Category Archives: Mark Harrison

Peer-to-Peer Boat Sharing thanks to Cruzin

Captain Up: Cruzin Launches P2P Boat Sharing

“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are 17 million registered boats in the United States, and they’re unused 95% of the time. That works out to a combined 5,865,000,000 days per year that could be spent sailing the ocean blue. Meanwhile, those empty vessels are costing their owners a combined $8,000,000,000 in maintenance, storage and other costs.

Boats are a luxury item that should be more affordable. The purchase cost isn’t too steep: usually between $10,000 and $30,000. But why buy a boat if you can only use it a few times a year? Of America’s 75 million boat lovers, the vast majority choose to rent or share ownership in their pleasure vessel of choice.

The numbers don’t lie: Cruzin is a smart idea. A peer-to-peer service that will allow boat owners to rent to qualified applicants, Cruzin is currently raising seed investment and hopes to raise anchor with a live site next month.

“This creates a channel for boat owners that didn’t exist before,” says Jaclyn Baumgarten, Cruzin founder and CEO. “For people who have to budget the money every year to be able to keep their boat, now they have a way to turn it into a source of income instead. They may even be able to buy a boat they couldn’t have afforded before.”

When Cruzin launches, it’ll do so with insurance backing from Lloyd’s of London. That insurance is crucial to the success of a rental-based model. Right now, most insurance policies won’t let owners collect money for the use of their dinghies and skiffs. Once you hand over the helm to a paying customer, your ship is uninsured. Cruzin aims to navigate those uncharted waters, offering primary insurance to boat owners and approved renters.

As for renters, there’s an important catch: No captain, no boat. Not just any land lubber can plunk down cash and cruise away in a yacht. To be approved by Cruzin, you’ll need to undergo identity and fraud checks, and submit proof that you’ve completed a reputable safety training program – or else hire a qualified captain. Probably a good idea, when you think about it.

Ultimately – as with other P2P services like AirBnB – Cruzin users will rely on reviews, photos and other reputation-building tools to sort the sailors from the pirates. It has also announced an exclusive deal with BoatUS – with America’s largest membership association of boat owners, the AAA of boats – and will reach out to its 600,000 members to build its base.

Still, you don’t need to own a schooner or a yacht to list a boat. Cruzin will include boats of all types, from any place in the U.S., as long as they meet key criteria and are well maintained.

Rental sharing and P2P solutions aren’t just smart economically, but from a resource perspective too. Getting more use out of the things we have already own means less waste. And by making maritime adventuring more accessible, Cruzin can open up plenty of new horizons.

Request your invitation to Cruzin here.

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Mentioned in the Post for being a Kama’aina

Looks like I was mentioned in the Washington Post yesterday, August 19th, in response to a comment I wrote to John Kelly — Readers share their mispronunciations — after he invited readers to share their stupidities — and I surely have a Presidential Suite of them to choose from.

That said, little story was about one question in particular, “What words did you mispronounce or misunderstand?”

Chris Abraham grew up in Honolulu and while he had seen the word “hors d’oeuvres” before, it wasn’t one he used. In Hawaii the preferred term is “pupu.” And so when Chris arrived at George Washington University in 1988 and attempted to describe what pupus were, he said they were the same thing as “whore’s de vores.”

Wrote Chris: “My best friend, Mark Harrison, smiled and said, ‘Chris, I think you mean ‘oar durves.’?”

True story — ask Mark.

Mentioned in the Post for being a Kamaaina

CEO and president of AH working together

Today, Mark Harrison, CEO and co-founder of Abraham Harrison, and I, Chris Abraham, president and co-founder, myself, are hotelling at The Abbey here in sunny Santa Cruz, California, as we cross paths.

I was at a tony conference/think-tank over Labor day weekend and Mark now lives in stylish and booming San Francisco. So, today we’re taking calls, making calls, and getting business done from wherever we happen to be, which, at this moment is at The Abbey.

