Take what you can get? Or get what you can take? I'll take the latter.

I'm going to do something I rarely do, and reprint nearly an entire post from Seth Godin, because this one really hit me where I was living at the time I read it. Now with Seth issuing a post to his blog every single day, the need for an editor comes seriously into question because 60% of what even the most talented writer can do is rubbish, but if you're willing to wade through that rubbish, many of his posts have real longstanding value. This is one of them.

Read Seth's post in the coloured print first, and then go back and see my own notations in the regular font. I think you'll see why it resonated with me.

Take what you can get (?)

When you're just starting out or when your organization is struggling or when the economy isn't hot, it's very tempting to take what you can get.

You just graduated from law school and you have a lot of debt and the best job you can get is doing collections work. Should you take it?

Your consulting firm is organized around providing high-value work for large corporations, but the only gigs you can get are small, struggling companies looking to spend a few hundred dollars a day. Should you take them?

The list goes on and on.

When I started my agency in Korea, CarlsonCreative, things were fairly bleak for the first six months. My staff told me that we were not getting pitches because we would not do them for free. I had also set a bar that clients needed to be of a blue-chip and pressworthy variety, ie: I wanted big logos so that when we finally won something, no matter how small, we could publicize it and get the street-cred of being an upstart David (no pun really) who had won against the Goliaths.

We scored our first pitch with the Armstrong flooring company from the US and followed that up with the Korean Broadcasting Corporation (KOBACO) and eventually, British American Tobacco - all paid presentations with the latter two turning into well paying clients and significant press generation vehicles. Within 18 months, we had become a 'hot' shop and the big agencies were truly scared of us.

There are two things worth remembering here:

1. Like bending a sapling a hundred years before the tree is fully grown and mature, the gigs you take early will almost certainly impact the way your career looks later on. If you want to build a law practice in the music industry, you'll need to take on musicians as clients, even if the early ones can't pay enough. If you want to do work for Fortune 500 companies, you'll need to do work for Fortune 500 companies, sooner better than later.

We took this to heart and I am still a believer in this today.

2. The definition of "can get" is essential. Maybe it seems like this gig or that gig is the best you can get because that's all you're exposing yourself to. Almost always, the best gig I could get is shorthand for the easiest gig I could get.

This has been redefined for me in the last few months with the pressure to get my feet planted in a new market representing the most basic of needs like eating and paying the rent. These things are of course primary, but certainly not the ultimate goal in the longer term. Why the hell, in a million years, would I want to teach business English in an already overcrowded market of teachers and schools who are busy undercutting each other on an almost daily basis, when I've got a quiver full of marketing and advertising arrows that have flown true for my entire career?

Because it's what I 'could' get initially, but it's not what I 'want' to get, eventually. What I'm after eventually is what I have been able to do my entire life - to balance business and creativity in a way which benefits my clients and provides me and my family a superior level of income and professional satisfaction.

Surviving is succeeding, no doubt about it. Doing the work is better than not doing the work. Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress. But, and it's a huge but, you define yourself by the work you do, and perhaps you need to redefine what you're willing to take and where you're looking for it. - Seth Godin

So I'm surviving. But that's not my definition of success. And I'm doing the work and not dying on the vine waiting for perfect in an imperfect world - but I'm spending more and more time defining what makes me unique in the market and striving to build a practice off that. This last week I renegotiated a contract which now pays me 30% more and broadens my responsibilities to consult on marketing with a client who had previously only needed language instruction.

Later in the week, I'm having coffee with a blue-chip sort of guy who works soley in the marketing business and in the evenings I busy myself with promoting this blog and writing copy for various businesses from software to arts and achitecture. All of this is still a far cry from having my own company in Korea, but at least I can remember what that was like, before we landed the big-fish client, and retrench my current life experience to more closely chase the dream of 'getting' what I can take, instead of just 'taking' what I can get.

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Many thanks to Seth Godin for helping me articulate this more clearly.

Brand Marketing Staff Training in Vietnam: The Pitch

Most of you are aware that I do Brand Marketing Training for Universities, Advertising Companies and Clients intensely involved in marketing but I thought I'd take a few minutes and explain exactly what that means and how it may benefit your company - especially in Vietnam.

I wish I could say that marketing education in Vietnam has been keeping up with the demand but alas all University programs fall far short of what multinational companies believe to be even acceptable entry level training, and the two private institutions that I'm aware of - ARTI: Run by the Vietnam Advertising Association and VietnamMarcom: A private institute, are primarily concerned with making a buck and don't employ any full-time foreign professors (yes, there are cost/profit issues involved) - but for any business that works on a multinational platform, the staff needs to be able to work with various people from various countries and I can provide an introductory coaching experience that's been successful across Asia and the United States as well - something no local institution can.

