Contact Hitting in Business

Not Sustainable is Not Success

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:55:00 +0000

Building a business like some of those mentioned in this article isn’t success to me. I know some people make money, but ultimately this seems to be almost a fraudulent way of working on an investment. Build excitement for prospects and projects, sell, have founders and employees move on, and the business tank, or potentially fail.

That’s not what I think business should be about and it’s one of those areas that I think has gotten so much press, but doesn‘t really benefit the economy or anyone outside of the investors.

Build something sustainable, something you can be proud of.

Don’t Be Afraid to Talk to your Customers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:32:00 +0000

I saw this tweet recently:

It’s about this issue with Amazon customer service, which wiped a customer’s kindle (allegedly) and is not communicating with him/her.

I don’t know the whole story, or what went wrong, but that type of communication, even with a good reason, isn’t acceptable. If you have problems with your customers, and they are trying to reasonably work things out, talk to them. Don’t let your employees ignore communications of withhold explanations.

Transparency is good for business.

Wasted Time

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:33:00 +0000

A nice infrographic from Atlassian. I know it’s aimed at getting you to try their software, but it makes good points, especially about meetings.

Lean Startups

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:36:00 +0000

I think I mostly agree with this post on why Lean Startups suck.

Listening just to customers, and following their leads doesn't differentiate you. It goes make sense to consider their opinions, but allowing them to drive too much of what you do isn't the answer.

I'm not sure if Lean Startups are the best way to do things, but watching what you do and being careful with your investments is always a good idea.

A higher P/E for more US jobs?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:15:00 +0000

What do you think? I think it's a good post from Mark Cuban, and I try to run my business the way he does.

Schedule Time Off

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:31:00 +0000

When you start a business, especially a small one where you are involved, it's easy to work constantly. I've been reminded of that recently with my wife, who started her own business a few months ago. She's realized lately that she's working 7 days a week, and not getting a break. She loves it, but it's wearing on her.

It's important to recharge, or get a break, even if you love what you do. If nothing else, it gives you a chance to think and perhaps come up with new ways to improve your business.

A Day Out

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:44:00 +0000

My employer had me over to visit recently for meetings and during one of the days I was there, we had a "day out" for our department. About 25 of us packed into a bus and drove to a small English town to visit the Gainsborough Museum and a print shop. We spent a half day doing etching and printing the results on paper and a half day in the museum. I have to say that it was rather enjoyable, and it was definitely a bit of a bonding time for me with people that I see once a year (or less).

I have to admit. I wasn't thrilled with the idea, and grumbled a touch. The museum wasn't terribly interesting to me and I didn't want to spend the time there when I could have been coming home a day early, but I did see the value in there. I got to know a few people better, and I think the bonding that occurred in the common experience will help some of us to work a little better in the future.

It reminded me of other events at places I've worked. One 20 person department had a monthly event of some sort for a few hours (lunch, a baseball game, a movie, etc.). Another had a large cookout 3-4 times a year for hundreds of employees.

Perhaps a waste of money, but none of the events was extravagant and all provided employees with the chance to let loose a little and get to know each other. I have to say that the places that did have some out of work bonding were the places I most enjoyed working. It's something I might recommend to small businesses, and something I'd do if I get another business going.

Treating Employees Well

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:36:00 +0000

I have had very few employees in my businesses, mostly just partners, so I’m not sure how I’d handle most issues, but I have worked for lots of people and seen relations between an employer and employee handled great, good, fair, and poorly. Unfortunately the latter seems to dominate.

I found this post from Reed Hastings on setting employees free very interesting. The idea that you value work, that you want employees to be happy and excited is a great one. In small companies, I can see this working well, and helping the company to grow and people to bond.

One thing in the post that strikes me as a better deal is the idea of compensating employees fairly now. Don’t do vesting, don’t do delayed compensation. Pay people a fair wage, and give them outright option or stock grants when appropriate, and vest them immediately. Delaying the grants makes it seem like you really don’t want to give them out, and you’re basing the reception on time, not work done. Not the message you want to send if you want motivated people.

I don’t know how well it scales, but it would be nice to see how a larger company could implement some of these ideas, and perhaps build a better culture.

Interns

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:37:00 +0000

I served as an intern in high school, and I thought it was a good experience. I had the chance to work for two different industries, computer science at a bank, and an assistant to an orthopedic surgeon. In both cases I didn’t really do any work that matters, but I had the chance to see how the businesses worked, and it helped me to decide how I wanted to proceed in my career.

In college I actually had a paid internship, alternating a semester of work with a semester of college, and that was more like a real job.

I think internships are a great way to teach someone a bit about your business, and also to find potential employees down the road. It isn’t a direct investment, and I’d guess that for every 10 interns you had over time, you might find one or two that would make good employees, but it’s a good service to the community and for younger people, and it gives you a chance to see how interesting your work is to others. You might even learn a thing or two from a fresh set of eyes.

However be careful, and don’t treat interns as free labor, to be exploited. Make sure you follow the guidelines from the US DOL.

Service is part of the product

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:55:00 +0000

Not everyone runs a business the way Apple does. Plenty of people build products, expect them to fail, but sell them so cheap that they don’t want service to be a part of what they do. Think Dollar Tree and the manufacturers supplying those goods. Service is not part of anything.

However if you are a small business, you can take a lesson here. You can build and grow, and retain customers by making sure you have a way to provide good service.

Should you start a business?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:06:00 +0000

As I write this, I'm laughing inside. I'm avoiding starting another one right now, just because life is a little hectic, but read this post with the same title and decide for yourself.

If you have the inclination, or even have thought about it, I'd encourage you to try. If you're under 25, not married, or have no kids, give it a go. We need more small businesses.

How Foursquare Grew

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:04:00 +0000

An interesting look at how FourSquare grew so quickly. It's an interesting look at using your customers to help you grow by building a platform.

Where do I tweet? My personal account or a company account?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:05:00 +0000

This is something I’ve been asked about blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. My advice is that you ought to keep a professional brand out there for your company.

I have two accounts, one for me personally (@way0utwest) and then one for my site (@SQLServerCentrl). The company site definitely gets less time from me than my personal account. I rarely sign on to the company account away from my PC, so it’s hard to maintain.

What I suggest first is that you use the company account to talk about the company, but make sure that someone is watching them. I would share this account with multiple people, and get them to spend a little bit of time each day posting items.

Feel free to retweet to/from your personal account and business accounts to the other. When appropriate. The important thing to remember is that the business account is based on your business and should match your business.

The personal account is for you, and you can get away with some tweets that aren’t business related, but if you are closely associated with your business, be careful about what you tweet. Remember it’s still your brand.

How Should We Pay People?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:19:00 +0000

It’s an interesting article on how to pay people from Dan Ariely at Business Week. It’s a look at some of the issues with paying for knowledge work, or work that isn’t well defined. The short version is that you don’t want to specify too tightly what you expect people to do, but then you have to motivate them to work in the best interests of the company.

I think this is one of the fundamental problems in management today. We still have this mentality from the blue collar factory worker and piecemeal or easily measurable work items being applied by management to knowledge workers. It doesn’t work well, and somehow we think that the hours work in some way relate to the output.

I blame lawyers. They tend to use this model, since they often bill by the hour. However the end result, the quality of that they produce, which is usually research, isn’t easily quantified in anything other than a win or loss. That often comes down to not only the soundness of the argument or the logic, but the charisma of the lawyer. That’s not even close to the way we do business in many other industries, especially technology.

More than money

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:20:00 +0000

I saw someone post a tweet during the recent hurricane that hit the East coast that essentially questioned the decision by Home Depot to stay open 24 hours. The tweet essentially questioned the business sense of paying employees when there wouldn’t likely sell enough materials to pay for the cost of electricity and staff. I was surprised, mostly because the person posting the tweet typically has more compassion for people than companies.

This decision isn’t about profit and loss. From an accounting, or MBA standpoint, this isn’t worth doing. However it isn’t about profits. It’s about serving the community and going the extra mile. It’s about being available to help your customers if they need it. I doubt anyone will come, but someone that gets damage at 10pm just might want to come get some wood, buckets, tarps, etc. for repair.

I’m sure some PR benefit accrues from the decision, but in my mind, this is more about being part of the community and understanding that there is more to business than straight profit.

Users first

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:40:00 +0000

I like this philosphy, Users First, Brands Second. It’s a piece from Fred Wilson, a VC investor in NYC. He makes great points that you want to make sure you are building a service users want first, and then worry about the branding and partnerships.

Ultimately you want a great service or product, and that comes from building something for your customers, clients, users, not your partners.

Distance Yourself with Emails

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:31:00 +0000

One of the things I’ve always done in a small business is publish my email. I want customers, or potential customers to email me, especially if they have issues.

As my companies grew, however, we learned that there are definitely tasks that we farm out to different people. An example of this is the problems with our website. It’s customary to have a “webmaster@” email address, and while we didn’t mind people pinging us, we didn’t want me, or my partner, to be stuck answering all of the emails.

So we added the webmaster email to our list. We both had passwords, and could check (and respond), but it gave us a layer of abstraction. Over the years, when we had an email for some specific function, we added an email, even if it was an alias to one of our accounts. It enabled easier workflow, and it allowed us to publish a standard email people could use.

I’ve suggested this to a few friends, especially those that do events with their small business. Having an “events@” or”webinars@” is an easy email to give to people and it prevents their emails from clogging your inbox. You might alias it to yourself, but if there are enough emails, you want to be able to send those to someone else, and having an abstraction through a separate email works out well.

Fire Some of Your Customers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:36:00 +0000

An interesting read from the HBR: It's Time to Fire Some of Your Customers

I worry that this is taken too literally by some people. It makes some sense, focus on those customers that provide good revenue, but this could easily be taken too far by the MBA crowd, and trying to be too efficient to limit yourself to certain customers.

Your customers will change over time, and you need a wide variety of them. The best customers are those you want to cater to, but offending or pushing away too many average customers might leave you without enough good customers over time. It’s also easy to make mistakes about who are the best customers if you don’t ask the right questions of your data. Make sure that you examine the “best” customers from many sides, many points of view, and analyze the data in multiple ways.

Passion and Business

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:58:00 +0000

From Great People are Overrated (Part II), there’s quote in one of the comments: I read this recently: Boeing went downhill after their primary strategic focus shifted from being passionate about building great planes, to a focus of delivering “shareholder value”.

I read something similar in a book about Clear Channel Communications, with a quote from their CEO saying they had to run their business the best way they knew how, without worrying about the competitors. If they did a great job, the profits would follow.

I’m not sure I like how Clear Channel has run their business, but they have run it their way and been successful. I do think that having a passion and building your product or service to be the best you can, for your market, means you will tend to do well. When you manage for shareholders or an investment, I think we all suffer with a worse product or service.

Should You Allow Telecommuting?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:19:00 +0000

I think I’d always make remote work an option for a company I owned, but should you? What if you’ve never worked remotely yourself, or if you have some concerns?

Ultimately you have to trust your employees. They have access to your data, your equipment, etc. They can find ways to waste time at work, and some of them will end up wasting more time at work than they would at home.

Implement a pilot program, test out different jobs, and with different people. Let them know this is a privilege that can be revoked, and see if their work improves or declines. You don’t need fancy auditing, or monitoring, or anything more than you have now. Either they get work done or they don’t.

If they do, you might be able to vastly reduce the costs you bear in maintaining a large office space. You might even be able to hire new people at lower salaries by giving them the option to work remotely.

Over Messaging

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:42:00 +0000

One of the things that I think people do in business these days is either over-message or under-message.

It’s easy to over-message, by sending something every day to people that isn’t interesting, or contains too much marketing. As an example, I am on the Woodcraft and Rockler mailing lists, and they both message too often. I get 1-2 emails every week from them with some sales, which really means that there’s always a sale.

Now once in awhile that works, and perhaps it does drive people that really love woodworking to spend more with them, but I think it may annoy a lot of people and I’m sure there are people that either a) unsubscribe, or b) only look at the emails when they feel like spending money.

What would I rather see? I’d like less frequent emails, with more rare sales, or the same frequency, but some interesting content in the newsletter that might get me to read for 5 minutes. An editorial, a tip or trick, a way that someone uses a tool on sale.

If you send out frequent emails, I’d encourage you to do a few things. First, track unsubscribes and if you start getting a lot of them, make sure you lower your frequency or find out why. The other thing I’d do is let people offer feedback. Perhaps some of them only want to get emails regurarly and others don’t. If you don’t have a technical way to do this, split your lists up. Put people into less frequent email lists and send them every other newsletter, or even combine two of your others into one and send it to them less frequently.

Email Questions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:40:00 +0000

In your business, you’ll get lots of emails (hopefully) that deal with your products or services. Answering them is important, and it shows a touch with your customers, but it shouldn’t be “just” what you do.

In my business, since I have a discussion area, I don’t answer questions in email, but instead point them to the discussion area. That works for me, but in most businesses that’s not the answer.

However you don’t want to answer the same question a few dozen times. What you ought to do is answer the question, then bcc yourself on the email, and re-use that content.

Publish the content as an FAQ on your site, of frequently asked questions.
Use the content in a newsletter as a “common questions” or support issue.
Use the content to develop an article or piece that helps teach something to users.

There are numerous ways to take advantage of this. Plus once you’ve done that, you can refer email questions to an already published answer, saving some time.

IT and Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 May 2011 22:38:00 +0000

This is a powerful quote:

“This is the digital world IT must keep up with--one where Apple can view a $40,000 car as an accessory to the iPhone.” - From IT Is Too Darn Slow

Not that every business needs constant innovation, but it does show opportunity and thinking outside the box is important. As you look to build a business, look for those ways in which people might view the world differently.

Play Long Ball

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 May 2011 18:03:00 +0000

One of the sayings of my business partner is to play long ball. Make decisions that are good for the long term, not the short term.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t make decisions about processes or issues that need to be dealt with today. Or that you focus on long term planning only. Or even that you don’t tackle some project because it’s a short term fix.

It means being aware that your business is a long term venture and you want to make decisions that will improve the business in the long term, not the short term.

Too Busy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 May 2011 18:04:00 +0000

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog. In my life in the first quarter there was a lot of travel, lots of work at my regular job, and a status quo in the business side of things, so I let this go.

I’ll make an effort to post more links and ideas on business moving forward.