Tonight Ido Leffler, the founder of the fashion product line “Yes to Carrots,” spoke to the NY Entrepreneurs’ Organization at the Trump SoHo ballroom. Here are my short-hand note take-aways from the talk…

• In sales, he’d inject an urgency into trying to get a meeting with someone. If he were coming to NYC for a week, he’d call up potential clients and tell them he was calling all the way from Australia and that he’d only be in NYC for one day and would love to meet with them. “You’d be surprised at how urgency gets people to act fast.”
• Treat employees like royalty.
• Take every meeting if you are the brand ambassador for the company, because you never know what meetings will lead to what. (My Note: If it’s a bad meeting, have an exit strategy because they can suck up your time. I’ve been there.)
• Fly only one airline to rack up the miles so you get upgraded. You’d be amazed at who you sit next to in first class and get three hours to build a relationship with over free drinks.
• “We saw all our competitors saying no to bad ingredients and we wanted to be opposite to that, so we became a company that said yes to good ingredients.”
• Have a social cause for your employees and even your clients to rally around. You sell product, but what do you sell it for?
• “The scariest thing for me is to be an employee.”
• “QVC and HSN are like bungee jumping for entrepreneurs.”
• If you can raise money once all together, that’s the best. A second funding round is massively complicated and ugly.
• “I am a good entrepreneur, I’m not a great CEO. Know when to let go.”
• If you’re going to outsource, outsource to experts.
• “We were extremely transparent with our finances with our employees, but we never let our employees doubt the fact that we were going to be huge.”
• “We don’t employ people, we adopt people.”
• “Employ good people.”
• “When you don’t want to do a holiday party because of all the stress, it is the most important time to do a holiday party.”
• The story matters. Your story and the company story, because everyone will ask you about it.
• “We built massive loyalty among our customer base. We have a VIC [very important carrots] program.”
• “Our customers know way more than we do, so we constantly connect and learn from them.”
• As the CEO, it’s important to smile all the way through
• “As a founder, even if you sell your company, it’s still your baby forever.”
• “My family is my rock. They ground me. They keep me sane. Bath time is my favorite time.”
• Take your ego out of the business.

I don’t know if it’s a trend isolated to just the tech geeks, but more and more I’m hearing the the words “right” and “so” being used as filler words like the word “like.”

I first noticed it during interviews with the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Then, in a recent trip to Austin, my oldest brother, Robin, mentioned he started picking up the bad habit from his programmers.

Though I’ve mostly noticed it in conversations with tech people, I’m starting to see it spread more into the general population as well.

Language is constantly evolving and this must be another attempt at a new filler word.

Consider this your public service announcement. The more you know the more you grow .

Luggage Porter by ColbyBluth

The day before Hurricane Irene made landfall along the Eastern Seaboard, a friend asked my wife and I to help volunteer setting up an evacuation center in NYC. While helping out, I was trying to be as nice as possible to the people coming in seeking shelter. I’d stop my work to help people carry luggage up stairs, answer questions, and clean up water spills. All of which I thought was part of my job as a volunteer.

After helping a family carry their luggage up some stairs, a supervisor stopped me and said…

“You shouldn’t be helping the evacuees as much because we need to train them to know that this is a self-help facility. They need to do things on their own. Training them that we will help them with everything is just setting us up for failure because there will soon be a lot more of them then there are of us and we won’t be able to help everyone.”

As soon as she said that, I flashbacked to the day before when I was doing an orientation training at a school and the president spoke before me. In his closing remarks to the orientation leaders, he said…

“No matter what, make sure to never, ever, ever let a parent pick up any luggage.”

Then a couple days ago on Twitter I saw this Tweet…

So my questions are, are we doing too much for our new students? Are we training them that no matter what they need, we are going to make it happen for them? Are we turning college into a daycare facility verses a place where you are expected to carry your own bag because after all, it’s your life?

This morning our friend Lauren texted us to see if we were up for helping set up a new Irene evacuation shelter they were opening near Union Sq. It makes sense that there would be need for a massive number of volunteers across the city, but neither Annie or I had heard anything about it on the news. Had Lauren not texted us, we probably would’ve stayed home, worked, took a walk, and slowly prepared the rest of the apartment for Irene. Instead we spent 5 hours doing some serious sweat labor to make sure those in need, and their pets, had a safe place to stay during the hurricane. I appreciate having people in my life who think about others as it helps me to remember to think about others. Not only does helping others help them, it also has been scientifically proven to make the giver feel good.

Below is the tralier for an upcoming documentry airing on Bloomberg TV starting September 13th at 9pm that follows the behind-the-scense progress of ten tech companies here in NYC, including Red Rover. Click here to read the full story from TechCrunch.

