david hieatt

“How to build a great brand with very little money”.

David Hieatt is co-founder of The Do Lectures. And Co-Founder of Hiut Denim Co. He has built companies with strong brands using some simple rules that anyone can use.

What you will learn?

How to tell your story?

How to give your brand a voice?

How to get people to love your brand?

The importance of 1000 true fans.

How to use the real advantages of being small? 

Is your idea going to change anything?

How to put a moat around your idea?

How to identify a niche before others?

The importance of being first.

How to fund it without losing control?

How to build a great team without employing anyone?

Price - £200

Limited to ten people.

Price includes – Great lunch with the best local ingredients.

Plus teas, coffees and snacks throughout the day etc.

Location: Cardigan, West Wales

Friday: June 22nd. 10am-5pm.

Mark Shayler's Do Day course: How to develop a world beating strategy from your bedroom? This will take place on June 21st. Same location. If you attend both courses, you can purchase both for £350 combined.

Email: Anna.thomas@thedolectures.co.uk

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 Just the next step.

 No past.

 No future.

 Just now. 

Have you noticed that doing the opposite to what you think often has surprising results.

To get better results at work, our instinct is to put in more hours.

When things stop going so well in our business, our intinct is to work even longer and harder.

When a footballer stops scoring, his instinct is to train harder, do more practice.

And yet, doing the opposite may give you better results.

It's counterintuitive, so it's not something many people try a lot. So there's not much proof.

But here's one example to think about:

 An experiment in the 1940’s measured men loading pig iron onto a train freight cars at The Bethlehem Steel Company. Each man didn’t stop until they managed 12 1/2 tons. By noon, they were exhausted and could do no more.

The next day, they were told to load the pig iron for 26 minutes. Then rest for 34 minutes. They rested more than they worked.  At the end of the day, they had loaded 47 tons. That’s almost 4 times as much as working flat out.

It feels counterintuitive, but if you want to do more, if you want to achieve more, if you want to get better results, go for a run as often as you can, take naps, stop trying so damn hard.

Getting the fit right on a pair of jeans is perhaps the most important

thing a jeans maker can do.

The difference between a great fitting jean and one that is sucky,

can be measured in a matter of millimetres.

That’s why cutting a pair of jeans from the cardboard pattern using a chalk and a single blade-cutting knife is an art.  It is where those millimetres can go missing.

And like all arts, it takes time to acquire.

Our cutter, at The Hiut Denim Co, has cut jeans for 38 years now. So in terms of hours, that is close to 80,000 hours.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote that to be considered a Grand Master at chess, you had to do 10,000 hours.

So I don’t know what that makes our cutter in terms of a title then, but I do know what it means for our customer: A great fitting jean.

www.hiutdenim.co.uk

Look up to the mountain and think it was too steep to climb?

Did you ever wonder, even for the smallest second, if you had the talent to make it to the top?

Did you ever just watch a rival and think ‘I might as well as quit now.’

But you didn’t, did you?

You took the first step up that mountain.

You practiced. You practiced. You practiced.

You said nothing.

You just put one-foot in front of the other one.

And climbed.

Never looking up.

Never looking down.

And the journey wasn’t a quick one.

But overtime, people started to take notice of you.

Admiring the skill. The style. The simplicity.

But it wasn’t easy getting there, was it?

The sacrifices made along the way had a high price.

Then one day, out of the corner of your eye, you caught someone looking at you.

You knew that look. He was thinking ‘I might as well quit now’.

And you shot him a stern look straight back.

“Don’t you dare.”

If you are going to start a business, read this book. If you are running a business, read this book. If you are hiring people, read this book. If you are expanding, read this book. If you are contracting, read this book. Basically, if you have any thought of running a business, you just gotta read this book.

Les McKeown has launched and managed over 40 businesses. And it shows. This is not a book written by a theorist. This knowledge comes from being at the coal face. It’s simple, practical and bloody essential.

