Look below for a view of  what it used to look like:
And that blank stare you see? The clutter made it hard to focus. But when there’s nothing on my desk I have to decide what’s the most important thing to work on now. I can’t fool myself into thinking I’m doing something important when I’m working on what’s merely urgent (or worse!). When there’s only one thing on my desk I know what I have to work on. When there’s two things on the desk (or more) I’m distracted.

You may also be able to see I’ve got ZERO emails in my inbox (the monitor on the left). I realized I was using it as a holding tank and doing so was cluttering up my mind. I’m using gmail so I just selected them all and archived them. That way I can find them with search if I need to, but if I don’t ever need them then I don’t need them. As mail comes in I’ll check periodically and empty the box every time. I’ve never been a huge fan of labels (folders) for email but I’m starting to find them useful. I now have one called “later” for stuff I want out of my inbox but don’t want to take the time for now.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Clutter

You do realize that multi-tasking is a myth don’t you? You can’t really do two things at once, you just flip from one to the other in very small bits. Like talking to someone on the phone while you’re having a different conversation with someone in the room. You don’t really hear them both at the same time. You just ignore parts of each conversation that (hopefully) you can infer when you switch back.

I’m trying to be more conscious about what I work on – meaning I’m deciding based on what’s important not what’s urgent (or distracting) unless I decide distraction is important for the time. It’s similar to the GTD process of emptying your inbox on a regular basis.

Applying this to a TODO list

I’ve started using Asana for my TODO / Project list. I like it because I can assign tasks to projects and see them that way. But in another view I can see all my tasks in a single list (called your inbox) This needs to be emptied regularly as well. The way Asana prioritizes tasks, you go to your inbox, and decide when you’re going to work on each task. You can assign it to TODAY, Upcoming or Later. I realized that the reason I kept so many things in my in box is I didn’t want to forget about them. The “Later” category is great for that. I can keep my Today list clean and not loose those wonderful ideas that I love (which often turn out to be not so great but that’s a post for another day).

It’s kind of like the concept of a WILL-DO list rather than a TODO list.

I see this post has gotten away from me.

It’s devolved into a productivity discussion – which isn’t bad – but that’s not the bigger thought that inspired me to write. The bigger thought is

The difference between zero and one is huge!

Much bigger than the difference between one and two or even one and one hundred. You see this in lots of arenas. When a startup goes from zero sales to one – it becomes a company instead of just a prototype factory. That’s why so many small shops stick the first dollar on the wall. They don’t do that with the 2nd or the tenth or even the millionth dollar.

Zero mistakes is a great place to be. So is zero late shipments. Factories post how many days they’ve gone with zero injuries – not how many days since they’ve had one.

And the difference makes the one important as well. The only one is much more important than the best of two.

Takeaway:
I’m not sure what’s the best takeaway for this post. But it’s a new year. A year I hope will be marked by a one followed by lots of zeros in my bank account. Maybe starting with zero things on my desk and in my inbox will help.

We were fortunate.  Also grateful for the funding and diligence of pro-active tree trimming around power lines that has been going on for years in this area.

So why does it matter to you?

Because of these facts.

• By the time it hit Connecticut, Irene wasn’t even a hurricane, just a tropical storm. Wind speeds and rainfall were below predictions – even predictions made just 14 hrs before landfall. So the national media reports that things were better than expected.
• Flooding, however is at record levels.  People who lived thru hurricane Gloria (1985) said they’d never seen flooding like this.
• As are the number of people without electricity – over 50% of the homes in the state lost power. Many will be without it for days.
• Vermont and even Montreal (which according to one meteorologist  have never had a tropical storm) did worse than expected.

Side note about Montreal. My wife went to Montreal on Friday to bring our daughter home after her summer there. They had planned to make the trip back on Sunday but as that was when Irene scheduled her visit they had to choose whether to come home on Saturday or ride it out up north and come back on Monday. They chose to arrive Saturday before Irene did. The right choice as it turned out; because damage to high rises which had been a concern for NYC never panned out there. But several windows were blown out of a high rise in Montreal – a building my family drove right by on their way home.

Better or Worse? So What’s My Point Already?