It’ll be interesting to watch how each company is positioned as our personalities and business styles were all over the place. I suspect our Red Rover crew will be seen as the serious, enterprise company dealing with big money coming in and out.

Though I was interviewed and on camera a lot, I’m not sure how much I’ll be seen during the show as Kevin is Red Rover’s CEO. I did however have my share of practical jokes that were caught on camera, so we’ll see.

8/8/11 UPDATE: Bloomberg just launched their website for the show.

Up until I was about 14 years old, we took family road trips around the US every summer. Our trips involved my two parents, four bothers, and me packing into a VW Van stacked full of food and camping supplies. As we got older we upgraded to an RV with built in kitchen, bathroom, and shower. One of our first trips in our new RV was to visit family along the East Coast with a swing through NYC.

Having never visited NYC, I only knew this larger than life, big shot city through its portrayal in movies and T.V. As a farm boy, actually visiting there made nervous.

With our RV, my dad rolled across the Brooklyn Bridge, through Chinatown, and found a place to park downtown on Wall Street. To me, Wall Street was the pinnacle of New York and all the power it held. I remember feeling so small and out of place as my dad parked our RV next to two black town cars that I’m sure were there to pick up some multimillionaire CEOs. Something inside me wished he’d parked outside the city and we walked in so not to disturb the power flow of the city.

Instead, my dad got out of the driver’s seat with an ear-to-ear smile on his face and proclaimed he was going to take a shower on Wall Street. At the time I remember wanting to hide under a blanket to avoid the embarrassment from the CEOs seeing my dad shower on their street as they walked by. But he showered, no one saw, and we went on with the rest of the day.

His shower on Wall Street became an epic story to tell among our family and friends. In fact, my dad’s whole life is filled with similar adventures that didn’t happen by accident, he made them happen.

I saw Wall Street like everyone else saw Wall Street, and in doing so, my experience of Wall Street was just like everyone else. On the other hand, my dad saw Wall Street in a totally different way, and in doing so, had an amazing experience that I’m retelling 18 years later.

If you know me, you know I am always fresh off of some new adventure that most people don’t believe actually happened. What you are really seeing is my dad’s approach to life living on through me.

Since moving to NYC a year ago, I don’t get to see my dad as much as I did when we were in Chicago, but no matter where I’m geographically at, I take with me many of his life lessons. His lessons, however, don’t come as lectures or rules, but rather in the way he lives his life. He won’t tell you what the lesson is, but rather patiently wait for you to discover it knowing that the teacher doesn’t show up until the student is ready. Sometimes I’d understand the lesson within a couple hours and other times it wouldn’t click till years later. It took me until college to understand what he taught me on Wall Street and I’m forever thankful.

Despite living in NYC and loving it, I’m still a country boy at heart. I love the big open sky, the fresh air, the sounds of nature, and the slow peaceful way of everything.

That’s right, tonight we went to Tranny Bingo at the Bowery Poetry Club with another cool couple we met last weekend. Out of the 75 people playing, ACbert walked away the big winner of the night by winning three of the six rounds including the money pot of $205 dollars! The other two prizes were a light up fish tank and two free drinks from the bar. It was a rather epic night beyond just the fact that ACbert won 50% of all the prizes. You’ll have to ask me in person sometime to get the full story . Nothing better than spending a Monday hanging with new friends while experiencing something new. 

A common street scene in NYC is young hip guys trying to sell a signed copy of their newly released music CD to pedestrians walking by. By telling you a sob story about how hard it was to produce and how they spent their life savings to produce it, your empathy button is triggered and some people actually buy one. The trick is the CD is often blank, or the recording is one of a million copies being sold by similar people with similar stories all over NYC.

Today I watched as one peddler upped the game.

It started out as usual by him handing out his CD as if he were giving it away. Then once it was in someone’s hand, he started into his story. Then the twist. Another guy walked by, took a CD, and within a few seconds of hearing the story reached for his wallet and handed over some money. Now, not only is the first person grappling to counter her own empathy button, but now she has to also overcome social proof and go against what the other person is doing and saying. It was fascinating to watch as the CD seller intuitively rattled through the same sales themes I was taught in business school. They also do it better than most sales people I know. Makes me want to write a book titled “The Art of Street Selling.” Someone put that on my list of books to write…

Twice a year the sunset lines up perfectly with every east-west street in Manhattan. New Yorkers call it…Manhattanhenge. ACbert and I made it a point to check out this year’s Manhattan Solstice in action. While the sunset was impressive, the crowd of people running in and out of the street during red lights stole the show.

via CoolPicGallary (because iPhones just don’t take pics like this)

The growing crowd waiting for a red light

I know her!