“What’s a haberdasher,” you may ask? Well, before I met Lee Dora I was unfamiliar with the term. I met Lee after he sent me a friendly email and a postcard offering his services. Normally I ignore unsolicited communications like this but it hit me at a time when I was interested in upgrading my business wardrobe.

You see, I was not always the refined, snappy dresser that I am now (at least sometimes…haha). I’ve always struggled with dumb questions like “does this suit go with this tie?”, “jacket open or closed?”, and “how do I pick out a good suit?”

These may seem like dumb questions and you may be asking why I didn’t just go down the the local Men’s Wearhouse and get some help. Well, yes, I could do that but I have zero desire to go clothes shopping. I hate shopping in general, and I especially hate it when I’m shopping for something I know nothing about.

So until I met Lee I was resigned to owning a couple of cheap sport coats and throwing them on with jeans and a dress shirt or just wearing some basic slacks and shirt combos when I wanted to dress up. I justified it by saying “I’m a trendy marketing/technology guy… I can get away with it, right?”

Well, then I sat down with Lee (who works for Tom James). He brought in his iPad full of beautiful photos of suits, ties, great-looking shirts, and even shoes that I could browse through. Not only does he have a massive collection of great-looking stuff, but it’s custom-tailored just for me. He measured me and got all my specs so that my clothes fit great. In addition, he guides me toward the right combinations of things so I don’t have to flounder around trying to figure out which shirt to wear with which suit.

Lee meets me at my office, spends about an hour providing me with consulting, gets my next order, and then comes back a few weeks later with amazing-looking suits and clothes that fit me perfectly. I had no idea how great it felt to wear suits that were made to fit me so well. It’s amazingly convenient. I don’t have to go shopping and I get great-looking, quality, custom-tailored business clothes delivered right to my office.

If you would like to work with Lee, you can email him at l.dora@tomjames.com. You can also find him on LinkedIn.

Maybe I’m just slow and everyone else has it figured out but up until recently, I’ve been pretty bad at picking out high-quality business clothing. Since working with Lee, I’ve been dressing better, feeling better, and getting positive comments from people who have been noticing my new “look.”

Talk to Lee and tell him I said hello

Insurance is one of those things that you don’t really think about it until you need it. At least that’s how I am. And when you do need it, it seems like the only option is to endure mediocre/terrible customer service, lots of paperwork, and lots of headaches.

Well, the paperwork may not be going away but I now actually enjoy working with my insurance agent. That’s because I work with Kara DeWitt.

Kara owns DeWitt Insurance Group along with her husband, Jim. Kara handles the property/casualty and business insurance side of the company.

Kara is truly a gem. She not only knows her stuff, but she works tirelessly for her clients to make sure they always get the best rates without sacrificing coverage, and she really goes out of her way to help her clients. Her clients get her cell phone number, and she works all hours of the day and night to make sure she is available for help. She communicates via text, phone, email, and Facebook which is pretty unusual for an insurance agent. It makes her very easy to work with.

I’ve referred many of my friends to Kara, often with a time-critical need. She has often worked weekends and evenings to finish applications or make sure the right paperwork goes through on time and has visited my friends in their homes so they are not inconvenienced. In short, Kara’s customer service is ridiculously great.

Kara provides my home, auto, and business insurance and I’ve never been happier with my agent. From her flexibility and availability to her reminders when I need to pay attention to renewals to her deep knowledge of her products, Kara is truly the best.

If you are not 100% happy with your insurance agent, stop messing around and call Kara DeWitt at 317.695.2046 or email her at kara@dewittinsurancegroup.com. I promise you will start to enjoy dealing with your insurance again.

Dr. Cory Harkins is my chiropractor and honestly he’s the best one I know. I met Cory last year when he joined my BNI chapter. I’m a big believer in chiropractic care as a complement to other forms of medical care and I’ve worked with quite a few. Cory is outstanding.

I’m a recreational tennis player… well, ok, I’m addicted to obsessed with tennis and I play year round. A few years ago I developed a really nasty case of tennis elbow that just wouldn’t go away. I tried lots of things to fix it, including acupuncture, chiropractic, and lots of painkillers. Most of the things I tried really helped. However, nothing really seemed to “fix” it. The pain would decrease enough that I could play again but it never really totally went away  and it would continue to flare up as I played more.

Then I went to see Cory. Within a couple of visits, my tennis elbow was completely gone and I could play tennis pain-free for the first time in years! It was amazing. Not only that, but it almost never flares up again as long a I schedule maintenance visits every now and then. When I am playing lots of matches in a row, it will sometimes bother me a bit but a visit or two in Cory’s office takes care of it and I am back on the courts pain-free.

Not only is Cory a great chiropractor, but he’s also a super-nice guy. He’s friendly, caring, and tries to do whatever he can to ensure that his patients are comfortable and getting the right treatments. He has referral relationships with M.D.s and is open-minded to all forms of health care as long as they are good for the patient.

I’ve referred many of my friends (including fellow tennis players) to Cory and they have been very impressed.