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When Mark Harrison encountered Steve Jobs

Now that Steve Jobs has left Apple as CEO, I wish him much-deserved good health and deserved happiness.

steve jobs1 When Mark Harrison encountered Steve Jobs After reading The 24 Hours After Steve Jobs Resigned I started to become a little nostalgic about an article that my friend and fellow-blogger John Brownlee wrote a few years ago, A private moment with Steve Jobs, about about a meeting that my CEO, Mark Harrison, had with Steve Jobs in a previous life, so to speak:

My friend Mark Harrison is an intriguing sort: a globe-trotting alpha male who spends winters rubbing elbows with bikini models down in Mauretius and summers either indulging in sport in Berlin or piloting yachts around Cape Horn. He’s also got some fantastic stories about his run-ins with various eccentric business tycoons. One of those tycoons is Steve Jobs.

According to Mark, the year was 2000, and the company he worked for had set up a meeting with Jobs. Their pitch was simple: while Apple at that time owned the educational market up until the end of grade school, they completely lost all of their users by the time high school started, where computer labs became dominated by PCs. Their proposition was simple: team up with Apple and leverage their presence in thousands of schools to expand Apple’s educational market share.

From the very second he sat down with them, Jobs seemed agitated. The second his ass hit the chair, Jobs began rocking back and forth autistically. But as Mark’s colleagues made blunt and undeniable appraisals of Apple’s presence in high school computer labs, the rocking dramatically increased, then exploded… along with Jobs.

A purpling shade of apoplectic, Jobs launched to his feet, flecking the table with spittle. “You’re shit! Your company’s shit! It’s nothing compared to mine!” he screamed, an outstretched finger jutting accusingly up and down. Eventually, his fury was spent, and the situation was defused by some politically expedient cooing noises.

Still, it’s all just so Jobs, isn’t it? Ever since I heard the anecdote, I can’t help but think of Jobs that way. Turgid with rage and quivering in front of a PC or DAP or mobile phone, spraying its display with spittle: “You’re shit! SHIT! DO YOU HEAR ME? Your operating system’s nothing compared to mine.”

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theboom.com: Hands Down the Best Voice-Isolation, Noise-Canceling Headset I’ve Found

[Guest post by my CEO and best friend, Mark Harrison]

550 24 theboom.com: Hands Down the Best Voice Isolation, Noise Canceling Headset Ive Found I have been searching literally for years for a voice-isolation, noise-canceling headset that can handle the noisy environments I have to make calls from on a daily basis. As CEO of a globally-distributed online social media company, I spend 2-8 hours a day on calls. More often than not, I am making these calls from an airport, train, restaurant, or car – or while walking from one of these to another. Wind and ambient noise has been such a part of my telephone world that my team had become convinced that I actually live in a cardboard box under an overpass somewhere.

Over the past few years, I have spent a small fortune on headsets, searching for something that would filter out the background noise and transmit only my voice. I tried countless bluetooth headsets (which did middling jobs, and gave me headaches to boot), and a pile of wired headsets (many of which blocked outside noise for me, but transmitted most all my background noise to the suffering people on the other end of the line.)

Then, about two months ago, I discovered theboom.com googling “voice-isolation headset”. I bought the V4, and it solved my problems immediately. I can be in the noisiest of environments, and the only thing anyone hears is my voice. Here is a recording I made the other day while on the autobahn on the way from Berlin to Munich, in an open convertible at 140kph while passing a deafening construction site. I was having a hard time hearing myself speak, but theBoom headset really only transmits my voice.

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The Boom headset is not cheap – the V4 consumer model I use is nearly $200 with tax and shipping, but it’s absolutely worth it to me. The only problem that I’ve had is that the plastics in the V4 have not held up well to my heavy use. The plastic around the earpiece and the ear wrap has cracked and I’ve had to re-glue the foam windscreen. I am thinking for my travel-heavy usage, I am going to have to buy the hopefully more robust “E” model.

