Content Marketing Applied: The Content Hub

SJR's idea to turn brands into their own publishers evolved during the financial crisis of 2007. Amid an economic collapse, everyone was nervous about the future, and there was constant discussion about how the United States would recover. Lawmakers were about to pump billions of taxpayer dollars into “shovel‐ready projects” through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (widely known as “the Stimulus”).

We were fascinated by it, and decided to create a blog that focused on infrastructure, energy, and sustainability—the areas that would create jobs and grow the economy. It featured news and thoughtful analysis written by journalists with true expertise in these areas. We called it The Infrastructurist and launched in 2009.

We had been market researchers and public relations specialists for master brands as well as strategists for politicians for many years, but our world was changing with the evolution of digital communication. For the sake of our longevity, our business had to expand its capabilities.

The Infrastructurist started as a passion project that filled a niche that other blogs in the world weren't filling at the time. And when we started it, we hadn't thought about how to monetize it. We just knew we had something interesting to say that people would want to read about.

As with many passion projects, we created something that the world ended up putting a very high value on. We created an engaged community with many subscribers who often discussed our work in the comments and on social media, and our blog was named a top blog in infrastructure. The Infrastructurist was ad free, and we never made a penny off it. If I could go back, I wouldn't change a thing.

It was The Infrastructurist that led me to the idea that brands could publish relevant industry news and analysis the same way a traditional publisher could. At the time, traditional media outlets were suffering; advertisers weren't biting for print, and publishers couldn't figure out how to properly monetize their digital operations, oscillating between whether to use paywalls or banner ads, which users hated. Unable to create a sustainable model, especially during a financial meltdown, publishers laid off hundreds of talented journalists and had to scale back significantly the quality work they were publishing.

There was a need to be filled, and an enormous business opportunity, wherein I realized that brands could tell relevant, engaging stories the same way The Infrastructurist had. In doing so, brands could get the exposure they always wanted from traditional media outlets but weren't able to land and then distribute it strategically. Ultimately brands could control the conversation, build stronger reputations, and possibly increase sales, if they said something people cared about.

As all of this was happening, we pitched a strategy for GE Reports, which we thought could be an online magazine about science, tech, and innovation on the same level as Wired, Popular Science, and The Economist's science and technology section. Because of our proven success with The Infrastructurist and the detailed plan we developed for GE Reports, they gave us a shot, and GE Reports became SJR's first content marketing success—well before content marketing was part of the zeitgeist. We've told some incredible, exclusive stories with GE over the years, from scientific breakthroughs in health care to innovations in clean energy. We've helped GE manage its reputation as it has transformed itself from an industrial and consumer goods company to the world's pioneer of digital industrial technology.

It was the beginning of a new era in corporate communications; “middleweight content” was born.

The Process of Creating a Hub

Let's talk about what this means for you. How exactly do you build a content hub that fits seamlessly with the rest of your web properties, makes sense for your brand, and is highly engaging and different from what's already out there?

A thoughtful, high‐level strategy from the outset is the first step to success. The more you can focus your message, the stronger your connection to your audience will be.

To truly become your own media company and create a community of engaged return visitors, earn media placements for your work, attract influential contributing guest bloggers, and gain a solid reputation in your field, you need to identify what truly makes your brand special and unearth industry knowledge as well as stories that people care about. Market research, comprehensive strategy, and careful planning (long‐term and short‐term) will help get you there.

Here's what that process looks like. Then we'll get into how to approach each element of your hub.

Thought Leadership

A great brand is a mixture of many things. It is products, services, and places bearing a particular name and logo that exist as tangible, useful things in people's lives. It's also a set of perceptions and associations in the mind of the public. And it's also a set of people working for the brand at any given time.

Thought leadership is almost entirely concerned with that last attribute of a brand, the people. So many companies are willing to put their products into the world but are unwilling to let the people who believe in them the most—the people who make those products or design those services—speak on their behalf.

This is the primary function of thought leadership, which is the current phrase attached to a bundle of services meant for the leadership: speech writing, event and social content support, and personal brand development. Think of it as executive communications expanded and accelerated for the digital media landscape.

