Coming clean

I have been bad-mouthing our marketing guy for several months now. At least since the beginning of this column. This negative attitude has propagated throughout our company, mostly by me, and caused the him to be marginalized. So he now operates in the margins and is essentially useless to the company.

How did this happen? I'll tell you exactly how it happened and I'll come clean in the process. He made a few mistakes and had a few bad moments where his sensitivities and frustration got in the way of business. Is this a hanging offense? Maybe it is, but in our company for one reason or another it wasn't. But I got down on him anyway, and because it's easy to be negative I got our CEO and some other engineers down on him too. It didn't take long until we lost all respect and essentially prevented him from doing any useful work.

One or two isolated incidents did not make our marketing guy incompetent, I made him incompetent by propagating a perception formed from sensitivity and frustration. Bad for business, I think so.

Unless you are going to fire a person, always think positive and focus on their strengths. And do not let one or two isolated incidents destroy a good history.

Stay focused?

We had a decent holiday week, 3 or 4 quotes went out, one of which was a very large, labor intensive job that would tie us up for the better part of a year. This customer requires about 60 weeks of custom work and another 40 hours per week of support. The end result will be a nice system for them but not much more than money for us. Most of the customization, we think, will not translate well to our other customers.

So herein lies the issue. Do we become a body shop for the next 12 months for one customer? On one hand the money is good and will keep the lights on, however, our R&D and product development will suffer during this time period.

We have done a few projects like this in the past. One was reasonably successful and brought in additional revenue for several years. Another was spectacularly unsuccessful and the resultant products were never used and had no follow on revenue. The project killed our R&D efforts and put us behind our competition.

The key is to determine if the custom work is close to your core products. And if there is any software, hardware or knowledge gained from the customization that will enhance, in any way, your standard products and services. If the answer to these questions is yes, you might survive the project. In other words is there any risk to losing focus by doing the project. A small company will not survive without focus.

And DO NOT, under any circumstances, let the computer scientists decide.

Our strategy is to charge a very high price for the effort. The high price will help gauge the customers interest and/or scare them off. If they scare off, we're better off without the job. If they can stomach the high cost, it might be worth another look.