pdowner – Philip Downer

21 Leadership Lessons from the Dave Ramsey Board

Every Monday 600+ Ramsey Solutions team members gather for our weekly all staff meeting. The meeting usually runs about 90 minutes. The aim is to ensure that all team members have insight into the wide variety of initiatives the company has undertaken and to see where we’re winning and where improvement needs to be made.

Ramsey Solutions has been named one of the “Best Placed to Work in Nashville” 10 times running. We’re hiring like mad, but with intention. With all the new team members joining us, the Ramsey Solutions board understands the importance of reinforcing our company culture. One way we do this is by hosting 15 minute, panel-style interviews with the board. These sessions are usually very conversational and fun to observe and contain answers to questions submitted by the team. Our company hierarchy is very relational (as opposed to positional) and these panels help show that our board is just a bunch of regular ol’ humans much like ourselves.

There are some great leadership concepts I’ve learned during my tenure here that I was reminded of in this presentation. I’ll be interested in your comments below.

***

Leadership Panel Members: Herb Jenkins, Pete Young, Jen Seivertsen, Lara Johnson, Suzanne Simms and Brian Williams

Authors Note: These are all paraphrased statements from the Ramsey Solutions staff meeting November 6, 2017. Words are my own, but intent is theirs.

Humility is demonstrated when you can identify where team members are struggling. Turn on your ears, listen up and understand that credibility is gained by how you treat your team, regardless of your role.
New leaders… Question everything but keep it open-handed. Some things we do are purposeful but others are sacred cows that should be shot (or slowly poisoned).
Intentionality surrounding communication is key. Buy-in and candor with leadership are paramount to your success.
The sheer level of talent across teams can be intimidating. Don’t be insecure that you’re not contributing to some self-perceived level.
Don’t forget who it is that we are here to serve.
Don’t be surprised when leadership is slower moving than you’d like. Their perspective may well be “This is how we’ve done it and it’s worked. Why change?” It’s your job to understand that history and then consider whether those assumptions can/should be challenged.
Understand what your leaders want to accomplish and how your role contributes. Your ability to pull in that same direction is how you will build you own credibility.
Be self aware. Ask those around you to help identify areas where you might need more awareness. Know that there will always be blind spots, so be comfortable in your own skin and own who you are. Build influence through confidence in yourself and your ideas.
Influence is a natural byproduct of trust. Trust is built from patience and going thru conflict together.
Kill your Key Responsibility Areas (KRA’s). Own your key responsibilities and be the guy or gal that is known to execute well. Over serve your leaders. Wayne Gretzky says “Skate to where the puck is going”. Use your skillset to help your leader see the future from a perspective that they might not have insight into.
Leaders talk. A lot. About you.
Communication; do it well and do it often. Know who to include, why and when you’re trying to drive an initiative forward. Be direct. Be clear. Be concise. Pay attention to how your communication is perceived.
Help your leaders obtain and process the information they need to make good decisions. Don’t assume they have the same insight as you.
An “us versus them” mentality should be a warning flag. Internal infighting means we’re not collaborating well. Work to break down cross-team barriers to ensure we’re all pulling in same direction.
Understand why we do certain historical processes. Gain knowledge and wisdom from existing leaders.
Our core values actually mean something. They’re not just on the walls, they’re on the walls for a reason.
Grooves are comfortable. Leverage new perspectives but be a champion for our culture. Learn new things but passionately protect the tenets that make us great.
Learn how to make fun of yourself. Take your work seriously but make fun of yourself at least once a day.
New leaders should know the war stories. You may not have been present, but they are our landmarks. Knowing where we’ve been helps us to shape the future.
Work from passion not from fear.
Find a mentor. Get guidance. Be challenged by someone.

