Category Archives: Bastos Ventures

Book Review of the Cash Flow Quadrant

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I’ve been wanting to review this book for some time now and I hope I do it justice with my quick overview. I’ll try to keep it simple as the book sometimes sounds a lot like a late night get rich quick scheme but there are slices of nuggets in there that are worth picking it up. What I find interesting is that I started reading it thinking that it would be the least interesting in the Rich Dad series for me and turned out to be a gold mine in psychological perspectives and human to human interactions. Having grown up around many of the types of people this book explains, I thought I’d break down the most important concepts in the book.

If you own a business than you need to read the “Cash Flow Quadrant” by Robert Kiyosaki which by far I think is one of the best psychological analysis of the business world as a whole. In the book he splits all of society up into four basic categories, Employees, Self-Employed, Business Owners and Investors. Without going into much of the books other more infomercial like components you need to understand this is actually a very astute comparison to make. I grew up in a very business minded home and was always taught to stay in school and get the piece of paper but think differently about what it is that I want to do with my life. The examples in the book came to life for me because I’ve seen every aspect of them first hand as you probably have as well, but it’s important to note that there is no right or wrong position to be in one of the 4 categories, you can be successful in all of them, but what is important is the mindset you have in the process.

He goes on to explain that Employees use words like “benefits” and “security”. He says that what he thinks drives them sometimes is fear but I think it’s more a factor of stability, there’s nothing wrong with that if what you’re looking for is a stable life, it’s just most Employees don’t prepare for the lack of stability towards the end of their lives and usually hand their money over to a sales man who sells them on a bond or securities portfolio and that’s when most get into trouble.

The Self employed in the book are like my father, again nothing bad about being a lone wolf or a specialist at something and working for yourself but for them money is not important, “independence” and “freedom” are. They are sometimes considered experts in their fields and like to do things their own way. Quality of work is much more important than money.

Business owners look for the best Employee’s and the Self Employed and are the ones that look to hire them so that they can keep their minds busy with the occupation of thinking. This may seem wrong as many Self Employed people consider themselves Business Owners but the book gives an interesting difference between the two. If you can walk away from your business without having a hand in it letting managers and the people you’ve hired to handle the day to day concerns than you’re a Business Owner, a real Business Owner can leave his business for a year, and return to find it more profitable. They build a system that is capable of running on its own, with capable managers. There are not that many good Business Owners in the world that can do this successfully but the occupation of thinking that I was discussing before involves focusing your energies on new Products, business concepts and ideas of course.

Investors make money with money. They don’t have to work because their money is working for them. This is how the book says “great wealth is made” but most people aren’t looking for that so it really doesn’t matter. To those that are but have never successfully gotten to that point, it’s their way of thinking that tends to keep them from being able to achieve it, like a Self Employed person wanting to make millions when they won’t hire anyone else, or the Employee hoping to invest in the stock market all the while someone is collecting fees for every stock purchased or month gone by. If wealth is the number of days one can survive without physically working and still maintain their standard of living, then investors can simply do nothing and their grandchildren will still be provided for. Some investors are considered employees, but only in their own corporations and for tax reasons.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it, pick it up on Amazon for cheap or get the audio book, it’s well worth the read to understand at a psychological level how people in business really think and what drives them.

Lone Wolf Syndrome

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With the success of one man tech companies like InstaPaper, there is this surge of desire within the Startup Community to go at projects alone and to not hire any employees at all. I think that is the desire of everyone who starts a business and or goes into business for themselves, this wish to not have to deal with employees and business partners while still being successful. Growing up my father use to always tell me that “if you can’t hire someone to do the job right, you might as well do it yourself.” This works for many people but here is where I caution those of you looking at keeping your startup a one man show and why it’s best to remember that it’s not having business partners and employees that’s the problem, it’s having the wrong partners and employees that kills Startups.

