that pass for a movie house today.&nbsp; Soon all our kids&#39; kids&nbsp;likely will have is their 60-inch flat-screen and a NetFlix download.&nbsp; The collective gasps during a&nbsp;horror movie, the laughs of a comedy, and tears of a tear-jerker will simply vanish&nbsp;as people &#39;see&#39; movies in the privacy of their homes [or cars, or cubes at work] and cease the ritual adjournment&nbsp;for a milkshake to discuss the merits [or their lack] of the last two hours&#39; shared experience in the dark.&nbsp; Strange and a little bit sad&nbsp;to think that &quot;the balcony was closed&quot; basically forever by the time my kids were in high school....</p><p>When this summer brings the annual renewal of the local newspaper I&#39;ll sit on the bill until the last moment thinking I&#39;ll be able to convert my bride into an online reader but I&#39;ll end up paying the renewal for another year.&nbsp; There&#39;s something calming and magic about her daily ritual of reading day-old [or longer] news on newsprint while sipping a cup of tea on the couch with the dogs cradled in beside her snoring every afternoon until she succumbs and lays the paper down and joins them in a pre-dinner hour nap.&nbsp;</p><p><img title="stacks of books" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/1/1/5/2/0/ar120656771002511.jpg" height="355" align="left" alt="stacks of books" width="142" />Our neighborhood is two minutes from the core of the downtown.&nbsp; When we moved in, they still had parades running from time to time down Main Street.&nbsp; That doesn&#39;t happen anymore.&nbsp; We had mostly independent shops and restaurants and locally-owned services doing business.&nbsp; Most of these are gone-- replaced by corporate America in a well-dressed, pseudo-village facade.&nbsp; Independents simply cannot afford the rents that can be commanded on a well-walked downtown street.&nbsp; Just as young families from a variety of backgrounds cannot afford houses in our neighborhoods.&nbsp; When we moved here it was because there was a diverse-looking ethnic population at the local high school and we thought our kids would benefit from many cultures blending together.&nbsp; That population has become increasingly upscale, increasingly less-diverse ethnically, and increasingly less interesting.&nbsp; Our neighbors next door are a younger couple who have been in their house for almost three years and I can count the number of times I have SEEN them on two hands.&nbsp; They must work 26 hours a day-- they&nbsp;are only occasionally seen walking from front door to car door and they simply don&#39;t choose to engage the neighborhood in any neighborly way.</p><p>And, apparently, they don&#39;t browse for used books downtown either.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:53:48 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/440277/bookstores-theaters-newspapers-and-neighborhoods-the-new-urban-bland- http://activerain.com/blogsview/416546/does-your-brokerage-need-a-customer-advisory-board- <p><img title="Boardroom" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/8/2/0/6/ar12051912160282.jpg" height="176" align="right" alt="Boardroom" width="220" />Do you really know what your customers think of you <strong><em>or do you only think you know</em></strong>?&nbsp; Are you confident enough to bet a significant stake in your company&#39;s future based upon your appraisal of how customers perceive your products and services, your pricing and policies, your value to them?&nbsp; <strong><em>How tuned in to your customers&#39; needs are you really?</em></strong></p><p>For most companies, what they know about how customers truly perceive them is surprisingly less than they think!&nbsp; And for most companies&#39; marketing organizations, the knowledge base isn&#39;t complete enough to risk significant changes in their offerings-new products to introduce, major changes to the buying and pricing experience, or fundamental shifts in a firm&#39;s customer service or online efforts.&nbsp; </p><p><strong><em>Customer feedback is often measured by simple response tools that all-too-often shadow the real truth</em></strong> about how customers view your products and your services.&nbsp; Keeping in mind that most survey data you receive is completed by either thoroughly satisfied customers (which tells you little other than you did something right) or by frustrated dissatisfied customers that want to vent their anger (which tells you a little more of what you need-- but not all that much more) <strong><em>most surveys and traditional client feedback tools tell you little that you didn&#39;t already know</em></strong>.&nbsp; In most cases, surveys either confirm what you already suspected was true or do little more than tell you what your ambivalent customers think you want to hear.</p><p>But <strong><em>what if you could get honest, candid feedback</em></strong> from folks who could help you avert a major marketing disaster, launch a new product that truly found the mark, or that helped you drive toward success and make significant upgrades to your company&#39;s customer experience?</p><p>What you need is a Customer Advisory Board to help you trial-balloon those marketing projects you&#39;re contemplating, that new product the sales department is always telling you they simply have to have, or that service upgrade your company needs to remain competitive in the marketplace.&nbsp; A Customer Advisory Board is a team of customers you invite to help you evaluate your plans objectively-- <strong><em>without introducing the inevitable internal (and often fatally biased) perspective you develop when you&#39;re too close to an idea</em></strong>.&nbsp; A Customer Advisory Board can help you see things from that critical &lsquo;other&#39; perspective-the one that you and your team can never have-the view from outside looking in at your company and its idea.</p><p>A<strong><em> Customer Advisory Board is more than just a rubber-stamp group</em></strong> you call together to bless your plans.&nbsp; A good Customer Advisory Board has membership drawn from all segments of your customer base-from the ones that you satisfied thoroughly as well as from those that might have had a less-than-stellar experience with your company in the past.&nbsp; <strong><em>The key is to bring people together that can and will be honest with you-that won&#39;t just tell you what you already know or suspect</em></strong> because they think that&#39;s what you want to hear.&nbsp; A good Customer Advisory Board can become that critical appraisal you need to have to decide if what you thought was a good idea when you started truly is!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:23:56 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/416546/does-your-brokerage-need-a-customer-advisory-board- http://activerain.com/blogsview/407247/is-the-supersize-me-generation-starting-a-square-footage-diet- <p><img title="Carbon Footprint" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/6/5/4/1/8/ar120467158881456.jpg" height="226" align="right" alt="Carbon Footprint" width="250" />My wife and I are in that age bracket where the thought of scaling down in size to have <strong><em>less to clean and less to maintain is a good thing</em></strong>:&nbsp; we might actually do it one of these days when and if&nbsp;we give up on the dream&nbsp;that our kids will be able to afford to move within a couple of miles of our neighborhood&nbsp;and will visit us frequently with grandchildren.&nbsp; Not likely-- and certainly less likely any time soon!</p><p>Still, I read here locally that developers were reducing the average&nbsp;size of a NEW house in our county, houses typically bought by younger families with children still in school, from nearly 2900 square feet (which seems enormous to me) down to a little over 2100 square feet.&nbsp;&nbsp;<strong><em>Is the &quot;supersize me&quot; generation finally having a reality check</em></strong> and reducing their concrete foundation footprint at the same time they&#39;re being encouraged just about everywhere to reduce their &#39;carbon&#39; footprint-- or is it just that smaller houses cost less to build and to buy and thus are more likely to fall within the conforming loan and qualifying guidelines?&nbsp; </p><p>I wonder what the overall influence of the new reality surrounding mortgage availability will be on sociological phenomenons like the McMansion.&nbsp; Seems we all can live on less, but <strong><em>only being denied more will make us do so</em></strong>-- until we&#39;re older and realize that more isn&#39;t better... just more.</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:13:14 -0600 http://activerain.com/blogsview/407247/is-the-supersize-me-generation-starting-a-square-footage-diet- http://activerain.com/blogsview/388899/pythons-and-emoticons-why-it-s-hard-to-discern-emotion-from-online-thoughts <p><img title="Burmese Python" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/6/3/5/1/5/ar120361571851536.jpg" height="196" align="right" alt="Burmese Python" width="300" />There I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle online when the headline grabbed me: &quot;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/21/MNABV5PP3.DTL" title="Gulp, The Pythons Are Coming" target="_blank">Gulp, The Pythons Are Coming</a>&quot; and I clicked in.&nbsp; Seems there are pet pythons abandoned to the wild&nbsp;in Florida and they&#39;ve proved highly adaptable and somewhat mobile-- they can, apparently, travel up to 20 miles a day!&nbsp; The story continues with a somewhat forked-tongue-in-cheek description of how long and how possible it would be for these reptiles to make their way across the country.&nbsp; What&#39;s great about this story isn&#39;t the python, the ludicrous time-line of migration, or the fact that a puff piece like this could even MAKE the front page of a major metropolitan news outlet.&nbsp; What&#39;s great about it is that the dozens and dozens of comments published by readers make it patently clear that <strong><em>YOU ALL-TOO-OFTEN&nbsp;CAN&#39;T DISCERN A JOKE </em></strong>when it&#39;s written online!</p><p><img title="Emoticons" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/9/0/8/5/8/ar120361684785809.gif" height="181" align="left" alt="Emoticons" width="200" />How many of you have written an email or a blog comment that you thought was perfectly innocuous when you read it back in your mind only to be <em><strong>slammed</strong></em> by readers that didn&#39;t &quot;read it the way you wrote it&quot; in your head?&nbsp; Let&#39;s face it:&nbsp; <em><strong>a huge limitation to the technology here is that we can&#39;t always grasp the subtleties of our language expressed through tone and temperament.</strong></em>&nbsp; Sarcasm can be &#39;heard&#39; but is often missed or misinterpreted online.&nbsp; We don&#39;t get the &#39;pace&#39; of the spoken expression we &#39;hear&#39; in our minds when we process what we write. We don&#39;t get the same clues when we read it that we get when someone [s-l-o-w-l-y] barks it out with a tone we find impossible to mistake.