If it's snowing, it must be Thursday

After losing the entire blog that I'd just completed, I'll sum up things quickly. It's snowing and we're freezing up here. Everyone put in killer overtime last week and this week to restore and reconstruct our back-end structures after last week's nuclear meltdown--without any of our customers losing service for more than a few minutes.

The next 3 months, we're aggressively pursuing our marketing plan--which means that the time we 'lost' last week will have to be made up over the next 4 weeks. Hosting seminars, buying booth space at conferences, sponsoring lectures, live demos and rolling out new customers will keep our nascent sales force busy in the coming days.

Old Dutch Proverb: It's always better to be too busy than too bored. After all, if your company's too busy, then at least you're booking billable hours.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

And 'Go Yankees!' Who'd a thunk they'd grab J.D. from the Bosox.

Hard-woes

Ugh. There must be something in the water. Over the course of the last 6 days, 75% of our hardware pieces have had critical to catastrophic failures. It's times like these that a company lives and dies (or survives) on its backups and redundancies. For over 98% of our customers, it was life as usual--they never suffered a twinge or inconvenience. For the remaining 2%, a few of the more advanced reporting tools were off-line for a period of time and a server security SSL key was inactive for about 45 minutes. It's a tribute to our staff and contractors that, considering the magnitude of the rebuilding and restoring, everything went so smoothly.
There's an old saying that's been passed down from generation to generation in my family: 'What do I want for Christmas this year? More time.' After re-allocating about 75 hours of staff time over the past week from our ongoing tasks to right the hardware ships, I'd like a box-full of extra time this Christmas.
Greatest thing ever: the latest cellphone from Blackberry (Verizon service) is designed to act as a passthrough from your computer or other device onto their high-speed wireless network. 700Kb-1.4Mb throughput anywhere in their range--and no extra 'service' charge that they like to ram down your throat. Ah, the doors that the ever-widening virtual broadband networks continue to open. 2 years from now, what does that do for the local wi-fi model that many smalled businesses and towns are rolling out or have installed? Another example of how technology continues to lower the costs to do more things than one can imagine while creating new opportunities and new avenues. Gotta love it.

Last, the question of the day: Will Nomah end up in Yankee Pinstripes?

Trends and Theories

Some thoughts and ponderings from the middle of the day:
The internet provides history's more rapidly changing mass-market-envoronment combined with history's most deflationary force ever. The speed at which it allows markets to completely change is unparallelled and our knowledge of what worked in the past (2 years ago) is rendered obsolete by our lack of knowledge of what is working (and failing) right now.
An interesting trend is continuing to be uncovered in on-line sales of brick and mortar retailers: they can compete in the online world with the low-cost WalMarts and Amazon.com's, it just takes them longer to get started. It usually takes the local b&m retailer 12-18 months to ramp up on-line sales of their goods through their web site. Why?
1. It takes time to educate your customer base. Eveyone knows about Amazon.com or Flowers.com. Your customers, and they're your local initially, don't know about YourStore.com and what it can offer them. It takes time, often up to a year or so to reach your customers and train them to shop or browse on your web site. People's behavior patterns weren't formed overnight, nor do then change in the blink of an eye. Great aspects of internet marketing, unlink traditional print, radio, or TV marketing, are that it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and you can easily put metrics to your campaigns to see what is working and what's flopping.
2. Customers are changing their buying patterns. Customer still like to 'kick the tires' on many products, but they don't have hours to spend browsing through your store. A buying pattern that is emerging this year has been the 'order online and puckup in store.' This combines the convenience of online selection and purchasing with the reassurance of in store product examining. It takes a 30-120 minute shopping trip and condenses it into a 5-10 minute quick stop--while still getting the customer in your door.
3. Age. Customers over the age of 35 compare prices online and convenience-shop online. Customers under 35 tend to buy with a hive mentailty online, communicating with like-minded groupd and friends to uncover both good deals and 'hot' products for any given market segment. If your retail demo. is the over-35 crowd, then your online sales will ramp up more slowly than if your target market was under 30. Over time, this will continue to shift and of course these customer behavior patterns create, and will continue to create, new and widely different marketing campaigns and opportunities.
4. Convenience. Many retailers are surprised at how many of their customers place orders on-line for products that they could easily pick up the telephone and order or stop by the store and purchase on their way home from work. When polled, the customers liked the convenience of shopping on-line, the anonymity of it (no pestering sales clerks), the ability to easily price-shop within your store, the quiet on-line store (no-one can overhear an on-line order being placed, unlike a telephone order), and the speed of purchasing on-line vs. purchasing in store.

Friday Afternoon

It's Friday afternoon, the snow is falling and a number of our contacts/cohorts have knocked off for the rest of the afternoon. After working through the entire 'used' and 'wanted' Administration sections, we've put together a 'Top 3' hit list to be ironed out in the coming 2 weeks (or before the Christmas Break hits and everyone's though flee the office and retreat into the relative peace of family life and holiday food). Growing your business and expanding your business model to incorporate new/additional facets is one of the enjoyable parts of being the boss--you can see and try to respond to the data that you get from the marketplace; make the changes necessary to deal with the ongoing flow of new information while still adhering to your core plan and philosophy.

Marketing and timing. At the end of the day, it's all about marketing and timing. You can build the best mousetrap in the world, but if you don't sell it, you won't sell it. Further, you can promote a product until you're blue in the face, if the market isn't ready for it, no-one will buy. Edison waving a lightbulb on a streetcorner in 17th century England is a great hypo- of a product that's too early. Xerox Lab's GUI innovations in the 1960's were an example of a brilliant set of products that were left unmarketed, unpromoted and hence, unsold.

How does that all tie together? By listening to many threads in many targeted marketplaces, an organization builds up a pile of domain knowledge, hard-earned wisdom as my Grandfather would say, that gives clues as to what those marketplaces want and when they are ready for it. There aren't any neon signs yelling out 'X customers want product ABC and they want it in 6 months.' The job of a company's leader is first to read the environment, second to be correct in the majority of the critical decisions that he or she faces--both in the choices and in when to make the decision, and third to motivate the company to execute on those decisions. If you're wrong on any of those 3 steps, you're out of business. If you're right, then you live to fight another day--with a smile and a flock of happy employees and customers.

First Posting

Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon.

Today, we're initiating the first significant upgrade to our Administration System. It's being redesigned after 24 months of customer usage to better fit the needs of our customers, based upon how they were using the system and how they plan on using the system, not just how our initial design thought it would be used. It's amazing what parts have become critical to their day-to-day operations--parts that no-one, not any of the customers, imagined would be that important.

The redesign is being executed for a number of reasons, the first and most important is to make the Administraion System palatable to our increasing number of customers. By improving the layout, the looks, and the ease of use, we are not only making everything easier and more visually pleasing to our existing customers, but we are also making the back-end, the part that our customers's employees use on a daily basis, significantly less frustrating.
The second reason is to make the required improvements and to add in the new features that our customers and our marketplace has told us that they need. With any semi-closed system over time, there are a minimum number of ongoing changes required to make the system function with reasonable facility in the current real-world environment. Add to that the new ideas, thoughts, needs, and 'wishes' that a system's users will devise and realise while using that system, and you have added second layer of continuing operations--improvements and additions. The second reason addresses that layer of operations.

This system, as with nearly all ongoing concerns, is a highly iterative one. Keeps it fun.