No Quick Fix

No Quick Fix

One of the concerns that I sometimes hear when talking to a business owner about investing in an advertising campaign is how long it will take to get results.

Or a variation is the opposite…

Can we handle all the business we get if we start advertising with your radio station?

My friends, there is usually no quick fix.

Advertising is usually not like a faucet that you turn on and customers come rushing out to buy what you have right away.

It takes time.

How much time?

Depends on how many ads you place and how often they air and a few other important factors.

However to the untrained, it might seem like things are closer than they really are.

Last month my wife and I took a trip to Washington DC to see the Cherry Blossoms and sightsee and along with a memorable trip, I’ve also got material for a few blogposts and podcast episodes.

The first day of our arrival, after checking in to our hotel and enjoying dinner at a local Irish pub, we decided to walk over to the Capitol Building which I knew was about 3 or 4 blocks away.  We could see it from the Irish pub.

Then we glanced over towards the Washington Monument and decided to hike thru the National Mall to the Monument where there were more Cherry Trees and it was my intention to continue to the Jefferson Memorial.

However as we started the first part of our journey it was getting dusk and our perception of distance and the time it would take was off.  We did make it to the Washington Monument, but there was no way we were going to continue that night all the way to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on foot on Friday night.

A couple days later, with some pre-planning, I made arrangements for us to get a tour of the major sites of Washington DC that included transportation and from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the daylight that Sunday, we could see much more clearly the big picture of how far we were from the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building.

The lessons we learned about quick fixes:

  1. Plan ahead
  2. Understand the journey
  3. Know when to regroup and find a different method
  4. Dress appropriate for the journey

Those same lessons apply to marketing your business, even the last one about dressing appropriately.

Want help? Contact me.

Reintroducing ScLoHo

Reintroducing ScLoHo

Last week, when I was recording the podcast version of my weekly update I mentioned briefly what a ScLoHo is. Today, that is the focus of both this article and podcast episode.

If this is the very first time you’ve listened to the Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast, welcome aboard.  If it’s the first time you’ve read an article I’ve published on this website, come on in.

Today I’m reintroducing myself, Scott Howard also known as ScLoHo.

I’ve been podcasting nearly every week since March 2017, so this is the beginning of my eighth year hosting a podcast.

I also checked my blogging history and I launched my first blog in 2004, 20 years ago.

The ScLoHo nickname began even before that as an email address because there are many Scott Howard’s out there and I needed something unique.

ScLoHo is a mash-up using the first two letters of my first name, Scott, first two letters of my middle name, Louis, and first two letters of my last name, Howard.

When you take those 6 letters and try and pronounce them, it becomes two syllables because there are only two vowels. Sclo (Sclow)- Ho (Hoe).

In 2004, I launched a couple of blogs, one was a personal blog, the other a media and marketing blog using Google’s old Blogger.com platform and eventually launched a few more blogs, all of them under the ScLoHo online persona.  At one point, for a couple of years, I was posting over 30 times a week on all of these blogs and this was not my fulltime job.  I was working for a group of radio stations from 2003 thru 2011 and blogging was just an unpaid side passion.

However, the ScLoHo name became pretty well known both locally and online.  I have used ScLoHo as a Twitter or X handle, along with nearly all my other social media profiles.  My personal email is @ScLoHo.net; I own the ScLoHo.com and .net domains and basically it use to be if you Googled ScLoHo, you’d find me.

Interestingly there were some people who knew me as ScLoHo and others who only knew me as Scott.  In the  summer of 2010, I was walking at the Tincaps baseball game, taking a lab around the stadium, when a group of friends from an advertising agency saw me and shouted my name.  Except, some yelled ScLoHo, and the others shouted Scott.

In 2011, I left radio for 10 months and worked for a website development company where a friend of my challenged me to merge the two and launched the ScottHoward.me website.  The dot me domain was not due to my ego, it’s because both the dot com and dot net domains were taken by other Scott Howard’s.

I imported over a thousand stories to this website from my blogs and eventually scaled down my updates from several a day to one a day to once a week.  The only time I’ve done less than a weekly update was a few months in 2022 and 2023 when my duties at the radio stations as a sales manager overseeing 4 stations and 8 salespeople needed my attention more than this. At the time, I also figured after 300 podcasts and over 1500 articles, I pretty much had shared everything there was to know and media and marketing.  I did monthly updates.  My focus was to help my team grow and to take the spotlight off me and on them.

