So yesterday I reviewed (kinder word) two days worth of INC magazine’s GROWCO conference in Orlando.
Today, Mike Hofman, editor of Inc.com, and Athena Scindelheim, manager of events for INC’s parent, Mansueto Ventures, both stopped me. I kind of puked on Mike about my frustration with the speakers. Athena read my blog and we talked about the challenges of speakers. It was nice to know that INC is listening to feedback. Athena did tell me that some people enjoyed McCann’s commercial, I mean, speech, but that if he had been more granular it would have been better for the audience. Those last 3 words make all the difference: For the audience. When you are a speaker, that is your customer.
E-Myth author Michael Gerber was the opening speaker today. Some people liked him; I have a different take on him that I will keep to myself mostly.
Gerber did ask some good questions:
Do you just have a job?
Is your dream simply to fix or make something better?
Where does your energy come from?
What impact do you have on your community, employees, clients?
What’s your Why?
What great things are you here to do?
Twitter was aflutter with Gerber is the church of the entrepreneur. He certainly made a big impact with his concept of the E-Myth – 25 years ago! Do we really need 4,000 E-Myth books specific to each vertical? And where will he get the $400 million to pay each “co-author” $100K per book? This is kind of the plan that Jay Conrad Levinson used with his Guerrilla franchise. It’s similar to Jack Canfield’s Chicken Soup franchise. I’ll just leave it at that.
Jim Schleckser and Kirk Aubry of the CEO Project came out on fire with on-the-point advice (and a workbook at each table) about what stalls growth in the SMB space. It’s one of 3 things: Talent, Process or Business Plan.
The next hour was a toss up between listening to Lexy Funk or Jason Fried. I went to hear Jason of 37Signals talk about How and Why to Grow Slowly. His presentation was very good, but it was ideas about business (probably a summary of his book, REWORK), but it wasn’t about Slowly Growing a Company. Good preso, but way off topic. That was all I could take. After lunch, I spoke with Athena and hit the road.
I get that you can’t control the speaker once they take stage, but there needs to be a penalty for some of this. And if they had to turn in their slide deck early, a review would have shown that it wasn’t on topic. Jason’s slides didn’t even mention Growth. McCann’s slides had embedded commercials. But maybe Manseuto didn’t get them early enough to review them. I enjoyed the panels and the interactive talks. It seemed like I hit too many non-CEO’s and too many Internet Marketers while networking. I’ll write up more notes On RAD’s RADAR.
