Category: Drew’s Articles

How This UK Start-Up Came to Be

Posted on by Drew Neisser

This is the abridged transcript from my interview with Paul Cook, founder of TagMan, a successful UK start-up that could very well take the US by storm.  For my thoughts on TagMan, see my article on FastCompany.com.

What is TagMan?
TagMan is a single piece of code that allows you to manage how you share data with companies that provide you with marketing software services. It’s a smart container tag for enterprising commerce. TagMan is a solution to a problem that the industry has had for a long time: implementing campaigns, collecting data, and sharing data with partners so they can provide marketing services and software.

What is your history and how did it lead to TagMan?
I was in media sales, almost got an electronics degree, and went into online advertising sales and found that clients didn’t actually know whether clicks were converting. I built a company called Redeye that was the first company to offer post analytic tracking services. We built that company into a full analytics platform and it was quite an intensive tagging process.

So from Redeye you discovered a new market?
People are drowning in tags and the solutions out there only solve part of the problem because they’re given free by a company with a vested interest. I wanted to provide something independent, something that would not just solve problems for the marketing department but also solve problems for the analytics department and conversion department.

What industry problems led you to start TagMan?
One problem was people had trouble implementing software-as-a-solution services. The second problem was everyone was stuck on a measurement system that worked thirteen years ago but in the modern age doesn’t really fit the bill.

Why did you think companies would embrace your product?
We thought that if we go to companies and give them the opportunity to separate the tagging from their web analytics platform that will give them enough on its own. We focus purely on the infrastructure so entrepreneurs will no longer be faced with this barrier of getting tags on the site. We wanted to make it really easy for companies to try a new product and service out.

The benefits are apparent very quickly, then?
One benefit of attribution with tag management is, rather than paying out affiliate networks and maybe a paid search click on top, you can control who sees the conversion and who gets paid. You save 30% on your marketing budget straightaway. We’ve got Europe’s largest travel retailer, Thomas Cook, on the platform and they saved around 20% on day one. People think the level of duplication is around 10% but actually it’s around 30%.

What does your competition look like?
There are other companies trying to tackle the same problem in the US. In the UK they’re essentially copycats and they can’t get funding. They’re not serious contenders for an enterprise-level customer. We’ve got global support and global rollout for clients, they couldn’t even begin to service that type of client.

Why is this different?
We provide a very simple path towards having attribution reporting in real time. In the US you have a lot of data but it’s not real time. What we’ve created is something that’s not quite as detailed but does the job and certainly a lot better than “last click” does. By changing the tags on the page we can plug data straight into figures seen by your ad agency. They’re actually seeing your attributions and figures.

Why are you solely a software-as-a-service company without a marketing consulting side?
We prefer to empower marketing service companies with quality data and tools so they can do that analysis and have them partner with us. If you want a tag management system the only choice is one tied to a search marketing company or a display advertising company. There’s a real question of their independence. We have no vested interest, we’re not trying to sell any marketing service company at the back of this. We’re purely providing independent tag management and attribution reporting. The industry needs an independent platform where this stuff can run through. We’re not going to hold anyone hostage.

What product support do you provide?
We provide enterprise-level support. We’re targeting retail corporations who expect a certain level of support. The whole point of the product is for companies to do the tagging themselves and making it sufficiently easy for them to solve their own problems. They no longer need to put in an IT request that will get done in two weeks time. They can do it themselves.

Why did TagMan enter the US market?
First, ad technology looks the same all over the world. If you’re a brand of smoothy, is that going to work in the US? Probably not because those brands are specific to culture. For us the positioning might have to be slightly different in the US but the base is the same. Second, it’s the biggest global market. It makes sense to go to another English-speaking market, one that’s 5-10 times the size of the UK.

Why do you think you’ll be successful in the US?
If you look at the online data ecosystem it’s far more developed here. Theoretically the need for tag management is far greater here and we’ve got a great product that’s been developing for four to five years.

Is there a bias among US companies for US software?
As far as if US software is better, I would say yes it is on average but averages can be dangerous. It doesn’t mean that every piece of US software is better than every piece of UK software. We have a proven track record for technology and have proven we’re the real deal, that we’re committed, that the product works.

Talk to me about TagMan’s growth.
It wasn’t until 2009 that we started to get traction. We had a few case studies and were lucky enough to win clients like Boden who are probably the best company doing direct marketing. By the end of 2008 you’re talking about less than ten clients, end of 2009 about 25, and end of 2010 near 100.