When providing thought leadership to top executives at some of the world's largest and most famous brands, I've noticed a curious phenomenon. Take a woman or a man who has the confidence and skill to lead tens of thousands of employees in multibillion dollar businesses and ask them to express a point of view to the public, even on a narrowly defined area of their expertise, and they freeze. Their sense of their own qualifications suddenly vanishes.

This is where it's helpful to remember how the advent of digital communications and social media is transforming the world we live in. And that executive communications, like any content from a company, can be transformative.

With social media in 2017, we are where TV was in the 1940s—at the birth of a new form of communication. We don't all have to be present on every new platform, but everyone is expected to have some niche in our shared digital common space, where people can go to get a sense of who they are and what they stand for. This is especially true of people in leadership roles.

In the absence of such a niche, people will begin to construct one for you, and fill it with their own version of your and your brand's identity.

Both for the strength of your brand's public image and as a way to build a stronger connection between your company's employees and its leaders, it's essential to build thought leadership into your overall digital strategy.

Your leaders should be communicating with strategic intention. Thought leadership content shouldn't be all about the brand, but it should reflect the leader's knowledge, interest, and perspective. The goal is to elevate the writer and ultimately the company, organically. At every turn, the executive should be educating, inspiring, or entertaining the reader in no matter how small a way.

When done well, thought leadership makes writers more human and adds to their credibility.

Approach every piece of thought leadership content by asking these three questions: “Is this worth saying right now? Should the client be the one to say it? Will people be interested?” Narrow the gap between how people perceive you and how you want to be perceived with valuable thought leadership work, and make sure that it makes sense coming from you at that particular moment.

Bill Gates didn't wake up one day and decide to start writing about malaria. He made it his mission to eradicate the disease, as well as many others, and started talking about it after he had established that it was a defining personal ambition. As you begin to think about your personal reputation and your long‐term goals, you have to think about how each piece of content ladders up to a greater mission, otherwise your words, no matter how well spoken, will hang in a vacuum.

Careful strategy should also be balanced with timely reactions to what your customers care about and what's happening in the world. If the Supreme Court is voting on same‐sex marriage, and your company has been a big proponent of such legislation over the years, speak your mind with confidence. If there's an environmental issue and you work for a retailer like Levi Strauss and Company, with a reputation for innovating sustainable practices and minimizing environmental impact, move quickly to get your point across.

My other piece of advice is to build in some expectation of unpredictability in the public's response to your message. Not everyone will be your biggest fan, and that's perfectly fine. There's no way of knowing how your work will resonate without putting it out into the universe. And for those in heavily regulated industries, even a mild perspective will humanize you and help make you relevant.

Avoid what in SJR parlance is called “thought manufacturing.” This is a situation where the strategic need for a leader to communicate and that leader's willingness to express anything related to his actual perspective doesn't overlap at all. This leaves the thought leadership team grasping at straws about what to say, often under considerable time pressure, and much of their work, however high in quality, is bound to miss the mark.

In cases such as these, it's best to engage not the leader herself but a trusted adviser who is willing to advance the work—and make quick executive judgments about what can be said and what will be approved. This will ensure that there is consistency to the work, without which good thought leadership cannot thrive.

There will often be situations in which a leader has to speak such as when the company has been publicly attacked or praised or when global affairs demand a response. These crisis situations, far from being moments of vulnerability, are the moments when the thought leadership team can prove its worth and gain more direct access to the leader its members serve. It requires all the nerve and skill of any firm that specializes in crisis communications, but it is well worth the effort. When the thought leadership team and the executive client learn to speak with one voice in a moment of crisis, the cohesive effect can be lasting, and powerful, and valuable to a company's reputation.

Have a Strong Visual Vocabulary

DESIGN

It's been said that we're in a golden age of design where clean aesthetics and functionality are deeply considered at every stage of the user experience. Creating an experience as Steve Jobs did with the iPhone, which is simply beautiful and so meticulously designed that anyone can use it, has become the core mission for virtually every tech entrepreneur and product designer.

While it's refreshing that design is being given its fair due and seen as more than colors, typography, layout and graphics, this awakening has been a long time coming.

The best design is human‐centered. It transfers knowledge by default. There are plenty of examples over the course of history.

