GarthBox

Gum under a bar table, I can now report, ages like a cheese nobody ordered. Fresh, it’s a soft yellow thumbprint from somebody’s good night. Give it a month and it grows a rind. (I have opinions about the rind, which is not a sentence I expected to write when I opened a bar.)

I’ve been in at Garth’s Brew Bar a lot of early mornings lately, before the day job, doing the work nobody puts on a chalkboard. Deep cleaning floors. Scrubbing bathrooms. Touch-up paint where chairs and elbows have been quietly arguing with the walls. Picking gum off the undersides of tables.

Then I lock up, head to my other job, and the bar opens without me. Most nights the beertenders run it. So most of the people who use those clean bathrooms do it on a night I’m somewhere else.

I happened to be working a shift recently when a guest said to me, “Hey, I just gotta tell you. This is the cleanest place. The bathrooms were incredibly clean, and you just don’t get that in a bar these days.”

I heard it because I was standing there. That’s the whole reason.

Praise keeps bar hours. It shows up when the room is full and the work is long finished, and it lands on whoever is behind the taps. On any other night that sentence gets a “thanks so much!” from a beertender, floats up toward the speakers, and is gone before the next pour. The person who did the work before the doors opened is, by design, not in the building.

Clean is an absence. No smell, no puddle, nothing tacky under your forearm. Guests almost never compliment an absence. They report presences. The only way that guest could see our bathrooms at all was by holding them up against every other bar they’d been in… “you just don’t get that in a bar these days” is a customer naming the category’s problem and placing us outside it.

I’d been treating those mornings as maintenance. That guest told me they were positioning. I would never have figured that out from under a table.

So there are two ways to live with work like this. Assume the praise is happening somewhere and keep scrubbing. Or go stand where the work lands and listen.

Assuming is cheap, but it costs you the information. Asking isn’t much better. “How were the bathrooms?” gets you a polite nod. The sentence worth having is the one nobody was prompted to say, and you only catch it by being in the room, not looking for it.

Marketing work runs on the same schedule. The CRM fields renamed so an automation stops misfiring. The deck rebuilt so sales stops apologizing for slide four. The people who benefit say thank you in rooms you weren’t invited to: a sales call, a customer’s Slack, a Tuesday night at the bar. Get yourself invited.

There’s a third way, and it’s the one I’m least proud of overlooking. My beertenders are the ones standing there. Whatever gets said about the bathrooms on the nights I’m gone gets said to them. And it runs both directions… they carry full rooms on nights I’ll never see, and I mostly meet their work the way they meet mine: as the condition of the bar when I walk in.

Two shifts that never overlap, each doing work the other only knows as evidence. Plenty of companies are built exactly like this, just with more meetings. The team is the relay or there is no relay. If the person standing in the room doesn’t know a compliment has an owner, it gets spent on whoever’s holding the tray.

The bathrooms will be clean again next week. Somebody will notice, probably on a night I’m off. I’d like whoever’s behind the bar to know that sentence has a forwarding address.

Stay Positive & Pass It Back

The sixth glass smelled like the midway at a county fair, that sticky stretch between the Tilt-A-Whirl and the funnel cake stand where everything is sugar that got a little too close to the fire.

The first five came with biographies. Where it started, who made the call, why it tastes the way it does. She told those stories the way a good bartender pulls a tap, without looking, every word worn smooth from a few hundred tellings. You could hear the grooves.

Then she poured the sixth and said, “Here’s our caramel apple version.”

That was the whole biography.

So I wrote one for her. Maybe it started as somebody’s dare in the back room and sold out before anyone could take it back. Maybe it’s the bottle quietly paying the electric bill for the rest of the list, which would make it the most important wine in the building and the one with the shortest introduction. (Occupational hazard. I can’t taste anything without writing it a positioning statement…#sorrynotsorry)

None of that came from them. The strangest thing they make walked out the door wearing whatever biography a stranger stitched together between sips, and they don’t get a vote on which one I keep. (My story was also different than my buddy’s story who had it next to me)

Familiar things arrive already introduced. You know roughly what a dry red is supposed to do before anyone sets it in front of you, because the category has been doing the talking for a few centuries. Caramel apple has no category to borrow from. It was the only glass on the table that genuinely could not speak for itself, and the only one asked to.

She had five stories because somebody gave her five stories. Somebody poured those wines for her, walked her through the decisions, let her taste why they mattered. Nobody sat her down with the caramel apple. The person pouring is the last link in that chain, which makes her the first one blamed for a gap she inherited. Invest in her and the customer hears your story. Skip her and the customer writes one for you.

Stay Positive & Hand Them The Sixth Story

We ran a product launch webinar once, and afterward the survey came back the way surveys do. A column of scores, a few polite notes, and down at the bottom, in the free text box, one person had typed: “Next time can there be donuts?”

It was a virtual event. The only snacks in the room were whatever each attendee already had in their own kitchen, which is a hard thing to put on a catering invoice.

So I sent donuts.