&nbsp; Humor can be &#39;heard&#39; as well and we can look for the visible facial cues when we aren&#39;t sure if what we heard was intended to be amusing or not.&nbsp; <em><strong>Online, we get none of those extra hints</strong></em>.&nbsp; Folks tried to add those little emoticons as an assist for us and they help-- but really, when you see them don&#39;t you have an immediate flashback to that cute little girl in middle school that used to pass you notes that had hearts over the letter &quot;i&quot; and x&#39;s and o&#39;s above her name [and by the way, if you are she, I thought you were cute and I liked you!]?&nbsp; They work but it&#39;s sometimes hard to take those little emoticons seriously.&nbsp;Still,&nbsp;maybe that&#39;s the point-- <em><strong>they work and we should take them more seriously</strong></em>....</p><p><strong><em>What can you do to be better understood online</em></strong>?&nbsp; <strong><em>Try these</em></strong>:</p><ol><li><strong>READ IT OVER</strong>&nbsp;three times s-l-o-w-l-y <strong>OUT LOUD</strong> after you&#39;ve written it.</li><li><strong>ASK SOMEONE TO READ IT AND GIVE YOU FEEDBACK&nbsp;<em><u>BEFORE&nbsp;YOU EXPLAIN</u></em></strong>&nbsp;what you were &#39;trying&#39; to express.</li><li><strong>SAVE IT AS A DRAFT</strong>&nbsp;and re-read it&nbsp;later-- step away&nbsp;from the emotion of the moment&nbsp;and&nbsp;&#39;hear it fresh&#39; again later.</li><li><strong>EDIT YOURSELF</strong>-- if you&#39;re not sure how it will be taken by the reader, re-write it until you are sure.</li><li><strong>CONSIDER EMOTICONS</strong>-- they aren&#39;t as professional as good writing but they&#39;re better than being misunderstood! </li></ol><p><img title="Heart over the i" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/2/1/4/9/ar120361783394122.jpg" height="73" align="left" alt="Heart over the i" width="98" /></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:30:20 -0600 http://activerain.com/blogsview/388899/pythons-and-emoticons-why-it-s-hard-to-discern-emotion-from-online-thoughts http://activerain.com/blogsview/360605/found-a-great-tip-for-training- <p>Over the years, Mrs. H. has grown OK with allowing the two Aussies to jump up on the sofa and snuggle in while she reads the paper and enjoys her afternoon cup of coffee... which was fine when the sofa was the old, beat up leftover from our first home almost 30 years ago.&nbsp; But just before the holidays we [finally] bought a nice replacement for the living room and relagated the &#39;paper reading&#39; and &#39;coffee drinking&#39; visits with the dogs to the family room sofa-- a leather unit that can easily be washed.&nbsp; But when I&#39;m away for awhile and the &#39;boys&#39; are alone in the house, I&#39;ve noticed the tell-tale shedding on the new burgandy fabric that lets me know we&#39;ve created a new naptime location-- and one I&#39;d prefer they not use!</p><p>I tried the typical teaching tools we&#39;ve always used and I&#39;ve moved them from where I DON&#39;T want them to be [when I&#39;ve occasioanlly caught them in the act] and rewarded and praised them for moving to the acceptable places.&nbsp; No luck... the shedding signs continued.&nbsp; Until a friend suggested I cover the new sofa temporarily with aluminum foil.&nbsp; Voila!&nbsp; Since covering the pads of the sofa, they avoid it like it was The Plague!&nbsp; I&#39;m going to leave the foil there for another week and then test it out for lasting &#39;behavior modification&#39; results.</p><p>Stay tuned!</p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:41:21 -0600 http://activerain.com/blogsview/360605/found-a-great-tip-for-training- http://activerain.com/blogsview/359416/talk-to-me-not-at-me- <p><img title="Telemarketing" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/1/6/7/4/5/ar120173276654761.gif" height="208" align="left" alt="Telemarketing" width="175" /></p><p><strong><em>What is with this new rash of computer-generated and pre-recorded messages trying to sell me stuff lately?</em></strong></p><p>I thought somewhere along the way there was a law passed that made it illegal for marketing companies to solicit using a computer as the initial interaction with a prospect.&nbsp; I thought the initial call had to include&nbsp;a live voice engaging the prospect somehow (so that you could have the opportunity to interrupt and specifically request to be opted out of future calls).&nbsp; Seems that law either changed or is being patently ignored.&nbsp; I get about a dozen of these calls every week!</p><p>OK, here&#39;s my rule:&nbsp; if you&#39;re a machine and you call me on the phone, I&#39;m hanging up as soon as I figure out you never had (<em>and never WILL have</em>) a pulse.&nbsp; Oh wait, you say, <strong><em>but what if the call offers me a great deal</em></strong>?&nbsp;&nbsp;<strong><em><u>SO WHAT</u></em>!</strong>&nbsp; I&#39;m hanging up!&nbsp; But <strong><em><u>what&nbsp;if I won something</u></em></strong>?&nbsp; <strong><em><u>SO WHAT</u></em></strong>!&nbsp; I got along without it up until now-- and I&#39;ll probably survive without it tomorrow!&nbsp; But <strong><em>what if they really</em></strong> <strong><em>want to know</em></strong> your opinion!&nbsp; <strong>TRUST ME</strong>:&nbsp; if you have no pulse and you dial me, or if you&#39;re responsible for making some inanimate object do so,&nbsp;you&nbsp;<strong><em><u>DON&#39;T</u></em></strong> want to know what I&#39;m thinking at that moment!</p><p>When did it become acceptable to let a machine do our client interactions?&nbsp; If we can&#39;t speak to real people and assess their interest, or lack of interest, how will we know the right way and the right time to follow up for a future opportunity?&nbsp; In the interest of saving money, these calls are automatically moving me from the &quot;might have once been possible&quot; pile of prospects to the &quot;I wouldn&#39;t trade with you under <strong><em>ANY</em></strong> circumstance&quot; pile.</p><p>Am I just too old for today&#39;s technology or have we, as a culture, lost something in the translation?</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:53:17 -0600 http://activerain.com/blogsview/359416/talk-to-me-not-at-me- http://activerain.com/blogsview/344104/-rebates-to-stimulate-the-economy-right-just-tighten-the-vise- <p><img title="vise grip" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/4/0/0/8/ar120070532580047.jpg" height="204" align="right" alt="vise grip" width="225" />I read today that the President and Congress are considering <strong><em>a bigger, better, bolder, brighter redux of the strategy</em></strong> that kept our micro-mini recession in 2001 under control-- <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/01/15/national/w110606S24.DTL" title="rebates" target="_blank">rebates</a>!&nbsp; The President&#39;s theory (and, of course, he&#39;s not thinking this stuff up on his own)&nbsp;is that by infusing cash into the economy now, especially cash that will get into the hands of our&nbsp;low and middle-income folks who are most likely to spend it&nbsp;right away and stimulate consumer spending, <em>a prolonged recession can be avoided</em>.&nbsp; </p><p>It&#39;s likely true that rebates would make quick work of <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/01/18/national/w002949S18.DTL" title="providing a boost" target="_blank">providing a boost</a> to our sagging economy, but isn&#39;t it also true that the boost would likely be&nbsp;only a temporary thing unless we fix the fundamental economic flaws happening around us?&nbsp; As I recall, the &#39;rebate&#39; from 2001 was really just an &#39;advance&#39; that ended up being tacked back on the following year-- presumably after we&#39;d all gotten &#39;well&#39; from our little financial malaise (we never really had it made clear to us that it was really just a loan to ourselves).&nbsp;</p><p>Is $800 per taxpayer really going to make a difference when unemployment is rising (California hit 6.1% it was <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/BU23UHP6V.DTL&amp;tsp=1" title="announced today" target="_blank">announced today</a>), real estate and mortgage have skidded if not flat out crashed as we all feel, food, fuel and other essential expenses are inflating (hey, think that $100 a barrel oil ISN&#39;T going to hurt in a few months?), credit is locked in a vise grip, and people are just downright scared about their futures?</p><p>Rebates will make everybody feel good about as long as it takes for the administration to change and the repayment plan to come due.&nbsp; Ah, that&#39;s tasty medicine.</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p><p>&nbsp;</p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:26:48 -0600 http://activerain.com/blogsview/344104/-rebates-to-stimulate-the-economy-right-just-tighten-the-vise- http://activerain.com/blogsview/338220/mental-timeouts-and-self-imposed-exiles <p>Sometimes you&nbsp;need to step back, force yourself to take a thorough mental timeout, and pause to re-evaluate things in your life and how they&#39;re working out for you.&nbsp;<img title="a clean slate" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/8/8/0/2/1/ar120033717812088.jpg" height="179" align="right" alt="a clean slate" width="231" />&nbsp;I&#39;ve just completed one of those timeouts related to my blogging-- my last post having been written October 30th,&nbsp;the same day I was informed my job&nbsp;had been eliminated and by December I would&nbsp;wake up unemployed.&nbsp; I&#39;ll finish another timeout on January 31st-- for almost 20 years now I go through a self-imposed exile and don&#39;t touch a drop during the month of January.&nbsp; That started as a team support thing for a friend that did way too many bad things to his body in the 80&#39;s but always maintained that &quot;if [he] &#39;could stay clean and sober for an entire month, [he] didn&#39;t have a problem that was out of control....&quot;&nbsp; 20 years down the road we all&nbsp;recognize that he was wildly out of control, that he had no idea how dangerous he was, and that he had a major case of denial going on.&nbsp; We were merely contributing to his delusions&nbsp;by courteously not drinking around him for that month.&nbsp; Still, the timeout&nbsp;habit remained long after the friend flamed out <a href="http://human-highway.com/lyrics/lyrics-18.html" target="_blank">[&quot;It&#39;s better to burn out, than it is to rust....&quot;]</a> and now it&#39;s just a good way to cleanse the body, drop a few unneeded pounds after the holidays and make February 1 a personal&nbsp;&quot;holiday&quot; to be anxiously awaited for weeks&nbsp;(there&#39;s&nbsp;a nice bottle of Bordeaux with my name on it waiting for the calendar to turn).&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Getting the news that you&#39;re about&nbsp;to wake up on the wrong side of the age&nbsp;50 border and out of work&nbsp;can be a scary thing but it can also be quite liberating.&nbsp; It&#39;s a chance to start out with a&nbsp;clean slate-- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa" title="tabula rasa" target="_blank">tabula rasa</a>-- or at least the&nbsp;chance to re-think what you&#39;d do if you could really get a complete&nbsp;&#39;do-over&#39; in life (which, by the way, you can&#39;t...).