In the meantime, I’ve bought a backup v4 for myself (which I am using now what with the first one having fallen apart), one for my girlfriend so we can talk on her morning commutes on the insanely loud BART train, and one for Chris Abraham, my business partner the lord of this site, for his similarly mobile work life. The headsets do work acoustic miracles, I could hardly recommend them more strongly.

theboom.com: Hands Down the Best Voice Isolation, Noise Canceling Headset Ive Found

The worst blog post ever — on my own corporate blog!

There was quite a Brouhaha over at the corporate blog of Abraham Harrison, Marketing Conversation, #112 on the AdAge Power 150, and its name was Alice in NeverLand — and this is basically a repost, of sorts, of what’s going on over there at MC in a post called This is by far the worst blog post ever — and if I were you, I would just go over there and read the article there and all the amazing comments over there too.

Just realize that the first 5 comments were written before I went in and updated the post to make a very self-conscious and hopefully humorous commentary and response to such a fantastically poor, unedited, shameful post.

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CEO Mark Harrison on Outsourcing Social to Agencies

Wow! What a firestorm. In the several days since Olivier Blanchard wrote Stating the obvious and I shot back with Can you outsource your Social Media presence to an agency? there has been 71 Comments on The BrandBuilder Blog and and — gasp — 89 comments on my blog! So, I will be spending the long holiday weekend bringing together some of the most interesting commentary. Today I will focus on some of the comments shared by my CEO, Mark Harrison, since he’s smart, savvy, and passionate while not really being much of a blogger so this is rare and great stuff. (Via Chris Abraham)

The first comment by Mark is about how our agency, Abraham Harrison, can and does run social media campaigns and blogger outreach campaigns on a daily basis, effectively and seamlessly, and also aggressively and passionately over years to powerful effect:

Brilliant conversation! I do love all the analogies and metaphor-creation (and I’ll probably come back in a bit to give you my US Congress/Afghan tribal leaders/Pashto-speaking diplomats analogy…), but let me take a moment to pull this out of the theoretical and go into factual, boots-on-the-ground real life data for a bit.

As Chris mentioned, for some of our clients, Abraham Harrison has been handling their social media top to bottom with business-changing results. Just one example from a client who called us in originally because they were getting steamrolled with negativity in social media and needed to turn things around before it killed the public’s and their investors’ perceptions of them:

In one year:

From an average of 5-10 strictly negative daily mentions on Twitter to 20-50 positive daily mentions and retweets reaching an average of over 122,000 people and making over 270,000 impressions a week

More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers

From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined

Over 45,000 Facebook Likes (starting from 0) and over 37,000 active users. From an average of 5-10 daily interactions on Facebook to over 175 daily interactions, and over 55,000 impressions a day (and all of this growing on a hockey-stick curve)

Tripled blogosphere mentions in 10 months time

And ROI?

Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month

Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

This is just one of our clients for whom we handle social media efforts – and not even the most impressive example, just the one I happened to have all the stats on hand for right this instant.

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.

And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring Abraham Harrison for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget and fill up th office space with all the well-paid staff they’re going to have to house and resource. And… if they hire Abraham Harrison, they know they have a team with a well-proven track record of extraordinary success in social media operations, with the ability to operate globally in 10 languages.

And… it’s risk-free. If one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they call me up and say, “Hey Mark, it’s been great…” and we go away. Try dissolving an in-house team overnight to switch to outsourcing. Neither cheap, nor easy.

Thanksgiving dinners and wedding planners and analogies and metaphors here or there, we have clear facts in black and white: outsourcing your social media to us at Abraham Harrison with our proven track record is going to get results starting the day you flip the switch, and will most likely do it at a significantly lower cost, at a much higher level of efficacy, and at a vastly lower level of risk than if you opt to try to build a social media department in-house.