Many multinational companies in Korea, Japan and China are fond of offering corporate training for their staff's in Asia and in Vietnam it's no different. It's cost effective, builds moral and comaraderie within working groups and after a semester with me - trust me - they'll be ready to play in the big leagues with all the confidence, planning and big-idea-ness that it takes to win clients, bosses, friends and markets. Anyone who really wants to scroll through my CV can see my LinkedIn page but for the short version, suffice to say that I began in Asia with Leo Burnett Korea and ended up with my own agency, CarlsonCreative, Inc., in Seoul for six years that serviced British American Tobacco, Samsung, LG, Hyundai and the like. Do look at the LinkedIn page or contact me for more background detail. Following are a few examples of how this might work for your company, followed of course, by some basic financials.

EXAMPLES

a) BRANDING WORKSHOPS - Ask what a brand is in Vietnam and you'll get a thousand answers - many are right - most are not. My 15 week course at Vietnam National University previously, was extensive, but I have now boiled a 700 page textbook (The New Strategic Brand Management - Kapferer) down to an easily digestible short course with examples from the real world (Ogilvy's 360 Concept, SWOT Analysis, etc.) These days the concept of a brand has extended itself into social networking sites like FaceBook and LinkedIn and even to Twitter, YouTube, Mixx, Digg and the like. Thanks mostly to this blog I am now extremely well-versed in the Web 2.0 world and have a firm stake in it. I like to use the term Brand Provocateur to describe the ever-thinking marketer who is never afraid of exploiting whatever media will extend their brand's communication strategies. Our group at VNU was called BrandMasters and you can see some of our group in the photo to the right below on Teacher's Day.

b) TEAM BUILDING - Sometimes the concept of working across strategies (Sales/Marketing/Media/Research/Account Service/Creative) is foreign to Vietnamese employees. It's certainly not taught in the schools. With a group project over a number of weeks, team members get to work in a real-life format but with a fictional client, taking away the barriers of, "We've never done it that way", or "They'll never buy it". I use my own team's work on Nintendo as a case study in selling video games to an adult market - born out of a research study. Our efforts yielded 2 1/2 times the projected sales and were the forerunner of Nintendo's Adult Wii efforts today. The case study is now taught at Northwestern Illinois University's Kellogg School of Management , home of Philip Kotler, by Jana O'Brien of Right Brain Consumer Consulting, our Research/Media leader at Leo Burnett, Chicago.

c) PRESENTATION SKILLS - Some people should be speaking and some should be doing PowerPoint slides - others, something else. Everyone needs to know how they can best add to a successful presentation, and it's not always by being the best speaker - it's by focusing on strengths - and making them work for the team. This was part of my VNU course but also involves how we, at CarlsonCreative in Korea, beat Diamond/Bates 141 on British American Tobacco by commandeering and re-branding the library bar at the Ritz Carlton Seoul with our campaign theme line (Club Finnesse) for BAT's largest Korean Brand - as the venue for the actual presentation, complete with a grand piano player and bar staff service for non-alcoholic drinks and snacks - an out-of-the-box, but right on target presentation idea that drove the brand message home and won the account for a very small company. Jon Taylor, the President of BAT Korea and now CEO of BAT Russia can be available to provide a reference if necessary.

In any course where the participants are working in a second language there's quite a bit of English teaching that happens but that's masked by the task at hand and becomes an integral element of solving a problem - thus being less of a lesson and much more of a fun exercise.

COST

The course rate is $45 an hour and a suggested short course is 6 weeks with three 90 minute sessions per week. This fee includes my writing and customization of courses to individual client needs. That works out to around $1200 total and can invlove any number of staff - 5 minimum, and up to 10 max. I use a retainer fee of 1/3, a midterm payment of 1/3 and completion payment of 1/3 billing system. Other details and course options can be discussed per individual clients.

Do consider a training course for your company, if you're a manager - and if you are staff and think it would be helpful, forward this web page to your boss. It's amazing what can be accomplished in a short period of time, with a motivated and cared-for staff. If you just need cheaper employees, you might check here<.

For more on Creativity, Education and the like, check below:

"Do Our Schools Kill Creativity?" - Sir Ken Robinson
Brand Marketing and Staff Training in Vietnam
2009 Marketing Predictions
The Language Barrier - An Asian Business Conundrum