If you own a business than you need to read the “Cash Flow Quadrant” by Robert Kiyosaki which by far I think is one of the best psychological analysis of the business world as a whole. In the book he splits all of society up into four basic categories, Employees, Self-Employed, Business Owners and Investors. Without going into much of the books other more infomercial like components you need to understand this is actually a very astute comparison to make. I grew up in a very business minded home and was always taught to stay in school and get the piece of paper but think differently about what it is that I want to do with my life. The examples in the book came to life for me because I’ve seen every aspect of them first hand as you probably have as well, but it’s important to note that there is no right or wrong position to be in one of the 4 categories, you can be successful in all of them, but what is important is the mindset you have in the process.

He goes on to explain that Employees use words like “benefits” and “security”. He says that what he thinks drives them sometimes is fear but I think it’s more a factor of stability, there’s nothing wrong with that if what you’re looking for is a stable life, it’s just most Employees don’t prepare for the lack of stability towards the end of their lives and usually hand their money over to a sales man who sells them on a bond or securities portfolio and that’s when most get into trouble.

The Self employed in the book are like my father, again nothing bad about being a lone wolf or a specialist at something and working for yourself but for them money is not important, “independence” and “freedom” are. They are sometimes considered experts in their fields and like to do things their own way. Quality of work is much more important than money.

Business owners look for the best Employee’s and the Self Employed and are the ones that look to hire them so that they can keep their minds busy with the occupation of thinking. This may seem wrong as many Self Employed people consider themselves Business Owners but the book gives an interesting difference between the two. If you can walk away from your business without having a hand in it letting managers and the people you’ve hired to handle the day to day concerns than you’re a Business Owner, a real Business Owner can leave his business for a year, and return to find it more profitable. They build a system that is capable of running on its own, with capable managers. There are not that many good Business Owners in the world that can do this successfully but the occupation of thinking that I was discussing before involves focusing your energies on new Products, business concepts and ideas of course.

Investors make money with money. They don’t have to work because their money is working for them. This is how the book says “great wealth is made” but most people aren’t looking for that so it really doesn’t matter. To those that are but have never successfully gotten to that point, it’s their way of thinking that tends to keep them from being able to achieve it, like a Self Employed person wanting to make millions when they won’t hire anyone else, or the Employee hoping to invest in the stock market all the while someone is collecting fees for every stock purchased or month gone by. If wealth is the number of days one can survive without physically working and still maintain their standard of living, then investors can simply do nothing and their grandchildren will still be provided for. Some investors are considered employees, but only in their own corporations and for tax reasons.

I went through all of this to explain that it’s okay to be a lone wolf developer and there are some cases like in InstaPaper’s situation where you can make it big and have millions of users generating millions of dollars as only one person. Yet we should see those cases as the exception to the rule and not the rule itself. If own a company and want to grow then put all your focus on finding the right people for the right positions and not just hiring to fill a position. Some of the greatest business stories of all time seem to show a single man with a single business mission but those individuals in most cases were smart enough to surround themselves with the people necessary to do the job right and allowed them time to think and strategize the opportune direction for their companies.

Think Like Google

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In Jeff Jarvis’ 2009 book, “What Would Google Do?”, he presents the case that companies like Google are not merely creating a new way to use the Internet, but instead are revolutionizing how businesses think and work rocking many industries to their very core. My wife and I walked into Picture People in order to take some photos of my wife’s family; we had a great time during the photo shoot. The camera lady was very energetic and though she earned only minimum wage, they had taken the time to train her and teach her how to do her job well. Then came time for us to select the pictures, we fell in love with all of them. When we looked over the prices, I realized we could not buy a single picture for less than twenty dollars. I explained to the young camerawoman that she did not have to print out the half dozen large photos and place them in frames, for we would be buying only a few. Then she told me the craziest thing; she said that her company policy was to print everything out even if I was not planning to buy it. The young lady would be fired if she did not print and setup the frames, each costing around $200. I even thought if the image is that expensive to buy, then why is it so cheap for Picture People to print it and then throw it away if I do not buy it. This simple policy of waste and sales is the nature of our current corporate culture, one that corporations believe is the best strategy to trick or convince their customers into buying their products and services. Google differs from most other corporations in that it does not adopt this business model.