Treat Every Transactional Email Like it May Be Your Last

I’ve been thinking about transactional email a lot lately. You know the ones I’m talking about. It’s the receipt thanking you for a purchase or reminding you about a recent account signup. They are the ones nagging you for feedback or reminding you about an upcoming appointment. Transactional emails are all of the customer communications that your business’ web site sends out – often automatically – to follow up with customers online. These are the kinds of emails that can easily slip through the cracks in terms of your branding and marketing. It’s really a shame when it does, because they are the perfect opportunity to surprise and delight the folks that make your business thrive.

I was recently reminded of this after my wife and I took a road trip through Montana. We stayed at a hotel whose main attraction was a 3-story, indoor water park. It was tons of fun and a great way to let the kids go hog-wild during a cold Montana winter. The hotel itself was OK, nothing terrible, but nothing great either. So when they sent me an automatic e-mail requesting that I fill out a survey I did just that.

When I fill out these kinds of surveys I try to be as honest as I can, and also offer constructive criticism if it’s due. I do my best not to be petty, and to focus on the kinds of things that I think could actually make a difference. It’s probably the marketer in me, but I like to think a real human being reads and acts on this information. Customer feedback is a marketing gold mine and I like to contribute where I can. But, I digress.

The last step in this particular hotel chain’s survey gives the opportunity to post a review of their property. The review is then displayed on their site for other, future guests. Simple, right? I took several minutes to write what I thought was an insightful and helpful review, and hit the submit button. To my dismay it came back with an error message letting me know that my review was too long. 1,500 characters it said – that’s your limit!

Let’s think about this interaction for a moment in terms of the user experience. Forget about what the actual review said – after all this post itself isn’t a critique of the hotel. Rather let’s focus on this single interaction and break it down step by step.

1. I took the time to clink the link in the message. I didn’t just delete the e-mail.

This is important, because it’s the first step in the engagement. Your customer has acted! They could have “changed the channel” by pressing the delete key and gone about their day.

2. I’ve gone through a multiple-step survey, carefully ranking my satisfaction on a scale of 1-10.

In the e-mail message you’ve only asked me to take a short survey. I think that my job is done. When I’m presented with another option it’s beyond my original time commitment. There’s a high likelihood that I’ll abandon your site now. Ask yourself if a second e-mail is a better option, or at least present the fact that a review will be requested.

3. I’ve taken the time to actually write a review.

Many statistics show that customer reviews and other customer generated content will be the primary factor that helps another customer choose whether your product or service is right for them. There is zero reason to limit how much input a customer can give you. It’s your job to determine what to pay attention to, and how to respond. Your customer has no obligation to help you out, the least you can do is make it as easy as possible.

4. I’ve submitted my review.

Again, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and imagine their thought process. Nowhere on the form was there any mention of a character limit until an error message was displayed after the form was submitted. The field in which the review was typed did not have any tools that automatically displayed the length of the text that had been typed. What’s a customer to do? Manually count each letter? The computer savvy ones may use another program to get the length, but forget it if you’re on a mobile device.

Is this your customer’s last time?

When I think about these kinds of transactional emails I like to take a worst-case-scenario approach. I assume that this is the last contact that I’ll ever have with the customer. When I paint it in this light, the importance of getting it right becomes more obvious. I know that if I don’t leave them with a good taste in their mouth it will be so much more difficult to earn their repeat business down the road.

Here’s the lessons that I’ve learned.

Treat every interaction as if it’s your last. Otherwise it may be.
Your customer’s time is precious and distractions are plentiful.
You don’t control the conversation. Let your customers say what they want to or they will find a channel where they can.
When you limit length, recognize that you may also be limiting the ability to effectively communicate. Use the privilege only when absolutely necessary otherwise your feedback may become so abbreviated it has a stunted feel.

@manifestphil Yikes! This is a great point! Do you mind e-mailing chsm@choicehotels.com — we promise there's no character limit there 😉

— Choice Hotels (@ChoiceHotels) February 1, 2016

There were some positive aspects to this interaction. I sent a quick tweet to @choicehotels when I had the issue. Their social media team was quick to respond and gave an e-mail address to send concerns to. I sent that address a message and their response was courteous and prompt. I also got a moment to think about the sites that I’ve developed and have already schedule a review of a couple of the older ones.