So you and co-founder, Jon Baron, are now living in the US.
We looked at the companies that were successful and the founders coming to the US was the common theme. We’re fully committed to the US market and we’ve shown that. Wherever the founders are is really where the company is based.

7 Crazy Ways to Increase Your Followers on Twitter

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In the more-the-merrier world of Twitter, follower count is an obsession for some brands, whether personal or corporate.  Rightly or wrongly, increasing this count has become an industry in itself, with tools and gurus whistling new promises like the Pied Piper of olde.  There’s even a ranking of the most followed CMO’s that has become a coveted bio item, bestowing instant credibility in the new social order.

A recent survey (see highlights on Slideshare) among Twitter users reinforces the urgency behind the growing obsession with follower counts. Conducted by Renegade with the Business Development Institute, the study identified a huge gap between the have’s and have not’s, finding that over 85% of Twitter users have fewer than 5,000 followers.  While a whopping 75% expressed a desire to substantially increase their follower counts, less than half actually had a strategy in place to do just that.

Troubled by this situation especially in light of Charlie Sheen’s highly publicized Guinness Book of World Record setting achievement last week, it seems to me that we tweeters need to find new character in 140 characters and we need to have all those wonderful twits out there find us.  So yes indeed, now is the perfect time for this cynics guide to increasing your follower count.

1. Be a celebrity
Honestly, there really is no easier way to increase your follower count than to be famous and already have lots of obsessive fans.  Whether you’re Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga, Shaquille O’Neal or Ashton Kutcher, your minions will simply fall all over your every tweet.  Say something nearly clever or almost worth reading and millions more will find you in a click of a mouse.  Not famous, yet?  Well, keep reading.

2. Be a notorious celebrity
When Charlie Sheen added 1.3 million followers in just over 24 hours this was big news, and he suddenly had another place to share his miraculously self-destructive behavior that he describes as “winning.”  Lest you think he’s totally insane, with endorsement deals from Broguiere’s Dairy and Naked Juice hanging on his every tweet, Sheen indeed may end up having the last laugh on Twitter.

3. Buy your followers
If celebrity is out of the question, then maybe it is time to get out the cash and simply buy your friends.  The remarkably reputable GetMorePopular.com guarantees they can get you or your brand more followers in no time.  Want 10,000 more followers? This enterprising start-up will get them for you in 1-4 weeks for only $999.99.  And for just another 25%, they’ll even find you followers you would consider in your target!

4. Bribe them with prizes
Joel Comm, in his best-selling book Twitter Power, recommends among many other techniques, offering prizes or free gifts to attract new followers.  For example, one of his apostles, @fitbizwoman gave away a free ebook with 120 smoothie recipes to help increase her follower count from a few hundred to several thousand.  While this may seem a bit crass, worry not, if the shoe fitbizwoman, wear it!

5. Follow to be followed
If bribing seems a bit too primitive, then perhaps an aggressive follower campaign is in order.  Using power tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, the idea is to identify likeminded tweeters who just might follow you back.  Searching their tweets, profiles and follow to follower ratios, you can suddenly follow hundreds of potential followers in a matter of minutes.  While testing TweetBig, without breaking a sweat, I myself added over 300 followers some of whom might actually care about what I have to say.

6. Unfollow the unfollowers
After you’ve aggressively followed hundreds if not thousands, you’ll then want to clean house, removing the ingrates who had the nerve not to reciprocate your follow. Again, by using tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, unfollowing is as easy as following.  In fact, Tweetbig even has something called a “time bomb” that will auto-unfollow in a specified number of days. Since 75% of the surveyed Twitter users in our study said the follow/follower ratio was important to monitor, the “time bomb” feature should be an explosive hit!

7. Follow your new followers
During my same test of Tweetbig, while adding 300 new followers, I also lost 70 old ones.  Turns out, some of my old followers took it personally when I didn’t follow them back.  This led me to a tool called UnfollowMe, which helps assess why your sheep might leave the flock and hopefully fix the problem.  One thing is for certain, if you don’t want to take a follower for granted, follow them back post haste or risk their stealthy exit.

8. When all else fails, be interested and interesting!
Now comes the really hard part. Like chicks in the nest, your new followers will be hungry and must be fed.  A steady diet of highly digestible content should do the trick, although it wouldn’t hurt if you actually cared about the conversation at hand.  Try listening to relevant tweet streams and adding your POV with panache.  Turns out, just as in real life, it is as important to be interested as it is to be interesting in Twitterland.

