MikeFarag.com

The Kid Behind the Counter

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On the way to a meeting I stopped by a local gas station to fill up and snag a drink.  Sam, the kid behind the counter, was probably 10 or 11 years old working with his dad.

Sam’s dad was coaching him on greeting customers, taking cash, credit and thanking us as we left. It was golden.

I’m not sure Sam knew how valuable a lesson he was getting behind that counter.  It reminded me of so many lessons I learned (sometimes I had no idea I was learning), at the hands of my dad.  The value of how to interact with others, handle money, open a bank account, ask for forgiveness for a job not well done.  I learned a lot behind my own “counter” with the steady hand of my dad behind me. Guiding me, coaching me, calling me out and telling me when I hit the mark.  It honed so many things that I continue to use today.

If you don’t have a “counter” for your kids to learn these things at, find one.

If you aren’t behind that “counter” with your kids, join them there.

If you still don’t have that steady hand or coach, you need to find it. Or rediscover an old steady hand.

It’s never too late to learn and hone the skills of human interaction, sometimes even manual labor or making change at a register is good for the soul.

The Power of 100 People

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It’s true: you really don’t need 10,000 or 1 million people to start. You just need 100.

100 passionate followers. In fact, you could start with 10, running for the first 100.

Think about it, you know 100 people. Combine your family with your friends.  Real friends mind you, not the 1300 people you may or may not really know that you call Facebook friends.  If you were passionate about starting something it only take 10 advocates and a run to the first 100 people to get something worthwhile rolling.

Jon Acuff talks about it in his book Start.

I told 100 friends about the site and started writing goofy paragraphs. On the eighth day of existence, 4,000 people from around the world showed up to read it. Turns out the 100 friends had passed the URL to 100 friends who had passed the URL to 100 friends who eventually told people in Singapore to read it.” (It’s now read by 4.5 million people. Just saying.)

Seth Godin on his blog and in several of his books:

I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living.)

I’ve seen it first hand with many clients (churches, startups, businesses).  So many times they forget about the first 10 and run to 100 in lieu of the thousands of millions they want to serve.  You know, the BIG numbers. Oops. When it doesn’t work, they wonder what went wrong.

They missed the first 10 and run to 100 and sold out for something too hard to attain. There is power in passionate advocates; businesses and movements are built on it.

Even Jesus started with 12. Arguably, he has a lot more followers than that today. Worked for Him, I am betting it will work for the rest of us.

 

You Need A Team

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To build something truly remarkable you need a team.  Alone doesn’t work.

Think about it…

The best house.

The best business.

The best marriage.

Trying to go it alone is not only no fun.  It’s also nearly impossible.

Building a team that can help you (your business, your marriage and even your house) be remarkable is quite possible. Forget the lone ranger stuff and build your team.

Know Your WHO: charity water

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I attended BIG KC, a two-and-a-half day event that aims to inspire, educate and celebrate the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the heart of the Midwest. Produced by Silicon Prairie News, the conference started as Big Omaha as early as 2010 and this was their first year in KC.

Good event, overall. But honestly, I love more interaction and some of the speakers weren’t as prepared to share their content or story as they could have been. They missed their WHY and WHO.

There were a few who didn’t – one whom I’ve admired for several years: Scott Harrison from charity: water. He started with a simple presentation formula:

  1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them
  2. Tell them
  3. Tell them what you told them and ask them to come with you

He wove his personal story with the story of the water crisis and put a face on the people who where engaged in helping. We could see ourselves in those pictures and stories. It’s not rocket science: we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves and we innately want to join others who are as passionate as we are about something specific. Scott did a great job of engaging the audience with that fact.

 

 

It puts a personal picture on a very serious issue: WHY Scott does what he does. Perhaps even more impactful is WHO is engaging in this effort to impact the world. It’s not difficult to identify people and groups that have similar qualities. I’m not talking about simple demographic qualities, but behavioral and personal passions.

At Fervor, we call this WHO: The People Strategy. It’s diving into the top three people groups you and your organization work with and want to replicate. Not everyone, just the ones who your story clicks with, the ones who give you and your organization energy. These are your advocates.

Yes, it means that you leave some people out. Thats okay. In fact, it’s imperative in order to grow.

Knowing your WHO lets you tell their story and gather more of them.

 

The Missing Circle: Know Your WHO

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“People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it” – Simon Sinek

If you haven’t seen or heard of Simon Sinek, you need to. His video is totally worth 18 minutes of your life. It could change your business.