However at the end of last summer, things changed.  I decided to step back from management and rehire myself as a member of the WOWO radio sales team.  With that change, I decided to return to weekly updates and to get back out in the community again instead of behind the scenes like I had been doing for nearly 4 years as a manager.

What’s my backstory?  Well first of all I never wanted to do sales.

In high school, my first venture into radio was on the air.  After graduation, I was on the air at radio stations full time in Marion and Kokomo Indiana and then returned to my hometown of Fort Wayne and was on the air at WMEE.  WMEE has always been owned by Federated Media and in the 1980’s WOWO was our competition, owned by another company.  WOWO was the big dog, the radio station that had the highest ratings and most listeners for decades.  However in the early 80’s I was part of the WMEE air team that finally beat WOWO and became the most listened to radio station according to the ratings.

Next stop was back to Kokomo and Indianapolis before taking my growing family to Detroit.  Up until I moved to Michigan at the ripe old age of 26 with 10 years of on-air experience, I had only voiced radio commercials, but never wrote and produced advertising campaigns.  The company I joined in Detroit was different and awakened a curiosity in me to figure out how to communicate and motivate people with a radio commercial to spend their money with a particular business.  I learned how to create ad campaigns that were distinct and unique, and most importantly, created top of mind awareness of a business so that consumers would eventually need them, those businesses were already Top Of Mind.

While in Detroit at Crawford Broadcasting and station WMUZ, I grew our production department, did a stint as fill-in host and eventually hosted the morning show for awhile and also took my first advertising sales position.

In my mid-30’s, we moved my family back to Indiana, I returned to working on the radio at WFWI in Fort Wayne and then took a hiatus and worked outside of media.  Finally in 2003, it was back to radio full-time for good, all most.  Eight and a half successful years with a group of Ft. Wayne radio stations, followed by full time at a website development company, another radio station and as the Social Media Guru for a multimillion dollar eCommerce company and then back to Federated Media in 2013.

Nearly 30 years between my first time with Fed Med as a WMEE Disc Jockey to my current position on the WOWO Sales Team.  I also spent close to 4 years as the General Sales Manager of WOWO and a year on an interim basis as sales manager of 3 other stations.

I’ve been a guest speaker with Huntington University a couple of times, Ivy Tech Fort Wayne, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and this year will be making my second appearance speaking at Trine University.

I’ve worked with over a hundred companies and organizations and consulted around a thousand in both formal and casual settings to help them become better with their media, marketing, public relations and internal sales and marketing.  Just in my 10+ years with WOWO have won a few achievement awards, called Feddies for Federated Media and even my own website won a best of contest by a competing media outlet.  Awards are nice, but what really motivates me is to have the opportunity to help others and share the wisdom and knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few decades and I’m continuing to learn as a life-long student.

Teaching, Training, Motivating and Encouraging has been a lot of what I do.  Helping people make wise spending decisions with their advertising and marketing is my bread and butter.  Being a dad, husband and grandparent keeps me grounded as well as my Christian faith.

There’s a philosophy about marketing and advertising that I call using Human Relationship Principles that I’ll review in the near future, but for now, you now know a lot more about this Scott Howard aka ScLoHo then you did 10 minutes ago.

 

64 years ago

64 years ago

It’s birthday week for yours truly.

And there’s not much that I want, because if I really want it, I usually buy it myself.

Of course the best things in life aren’t things that you can buy anyway.

I’ve been doing a lot more reflecting on things lately, compared to a few decades ago, even more than 5 years ago.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 kind of turned some of us to become more introspective because at the beginning, there was so much unknown and conflicting information.  We were told that we just needed to stay home to flatten the curve for a few weeks and then as weeks became months, well you were there too.

25 years ago, I returned to Fort Wayne, Indiana to help my Mom downsize after the death of my Dad.   I was just 38 that summer and my Mom had just turned 65.  I’ll be that age next year, but my health is much better than hers was back then.

Last month, I happened to visit the radio station that gave me my first full-time on-air job as a teenager, and low and behold, there was a guy named Jim who had worked there all those years ago and he was there when I visited.  He was having a birthday that week and turning 75, and still working in sales and on the air.

A few days later, I had coffee with my friend Lee to talk about a client.  Lee’s a few years older than me and I’ve known him since I worked on the air at WMEE in my early 20’s.

And one more connection to my past happened back in October when I spoke to a college class at Trine University at the invitation of an old acquaintance of mine that I met nearly 20 years ago.  He’s a professor now and invited me to speak to his class.