Final note:
Despite my cynicism, try not to underestimate the value of a strong following on Twitter.  Reports Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer at OpenSky, who has more than 43,000 followers, “Having thousands of followers has given me a broad audience of marketers, bloggers and social media enthusiasts.”  Rubin adds, “Follower counts are important [for brands] because that is what gives them access to the social graph of others and that is the true power of Twitter, the ability to spread a message. “  (For a deeper discussion on this same topic, join me at BDI’s The Social Consumer – Case Studies and Roundtables.)

How to Double Your Sales By Really Trying

Posted on by Drew Neisser

To me, genius is the ability to make the difficult look easy, like the prima ballerina who floats with seemingly effortless grace across the stage.  Such was the nature of my conversation with Loic Moisand, the co-founder of Synthesio, who explained how his social media monitoring company has managed to double sales three years running and expected to do the same in 2011.  It was all so matter of fact, it was as if any one could have done it, anyone that is, who followed these 7 oh so easy steps.

1. Have two heads
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.  Elbert Hubbard
Since few of us are actually born with two heads, physically or metaphorically, Moisand was lucky enough to found Synthesio back in 2006 with Thibault Hanin (CTO).  Explained Moisand, “we are two founders with two totally different profiles, he’s in charge of product development while I’m in charge of sales and consulting.”  Together they became the yin and yang of social media monitoring, ensuring that their products and services are an equal balance of hi-tech and hi-touch.

2. Be the early worm
To see things in the seed, that is genius. Lao Tzu
In 2006, a handful of people were thinking about the importance of monitoring social media for big brands as if their reputations depended on it.  Among these were the French duo, Moisand and Harin, who spent two years on product development.  “We really worked slowly,” explained Moisand who personally conducted research among 400 professionals in order “to really understand how social media could help them on a daily basis.”   When they finally launched their monitoring tool in 2008, the market was just about ready for it.

3. Act global
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born in Europe, Synthesio’s product offering was informed by its locale. “From the very beginning, our goals was to work in several languages, so we started with five,” noted Moisand.  Now covering 30 languages, it is the only truly global offering in its category.  Not surprisingly, among Synthesio’s 50 or so clients are many of the world’s top global brands, brands that rely on Synthesio’s platform to help with reputation management, customer service, product research and increasingly, in crisis situations.

4. Think local
Genius ain’t anything more than elegant common sense. Josh Billings
Few companies practice what they preach as well as Synthesio.  Wanting to help their clients connect on a global basis, they added offices in New York and London to round out their Paris headquarters.  More importantly, Synthesio is fast becoming one of its own best case histories, using their own social media management tools to drive leads.  “We currently have three to five incoming leads every day coming from many places in the world thanks to [our] community management,” explained a gleeful Moisand.

5. Just say no to self-service
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook. William James
In the world of software as a service, service is generally an afterthought and rarely a profit center.  Synthesio, on the other hand, added consulting services on top of its initial monitoring platform after about a year, a decision that has further differentiated the brand from competitors like Radian 6.  Explained Moisand, “we really want to nurture our clients and help them understand what they can do with their online reputation.”  Now armed with a team of analysts and consultants, Synthesio had the wherewithal to truly help their clients navigate through the ever-changing social landscape.

6. Never lose a customer
Genius is talent set on fire by courage.  Henry Van Dyke
This start-up thing is getting easier and easier, right?  Just go get the customers and then hold onto them like a famished ferret.  Exclaimed Moisand, “you spend so much time finding a client when you lose it, it’s really a nightmare.”  “That’s why we have a team of experts, to make sure [clients] have someone to talk to and just keep working with us all the time,” he added.  With this kind of attention to retention, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Synthesio keeps over 90% of its clients from year to year and Forrester awarded it a Groundswell award for best B2B Listening (http://bit.ly/i85L7o).

7. Don’t sleep
There is no off position on the genius switch.  David Letterman
Okay maybe this entrepreneurial thing isn’t all that easy and takes significant stamina along with brains and sales skills.  Noted Moisand, “last year, I think every week there was a new tool coming to market and a new tool was dying.”  In the face of this relentless competition, Synthesio has not sought outside capital, instead guided by its motto, “money doesn’t make you smart,” they continue to find new ways to innovate with client and internal input. Acknowledging the true nature of his challenge, Moisand confessed, “we don’t sleep at night.”

