Where are we

Its been about a month and nothing much new. We're plodding along with a few small projects and a few potential projects, but it's esentially more of the same. Our marketing department is still useless, our sales department hasn't done much and we are almost out of runway.

We are considering selling the company but haven't turned up much there either. I have suggested that we rethink all of our current sales/marketing strategies because they're not bloody working. Something big must happen in the next week or two. I'll keep you posted.

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.

You do what you have to

Years ago I was working on a site in England. We have customers all over the globe and many of them require assistance from us to install and maintain their systems. In the early days, I would travel to many of these sites for installation, troubleshooting and training.

Anyway, I was on a site in England and the rules prevented me from working weekends. I would prefer to work 7 days a week to get the project done, but rules are rules. On the weekends I would usually hang around with my English and Welsh friends, hit the pubs, visit the countryside, etc.

One Friday morning I got a call from headquarters about customers in Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong that were having problems. Since I had nothing to do that weekend, I scheduled a flight to Singapore, Jakarta and Hong Kong. I left Friday after work, around 1800 and arrived in Singapore Saturday afternoon. The site rep for the Singapore job met me at the airport and we went directly to the site. I fixed the problem within a few hours and was on a flight to Jakarta by 2100. I arrived in Jakarta before midnight and again went directly to the site and fixed the problem within a few hours. I was on a flight to Hong Kong by 0400. I arrived in Hong Kong early Sunday morning and spent a few hours looking for the site rep. At this point I had no idea where the site was located. However, I did know it was on top of a skyscraper and had a radio tower.

After several hours of trying to contact the site rep and with time running short: I had to be back on the job in England by 0900 Monday. I had no choice but to find the site myself. I took the tram to The Peak where there was a panoramic view of the Hong Kong skyline. I filled the pay-per-view binoculars with tokens and started scanning the city for a radio tower on a skyscraper. Of course, Hong Kong is more densely packed with skyscrapers than any other city in the world. And of course, every skyscraper has a radio tower. I was getting desperate. After an hour of searching, I found the radio tower by its company logo. I made a note of the building and scampered down The Peak keeping the tower in site at all times.

I got to the base of the building with a few hours to go. Keep in mind it was a Sunday and a Hong Kong holiday so no one was around. The building was locked. I waited by a fire exit until people came out and as the door was closing I quietly slipped into the stairwell. I climbed 67 floors to the roof where I found the door to the site, a door with a combination lock. It was one of those push button combination locks. I tried several combinations to no avail. I tried knocking to no avail. Eventually, I was escorted down the 67 floors by two armed security guards and unceremoniously thrown out the back door.

I got to the Hong Kong airport after being stuck on the highway in an overheating taxi just in time to catch my flight. I was back at Heathrow by 0700 and back on the job by 0900 Monday morning.

I did what I could, two out of three ain't bad.

The nuclear option

We started the preliminary financial planning for our nuclear option today. It was so preliminary, in fact, it took less than ten cells of a spreadsheet. Anyway, the nuclear option is to open source most of our software; essentially give it away. We'll make money on maintenance and support. Maybe.

We obtained a research paper from MIT that describes business models around open source software; so we'll see what we can learn and adjust our plans accordingly.

Our revenue per sale will go down by about 75%, however because the software is free, we hope to increase the volume to offset the lower price point. And we hope the exposure will bring us into new markets previously unavailable to us. The marketing strategy we can borrow from one of the many successful open source companies currently in existence. The key to this of course, is the products. Are they really useful outside of our current niche? Will companies in our niche drop our competitors for an open source solution? I guess we'll find out.

The end of specialization

Yahoo! recently introduced some new products and opened up their technology to developers . We can integrate our products into Yahoo! to produce a much richer product offering. A Web 2.0 enabled product set. This could be a great opportunity for exposure in a new market and a competitive advantage. It sure would help to have a marketing department.

I'm done whining about our marketing department. It's time to take matters into our own hands. Anyone who doesn't produce at 110% will be marginalized (given menial and tedious tasks) and the producers will be given the important tasks. So we may have engineers doing marketing and accountants doing engineering but at least the important work will get done by the best minds available. This marks the end of specialization. I'll keep you posted.

Honeymoon is over

Well the honeymoon is over. Our new sales guy has been here one week and our CEO is already complaining about him. Apparently he sent out a quote that didn't include a sales pitch. The quote went out in a simple two sentence email. It didn't have any marketing words about how great our products are and how they are better than the competition, et cetera. This sounds like a marketing issue, but what do I know.

Our old sales director was either afraid to send out quotes because of the lack of marketing material or would send them with a fifty paragraph email. Absolutely no one reads a fifty paragraph email.

I guess you just can't win.

So far I like the new guy. I'd rather see the calls being made and the quotes going out.

And now we have our CEO writing the marketing material to include with the quotes and calls. It just might work.