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Written by David Law | 07 November 2009

We have been using Google Apps for companies for a couple of years now and love it.  I can't recommend this email and groupware product enough.  There are a number of compelling reasons to use this suite of cloud based apps:

  • Its Free
    • The Standard version is at least free.  When you are initially starting out I would suggest that this standard version is more than sufficient to get going on
    • The professional version adds space and full exchange functionality but that can wait for a little while while you save $50/year/user
  • Gmail: 
    • Great email service with your own URL
    • Postini which is built into Gmail has great Spam protection.
    • The email runs on the gmail servers and allows you to use your own email client on your desktop or the familiar Gmail interface on the web.
    • When you are overseas, often the only website reachable is Google
  • Shared Documents
    • This is useful, although the features are fairly limited compared to desktop versions
    • It is great to use for shared checklists etc.

Then when you are ready to actually pay for this great service, it is only $50/year per user.

 

Why NEVER to use Yahoo

Written by David Law | 04 November 2008

Yahoo sucks!  Yes, not very business-like but at this point there I have nothing good to say to Yahoo, and more to the point I don't have any forum to give them constructive feedback or have a meaningful dialogue with them regarding their actions.  Made-Products one of our companies used Yahoo Store as the web commerce engine for their products.  The Yahoo solution is price competitive, doesn't require much technical knowledge and has been pretty reliable for some of our other companies.  All of that changed around the first of the year.  Without warning Yahoo shut down our store around January 1st 2008. Poof, one minute a nice small web-store was operating without any major hiccups and the next it was gone.  I have to reiterate 'without warning'  it was suddenly taken down.  What followed felt more like a scene from Kafka's novel 'The Trial', than a business interaction.  Numerous calls to tech support didn't resolve the issue, or even find out what the issue was.  Only after a couple of days and many calls to tech support was it escalated enough so that we found out that the site had been shut down based on 'abuse' and again it was never made clear what the 'abuse' was.  This apparently could have been Mail, Store and one other type of abuse that I can't remember right now.  The only way to contact the department that handles 'abuse' issues is... you guessed it by email and there are three different emails to choose from.

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A Disturbance in the Force

Written by Ryan Mongan | 23 April 2008

Summary: I was at a love fest recently that was all about extolling the virtues of entrepreneurial niche businesses. Then, someone said how she was consulting with large companies on successfully defeating entrepreneurial startups. That was a buzz killer.

I just got back from a learning event that I attend each year at MIT. I always come out of it a bit wiped out. This is partly due to the volume of the content and partly due to the alcohol flowing into the wee hours of the morning. This year was one of the best I had attended with some really fantastic speakers and subjects that hit home for me.

One of the speakers, Frances Frei of The Harvard Business School had done a lot of research into focused disruption and the responses to it. Focus is one of the three classic competitive advantages put forth by Michael Porter in his 1980s work, Competitive Strategy. Focus is how a company targets a niche market and is able to retain an advantage over its large, well funded competitors. She said that in most cases, the practice of focus is a strategy that big companies just can’t deal with. Big companies need big growth. They can’t spend a lot of effort developing small markets. They need to introduce products with mass market appeal and reach. Of course she had a very friendly audience in me. But then she went on to say that she was consulting with big companies on how she had seen big companies respond successfully to focused differentiation.

Hold the phone! What is she doing? The last thing I need is someone out there doing that. I thought about heckling her to distract her but she seemed pretty quick witted. I thought about pulling the fire alarm but that wouldn’t stop her in her crusade of darkness. So, I bit my lip and decided to listen to this evil doer.

She described the typical reaction process that big companies go through when a focused disruptor moved in on some of their business.

First they are dismissive. “Their product is inferior. They’ll be lucky if they are in business next quarter.”

Next comes concern. “Huh. Some customers seem to like their inferior product.”

Following this is a ‘who cares’ attitude. “We didn’t really like those customers anyway. They were just a distraction from our core customers.”

Finally, worry sets in about other focused disruptors as the first walks away into the sunset with a bunch of former BigCo customers.

Fortunately she went on to say that successful big company responses are few and far between. However, the few successes that she did delve into shared some characteristics. Yum! Brands, GE, and Omnicom all have been successful. All have distinct sub-brands and all of them have shared back end services that their individual brands all use. Sharing these services gives them a cost advantage over their niche competitors. You can really see this play out with Yum! Brands and their ‘Multibranding’ locations. Several restaurants share one building. Not only does this cut the costs for each individual restaurant but it appeals to groups that can’t decide on one kind of food. The other common characteristic was a strong autocratic leader. This person, in her eyes, was a requisite in order to say no to the constant pull of non-shared services. You could see how the management in charge of the Pizza Hut brand for example might push for their own procurement system explaining that their customization would allow them to be even more competitive. The strong leader who resists this tide is the one who maintains the cost advantages.

