Dennis Yu

The Do’s and Don’ts of taking on a new job

advice, interview, learning, mentorship, Personal Growth /

1) Become a highly-concerned observer 2) If your mouth is open, you are not learning  3) Challenge your assumptions 4) Listen to your peers 5) Help your boss raise their status 6) Create a business plan for every assignment 7) Direct your availability up, down, and sideways 8) Be aware of others’ feelings and goals  9) Know the names and responsibilities of your peers 10) Ask for help and show your appreciation 11) Do not try to impress others with your past  12) Keep to your word 13) Become part of your team first before you become a leader 14) Arrive early and stay late. 27 years ago, the CEO of American Airlines gave me this. This will stay with me forever, and I am sure with my mission to provide jobs to a million Pakistanis this will come in very handy for them. 

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What course should I take?

learning, Learn Do Teach /

We’re trying to help small businesses by training more folks to be able to help them move their business online. It starts with Learn. Do. Teach. The more we know the more we can share. I think we’ll see a crowd-sourcing of education. And what a great opportunity! A lot of folks have been asking me for direction, so let me break down our course offerings. All our courses are broken into 1-minute chunks. Why one minute? That’s how much time you have. For solopreneurs: start with Vendasta, how to start an agency. For business owners, and especially local small business owners, chiro, plumber, etc., start with Social Amplification Engine. If you want to work ON your business not IN your business, or if you’re the emotive, creative, relationship-driven type, start with personal branding. All three will lead you to the same place, but you can choose where you begin, based on your skills and your situation. But begin by playing to your strengths. If you’re trying to scale up, look at Checklist Architecture, optimization course, basecamp basics (the six threads on how we organize projects at scale) Level 4 Project Manager Course; How do you project manage? If you’re ready to scale, you can start using Learn. Do. Teach. If you’re a successful business owner (doing more than $1 million/year), then look at the Nine Triangles Course. It’s a framework that will work best if you’re already doing quite well. There are many ways into all of our courses, but they all lead to the same framework: The 18-Module Architecture. There’s a path for the specialists; digital markers, agency owners, and stay-at-home moms. You’ll focus on Modules 7-12. Modules 1-6 make up the Social Amplification Engine; good for business owners. If you’re a partner, like Vendasta, GoDaddy, or Instagram, there’s a path to train you. No matter where you are on your journey, think about balancing learning, doing, and teaching. Then, when you’re ready, and you’ve learned the skills, send your work over to me. We’ll work to get you hooked up in a marketplace so you can begin helping others. Think of it like online dating, except for business. As you share, you’ll get feedback, and accolades, from people like me. Here’s a tip to get you started: find your lighthouse client. It will be easier to serve 50 businesses that are similar than it will be to serve 10 random, different businesses. Let me know, what has been your favorite course? What course did you start with? What course did you find the most interesting? How can we improve our courses? Where have you been stuck? Most of all, I want to see you succeed! Hit me up. And, do something for me, let’s start overcoming the of being on video – start replying to things in short videos! Be it your friends’ text messages, Facebook posts, Instagram messages, or whatever. Just jump in! Check out all of our courses here.

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I’m exhausted

Business, COVID-19, learning /

I’ve been up past 4 am each day this past week, responding to people who really need help. They lost their job, their business is shut down, they need money right now for rent, and they have kids to feed. How many local businesses around you are struggling? Want to help your local restaurant, chiropractor, real estate agent, or other business let people know they are still open– serving food curbside and handling customers via digital? This Coronavirus pandemic is not going away in 27 days– there is no going back to “normal”. We face a permanent shift to learning how to connect digitally, to market digitally, and to learn digitally– do you agree? My buddy, Brendan King, created the Conquer Local program to help train digital agencies to serve local businesses. He’s footing the bill, since he’s a successful business owner doing his part in this crisis– so it’s totally free to you, even if you have no experience. I’m honored to be one of the instructors in the program, which includes live weekly training calls for us to perform exercises together to start your digital marketing agency. We will not only help you get everything going but give you clients, too, once you’re qualified to serve them. While people are quarantined at home, instead of watching more Netflix, they should be taking advantage of the time to learn Facebook ads, how to rank on local search results, how to get more reviews, how to generate more revenue from their existing customer base, how to create one-minute videos, and so forth. If you want to join this free program, I’d be honored to teach you– link in the comments below. If you are a world-class digital or local marketer and want to help out by training and mentoring these new agency owners, let me know. If you’re a local business and you want help during this time, you could go through these same exercises yourself– link in comments below. We need to create more jobs and help local businesses right now, do you agree?

