I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn

Nathaniel Clevenger would like to stay in touch on LinkedIn. Nathaniel Clevenger Member/Manager, Tiger RM, LLC, M2&Co. Portland, Oregon Area Hi Tridentblog, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. - Nathaniel Confirm that you know Nathaniel You received an invitation to connect. LinkedIn will use your email address to make suggestions to our members in features like People You May Know. Unsubscribe This email was intended for Tridentblog Email. Learn why we included this. If you need assistance or have questions, please contact LinkedIn Customer Service. © 2015, LinkedIn Corporation. 2029 Stierlin Ct. Mountain View, CA 94043, USA

Biography of Nathaniel Clevenger (December 2010 Update)

Nathaniel “Than” Clevenger, Partner, The People's Builder LLC

An entrepreneur, marketing strategist, corporate leader and writer, Than brings a broad background in strategy, business development and marketing to The People's Builder (TPB) and it's related companies. His primary responsibilities include investment capital raising to support the company's growth, marketing strategy and land acquisition.

Prior to helping to establish TPB as in the Summer of 2009, he spent the previous ten years as a consulting chief marketing officer for a variety of companies in Canada, Europe, the U.S. and Central America. including Vidabode Group, Nova Scotia, Canada, a manufacturer of lightweight concrete wall panels for durable construction projects worldwide; Nature Bake, a 60 year old family-owned organic bakery in Portland, Oregon; Soft Solutions, a Beirut, Lebanon, retail software solution provider; SGL Networks, an international currency exchange system based Panama; Best Concrete Concepts and Pourlavie Manufacturing, a concrete wall panel innovator based in Pilot Point, Texas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and The Commerce Bank of Oregon, Portland, Oregon, the Oregon branch of Zions Bancorp, to name a few.

Prior to forming his own consulting practice, Than served as a vice president and co-chair of the global marketing team for Fleishman Hillard (FH) —currently the largest marketing communications and public relations firms in the world. While with FH, he advised CEO’s, management teams and boards of directors in both public and private companies on creative and award-winning marketing and communications strategies. Prior to his FH tenure, Than resided in Washington, D.C., where he’d spent the previous 17 years honing his skills as a communicator and marketing strategist. He began his career in D.C., at Hill and Knowlton Public Affair, where he started as an executive assistant for Nancy Reagan's former press secretary and special assistant to President Reagan, Elaine Crispin, as well as Jackson Bain, a former NBC Correspondent and the first reporter to see Elvis after his all-too-early demise. During his four year tenure at Hill and Knowlton, he grew two inches and moved from assistant to account executive with only one visit to the hospital for stress.

Current and former clients include CEO's and senior executives in large and small, privately-held corporations, Fortune 500 and multinational corporations, foreign heads of state, trade association directors and senior executives at large non-profit foundations. Organizations, companies and leaders with whom Than has worked include: Sir Robert Maxwell, The White House Chief of Protocol, the last Miss U.S.S.R., the Royal Family of Kuwait, the former heads of state of Finland, Brazil, North Yemen and Angola; as well as the CEO's of Gulfstream Aerospace, NBC, Lockheed Martin, The American Red Cross, The American Task Force for Bosnia, UNICEF, The United States Olympic Committee, Reading is Fundamental, the Recording Industry Association of America, Deloitte and Touche, Enterprise Ireland (the seed capital investment agency of the Republic of Ireland), Preston Gates and Ellis, Swinerton Builders and responDesign (an interactive video game publisher) to name a few.

Early in his career, Than served in staff positions with increasing responsibility (including supervisory) with The Democratic National Committee (52nd Presidential Inaugural Committee), The Canzeri Company and Hill and Knowlton Public Affairs Worldwide Company in both the D.C. and New York offices.

He has written speeches and or correspondence for a variety of leaders including former U.S. presidents; former International Monetary Fund Chairman, Michel Camdessus; comedian, Bill Cosby; former District of Columbia Mayor's, Sharon Pratt Kelley and Marion Barry Jr.; various U.S. Olympians and U.S. Olympic officials, including gold medal skater, Bonnie Blair and gold medal boxer, Riddick Bowe as well as sports commentators Bob Costas and Greg Gumbel. He also served as protocol and event manager for the opening ceremonies of the Korean War Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C., and as a spokesperson for one of Washington, D.C.'s mayoral inauguration events.