Cory practices at ProWellness Chiropractic in Fisher, Indiana. It’s a beautiful office with a super-friendly staff. You can make an appointment with Cory by calling 317-595-9620. If are having issues like back pain, joint pain, headaches, etc. consider going to see Cory. I think you will be happy you did.

For the next few weeks (or more), I will be highlighting my trusted business partners with a weekly blog post that shines a spotlight on the great people who provide me with valuable services and do so with integrity, competence, and great customer service.

Some of these partners provide me with business services, some personal, and some both. In all cases, these individuals are part of my trusted network of professionals who really “get it”. If you are in need of any of the services that my partners provide, I encourage you to contact them to learn more and tell them I said hello.

I personally endorse every professional in this Partner Spotlight series and I am honored to be working with all of them. I hope it helps others in my network get connected to professionals who can help them, as well. See you next week for the first of many Partner Spotlight posts!

I’m not a big fan of getting all reflective, goal-hungry, and sentimental when a new year rolls over (I prefer a more constantly-flowing kaizen approach) but this my one year-end indulgence. As Seth said, it doesn’t matter whether these things were a hit or not (though thankfully they were all successful!), just that I shipped them. Here is my list.

• Delivered two presentations at the CMS Expo in Chicago
• Launched a highly successful and innovative QR code scavenger hunt for the Massage Therapy Foundation
• Donated over $2,000 in money and services to worthy non-profits
• Won the “Supplier of the Year” STAR Award from ISAE
• Delivered presentations at national conferences from Massachusetts to California
• Concepted, organized, and marketed a successful first-ever ROWE Bootcamp
• Launched the ROWE Online Training Community
• Launched the Massage Learning Network – an e-learning community for massage therapists
• Ran a highly-successful B2B Power Team meeting for my BNI Chapter
• Completed the Thrive Progam from Reachmore
• Won three Addys at the 2011 Addy Awards
• Registered SpinWeb as an an official Authorize.Net reseller
• Became a BNI Training Ambassador and launched the BNI Central Indiana Advanced Business Training program
• Moved SpinWeb to a great new office

Most of these things were done with help from my outstanding team at SpinWeb. A huge thank you goes out to those who contributed and assisted.

I enjoyed this exercise and it helped me see 2011 with a new perspective. It also helped me see what things I wanted to ship but didn’t, which makes for a some nice goals for 2012.

What did you ship in 2011? I would love to hear via your comments below.

Based on what I’ve observed, there is a popular notion related to social media floating around among consultants that really bugs me. When discussing social media in the workplace and in business communication, the battle cry seems to be “you need a social media policy!”

No, you don’t.

A social media policy sounds like a good idea on paper but let’s look at the message it sends. First of all, let’s agree that social media is not some weird, magical new thing that requires it’s own set of rules. It’s not. Social media is communication. Technology has changed in ways that allows communication to become more transparent, scalable, and flexible. However, at it’s core it’s still just communication.

Next, let’s agree that our employees are not stupid. As business owners and managers, I’m going to assume that we want to hire smart people that know what they are doing.

Finally, let’s agree to trust our employees. Again, I’m going to take another leap of faith and assume that we want to hire people that we trust. Sound fair?

If all this is true, then why do we feel the need to regulate and hamstring what our employees do on social media?

I, for one, love it when my team members show their personalities on Twitter, write insightful and opinionated blogs, and talk to our clients on Facebook. I trust my employees. I hire smart people. I enjoy what they bring to our team and encourage them to be visible and active online.

“But what about regulations and stuff, Reynolds! Your company is all fluffy marketing and shiny things but I have to worry about compliance and blah blah blah!”

Ok, so what? Is this a social media problem? No. This is a company culture issue. If you hire smart people with common sense and train them adequately to understand what their outcomes are, do you really need a social media policy? Or would you rather set them free to be creative and authentic?

And if you don’t trust your employees, then why are they working for you?

Please stop over-regulating, over-policing, and over-policy-izing your employees. If you trust them, you may just be pleasantly surprised.

It also has some SEO benefits which I have leveraged before. One of the ways I have used LinkedIn for SEO is by customizing the “last name” field with specific keywords. By adding a descriptive phrase after your last name when editing your profile, you can cause these keywords to show up in the title tag of your profile.

Up until this week, here is what my display name looked like this:

“Michael Reynolds – Internet Marketing Speaker”

Instead of just specifying my last name as “Reynolds”, I instead made it “Reynolds – Internet Marketing Speaker” in order to add these keywords to the title tag of my profile. This was giving me some SEO benefits and I was being found for phrases that contained these keywords. However, yesterday I discovered that my LinkedIn account was locked and I could not log in. I contacted support and today I received this message:

Hi Michael,

In a recent review of your LinkedIn Profile, the name fields of your account reflect information other than your first and last name. The LinkedIn User Agreement requires use of true names rather than pseudonyms, business names, associations, groups, email addresses, or other characters when registering on our site. We believe that any information other than first and last names in the name fields undermines the professional nature of our site and services.