The point is that large scale trends can be irrelevant to specifics on the ground without being wrong. If your house did fine in Gloria (a REAL hurricane) but got flooded by Irene (JUST a tropical storm) the fact that, by some numbers, Connecticut did better than predicted doesn’t really matter to you.

That means that national or global economic trends of recessions, tight lending by banks, layoffs etc. may not be applicable to your business. Things may be better for you or worse depending on the specifics of your situation.

For example, most of my current clients are doing better than the national averages in recent months and are having trouble hiring. One whose business as always done better than his local competition is having hard times and seeing his numbers dwindle and is having to cut staff. We’re starting to track different data points to learn the causes of these things and how to exploit them.

Takeaways:

• You can’t extrapolate from large scale trends to your business.
• The smaller or more local your company is, the more this is true.
• Changes in large-scale trends SHOULD make you take a more detailed look at the data you’re collecting to see what’s really going on for you and how you can capitalize on how you’re different.

Seth Godin writes a post with a similar conclusion, though Seth adds some more profound insights – as he usually does.

One interesting line from Seth is “At some point, a healthy and fairly paid community is essential if you want to sell them something.”

Think about it. How well would your company survive without a market that had the money to buy your products, the time to shop for and enjoy them, and the leisure to pay attention?

flickr.com/photos/ramdac/ Jason Gulledge

I almost called this post the ideal team for RUNNING your company. But that would be wrong. You can run it however you want. Some people want to be in charge of everything. Fine. Some want to just do stuff and not think about process or monitor any results except the bottom line. Fine. Some want to operate on a whim and change direction on impulse. Fine too. You can run a company any of those ways. Just don’t expect it to grow very large or very fast.

If you want a company to grow, you have to have a team that executes. Hence the term “executive.” By executive, I mean someone who can take an idea and run with it: make it happen. I don’t mean they run away with it. Executives need to be monitored and accountable but they don’t need hand holding. They take responsibility and initiative.

There are two reasons you need a team and they both relate to the fact that a growing company is constantly changing. There are new activities and new challenges all the time. (This same is true of a turn around situation so the team concept is applicable there as well even though the company may actually be shrinking not growing).

Reason # One is there are too many moving parts for a single person to do them all. If the same stuff is happening over and over again, maybe one executive can deal with it. But by definition, this won’t be true if you’re growing.

Reason # Two is because of the shower syndrome. You know those ideas you get in the shower? Or maybe as you’re falling asleep, or out walking the dog? I often get them when I’m in the car by myself – another reason not to text and drive.

Those are the result of your non-conscious mind working on a problem after your conscious mind has let it go. They aren’t always right but they can be very very powerful. The reason for a team is you only get these ideas about one thing at a time. If you’re focused on raising a new round of investment, you won’t be focused on opening a new market.

flickr.com/photos/rocketjim54/

You need a team so more people can get these kind of ideas in the shower. Not that I recommend group showers or anything.

So without further ado here’s your team:

NOTE: The ideal team size is not 7 even though I’ve listed 7 categories below. The best team size is either 3, 4, or 5. It makes sense to combine responsibilities based on your industry, company size and individual’s skill sets. But you do need a “buck stops here” person at the top of each of these categories.

Sales & Marketing. I know these are separate skill sets, but they both serve parts of the same process (turning a person into a lead, then a prospect then a customer). So you need a person at the top who can make this happen and do it in a way that supports the strategic goals of the company. At different times that means opening up new markets, shifting the sales mix toward, or away from certain product lines, more profitable sales at the expense of market share – or vice versa.

Operations. This person is charged with developing an organization to deliver what the sales people sell. They must focus on effectiveness, not just efficiency. They should be able to accurately project lead times, quality assessments and costs.

CFO Everything the company does affects cash. Someone needs to be focused on the cash aspects of every decision the company makes. Someone need the time and bandwidth to routinely hit up vendors for better prices, make sure sales are collected early and bills are paid at the optimal time.

This person need not be an accountant. But they need to understand accounting well enough to “speak the language” and relate accounting to management decisions. And she (or he) must understand the differences between short term spending and long term investment.

