GUEST ON GO GREEN RADIO WITH JILL BUCK, Friday, May 6, noon ET/9 a.m. PT https://www.voiceamerica.com/show/1303/go-green-radio

This is a very well-written book—but not a pretty story. The twin brothers who founded Earth’s Best, the first company ever to produce organic baby food at commercial scale and with national distribution, planted a flag in the ground for 100% organic, top quality, and unwavering ethics.

Starting an organic baby food company turned out to be a whole lot harder than, say, manufacturing natural ice cream. Especially when you have no experience manufacturing anything at all (never mind the specific and very complex world of making baby food), you’re wildly undercapitalized, you discover that no existing manufacturing plant can keep the organic food separate so you have to build your own, your production equipment is beyond ornery, and you’ve chosen to locate in Vermont—3000 miles from the California base of most of the organic commercial growers that existed in the late 1980s US.

It gets even harder when you have to bring in venture capitalists with no understanding of the organic movement and no respect for the company culture, and you’re forced to give up control inch by inch over a period of years. These two very decent men got slapped in the face by the production issues and then knifed in the back repeatedly by the players they brought in to save the company.

Amazingly, Earth’s Best somehow survived, and was eventually sold to Heinz, and then to the natural foods conglomerate Hain Celestial. And it eventually became profitable, though long after the founders were forced out. And not so amazingly, the idea of natural baby food caught on, and all the major players eventually added natural and organic lines. For this, eco-conscious parents should give thanks to these brothers.

But the real reason to read this book is to learn from their mistakes. Use it as a negative playbook, so if you’re ever going for funding, you’ll know how NOT to get shafted. Too bad crowdfunding didn’t exist back then.

Of course, the book is told from their points of view. Those they battled with might tell a different story. And they made a number of errors, and then kept making them. Issues with sourcing and manufacturing had to be overcome, and sometimes that meant dumping unsatisfactory inventory for pennies on the dollar. These things happen. But their tolerance for incompetent, arrogant managers surprised me. And even worse, after getting burned multiple times, I’d have thought they would figure out that no oral promise is worth anything. Get. Everything. In. Writing.

With 34 years in business, I’m not really the market for another book on startup success. But many of my clients and readers are, and I often read books with that audience in mind (and wish I’d read a few in the very early days of my business).

This book is warm, approachable, and full of common sense, as well as a lot of Law Of Attraction and personal motivation material to get a new business up and running on solid footing. I found that many of the suggestions were clumped into certain sections of the book; I’d take a bunch of notes on successive pages and then go 10 or 15 pages without any notes. But even those less useful sections were still a good read.

The book contains several exercises. One I found especially useful is a new way of looking at brainstorming (p. 123). She also has a very small section on business helping the wider world, and I’m glad to see it there, even if it’s not very comprehensive. (My own next book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, goes into far more detail on this.)

Some of the wise nuggets I especially like:

• Learn how to find the love often hidden in negative messages from friends and family
• Understand that thinking Law Of Attraction thoughts isn’t enough; you also have to do the work 
• Create a story that’s consistent with your reality AND with your customers’ experience of you
• Seek out not only the intersection of your skills and interests and a market, but also for the intersections of both fiery passion and the warm gentle glow (much like a successful long-term marriage)
• Develop great branding by first targeting your market as narrowly and carefully as possible (and recognize that if you’re in different markets, you probably need different branding and marketing even for the same product)
• Use “lean in marketing”: be interested, not just interesting, and create a positive user experience
• Recognize that search keywords, headlines, etc., should speak to the need (the hole your prospect wants to drill) rather than the tool you provide (the drill bit)
• Acknowledge that more isn’t always better
• Make sure all employees know that they are the customer service department
• See mistakes as opportunities to fix things
• Give value, even when you’re networking

“I am a business and life coach and work with people in many fields, assisting them to expand their work. it is unique for each person – the best programs to create, the groups to work with, how to find customers and clients…

When Yanik Silver sent an advance manuscript of his new book, I liked it so much that I adapted a whole chapter as an essay in my own new book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. He’s one of four outside contributors.

My enthusiasm is apparently shared by a very influential group. Alongside my blurb, he’s got people like Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos); John Paul DeJoria (co-founder of Paul Mitchell); and my brilliant friend Sam Horn (author of Tongue Fu and several other excellent books).

It’s focused very strongly on how business can have an impact in the wider world, and makes an excellent complement to Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. But its focus is quite different; with the exception of the shared chapter, there’s almost no overlap. Although Yanik comes out of the world of big-money Internet marketing, his book has an almost spiritual feel—reinforced by the mandala-like concept wheel that opens several chapters. He even uses the term “Transcending” as the third of the three stages of an evolved enterprise; the others are Transactional and Transformational (pp. 48-56).

He draws many lessons in marketing AND management through his own experience and those of his Maverick and Underground members—as well as thought leaders from Thomas Edison to Richard Branson. Edison, he points out, created an entire ecosystem of his ventures, all of which supported each other (p. 93); in the modern world, Zingerman’s does the same thing, with a bakery supplying bread to the flagship deli, for example (pp. 86-88). Tony Hsieh notes the importance of building a culture—not just hiring for values, but firing over them (p. 185). On the same page, Yanik shares a powerful insight about leverage: “little hinges swing big doors.” And a long guest essay by Joe Mechlinski is just filled with powerful leadership insights (pp. 195-207).

It’s a lot about how the good feeling you have making a difference in the world—and the fun you can have while doing it—translates into measurable bottom-line profits. The fun piece is very important to Yanik, a self-described adventure junkie. There’s a long an honorable tradition around this; he notes that the Dalai Lama has referred to himself as a “professional laugher” (p. 104).

That fun often translates to really creative ideas around building a deep and lasting community, internally and externally. Whether it’s exotic branded swag (such as the green Speedos that have become a part of Yanik’s Maverick brand), a unique collective experience, or even the ability to earn some sort of merit badges, as Harley riders do (pp. 170-171)—these can have vast marketing impact.

Creative marketers, he says, have to fall in love with customers and prospects (p. 160), and to use that love to do the unexpected. I’ve said for years that your real brand is not your slogan, logo, colors, etc., but the prospect/customer’s perception of you. Yanik puts it a bit differently: “It’s what other people are saying about you” (p. 161). This could take the form of genuine caring, such as Zappos not just refunding the purchase when a customer’s husband died in an accident before she could give him the brand new pair of boots she’d bought him, but sending flowers for the funeral! (p. 143).

How do you find ways to inject that creativity and that love? Yanik offers not only the usual tools, but also “community decoders” such as origin stories, in-group lingo and rituals, creeds, barriers to participation, sharing the inside story, artifacts, exceptional experiences, AND a higher purpose (pp. 163-180).

He looks quite a bit about the choices we business owners can make in our consumer role. Example: choosing to hire a firm that employs disadvantaged workers to fill goodie bags for a conference (p. 50).

And much of the work is backed up with rock-solid numbers that validate our choices to use our businesses to do good in the world. I knew about Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign and mention it in my new book. But I didn’t know that the company’s sales leapfrogged 40 percent in the next two years (pp. 150-151). He has numbers for many of the best known case studies of social entrepreneurship and business creativity.