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The journey.

Growth Mindset, learning /

If all you see from someone is pictures from the top of the mountain, applaud them. But if you hear lessons from their journey along the way, follow them. Decide if you’re more interested in what success looks like or whether you are willing to put in the hard work, behind the scenes to get you there. When you see someone struggling, encourage them, since the journey is 10 times harder and will take 10 times longer than they think. They will need all the support they can get— and that includes me.

The journey. Read More »

Over the last 25 years, I’ve seen a lot of people succeed and fail.

Failure, leadership, learning, Success /

The #1 thing I notice beginners do, which experts don’t, is they focus on… + FANCY instead of the fundamentals. When we troubleshoot campaigns, 99% of the time, a bunch of fundamentals are missing. And it shouldn’t take an expert to notice what can be tracked via a checklist. + URGENCY instead of results. A fire drill is exciting and gives the semblance that things are happening. But don’t mistake commotion for progress. + APPEARANCES instead of progress. Are you focusing on how you look instead of getting the job done? If your perfect Instagram flex is ruined by getting dirt under your nails, you can still out-pretend the other fakers. + THEMSELVES instead of others. If you want to make a million dollars, solve a $100 million problem. When you lift up others and serve others, they can’t help but toot your horn, instead of you awkwardly tooting your own. LEARNING all the time instead of trying to give advice on something you’ve never done yourself. The most successful people I know read 3+ hours a day and actively seek out other successful people. Do you know someone who fits the description above of a successful person or a failure?

Over the last 25 years, I’ve seen a lot of people succeed and fail. Read More »

Be your own videographer

learning, video /

If you don’t have a friend who can follow you around to take video, here’s your solution to capturing b-roll footage for your personal and company brand. You. Yes, that’s right. You have to be capturing these bits that give your videos context, for your video editing person to use in addition to whatever you might get from your live show, speaking engagement, or interview. I use the Facebook Moments app to automatically categorize and share these with our video people. So no need to mess around with uploading and labeling. Facebook automatically recognizes faces and locations. You have to get scrappy when you don’t have a professional film crew and a big budget. That means you have to learn a little bit about good shooting techniques, even if you’re an amateur like me who doesn’t have much time and is intimidated by fancy equipment. I do this all with an old iPhone, and so can you.

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Lisbon, London, Dubai, Iceland, or wherever.

Leave a Comment / leadership, learning /

So many people glamorize and seek the “laptop lifestyle”. But what they don’t tell you is that the secret to pulling it off is solid operations- meaning that you have a team of people who are following a clear process to get the work done as a TEAM. Failures WILL happen. What’s your process for handling them? We lost two people last week who wanted the glamour but weren’t able to get stuff done. And because of the process, others came in to take over, so that projects don’t run into disaster. The #1 thing I spend my time thinking about is how to create “repeatable excellence”. In other words, look at where we’ve had failures in the past and continuously build training, task assignments, accountability, and automation to enable “graceful failure” when it does happen. If you play golf, you know it’s not about hitting perfect shots but minimizing the cost of mistakes. I want to hit the fairways and greens in regulation. But if I miss, I want to go “up and down” to save par each time. When you travel, that’s one way to test whether you have a strong process- that your team can operate without you physically there in the office to provide real-time support. My knowledge and experience in operations is 10X whatever my skill in digital marketing. The actual making and tuning of ads are mechanically simple and defined. But the emotions of people, the expectations of clients, and the random things that happen along the way create an infinite variety of situations to test your process.