Legal Almost everything the company does has legal implications. This person should not be in-house council. They should probably not even be a lawyer (like the CFO need not be an accountant). But they have to “speak the language.” This person should know when something needs to be sent to the company’s counsel and when it doesn’t. They should be able to mark up legal documents and negotiate contracts to a point where you’re not paying lawyers to do things that a mere mortal can accomplish. This way the firm can get the most benefit from what it does spend on legal fees.

IT Here I’m talking of IT as a strategic function – not a support function. Increasingly, every company has some informational or knowledge component to what they sell or how they make and sell it. Someone needs to know how to tap into the latest technology to provide a competitive advantage in that aspect of the product or process. This is the person I’m talking about.

For some historical perspective, consider this. Before factories were run by electricity, they were powered by an external source – often water. No matter what they produced, they needed an intricate arrangements of wheels, belts, pulleys etc to get the power from the river or waterfall outside the building to the machines and devices inside. The ability to design and implement the power transmission often became a strategic advantage to the firm – despite that fact that what they sold did not contain water, belts, or pulleys. That is the aspect of IT that I’m referring to here. It is of course, more critical in some companies than in others, but worth considering in all companies.

New Products Every market is moving faster and faster. Just selling the same stuff year after year is a way to consign your company to the commodity market (at best and the graveyard at worst). Someone should be thinking 1,2 or 5 years out about and developing new products for existing customers as well as new markets. This job is very much in the Important but not Urgent category.

CEO The CEO is the keeper of the business model. It’s up to her (or him) to understand how the trends and cultural changes outside the company affect and are exploited by the systems and organizational structure on the inside.

This person is the captain of the ship, or more aptly, the conductor of the orchestra. Did you ever stop to think that the conductor makes none of the sound the audience hears? Their job is in two parts. One faces outside the company where they need to make key relationships and notice trends. One faces inside the company, where they develop the size and scope of the organization to profit from those trends and relationships.

So How Do You Get There From Here?

It takes a big cultural shift for many companies – especially ones that were founded by a single individual.

I’m a big fan of the bootstrap – that phase when you do it or make it rather then buy it, when you spend time rather than money, and pay in stock options rather than cash. But a company can only bootstrap so far. If you’re going to build a top notch team, you have to hire the best and pay them market rates. But just as importantly, you have to structure the organization so those expenditures are investments rather than costs.

Another big attitude shift is that of control. When one person’s at the top they are expected to know everything and all the decisions rest on their shoulders. A company like that can’t scale past a certain point. To grow you must be thrilled to give up control, and be happy to find people who are much better than you at certain tasks.

Another cultural shift is that as a company grows it becomes more dependent on process and less on just getting the job done. Not to say that process should be allowed to impede the results – that’s bureaucracy. But the wisdom and experience that people develop can’t be allowed to live in a few people’s heads. It has to spread throughout the organization so that best practices abound. That takes process.

THANKS

Many of the ideas here were inspired by a discussion I had with Mark Volchek about this topic. Mark is a co-founder and the CFO of Higher One. The company was founded in 2000 by students right out of college, was on the INC 500 in 2009 and went public in 2010.

image source flickr.com/photos/bradgillette/397715338/

If you ever read anything about starting or running a business in the press; or if you go to hear people speak about the topic, in all likelihood you’ll find they’re probably not telling you the unvarnished truth.

The Close Encounters Syndrome

Why don’t they tell you the truth? I call it the Close Encounters Syndrome. Some of my readers  may be old enough to remember the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” It’s from 1977.

Richard Dreyfus plays a guy who sees a UFO one day and it scars him for life. He can’t get this sound out of his head, and has a vision of a mountain he has to build – right in the middle of his living room. As you can imagine it doesn’t sit well with his wife. In the process of following his bliss obsession, he looses his job then his wife leaves him and takes the kids. And throughout it all he keeps at it, undeterred. Then finally the aliens really exist and they come back to earth to and take him away in a blaze of glory proving that his vision was right all along.

By the way, the ending is where they got the idea for the last 5 seconds of this ad:

So what?

Well you see they don’t make movies about people who hear things, have visions, loose their jobs and their families and end up in the loony bin, instead of in outer space. It just isn’t a story people want to pay to see – despite how wonderful and inexpensive the pop corn is at those places.

Likewise you don’t read much about how hard it is to get a business going, or the specific mistakes people made that caused their company to crash and burn. Or the ones who went bust trying to do exactly what Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or [fill in the blank] did.