In conclusion my fellow netizens and marketing attuned friends; pay attention to those post-sale interactions. Ask yourselves if you should even try to control the conversation on your website or whether the free exchange of information and ideas is more important to your brand. If you’re using survey and e-mail marketing software to automatically send messages, go through them yourselves and put yourself in your customer’s shoes the entire way.

Remember that somewhere out there, there is certainly a marketing-obsessed web nerd who probably thinks too much about things as simple as transactional emails.

WordPress Visual Editor Not Expanding With Zurb Foundation 5 CSS Styles

I just hunted down a very annoying bug in my Manifest Foundation WordPress starter theme that was preventing the visual editor (TinyMCE) from expanding vertically when the default CSS styles from the Zurb Foundation framework are included as an editor stylesheet.

Basically, the height of the visual editor is supposed to be determined based on how much content you’ve actually written in that area. This prevents you from having to scroll both the editing area and the page independently from one another. As you add content the height automatically expands, keeping your editing toolbar visible at the top of the page. Overall it’s a very nice feature, albeit one that many of our clients don’t always grasp intuitively (but that’s another post).

The bug I mentioned was preventing the editor from expanding vertically. Oddly enough the height of the editor would increase by one pixel every time that the user clicked the editor, or navigated using the arrow buttons on their keyboard.

After ruling out that this was a core error or at all related to any of the plugins I was running, I was then able to disable the editor stylesheet and see that the editor functioned as intended. The offending rule is located in the /scss/foundation/components/_global.scss partial of the Zurb Foundation framework.

As part of it’s styling reset, it ensures that both the <html> and the <body> elements are set to 100% height. On the front-end of a theme this ensures that the off-canvas, mobile menu will work as intended. However, the visual editor in WordPress uses an embedded iFrame that also includes these elements. Just place the following rule at the end of your editor stylesheet and you’ll come up aces.

html, body {
	height:auto;
}

An example of my full editor-style.scss file follows:

@charset "UTF-8";
@import "config/settings";
@import "../bower_components/foundation/scss/foundation/components/type";
@import "../bower_components/foundation/scss/foundation/components/clearing";
@import "../bower_components/foundation/scss/foundation/components/tables";
@import "../bower_components/foundation/scss/foundation/components/thumbs";
@import 'site/wp';

html, body {
	height:auto;
}

WordPress Security 101

A presentation made March 13th, 2013 to the Montana WordPress group in Bozeman, MT.

WordPress Security 101 from Manifest Creative

Simple Filters Make Using Custom Post Types Easier

I’m always looking for good ways to make the WordPress UI as intuitive as possible for Manifest Creative clients. You’d be amazed at how many folks get frustrated trying to remember “What field does what?”. There’s naturally a bit of disconnect between filling out information in the admin and how it’s displayed on the front-end to visitors.

A great example of this disconnect between the admin and front-end is one of our non-profit clients. We use a custom post to display a list of sponsors for the organization. Each post type includes several meta fields for details and is displayed on the front-end alongside the sponsor’s logo. In this use case it makes perfect sense that WordPress’ featured image feature would be used for the sponsor’s logo. But, because “featured image” is not immediately equated with a logo, it’s a prime candidate for customization.

By simply changing the text from “Set featured image” to “Choose sponsor logo” we can eliminate any question of where the admin user should set that particular item. As they say, it’s the little things!

When I create a new custom post type, there are 3 areas that I consider mandatory to customize:

The “Enter Title Here” text shown for the post headline
The “Featured Image” meta box title
The link that says “Add featured image” or “Remove featured image”.

All of this code usually goes into the individual PHP file I use to create the custom post type, but you could just as easily include it in your theme’s functions.php file.