Inefficiency and mass thinking is like a cancer that is eating its way through modern businesses; many small companies as well as Fortune 500 enterprises operate no differently than the big government bureaucracies which they so adamantly rally against. Businesses do and can still make money the old way, but if they are to survive in the next ten, fifteen or twenty years, they must adapt to a different way of thinking. If they do not do so, companies run the risk of having their businesses cannibalized from the ground up by smarter, faster and more open competitors. Google’s way of doing business has changed the rules and allowed new and old corporations to cannibalize themselves and revolutionize their way of thinking for the better.

The first of many issues plaguing corporate culture is Customer Service. The relationship between customer and company has changed for the worst over the last few decades and we seem to think of it as progress. Small business imitate large corporations in everything they do including how they handle customer service because they believe that it will bring them similar levels of success. Whether small or large, companies cannot afford to put a customer on hold for long periods of time no matter how much they continue to tell them that “your call is important to us!” As the internet has shown, people are looking to interact with these companies, to tell them what they want from those companies; the question is are they ready to listen to their customers? Give the customer control of your product or service, and they will use it for the better to help you create value in your company. If one listens to the users and cherishes their ideas, even the bad ones one will succeed.

The advantages to giving control is that the worst customer can become a best friend. Dell Computers ran into some problems a while back when they where first known as having the best customer service in the industry. Yet when random blogs began to pop up chanting the atrocities of Dell’s Customer service department the company ignored it, thinking like many do in old media circles that if peope do not give it credence it will just go away. Yet the internet has freed the customer to speak out against a large organization and for everyone to have a shared discussion of any company together online. The more the company ignored it, the worse the problem became, until finally, when users did a search for Dell on Google, a popular site called “Dell Sucks” became number two on the search results. With the advent of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, companies are scrambling to learn how to use them to the most advantage. Dell immediately told their customer service staff to look on every page and every blog for problems and ordered them to start answering customer concerns. Many companies would claim that they do not have the man power to do such searches and answer every customer problem online. However if they tried, they would recognize that it is possible to do so. Dell’s customers were already having a conversation about them; it was up to Dell if they wanted to join that conversation.

The second advantage is that the best customer is now the best partner. The best example of this is Google’s Gmail service; they could have launched it out like so many other Email providers like Yahoo or Hotmail, but they kept it in Beta (testing version) for nearly five years before they even offered it as a product. They handed control of the service over to their users for free and got so much feedback that it is now one of the most powerful webmail clients used by enterprises world wide. The critics would say that it is great if one is offering a free product to people, but what does one do when people have to charge their customers. Salesforce.com charges their business customers for access to a platform they built and they themselves use. Their business is Customer Resource Management and they do it well, if there is something that their customers need, they immediately implement it and offer that feature to all their other customers without a problem. They do this by creating an internal network for their customers to communicate with each other and ultimately do business amongst themselves.

In the previous case we saw with Picture People, I was a loyal customer, I loved their product and their service, but when I told them not to print all those photos, they did not listen to me because they felt they knew better. Picture People’s business belief is that if they force their employees to do it, the customer will fall in love with it and want to take it regardless of the price. Not to say that some do not but it is a waste and probably not very profitable. Plus the picture I take there is Copyrighted so that means I cannot make my own copies of a picture of myself. Why cannot I take this picture and post it on Facebook or Twitter? What makes them think that I am going to come back to them for reprints if it costs me a fortune to do so and what gives them the gall to make me feel like a criminal for doing it myself. If Picture people made the customer a partner and allowed them to post their pictures for the world to see, it may gain more customers. My love for their product should be their greatest asset, not their chance to nickel and dime me for every cent. In a world with so much choice, customers will no longer be content with a business’ half hearted attempts at customer service; one must go above and beyond for their business.

