Back in April as we started thinking about what we wanted our company to become, we set out to create values. We asked the question “What do you Value?“. We knew that these were going to be aspirational, and that we’d revise them over the next little while as we put them into place. What became immediately obvious to us though was that there were too many, that they weren’t specific enough, and that the only two we could remember were “Provide Ludicrous Value” and “Have Fun”.
We knew we had some work to do.
Then an interesting thing happened. We ended up working with a few companies that didn’t align with what we wanted to do. Those projects didn’t fit our vision of what we wanted to become, and many of them were “one and done” type jobs where we did something, but didn’t have a long term vision on how to work with the client. (more…)
It’s a harsh truth that nobody wants to hear, but it’s true, nobody cares that you’re a vegan. Nobody wants to listen to you drone on about the fact that you don’t eat anything with a face, or that animals are your friends and you don’t eat friends.
I totally understand, I eat two vegetarian meals a day right now, and I plan out a vegetarian dinner once a week. I don’t do it because of ethical reasons, I find that a mostly plant based diet makes me feel better. I’ve tried to convince my parents that they need to adopt a similar diet, but they’re not really interested. Now with that said, I honestly believe chickens wouldn’t exist if they didn’t provide us eggs…but I also don’t like factory farming conditions. However, I understand that without modern advances in agriculture, we wouldn’t be able to support our massively ballooning population.
WAIT!!!
Be honest. You totally scanned over that last paragraph didn’t you?
The reason you scanned over it is simple, you really don’t care WHY I choose to eat the way I choose to eat. I either had you, or lost you at the word “vegetarian”.
It’s the exact same with your business.
Nobody cares WHY you choose to sell sprockets*.
Nobody cares about the history of your sprocket sales.
Nobody cares what the ethical reasons for your sprocket manufacturing process is.
They want to know that your sprockets will solve a problem they have.
They want to know what pain points your sprockets fix in their business.
People care how your sprockets will make their lives better.
*NOTE: I don’t care if you sell artisanal platypus abodes, or high end consulting services, for the sake of this post, we’re calling all of it sprockets…WHAT you sell doesn’t matter. HOW you sell it is what matters. (more…)
One of the things that boggles my mind about modern websites is the lack of contact information, or even worse, a hostile contact us form. I have found many contact forms that require far too much information, don’t work, use anti-spam technology that doesn’t work, or simply don’t exist.
It’s almost like the people behind the websites don’t want to be bothered by their customers.
We have two separate contact forms on NorthIQ. One is a simple Contact Us form, the other is Get a Quote.
We decided early on that these forms would be light, and easy to fill out. The idea is to give us enough information to have a conversation. Every form that is filled out on any of our websites goes into our CRM (Hubspot). When we are on a call, we open up Hubspot and write notes. (more…)
A year ago I quit a job that was comfortable to join a partner in building a business of our own – NorthIQ.
He had been doing it for some time prior, but it had gotten to a tipping point – he needed help that was greater than me pitching in during the evenings. If we were going to make this happen it had to be right then.
There were other benefits, we could change our positioning, offer more breadth of digital services, and change the company significantly from “just another web development firm” into a true digital marketing company that could bring something entirely different to the table.
My family had understood this was an eventuality but the sudden decision to quit happened over the span of Easter weekend, and I started my first full day at NorthIQ on May 15, 2018 and everything changed.(more…)
NorthIQ has been around for nearly three years now. We’ve been a remote company, when I first launched, I worked from my own home office, and when Craig came on board in May of 2017, he worked from his home office – we called them the Oakridge and Sunningdale offices respectively. We have met in each other’s homes, in coffee shops, and in rented meeting rooms.
For the most part, our office situations worked out well. There were times however that we wished we had a shared space. I have countless sticky notes in all manner of places, I have a whiteboard I rarely use, and there are times that we just need to work together. There are also countless missed opportunities for brief chats, quick catchups, and the kind of one-on-one brainstorming that you just can’t do in your homes. (more…)
Our Manage Comics blog was recently suspended by Medium for no justifiable reason. To date the only explanation we have been given is that we were accidentally caught in their spam filter.
This caused a huge impact on our business, saw our page rankings plummet, created dozens of orphaned links from sites that had referenced us, and left us scrambling to solve a problem that our vendor has not been able to give us a reasonable explanation behind.
Because of the negative effects on our business, and Medium’s lack of a reasonable explanation for what happened, we have removed all content from Medium, and we are firmly advising our clients against using Medium as a blogging platform.(more…)