Simon prescribes his “Golden Circle” and tells us to start with why. This works. Mission, Vision, Values are great. They can sound stoic and static and end up hanging on a wall somewhere instead of residing in our hearts and minds. Many times, stopping there leaves us wondering: how does it relate to me? I have reworked Simon’s golden circle as a simple way to help people and organizations really explain their story.

Copyright Mike Farag

In my corporate days, we would spend millions of dollars, time, and energy trying to delineate market segments with; quantitative, demographic and even some behavioral data. And that’s where the missing circle comes in. It’s where the rubber meets the road.

Why, How and What are key elements to understanding and communicating a person or business’ story. But who do we tell that story to and how should we tell it? With so many channels available to us today, how do we know which to use without knowing who our best clients are?

 

WHY + WHO = Amazing Results

I have seen it. Why is powerful. Why works.  It might be easy to think of it this way: Why is 15,000 foot view, How is 10,000, What is 5,000 and Who puts the plane on the ground.

It starts with why, it ends with who.

WordPress Attack & What to Do

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My buddy Evan and I spend a lot of time working with clients who need help on their websites, we build stories online, with the help of along with some great web developer partners at Fervor.

We noticed that WordPress was under attack (yeah we are kinda geeks like that) and Evan spent some time writing out our thoughts on what’s going on…

Over the past couple of days, hackers have been attacking websites hosted on the WordPress platform. Now, we really like WordPress and use it for a lot of sites. It’s extremely robust, flexible, and well documented with a lot of free and inexpensive plugins that add custom features. Well, because of all of that, we aren’t the only ones that use it. In fact, it’s this popularity that has made it such an attractive target for hackers.

So what flaw in WordPress are these hackers exploiting? None. Instead, they are using a bunch of computers (approximately 90,000) to try a bunch of passwords with the username ‘admin’. It’s called a dictionary attack because they are effectively running through every word in the dictionary to see if they can find one that works as a password with the admin user.

In addition to the above, the massive scale of these attacks are resulting in a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack that is overwhelming servers and rendering websites unavailable. A few of our small, personal sites are currently M.I.A…

What can you do to protect your site? A bunch of things. Employ the following… or just contact us to take care of it for you (including hosting your website). If you’re wanting to change web hosts from WordPress to a separate hosting server, you might also want to look at migrating your site to a dedicated host like Hosti Server or others can provide.

Don’t use ‘admin’ as your username. In fact, remove the ‘admin’ user from your WordPress database.

Use complex passwords – preferably those that have been randomly generated. We are big fans of (and made the investment in) 1Password from AgileBits because it generates long non-sensical passwords and syncs them with all of our computers, iPhones, and iPads. We’ve also heard good things about LastPass. Pick one and use it for everything.

Install the Login Lockdown plugin for WordPress. This plugin can help prevent any one computer that is used as part of this attack from being effective for very long. It can block IP addresses of bad login attempts preventing them from continuing to try to login. Are settings are as follows.

  • Max Login Retires: 3
  • Retry Time Period Restriction (minutes): 5
  • Lockout Length (minutes): 6000
  • Lockout invalid usernames? YES (If you’ve removed the ‘admin’ user, then you’ve effectively made the change necessary that will protect your login from this specific attack.)
  • Mask Login Errors? YES (Why tell them what didn’t work?)

Install the Better WP Security plugin for WordPress. This plugin will let you make several changes away from the default install that will eliminate your exposure to this attack and subsequent ones.

  • This plugin helps you remove the ‘admin’ user.
  • Force longer, more secure, passwords.
  • Change the login URL from www.yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php to something else. This attack, specifically, is targeting the wp-login.php page. Thus, if you use Better WP Security to change it to something else, your site would not be targeted with this attack. For added bonus points, change it to something crazy, such as /LetMeIn or /OpenSaysMe

There are other steps that this plugin can help you take to secure your site. It’s got a pretty good dashboard that shows you what it feels are still vulnerable versus what needs to be secured. And, it will make those changes for you if you click a couple buttons.

Generally, you should also do the following to reduce any exposure you might have to future attacks.

Keep your WordPress install up-to-date. There are vulnerabilities removed and bug-fixes included in each update.

Remove unused plugins and themes. The less you have installed, the less possibility there is that you’ll have some vulnerability open to hackers.

Don’t use shared hosting. With shared hosting, you are also vulnerable should someone else get hacked. With a dedicated server – even virtual servers – you are more isolated from the laziness or ignorance of other website owners.

If you want help, just give us a ring.

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FERVOR

  At Fervor we are dedicated to more than marketing, we help those out to make an impact bigger than the bottom line. More Here.