Les spoke at The Do Lectures last September. I was looking around at the audience as he spoke and all the entrepreneurs were sitting there and they all looked a little uncomfortable. Les was holding a mirror up the them and me. And we all recognised ourselves in what he was saying.

When you are running a business you tend to think your problems are unique. It’s a lie. The things you are going through follow a set pattern. And once you know that, once you know where you are in that set pattern, then it becomes easier to understand what to do to get your business to be at the stage that you want. And not the one you are in.

The book has really helped me think about the businesses I run. I think it gives you an overview of each defined stage of your business. In a way it gives you confidence to know what you are going through is not unique to you. Once you know that, you can take the emotion out things. And make decisions that will get you to where you want to get to.

It tells you how to hire differently in the different stages, it tells you about the tensions between founders and managers, and it does all this by giving you real life examples which works for me. I relate to the examples given.

At the same time of reading this, I was reading Steve Jobs biography. I can recommend reading these books in tandem. They give you different things. But you need both to succeed in business.

Yes, If you are running a business you should read this book. And then read it again. Essential.

Predictable Success – Les McKeown.

Wall Street Journal  Bestseller.

We have not bought howies back.

We’ve had endless emails, phone calls, text messages, direct messages congratulating us about getting howies back. But we are not part of the management team. Nor have we given any thought about buying it back since we left.

So who has bought it? Well, as much as we can gather from the town gossip, the guy Timberland hired to run howies has bought it with venture capital backing. What that means for its principles like organic cotton, the earth tax and its dream of being the lowest impact clothing company, I guess time will reveal the answers.

As for Clare and myself, we are just about to get our town making jeans again with our new company – The Hiut Denim Company.

I can’t tell you how exciting it is to make something. When you pick up a roll of denim and watch it get turned into a pair of jeans, well, that’s where our hearts are now.

We can’t wait. Not long now.

All the best,

David and Clare.

Erosion works over time.

Yes, there are big storms and the process is speeded up for a short time. But by and large, erosion is just the sheer monotony of the normal. Tide in. Tide out.  Multiplied by a million, trillion times.  A subtle action repeated to give an extra ordinary smoothness to what started life as a jagged rock.

In life I think we all start out as jagged rocks. But unlike erosion, I think it’s the big storms that knock us into shape.

Each big event takes another edge off of us. Until one day, we are fully rounded. And we are then at that time, the very best of what we can be. No edge can get any smother.

When I heard that Steve Jobs had died, I felt another edge fall off of me. A hero of mine had died. My first computer was a Macintosh. And I have never bought any other computer other than Apple.

I loved the simplicity. I loved the fight against the status quo. I loved that there could be another way. I loved he wanted to change something.

And his story of dropping out of college and having to leave the company he started struck a chord with me, because I went though that too.

And for me, he became my role model of how to bounce back. He inspired me to think that the pain of failing was something that I could put to good use.

I believe Steve Jobs left Apple as a creative man and returned as businessman and a creative man. The pain of those big events, well, they were some huge edges falling off of him. And yes, they were the making of him.

His convergence strategy changed music, and then phones and I am sure it will change Television next. And it will be where everything comes together, where music, film, apps, email all merge quite beautifully and simply together for the first time. And it will be his last piece in the jigsaw. It will be his masterpiece. And you and I will think why didn’t someone do that before.

So I would like to thank Steve Jobs for showing that the John Sculley’s of the world don’t win. That one man’s vision is better than any committee. And that you can come back stronger after failure.

My thanks to him for teaching me those things.

9am start.

Good morning, I guess you are all here because you want to go and start something. That’s good. Most businesses fail because they never start. So you are going to be ahead of just about 99% of people. 
So let me ask, what is everybody planning to do? If it’s a secret, keep it that way. If you are happy to share it, then that’s cool too. Also which brands inspire you and why. And today, there’s a lot to cover, if there is anything you want to learn in particular, say now.

Today is going to be me going through 12 key points on building a brand with little money.

1, Love.

The easiest way to get your customers to love your brand is for you to love it first.