Than has been an advisor to several Oregon- and Washington, D.C.- based non-profits and was recently listed in Strathmore's Who's Who in American Business, 2004 Edition. He is a native of the Hampton Roads area of southeastern Virginia (formerly and historically known as Tidewater) and enjoys competitive sailing, painting, and random outings and quiet evenings with his wife of 17 years, Sydney and their three children, Jack (11), Steele (7) and Gus Henry (5).

Want to create an email newsletter? Here's a great place to begin...

So, you think you want to create an email newsletter. Great! (Deciding is the easy party.)

Now, you need to get organized. Whoopee! Let's start with a few basic questions.

1. Do you have a list of contacts with their email addresses? If so, do you love your list? If not, who does love it?*

2. Do these contacts want to receive news, tips, ideas, musings, instructions, advice, promotions, publicity and the like from you about 6 to 12 times per year or more?

3. Do you have a content plan? By that we mean, do you have a set of story ideas? Are they compelling? Do they call readers to take some action?

4. Who is going to write your newsletter and keep the ideas fresh? No body likes a boring newsletter.

5. Do you have a Website? If so, can visitors "subscribe" to your newsletter there?

With that out of the way, here's what we can do:

1. We help you learn what we mean when we ask if you "love your list." Loving your list is the sine qua non of developing and managing a powerful email newsletter. Yes, content is critically important, but so is mastering the physics of sending out your news.

2.We help you build your newsletter - providing you with template editorial calendars to keep your communication interesting, lively, topical, useful - and above else, pithy.

3.We help you decide upon the optimal time and date to send the newsletter to your list.

4.We tell you how many people opened your newsletter, read it, forwarded it to a friend or clicked through to your Website. We can tell you some other cool things too.

5.We give you a piece of code that you can add to your Website so visitors can easily subscribe to your newsletter. (Don’t worry, we know how to put it on your Website.)

Here's what we charge.

A one time set up fee: $150.

Plus

$50 per month on an annual contract. $75 per month on a quarterly contract.
........................................................................
We accept checks and Visa and Mastercard through PayPal.
........................................................................

Don't have a Website, we'll help you set up a host-free Weblog/Website for less than a few hundred bucks give or take.

Don't want to write your own newsletter? We can do a "three-story" site for $399 per edition. (1,000 word maximum; 50 cents a word after that).

Advantages of an email newsletter:
- Cost (no printing costs!)
- Links (you can link content to your Website)
- Organization via a sophisticated Customer Resource Management (CRM) technology
- Eco-Friendly. No waste.
- Flexibility of design
- Trackability. Reports of usage "on demand"
- Subscribe function on your site.

Disadvantages:
- You generally can't add attachments like Word documents, PDF's and the like.
- Not particularly personal, though one can personalize these newsletters through the CRM.
- Some design limitations, though the technology has gotten more flexible.
- Spam Filters and Firewalls can prevent your news from getting through occasionally.

Contact: thinkfast4@aol.com

The Simple Business Plan: An Outline

Simple Business Plan Fundamentals

1. The purpose of the document (i.e., Why are we writing this?)

2. What Are We Selling; to Whom? (a product, a service or an idea; describe the audience)

3. What is Our Mission (i.e., Why are we deciding to this with our lives?)

4. Core Values (Is this idea inspiring? To ourselves? To others? Is it worthy of our talents? And is it bigger than we are?)

5. Strategic Business Goals

6. Near-term Business Goals

7. Where do we find clients and how will we continue to find them? (i.e., marketing strategy)

8. Who are our competitors and how are we better? (i.e. competitive analysis or SWOT)

9. What is our timeline?

10. Who makes the business run? And, do they have relevant skills in the business we are attempting to create?

11. What is our pricing model? And, how will we get paid?

12. What is the company's financial position and what are our expectations for the coming year? How will we pay our investors back?

Attachments:

-- Financial Pro Forma
-- Research data
-- Endnotes

Branding for an Accounting Firm: Ancient Symbols Provide a Guide

Assignment: Provide strategic guidance on a new brand for a growing regional accounting firm.
Summary of Approach:

For several years, we have been using The Complete Encyclopedia of Signs and Symbols as a guide for identifying and evaluating the "vocubulary that formulates our thoughts" on brand symbols and establishes a guide for our recommendations on brand development.