&nbsp; Coming as it has during the holiday season, it&#39;s also a chance to think of the things in life that really matter, to tie in those New Year&#39;s Day resolutions and to try and start fresh with both the 2008 calendar and the life routine.&nbsp; Having a timeout is really just a way of exercising self-control.</p><p>Some things are clearly black and white issues with not a millimeter of gray separating the two.&nbsp; And sometimes you have to remind yourself that it&#39;s just that simple.&nbsp; You&#39;re pregnant or you&#39;re not.&nbsp; You&#39;re married or you&#39;re not.&nbsp;&nbsp;You drink or you don&#39;t (in January&nbsp;I simply don&#39;t...).&nbsp;&nbsp;You smoke or you don&#39;t (I bummed the first one in 1971 so it only seemed right to bum the last one,&nbsp;which I did&nbsp;November 29, 1989).&nbsp; You go to work or you don&#39;t.&nbsp; Well, January started out as an &quot;I don&#39;t&quot; on the go to work thing&nbsp;but I&#39;m committed to making a change there and ending that particular timeout.&nbsp; Being without a meaningful place to go every day and make a contribution is just too boring.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/po_scf.shtml" title="Put me in, Coach, I&#39;m ready to play." target="_blank">Put me in, Coach, I&#39;m ready to play</a>.</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:25:54 -0600 http://activerain.com/blogsview/338220/mental-timeouts-and-self-imposed-exiles http://activerain.com/blogsview/255680/does-days-on-market-change-the-tools-you-use-to-market-a-property- <p><img title="Price Reduced Rider" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/1/9/4/7/6/ar119376885767491.gif" height="73" align="left" alt="Price Reduced Rider" width="180" />I was speaking with a REALTOR&reg; friend the other day and she mentioned that the average DOM had risen substantially in her&nbsp;county-- as it has in most counties.&nbsp; With fewer buyers out there ready and able to transact and with sellers not yet reacting quickly&nbsp;enough to the new pricing realities of a &quot;buyer&#39;s market&quot; homes are languishing.&nbsp; <img title="Emmitt Smith -- NFL Rushing Leader" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/9/9/5/0/7/ar119376899670599.jpg" height="190" align="right" alt="Emmitt Smith -- NFL Rushing Leader" width="150" /><strong><em>Properties that would have attracted multiple offers at or above listing price within a week&nbsp;only 18 months ago are now, slowly and quietly, starting to&nbsp;show off those &quot;Price Reduced&quot; sign riders</em></strong>.&nbsp; These&nbsp;usually&nbsp;signal the end of the frenzy and the return of Sunday afternoons watching rushing&nbsp;on the&nbsp;football field instead of&nbsp;making rushes to&nbsp;the&nbsp;Open Houses.&nbsp; <em><strong>I know what a buyer&#39;s market&nbsp;means to her, but I wondered what it might mean to me</strong></em>.</p><p>Last year I spoke with many of you at&nbsp;trade shows and during brokerage meetings and what I heard over and over again was that <strong><em>it didn&#39;t always pay to spend good marketing dollars</em></strong> on &quot;better quality&quot; printed materials-- because houses were being snapped up faster than would warrant the cost of the design and production.&nbsp; <strong><em>But successful REALTORS&reg; were still doing the traditional &#39;blocking and tackling&#39; marketing efforts that had made them successful-- postcards to the farm, flyers for listings, and business cards-- LOTS of business cards</em></strong>.&nbsp; But the average REALTOR&reg; wasn&#39;t digging deep into pocket to spend on marketing materials-- if they could save money by printing&nbsp;smaller quantities, producing lesser quality, or doing nothing at all and still &quot;sell&quot; a home-- <strong><em>why shouldn&#39;t they</em></strong>?&nbsp; </p><p><strong><em>There was a good reason why they shouldn&#39;t have saved those pennies</em></strong>-- and that reason rests with today&#39;s soft market!&nbsp; The successful REALTORS&reg; understood that spending&nbsp;on quality materials, even when business was easy to get,&nbsp;promoted&nbsp;their &#39;personal brand&#39; and would make them better able to withstand the inevitable downturns that always come.&nbsp; <strong><em>Less successful or&nbsp;less marketing-oriented agents saved a few dollars by NOT spending on marketing materials when business was flush</em></strong>-- and many of them are living to regret it now that deals are harder to come by.</p><p>So with that in mind, what materials are more likely to become viable again now that inventories are increasing, the average days on market is&nbsp;lengthening, and REALTORS&reg; are having to think more about how to &quot;position&quot; a home for sale during a longer listing period than was the case only a year or so ago?&nbsp; </p><ul><li>Are you more inclined to invest in materials than before?</li><li>Which marketing materials make sense today that might not have before?</li><li>How has your marketing strategy changed given a longer &#39;days on market&#39; cycle?</li></ul><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:42:13 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/255680/does-days-on-market-change-the-tools-you-use-to-market-a-property- http://activerain.com/blogsview/251559/the-secret-of-all-sales-efforts-revealed- <p><img title="Steaming Mad" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/9/2/7/6/3/ar119346356136729.jpg" height="100" align="right" alt="Steaming Mad" width="84" />I admit, one should never blog in anger.&nbsp; That&#39;s why I&#39;ve invoked&nbsp;my traditional 24-hour rule started years ago with the &quot;send button&quot; to allow cooler heads to prevail and to avoid that&nbsp;seasick&nbsp;feeling that&nbsp;overtakes you moments after hitting it&nbsp;on a message you realize you&#39;re probably going to regret [immensely].&nbsp; But really folks, there are just things that rookie professionals&nbsp;and obnoxious sales people do that drive me nuts:&nbsp; and I should know because over the years, I&#39;ve screwed up and done them too!&nbsp; Don&#39;t fall victim to being &quot;this guy&quot; or &quot;that&nbsp;gal&quot; when you are the selling entity or the person that needs or wants something from someone else.&nbsp; A few tips:</p><ol><li>If I tell you, repeatedly, bluntly, that I&#39;m NOT the decision-maker and that I&#39;m not, in any way, involved in this activity or transaction but that I&#39;ll forward your [whatever] along elsewhere internally, <strong><em>don&#39;t try and turn me into the most important person on your planet</em></strong>&nbsp;hoping I&#39;ll become your&nbsp;key link and conduit to the deal.&nbsp; It&#39;s my way of saying &quot;leave me&nbsp;alone&quot; without being rude.</li><li>If you have the right contact but THEY&nbsp;aren&#39;t being as responsive to you as you&#39;d like,&nbsp;<strong><em>don&#39;t call me or send me repeated emails </em></strong>and try and make THEIR&nbsp;unresponsiveness to YOU&nbsp;my&nbsp;problem&nbsp;to deal with.&nbsp; Your issue or&nbsp;deal is with them-- not with me.&nbsp; I have other challenges besides running interference when you don&#39;t get your needs met.</li><li>If I&#39;m NOT the guy, and I&#39;ve told you that, <strong><em>stop CC:</em></strong><strong><em>ing me on every routine communication and stop leaving me status voice mails after hours when you know I&#39;m not around</em></strong>.&nbsp; You don&#39;t need to feel compelled to &quot;keep me in the loop&quot; if I&#39;ve told you I&#39;m not a part OF the loop!</li><li><strong><em>Recognize that there&#39;s a fine, fine line between being assertive and being obnoxious</em></strong>-- and know that I err toward the side that ends up with you losing.</li><li><strong><em>Remember the first rule of sales</em></strong>:&nbsp; the one that 97% of ALL sales people forget.&nbsp; If it isn&#39;t&nbsp;a benefit to me&nbsp;somehow-- personally or jobwise-- <strong><em>I simply don&#39;t care--&nbsp;and I&#39;m OK with not caring until there IS a benefit to me</em></strong>.</li></ol><p>Want to succeed more often?&nbsp; Want to win?&nbsp; The secret of sales can be boiled down to one small thing that assures you&#39;ll win.&nbsp; <strong><em>Be there when it&#39;s over</em></strong>.&nbsp; Sales people lose because <strong><em>somehow, someway, they get screened out from being the successful candidate/choice/product before the decision is made</em></strong>.&nbsp; Win more deals by NOT getting screened out along the way toward the decision!&nbsp; </p><p>Think about it.&nbsp; Everybody BUT the successful candidate/choice/product does something to NOT be there when it&#39;s over.&nbsp; That usually starts with the person representing the solution, not with the solution itself.&nbsp; <strong><em><u>Try NOT doing the things that assure I do everything I can to make sure you aren&#39;t there and you&#39;ll succeed more often</u>!</em></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Sat, 27 Oct 2007 01:06:14 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/251559/the-secret-of-all-sales-efforts-revealed- http://activerain.com/blogsview/247479/dog-versus-man-institutional-knowledge-brokerages-and-how-we-share <p>People and dogs are different in &quot;oh so many ways&quot; but there are still things we can learn from the so-called lesser&nbsp;creatures.&nbsp; I really started to think about this after listening to <a href="http://www.brokeragentnews.com/audio/company/morris.html" title="Steve Morris" target="_blank">Steve Morris</a> talk about the rationale for creating <a href="http://www.exitrealty.com/" title="Exit Realty" target="_blank">Exit Realty</a>.&nbsp; Mr. Morris&nbsp;positioned that <strong><em>people inevitably need to be convinced first of their own self-interest before deciding to take an action that benefits the group.&nbsp;&nbsp;</em></strong>Once convinced,&nbsp;of course, they would invariably act in that&nbsp;common&nbsp;self-interest-- but not until.&nbsp; <strong><em>Because self-interest was the overriding concern, knowledge often was withheld by those with it from those that could most certainly gain from it</em></strong>-- because the self-interest of the knowledge-holder wasn&#39;t necessarily aligned with the need of the knowledge-seeker.&nbsp; Sharing wouldn&#39;t happen until the knowledgeable saw some&nbsp;benefit to themselves in sharing.</p><p><img title="dogpack" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/4/1/2/3/3/ar119316320633214.jpg" height="221" align="right" alt="dogpack" width="275" />How different from how animals farther down the evolutionary scale behave.&nbsp; Dogs don&#39;t have opposable thumbs-- biologists will say they are, by definition,&nbsp;less-evolved than humans.&nbsp; But dogs invariably&nbsp;act first, seemingly without concern&nbsp;for their individual self-interest-- and in doing so somehow&nbsp;assure that&nbsp;their self-interest will&nbsp;be met.