Instead we read about how people got great ideas and never gave up and became rich, famous, beautiful and skinny. We’re left to figure the other stuff out on our own.

But things may be starting to change

Recently Eric Ries pointed out this problem. And quoted Paul Graham saying something similar.

On top of that, Inc Magazine had a series of short articles where they specifically profiled business failures. Check out the October 2010 issue starting on page 67.  I can’t find them online but if you search Inc.com for 2010: Learning the Hard Way, you’ll find them.

There’s More Learning in Failure

The funny thing is, there’s more learning in failure than in success. Why? Because when things go right, you don’t really know how much was luck, how much was timing, how much is able to be replicated. But when things go wrong it’s often easier to figure out what not to do next time.

Takeaways:

• Don’t believe everything you read.
• Especially about success.
• Learn what others did wrong.
• Learn what you do wrong as quick as possible.

What Do You Mean Organization?

That’s reaction some entrepreneurs have. They don’t need no stinkin’ organization. They just tell people what to do. Then they scream and curse when it doesn’t get done right. But whenever you have two or more people working toward a common goal, you have an actual organization, whether you like it or not.

The trick to developing a growing, thriving organization is to push as much responsibility as possible down the organization.

Yes, Down The Organization.

The more things that are handled as close as possible to where the work is done, the more people at the top have time and resources to do more strategic things. But this is hard to do.

Why? Because the people at the top often have more experience and ability. At least we say that’s the reason. Yes, they often are more competent. But the reason it’s hard to push that competence down the organization is that people who are good at what they do have what’s called “unconscious competence”. Remember when you learned to drive a car? Remember the focus it took? You were developing competence – consciously. At some point you got so good you could drive and talk and listen to the radio, AND think about something else. You became unconscious of the movements needed to maintain speed, steer, put on the blinker etc. That’s unconscious competence.

People Don’t “Get It” When They’re Not Unconscious

Probably the person down in your organization, the one who should be given some responsibility, is not unconsciously competent. And if you just told them to do something they wouldn’t do it right. They wouldn’t get what you wanted done. It may not be that they can’t do the job, just that they need training, mentoring, oversight (aka management) to be able to execute that responsibility as well as it needs to be done.  And that takes time and effort.

But more than time and effort it takes you being able to explain what you do well, and how you do it. That’s what trips most of us up. When we are so good that we are unconsciously competent, we can’t always explain to another person how it should be done. And so, we can’t figure out how to push some responsibility down to someone else. And we have to keep it ourselves. But that limits the growth of the company.

The Solution?

There are many: Checklists, Work Flows, Management Training, Mentoring, etc. “The Exercise of the Elves” is one of my favorites. They all take a skill set that is often quite different from the skill of actually doing the work. This is one reason many small companies stay small. They aren’t willing to invest in that skill. Big companies are. They hire people to do these things, or they bring in consultants [shameless plug] or both. Companies that aren’t willing to do this are forced to keep responsibility at the top and keep their organizations small.

But if you want to get out of the engine room and into the wheelhouse; if you want to take your company to new places; in short, if you want to function more like the CEO and less like the General Manager, it’s a skill you need to bring on board.

image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/debaird/325700

Then click on Lucky Day for a two and a half minute video of some of the luckiest people on earth – pedestrians, drivers, even bank robbers.

Stay for the last one – I laughed out loud.

On a serious note, don’t disregard luck as a source of your business success. Not the only source. You have to be smart enough to recognize the luck and take advantage of it. But I doubt Bill Gates would be as successful as he is if he’d been born 30 years earlier. Would Sam Walton have done as well in the 1800′s as he did in the 1900′s? Would George W. Bush have been President if he’d been born in Texas to an oil family instead of Connecticut, to a political family? (look it up) Or Obama if he’d really been born in Kenya?

There’s been some interesting research on luck. Turns out people who feel lucky are more open to seeing possibilities that others miss. But those who think their success is all of their own doing, miss a lot of opportunities.

I read of one person who asks everyone she’s interviewing for a job if they are a lucky person.

Are you a luck person?

UPDATE: Turns out that last bit of the video is fake. Thank you SNOPES – but still funny.