In 1812, a French engineer named Charles Joseph Minard created what is widely considered to be the best data visualization (see Figure 7.1). Balancing detail with clarity, he mapped Napoleon's troops march through Russia.¹ He included loss of life, time and location, temperature, geography, and historical context all in one graphic, without distracting text or labels. Information‐rich without being overly cluttered or hard to read, the visualization was recognized as great by a number of cartographers. Famed French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer Étienne‐Jules Marey said it “defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence.”²

A more recent example of brilliant design: Michael Bierut's New York City street and subway maps that keep millions of New Yorkers from getting lost.³

When asked how he stays creative, Bierut told Wired that he “doesn't believe in creativity”—at least not for creativity's sake—it has to be used deliberately within the parameters of clarity, intuition, and logic.⁴

This is how we should all be thinking about design. It's arguably the most important part of a content hub, as crucial as the quality of the content itself. We need to implement design thinking at every stage of production.

So how exactly does one do that?

Ask Questions and Then Problem Solve. To be most effective, designers need to be asking a lot of questions, and they really need to be focused on finding answers through A/B testing and talking to users. “How do we get our audience to click through our photo galleries?” “How do we get our users to discover content that they're most interested in within a few seconds of finishing an article?” “How do we balance keeping our page fresh with new material while maintaining the option of featuring certain pieces prominently?” From the get‐go, these are the kinds of questions designers should be asking. They shouldn't be afraid to question what they've created, either.

Above All Else, Tell a Story. Designers need to create a visual vocabulary in their work to weave a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end through simple, intuitive interactions. The story should come before the visual execution, and designers should resist the temptation to build for a platform or a visual gimmick. With each design, it's important to ask, what are you really trying to say? And, most important, why should the user care?

Routinely Gather User Feedback and Iterate. Make time to talk to people—formally with A/B tests and informally through short in‐person conversations. Even if you don't have a full design ready, talk through your rough prototypes and ideas to uncover opportunities for improvement. Be a constant learner who's totally open to discovering ways to make the experience better and more valuable. Follow Lean Startup founder Eric Ries' minimum viable product model, in which you show products that contain just the basic features sufficient to be functional in order to test your hypothesis without investing too much time engineering—this is how you remain agile and accelerate learning.

Allow Users to Discover and Design Features That Make It Easier to Stay Engaged. How will you keep users on your website? Related content selections placed above the fold can funnel users deeper into the site, and recommendations strategically located above the footer will capture and reengage those who scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. Personalization tools that help you get to know your users through data stored in cookies or through users' log‐in information, can help serve relevant content. But it's also about the fine details, such as your verbiage for “related content,” the thumbnails accompanying articles, and the physical layout that can make a user want to stick around.

Make It a Team Effort. Can't stress this enough. As I said in the last chapter, the most successful designers don't operate in a vacuum. They work alongside a fully inclusive team in which each member is free to express his unique perspective. Ownership of projects should be shared—this keeps everyone engaged and motivated to do their best work.

The Sensory Experience. Brands can't define themselves by words alone; images, video, interactives, GIFs, podcasts, infographics, and immersive experiences all tell stories of their own.

We're visual learners and thinkers. When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10 percent of that information three days later.⁵ However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retain 65 percent of it three days later. This holds true for a compelling image with an interesting photo caption, as National Geographic demonstrates on its Instagram channel, as well as a clean and straightforward data visualization, which the New York Times does exceptionally well.

In a world where content is spread across multiple platforms and the platforms are increasingly idiosyncratic—GIFs are better suited for Tumblr's audience over Pinterest's, for example—we need to carefully consider whether we're speaking the same language that each audience does. You can take one single message and splice it several ways to craft a unique angle for different mediums and platforms. And like the podcast Serial or Netflix's Making a Murderer, you should be thinking about ways to divide your most compelling stories into episodes to keep your audience engaged.

The hardest part is figuring out what your story is and how it's different from what's already out there. From there, you can engage all five of your audience's senses and atomize your message for different platforms to create a digital ecosystem full of complexity and personal interaction.

Two issues of SJR's quarterly digital magazine, Unfiltered, sought to demonstrate these concepts: atomization, splicing one message over different mediums and platforms, and serialization, telling one story over multiple episodes. (For more on these concepts, see Chapter 5.)