&nbsp;&nbsp;The interests of the pack, and things that assure its survival, align well with the interests of each pack member.&nbsp; Sharing knowledge, therefore, becomes automatic and natural.&nbsp; <strong><em>Does the pack know something we humans either don&#39;t know or have somehow forgotten throughout our evolution?</em></strong></p><p>This&nbsp;thought came to me at the point in the lecture where Mr. Morris&nbsp;was discussing the sharing of institutional knowledge and the knowledge necessary for&nbsp;passing on&nbsp;sales skills important to the survival of a&nbsp;brokerage.&nbsp; Until the top producers have some&nbsp;vested interest&nbsp;the exchange of knowledge will benefit themselves individually, they just aren&#39;t motivated to share with the group.&nbsp; In the typical brokerage, there is no &quot;pack&quot; to provide for the safety and well-being of the others-- <strong><em>there&#39;s only a collection of individual agents loosely aligned but still trying to outperform everyone else </em></strong>around them.&nbsp; Pack strength and pack mentality never supersedes the focus on&nbsp;individual needs and performances.</p><p>When I brought the new dog home and started paying attention to him [the &#39;transition dog&#39; for those of you that understand it&#39;s better to introduce the newbie to the household before the old dog fades away]&nbsp;<strong><em>the first thing the older dog did was walk the young buck around the house and yard</em></strong>: &quot;This is where we get water.&nbsp; This is where we get food.&nbsp; This is where we squat.&nbsp; This is how we get a cookie from Mrs. H. every afternoon.&nbsp;&nbsp;This is where we can lay down and rest.&nbsp; This is where we get yelled at if we try and lay here.&quot;&nbsp; The old dog instinctively trained and educated the younger&nbsp;dog on how things worked, how to be successful here, and what NOT to do.&nbsp; The old dog made sure the household would function in a rhythm and with a somewhat predictable flow-- even if the old dog someday wasn&#39;t there.&nbsp; The ways of the pack were passed on and the skills necessary to keep the pack going were transferred without thinking about competition or self-interest.&nbsp; </p><p><strong><em>What highly evolved society made <u>that</u> behavior the cultural norm-- and how do I get that to happen in my world?</em></strong></p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:52:02 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/247479/dog-versus-man-institutional-knowledge-brokerages-and-how-we-share http://activerain.com/blogsview/241870/set-your-office-up-with-templates-and-save-money-time-and-headaches- <p><strong><em>Why more real estate and mortgage professionals DON&#39;T do this is a mystery to me</em></strong>.&nbsp; Rather than having haphazardly created, randomly laid out materials that have little &quot;brand&quot; identification, design pieces that truly represent your company well and then have us &quot;templatize&quot; them in a design gallery on the web so they can be used repeatedly without paying a graphic designer each time you need something changed.</p><p><img title="Design It!" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/0/3/2/8/ar119281295082302.jpg" height="96" align="left" alt="Design It!" width="515" />&nbsp; One of the fastest growing trends in our business here is the use of templates to maintain brand integrity while allowing individual agents and originators to customize the details of a marketing piece to suit their unique needs.&nbsp; Nowhere does this make more sense to a broker or owner than for business cards, listing flyers, rate sheets and postcards.&nbsp; Purchase and production of these pieces is usually done by the individual agent that needs to market him or herself-- without thought toward marketing the overall brand of the firm.&nbsp; <em><strong>But providing easy-to-use templates wrapped around a design that creates a consistent look and feel for both the company AND the agent can become a tremendous marketing asset</strong></em>-- both for selling properties and programs directly and also for recruiting potential new talent to the firm!</p><p>Make the commitment to market your brokerage and your company&#39;s brand more effectively in 2008.&nbsp; Start by arranging a meeting with us to discuss adding your company&#39;s design templates to an online gallery to bring a consistent look and feel to your marketing effort.&nbsp; Every agent can still produce and pay for their own materials but you&#39;ll help them make their productions more professional and more consistent to your brand!</p><p>I&#39;ll be at NAR in Las Vegas in November.&nbsp; <strong><em>Schedule a meeting and we&#39;ll help you create and administer 10 online templates for your company at no charge</em></strong> just for taking the time to discuss it!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:06:44 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/241870/set-your-office-up-with-templates-and-save-money-time-and-headaches- http://activerain.com/blogsview/229105/just-exactly-what-would-you-do-for-money- <p><img title="Female Entrepreneur" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/3/8/4/2/8/ar119177929882483.jpg" height="121" align="right" alt="Female Entrepreneur" width="110" />I&#39;ve been reflecting on this all morning.&nbsp; It&#39;s Sunday morning here in the office and I was here all day yesterday as well.&nbsp; There&#39;s a marketing project I&#39;m working on to reach out to the newest members of <a href="http://www.realtors.org" title="NAR" target="_blank">NAR</a> and it&#39;s taking longer to get ready than I had hoped when the project started.&nbsp; Part of the delay is because <strong><em>it&#39;s hard to find employees that really want to work hard to make extra money these days</em></strong>.&nbsp;</p><p>I offered overtime to our staff here to try and get&nbsp;this project off the &quot;to do&quot; list but not a single one was willing to work the weekend and give up their plans-- even on overtime!&nbsp; It made me wonder about work and balance and whether there&#39;s a &quot;change&quot; happening [especially among our younger people] that has them in a <strong><em>&quot;I just won&#39;t do THAT for money&quot;</em></strong> frame of mind.&nbsp; On the one hand I <img title="Car Crash" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/7/8/9/5/ar119178069259872.jpg" height="128" align="left" alt="Car Crash" width="170" />applaud them for wanting to have a good, solid mental health break from the office.&nbsp; On the other hand, I&#39;m wondering if the world is so completely different from when I was their age-- because I would do almost ANYTHING [<strong><em>note:&nbsp;almost anything</em></strong>!] to make some extra cash and get ahead.&nbsp; Do they want less than I wanted or do they simply have so much now that chasing more isn&#39;t that rewarding for them?</p><p>I have 4 sisters and a brother and we were a family that lived by the &quot;whoever finished everything on their plate first [including the brussel sprouts-- yeeew!] got the last pork chop.&nbsp; We weren&#39;t dirt poor but we weren&#39;t well off and the drive to &quot;get more&quot; was a real one.&nbsp; When I was young I was all about making extra cash-- just about any way I could.&nbsp; Things I&#39;ve done for money:</p><ol><li>Carried 8&#39; solid core doors up stairways and spread them to under-construction mountain condo doorways for installation.</li><li>Swept warehouses and cleaned toilets.</li><li>Folded and delivered newspapers for a penny apiece (400 papers to make $4).</li><li>Made pallets from 7am until 3:30pm.</li><li>Wiped up messes [you figure it out] as an orderly in a mental facility from 4pm to midnight while making pallets from 7am until 3:30pm.</li><li>Drove a tow truck and took accident [and other law enforcement] calls-- some not especially pretty memories [if you add in the suicides].</li></ol><p>So what have you done for money [that you&#39;re willing to talk about here]?</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:13:07 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/229105/just-exactly-what-would-you-do-for-money- http://activerain.com/blogsview/228357/visit-with-us-at-the-california-association-of-realtors-expo <p><img title="2006 CAR Expo Booth" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/1/2/6/1/0/ar119170365801621.jpg" height="180" align="right" alt="2006 CAR Expo Booth" width="240" />Anybody heading off to Anaheim next week to the <em><strong><a href="http://www.car.org/?id=MzYwNTg" target="_blank">California Association of REALTORS&reg; Conference and Expo</a></strong></em> should stop by our&nbsp;booth sometime during your trip and say hello.&nbsp; We&#39;ll be there, dutifully hosting&nbsp;the trade show booth and offering special incentives and discounts for CAR&nbsp;members and other CAR Expo attendees.&nbsp; </p><p>In addition to the <a href="http://www.psprint.com/NAR" title="NAR Member Benefit&reg; Program discounts" target="_blank">NAR Member Benefits&reg; Program discounts</a> that all CAR members are eligible to receive, I heard a rumor there was an iPhone, a LOT of free printing work to help REALTORS&reg; market themselves, some great wines, and a few other things that were going to be given away to attendees!</p><p><em><strong>For you ActiveRain folks</strong></em>, make a comment below before the show and then stop by the booth and see me.&nbsp; I&#39;ll give you a card worth $25 that you can use on top of all these other great deals!&nbsp; Make a comment, then show up at the booth and find me.&nbsp; That&#39;s it!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p><p>&nbsp;</p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:56:24 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/228357/visit-with-us-at-the-california-association-of-realtors-expo http://activerain.com/blogsview/224638/are-the-mommies-ruining-our-kids-health-while-they-destroy-property-values- <p>You don&#39;t know it yet but this is a discussion about property values, fear, and the advice I didn&#39;t take from my Lakewood-area REALTOR&reg; all those years ago.&nbsp; <img title="Indian Valley Elementary School" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/5/3/0/2/2/ar119142995822035.jpg" height="155" align="right" alt="Indian Valley Elementary School" width="300" />Today is &quot;Walk To School Wednesday&quot; in our neighborhood-- the&nbsp;day when the &#39;Mommies&#39; of Indian Valley Elementary School either leave the SUVs in the driveway for a day and walk their kids, en masse, up the block to the schoolyard or they carpool the gas guzzlers&nbsp;to a common meeting point at the neighborhood pool and walk the remaining 500 yards.&nbsp; <em><strong>It&#39;s the one day throughout the school year when the near solo ride to school with&nbsp;junior&nbsp;and his&nbsp;&quot;backpack&quot; in the Suburban&nbsp;will get you at least&nbsp;minimal glares from your otherwise fellow global warmers</strong></em>&nbsp;who, for today anyway,&nbsp;have foregone&nbsp;the&nbsp;bumper-to-bumper grind up my&nbsp;street to the drop off area in front of the School Office.