There’s also been the death’s of a few friends and family members in the past few years that have made me introspective and finally, I think one of the last items that has influenced what I’m sharing today was the role I had in our company from early 2020 until a couple months ago.  I was the General Sales Manager of WOWO radio and then also a few other stations before returning to active sales a few weeks ago.   As the General Sales Manager, a big part of my role was to hire, coach, train, and mentor my team.  Now I get to lead by example again.

My desire is to pass along knowledge.  It’s kind of weird, because I’m a curious person looking to learn myself and so as I talk to my elders, I want to know what they can teach me.  And I’m at that age where I’m passing along and passing down what I’ve learned too.   In a moment I’m going to share with you some resources that helped me and could help you too.

But first I recall when I was about 30 years old and creating advertising campaigns for businesses in Detroit.  I had clients in numerous and varied businesses and I took what I learned from observation, from conversations and from experimentation, using their money and improved all of them.  There was a guy Steve who had a transmission shop, a doctor named Tim who was working with his wife to build a health care practice, another man named Mike who ran a rental car business until we transformed it into the best used car dealership in the area and another favorite was a family headed up by Ed and his wife Sharon who created a small mortgage company with their daughters and we transformed it into a debt-reduction vehicle for thousands of homeowners.

This website started out years ago as a blog to save stories and articles online in case my laptop crashed and burned, and has become a resource for others as well as a creative outlet still for me.

So besides this website which will live as long as I pay the hosting fees, there are a few others that I recommend.

I also need to add this disclaimer that I read a lot less books than I did 30 years ago.  Instead I listen, watch and research.  With podcasts and online videos being available in much greater accessibility that 30 years ago, you may find a format other than paper books to be a preferred resource too.

Here we go with authors whose books I’ve bought and read and recommend to others:

Sales Leadership: Mike Weinberg.  I’ve read three of his books and was a regular listener to his podcast when I was a sales manager.  I was part of his launch team for his latest book, First Time Manager: Sales.  Check him out here: https://mikeweinberg.com/  

Marketing guru Seth Godin.  A thought leader and I see he also has a podcast that I’m going to subscribe to:  https://www.sethgodin.com/   

Roy H. Williams, aka The Wizard of Ads, besides his books on marketing, he publishes a weekly newsletter called the Monday Morning Memo that includes a rabbit hole that often is fun and intriguing. http://www.rhw.com/youll-laugh-youll-cry/ is the link to his books and here’s the link to his MMM: https://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/

Art Sobczak has sales books that I’ve bought along with a podcast and blog at: https://businessbyphone.com/

There are three others that I’m going to recommend that had an impact on my 20, even 30 years ago:

Harvey MacKay https://harveymackay.com/   Harvey’s first two books on sales were so influential that my first year as sales manager I gave my team their own copy of them for their own use.

Trout & Ries.  Al Ries and Jack Trout launched a series of books on Branding and Marketing in the 1970’s that I discovered when I started in the ad world in 1986.  Al passed away just last year and his partner and daughter continues his work. https://www.ries.com/books/

The last recommendation is a book that I re-read every few years as a reminder of how to approach sales. Frank Bettger penned the book How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in the 1940’s and here’s an Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Raised-Myself-Failure-Success-Selling/dp/067179437X 

I urge you to be curious no matter how young or old you are and continue to seek knowledge and share with others too.

 

Duty Calls

Duty Calls

When you are good at something and recognized as being good at it, but you’ve stepped away from it and now the challenge to return to it comes up, what’s your response?

That’s the position I found myself in earlier this month and it’s a position that I’ve been in before.

For nearly 10 years, I’ve worked for Federated Media in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  I began as the 5th person on a 5 person sales team for radio station WOWO.

That was going to be my final job, however at the tail end of 2019, our company underwent some changes in upper management and my boss, Ben Saurer who had served as the General Sales Manager for WOWO radio was promoted to Vice President/General Manager of all of the Fort Wayne Federated Media radio stations.  This created a very important opening, actually a couple of openings that needed to be filled as Ben had been the General Sales Manager for both of our talk radio stations; News Talk WOWO & Sports Talk WKJG AND he was filling in as the General Sales Manager for WBYR, our rock station.

Even though I didn’t have ambitions to return to a management role, after careful consideration, prayer and encouragement from my sales teammates, I applied.  After a nationwide search was conducted, Ben offered me the position which I accepted to lead WOWO.

WOWO has been the “big dog”.  We brought in more revenue than any of the dozen stations in our company and we knew that we were also the leader of all the 25 or so local radio stations.