Final note:
While Synthesio is hardly a household word in the US, don’t be surprised if you start to hear their name in the halls of globally ambitious American companies.  And should you doubt me, just remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words, “people of humor are always in some degree people of genius.” (This article first appeared on FastCompany.com).

Six Ways to Bring on the Love for Your Brand

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Our Feb newsletter had a really high open rate so I figured I’d share the content here too.  Enjoy.

While marketers big and small are furiously pursuing “Likes” on Facebook, we couldn’t help but wonder if that was setting the bar too low.   With several Social Media Week events under our collective belts and Valentine’s Day upon us, here are six socially savvy ideas to help bring on the “Love” for your brands.

1. Learn to love the Like button on your website

Kevin Delaney, Managing Editor of the WSJ, noted at BDI’s Financial Services Social Communications Forum, that despite their initial skepticism,  the WSJ now considers the Like button an essential traffic driving tool, contributing hundreds of thousands of incremental page views.  While you may already be using tools like Share This or Wibiya, make sure you’re also embedding the Like button after piece of content.

2. Cuddle up with the Get Satisfaction app on Facebook

Mighty Leaf Tea installed the Get Satisfaction app last April after they noticed customer service related questions on their Facebook fan page. Bliss Dake, VP of eCommerce at Mighty Leaf Tea explains,  “you need to provide [your] community with the most effective, efficient and transparent means of communication possible.”   Other brands cuddling with fans in this way include Motorola, Mint and Walmart.

3. Promote your Promoters on Facebook

If you are all ready a fan of Net Promoter and are using it regularly to track and improve customer satisfaction, then you may want to check out Systino’s NPS integration on Facebook.  Reports Steve Baxter, CEO of Systino. “We launched the Facebook integration about 6 months ago and our customers, in particular Fleet Foot, love it.”  Note–you need to be a Systino customer to add their FB app.

4. Share your love daily not in spiky viral doses

Anna O’Brien, former social media director at Citibank, advises against the use of “viral campaigns that spike traffic but not engagement.”  O’Brien said that such campaigns, like Juicy Fruit’s Unicorn effort, can actually hurt brands since Facebook looks at fan interaction to determine if brand fan page posts get passed along.  Instead, O’Brien advises brands to engage daily by providing relevant content.

5. The buck may stop there but the love doesn’t

At the “lovefest” otherwise known as the Satmetrix Net Promoter Conference, speaker after speaker offered examples of extraordinary customer service.  One of the highlights was Andy Lark, who described Dell’s transformation into a truly customer-centric organization.  Active users of Twitter, Lark noted that even their Chairman Michael Dell was known to write personal tweets to customers, a simple act that has generated amazing levels of surprise and delight.

6. Do something worth loving

Earlier this year, the social media “tweam” at Virgin Media, “the Comcast of the UK,” noticed a complaint from celebrated tweeter, Stephen Fry.  Virgin’s tweam alerted their service department that Fry’s cable service had gone down.  Dispatching a service team that fixed the problem within three hours, Fry was overjoyed and shared his love of Virgin with his 2.2 million followers.

If you have any questions on how you can share the love with your customers and prospects, you know where to find us.  Happy Valentine’s Day!

Bring on the Facebook Love Button

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Social media practitioners have pursued “Likes” of late like they were going out of style.  Land on the Facebook page for brands such as Bud Light, Mercedes and Allstate and the appeal to hit the Like button is a full-page event.  Not that this is in itself  bad business; in fact many social media gurus would call this a “best practice.”  But after spending two days with companies seeking game-changing levels of customer satisfaction, the simple pursuit of Like feels inadequate, if not downright unlikeable.

Explained Deborah Eastman, GM of Business Consulting at Satmetrix, the host of the Satmetrix Net Promoter Conference I attended last week, “Like to me is opting in, I don’t think it identifies you as a promoter or a passive or a detractor.”  More to the point, Eastman added, “I don’t think Net Promoter is about like, its about love.”  And while this might seem like a subtle distinction, the brands that are currently pursuing “Love” as a business strategy are also starting to bring this mentality to their social activities.

Mighty Leaf Tea Brews Up Love

In her presentation on the intersection of social media and Net Promoter, Eastman highlighted a number of good and not so good cases.  Among the better ones was Mighty Leaf Tea, a company known for having fanatical loyalists.  Including a customer support tab on its Facebook page, Mighty Leaf offers its fans a chance to ask questions, share an idea, report a problem and give praise.  (By the way, their Support tab is powered by Get Satisfaction’s Facebook app.)