&nbsp;</p><p><img title="Kids Walking To School" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/8/7/7/6/ar119143305467787.jpg" height="132" align="left" alt="Kids Walking To School" width="175" />Now don&#39;t get me wrong:&nbsp; WTSW&nbsp;is a national program and a worthwhile endeavor that has&nbsp;merit.&nbsp; Walking is good for kids and their parents and this&nbsp;is a healthy and a social activity for the kids and the&nbsp;Mommies.&nbsp; I know it will make junior appreciate his&nbsp;ride to school tomorrow.&nbsp; And, it&nbsp;gives credibility to the &quot;when I was a kid...&quot; stories the Mommies and the kids will listen to the Daddies tell over&nbsp;their dinner tables tonight.&nbsp; But &quot;Walk To School Wednesday&quot; shouldn&#39;t be a special event.&nbsp; Walk to School Wednesday should be surrounded, each week, by &quot;Walk To School Monday, Walk To School Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday!&nbsp; When did it change and become OK to take the car three or four blocks instead of walking or riding your&nbsp;bike?&nbsp;&nbsp;When was it OK for kids to arrive via chauffeur and queue up for 10 minutes in the circle driveway just to make sure they get dropped off 30 yards closer to the doorway--&nbsp;the least possible distance from car door to the classroom door?&nbsp; </p><p>I try to get up right about sunrise and walk from my house, past the school into the <a href="http://activerain.com/blogsview/45116/Walnut-Creek-CA-and" title="Open Space" target="_blank">Open Space</a>, and put in another 3-4 miles on the trails before showering for work.&nbsp;&nbsp;Despite the crisp air and my&nbsp;tired knees, most mornings I enjoy the walk.&nbsp; I confess there are mornings where I struggle with my conscience during those&nbsp;last five minutes of the second &quot;snooze button&quot; session and I confess, sometimes the&nbsp;snooze button wins.&nbsp; But most mornings I make my doctor&nbsp;happy&nbsp;as she struggles to keep me off of the cholesterol medicine the old-fashioned way-- <strong><em>by&nbsp;having me drag my carcass up the block to&nbsp;walk some health into my veins</em></strong>.&nbsp; </p><p>Mommies seem content to teach their children that driving 3 blocks instead of walking is perfectly acceptable.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; I think it comes down to&nbsp;fear.&nbsp; Fear of traffic, fear of the child predator,&nbsp;fear of not being able to shepherd and watch&nbsp;over their progeny all the way from front door to school door.&nbsp; How sad is that?&nbsp; In our mass media society, one child and one driver in Anywhere, USA has a&nbsp;careless but tragic moment and suddenly all children everywhere must avoid the sidewalks.&nbsp; One child somewhere is victimized on the route to school by a predator and suddenly every bush along every street hides a potential boogie-man.&nbsp; One mother loses a child so all mothers build deeper and deeper layers of insulation around theirs.&nbsp; <strong><em>It&#39;s natural.&nbsp; It&#39;s understandable.&nbsp; It&#39;s just sad</em></strong>.</p><p><img title="Beaver and Wally" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/4/1/9/3/1/ar119143439613914.jpg" height="235" align="right" alt="Beaver and Wally" width="175" />My neighborhood (and I&#39;ll bet thousands and thousands of others) used to hear laughter and noise each morning as the kids meandered their way to class.&nbsp; People drove slower because&nbsp;there were always kids to watch out for along the way!&nbsp; Same thing every afternoon... though&nbsp;the kids&#39; laughter&nbsp;sounded a little more joyous with&nbsp;the prospect of an afternoon&#39;s play ahead.&nbsp; <em><strong>Neighborhood kids walked by the houses and became acquainted with the neighbors-- friendly or otherwise and the neighborhood became a friendlier place!</strong></em>&nbsp; The scary Mr. Wilson-type man at the corner who yelled at you for cutting across his lawn became known to the Dennis The Menace kids.&nbsp; The elderly couple&nbsp;along the way that needed some extra help with the yard-work as they aged found a ready supply of labor walking past their house twice daily.&nbsp; <strong><em>Kids got exercise, learned the value of hard work in exchange for cold cash, and developed a sense of community by simply running into their neighbors and making their acquaintence</em></strong>.&nbsp; Kind of &quot;Leave It To Beaver&quot; I know, but it&#39;s true.&nbsp; </p><p><img title="Mr. Wilson" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/0/9/7/7/ar119143550077902.jpg" height="176" align="left" alt="Mr. Wilson" width="150" />When we bought our home, our REALTOR&reg; tried to guide us off the street where we bought and onto the streets that bisected it.&nbsp; Her logic was the traffic every morning at 8:00AM and every afternoon at 2:30PM as the Mommies dutifully drove up the block to the elementary school made our street less desirable.&nbsp; <em><strong>From a property value standpoint, she was right-- homes on our street sell for substantially less than homes that cross it</strong></em>.&nbsp; But I enjoy being along the route the kids take to class, in the mornings especially.&nbsp; I enjoy seeing their smiling faces, clean and bright on their way to learn some new and wondrous things each day.&nbsp; I just wish I could hear them laughing from behind those SUV windows....</p><p>Hey, Mommies!&nbsp; If I&#39;m &#39;mean &#39;ol Mr. Wilson I&#39;ll understand you trying to pad all the world&#39;s corners for your kids.&nbsp; But to me, <strong><em>I&#39;m just the guy with $20 and some weeds in the yard that would love to find a kid willing to learn the value of an afternoon&#39;s labor</em></strong>!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p><p>&nbsp;</p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:20:30 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/224638/are-the-mommies-ruining-our-kids-health-while-they-destroy-property-values- http://activerain.com/blogsview/219350/client-roi-why-is-it-the-thinnest-deals-are-the-most-demanding-customers- <p><img title="Mandoline" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/0/0/9/7/ar119099933079002.jpg" height="220" align="left" alt="Mandoline" width="330" />I noticed early in my career that the <strong><em>clients who paid the least for whatever was being sold were all-too-often the clients that became the most demanding</em></strong>, the most particular, and the greatest time-wasters in my Rolodex.&nbsp; Why is it there seems to be this inverse relationship between time spent with a client and overall margin of a transaction?&nbsp; <strong><em>The customers that bring the&nbsp;&#39;thinnest&#39;&nbsp;deals&nbsp;are also the most difficult to make happy</em></strong>!</p><p>Case in point: as a favor to a vacationing&nbsp;associate here&nbsp;I started assisting&nbsp;a client with an unusual job-- a small production.&nbsp; The job is&nbsp;nothing fancy-- a specialty product the client hopes will catch on as a new type of business card-- but it&#39;s&nbsp;just atypical enough that it required a little &#39;hand-holding&#39; to make sure it was produced correctly.&nbsp; All told, the client&#39;s initial production was about a $125 order-- frankly something that warrants 5 minutes attention.&nbsp; All told now I think we&#39;re approaching a combined 2&nbsp;and a half hours of telephone discussions, 43 emails back and forth (as of this morning&#39;s 4am voice mail and email), and the involvement of two other people here to make sure the client&#39;s needs are met adequately.&nbsp; And, lest you think I&#39;m being unfair because this is a small job,&nbsp;the client <strong><em>repeatedly asked for discount upon discount</em></strong> because this <em>was such a great opportunity that would most certainly lead to enormous orders in the future</em> after the idea caught on with the general public.&nbsp; I hope it does.</p><p>In the meantime, I&#39;m plotting ways of getting even with my vacationing associate...!&nbsp; If you have any ideas on how, send &#39;em along!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:23:37 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/219350/client-roi-why-is-it-the-thinnest-deals-are-the-most-demanding-customers- http://activerain.com/blogsview/212581/your-attitude-amidst-change-dictates-everything- <p><img title="Earth&#39;s Tectonic Plates" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/6/9/7/7/ar119042036477967.gif" height="282" align="right" alt="Earth&#39;s Tectonic Plates" width="385" />This week found me meeting&nbsp;with a former business associate from the wireless industry to catch up on the last couple of years and to work out the details of a printing project we&#39;ll be doing for him and his dealership.&nbsp; The wireless business, for anyone that&#39;s been around it, is one that has experienced change on a monumental scale and continues to feel&nbsp;8.2 Richter scale&nbsp;shifts in its tectonic plate &quot;old boy network&quot; foundation.</p><p>I rode that wave for the entire 90&#39;s and into this decade only to draw the line at yet another wireless mega-merger where my role would most certainly have&nbsp;ended up diminished&nbsp;as I turned down opportunities to relocate to wherever the&nbsp;corporate facility du jour would have been located.&nbsp;&nbsp;I was-- and still remain-- committed to NOT&nbsp;relocating&nbsp;away from&nbsp;this beautiful San Francisco Bay Area where my bride&nbsp;and our&nbsp;family&nbsp;have made ourselves a home.&nbsp; My attitude toward change at that moment in time&nbsp;wasn&#39;t especially receptive and that made change difficult.&nbsp; My friend, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&amp;search-type=ss&amp;index=books&amp;field-author=Samir%20Riad&amp;page=1" title="Samir Riad" target="_blank">Samir Riad</a>, who as an independent dealer-owner was impacted far greater by the various buyouts than I ever would be, remained constantly upbeat, unusually even-keeled, and frighteningly adaptive as chaos pretty much rained down&nbsp;around him.&nbsp; How did he handle it?&nbsp; He changed his focus and turned his attention toward writing a book about, of all things, <strong><em>learning to play bridge</em></strong>.</p><p>He confessed that the motivation to write the book came after a long evening with our respective wives, a few too many bottles of nice Cabernet, two absolute bridge virgins (Mrs. and myself), and a deck of cards on the patio.&nbsp; Our pathetic attempt to master a complicated game requiring&nbsp;attention spans beyond those of a gnat while simultaneously draining supplications from&nbsp;the&nbsp;Mondavi,&nbsp;Jordan, and&nbsp;Heitz family cellars proved impetus enough for Samir to add <em>published author</em> to his long list of credentials.&nbsp; <strong><em>When business was stressful in one area, he mused, best not to obsess on the negative but to&nbsp;concentrate elsewhere&nbsp;and find another way to be successful.</em></strong>&nbsp; Change is&nbsp;inevitable.&nbsp; How you react to it is entirely controllable.</p><p>Real estate is changing.