Mark also wrote a very similar thing over at Olivier’s blog I’ll share here as well:

Hey Olivier,

Thanks for firing up so much valuable discussion – both here, and over on Chris Abraham’s blog. Thank you for all your comments there – let me reciprocate with some of what I wrote there in response to your comments:

The long and the short of it is that, actually, a company can successfully outsource the handling of client relationships in social media. We’ve got years of results and clear facts that show it. I know it offends your theory pretty directly, but the facts are facts, and it simply works – often better, and at lower cost than companies trying to handle the social media work in-house.

It’s good to draw up guidelines to help companies find their way in this new landscape, but when reality runs counter to the rules you make up, you have to adjust them accordingly. The fact is that the real world results show your rule #2 to be incorrect. so you should adjust that.

[ . . . ]

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring an agency like ours for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget to build up a new team. Then they know they have a team with a well-proven track record.

And… when it’s outsourced to an agency like ours, the risk is vastly lower. You know you have an effective team from the first day, and if one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they can call up and say, “Hey, it’s been great… we’re not re-upping the contract.” and they are free.

It is important to create theories, and guidelines, and rules, but they have to reflect real-life results. The real-life results show that you can very successfully outsource your social media work and get the best possible ROI at much lower costs and lower risk than doing it in-house.

Your item #2 is not obvious. In fact – and in the face of the facts, it’s simply wrong. (And, obviously, #10 by extension is also wrong…)

Most of the other stuff though, is both obvious, and like most of what you write, right!

And then, after Mark got lots of push-back from Olivier himself, Mark came back to expand upon his thoughts:

Hey Olivier -

Did you miss the “ROI” part – right after the SM metrics I quoted?

And ROI?

Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month

Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

THAT’s what increasing their Twitter followership by 20,000% did for the client, THAT’s the dollars-on-the-table value tripling their blogsphere coverage got them, THAT’s why our getting them 37,000 active fans on Facebook is relevant.

Quadrupling the size of a client’s customer base is absolutely the “helping this client meet their business objectives”. Lordy, Olivier, what more could you want as evidence that outsourcing social media to experienced pros is indeed often a really, really good business decision?

And my aim in this discussion is not to prove that my firm gets results – our clients, and much of the business world know that. My aim is to move this conversation towards real-world facts and away from un-backed theorizing, arbitrary rule-inventing, and finger-wagging fire-and-brimstone preaching. That is what irritates and alienates the business world and undermines the credibility of our industry in their eyes.

The fact is, your Obvious Thing #2 – that you supposedly can’t outsource the management of your customer relationships in social media – is just clearly, provable, undeniably wrong, and stating such untruths as gospel and “obvious” hurts our entire industry. There are so many people out there in the business world who’ve come to rolling their eyes at “social media experts” because there is so much unfounded BS and from-whole-cloth blowharding going on in our industry.

Repeating faith-based untruths will never make them true, any more than it made WMD’s in Iraq true. All it does is undermine the credibility of the social media industry.

You are one of the voices out there who speaks very little BS, and I want to help the authority of your voice to remain intact by pointing out when you are preaching an untruth, so you can correct it and not lose the power your words have in promoting our industry in the broader business world.

Please, for the sake of the credibility of your voice, revise your pronouncements to align with facts and real-world results. Otherwise, your valuable voice will slowly erode to being one of those you warn about in your Obvious Thing #10: one not “fit to be consulted on the subject”, and that will not be good for any of us in social media.

OK, I will work on collecting comments from both side

CEO Mark Harrison on Outsourcing Social to Agencies

Mark Harrison on Outsourcing Social Media to Agencies

Wow! What a firestorm. In the several days since Olivier Blanchard wrote Stating the obvious and I shot back with Can you outsource your Social Media presence to an agency? there has been 71 Comments on The BrandBuilder Blog and and — gasp — 89 comments on this blog! So, I will be spending the long holiday weekend bringing together some of the most interesting commentary. Today I will focus on some of the comments shared by my CEO, Mark Harrison, since he’s smart, savvy, and passionate while not really being much of a blogger so this is rare and great stuff.