User Agreement:

http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=user_agreement

Please consider this communication as a courtesy notice regarding our User Agreement. We’ve internally noted that your name field is not in compliance. If we receive additional reports and/or discover that these changes have not been made, we will take the appropriate action. To avoid any interruptions in service, please use the link below to update your name fields and ensure that it only contains your first and last name:

Name and Location Settings:

https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?nameloc

Thanks for your cooperation in this matter.

Regards,

Amy
LinkedIn Privacy Team

Interesting! Either the terms of service changed, or I did not pay attention to them. I’m normally a stickler for following the TOS of social networks so I’m a little annoyed with myself for missing this.

I quickly corrected it and Amy from LinkedIn was kind enough to unlock my account but I’ve noticed others doing this as well so I wanted to issue a warning about this so others don’t fall prey to the same violation that I experienced.

So tighten up your LinkedIn display name… or else!

However, there is one email function that I wish more people used: redirect.

Redirect is an awesome function that makes communication much more efficient in certain cases. Most of the time, if someone wants to send an email on to someone else and delegate the responsibility for followup to the recipient, he or she will forward the message. Then, the recipient will have to either start a new email to the original sender (which eliminates the original message thread), or reply and then swap out the email address so that it correctly gets sent back to the original sender.

However, there is a more efficient way to do it. By using the redirect button, the email gets sent on to the new recipient while preserving the email address of the original sender. This means that it looks to the new recipient as if the email was originally sent to him or her. This also makes it very easy to reply to the original sender.

In Apple Mail (you are using a Mac, right?) instructions for using redirect can be found here . I’ve customized my Apple Mail toolbar to display the button at all times. Apparently you need a plug-in to do it in Outlook. Thunderbird also has an add-on for it.

So if you, as person B, receive an email from person A and you need to delegate it to person C to reply to person A, use the redirect button instead. It will save person C some time and effort and is a smoother hand off.

I’ve been having some interesting conversations recently with other professional services firms that bill their clients based on time. It’s interesting to me because a few years ago, SpinWeb made two very significant changes:

1. We implemented ROWE
2. We eliminated time-based billing

Yes, the two are related.

Pre-ROWE, we billed our clients based on time. We would do the old-fashioned dance of “hmmm… I would estimate this project at 70 hours” and then hope we  magically hit that target. We all knew we were simply making up numbers out of thin air and hoping it was remotely accurate. It was a huge pain. Every time we did this, at least one or more of these things would happen:

1. No matter how many times we called it an “estimate,” our clients would hear a fixed price
2. Once the invoice was sent, we would end up arguing over money (see #1)
3. Employees would forget to track time, which caused us to lose money or spend time going back to find the hours
4. We would be penalized for being efficient (less money)
5. Our clients woud be penalized if we were inefficient (over-billing)
6. We would fudge and edit time reports to avoid arguments
7. We would spend 10% of our productive time just dealing with all the minutiae of tracking time

As you can see, time-based billing is not much fun. However, it is such an accepted norm in professional services that not many people really question it. They just accept it as “the way things are done” and continue to trudge along with all the lost productivity and pain that comes with it.

However, when we implemented ROWE at SpinWeb a few years ago, an interesting thing happened. As we eliminated time as a measurement of productivity and started focusing 100% on results, we also began to extend that mindset to our services. It became more and more ridiculous to apply time to our internal results and so we began to see how we could revolutionize our billing, as well.

Soon after implementing ROWE and using the tools from that experience, we moved to a 100% value-based billing model. No more time tracking.

It has been one of the most tremendously positive changes we have ever made at SpinWeb.

No more making up numbers. No more arguing over money with clients. No more babysitting employees to remind them to track time. No more answering questions like “how much time should I bill for this?” five times a day. No more making up different prices for each project. No more scary “estimates” that leave clients fearful of over-billing. No more being penalized for being efficient.

All these issues: gone.

Clients are happier. Employees are happier. The company is more profitable. Everyone is more productive. Best of all, we have not had a single argument over money since the switch.

I cannot stress how much of a dream it has been to move to a 100% value-based billing model. If you are still billing based on time, let me assure you that it’s possible to make the switch. If we can do it as a web services firm with lots of moving parts and complexities, I’m confident that anyone can do it.

Have you moved to value-based billing? I would love to hear your experience.

A lot of people I talk to wonder how to get more interaction online. They say things like “how do I get more Twitter followers?” and “how do I get more people to talk to me on Facebook?” and “how do I get more LinkedIn connections?”

There are lots of ways to get better results on social media but one of the most simple things you can do is to simply use a good, high-quality, real photo of yourself. It may sound obvious but I run into all sorts of people online who use photos of their dogs, babies, flowers, or cartoons as their profile photos. Then they wonder why people don’t accept their connection requests, follow them, or take them seriously.

Want some data? I did a LinkedIn poll recently that gathered some great feedback on this issue. Out of 324 people who responded, 63% said they were less likely to interact with someone who did not use a real profile photo. You can see more details on the LinkedIn poll itself which includes demographic data.

So what does this mean for business people (including job seekers)? Simple: if you value networking, marketing, and branding as key components of your business growth and you want to use social media in a business context, be sure to use a real profile photo to maximize interaction.