Skyhooks or Cranes? (Danny Iny)

It was comforting, reading his chapter in Engagement from Scratch, that in some ways – however big or itty bitty –  Danny Iny seems somewhat like me.  At least he was back in 2010, with some things seriously going for him, positioning him with strong growth potential, but the results not happening.

Background:  Back in 2007, at 24 (25?), Danny founded a start-up that went bust by the end of ’08.  He found himself with a semblance of a client base, burdened by debt & striving to keep afloat. 

The key word – STRIVING. Danny didn’t fold; he flexed his entrepreneurial muscles & forged ahead, still enthusiastic eager energized.  As he says, “I reached out to my past clients, went to every networking event that I could find, rebuilt my consulting practice, started paying off my debt, and go back on my feet.”  Danny didn’t wait to feel stabilized; he DID things that made it so. 

In Peter Vogopoulis, Danny found a kindred spirit.  Like Danny, Peter was a bustling business/marketing coach, working with entrepreneurs & seriously small businesses (0-10 employees). 

The two became concerned with the many MEs (as in me myself & I) they saw – people with inspired ideas but without the means ($) to pay for the training they needed to flip from dream to DONE.  The two wondered - How to support grievously under- or unfunded entrepreneurs?

Danny & Peter gave abundantly of their time & energies, but realized they could totally deplete themselves without making much difference to the huge problem.  They looked around for training that could fill that need & discovered – there wasn’t any.  So, they built one themselves, a task to which they were well suited, with experience in both marketing & education.  (Now who does that sound like?  Or, right – me!)

The partners developed a program, designed a website, kicked off a new blog, launched a business.  The two men were fired up, eager for all the hits on their blog that would drive traffic to their website & sign up ready to roar trainees.  Reality was a tad different – they scored abysmally low readership, no sales.  Zilch.

One of the many things they learned – and I learned, thanks to Engagement…. – is the best website & blog is worth nada if readers don’t respond to a clear call to action.  The whole reason for writing a blog – convert interest into activity!

Peter & Danny’s weren’t.

So, they stepped back, reassessed rejiggered revamped their approach.  Things improved, readership soared 300% ~ to 25-30 readers a day.  They needed to jump start way more people (the MEs) who needed them.  Here’s the core of their aha:

·         There’s no getting around the fact it takes time to grow a blog. 

·         Put one foot in front of the other, walk don’t run.

·         Build a solid scaffolding on which to drape your efforts

·         To build something BIG, begin with something small & effective, repeated over & over, slowly but surely closing the distance between dream & DONE.

Danny grabs my hyper-focused attention when he says, “Try to run before you learn to walk, and you’d never stop crawling.”

Moment of silence, please.

That one sentence describes the very thing that doomed me in elementary school &, in lesser ways, in high school & college.  See, the messages I processed from my considerably older (and probably oblivious) siblings was to bide my time for the great & grand gesture – which never came.  I am sure that they knew all about the importance of taking small steps, but all I heard was “big & bold.”  Duh on me!  The years I wasted looking for skyhooks instead of using earth-bound cranes.

Skyhooks & cranes are terms introduced by Daniel Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.  A skyhook reaches down from the sky & pulls up creations from the earth.  It is, alas, purely imaginary.  Cranes build up from the ground, creating the Empire State Building & the Golden Gate Bridge & … well, anything that soars to any height!  They build their wonders incrementally, step by step. 

For shockingly long periods of my all-too-short life, I regularly banked on skyhook-worthy miracles instead of taking the time & steps to secure a stable foundation.  Sigh - even when I stopped seeking impossible skyhooks & settled down to the slog of getting things done, my catalogue of habits kept messing up efforts to actually flip from dream to DO. 

It seems to me that finding Engagement from Scratch – dozens of meme-exploding voices – is second only to connecting with John in shaking up my perception of who I am & how far I can reach.  Today, it’s easier to see if I’m wishing for skyhook supernatural solutions ~OR~ acting from a super nature that understands we have to walk before we can run, build a strong foundation before we can cut the ribbon on a soaring skyscraper.

My spirit does cartwheels reading that building relationships is at the heart of rewarding online activities, particularly blogging.  That little-known bloggers are as important as big names.  That EVERYONE has value. 

As Danny closes his chapter, “A loyal & strong audience is much more than a bunch of readers – it is a living & breathing entity that ties real people together.  In other words, it is a community.” 

That sings to my soul!