Real ones, in a real box, to a real door, for a person who had watched our launch in whatever you wear to watch things from home. It wasn’t in the plan. It was a joke in a comment field and I decided to read it as an order. (What’s more… it was to someone on a university campus which is notorious for having too many halls, remote workers, front-desk workers, and locked office buildings… I had little confidence the donuts would get to the actual person but hell did I try!)

Another time, I got a national clothing brand to run the tagline Carpe Denim. Seize the jeans. Somewhere a Latin teacher sat up in bed and didn’t know why. The brief asked for a tagline. It did not ask for a pun with a dead language holding the door open.

Both of those live in the same drawer in my head, the one labeled “I can’t believe they pay me for this.” Say that sentence slowly and it starts to sound like a confession. It’s what a guy mutters walking out of a bank with something lumpy under his coat. The feeling it describes is getting away with something… and you are.

Nobody asked for the pun. Nobody asked for the donuts (fine, one person did, but they were kidding, and they don’t sign my pay checks).

Both moments came out of the gap between what the job asked for and what I decided to hand back. The job description covers the ask. The gap belongs to whoever bothers to stand in it.

They’re tiny at the moment of decision, too. The tagline eventually rode on a national brand, but the choice to make it a pun happened alone, before anybody had an opinion. The donuts never got big enough for anybody to have an opinion at all.

That free text box is the junk drawer of every survey. We build the whole thing to collect scores, then tuck one open field at the bottom where nobody looks, and that’s exactly where a customer stops being a respondent and starts being a person. A joke in a survey is somebody waving at you from across the room. Waving back costs about what a box of donuts costs, and I’d bet that person remembers the box longer than anything we demoed. (They also sent us an email saying they couldn’t believe someone sent them donuts…or that someone read their feedback.)

If you lead a team, you can’t assign this. Write “surprise and delight a customer” into somebody’s quarterly goals and you’ve turned the donut into a deliverable with a due date (and it will taste like one). What you can do is leave the small stuff unpoliced. Don’t make anybody justify the box. Team first, then customer. The donuts only travel in that direction. (Or, what I’ve done with my team at GBB – give a stipend with a no-questions-asked caveat to go above and beyond when they feel like it.)

The question of what you’re doing all this for shows up eventually, usually on a Tuesday afternoon when the work has gone the color of a filing cabinet. It’s tempting to wait for the job to hand you one of these special moments. It won’t, though. I can’t even replicate it at GBB. They were never in the job. They’re in the margins, in your handwriting, in your spirit for doing the work you’ve signed up to do.

Which leaves the strangest math in the whole thing. The moments that make you feel overpaid are the exact ones nobody is paying you for. The company bought the ask. The gap was always yours to give away.

Stay Positive & I’ll Send Those Donuts Every Single Time

Every guest at a murder mystery dinner gets handed a reason to be guilty. A little booklet, a character, a secret, a grudge against the victim that would look terrible in front of a jury. The kit is built so nobody at the table comes out clean, because a table with one obvious suspect is a very short dinner.

We just did one with the crew from the bar. These are people who read strangers for a living. From across the room they can tell who is celebrating, who is stalling before going home, and who wants to be left alone with a stout. They brought every ounce of that to the table, and before long a nice meal had turned into a deposition with appetizers.

Theories arrived with footnotes. Alibis got cross-examined between bites. Every motive needed a second motive to hold it up.

Then the reveal came, and it was the obvious one. The character the clues had been pointing at since the start. The one we had all walked right past because it felt too easy. (Picture a beertender patting down every pocket for the opener clipped to their own belt loop. Now seat the whole crew at one table.)

We hadn’t missed it. We had passed on it.

The obvious answer ends the party. Say the plain name in round one and dinner is over by eight. The arguing was the fun, and the complicated theories were how we kept the band from packing up. A clever theory also makes the person telling it look clever, while saying the plain name out loud makes you look like you skimmed your booklet.

Work runs the same game, except nobody has to write the red herrings for us. We bring our own.

A campaign comes in soft and the room fills with theories. The attribution is lying. The audience drifted. The algorithm changed on a Tuesday. Somebody brings a slide about creative fatigue. Meanwhile the obvious answer sits at the end of the table with its napkin in its lap… the offer wasn’t very interesting, or nobody could tell what we were selling.

A complicated theory gets you another meeting. The obvious answer gets you a to-do list, and that list usually has the room’s own name at the top. At dinner the obvious suspect was a stranger in a booklet. At work it tends to be us.

Customers make it stranger. When people walk away from something, they usually tell you why in plain words. Too expensive. Didn’t get it. Broke the second time. A smart team hears that and goes digging for the real reason, as if the customer had handed over a decoy. (I say this as a guy currently up to his elbows in survey crosstabs, convinced the good stuff lives three questions deep. It might… but I should still read the first answer like it’s true.)

So let the obvious answer go first. Say it out loud before the interesting theories get their coats off, then try to kill it. Sometimes it dies and the nuance earns its chair. Often enough to be embarrassing, it’s the last one standing. And if you run the room, make the plain answer cheap to say. A team that only gets applause for clever will hand you clever, and your customers’ boring complaints will die somewhere between the counter and the conference room.