Type in a question about Mighty Leaf on their support tab and you just might find an answer already there from another fan.  Encouraging customer to customer interactions not only builds a sense of community around a brand but it also offers the potential to lower customer service costs as “promoters” do the company’s work.  That said, relying on Facebook fans exclusively to do this work could lessen the love.  With a number of the questions posted by fans currently unanswered on Facebook, love for Mighty Leaf could be leaking just a bit.

VirginMedia Plugs into Love

Eastman also pointed to VirginMedia, “the Comcast of the UK,” as a company plugged into the social scene. With a “tweam” in place monitoring tweets 24/7, VirginMedia was more than ready when actor/comedian Stephen Fry tweeted about his cable service going down to his over 2 million Twitter followers.  Relaying the complaint to customer service, VirginMedia rushed a repair truck to Fry’s house and within a couple of hours had fixed the problem.

Not surprisingly, Fry was overjoyed by the speed of Virgin’s response, singing their praises in tweet after tweet.  Recognizing that customer “voices” are not all created equal, Virgin’s response to Fry’s very public complaint was indeed impressive both in terms of speed and cross-functional integration.  Interestingly, VirginMedia is not quite on its game with Facebook, where a veritable “suckfest” is happening on their Review’s tab with service complaints piling up like open wounds in a knife fight.

Like is Not Love

My purpose in sharing these two mini-cases is multi-fold.  First, is the simple recognition that gaining a Like is nice but hardly an end in itself.  True brand advocates are created and maintained by doing things that exceed expectations.  If you put up a Facebook fan page, it is expected that you, the brand, will respond within at least 24 hours.  However, if your CEO responds, as Michael Dell does on some occasions via his tweets, then you just might blow someone away.

Another key here is the recognition that social media is best approached from a customer experience perspective rather than a marketing channel.  Marketing tends to focus on what to say while customer experience professionals emphasize actions, asking themselves “what can we do to turn this nice customer into a super promoter?”  This approach yields such social innovations as BestBuy’s Twelpforce and the use of functional apps like Get Satisfaction’s on Facebook fan pages.

This particular understanding may also effect where you put your social media team within the organization.  Explained Gibbs Jones, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Suddenlink, a cable company making bold moves to improve customer satisfaction, “social media is a shared responsibility between Customer Experience and Corporate Communication (PR), with some involvement from Marketing.”  Since Gibbs and his team are actively pursuing Love, they know a simple Like is just the table stakes, akin to “just responding during business hours.”

Then there is the rather advanced notion that social media can and should be integrated into what the Satmetrix folks call a “closed-loop process.”  Explained Eastman, “you need to know if they are customers or not; you need to know if they are high value customers or not.”  With this knowledge, you can begin to craft an appropriate customer experience that ultimately integrates social into a systematic monitoring of customer engagement across all touch points.

Are You Ready for the Love Button?

Pursuing Love via social media will put you way ahead of the crowd. Reported Eastman, “few of our customers are integrating social media in Net Promoter at this point,” and these are the folks that are leading the way with Love-engendering customer experiences in just about every other channel.  One exception is Chick-fil-a, whose legendary in-store customer experiences have begun to inform their approach to Facebook, drawing a whopping 3.7million Likes thus far.  Undoubtedly, should Zuckerberg and Co. heed our call for a Love button, true fans of brands like Chick-fil-a will simply eat it up.

Final note: turns out there is a lot of demand for a Love button as this amusing video demonstrates.

8 Tips on Loving Your Start-Up

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Job satisfaction need not be fleeting for entrepreneurs especially if they follow these 8 tips gleaned from an interview with ZogSports founder, Robert Herzog.  This article first appeared on FastCompany.com.

Robert Herzog founded ZogSports a few months after watching an airplane crash into what was his office on the 96th floor of the World Trade Center tower.  Eight years later, after growing his company from one sport to a dozen, from five hundred participants on 29 teams to sixty thousand on 4,000 teams in three markets, Herzog happily admits that, “I love what I do everyday.”  How Herzog has been able to sustain his initial enthusiasm is both instructive and inspiring, revealing 8 tips for just about any entrepreneur who actually wants to enjoy the journey.