The atomization issue explored the topic scent, and our team created GIFs of a woman smelling a scent, a business story about the state of the perfume industry, a podcast with a neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Diego who is unable to smell, an illustrated map and photo essay of scents across Manhattan, and a short man‐on‐the‐street‐style video (as well as a Snapchat story) of people answering, “What does New York City smell like?” I also wrote about how marketers can tell stories with scent.

For the serialization issue, we stuck to written stories with a highly compelling set of images. We did a story about our favorite serialized true crime shows, from HBO's The Wire to Netflix's Orange Is the New Black; a story about how serialized storytelling has been creating community since 1933, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fireside chats; a listicle about how brands can execute serialization without falling flat; and I wrote about rich and deep communication in an age of serialized storytelling.

For these issues, and for every issue, there's a lot of strategy and planning up front. Our team of writers, artists, photographers, and designers evaluates and reevaluates how each piece fits into the greater whole, tweaking concepts along the way, and meeting several times to brainstorm execution and logistics. In an ideal world, this is how brands should operate when they tell stories.

IMAGES, ILLUSTRATIONS, INFOGRAPHICS, AND INTERACTIVES

Your brand is competing with millions of photos, videos, interactives, GIFs, and infographics each day on the Internet, and we're bombarded by way more information on the Internet than our brains are able to fully process and remember. We spend an average of 8 hours and 10 minutes consuming some sort of media each day, and by 2017, we'll be closer to 8.5 hours, according to research. Most of that media consumption is on the Internet, particularly on our smartphones.⁸

In the past, media consumption was a much more passive experience—we'd watch television or listen to the radio. With the rise of digital platforms and smartphones, our media consumption has become increasingly interactive, with frequently interrupted viewership and multitasking happening, while we watch.

This means that your brand has a very small window of opportunity to stand out. So your creative has to be even more relevant, eye‐catching, and meaningful to the audience, otherwise it will be drowned out in the noise.

There are some visuals on the Internet that just stick with us. They transcend language and cultural barriers, and traditional concepts of literacy to connect with audiences on an emotional level.

I'm not talking about stock photos—unless we're talking about the hilariously staged stock photos that everyone loves to hate, regardless of your age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. I'm not talking about the stereotypical images that come from a corporate visual assets library, such as highly edited product shots, nor your brand's spin on the latest viral meme.

I'm talking about compelling, original images.

Some of the images in each of our Unfiltered issues are unlike anything I've ever seen. For the serialization issue, our creative director went for a retro, vintage look that drew inspiration from catalogs and magazine ads from the late 1960s or early 1970s (see Figure 7.2).

Like compelling images, infographics and interactives need to say something. They need to be totally original and different from what's already on the Internet in order for it to be worth the time, effort, and cost to produce them.

Some people think infographics are overhyped, but when done right, infographics make complex information easy to comprehend. They make raw data, dense reports, and white papers digestible, democratizing information for users. And when they tell a compelling story, infographics and interactives are very sticky, meaning they stick in users' minds and show up on their social feeds. Infographics are liked and shared on social media three times more than any other type of content.⁹

According to research from Hubspot, 90 percent of the information passed to the brain is visual, which the brain processes faster and more easily.¹⁰ Therefore, it's unsurprising that 40 percent of people respond better to visual information compared to plain text.

Great infographics and interactives tell a story; they have a beginning, middle, and end. They are equal parts art and science—with function and the user experience more important than overindulgent fashion. Designers need to be careful not to unwittingly distort the data to fit a decorative scheme. They must be created with precision, care, and integrity.

As infographics become more ubiquitous, users are becoming more literate in reading charts, diagrams, and graphic representations of data.¹¹ As a result, producers of infographics—from marketers to brands and designers—will need to be more mindful in what they create.

My best advice is don't create an infographic or an interactive for the sake of creating it. I can't emphasize that enough; you need to have a compelling reason to tell a story in pictures. And any added animations need to advance the story you're telling. Every digital element needs to serve a purpose, just as Minard illustrated back in 1812 with his map.

Emerging Platforms

Our technology is steadily become more relatable, more human. Natural language processing systems, such as Siri and Google Now, are getting better at understanding us. Cognitive computing systems can predict our needs before we consciously think of them. Wearables can track our biological functions with great precision—there are even mood‐sensing technologies and high‐tech headbands such as Muse that can help us meditate. Technology is becoming an ever more seamless extension of ourselves, and in the future it will be integrated into our day‐to‐day lives as pervasively and invisibly as earlier technologies, like clocks and electricity.