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If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Leave a Comment / learning, mentorship /

The second thing is to realize that it’s not WHAT you do that matters most, but HOW you do it. People are incredibly forgiving and patient when you make mistakes. I’ve made more errors than a millipede has legs. Your mentors are there to help you identify your blind spots. Listen to them. Get a mentor now if you don’t have one. Fear, pride, and ignorance widen your blind spots.Remedy this with gratitude and accountability. You can’t have fear if you have gratitude.You can’t be blinded by ignorance if you are accountable. Is this something you need to hear right now or perhaps a friend of yours who is struggling with something?

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. Read More »

What I’ve learned about entrepreneurship and getting stuff done

Leave a Comment / Entrepreneurship, Growth Mindset, learning /

– 2 hours of learning followed by an hour of doing beats 3 hours of doing.– If you have to say you’re an influencer, successful, honest, or whatever– you’re probably not.– Things are never as bad, or as good, as they seem, at the moment– so slow down a bit.– Why do people buy? There’s the “real” reason and socially acceptable reason. Appeal to the emotion first, then the logic.– Successful companies are based on teams, not heroes. If you are growing your business, do you have a partner and several mentors?– The “secret” of Facebook ads or the newsfeed algorithm is not a magic formula, but mastery of the fundamentals– goals, content, targeting.– If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a video is worth 1,000 pictures and 1,000,000 words. Make one-minute videos the heart of your marketing strategy by organizing your people and the process around it.– Having a few high-quality friends is worth more than “knowing” everyone out there.– Most people are struggling on the inside, but put on a good face– so be nice whenever you can.– Occam’s Razor is a good lie detector and problem troubleshooter– the simplest explanation is usually the most likely.– Dunning-Kruger variation– those who talk the most, know the least. The best people to know are not the most famous ones unless your goal is to be famous.– I’ve gotten more stuff done by sleeping 7 hours each night than “hustling”. That hour of clear thinking is worth 5 hours of tired, mistake-ridden zig-zagging. I justify working out as a business investment in my mind.– It’s okay to say NO– you don’t owe anyone your time. And without a filter, you can’t really say YES to what matters. Mari Smith taught me to say NO to anything that wasn’t a heck yes.– Don’t confuse motion with progress. I work only 3 hours a day since I need 2 hours to learn and 3 hours to teach (#LDT = learn, do, teach).– Perhaps the biggest learning– to consciously make time for GRATITUDE at the start and end of each day, to appreciate the awesome people I’ve been taking for granted.

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I’ve learned and grown so much.

Leave a Comment / Entrepreneurship, learning, mentorship /

I truly know that all things work together for your good if you believe there is great good in even the darkest evil. I used to think the winners in entrepreneurship were the smartest, hardest working, or luckiest– they had the better product and optimally tuned process. But examining more closely, they have better teams from better cultures. Their people support each other and have open communication that first requires complete trust. The journey is so hard– beyond what one guy can do, despite the superheroes in the movies. And without mentors, loyal customers, and amazing teammates– your best ideas are just that. * I’ve re-learned that it’s better to be kind than right.* People remember how they felt, not what you said or did.* Gratitude helps you realize wins you may have overlooked or discarded.* You are alone, yet have more friends than you know.* What appears so good is never that good, but what’s bad isn’t that bad, either.* Decisions made when angry, in haste, or in secret you will regret later.* There is always enough time to do the right thing and even fix mistakes that seem too late. I’ve heard that if you want to go fast, go alone– but that if you want to go far, go together. Everyone needs support, even the ones that appear the strongest. Mentors are rare in the world of friends or work– so find them and do anything you can to cherish them. I’ve spent time in the last few days in awe of mentors who have given selflessly to me, whether still alive or just in my memories now.

I’ve learned and grown so much. Read More »

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