Archives for March 2021

March
13, 2021

6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

An exemplary woman brings great satisfactions. This is demonstrated by the study When women lead, firms win by Standard & Poor’s. Well, when women lead, companies earn up to $ 1.8 billion worldwide.

And although only 39% of companies in Mexico have been founded by women, according to the Association of Entrepreneurs of Mexico ( ASEM ), their businesses are precisely more profitable than those run by men, according to the report Women Entrepreneurs: an unexplored investment opportunity , from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The IDB notes that women entrepreneurs in Latin America receive up to 50% less investment, and their companies achieve income up to 20% higher than companies founded by men. However, women are the ones who have been most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. A clear example is that as daycare services, schools and other services continue to be closed, they have to work more and are not paid; and because they do not have time available, they cannot grow their businesses.

But they well say that “there is a time for everything.” Therefore, we invite you to the webinar organized by Entrepreneur and Mastercard called Woman 4.0, forming alliances and leadership with a cause , where four successful women will be the speakers: Silvina Moschini, CEO of SheWorks! and TransparentBusiness, Marcela Carrasco, president of the Andean Division of Mastercard, Gabriela Lucke, director of INCAE’s Collaborative Center and Female Leadership, and Claudia Corona, founder of Impronta Verde and Co-Leader of the 30% Club.

Technology will be the protagonist of this webinar that will take place on March 17 at 3:00 pm ( Mexico City time) through the Entrepreneur networks in Spanish .

Technology became the balm in the pandemic, as it has prevented an economic and social collapse. Thanks to it, companies were able to operate remotely. Therefore, today more than ever it is essential to invest in technological tools for your business to succeed. The goal is to produce more, better and in less time.

In the technology sector, women are the ones who have the greatest challenges when undertaking entrepreneurship. Since 2010, only 43% of tech startups founded by a woman have been funded, according to Endeavor, an organization that promotes high-impact entrepreneurs.

Good advice is the way to success

One of the speakers at the Mujer 4.0 webinar, forming alliances and leadership with a cause , is Claudia Corona, passionate about innovation in the food and agriculture sector. She is the founder of Impronta Verde , a consultancy that promotes disruptive solutions to reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions throughout the supply chain. Before starting he worked for more than 20 years in global banks; and in leading multinational companies such as Comex and ECOM Group.

Claudia Corona knows that good advice is the way to success; Therefore, she has had mentors who have helped her understand different perspectives, languages and different ways of solving situations. “The harshest comments I have received have been from women trying to fit into a masculine milieu. I think they judged with more severe criteria than men because they had to open a gap for others ”, shares Claudia Corona, founder of Impronta Verde and Co-Leader of the 30% Club for Entrepreneur in Spanish.

Her fight for equality changed when she decided to become a mother, especially since flexible hours weren’t common 13 years ago. “I had to work overtime and show undeniable results. I feel very proud of having made it possible for others to have access to my same work scheme ”.

^{Art: Entrepreneur}

Claudia Corona is very good at negotiating, so we ask her for her best tips for our Entrepreneur reader:

1. Knowing your personality is vital. To know how to act and connect with people. To do this, you must develop empathy and humility.
2. Set points of agreement and disagreement diplomatically . To achieve this you must have confidence in yourself and use your voice to say what is valid and what is not negotiable.
3. Know how to listen and read body language . It helps a lot to understand the reactions of the other person to generate a dynamic that helps you achieve your goal.
4. Profiling very well the person with whom you are going to negotiate . To find common and different points that are very useful for dialogue when conversations get tense. Take a breath when the conversation stalls.
5. Be up to date on various topics. Sometimes it helps to connect in multiple situations, especially, to know habits and customs in other countries.
6. Attend to the details . You have to see the whole forest, but in the details you discover definitive turning points for forging long-term relationships.

And how to detect opportunities in adverse environments? The best advice from this entrepreneur is to know the trends and the environment. Stay alert to needs and look for ways to innovate because this makes the opportunities stand out.

Finally, for the woman who aspires to the top management of a company, she recommends: be curious, be willing to experiment, learn and adapt in short terms. Having resilience and tenacity is crucial to knowing how to get up after failure and learn from it.