While that is unsettling to some people, I see it as an opportunity. We're at the outer edge of a digital revolution akin to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid‐1700s.

As marketers and strategic communicators, experimentation with new technologies should be constant, and we shouldn't be afraid of failing in the course of discovery. By the time you read this book, I'm certain there will have been dozens of examples of brands exploring new storytelling frontiers. I hope yours is one of them.

So here's my permission to dabble in virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Go ahead and create 4‐D experiences. Build interactive, shoppable windows in areas with high foot traffic. Consider integrating unique scent and touch into your story to make in‐person experiences sensory. Venture into lesser‐known territory to create unexpected experiences for your fans. Figure out how to express your brand's core personality in a new way and make your mark. For the nervous entrant, as long as you stay true to your identity and put the user at the center of the experience, your experiment is going to be okay! And even interesting failures are bound to get your brand attention.

The Best Content Hubs…

Have one primary navigation. While there's no one right way to design a website's navigation, it should be as simple as possible, with few tabs and no drop‐down menus.

Overwhelming your user with choices and using too much text will hamper the experience. Package your website so content is discoverable in a way that doesn't make the user have to click too many times to get to a new piece of content. When site structure is optimized for content discoverability, you'll likely find the number of navigation options going down.

Integrate microsites. Don't create dead ends. Your hub doesn't exist in a bubble. Include a clear way to navigate to other owned properties from the microsite to lower bounce rates and increase conversions (if that's the goal). Search engines will reward you for this.

Highlight new content. Switch your featured content often—at least once a day—so that visitors keep coming back. For any digital content feed, from a twitter account to the front page of a newspaper, a once‐daily refresh of content is optimal.

Label content clearly and descriptively. Generic pillar labels like “News” don't communicate what the user will find when they navigate there. Save visitors the click (and help reduce your bounce rate) by making your website navigation descriptive.

Have fully functional search. Make your search bar prominent on the homepage, and ensure it's wide enough for long strings of text. Your search functionality has to be smart, and you can improve it by mining your web analytics data to determine what users are actually searching and adjusting accordingly. Implement a natural language processing‐enabled search engine rather than a basic keyword engine so users are able to search fluidly, with terms that make intuitive sense. Adjust search for mobile as well, with features such as autocomplete to account for misspellings on smaller screens. Lastly, give users the ability to refine queries by using variables like type, topic, author, date, and geography.

Make SEO standard. More important than putting spend behind your hub is making it sticky enough that users can find it organically. Being consistent is key, which means it's imperative that everyone involved with the hub—from writers and designers to the social team—is properly educated on best practices. Make sure everyone is tagging images, adding inbound and outbound links, filling out the metadata, and using keywords on each page. An HTML and XML sitemap needs to be created from the start. These are a few foundational best practices, but I'd advise consulting an SEO expert who can give ongoing advice most pertinent to your website.

Consider the full distribution ecosystem. Social media should never be an afterthought. From the outset, plan content creation around how it will be tailored to each platform and test your atomized pieces in creative ways across your accounts. Secondly, develop partnerships with influencers and media outlets for syndication of content, and proactively engage both as content is being developed with the goal of driving awareness and amplifying content. Also invite influencers to create content for your site and cross promote it through your social channels and theirs. And, of course, consider paid media against search, social, and sponsored content—paid is especially important in the early stages of a website launch to drive awareness.

Measure and pivot. The ability to leverage analytics will be crucial to your hub's success. Measure, learn, and iterate. Use a platform like Single Score, which is a customizable algorithm to measure ROI and define success. The dashboard should be tailored to the company's strategy and digital footprint, offering a daily, comprehensive overview of earned, owned, paid, and competitive benchmarking in one place.

Internal Communications

Most strategic communicators treat internal corporate communications as an afterthought, which is an enormous lost opportunity. The days of the corporate newsletter are long over, as are the days when that was enough to capture the attention of your employees. Most executives recognize the need to keep people informed about the company's strategy and direction, but few understand the need to excite employees about the brand's power and tell its best stories. Also, many times internal communications falls on the shoulders of HR professionals, who may lack the communications skills to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Internal communications can do everything content marketing can do for a brand. At best, internal communications has the potential to transform how a company operates.