1. Pursue your Passions

Duh, right?  After all, why would you go to the trouble of starting a business if you didn’t love the idea?  [Pause here if you’re in it for the money.]   With passion comes insight and hopefully an unmet need.  In Herzog’s case, the insight came after meeting his wife playing co-ed softball.  “I played in all these other recreational sports leagues and while I had fun with the sports aspect of it, they provided terrible customer service,” explained Herzog.  Knowing he could do better, he added “I wanted to create what I wished had existed when I was single.”

2. Make sure its Meaningful

This is one of the lofty notions that sounds good at the beginning but can be tough to sustain once an organization matures.  Recognizing a growing interest in altruism, Herzog made charity the third pillar of ZogSports along with the sports and social aspects of the service.  Herzog is understandably proud that the organization has helped raise one million for charity thus far but takes just as much joy from the sports and social aspects.  “I organize other people’s fun for a living,” explained Herzog, offering a broader perspective on what can make a job meaningful.

3. Hire the Happy

While most entrepreneurs will tell you the importance of building a team of different personalities and skill sets, few will call serious attention to the attitudes of these hires.  “When I hire people, I ask a whole series of questions about how much fun they are,” explained Herzog.  “We don’t hire people who are really uptight,” added Herzog, who considers himself the most uptight of the bunch.   “When I started Zog, I wanted to create a workplace that was fun, open and collaborative,” noted Herzog, who I witnessed greet a random team captain with outright exuberance.

4. Prepare yourself Properly

The serial entrepreneur is often content to get his/her idea off the ground and then move on, requiring a modest amount of prior experience.  Herzog, on the other hand, brought a wide range of experience to his new company, enabling him to adapt to the changing nature of his job.  “I feel like having a whole bunch of different jobs before this was incredibly helpful,” insisted Herzog.  Having been both a management and operations consultant and executive at several start-ups, Herzog “was about making things better,” which also ensured he was unlikely to get bored as the company grew.

5. Forget about Funding

Spend time with entrepreneurs and inevitably the conversation drifts back to finding VC funding.  And while not every entrepreneur is in a position to bootstrap his or her idea, don’t assume that outside funding equates to job satisfaction.  Self-funded from the start, Herzog has not sought outside investors.  Explained Herzog, “I have found that my job is so much easier because I don’t have anybody else’s money in here telling me how fast we should grow.”  Also relating this independence to his high job satisfaction, Herzog offered emphatically, “I don’t ever want to work for anybody else again!”

6. Emphasize the Experience

A lot of start-ups narrowly define their offering to the product or service at hand and in doing so miss the larger opportunity.  In the case of ZogSports, Herzog is quick to note that their business transcends sports.  “Our goal is to be the highlight of a ‘zoggers’ week,” and to do that explained Herzog means that every customer interaction from registration to the games to the post-game happy hours needs “to be overwhelmingly positive and fun.”  The end of result of this emphasis on experience is that 80-85% of the new zoggers come from positive referrals, keeping marketing costs down and CEO smiles up.

7. Live your Life

While working long hours is hard to avoid at the start-up stage, entrepreneurs who continue at this pace year after year are unlikely to say, “I love my job.”  Although Herzog admits to having worked 80-90 hours a week initially, he has avoided over-extending himself and the business since then.  “I never wanted to work that much and completely sacrifice every other aspect of my life,” explained Herzog.  A father of two, Herzog also derives helpful instruction from his family time.  Admiring his son’s

ability to be happy 24/7, Herzog explained, “I look at him and say, wow that’s just amazing, why should I dwell on this thing that’s bothering me?”

8. Grow your Goals

Like sharks, entrepreneurs have to keep moving, challenging themselves and their employees to do better.  The gleeful Herzog is no different here.  “I see my enjoyment in my job being tied to being able to grow the business and provide my staff new and exciting opportunities,” he added.  As such, Herzog is investing in new systems that will make it easier to offer a standardized experience from game to game, sport to sport and market to market.  With these systems in place, Herzog hopes to be able to expand to 15-20 markets in the next five years, a growth pace that will be hard not to love.

Final Note:

Given that he is in the business of providing “an escape from people’s daily lives,” it is little wonder that Herzog puts a premium on having a well-balanced life himself.  He also is well aware that his situation is not the norm nor easy to maintain, “I couldn’t think of a better job for me but if I didn’t have to work hard at it, I might not appreciate it.”

[Robert Herzog, Founder of ZogSports]