Learn more about the subject and learn how to boost your leadership in the webinar: Woman 4.0, forming alliances and leadership with a cause .   We are waiting for you on March 17 at 3:00 pm (Mexico City time) in the Entrepreneur Networks in Spanish

Our business coaching franchises taps into growing demand for coaching and sales training services

The Growth Coach^® is an industry-leading business coaching franchise, established in over 150 markets in the United States and abroad. Since our founding in 1992, our coaches have helped thousands of small business owners achieve their personal and professional goals. With 28 million businesses in the United States, the demand for business coaching has grown to a tremendous $11 billion industry. The Growth Coach is ramping up for a rapid nationwide expansion, and is actively seeking entrepreneurs with proven leadership experience to help their small business communities prosper.

A business coaching franchise is vital in all economies – good or bad

Navigating uncertain economic times is a minefield of potential disasters for small business owners, managers and the sales teams that drive revenues. The Growth Coach business coaching franchise owners provide stakeholders with the tools and skills needed to hone their instincts. That way, they can avoid growing too quickly ahead of an economic downturn and make sure to maximize opportunities for growth and expansion when the economy is strong.

It’s no secret that economists are bullish on the economy these days — except on the days when they’re not. It seems we can’t go a week without hearing about this index setting that record, or that stock reaching an important threshold, only to turn around the next week and hear dire predictions about leading economic indicators. That’s where The Growth Coach business coach comes in — and that’s also one of the reasons why our business coaching franchise is virtually immune to economic turmoil.

Our management team positions Growth Coach owners for long-term franchise success

When you make the decision to become part of The Growth Coach, you’re making a commitment to yourself and your community to help business owners, managers and sales teams grow — both personally and professionally. We’re there with you at each step of the process, to provide training, develop new materials to respond to market demands, and help you grow your coaching franchise through professional marketing and promotional materials.

We’ve spent more than 15 years perfecting The Growth Coach franchise model in communities across the country, working with coaches from all walks of life and myriad careers. All that work shows in our comprehensive training programs, simplified business operations, referral-based marketing systems, and high-visibility branding.

March
9, 2021

12 min read

This story appears in the
March 2021
issue of
Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

The scene opens in hell. We see flames. We hear screams. Then the camera closes in on Satan himself — big horns, giant pectorals, bright red skin — as he slumps over on his throne. His phone buzzes. He glances at the screen. “You’re a match!” it says. Satan perks up, eyes wide in amazement. The dark lord, it appears, is looking for love on Match.com.

Cut to: a bridge underpass, in a park on Earth. There are trees. It is quiet. Satan waits to meet his date. A woman approaches. “Hi, Two-zero-two-zero?” Satan says to her. “Please,” she replies, “call me 2020.” Then it’s montage time: Satan and 2020 picnicking in an empty football stadium, doing yoga in an empty gym, stealing toilet paper and hanging out by a Dumpster fire, and generally setting their hearts aflame as they watch the world burn.

Related: 5 Most Successful Video Marketing Tactics Brands Are Using to Grab Eyeballs and Convert Customers

When this ad for Match.com debuted online in December 2020, it triggered an instant lovefest online. Ryan Reynolds expected as much. He cowrote and produced the spot for his marketing company, Maximum Effort, which has become one of the hottest in the advertising game. “I would have paid for [the Match ad] myself just to make sure we got it done,” Reynolds says. “I felt pretty confident that it would work. And when it did work, then I would go bill them back.” He laughs. But don’t worry about his compensation: He’s also on Match.com’s board.

A pandemic-themed ad created for Match.com.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Maximum Effort

Reynolds used to dislike marketing. He saw it as an obligation. And anyway, he was an actor; the marketing was for other people. But then, he spent a decade trying to turn the oddball Marvel superhero Deadpool into a movie — and even when 20th Century Fox finally got on board, the studio remained skeptical of its potential. So he teamed up with one of the studio’s marketing execs, George Dewey, who’d spent 15 years at the giant ad agency McCann, and they launched a ridiculous guerrilla campaign that stirred up so much excitement that Deadpool became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. (And so did its sequel.)