&nbsp; Some will focus on the things they don&#39;t like about the new paradigms.&nbsp; Others will start concentrating on how best they can become successful amidst the new environment.&nbsp; Your ability to dwell on positive outcomes, make honest assessments of what you want [and don&#39;t want] from the new environment, and then demonstrate the courage to initiate the changes necessary to bring about your success will dictate everything!&nbsp; <strong><em>Hoping for change to arrive at your doorstep in a manner you approve of is a fool&#39;s game</em></strong>.&nbsp; Making individual changes occur that you control so you can adapt to&nbsp;global changes that will happen&nbsp;around you anyway&nbsp;is what will dictate your success.</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Sun, 23 Sep 2007 13:41:10 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/212581/your-attitude-amidst-change-dictates-everything- http://activerain.com/blogsview/209286/foreclosure-here-foreclosure-there- <p><img title="The beverly Hillbillies" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/9/8/2/5/ar119015824252897.jpg" height="232" align="right" alt="The Beverly Hillbillies" width="333" />I was speaking with a colleague today about the market in general and he casually mentioned that this past weekend had been &quot;<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055662/" title="Beverly Hillbillies" target="_blank">Beverly Hillbillies</a>&quot; weekend in his [very nice and rather upscale] golf course neighborhood.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; No fewer than three families within eyesight of his front porch moved everything out of their [formerly impeccably maintained] $800K homes, packed as much as they could on top of trucks and cars, and left everything they couldn&#39;t move out in time to be lost&nbsp;to the bank through foreclosure.</p><p>Unlike the Clampetts, these folks are forced to move away&nbsp;from &#39;the&nbsp;good life&#39; to a place that likely won&#39;t be as nice as the one they&#39;re leaving behind.&nbsp; They weren&#39;t able to find their &#39;bubblin&#39; crude&#39; that would let them live a life beyond their former means.&nbsp; They&#39;re headed for a world where the only certainty is that&nbsp;credit won&#39;t be the means by which they improve their lifestyle.&nbsp; Ahead for them is a world where cash on the barrel-head will become the norm, where owning a house will once again be a dream enjoyed by other people, and where living beyond one&#39;s means is simply not possible because they&#39;re just not a good enough risk.&nbsp; They&#39;ll have to re-learn financial discipline and how to save for what they want to own.&nbsp; They&#39;ll have to work hard each day to have what they need.&nbsp; They&#39;ll have to stop taking for granted that things will simply always be provided for them merely because they decide they want those things.&nbsp; Sounds pretty old school.&nbsp; Kind of &#39;Depression-era&#39; in it&#39;s mentality.&nbsp; </p><p>Maybe the Clampetts and their simple life mentality had it pretty good before they moved to Beverly Hills-- and maybe they just didn&#39;t know it.</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:52:50 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/209286/foreclosure-here-foreclosure-there- http://activerain.com/blogsview/204998/home-mortgage-accelerator-programs <p><img title="Home Ownership Accelerator" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/3/6/2/4/4/ar118980839544263.png" height="62" align="top" alt="Home Ownership Accelerator" width="536" /></p><p>The GMAC Accelerator program has&nbsp;started popping onto my professional and personal radar so I&#39;m curious about it (and others like it).&nbsp; The basic premise is to flow all cash you receive into an account that is tied to your mortgage-- effectively reducing the average daily balance of your loan and reducing the volume of interest you pay.&nbsp; By having monies sit in this account (instead of some other bank&#39;s account) you&#39;re &quot;freeing up&quot; money that would have been paid in interest to be paid instead toward reducing the principal on your loan.</p><p>What are the good news and the bad news components of programs like this?&nbsp; <strong><em>The rewards seem fairly evident but what are the risks?&nbsp; </em></strong></p><p>Looks like this is fairly straightforward competition to the traditional banking and savings institutions.&nbsp; What is it that consumers need to know to properly assess the merits here?</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:27:47 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/204998/home-mortgage-accelerator-programs http://activerain.com/blogsview/188770/if-this-was-free-would-you-use-it- <p>I need to know if you would use this! I&#39;m considering making a toolbar available to the real estate community-- <strong><em>at no charge</em></strong>-- that could be downloaded by you from our&nbsp;website and by all of your clients and your prospects [<strong><em>for free</em></strong>] from YOUR website and <em><u>would place your franchise logo</u></em> [or another logo that suits you better, perhaps] <em>on your clients&#39; and prospects&#39; desktops as an icon </em>similar to the &quot;Google&quot; logo icon that appears when you download that toolbar.&nbsp; Next to your &quot;brand&quot; a scrolling RSS reader would pass headline announcements from feeds you or each of your users&nbsp;could elect to receive based upon your respective&nbsp;preferences. &nbsp;In addition to these headlines, any messages you want to deliver&nbsp;to your &quot;group&quot; would be scrolled (in red to emphasize their importance) across the reader and would not cease in rotation until your client read the message or you decided to&nbsp;expire it from rotation!&nbsp; <strong><em>Talk about a great way to communicate with your prospects!</em></strong>&nbsp; And, even better, scrolling over your branded logo with their mouse would open a drop-down menu of web pages YOU could decide upon and control-- like <strong>your </strong>personal website, <strong>your</strong> Featured Listings, <strong>your </strong>blog, <strong>your</strong> referral recommendations, and so forth.&nbsp; </p><p><img title="Sample Toolbar" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/1/0/0/8/5/ar118851349658001.png" height="221" align="left" alt="Sample Toolbar" width="250" />By downloading the toolbar, your clients would be delivered a toolbar that enables them to select and customize their own RSS feeds for news, sports, business and entertainment information-- whatever they decide.&nbsp; In addition, they&#39;ll be able to create their own blogs, and participate actively or passively, as much as they choose, in a social e-commerce network. &nbsp;<strong><em>And you get a guaranteed way to reach out to them from time to time</em></strong> that will never leave your message erased accidentally from&nbsp;the answering machine, returned as undeliverable if their email address changes, or tossed by mistake into their&nbsp;filter as SPAM. &nbsp;</p><p>So I come back to the original question:&nbsp; <em><u>If I make the toolbar available-- <strong>for free</strong>-- would you download it and make it available for your &lsquo;farm&#39; to utilize?</u></em>&nbsp; Could you see yourself using this tool to create value for your past clients and future prospects?</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:39:58 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/188770/if-this-was-free-would-you-use-it- http://activerain.com/blogsview/182581/what-are-you-aiming-for-can-you-hit-the-mark-or-will-you-rooty-toot-shoot- <p><img title="Target" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/5/3/7/6/0/ar11879095306735.jpg" height="150" align="left" alt="Target" width="150" /><em>What are you aiming for</em>?&nbsp; <em>What do you want</em>?&nbsp; I ask this question of our&nbsp;<a href="http://www.psprint.com/about/testimonials/index.asp" title="clients" target="_blank">clients</a> (and I ask it of other folks) a lot!&nbsp; It&#39;s amazing how many people&nbsp;are out there wanting something and working toward... er, something... <em><strong>but they&#39;re not really sure</strong> <strong>what that &#39;something&#39; is...</strong></em><strong>&nbsp;</strong>because they&#39;ve never taken the time to try and define it for themselves.</p><p>To demonstrate a point for people that often needed proof to believe, I used to ask sales trainees if they were &#39;good with their aim&#39; and, of course, being sales types <em>they ALL thought they were fabulous</em>.&nbsp; I&#39;d give them a rubber dart gun (a prop I kept handy) and ask them to hit my hand as a target from a few feet away.&nbsp; Most of them could do this.&nbsp; Then I&#39;d&nbsp;make it slightly harder... I asked them to do it blindfolded.&nbsp; After strapping on one of those great international flight eyeshades they&#39;d gear up to show me how good they were and how they could still hit my hand-- even with their eyes closed.&nbsp; Except I&#39;d quietly move my hand and they would, inevitably, miss the mark-- <strong>each and every&nbsp;time</strong>.&nbsp; <em>It&#39;s amazing how many times you&#39;ll miss the mark when you don&#39;t know and can&#39;t see what you&#39;re aiming at</em>!</p><p>How many folks out there have a well-defined vision of what their success looks like-- something that can be visualized, quantified by&nbsp;some metric (it doesn&#39;t have to be money, believe me!), and evaluated from time-to-time for performance versus expectation?</p><p><img title="Frankie and Johnny" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/5/6/5/2/0/ar118791190802565.jpg" height="147" align="right" alt="Frankie and Johnny" width="147" />Frankie and Johnny were lovers and, as you probably know, Frankie shot Johnny in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043980/" title="Rooty Toot Toot" target="_blank">Rooty Toot Toot</a>.&nbsp; And then got away with it.&nbsp; She knew what she wanted to do, aimed,&nbsp;(figuratively and literally), and caused it to happen convincing the jury it was all a misunderstanding and an incredible ricochet as she tried to &#39;return&#39; <em>his</em> gun.&nbsp;&nbsp;Similar &quot;I wanted something and&nbsp;just did what I had to do...&quot; stories (sans the bullet hitting the man)&nbsp;fill our folklore and our motivational passages ad nauseum-- yet still so many of us don&#39;t take the time to decide what it is we want the &#39;something&#39; to actually be.&nbsp; We have no idea of what it should&nbsp;look like when it&#39;s over and, consequently, we often fail to see it even when it happens!</p><p><img title="Popgun" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/7/3/1/0/ar118791229401377.jpg" height="135" align="left" alt="Popgun" width="135" />Without a vision of what a successful outcome will be, going forward will leave you armed with a popgun instead of a pistol, with no clear idea of where the target is, and with no visual of what the target looks like <em>so you might&nbsp;<strong>RECOGNIZE</strong> it when it presents itself<strong>.