We had a great night. The wrong answers were the best part of it, and at dinner that’s exactly what they’re for. At work they cost more, and they cost in the most comfortable way there is.

They feel like thinking.

Stay Positive & Check Your Own Belt Loop

My daughters worked our poetry scavenger hunt like two bounty hunters holding warrants for everything on the list. They loved it. Then we got to the part where the pile of found things is supposed to turn into a poem, and the posse lost the trail.

Two moves show up in that moment, and anybody who has led anything knows them by heart.

Push: coax, check in, sweeten the deal with ice cream, ask again in ten minutes.

Or do it yourself. Write the poem, read it out loud, and let everybody pretend it was a group effort.

Work runs on the same two moves.

A project stalls and we either badger it or carry it. Follow-ups, nudges, a little incentive for whoever finally budges.

Or we stay late, build the thing ourselves, and then wonder why nobody else seems to care about it.

There’s a third move that only looks like quitting from up close: Pick a different project.

Every project on your plate right now is standing in front of a crowd of projects you quietly turned down. You never mourned them because you never watched them leave. Attachment is mostly just which one you happen to be facing.

I’ve launched the same kind of product at two companies, and both times what slowed it down wasn’t the product. It was everything else on the roadmap that also wanted to go first. You can badger a roadmap all quarter… I did… and it still fell to lower priority.

A stall is information, isn’t it though? Information is what we can decide to act on.

It’s the room telling you which part it’s willing to carry. And I’ll tell you, it took awhile to make the choice, but I ultimately let my efforts down to rest on that project while I focused on different product features.

Those other features? They were the most successful product launches for the company, too.

It’s refreshing to look back and think I could have pushed harder or done more of the work myself… but instead I chose a different project altogether and landed with a story I’m proud to share.

(You can imagine “No one was doing what needed to be done, so I did all the work.” isn’t a riveting interview pocket story… or one I’d care to tell my daughters when they’re on a poetry scavenger hunt.)

Stay Positive & The Choice Is Yours

Make it pop.

Make it fun.

Make it glow.

Make it sharable.

Make it valuable.

Make it snackable.

Make it mandatory.

Make it real.

None of these demands are wrong.

Until you know who you are making it for.

Stay Positive & It Starts And Ends With The Target

I keep a list of things I want to do before I’m done. Coach hockey. Earn the Advanced Cicerone. Learn German well enough that worauf and wovon stop ambushing me mid-sentence. Open a Christmas tree farm with a brewery and a beer hall attached, which may be the most Wisconsin sentence I will ever type.

I love that list. I’ve also noticed it has weight. It rides along in the passenger seat with its feet up on the dash, humming the same four bars, and every so often it leans over to ask whether we’re there yet. (We are not there yet.)

So I’ve been running a test on it. Picture yourself losing at the thing. Not failing to start. Losing, mid-game, scoreboard lit, people watching. Then watch what you reach for next. The honest answers are short.

You get fired up and try something new. You study the loss and come back better. You call friends and ask them to come lose alongside you until you stop losing. Or you back out.

If it’s that last one, cross it off. The list was never free to carry, and every item you’d quit on still gets a plate at dinner.

“Try something new” is the slippery one. It can mean a new way up the same hill or a different hill entirely. One is persistence. The other is quitting with excellent posture.

The bigger problem is where the test runs. It runs in my head, and in my head I lose beautifully.

• It’s a tasting exam where you swear the sample smells like movie theater butter and the answer key says it’s clean.
• It’s a drill you ran for somebody else’s kids, falling apart before the second whistle.
• It’s ordering in German and getting answered, kindly, in English.

When I looked hard at the list, every item had the same flaw, and it wasn’t money or nerve. None of them had a first physical action. Nothing I could do on a Saturday with my shoes on.

Which means I’d been running the losing test on a daydream…

So maybe the first physical action for anything on the list is the smallest real way to lose at it. Book the practice exam you expect to bomb. Ask to run one practice from behind somebody else’s bench. Then the answer comes from your body instead of your imagination, and bodies are terrible liars.

German already passed, as far as I can tell. I lose at it constantly, and my response has been to WeChat the exchange student our family hosted and make them wade through every worauf I put in the wrong place. That’s the third answer. I called somebody in.

Teams carry these lists too. Every roadmap has a someday column, and the items in it sit there like a keg nobody ever tapped, holding a spot in the cooler while everyone walks past on the way to something else.

Run the test there, out loud. Ask who would keep working on it if the first numbers came back ugly. Then ask who they’d recruit.

Saying you’d stick with it costs nothing in a planning meeting. Asking someone to come stand next to a losing project costs you something…so people only spend that on work they actually believe in.

If nobody would make the call, take it off the board in front of everybody. The team has been carrying it for you.

Losing once makes the list lighter no matter what you reach for next. The item either turns into a practice or it gets out at the next exit, and either one weighs less than a daydream.

Stay Positive & BRB, Going To Go Order A Pretzel In German