<?php
/**
* Filter the default title
*
* @param string $post_title The current 'Enter title here' text
* @return string The modified default text
*/
add_filter('enter_title_here', 'post_type_default_title');
function post_type_default_title($title) {
	global $post_type;
	if ( $post_type == 'mcrm_contacts' ) {
		$title = 'Company Name';
	}
	return $title;
}

/**
* Filter the Featured Image Metabox
*/
add_action('do_meta_boxes', 'post_type_featured_image_box');
function post_type_featured_image_box()
{
    remove_meta_box( 'postimagediv', 'mcrm_contacts', 'side' );
    add_meta_box('postimagediv', __('Company Logo'), 'post_thumbnail_meta_box', 'mcrm_contacts', 'side', 'default');
}

/**
* Filter the Featured Image link
*
* @param string $content The original link for featured image
* @return string The modified string
*/
add_filter('admin_post_thumbnail_html', 'post_type_featured_image_link');
function post_type_featured_image_link( $content ) {
	global $post_type;
  if ($post_type == 'mcrm_contacts') {
    $content = str_replace(__('featured image'), __('logo'), $content);
  }
  return $content;
}
?>

Piano Guys Cover Lord of the Rings

It’s no secret that I’m a huge LOTR nerd. I came across this in my inbox this morning and had to share.

Awesome tools built on WordPress

I’ll continue to update this post as I find other “best-of-breed” or useful apps that I find for working with WordPress.

Today I found two cool tools that I thought were worth mentioning…

Screenshot of the Pea.rs website — The Pears theme lets you create your own repository of design patterns.

The first is an awesome WordPress theme by the folk over at SimpleBits (yep, Dan Cedarholm is the co-founder of Dribbble). It’s called Pears and allows you to create a custom library of your own HTML and CSS snippets for future use. Run it on your localhost machine (or online) and you’ll have your own repository of design patterns you can apply to any project. One word: Suhweet!

Screenshot of the wpremote.com website — WP Remote lets you bulk-manage your WordPress sites.

The other item worth mentioning is WP Remote. It’s basically a service that lets you manage multiple WordPress installations. Upgrade the core files, plugins, etc. all from within a single control panel.

I have nearly 100 WordPress websites that I’ve developed, and needless to say, keeping them all up to date can be a pain in the hind-end. I’ve toyed with the idea of putting them all into a multi-site installation, but that seems like overkill (not to mention a lot of retrofitting). I think I’ll give this service a try and see how it works out. Oh, did I mention that it’s free?!?

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

A great interview with comedian Louis CK who points out that the more amazing things become, the more that people begin to expect them.

Who is Philip Downer?

Well by now it should be obvious that I’m a website developer. 🙂 Here’s the in-depth, not quite a resume look.

About Me

I’ve been developing websites in various capacities for 16 years. I founded Manifest Creative (a sole proprietorship) in 2005. My areas of strength are:

WordPress
PHP/MySQL
HTML5/CSS3
jQuery/JavaScript
Authorize.net integration

I’m also a well-rounded graphic designer. I have the unique ability to be able to both design and program, which helps me to understand both areas of website development. I’m familiar with several different marketing platforms and often leverage them for customers:

Campaign Monitor
Facebook brand pages (and API)
Twitter (and API)
Google Maps

I use Git and GitHub for version control and to contribute open source projects back to the community.

I frequently use BaseCamp for project management and bug-tracking. I use Skype for visual conferences.

Pricing & Availability

I bill my services hourly. I usually prefer to get full specs on a project and provide a flat-fee estimate based on what I believe the site will take. I book projects on a first-come, first-served basis with a 50% deposit holding your place on the production calendar. For small projects, with established customers, I’ll usually just dive in. I’m usually booked out about 2 weeks before able to accept new assignments.

Portfolio

There are a number of websites on ManifestBozeman.com in the portfolio section. Several of my most recent projects haven’t made it up yet, so I’m linking to them here. 🙂

Social Media

I’m active on several social media channels as well: