Don’t Make Me Work Hard to Give You Money

I’m always confused by how hard companies make it on consumers to buy their products, online, and in “meat space.”

Have you been to a Walmart or a Best Buy, lately? Good luck finding someone to help you with your purchase (or even finding what you want to buy, for that matter).

For enterprises, purchases are often as much an exercise in persistence and diplomacy, than they are a straightforward transaction, as you haggle with vendors, channel partners, and sales people.

But there are a few companies that absolutely understand the KISS principle.

Southwest Airlines makes it ridiculously easy to book and purchase online tickets. Dropcam sells their cool HD WiFi cameras in a very easy online process (plus, free 2 day shipping!). BlueJeans network sells their awesome Software-as-a-Service teleconferencing bridging service via a drop-dead simple “try if for 14 days free” online form. And it goes without saying how easy it is to purchase goods from Amazon.

In short, these companies “get” the brilliant concept that it should be drop-dead simple to acquire customers, and sell them goods and services that they want to buy – now.

When I hear of companies that are struggling with their sales, more often than not it has to do with their sales cycle, as much as it does their products.

In my first year as CIO at Hendrix, I had one national vendor that I kept trying to give business to (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range), that I couldn’t seem to even get interested in taking a purchase order. They are now firing thousands of people – and I am in no way surprised; not because they didn’t take my money, but because they didn’t seem to understand how to take anyone’s money.

It’s not only large companies that have this difficulty. Startups usually suffer from this malady (with a few rare exceptions), altogether forgetting that the reason they exist is to (one day, at least) make money.

The solution for companies struggling with their sales cycle is really quite simple.

Make something great – and then make it ridiculously easy for customers to buy and begin loving your product or service, immediately, if not sooner.

You Have to Show Up

I had a friend some twenty years ago – I’ll call him Bill – who opened a small music store in Nashville, on Second Avenue (that was just becoming a revitalized tourist area at the time).

What should have been a glowing success (a music store, in the heart of Music City, USA) was instead a complete failure.

Within a year, he was out of business.

How did this happen?

Well, his business plan had two fatal flaws.

1. He sold only music he liked, and
2. He didn’t keep regular, predictable business hours.

It sounds simple enough, but simply, consistently, being available, every day, can make a tremendous difference between achieving great success in your business… or abysmally failing.

And not listening – or even pretending to listen when you do appear – just adds insult to injury.

If you’re not consistently present and engaged in your daily affairs, there is absolutely no way you can be affective with the constituencies that you’re trying to service.

Worse still, you signal that you don’t value the time, talents, and patronage of the people you need to succeed.

Show the people you want to influence that you do value them by showing up – on time, every time.

Lifestyle Businesses

I’ve written about this in the far past, but I simply don’t get the bias against so-called Lifestyle Businesses.

A Lifestyle Business is one where usually one or two founders create a business based upon their talents and abilities, and never intend for it to be a mega-corporation; in fact, most are created by people who want to set their own terms and live their lives they want to live.

They’re not out to change the world – they’re out to make a little profit, hire some cool people, and take the afternoon off to see little Suzy’s dance recital.

You know what’s cool about a Lifestyle Business?

• All the equity belongs to you. Want more money? Work harder. Or simply work until you can pay all of your bills.
• Where you want to live is where you work. Don’t like your current city or state? Pack up the company and move wherever you like… hopefully a business tax friendly state.
• You don’t have to answer to a board of directors or stock holders. If you want to try something, you try it. You are accountable only to your customers and yourself.
• By definition, Lifestyle Businesses are or they aren’t, generally speaking. That is to say, they are usually bootstrap operations funded solely by the founders with no outside investment. If they’re not profitable, they cease to exist. There is no “next round of funding.”

What stinks about Lifestyle Businesses?

• The responsibility is yours and yours alone. You don’t make payroll, it’s on you. You don’t get paid, you don’t eat.
• Most Lifestyle Businesses depend heavily on the talents of one or two key people. They quit, you’re done. That makes buying Lifestyle Businesses a very risky proposition, because you’re not really buying a company but you’re buying one or two people, more or less.
• Lifestyle Businesses don’t have the capacity or capital to scale. Unless you invent the next hula hoop or slinky.

There are some Lifestyle Businesses that do sometimes scale, a bit, and do get purchased by bigger companies. Techcrunch, the tech blog created by Mike Arrington, is probably the most prominent example of a business started in someone’s house and was later bought by a big company (AOL). However, as it turns out, the sale was a risky one for AOL, since the value of the company was largely vested in Mike, and with his departure the brand quickly fell apart.

But I am writing this little piece not to bury Lifestyle Businesses, but to praise them.

I owned and ran a Lifestyle Business for fifteen years, from 1996 until this past year. I spent every February (at least until my kids started school) living in the Florida Keys. I took my vacations whenever I wanted to. If I wanted to work harder I did, and when I didn’t, I didn’t. And I pretty much ran things the way I wanted to, how I wanted to, and when I wanted to.

Ultimately, it became time to do something else. The kids got older… and college for the boys started looming large in the windshield. After weathering a few recessions, successfully, there were other challenges I found I wanted to tackle. Truth be told, I simply got older, and for a large part of what I did for the last decade and a half, it really was a young(er) man’s game.

For those out there chasing your dreams, not wanting to be the next Facebook but to simply create something of beauty and utility and personal satisfaction, I say “awesome.” You can be successful, send your kids to great schools, live where you want to live, pay the mortgage, and have an extremely satisfying life. You don’t have to create the next PayPal or Twitter or Facebook to do that.

And you don’t need venture capital to do that – you simply need an idea, drive, talent, and passion.

Don’t let someone who poo-poos your Lifestyle Business as something less than worthy bother you in the least. Chances are in five years you’ll still be in business doing what you love, and they will be onto their next Pivot.

There’s No Delete Button on the Internet

I would love to fast-forward five years from now and see how job searches and grad school applications are being impacted by what gets posted online.

I know such filtering in the application process is being used extensively even today; but I see no brakes being applied by the Millenials I interact with, and what they choose to share on the interwebz.

Maybe it will lead to a more forgiving political climate. Maybe it will lead to a more open social structure.

But how will those embarrassing photos from your twenties play out when you’re up for that “big promotion” in your forties?

Think before you post. There’s no delete button – yet – for the Internet.

ZamZar

Dear G-d. Not Another Webinar.

I am prone to stating a strong dislike… well, hate, actually  - of webinars.

Why?

Because 99.9% of them are colossal wastes of time.

Most aren’t well researched. Most are (or look like) they are thrown together at the last minute. And almost all of them have abysmal audio / video / content. I can’t tell you the last time I sat through a webinar for any more than a handful of minutes without bailing.

One would think that after a while people would catch on.

And yet, I can count on getting at least five or more come-ons – daily – for a webinar of some ilk.

I beg you all – in the name of everything that is holy – if you have an insane itch to host a webinar, resist doing so with all your might.

However… if you must persist in this madness, please do the following:

1. Don’t rehash your company’s history. Nobody cares but you and your employer. Almost every webinar starts off with 10 or 15 minutes of this dreck. Just leave it out. Seriously.
2. Get to the point. Fast. Your time is valuable. And so is the poor schmuck’s who just sat through 5 slides of you describing the first 10 years of your company’s existence and why they switched from making wodgets to widgets. Respect your audience’s time as if it were golden. Because it is.
3. Don’t read your slide deck, word for word. If you’re reading me your Keynote / Powerpoint deck, all I’m getting is a less interesting blog post that I could have read on your site without scheduling an appointment to have an audio version (voiced by Monotone Man ®) of the same. It adds nothing. And insults everyone’s intelligence.
4. For G-d’s sake, buy a good microphone. If I’m sitting there listening to the Teacher from Peanuts (wah wah, wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah), then I’m not focused on your pitch, your message, or your content. Meanwhile, I’m thinking “there goes another 30 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.”
5. If you are delivering video as part of your presentation, make sure that you are in focus, in the frame, and are being shot in front of a background that isn’t competing for your attention. While I’m on the subject, there are plenty of unemployed actors, community theatre players, and voice over professionals. Use them, because odds are (in the Arkansas vernacular) they ain’t you.
6. And finally, have something to say that is interesting. Don’t tease me with a follow on premium up sell. Deliver the goods. Make it worth my time.

In summary, Quality Counts.

Quality Content. Quality Production. Quality Delivery.

If you’re not going to go to the trouble, why should your audience?

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes.

Changes coming – soon! Watch this space!

Getting Permission

Looking around at success stories in business or in life, there is a few things that seem to be recurring themes:

• Success often follows unconventional behavior
• Permission to act isn’t usually sought, desired, or needed

Too often I run into people unwilling to risk because they need permission to act.

Risk entails potential loss. And just as potentially, great gain.

No one can ever grant you enough permission in the world that mitigates risk to zero. But many use the lack of permission as just that excuse to not act on whatever their desires are, because they are scared of the potential failure that may await them when they make the leap to chase their dream.

Don’t ask for permission. Weigh the risks. Go and do.

Project Lifetimes

Usually when one discusses project lifetimes, it is almost always in the context of describing the time and events between when a project is conceived, when it is delivered, and all that stuff that happens between those two fenceposts.

But project delivery is just the beginning of a project’s lifetime.

By a far sight.

My longest lived project, gauged by years in production and useful life, was eighteen years (an MS-DOS based electrical estimation project that was retired in 2007). My current “dean” of active software projects, running in pretty much the same form I completed it, is an engineering design product called SAND that I developed for the Bank of America (and now actively maintained by HP) – in continuous production since 1998.

In short, software projects can have surprisingly long lifetimes.

That’s why when I hear designers and developers say that they’re doing something because it’s expedient and that they will go back later and “do it the right way”, I cringe. Because practical experience tells me we usually never get a chance to “redo something the right way” once a project gets out into the wild.

Some developers – quite wrongly – expect their responsibilities and obligations on projects to end the moment their contractual obligations free them to move on the next thing.

A great many software projects would have happier endings if developers took their responsibility and obligation in products with all the gravitas that would normally go along with birthing something that could have a potential lifetime in decades.

Most of us consider our spans of administrative control to cover only that period from one paycheck to the next.

And our software is all the worse for it.

This isn’t a paean to Work as Life – only a lament that as developers we often don’t envision that our creations will have lives that far outrun our ability to dream.

Changes a’ Comin’

I’ll have some news tomorrow.

Watch this space.