Related: How to Plan a Viral Marketing Campaign

“We started to look at marketing as a completely different tool we had in the shed, and something we could really tell stories with,” Reynolds says. “Everything is storytelling; if you’re not paying attention to that, then you’re just broadcasting and not engaging.” He and Dewey joined forces to build Maximum Effort, which has since produced consistent viral gems for a range of projects, including companies Reynolds owns (most notably Aviation Gin and the low-cost wireless company Mint Mobile). “Now I look at marketing as one of the great joys of my life and my business.”

Recently, while shooting a film in Vancouver, Reynolds stepped away to share what he’s learned about pushing the boundaries of what’s creatively possible — and pushing himself (and his team) to constantly reinvent.

Image Credit: Guy Aroch

Tell me about your creative process. When you sit down to come up with something like that Match ad, where are you starting?

You know that line about how Shakespeare smuggled poetry into popular works? Well, we’re kind of the opposite. We really feel like, when somebody is watching an ad, there’s no reason it cannot feel extremely entertaining and inventive and fun.

We want to bend, not break. We want to be able to comment on something like 2020 without being disrespectful to the grimness of that situation. So you’ve got to give yourself some guardrails — and we love guardrails. Problems are our best friends, because they really inspire ideas and ways to create. Even if it’s just “Our budget has to be X.” We can still get the job done, and we have to think outside the box in order to deliver something that is of great quality. I mean, showbiz will teach you that. If you keep throwing money at a problem, that problem is only going to be exacerbated.

I’m reminded of something I’ve heard you say before — that you’re happy Aviation Gin had a smaller marketing budget than its large competitors, because it forced you to be scrappier with your marketing.

If somebody says, “You have $10 million to go shoot an ad,” the reflex for most people would be to say, “OK, so let’s start with some helicopter shots. The city’s in peril, a superhero comes and lands and uses a skyscraper to block out the alien ship.” Immediately, your brain goes to scope and scale. But scope and scale can be character, too.

Related: Here’s How to Plan Your Digital-Marketing Strategy and Set Budget Priorities

This lesson was driven home to me while shooting Deadpool. Every time the studio took money away from our budget, we replaced whatever set piece we lost with character. Eventually that became the hallmark and defining characteristic of that property. People don’t remember saving-the-world kind of nonsense. They remember what he said, or how he reacted to a moment. To me, that lesson is worth its weight in gold, because you can penetrate the zeitgeist and make an impression without spending a ton of money, without busting the bank.

I mean, we live in a world that’s so reactionary, so there’s a lot to play with. But here’s a tenet of our work: We don’t want to be divisive. There’s enough of that out there. I know it sounds super saccharin, maybe a little nauseating, but when we talk about our company’s M.O., we talk about bringing people together. So when we talked to Match.com and they were nervous about this pitch — Hold on, your lead characters are Satan and a woman named 2020? — we had to reassure them that we’re not here to divide. We are here to embrace something and bring people together over a common experience. When people have an emotional response to something, or find something incredibly funny, it travels.

Image Credit: Guy Aroch

That seems to explain your marketing, which is often very simple. Most of the ads you produce are just a few people in a room, or you speaking direct to camera. And what you’re saying here is — a large budget can cause people to forget about human connections.

Yeah. I think audiences are numbed to spectacle. We’ve all seen superheroes save the day. We’ve all seen a city in peril. I mean, when we were working on our Peloton Aviation Gin ad, all we were doing is really just acknowledging the cultural landscape in that moment and doing it in a way that doesn’t attack Peloton. [For context: In 2019, Peloton released a cringe-inducing ad featuring a woman whose husband buys her a Peloton bike, and she becomes uncomfortably obsessed with it. Critics and consumers tore it apart, interpreting the ad as sexist or tone-deaf. Days later, Maximum Effort released an ad featuring the same actress, looking shaken, downing Aviation Gin martinis at a bar with two girlfriends and toasting to new beginnings. It was widely praised as one of the greatest ad moments of 2019.]