</strong></em>&nbsp; You&#39;ll&nbsp;have <strong><em>no&nbsp;chance&nbsp;other than &#39;pure chance&#39;</em></strong> of attaining what you want.&nbsp; </p><p><em><strong>To hit the mark you need to see the target</strong></em>.&nbsp; To see the target, you need to know what a &#39;target&#39; looks like.&nbsp; Otherwise, it&#39;s Rooty Toot Shoot and the bullets are likely to be flying everywhere-- except where they&#39;ll do you any good!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:52:25 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/182581/what-are-you-aiming-for-can-you-hit-the-mark-or-will-you-rooty-toot-shoot- http://activerain.com/blogsview/180721/the-sweet-science-boxing-helps-your-direct-mail-win-by-a-knockout- <p><img title="Knockout Punch" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/3/1/3/1/4/ar118773980041313.jpg" height="152" align="right" alt="Knockout Punch" width="203" />I&#39;ve been accused of being &quot;direct&quot; before (truthfully, sometimes &#39;too direct&#39;)&nbsp;and, while I can be subtle and delicate when absolutely necessary&nbsp;I much prefer getting right to the point.&nbsp; For me, it&#39;s a &#39;style&#39; decision.&nbsp; <strong>Your direct mail should never be accused of being&nbsp;&quot;too direct&quot;&nbsp;and if it ever is, keep doing it</strong> <strong><em>because it&#39;s working</em></strong>!&nbsp; </p><p>Like a well-thrown&nbsp;punch, <a href="http://activerain.com/blogsview/92845/Five-Secrets-Of-Direct" title="good mail" target="_blank">good mail</a> has a clear target in sight.&nbsp;&nbsp;A skilled boxer times the punches for effect-- not every swing is a knockout but every delivery has a purpose.&nbsp; There&#39;s nothing worse than watching a fighter lose control and flail away at nothing but thin air-- wasting precious energy on punches that land nowhere.&nbsp;&nbsp;Watching this desperation you just&nbsp;know the opponent&nbsp;is mentally lining up the&nbsp;crushing knockout blow!<br /><br />Before every fight the boxer&#39;s trainer will review the strategy.&nbsp; Before every direct mail campaign, review your strategy as well.&nbsp; You&#39;ll get better results and come out on top&nbsp;if you keep these rules in mind: <br /><br />1.&nbsp; <strong>Reach out to your&nbsp;current customers first</strong>-- they&#39;ve already established a buying relationship with you so take advantage of that position.&nbsp;&nbsp;Target pieces that will cater to their specific&nbsp;needs and past purchase habits but don&#39;t be afraid to suggest additional offers they may find of value. <br /><br />2.&nbsp; <strong>Get the&nbsp;best mailing list you can</strong> and keep it as current as you can--&nbsp; spend time keeping your list both current and clean.&nbsp; Fix typos and update fields with poor formatting that may prevent a delivery from being made.&nbsp; Use a quality list broker to expand your field of opportunity.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />3.&nbsp; Jab, jab, jab!&nbsp; Repeat, repeat, repeat!&nbsp; <strong>It takes repetition to be successful</strong> in the direct mail game.&nbsp; It&#39;s better to&nbsp;mail&nbsp;to the same person several times over a period&nbsp;than to mail more people only once.&nbsp;&nbsp;Direct mail is a form of advertising-- and advertising builds success based upon the number of impressions you make.&nbsp; Don&#39;t set yourself up for failure by expecting a single mailing to deliver you immediate returns-- it takes time and repetition to come out on top!</p><p>4.&nbsp; <strong>Make your message&nbsp;personal</strong>-- develop content&nbsp;that aims for&nbsp;each intended recipient and at least gives&nbsp;an impression of being personal in approach.&nbsp; No one wants to think of themselves as &quot;generic&quot; or ordinary.<br /><br /><img title="Junk Mail" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/6/2/4/3/ar118779984934262.jpg" height="350" align="left" alt="Junk Mail" width="300" />5.&nbsp; <strong>Write like you speak</strong>--&nbsp; Have a tone that&#39;s normal, not formal (unless you speak that way)!&nbsp; When you prepare copy,&nbsp;picture yourself having a conversation with each recipient and say the copy out loud to hear how it sounds.&nbsp; Make it sound&nbsp;friendly and appealing to your intended audience. <br /><br />6.&nbsp; <strong>Less is usually more</strong> so keep it simple-- provide enough information to get the action that you want, then stop.&nbsp; Don&#39;t use the direct mail piece to sell the details if what you really want is an interested prospect to call you on the phone.&nbsp; Provide enough reasons for them to call you-- and then stop!&nbsp; Want them in your office or store?&nbsp; Give them enough reason to stop by-- but not so much that they feel they can skip this important action.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />7.&nbsp; <strong>Don&#39;t be a &quot;feature creature&quot;</strong> and forget about the benefits of what you offer-- people buy solutions, not &#39;things&#39; so much.&nbsp; Don&#39;t tell about the things you or your company or your product have--&nbsp;<strong><em>tell what those things will do for people</em></strong>!&nbsp; <br /><br />8.&nbsp; <strong>Be willing to test and be willing to change</strong> based on results--&nbsp; try&nbsp;different mailings sent to&nbsp;different groups and test&nbsp;what delivers the best results.&nbsp;&nbsp;Don&#39;t be married to one style or message if it appears a different one will get better results.&nbsp; It&#39;s all about ROI and you&#39;ll need to experiment to determine what works for you!</p><p><strong><em>Remember, if it doesn&#39;t pack a nice punch, it just may be junk mail!&nbsp;</em></strong></p><p>If we can help you develop and deliver a great campaign, drop me a line or visit us at www.psprint.com.&nbsp; And don&#39;t forget to use your Active Rain discount code.</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:29:03 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/180721/the-sweet-science-boxing-helps-your-direct-mail-win-by-a-knockout- http://activerain.com/blogsview/174791/the-worst-popular-song-ever-used-in-an-advertisement-now-i-know-elvis- <p><img title="Elvis in Vegas" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/3/1/9/4/2/ar118720115324913.jpg" height="348" align="left" alt="Elvis in Vegas" width="275" />Someone will eventually write a book about the obnoxious use of great music (and vice-versa) in cheesy advertising spots-- who knows, maybe me if you all respond with your great suggestions to round out a good list.&nbsp; Good songs used well and great&nbsp;songs used awfully, that&#39;s what we need to know!&nbsp; </p><p>I understand&nbsp;imagery and the use of emotion in advertising.&nbsp; I get the part where advertisers rope you in by making great associations with things you want to be associated with (I&#39;ve seen those Coors Light ads with the little chicas that were NEVER around when I was in college!).&nbsp; I know that sex sells!&nbsp; But c&#39;mon, really, Elvis and Viagra?&nbsp; And on the anniversary of his death, no less?&nbsp; Puhleeze!&nbsp; So I say this as a warning to all of us that need to market ourselves-- be careful about what you use to associate yourself and an image!&nbsp; It could come back to haunt you!</p><p><img title="Viagra Pills" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/6/8/1/5/1/ar118720169015186.jpg" height="142" align="right" alt="Viagra Pills" width="200" />I heard it [not on the grapevine] this morning on the drive in to the office.&nbsp; An Elvis rip-off singer doing <strong>&quot;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbPD0E9qDUU" title="Viva Viagra" target="_blank">Viva Viagra</a>&quot;</strong> loud enough to get The King himself to break his self-imposed hiatus from live shows and come out publicly against exploitation of the classics!&nbsp; <strong><em>Try not to have THAT song in your head all day!</em></strong></p><p>Enough already with the 600 times a game John Mellencamp songs for Chevy.&nbsp; No mas&nbsp;with <strong>&quot;Mr. Roboto&quot;</strong> and the VW.&nbsp; If I hadn&#39;t seen Led Zeppelin in &#39;73 with my own eyes I could maybe understand them&nbsp;doing a Cadillac commercial-- but I was there, man, and they played for 4 hours!&nbsp; How could Jimmy Paige&nbsp;do this to me?&nbsp; It&#39;s so bad that I&#39;ve erased&nbsp;<strong>&quot;Start Me Up&quot;</strong> from the list of actual Stones &quot;songs&quot; and now just think of it as a cheesy commercial jingle.&nbsp; Help me out here:&nbsp; Devo&#39;s <strong>&quot;Whip It&quot;</strong> as the theme to a Swiffer ad?&nbsp; Save me!&nbsp; <strong>&quot;Lust For Life&quot;</strong> on a cruise ship line ad?&nbsp; Clearly somebody didn&#39;t read <a href="http://www.lyricsdir.com/iggy-pop-lust-for-life-lyrics.html" title="the liner notes" target="_blank">the liner notes</a>!&nbsp; Creedence&#39;s <strong>&quot;Fortunate Son&quot;</strong> on Wrangler jeans?&nbsp; If that doesn&#39;t make a songwriter negotiate the copyrights to their music better-- nothing will (unless it&#39;s hearing The Who on a Nissan commercial-- Pete, I renounce you for free-- <em><strong>and that&#39;s the REAL Bargain</strong></em>!).</p><p>Some songs work in ads without destroying the song itself or the artist.&nbsp; If Microsoft torched The Stones with Windows 95&#39;s launch, using&nbsp;Madonna&#39;s <strong>&quot;Ray of Light&quot;</strong> for XP was genius.&nbsp; It works and I don&#39;t actually run from the noise&nbsp;if the song is played on retro radio.</p><p>But let&#39;s face it:&nbsp; What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.&nbsp; Or at least it should have, Elvis (you remember what wise men say, don&#39;tcha?)....&nbsp; <strong><em>Cue the Viagra ad and then cue the music to &quot;Start Me Up&quot;!</em></strong></p><p>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:52:24 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/174791/the-worst-popular-song-ever-used-in-an-advertisement-now-i-know-elvis- http://activerain.com/blogsview/174660/coyotes-nipping-at-the-heels <p><img title="Pills" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/9/5/7/0/1/ar11871946710759.jpg" height="107" align="right" alt="Pills" width="150" />I turned 50 in mid-July&nbsp;and just received&nbsp;an invitation&nbsp;to join the <a href="http://www.aarp.org/" title="AARP" target="_blank">AARP</a>, a testament to the data gathering skills of list management firms I&#39;d be proud to have supporting and timing our direct mail offerings here.&nbsp; <strong><em>The annual check up regimen at 50 is, for the as yet uninitiated, a true delight</em></strong> and worthy of a blog all to itself (which I will&nbsp;NOT write-- some memories, I contend, should simply be repressed as deeply as possible).&nbsp; Somewhere between the stress test echocardiogram and the colonoscopy&nbsp;there was time for the&nbsp;prostate, the <a href="http://www.webmd.com/colorectal-cancer/Fecal-Occult-Blood-Test-FOBT" title="FOBT" target="_blank">FOBT</a>, the lipids, sugars, and cholesterols and the annual lecture about better diet and more exercise followed by the subtle threat of pills, pills, and more pills if I didn&#39;t manage things effectively enough myself &#39;the natural way&#39;....