Honestly, as I was interviewing with Ben for his old job, I told him it was going to be a tough decision for him to make.

See in 2019, I lead not just the WOWO Sales Team of 5, but I was selected as the Account Manager of the year for the entire company.  1 out of 40 or so sales people.  Not bad for starting out at zero when 2014 began.

The decision Ben had to make was to take his top salesperson out of sales and put me in management, or keep me where I was.

The skill sets are similar but the application is very different between sales person and sales manager.  If you are considering a sales management role, or are in that position right now, I recommend you buy a copy of my friend Mike Weinberg’s new book The First Time Manager: Sales.  I was on his launch team and got a preview copy and it’s excellent. I bought a copy too which I am giving to Ben.

So Ben makes the tough decision and I took over as the General Sales Manager 1 month before the pandemic shut down our country in early 2020.  We are working remotely for 3 months and scrambling to figure out what adjustments to make because it wasn’t what they originally promised… a two week shut-down to flatten the curve.

Low and behold, when 2020 was over, WOWO and our other stations survived, better than had been expected. As I continued my position as the General Sales Manager of WOWO in 2021 and 2022 we faced what a lot of companies faced.  Shortages, but ours was the people kind.

About a year ago, one of our other sales managers moved to a sales person position because their talents were better than any of the candidates we’d been interviewing.

That manager was overseeing three stations and about a month after they joined my WOWO Sales Team, I took over as the interim General Sales Manager for those stations too in addition to WOWO.

This summer I went on a hiring spree to add two more salespeople to the stations I was temporarily overseeing.  Last month and this month those two salespeople began and will be selling for our rock station.

In the meantime, we also hired a new General Sales Manager for those stations I was overseeing for the past year and he begins in October.  He’ll do fine, he spent most of his 25+ years working in management and with Federated Media.

Another change, and this is the reason for the title of this today, Duty Calls, I am switching gears and returning as a Senior Sales Person for WOWO.  Try as we might, we have been challenged with having a full team of sales people on WOWO the past 18 months and it’s time for me to step in and fill that role again.  As far as I know, Ben is going to be doing both jobs of V-P/General Manager for Federated Media Fort Wayne; AND overseeing the WOWO sales team.

As Duty Calls me to help in a sales role again, I look forward to helping more businesses invite our listeners to become their customers and you’re likely to see me out of the office a lot more than I’ve been since 2020 and I look forward to it.

No longer will I refer you to someone else on the WOWO sales team, I’ll get to work with you personally just like before.

ScLoHo Changes

ScLoHo Changes

UPDATE on 2/28/2023:

Despite what I wrote and my intentions a few months ago when I wrote this piece, I am going to be updating more than once a month.  Maybe weekly again.  We shall see.  There’s just too much on my mind not to share with you.  Last night I felt the urge and wrote and published this: https://www.scotthoward.me/wheres-the-money-in-2023/

Now here’s the original article:

This article and the audio version which is podcast episode # 286 is to announce some changes. The short version is I am going to reduce the number of articles I publish and podcasts I record.

This is due to a change in focus in my life and changes in the world around us.

Right now there are 1570 articles that I wrote and published on this website and most of them over the past 5 and half years have been captured in audio form as the Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast.  When I began writing and publishing the articles, over 15 years ago it was the beginning days of blogging and I actually had multiple blogs.  Some were updated weekly, others 3 or 4 times a day.  This was not a full-time gig, it was a side hustle, but not quite.

Side hustles are usually designed to make money.  Writing and blogging never had a direct connection to making money for me.  This was a passionate hobby.  If I was an artist, I would have been creating dozens and dozens of pieces each week, but as someone who has spent a considerable amount of my life in the media and marketing world, writing about it has been my creative outlet.

For awhile, there were just a few of us in Fort Wayne, Indiana that were blogging consistently and then I realized I was the only one of those that started out around 15+ years ago.  Long time acquittance and friend Anthony Juliano started shortly after he joined the Asher Advertising Agency where he’s been for 18 years and his focus has changed and sharpened over the years.  Most everyone I know with a few exceptions have stopped.

First off, I’m not stopping.  I am however going to change the frequency.  My intention is to do a monthly article and podcast update instead of weekly.

Two reasons:

Time is primary for me.  In 2020, my position with Federated Media changed from being a member of the WOWO radio advertising sales team, to becoming the General Sales Manager of that team.  It has taken close to three years for me to minimize my selling role on our team. In 2020, despite my being in management, I was still the number 2 salesperson for WOWO.  In 2021, I was either #2 or #3 every month.  My goal for 2022 was to reduce my selling time even more, to next to none, and with some staffing changes the past few weeks, that looks very possible.