Related: Taraji P. Henson: Your Mission Must Be Stronger Than Your Fear

I just thought there was such an interesting redemption to that. If we could find Monica Ruiz, the woman in the Peloton ad, we could give this a side B — a look at this person from a different perspective, in a way that acknowledges and plays with the cultural landscape and the zeitgeist but still is only there to have fun with it. Not to further divide. Not to wag our finger at anybody or vilify anybody. Just to acknowledge this thing.

We found Monica — I called her four or five different times because she was so nervous that this would backfire. It’s already so alienating when you’re the subject of all of that energy and attention. But we did it. It was really where we started talking about “fast-vertising” — doing things with a speed and agility that others can’t, because Aviation Gin is owned by me, so I don’t really have to go up some huge corporate ladder. I can just say, “Let’s do it.”

You just told two stories — Match and Peloton — in which you approached a potentially controversial subject and had to convince others that you mean well. What’s your strategy for talking people into seemingly scary ideas?

It’s convincing them that I’m as risk-averse, if not more than they are. You want to be able to do something where everyone feels like you’re being provocative but nobody feels vilified, attacked, or nullified. It always comes back to that same edict: Let’s bring people together. Let’s filter everything we do through a prism of joy, as opposed to cynicism or division. I mean, division is very viral, but it’s not our bag. And it’s boring.

Related: Richard Branson Skewers Ryan Reynolds’s Business Knowledge as Virgin Atlantic and Aviation Gin Announce Partnership

Your ads can be self-referential or feature you as an overly confident dummy. Like the ad about Aviation Gin’s partnership with Virgin Atlantic. The setup was that you and Richard Branson were making an ad about the announcement, but you barely understood what was happening. Where does that instinct come from, to flip advertising on its head?

It just depends on what we’re doing. I mean, with the companies I own, I feel an obligation to be transparent. It doesn’t mean that transparency can’t be soaked in irony or self-awareness or silliness. When it’s me out in front, usually I’m playing with preconceived notions about celebrity or about the commercial space. We lean into the things a lot of people traditionally lean away from, which is “Hey, this is an ad. We are acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape in this ad. And we are telling you that we’re doing that.” It allows people to be a part of it.

Reynolds with Richard Branson in a spot for Aviation Gin.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Aviation Gin

If I’m zooming out even farther, I look at our company, and our goal is to radically improve. But you don’t radically improve just on creative, because everyone is going to have great ideas. It’s our goal to radically improve in new and inventive ways. Rethinking things is our favorite thing to do, too. If I hadn’t second-guessed every decision I made since I exited the womb, I don’t know that I would be in the position I’m in. I think it’s OK to rethink things — even good ideas! I mean, if you’re satisfied with just making money, you’re not going to be a disruptor for very long.

As any entrepreneur knows, there’s a difference between wanting innovation and creating a culture that fosters innovation. How are you doing it?

I always say that you can’t be good at something unless you’re willing to be bad. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten way more comfortable with not having the answers. I think it’s such a great tool of leadership to be able to say, “I don’t know.” The worst leaders I’ve ever worked with or been around are the ones who are steadfast and indignant in their righteousness, and really worried about their image. So I love saying, “I don’t know.”

Related: Drew Barrymore Grew Her Lifestyle Brand and Started a New Venture in the Middle of a Pandemic. Here’s How She Did It.

Everyone at the company has different specializations and different interests, which we foster and want to grow. I want the people who work at Maximum Effort to feel like they’re the CEO. I want everybody pushing toward a direction that is really inspiring for them.

And that’s worked so far. I don’t pretend to know how exactly to run a company. But I think that people who run companies, they don’t know either! It’s great to stay curious and in the moment. Innovation is always born of curiosity.

You have an ability to stay a step ahead of culture — to engage with the next part of the conversation. What’s your advice on how to do that?

Well, you’d be a moron to not acknowledge the now. But as a company, we talk about 2022 right now. It’s just that balance of: We love culture. We know culture is typically very now. But we also love thinking ahead, and looking at where we would like to be, and what we would like to be doing, and trying to manifest that to the best of our abilities.