But what better way to raise corporate reputation than with a company's most important asset: the employees themselves? If we put as much effort into internal communications as we did external communications, employees would have a stronger emotional connection to their work that would make them more motivated, and they'd feel more loyalty toward the company—a necessary aspiration for companies in today's business landscape, with only 32 percent of employees engaged in their work.¹² Employees would also have more knowledge about what's going on in the industry and the company's place in it, and feel more unified by a common sense of purpose and identity. In the process, a strong communications program would trigger different departments to share their knowledge and customer stories with the communications team, which would make for better storytelling across the board.

Exceptional internal communications can have real implications for company profits. In 1992, Arthur Martinez was named head of Sears' merchandising group during a time when sales were in the gutter. On sales of $52.3 billion, the company's net loss was $3.9 billion, almost $3 billion of which came from the merchandising group, according to Harvard Business Review (HBR).¹³ It was a culmination of negative factors, but most of them attributed to the company's lack of focus. Martinez made it his mission to energize and focus employees. He created task forces of senior managers, which spent months listening to customers and employees, studying best practices at other companies, thinking about what would constitute world‐class performance at Sears, and establishing measures and objectives. The task forces surveyed workers, held focus groups and town hall meetings, and honed in on personal development to build a workforce of high‐growth involved and empowered employees. The results of the efforts were stunning, with the multibillion‐dollar loss turning into a $725 million profit in the first year alone and a total shareholder return of 56 percent, according to HBR.¹⁴

Needless to say, this is an extreme example of the positive results of effective internal communications, but it's proof of how robust an opportunity it is.

Ultimately, there should be no sharp difference between internal and external communications—both should convey one cohesive identity and message and leverage different mediums to tell stories. Videos, interactives, podcasts, and so forth can be created for employees to build that emotional connection with the company and the brand.

Turn your year‐end financial report into an easy‐to‐comprehend data visualization for employees, for example. Use customized channels for specific announcements through platforms such as Slack. Take boring training manuals and turn them into short, creative, even funny how‐to videos. Build a knowledge‐sharing platform that will enable employees to teach each other new skills and make stronger personal connections in the process.

In addition, you can build a unified communications strategy with a centralized internal and external hub. For example, Target's A Bullseye View has lifestyle, online magazine‐style stories, such as exclusive interviews with Taylor Swift under its News and Features tab, but the navigation also leads to the corporate site, which includes Target's purpose and beliefs, history, stock information, and annual reports. While this works for Target, it might not be possible for every company. But a unified website is certainly worth exploring, as the goal should always be to align external and internal perceptions of the company's integrity and mission.

Regardless of how internal communications looks in practice, try to keep it free of corporate speak. Your employees can be your best storytellers and a major source of marketing inspiration. When Miller Brewing Company conducted an in‐depth study aimed at measuring employee attitudes for the sake of improving morale, company leaders learned that employees took great pride in the company's tradition of brewing, mythologized by stories such as that of founder Frederick Miller carrying the yeast in his pocket from Germany in 1855.¹⁵ The internal campaign leveraged those messages and became a celebration of employees' passion for great beer. The company hung large posters of employees in the breweries, depicting workers as company heroes and distributed materials reinforcing the campaign, including a book celebrating the vocation of brewing and T‐shirts emblazoned with “I Make Miller Time.” The brand's heritage of craftsmanship, which came from employees' perception, became a focal point of consumer advertising, with new TV commercials featuring employees talking to the camera and expressing their passion for Miller beer. And as HBR points out, the focus on internal research by collecting stories like that of Frederick Miller ensures that company folklore doesn't walk out the door when veteran employees leave, which preserves the culture for future generations of employees. If communication becomes a truly democratic, collaborative effort, where employees outside of the communications team tell their stories and impart their wisdom, the result is powerful.

For internal e‐mails from executives, ask yourself why can't one‐way communications be two‐way? How about instead of that lifeless e‐mail, the CEO holds an in‐person fireside chat or Google Hangout for remote employees, and gives them the opportunity to ask anything? Treat your employees better than you would your customers, and listen to them more than you speak. An open door policy will work wonders for your business.