Ever made pancakes? Even if you haven't, we bet you actually have…
…because developing any new idea or initiative is just like making pancakes.
The first time you make a pancake - and I say this from deeply held experience - it’s not usually the greatest. My first real pancakes were a disaster of epic breakfast proportions. If you’ve ever bitten into a brick with maple syrup on top, you’ll understand. Ask my kids.
The second pancake you make though, is usually better. Even if the now toothless kids you served the first round of bricks to, find it a bit too salty.
So you have another crack.
The third? Well, yeah, not bad at all.
By the forth and fifth, you’re adding chocolate sprinkles and flipping pancakes blindfold.
A few weeks ago, we made our first big new pancake. It was a masterclass, called 10 Slides To Yes. It trains you in a 10-slide system that gives you the confidence and clarity to get buy-in to ANY new idea you have. It could be a new product launch, a new strategy, process, initiative, or winning a new client or project. You name it, getting buy-in is how we get stuff done.
Which is why we set out to share our decades of experience pitching and selling ideas, initiatives, product and brands, so you could get a big career edge in about 90 minutes flat, and for less than the price of a dinner for two (OK, with wine).
When we served it up to you a few weeks ago, we weren’t entirely sure what stage our pancake was at.
First? Second? Or were we at the chocolate sprinkles AND whipped cream stage?
Which is why we let you taste it first.
It turns out…our pancake was a bit of everything.
The good news is, you thought the class itself was unanimously excellent, valuable and easy to put in place. We got a range of fabulous testimonials.
PHEW.
But the big a-ha? The packaging didn’t do it justice. You told us the website copy on the landing page was too long. It didn’t describe the class well enough, the value you get, or how good it was. We had put our pancake on a digital shelf and inadvertently disguised it as a gluten-free loaf of bread.
We knew the drill. Act on the feedback. Fast.
So we overhauled the masterclass site. We cut the copy down. We edited it and edited it until every chiseled word and every image had a purpose.
And we’re sharing our experience as a Jolt, because it’s as real world as it gets - and if you haven’t already gone through something like this - you will.
To see the changes we made, you can check out the new site here:
The point of sharing our in-the-moment experience with you is five-fold:
It’s the purpose of The Jolt.
Always be humble. Actively asking for feedback on any new initiative is the greatest thing you can do. You can choose what to do with the feedback, but we guarantee, it’ll open your eyes and fire new synapses of thought.
Everything communicates. Communication is the lifeblood of success, and the hardest to get right. Even if the words you use to describe something are only slightly off at the start, that gap of understanding can widen exponentially over time until you forget what your initial intent was in the first place. Edit fast, then edit again with feeling.
Passion & pride can be blinkers. Pride of ownership and single-mindedness are incredibly powerful resources to move us into action. But pride can also create stubbornness to change when we don’t like what we hear. Feedback kicks stubborn in the pants, and sends it home without dinner.
You never get pancakes right first time. Perfection is an utter illusion. Everything great you see in life, from careers to movies, books, music, websites, products and brands, started life as a less than brilliant pancake* (*apart from the song “Yesterday”, which arrived as a fully formed golden pancake in one of Paul McCartney’s dreams).
There’s a reason Ken Blanchard, author of The One-Minute Manager says “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”.
Feedback makes for great tasting pancakes.
With Love, Milk, Salt (not too much), Sugar, Baking Powder, Butter, Eggs & Flour,
The Jolt.
The New Jolt Masterclass 10 Slides To Yes