I came away from this talk a bit more worried about large companies than I had been in quite a while. My mind was put more at ease when I decided that leaders like Jack Welch, David Novak, and John Wren don’t come along every day.

Brand like you sell sugar water

Written by David Law | 09 July 2007

Summary: Great small companies create specialized products that target an identified user group and are unique in the market. Great small companies most often don’t have the luxury of a brand manager or often even a marketing department. Learn from the branding efforts of the big guys and have your next product release be an even greater success in the market.

As I was drinking a Snapple green tea, waiting in the Des Moines airport, I took a close look at the Snapple packaging and had time to think about the amount of effort that is put into the graphics, the marketing message and the overall brand of the product. There was nothing unique or differentiated about the actual drinkable product inside. Cola is another great example of a non-niche product with practically no taste difference between any of the colas on the market. In taste tests consumers can’t tell the difference. Yet when you ask consumers they have a strong preference for one the drinks. The brand and marketing is the only differentiator between the drinks.

Imagine how you would sell your product if there was nothing unique about it on the market. What would you do differently?

Here is an interesting pdf of a study by McClure1 et al that looks at what happens in the brain when consuming cola. They perform blind taste tests and then also taste tests with brand cues for Coke and Pepsi while watching the subjects brain response using fMRI. The presence of brand images causes different areas of the brain to fire and interact with the taste centers to define the preference. Branding works in changing how we feel about the product especially in the case for Coke and apparently less so for Pepsi.

So how does this apply to our small companies? How would you brand and market your product if there were nothing unique or better about it compared to competing products on the market? Why don’t you do that currently? If the product can sell well on its own unique merits then the combination of a unique product and a strong brand and marketing message can only improve the sales of the product. So save some time, energy and budget when developing your next product and spend some effort on the branding and packaging of the product. You will improve the user experience and perception of the product and ultimately drive more sales.

1. McClure, Samuel M., Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim S. Cypert, Latane M. Montague, and P. Read Montague (2004b), “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks

The Empowerment Doctrine

Written by Ryan Mongan | 17 May 2007

Summary: This is the single strongest indicator I have found of a company’s cultural strength.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Jack Daly and Tom Peters speak on a couple of different occasions. They both have a passionate and engaging delivery style that wakes up the audience and gets everyone fired up for the future. While the style and enthusiasm are great, it is the substance that really sets the two apart. Peters operates more as a futurist and an academic. He tries to predict which companies are going to do well and what the new hot trends are going to be. What he then winds up doing is having to defend his prior statements when the markets don’t move in exactly the way he thought or when companies don’t quite live up to the expectations that he laid out. Daly, on the other hand, focuses on his own business practices. Besides getting near immediate feedback to his theories, his hands on experience engenders him more to the entrepreneur while Peters has a big following of investors. I’m not bashing Peters – I enjoy hearing both of them but I’ve been able to execute on many more of Daly’s principles.

Yesterday I was able to roll out one of these principles at one of our new companies. I entitled it an “Empowerment Doctrine”. I brought it up at the end of our weekly all-hands meeting. What I scribbled on the white board was the following.

Is it right for the customer?
Is it right for the company?
Is it ethical?
Are you willing to be accountable?
Is it consistent with the company’s beliefs?

If ALL of these are true,

DON’T ASK, JUST DO.

This was enthusiastically received by everyone. I was very glad about that, and a bit relieved. Reluctance would have been an indicator of a potential personnel issue. The first place I look for reluctance would be with the CEO. Some CEOs don’t want to let go of the reigns. They feel that they need to make every decision in a new venture because every decision matters in a new venture. But this just doesn’t work. By holding on tightly, they slow the company down. An autocratic leader eventually creates the culture whereby people defer all decisions or they leave. This will eventually spell defeat for the company as a many-brained company will always defeat a one-brained company.

That is not to say that reluctance won’t exist within the general staff. You can have an empowerment oriented leader but still have people unwilling to risk decision making. This might be an employee issue — perhaps they just don’t have the confidence of conviction. But, more likely, it is a cultural issue. If the company does not represent a safe environment where failure is tolerated, risky behavior will be quashed. Even when it is said in jest, joking around with comments like, “you better get your resume in shape if this doesn’t work.” puts people on the defensive. Second guessing of decisions starts occurring and the less risky alternatives start appearing the most attractive.

This doesn’t mean that mistakes won’t be made. When I laid out the doctrine, I said explicitly that we will make mistakes. But, when we do, we will learn from them and refine the boundaries around each of the questions.

Another source of decision phobia exists if the answers to the questions above are not clearly known by everyone in the company. Maybe the core values or the company BHAG haven’t been articulated. Maybe they have been articulated from on high but not internalized by the staff. Does the staff truly know the customer? Do they know what the customer wants? Having to answer these questions brings people together. A common vision is created and the company moves rapidly past bumps in the road that don’t need to be debated.

Time will tell if this truly sinks into the culture at this company. At least for day #1, it is on the right path.