My Drug of Choice

Wow. That title ought to get me some hits on the Google -  doncha think? But really this post is about …

How to Treat Your Customers Right

And about how I got get free drugs from people who are doing it wrong. I have rosacea, a disease that makes my face  break out like a teenager with acne. One of the treatments is a low dose of antibiotic. So they make one that’s time released so I only have to take it once a day. (It doesn’t help much but my doctor says we have to give it a year.)

The drug is basically tetracycline. You can buy 300 capsules (250 mg) of tetracycline for $30. Mine is time released (a common process that I can’t believe adds that much cost) but which cost $311 for 30 capsules of 40 mg each. You do the math. Never mind. I did the math. Mine cost 25.9 cents a mg. The other cost 0.04 cents per mg. Mine cost 648 times as much. Six hundred and forty eight times! Just for making it time released.

But that’s not the story of treating your customer’s wrong. That’s the story about the health care in the US and I already wrote about it. I don’t actually pay $311.00 each month for my drugs. Yes I have health insurance, but the deductible is so high ($10,000 per year) because it’s an individual plan that unless something catastrophic happens I’m paying for my health care myself.

No, the reason I don’t pay $311.00 is that the doctor gives me a card which allows me to get 30 pills for $25. So maybe if every one pays that much the real cost is 2.08 cents per mg – only 52 times  as much as non-time released. Go figure.

It turns out the pharmacies in my area all want new customers. So it’s easy to find a coupon that gives you $25 in savings, gift cards or whatever if you bring a new prescription  to them. And many places in my area do this. So guess what I do? Each time I get a refill, I bring it to a new place and get $25 off of a $25 prescription  so I get my drugs for free.

So what are these pharmacies doing wrong?

Mistake #1 – They are treating prospects better than customers.

That’s a very stupid thing to do. Your existing customers are the cheapest ones to market to. Not the ones you should be forgetting about. It’s not as easy to measure your results with existing customers. You don’t know if they would have bought anyway. And this leads me to suspect the reason these pharmacies are doing is wrong.

Mistake #2 – Measure the right things.

Somebody at corporate probably figured every new prescription  customer was worth $XXX because they would keep their business for a while, they would buy other things while they are in the store etc. So they figured it was worth $25 to get them in.

And you know what? They might be right. I’m not like most shoppers.  So maybe the $25 they didn’t make on me is just the cost of doing business. Maybe the whole promotion does pay off. Maybe. I doubt it. But even if it does make money for them it’s probably not the right thing for you. Why?

A Small Company is not a mini-Big one.

You can’t take what works at a $500 million dollar company, scale it back 100 fold and expect it to work at a $5 million dollar company. The scale doesn’t work like that. These big pharmacy chains are faceless companies to me and probably most of their customers (and employees). You aren’t – or you shouldn’t be.

Takeaways:

• Measure the right things
• Treat your existing customers better
• Be a face people can have a relationship with

Why people cheat and steal and how this can be encouraged or discouraged. The reasons are not at all what you’d expect.

How these conditions were exacerbated by the stock market and financial systems to cause the mess we’re in.

Why our intuitions can lead us wrong and what to do about it. This doesn’t come up till about the 14th minute but it’s the most important takeaway. It broadens the appeal beyond cheating and beyond the financial mess. How many of your intutions do you rely on to run your business and how many have you really tested?

Takeaways:

1. Buy Dan’s book here  http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
2. Test your intuitions. This is a hard and painful process for most people. Hard because our intuitions are often invisible – we just think of them as “how things work.” And painful because self inspection often is. Hire a coach to help if you want to break out of the limits your intuitions are imposing on your growth.

[tags] CEO skills, entrepreneurs, intuition, small business, management [/tags]

In fact, it’s both the worst of times and the best of times (haven’t I heard that before?) And you’ve got to deal with both. I’m launching a new program to help companies do this called “Tighten Up and Come out Swinging”

Tighten Up to deal with the problems. Come out Swinging to take advantage of the opportunities.

In fact I’ve re-done the opening page of my web site to explain the details. Check it out.

Takeaway:

• Call or email to see if I can help you

[tags]CEO Skill, economy, small business, entrepreneur, turn around [/tags]