What remains is contradiction: We must believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet be true. These are the words of Gareth Cook, shared at the end of his recent article on accomplished economist Raj Chetty in the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic. Cook explores the corners of Chetty’s version of …
Growth
We’re currently looking for a creative support specialist, but that’s not what this blog post is about. Well, that’s not all it’s about. Like everything we try to do here, we approach the way we recruit, select, and develop our team members with an intense focus on learning and a healthy dose of professional humility. When I discuss humility here, I’m talking about something very basic: understanding that you …
Last weekend, we had our annual team retreat in New Orleans. Yes, we actually worked while we were there. Probably because Mardis Gras hadn’t yet begun, but also because we tend to be fairly responsible professional adults. Fairly. Our home for the weekend was a partially renovated duplex near the French Quarter that had lots of character but not a lot of insulation, which meant there was liberal use of …
Research and development. Trial and error. Risk and reward. They’re all a part of doing business, no matter what business you happen to be in. Our commitment to learning at Fahrenheit Creative Group stems from that reality. We invest in new ideas and opportunities, always seeking to increase value for our clients, sharpen our professional skills, and grow our business. Sometimes all three of those things happen. Sometimes only one of …
I just wanted to post a quick word of congratulations to the fellow graduates of the 2017 SBA Emerging Leaders Executive Training Program, listed in the Mississippi Business Journal article below. I wish each of them great success in the years to come. 6 graduate from SBA Emerging Leaders Executive Training Program After spending eight months and more than 100 hours of work in evening classes, six small businesses will graduate …
Disclaimer: This post is really just way for me to share some dope new and old school hip-hop videos, but you might find something of value. Actually, you’ll definitely find some value. Enjoy. “In my city, they have a ball, but no, not me, ’cause after all, I work.” – Phonte/Foreign Exchange, Asking for a Friend Why do you go to work (check out the Kool Moe Dee video below)? No, seriously, …
How many times have you heard someone give a motivational speech and say with authority, “It’s not the destination, but the journey that matters” or “life’s a journey, not a destination”? Well, let’s say this idea is true. How does it play out? If the destination doesn’t matter, then as I’m falling off a cliff with the ground quickly rushing towards me, do I take a fraction of a second …
The world ends. Or at least it can feel that way. This, like many if my random revelations, has an odd derivation. I have very excited about seeing The Foreign Exchange (TFE) live at this show in Charlotte. If for some odd reason you are not a fan of The Foreign Exchange, please watch this and listen to this and then come back and finish reading this post. I’ll wait. …
See spot. Good. Don’t see spot. See spot run. See spot run your business into the ground. Seeing spots is healthy. I’m not referring to ocular health. If you’re seeing actual spots, you should immediately consult your optometrist. However, if you are an entrepreneur, manager, or really anyone at any level working in any organization, you should be actively trying to find the spots that you aren’t seeing. The blind …
There’s a lot of talk about thought leadership. Many nonprofit organizations and leaders often speak about ways to position themselves as “thought leaders” in their respective fields or service areas. The term “thought leader” is slightly deceiving. It means more than just producing good ideas, speaking at conferences, or attracting new followers to a social media network to share insight on a topic. In the nonprofit community, thought leadership does …
Have you ever been in your car and heard a strange sound? Something that was just a little off…a little shaky…a little weird? When this happens the first thing that comes to mind is “What is wrong?” The second: “How much will it cost?” The same situation can occur in businesses. As companies grow and take on newer and larger clients they must be sure to fine tune every aspect of the …
I never interned while I was in college, so I missed that whole experience. After six years, I have gained plenty of experience being on the other side of the internship equation, and as an employer (i.e. the offerer of internships), I have gleaned a few things from some extremely pleasant interns and other excruciatingly painful internship periods that may be helpful to other small businesses thinking about offering an …
Transition – 1. movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc. to another; change 2. Music a. a passing from one key to another; modulation b. a brief modulation; a modulation used in passing c. a sudden, unprepared modulation 3. the most confusing time in anyone’s life…ever Everyone in this world has gone through some sort of transition in their life; whether it’s from one school …
Disclaimer: I usually don’t waste time writing open letters to corporations unless there is some gross violation of civil or human rights. This letter is definitely not that. However, there are some larger points that I felt could be made by sharing some of the horrible experiences I’ve had an Enterprise. To the Enterprise Holdings Leadership Team: I’ve recently had a terrible string of rental experiences at Enterprise. I want …
If you asked me what I do, I’d probably tell you I work with an awesome team of creatives to solve tough problems for great clients. But if you asked me what business I’m in, I’d tell you something different. Because I’m in the customer service business. And if for some reason you’re not, then you may not be in business for long. We spend a lot of time talking …
The Netflix series Last Chance University is arrestingly interesting. It’s also maddeningly disappointing, gut-wrenchingly frustrating, and unfortunately truthful. If I were able to watch Last Chance University for pure entertainment, like I’m sure so many people can, it wouldn’t be so difficult to accept. And although this is rather off-topic for our blog, I feel the need to share. So I will. And I’ll do my best to put a nice …
So, this is a very random post. Kind of. We devote the last 30 minutes of our day every Friday to writing (or preparing to write or thinking about writing or thinking about preparing to write – you get the picture). Unless of course our perfect world is disrupted by work, which happens from time to time (can you believe it?). As I was preparing to think about what I …
Cartoons are normally the last place we expect to find some sort of worthwhile life lesson but there is one series that I recently revisited from my childhood (Netflix FTW!) that made me think about how we as marketers have to sometimes take failure in stride and keep pushing through. When I was a kid in the 90’s, I wasn’t overly concerned about providing graphic design and social media marketing …
Toward the end of Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc., Catmull includes a chapter dedicated to tech and design legend Steve Jobs. In that chapter, Catmull shares an exchange between Jobs and a Pixar director where Jobs compares the characters in a film in progress to Saturday morning cartoon characters. Now I am a fan of Saturday morning cartoons. Some of the best hours of my life were spent in front of a television …
I’ve seen the phrase “leading from behind” a lot. I never knew the derivation, so I did most of us do when curiosity strikes us while surfing the internet – I Googled it. I quickly learned that although many people attributed the phrase to Nelson Mandela, he never actually said it. And there was quite a bit of debate over if it was a positive or negative method of leading. …
We didn’t win last week. Technically, one of our clients didn’t get the win it was seeking, but from our perspective, when one of our clients doesn’t achieve its goals we don’t achieve ours. You’ll notice that I didn’t say we, or our clients, lost. Because we didn’t lose. True, we did not get the result we were seeking last week, and that’s not something we’re happy about. We did, …
But the App Store’s middle class is small and shrinking. And the easy money is gone. I found this article (Life and Death in the App Store by Casey Newton) on Longform.org (a great place to find awesome literary and journalistic jewels) and was very intrigued for a few reason. First, the struggles of the Pixite, the company that the article features, are directly related to the need to create a sustainable business …
Everyone wants to go fast, but fast doesn’t always win (see Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare as told through this classic Walt Disney cartoon). Paul Graham outlines a basic truism for business growth in his post Startup = Growth: For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. First, your business doesn’t have to …
Earlier today I was randomly navigating from article to article, and I landed on a short piece by David Berkowitz titled Why Snapchat’s 3V Advertising Model Is Flawed. Full disclosure: I’m not on Snapchat, and the older I get, the less knowledgeable I become about emerging and new social media platforms. For example, my awesome interns hipped me to Dubsmash and shout out pages on Instagram, both of which turned out to …