The beginning of October however saw some additional organizational changes start to occur and for at least an interim basis,  I am also managing 3 more stations along with WOWO for the rest on this year.  The time I need to devote to the sales teams and the individuals that make up these teams is more important than ever.

Years ago, when I was with another group of radio stations and was promoted to a General Sales Manager position, I asked my boss, which was more important, my own sales or the sales of the people on my team.  He took the easy answer and said both.  I decided that it was more important to be able to multiple my time than add.  8 plus 2 = 10.  8 x 2 = 16.

What that meant to me is instead of adding two more hours to my day, it was a better investment of time to teach, train, coach and mentor others to be their best.  That’s the multiplying principle.

Something else I’ve learned from a guy I just heard of this year, Mike Weinberg, is that that Sales Managers and Sales People should employ different skills and talents.  Sometimes they are opposites in those two positions.  Our companies outside sales consultancy has different online talent assessments that potential candidates take for different positions.  Some do well in Sales but are not so great in Sales Management.  Honestly, less than half the people we have taking any of our online talent assessments score high enough to be considered for employment.

Here’s why we put so much value in those talent assessments…

Talent is like your height, skill is like your weight.  Once we become adults, we stop growing taller.  Our core talents are what they are.  What we do have control over, all of our life, is our weight. Like skills, we can grow and develop over time with the right development.

So I said Time is one reason for my changing the frequency to monthly instead of weekly updates.

Reason number 2 is accessibility of information. You and I have access to more information that ever before.  You don’t know the answer to something?  Ask your phone!

If you want to know what I think about something, there are two ways to find out.  My website has a search feature powered by Google.  Having published so many articles on the subject of media and marketing over the years, you’ll likely discover I already answered your question.   Also you can reach out to me directly.  I don’t hide.  My personal email is Scott@ScLoHo.net and you can also find my phone number for phone calls and texts at my website too.  You can direct message me on the socials too.  I’ve been on Twitter since October 2008 and am on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn too.

Thanks for your time today, my next update will be in November

 

Getting Personal with August Reflections

Getting Personal with August Reflections

I’m skipping my usual format for this week’s update and going to share some personal stuff instead.  Next week’s update is already ready but a few things have occurred recently that I decided to share right now.

When this article and podcast goes live, I will be getting ready to have a meeting with other radio managers as we sit on a boat in the middle of a lake in northern Indiana.

There are over 1500 articles on this website that I’ve written and published over the past couple of decades and this is also podcast #278. The Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media & Marketing podcasts have been updated nearly every week since March 2017 and when I started the podcast, these articles became more business focused and less personal reflections.

However the following year, I wrote about a couple of tragic event that occurred 4 years ago this month.  In August 2018, my friend Charly Butcher who was the host of Fort Wayne’s Morning News on WOWO radio was on vacation and we got news that Charly has died.  It was totally out of the blue, as he was one of the more fit people we knew.  About the same time, one of my wife’s brother’s was taken to the hospital and within a couple of days, we knew that Mike was in his last days.  I was contacting funeral homes to make arraignments for my brother-in-law, my wife was at his hospital bed, the radio station was in shock and dealing with the sudden death of Charly and it’s both a bit of a blur along with some very sharp distinct memories of that week.

Fast forward to August 2022 and I’m getting reminders from Facebook Memories about events from years past in August.  First off, 2013 that same brother in law, Mike was in the hospital getting his jaw wired shut after being beat up and left for dead.  He survived that and stayed with us for a few weeks to recover.  Then the 2018 events I just mentioned showed up.  Charly passed away on August 15th, which happens to be my Mom’s birthday.  If she was still around, this week should would be 79.  Mike passed away the following week.

In the past couple of weeks I was also informed of deaths of three friends.  Mary, Dan and Jill, all unrelated have had their time on this planet come to an end.

Before you get all depressed or think that I’m feeling down, I’m not.  Sad, that I can’t talk to any of those people anymore, but more reflective.  9 years ago I wrote the following words:

Days that Count versus Counting The Days. Because we cannot accurately count the days or years we have left, my goal is to live Days that Count. Live each day with open eyes, ears, and an open heart.  Do not let opportunities to help, give, listen, serve to be pushed aside or ignored. Instead, weigh the opportunities and see how God wants us to respond.

Until next week, I’m Scott Howard, aka ScLoHo.