</p><p><img title="Open Space" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/4/6/0/6/ar118719519260642.jpg" height="133" align="left" alt="Open Space" width="200" />Which brings me to the coyotes....&nbsp; I live in the Lakewood area of Walnut Creek, a neighborhood that is two minutes from downtown but feels twenty miles out of town once the sun goes down.&nbsp; There are no curbs and gutters here.&nbsp; There are no streetlights.&nbsp; There are plenty of wild things that howl in the night-- among them the coyotes that live in the <a href="http://activerain.com/blogsview/45116/Walnut-Creek-CA-and" title="magnificent open space hills" target="_blank">magnificent open space hills</a> just up the road from my house.&nbsp; And there are good hiking trails at sunrise.&nbsp; My doctor, a charmingly round little woman who&nbsp;never makes me feel bad for drinking wine with dinner, eating red meat, or for cooking with real cream and butter, insists I walk more to keep the numbers right.&nbsp; And <a href="http://activerain.com/blogsview/60106/I-Want-To-Know" title="the two Aussies" target="_blank">the two Aussies</a> that make most of the important decisions in my household support my doctor&#39;s insistence-- so much so that they bring the proper shoes each morning about 5:30am and wiggle and snort until I awaken, arise, and accede to their demands for an off-leash romp&nbsp;in the hills followed by [for them] a day of lounging around the yard waiting for the next walking homage to Dr. E&#39;s numbers and charts.&nbsp; Which, as I said, brings me to the coyotes....</p><p><img title="Coyote" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/3/2/8/7/ar118719611578237.jpg" height="172" align="right" alt="Coyote" width="232" />After a solid hour of hiking last Friday the dogs and I were headed out of the hills when the solo yipping started.&nbsp; I&#39;d seen the old coyote many times before and he never approached when I had both dogs loose.&nbsp; He retreated again this time as well but for the first time mine decided he might need attention and they bolted up the ridge in chase.&nbsp; I know coyote didn&#39;t appreciate the morning workout and the run up to the top of the ridge from the valley floor was strenuous for all (reference&nbsp;the echocardiogram above).&nbsp; Howling and yipping after every plateau, coyote finally convinced my crew they&#39;d never catch him and eventually we all gave up, hiked down, and left for our respective day&#39;s activities.</p><p>This morning&#39;s hike took us down the Indian Creek trail and there the coyotes had laid their trap.&nbsp; Far enough onto the trail to not turn back&nbsp;we encountered them.&nbsp; Five that I counted.&nbsp; My younger dog, Chip, started the race but stouter Guy followed without asking a lot of [seemingly useful] questions.&nbsp; They&#39;re dogs-- they don&#39;t rationalize behaviors first-- they just run.&nbsp; After the first hill I lost sight of them but they heard my call about the time the first yelp let out.&nbsp; The pack made it clear whatever meal they had taken down up the hill, likely a fawn, wasn&#39;t on the &#39;share with Aussies&#39; list.&nbsp; Two of the five coyotes raced mine back off the hill to the creek and made it patently clear the dinner invitation had been&nbsp;selective.&nbsp; I sent them away to devour their kill and turned mine back up the trail for a cup of coffee and an avoided trip to the vet and&nbsp;the emergency room.&nbsp; As I passed the area where the old coyote had run his heart out up the ridge a couple of days earlier I began to wonder... <strong><em>would coyotes turn on their own if they sensed weakness</em></strong>?</p><p>My sentiments are&nbsp;with the old coyote today and I wish him well.&nbsp; He was smart enough to turn and run and I hope he sees the sun rise over the hills for a long time to come!&nbsp; I hope he never catches grief from anyone about which&nbsp;foods he selects&nbsp;for dinner, either!</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:01:51 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/174660/coyotes-nipping-at-the-heels http://activerain.com/blogsview/168246/how-to-divorce-your-agent-breaking-up-is-hard-to-do- <p><img title="Breaking Up" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/8/1/6/9/2/ar118670819129618.gif" height="180" align="right" alt="Breaking Up" width="150" />I started thinking about divorce this week and I know it&#39;s an uncomfortable thing for us to think about-- but it happens to someone pretty much every day.&nbsp; My thoughts weren&#39;t about divorce at home (we&#39;re hopelessly smitten with each other) but on the job.&nbsp; <strong><em>How do you break it off with a professional that has been &quot;in service&quot; too long?</em></strong>&nbsp; How do you tell your REALTOR&reg;, or your buddy from college that does mortgages, or any other &#39;relationship professional&#39; that you&#39;ve grown and moved on without upsetting the friendship and the harmony of the universe?&nbsp; <strong><em>How would you want your client to break it off?</em></strong></p><p>My thoughts were drawn to the subject after thinking long and hard about my bride and the &#39;long-in-coming&#39; break up she&#39;s just endured.&nbsp; For about three years now my daughter has been subtly and not so subtly encouraging my wife to break up with her hairdresser.&nbsp; My bride has been seeing the same woman for a little more than 11 years now and, according to my daughter, <strong>it&#39;s long been time for a change</strong>.&nbsp; It was change that drove the two of them together years ago... my bride wanted to&nbsp;shift from the &#39;below the shoulders&#39; style of her 30&#39;s to the shorter, more stylish look of her 40&#39;s but couldn&#39;t really go for broke until we moved to a new town-- <em>forcing the breakup with her old stylist</em>.&nbsp; That break up was amicable and made sense-- like the summer after high school romances that inevitably lead to different college lovers by about the second week of your freshman year (even though you don&#39;t admit it to each other until Christmas break).&nbsp; Both sides &lsquo;get it&#39; and both sides move on without trouble.&nbsp; It&#39;s never really personal.&nbsp; But a hairdresser?&nbsp; Few things are more personal than that!</p><p><img title="It&#39;s Showtime!" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/7/5/0/9/3/ar118670772339057.jpg" height="212" align="left" alt="It&#39;s Showtime!" width="150" />Now I support the current break up as necessary and have encouraged my wife to step beyond her comfort zone and <strong><em>simply stop making appointments</em></strong> with the &quot;poofie&quot; stylist-- I say &lsquo;poofie&#39; because for eleven years now my bride has walked in to my office about once every 5 weeks and smiled nicely hoping I notice her new cut.&nbsp;&nbsp;And, oh, do I&nbsp;notice!&nbsp; I said back then &quot;maybe a&nbsp;little &#39;poofie&#39; looking for you, isn&#39;t it?&quot; and promptly regretted the mistake.&nbsp; But like any good and stubborn man the path of denial is far more trodden than admitting to any mistake and &lsquo;poofie&#39; became a household word that eventually blended into the fabric of our lives.&nbsp; For the last couple of years I&#39;ve even been proactive with her, announcing &quot;Poof!&quot; and tossing my open hands up around my cheeks in a theatrical &quot;It&#39;s show time!&quot; sort of way (reminiscent of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Scheider" title="Roy Scheider" target="_blank">Roy Scheider</a> playing <a href="http://www.fosse.com/" title="Bob Fosse" target="_blank">Bob Fosse</a> in the movie <strong><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078754/" title="All That Jazz" target="_blank">All That Jazz</a></strong>).&nbsp; I usually&nbsp;stay up late those nights and read or watch the ballgame and contemplate my stubbornness... the promise of a &#39;let&#39;s go to bed early&#39; evening&nbsp;sort of fades when you&#39;ve just been scowled at by a woman with a &#39;poofie&#39; new cut and coif.</p><p><img title="Marcia Hendricks -- Paris Hairstyle" src="http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/0/8/8/0/ar118670707608802.JPG" height="225" align="right" alt="Marcia Hendricks -- Paris Hairstyle" width="300" />Our trip to Paris last autumn to visit the daughter happened about the time my bride was scheduled for a refresh on the &lsquo;poof&#39; job.&nbsp; It didn&#39;t take much persuading for daughter to steer mother into a Parisian salon near the 16^th and there began the epiphany.&nbsp; The cut was magic, the look adorable, the change spectacular.&nbsp; But, alas, Paris isn&#39;t our home and now every 5 weeks I get a hopeful smile followed by a &quot;Did she do it any better, this time?&quot; which I now follow up with a &quot;You look wonderful!&quot; (I&#39;m older, I&#39;m wiser, and I prefer going to bed-- early or late--&nbsp;remaining on speaking terms with my bride).&nbsp; Her wistful look tells me what I already know... she wants and needs more from the relationship, she knows there is better to be had, and she has tasted the excitement of a fresh relationship and wants and expects more!&nbsp; I&#39;ve come to sense her regret about her current relationship and I&#39;ve wondered if she could ever muster the courage to simply end it all and move on.</p><p>After almost 30 years together she continues to surprise and delight me and last week was one such surprise.&nbsp; She bought a nice Hallmark, took a long time to write a short note, sealed the envelope, and, extra-postage required, played the &quot;<a href="http://www.chickenhead.com/stuff/dearjohn/index.asp" title="Dear John" target="_blank">Dear John</a>&quot; card before she could think too much about changing her mind.&nbsp; In the span of one moment she went from &quot;poof queen&quot; to &quot;exciting free woman on the prowl&quot; for a new look, a new feeling, and a new stylist.&nbsp; Last night she gave a tryout to candidate #1, a local young woman who was briefed fully on the break up and the many psychologies that led to it before accepting the job.&nbsp; Will it last?&nbsp; I don&#39;t know-- maybe she&#39;s only the transition girl and maybe she&#39;s the real thing for the next 10 years.&nbsp; All I know is that my wife looks lovely, looks as young&nbsp;and vibrant as ever I&#39;ve seen her look-- in short, <strong><em>she looks&nbsp;happy</em></strong>!&nbsp; Maybe that&#39;s worth a &quot;<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dea5.htm" title="Dear John" target="_blank">Dear John</a>&quot; every decade or so....</p><p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishendricks" title="Chris Hendricks" target="_blank">Chris Hendricks</a></p> Chris Hendricks (Chris Hendricks) Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:12:28 -0500 http://activerain.com/blogsview/168246/how-to-divorce-your-agent-breaking-up-is-hard-to-do-