24. August 2011 by Frank Goad.

I find there are three kinds of questions that my clients ask: A. Those of piercing insight; B. Those of curiosity or the need for more info, and; C. Those that tax any form of belief.

A. I love, love, love getting the A-types. They make my job so much easier and the clients see much better results. Sometimes they occur when a concept I’m explaining lights up inside their head and they see the big(ger) picture; other times, they happen when they take what they’re given and come up with something entirely new. These questions (or observations) are a bit rare and usually come when I’ve been working with someone for awhile.

B. These make up the majority of questions that I get and occur during the discovery and strategy portions of our relationship. Given that Frank Communication’s modus operandi is pretty comprehensive (we look at the whole company/picture, not just a small aspect), and that we ask a LOT of questions, clients don’t always see the connections we’re working toward. As we spend time together, they see what’s going on and get excited, and then the questions come: “Hey, what if …?”, “That sounds like something I saw last week – did you see … ?”, or “Ohh, I get it … does this mean we’ve been … ?” These are exciting because these questions lead to an A question if they’re going to happen.

C. The incredible ones in this category aren’t what you might think: They usually don’t come from ignorance but, instead, come from misinformation. They can start with “Well, I’ve got a friend who said X, so don’t you think we should … ?”, or,  ”Yeah, well, I heard about X and heard about someone who tried it and X happened – shouldn’t we try that?”, or a variation of those.

C-type questions are understandable, though, because so much has changed about advertising and marketing in the last six years, and some changes are a bit drastic. Folks are often taking advice from people who are shooting in the dark (often at their foot), or they’re reading books written by someone who’s really persuasive but ill-suited to be giving advice, or who is simply giving bad advice. Sometimes it’s because folks are desperately confused and grabbing at straws or, even more bewildering and touchy, a good friend tried something that worked for them, but which doesn’t work so well for my client for one or more reasons (timing, content, budget, etc.).

When I get C-type questions, I’m glad because that means we’re making progress. It often happens that when folks have a bad experience, although they might be wary, they now have a base of information that helps them make sense of what will help.

The most important thing is to keep asking questions. Sure, sometimes the questions sound dumb, but that’s okay because that’s how we learn, and the more we learn the better off we are. A, B or C, it doesn’t matter because you’ll probably only have to ask any of them once.

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26. August 2009 by Frank Goad.

Cryptic title, I know. What I mean is, the things I see on my computer - the electrons - make me reflect on my corporeal being - the atoms. Facebook has really messed with my mind many times. For instance, folks I’ve not seen in twenty or thirty years from my little hometown are now talking to me on Facebook. I see their pictures and they’re not the ones I knew back then. Logically, what would you expect? High school was a long, long time ago.

On the other hand, the realization of the amount of time that’s passed smacks me around a bit. High school reunions just wash over you and you get a lot of it out of the way in one “fell swoop.” Facebook is a steady diet of, “Oh, man, has it been that long?”

To anyone under thirty-five or forty, this is probably fairly meaningless. It occurred to me that history teachers probably have a hard time because it’s not easy to get someone to appreciate other folk’s history when you don’t have one of your own. When your own is still being written, the ever-lengthening scope of it tends to skew how you record it.

It doesn’t stop the melancholy, though, and that’s just life. While that’s easy to say, the emotions color everything. Being fairly ambitious, my tombstone will not read, “Nice guy, but unmotivated”, so I think about my legacy. What example will I leave my children? Probably that of a workaholic but, in many respects, that’s a man’s world to me.

All that aside, there’s still the fact that I’m deep into middle age and the re-connections make me think harder about what being my age really means. Things are more finite now. My life is good, but there’s a gravity and a lightness that coincide. I can glimpse the end and the beginning, see all the good that’s passed and imagine that which is coming. The age old questions - What have I done with my life? How will I get by when I’m old? Etc. - bear down but, being pretty optimistic, I always assume that I’ll bull my way through it all. Still, there’s a little nagging doubt and ’round and ’round we go. That’s life, though, and it’s a far better thing than the alternative.

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