The biggest mistake you can make in life is to do something just for the money. It is one of the biggest sadnesses of man. People living for the weekend are people who are dead 5 days a week. Because they are doing the thing they don’t love to earn money so they can do the thing they do love on the weekend. They are alive two days a week.

Don’t do it. You can always make more money, you can’t make more time. So here is some advice: Find your love. And make the thing you love doing the thing you do the most. Not just on weekends. But all the time.

Oh, and the good news is if you love doing, you will get good at it. Work will never feel like work. And in the end, all that love will show in your product, your service, your business. 
Love pays well. Not just in a pay cheque but in your health, in your happiness, in your day to day, in your family life.

My old boss was a difficult but wise man. His advice was to chase the work, not the money. The money will come. And he was right……

Plumbers, chefs, electricians all have their trade secrets. Those little tools or techniques that just make it easier for them to do what they do. It’s the things that make them professional and separates them from the amateurs.

The Internet is the same. It has its tools and techniques that help you stand out. I discovered this by accident.

At some point last year, I was trying to figure out why I was having so many visitors to my blog (davidhieatt@typepad.com). It’s a small blog and the traffic is small but regular. But suddenly the traffic was spiking. That one article had been viewed 45,000 times.

And I didn’t know why. So I began to dig.

When I started to look into it, it turned out that 99% of my traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. It was coming from a single piece I had put on my blog that someone had obviously liked and then had put up on Stumble Upon. And from there it just went a little bit crazy.

I knew of Stumble Upon before this. But I didn’t use it. It wasn’t on my radar. But it was dawning on me just how powerful a tool it is.

So I decided to try and find out more about how to use Stumble Upon. I watched a video by Tim Ferris who I believe amongst other things, is a truly great direct marketeer.

I visited his blog and found a video where he tells the audience just how important Stumble Upon was as a tool for getting his great content out there. I know how good Tim is at using the secret tools of the Internet, so that made me ask the question why doesn’t everyone know how good Stumble Upon is? It was like some secret tool for those in the know. Except, and I keep saying it, it’s massive.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Gi3QNdN2w&feature=player_embedded)

Everyone talks about Facebook, Twitter and Google, (and understandably so) but no one talks about Stumble Upon. And yet it is huge. This set of Internet stats put it second to Facebook with a 25% share of traffic. (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_accounts_for_half_social_traffic_stumbleu.php)

So then I asked someone to go and research Stumble Upon and for them to tell me how we could use it for The Do Lectures. (www.thedolectures.com) To get our great content out there to more people and faster.

Then coincidentally at the same time, we got an email from Stumble Upon saying they would like to give The Do Lectures $5000 worth of free advertising.  At first I thought it was spam. But I checked out the email address and it was for real.

Yeehah.

So not only had we just found out how important Stumble Upon was. And how powerful it is. But they wanted to help us. We were going to get $5000 worth of free advertising. That would bring us 100,000 views plus more if it went viral.

So this August, we spent their money. And correspondingly our viewing figures went crazy. It worked so well for us because we could target their interests to our interest so accurately. And, here's the other good thing. It keeps on working.  If people think your content is great they keep telling people they like it. So it keeps on being spread out there for free. So even though we spent the money real quick, it is still working for us now. Like a snowball going down hill. It just keeps getting bigger. And it keeps rolling without us pushing.

We have tried many things at The Do Lectures to get our talks out there to more people. We have tried Facebook but it hardly made any difference to us. We know Google adwords works but they aren’t cheap.

So when we have some money next year to spend on getting people to see our talks, where will be spending our money? Stumble Upon, no doubt.

I would have said that before we were given $5000 to spend on it. But now I have proof. I saw what it did to our traffic. And, importantly, what it keeps doing to our traffic. I know spending money on Stumble Upon is a super smart way to spend our money.

Just to finish up, whenever we get some spike in our figures now, the first question I ask is it Stumble Upon? The answer is often “Yup”.

Stumble Upon may not get talked about that much, but it is one trade secret worth knowing about.

Because it works.

More info:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/audiencetools