Truth be known, we think brand development for most professional service organizations is often over-done, too expensive and contrived. Accenture, for example. Does it really matter what the name of this company is? McKinsey, is another. Would the company be thought of any differently if it were called McClaskey? On the other hand, where would Nike be today if it had been called "Phils Running Shoe Company."

It is, however, fun to conduct a search using the encyclopedia and then cross-referencethat to what can be found through online searches. The encyclopedia begins with a description of symbols:

"The word 'symbol' is derived from the ancient Greek symballein, meaning to throw together. It's figurative use originated in the custom of breaking a clay tablet to mark the conclusion of a contract or agreement; each party to the agreement would be given one of the broken pieces, so that when they reconvened the pieces could be fitted together like a jigsaw." The individual pieces were known as symbola. "A symbol not only represents something else but also hits at a missing 'something', an invisible part that is needed to achieve completion or wholeness."

With regard to accounting, the nearest symbol are dots and lines. We were drawn first to consider lines. According to the encyclopedia authors, "the straight line is one of the five basic elements of Western ideography."

This sign is a base: ___

This sign means unity: I I

This means equality: =

This means complete entities: It also signifies friendship. I I I

This means similarity in one dimension:
___
___
___

And this means the same as:

Other interesting thoughts...

-- Neolithic stones, apparently, with geometric line design, such as those found at Susa in Iran, are thought to be counting stones or calculi - the word calculate is from the Latin "calculus" meaning "stone."

-- It seems many counting sticks and carvings in ancient stones were used to calculate the cycles of the moon.

-- If you type in "ancient accounting" in Google, you will also see some additional images of different counting systems.



What do we recommend?


Counting and keeping track of what we own, owe or desire is an ancient human trait. The symbols representing how we have accounted for people, places or things is virtually limitless. To keep the exercise focused and simple, we sent the following recommendation to our accounting firm client:

To every challenge there is a symmetrical and thoughtful solution. Symbols are ancient things with deep meaning. And while there seems to be no compelling reason to pay a small fortune to re-engineer your brand, there is a way to make the process enjoyable for those of your staff interested in seeing a refresh of your imagery, while also being acutely sensitive to cost.

Everyone can guess at what they might want to see, but it’s the why that must be considered. Why is changing the brand so important? Sometimes the only answer is “because it feels dated.” I am no expert at brand development, but I am a student of it. And a skeptical one at that. I have always chosen more classical interpretations over fancy over-the-top design. I’ve learned that I’m either not smart enough or creative enough to conjure something entirely new. This means I tend to stick to fonts and designs that were developed pre-industrial era or just as the industrial revolution dawned.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I have some simple advice that I will be prepared to share that is applicable to all professional services concerns. These are the steps to take as you begin.

1. Consider fonts first. Your name is more important than a design. Fonts have history. Understanding the history of fonts is a simple way to give any new brand the symmetry it requires to reduce risk in the human brain.

2. Consider color second. New brain research shows that the human brain is capable of “feeling” colors and assigning images in the brain to colors and feelings. Extreme examples of people “feeling” images is known as synesthetes

3. Consider the meaning of symbols. For example, in the medical world, the caduceus has a long history of connection to the medical profession. What classic symbols come to mind for accountants?

The Case for Case Studies

Every time I recommend that a client put together a case study, they groan. Why? Too much work for too little result. Hard to argue with that. But, argue I will.

Here are the top six reasons why companies should develop case studies:

1. They are basic story-telling elements. The more complex your product or service, the more valuable a case study can be. Having case studies allows you to provide examples of how your product or service solved a compelling business problem. Let's say you are putting together a Power Point. You need examples of what you've done. Dust off the case study and voila! instant Power Point.

2. Case studies force you to consider your company's value proposition at a very tactical level. A simple case study describes a challenge, a solution and a result. Considering these three issues more critically allows leaders to make adjustments in tactics and strategy.

3. Case studies provide a window into how the author views the company's value proposition. Assigning a case study can help staff work through issues they need to master. The simple framework gives leaders a more clear understanding of how their staff addresses problems and challenges.