Brilliant conversation! I do love all the analogies and metaphor-creation (and I’ll probably come back in a bit to give you my US Congress/Afghan tribal leaders/Pashto-speaking diplomats analogy…), but let me take a moment to pull this out of the theoretical and go into factual, boots-on-the-ground real life data for a bit.

As Chris mentioned, for some of our clients, Abraham Harrison has been handling their social media top to bottom with business-changing results. Just one example from a client who called us in originally because they were getting steamrolled with negativity in social media and needed to turn things around before it killed the public’s and their investors’ perceptions of them:

In one year:

From an average of 5-10 strictly negative daily mentions on Twitter to 20-50 positive daily mentions and retweets reaching an average of over 122,000 people and making over 270,000 impressions a week

More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers

From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined

Over 45,000 Facebook Likes (starting from 0) and over 37,000 active users. From an average of 5-10 daily interactions on Facebook to over 175 daily interactions, and over 55,000 impressions a day (and all of this growing on a hockey-stick curve)

Tripled blogosphere mentions in 10 months time

And ROI?

Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month

Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

This is just one of our clients for whom we handle social media efforts – and not even the most impressive example, just the one I happened to have all the stats on hand for right this instant.

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.

And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring Abraham Harrison for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget and fill up th office space with all the well-paid staff they’re going to have to house and resource. And… if they hire Abraham Harrison, they know they have a team with a well-proven track record of extraordinary success in social media operations, with the ability to operate globally in 10 languages.

And… it’s risk-free. If one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they call me up and say, “Hey Mark, it’s been great…” and we go away. Try dissolving an in-house team overnight to switch to outsourcing. Neither cheap, nor easy.

Thanksgiving dinners and wedding planners and analogies and metaphors here or there, we have clear facts in black and white: outsourcing your social media to us at Abraham Harrison with our proven track record is going to get results starting the day you flip the switch, and will most likely do it at a significantly lower cost, at a much higher level of efficacy, and at a vastly lower level of risk than if you opt to try to build a social media department in-house.

Mark also wrote a very similar thing over at Olivier’s blog I’ll share here as well:

Hey Olivier,

Thanks for firing up so much valuable discussion – both here, and over on Chris Abraham’s blog. Thank you for all your comments there – let me reciprocate with some of what I wrote there in response to your comments:

The long and the short of it is that, actually, a company can successfully outsource the handling of client relationships in social media. We’ve got years of results and clear facts that show it. I know it offends your theory pretty directly, but the facts are facts, and it simply works – often better, and at lower cost than companies trying to handle the social media work in-house.

It’s good to draw up guidelines to help companies find their way in this new landscape, but when reality runs counter to the rules you make up, you have to adjust them accordingly. The fact is that the real world results show your rule #2 to be incorrect. so you should adjust that.

[ . . . ]

Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring an agency like ours for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget to build up a new team. Then they know they have a team with a well-proven track record.

And… when it’s outsourced to an agency like ours, the risk is vastly lower. You know you have an effective team from the first day, and if one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they can call up and say, “Hey, it’s been great… we’re not re-upping the contract.” and they are free.

It is important to create theories, and guidelines, and rules, but they have to reflect real-life results. The real-life results show that you can very successfully outsource your social media work and get the best possible ROI at much lower costs and lower risk than doing it in-house.

Your item #2 is not obvious. In fact – and in the face of the facts, it’s simply wrong. (And, obviously, #10 by extension is also wrong…)

Most of the other stuff though, is both obvious, and like most of what you write, right!

And then, after Mark got lots of push-back from Olivier himself, Mark came back to expand upon his thoughts:

Hey Olivier -

Did you miss the “ROI” part – right after the SM metrics I quoted?

And ROI?

Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month

Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million

THAT’s what increasing their Twitter followership by 20,000% did for the client, THAT’s the dollars-on-the-table value tripling their blogsphere coverage got them, THAT’s why our getting them 37,000 active fans on Facebook is relevant.

Quadrupling the size of a client’s customer base is absolutely the “helping this client meet their business objectives”. Lordy, Olivier, what more could you want as evidence that outsourcing social media to experienced pros is indeed often a really, really good business decision?

And my aim in this discussion is not to prove that my firm gets results – our clients, and much of the business world know that. My aim is to move this conversation towards real-world facts and away from un-backed theorizing, arbitrary rule-inventing, and finger-wagging fire-and-brimstone preaching. That is what irritates and alienates the business world and undermines the credibility of our industry in their eyes.

The fact is, your Obvious Thing #2 – that you supposedly can’t outsource the management of your customer relationships in social media – is just clearly, provable, undeniably wrong, and stating such untruths as gospel and “obvious” hurts our entire industry. There are so many people out there in the business world who’ve come to rolling their eyes at “social media experts” because there is so much unfounded BS and from-whole-cloth blowharding going on in our industry.

Repeating faith-based untruths will never make them true, any more than it made WMD’s in Iraq true. All it does is undermine the credibility of the social media industry.

You are one of the voices out there who speaks very little BS, and I want to help the authority of your voice to remain intact by pointing out when you are preaching an untruth, so you can correct it and not lose the power your words have in promoting our industry in the broader business world.

Please, for the sake of the credibility of your voice, revise your pronouncements to align with facts and real-world results. Otherwise, your valuable voice will slowly erode to being one of those you warn about in your Obvious Thing #10: one not “fit to be consulted on the subject”, and that will not be good for any of us in social media.

OK, I will work on collecting comments from both side

Mark Harrison on Outsourcing Social Media to Agencies

Mark Harrison & Chris Abraham at Aspen Renaissance

Mark Harrison & Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison at
2010 Labor Day Aspen Renaissance Weekend

Abraham Harrison LLC: A Model for Global Workforce

I few weeks ago, Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, took part in a think tank in Casekow, Germany, at the Corpus Operis castle. The subject of Mark’s talk was how Abraham Harrison recruits, manages, and maintains a staff of over 40 within the loose confines of a completely distributed, global, virtual client services company. Mark McMillan wrote this very insightful piece about Mark’s contribution to the conference over at the Talent Function blog: Virtual Admiration – Abraham&Harrison (A model for global workforce).

This week at Corpus Operis in Casekow, Germany, I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Harrison, the CEO of Abraham&Harrison (“A&H”). A&H is a global social media marketing and public relations company [see the framed video below for a pleasurable description of what they do]. The company has a workforce of approximately 35 people operating in 5 continents, 12 countries, in 11 languages, and on 1 Internet. The A&H workforce are predominantly independent contractors, completely virtual, and global. This emerging workforce model is not uncommon, many aspire to build a business like this, but it is unusual to find someone actually doing it. So, let’s hold Abraham&Harrison up to the sun and see what we can learn.
Mark runs the business from his endless summer lairs in Mauritius, an island off the coast of India, and Berlin, Germany. He runs the company with one of his best friends, Chris Abraham who operates from Washington, DC. The business is three years old and has an international client list full of names that you would recognize.
Since the beginning Mark and Chris have consciously shaped a company culture to sustain the business lifestyle that they want. Mark was taking a well-earned sabbatical in Tanzania. Chris had started a PR company and it had grown past the overwhelm level. He asked Mark if would help him run the business. Mark’s response, “Yes, IF you agree that I am free to live wherever I want. My freedom is what I value most. I’ll do it if we agree to run the company as a virtual company.” And so, the first seed of the A&H workforce culture was planted. Mark and Chris have worked hard, with their team, to establish and embody a culture that delivers results for clients while maintaining the lifestyle that the workforce WANTS. Here are some highlights to the A&H workforce approach:
All Accept that Freedom = Responsibility. With a virtual, contracted workforce, there is inherent freedom. There is no boss watching you. No one can see if you have showered, or if you do your laundry at 2:30 in the afternoon. The “virtual risk” is that workers will not work and that it will take a long time to figure that out. The virtual model requires workers who are self-motivated and who accept responsibility for getting the work done. The virtual risk is mitigated by the inherent pressure of being an independent contractor. Since there is no guarantee of a next project, contractors tend to work very hard. Actually at A&H, contractors tend to work too hard. This is a big concern of Mark’s and he regularly protects his contractors from themselves. There is no notion of a 9 to 5 work day but everyone is grounded in the responsibility for selling and delivering work.
Recruitment via Nepotism. Effective recruiting is particularly essential with a virtual, global workforce. Mark proudly relies on nepotism as a primary recruiting tool, “In our environment, our workers feel great responsibility for the people that they introduce into a project. It reflects on them and that produces a very results-oriented energy.” Leadership by Capacity (not by role). Mark and Chris have deliberately created a culture that emphasizes people’s strengths. Team members are encouraged to take projects and tasks that fit their strengths. At times this means that Mark and Chris step aside and let others lead tasks that typical executives would insist on doing. Since they leverage all cloud-managed business applications, the tasks of the business are available for everyone to see. There is total transparency to the work at hand.
Currency Awareness. The A&H corporate lexicon includes the word “currency” which has a different meaning than monetary value. Currency refers to each person’s set of prioritized value drivers that they want from their work at A&H. For example, someone’s currency might look like:
Team Member 1 = freedom, money, the opportunity to play and create
Team Member 2 = predictable pay, time with kids, no emergencies
Team Member 3 = power, respect, responsibility, trust
Mark and Chris make a point of knowing what is most important to their staff and they talk about it openly. It is a bit like how people throw around the Myers-Briggs identities [INTJ, ENTJ, etc...] to describe themselves. Currency awareness pervades decision making at A&H: how they assign projects, how they schedule meetings, how they communicate with each other, etc… The currency concept provides them with a roadmap to create a sustainable workforce.
Total Communication. We rarely get to see our digital co-workers. They live in our phones and in our computers. And aside from an occasional astronaut quality visage through Skype, we don’t have the opportunity to read body language. And global co-workers work when we are sleeping, or when we are bringing the kids to school. How do you keep everyone on the same page? A&H approach this by putting everything in the digital cloud. All calendars, documents, spreadsheets, project plans, go into the A&H cloud. Everyone can see what everyone is doing, and has done. And, they cultivate a cc / bcc / reply-all culture so there is a forensic record of everything. To make this system work, Mark and Chris make sure that they are very accessible to their teams. The most impressive thing is that they actually have an articulated communication protocol. This approach also presumes that people know how to leverage email-rule functionality so that inboxes don’t become overwhelm boxes.
“No-Emergencies” Culture. If a leader or client has a work style that seems to produce a steady stream of last minute emergency meetings, then it spreads out of control. If it gets enabled consistently, then it becomes a feature of the entire culture. And make no mistake, it erodes the quality. Mark and Chris work hard to mitigate this by embodying and enforcing a no-emergencies culture. At A&H everyone buys into an agreement that meetings are only booked with at least 1-day advanced notice and meetings should never be more than 1 hour. This policy takes discipline and it does require Mark and Chris to push back on clients on a regular basis. Emergencies do come up, but at A&H they almost always real versus personality-driven emergencies.
As you can tell, I am a big fan of A&H and their leadership team. They are living the virtual, global company dream in a real way. The conscious, overt crafting of a culture that provides a holistic lifestyle for its workers is an inspiration. Can large organizations learn from the A&H example? What happens when you design the company to produce engagement?

Abraham Harrison LLC: A Model for Global Workforce