4. The Web demands fresh content. In meeting after meeting, clients are searching for ways to keep their Website content fresh. Case studies fit this bill and can be useful tools for search engine optimization, competitor differentiation and prospect education, among other things. Key words can be linked to products or services in other parts of a company's site or linked to partner or supplier sites.

5. Continuous learning is a good thing. Case studies are among the simplest way to get to the root of an issue not only for successes, but also failures. They're also inexpensive requiring an a couple of hours at most.

6. Nothing bad can happen as a result of creating a case study. They are like the oatmeal of corporate communications. They force you to chew on your approaches and they clean out clogged creativity. Yeah. Yeah. The metaphor's kinda lame. I still think it works, though.

In addition, to these, case studies can be used as attachments in correspondence to prospects to show them what you or your organization is capable of or as supporting material for proposals.
Media also like case studies as they define your "brand in action."

Email Newsletters for People Who Don't Want to Produce an Email Newsletter

So, you think you want to create an email newsletter. Excellent. (Deciding is the easy party.)

Now, you need to get organized. But, you don't need to do everything. Following our AMP process (trademark pending), you can get started on your own then call some professionals in to take over the rest.

A stands for Audience...

1. Do you have a list of contacts with their email addresses? If so, do you love your list? If not, who does?

2. Do these contacts want to receive news, tips, ideas, musings, instructions, advice, promotions, publicity and the like from you about 6 to 12 times per year or more?

M stands for Message...

3. Do you have a content plan? By that we mean, do you have a set of story ideas?

P stands for Process...

4. Who is going to write your newsletter and keep the ideas fresh? No body likes a boring newsletter.

5. Do you have a Website? If so, can visitors “subscribe” to your newsletter there?

With AMP out of the way, here’s what we can do:

1.We help you learn what we mean when we ask if you “love your list.”*

2.We help you build your newsletter - providing you with template editorial calendars to keep your communication interesting, lively, topical, useful - and above else, pithy.

3.We help you decide upon the optimal time and date to send the newsletter to your list.

4.We tell you how many people opened your newsletter, read it, forwarded it to a friend or clicked through to your Website. We can tell you some other cool things too.

5.We give you a piece of code that you can add to your Website so visitors can easily subscribe to your newsletter. (Don’t worry, we know how to put it on your Website.)

Here’s what we charge.

A one time set up fee: $250.

Plus

$50 per month on an annual contract. $75 per month on a quartlerly contract.

........................................................................

We accept checks and Visa and Mastercard through PayPal.

........................................................................

Don’t have a Website, we’ll help you set up a host-free Weblog/Website for $499.

Don’t want to write your own newsletter? We can do a “three-story” edition for $399 per edition. (1,000 word maximum; 50 cents a word after that).

SCIPAB. If you have to do a Power Point, then this is one formula to follow

SCIPAB

Situation --- what is the situation (eg. it's bad now ... world stats, environment)

Complication --- what complicates the situation (eg. it's getting worse ... the human needs that complicate the situation)

Implication --- what is the implication of S,C (eg. human pain, weather isn't fair ... someone has to do something about it)

Position --- what is our Position on S, C, I (eg. There is a better way --- our way ... we have done something)

Action --- what is the Action to take as a response (eg. we have an opportunity, and the time is now ... for you)

Benefit --- what are the key benefits of taking action (eg. in audience terms, here is how you gain your meaningful ROI)

Source: www.mandelcomm.com

How to write a "creative brief?"

I like to make myself crazy by gathering every detail possible and then torturing myself with the development of cleverly crafted creative briefs. So, here is a creative work in progress for your viewing and using pleasure:

These are questions that I like to answer when developing a "creative brief" or "creative memorandum"

What's the purpose of this creative brief? Or, what story do we desire to tell in the most creative manner possible?

What’s our business objective? Or, why in the hell are we doing this?

What kind of background information do we have?

What should this piece of brilliance look like? Is it a printed piece? Is it a video? A photo shoot? An event?

Who is the audience?

What are the messages? Don't write me a novel. Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.

How will this be different than what's already out there? Will it change the world? Will it make people: Act? React? Take notice? Yawn? Angry?

What miscellaneous issues do we need to be made aware of? For example, has a competitor already done this? Will we look really cool or really lame if we take this on?

How much will this cost to complete? Will it be worth the effort?

What do we do immediately after reading this?