The second solution is that business needs to look at is the way it views the new economy. Small is the new big. Large corporations with hundreds of employees is too costly when one factors in Union Worker Costs and employment benefits. A company must manage abundance and not scarcity. When Adams wrote the book Wealth of Nations he explained that scarcity raises prices and thus is what they need as a business man to look for. Airplanes have a limited number of seats so they can charge more for those seats, Theaters have a limit of people that they can have in one movie so they charge more based on the number of people who want to see a film. In a world where a start up company can compete with a Fortune 500 in a level playing field, it pays for a company to stay small both for their clients and their share holders. Businesses need to think distributed in that they must share and network with others and not hoard for themselves. Instead of wanting the customer to come to the business, go to the customer. The news paper should look for its local bloggers, invite them to write on their print paper. Websites in exchange would promote the newspaper’s own website and content. Many newsmen will say that this cannot be done, that their profit margins will be too low to support the paper, the solution is to gut the paper. It is better that they canabalize their own business and not allow a competitor to do so. They should not see Bloggers as a threat but instead view them as a valid cheap resource for news stories that senior news men can view and edit if necessary. The news papers can also turn over their ad services to Google allowing it to do find their advertisers for them so that they can focus on what they do best, find the news. The more a business focuses on its area of expertise, the more Google will search them on that content and make them the experts on the subject.

The first advantage of new economy is the ability to rid corporations of the inefficiencies in business and focus only on what will make the business profit. In the case of Picture People, their inability to be efficient will probably be their downfall, a better and cheaper photo place will do a better job and take them down much like they took down Olen Mills. Google’s view is that one needs to manage abundance of information and not control scarcity of what the customer does not know, instead of linking to select websites with guarded information, Google search is built to get better as they get more sites on the internet in order to be able to search them and give their user a more concise answer to the question. Nothing that is done at Google can be done without data, there are no hunches at the board room. No single executives pics the product because they think it is a good idea. If an employee has an idea, they must come to the boss with hard data to back up that idea. If they want to make a change to a site, they run tests of different designs and see which customers found easier to navigate. If they want to create a new product they do Beta runs for customers to give them feedback that then they can present to the CEO. If one cannot come to the boardroom without the data to back up everything they want to do then they do not get to present it. If one does then the board votes on what they feel based on the data shows the most promise. Many will say that this is an absurd way to do business, that employees should be doing their jobs and not collecting random amounts of meaningless data on something as random as a website change, yet Google has proven itself a leader in innovation at every turn because of this method. They manage their abundance by allowing their customers and users to get more and more data back to them so that they can then create a better product.

The second advantages businesses must remember is that we now live in the gift economy, free as a business model. Everyone of Google’s products is free in some way shape or form, they make their money off of advertisements that are geared towards the niche needs of their users. So the better Google gets at offering ads to niche markets, the more money Google gets from it is advertisers. Walmart has destroyed man small businesses who sold the same product as they did and at a much more expensive price, they sell mainly to mass market needs and can control their prices in order to wipe out the competition. Any company wishing to compete against the Walmart’s of the future must think Niche, they must offer products that one cannot find at the mega stores thus creating a niche economy that they lead and own. The mass market is dead, the economy of niches is the new paradigm. A boot maker in Texas uses Google to sell his $5000 boots online, he only sells to a select set of customers that find him based on his niche market and with the help of Google sells hundreds of these per month. This niche product will not be found on Walmart shelves any time soon, but ask the boot maker if he is complaining? Remember Picture People, their absurd prices for their photos prompted me to realize that if they changed their business model they could increase their customers and grow their value. Instead of Copy-writing the photos they take, offer them for free online. Charge a hosting fee after the pictures have been taken that allows their customers to go online and pull the pictures from. They know their customers will want to go to Walmart or other Photo sites to print their pictures so offer them that as a service. Give them the ability to purchase through Walmart and make a few cents on the dollar in the long run. Allow the customer to post the pictures on their Facebook or Flickr accounts so that they can share it with everyone and thus promoting the business more. Do not hold the customers to one’s standards but instead allow them to create their own and make money in the process.

Most businesses would look at this and think it is absurd, “I sell a product” the say “not a service or a website,” Yet one does not always to see free as something business offers their customers but it can also be a means to learn from them as well as their employees. Google offers a 20% free project for their workers, this means that during an 8 hour day, employees are allowed one and a half hours to work on their dream project or innovation. Google benefits from this time because almost all of the projects invented during this 20% become full time Google products later on. Everything from Google Maps to Gmail was once someone’s 20% and is the lifeline of Google’s innovation. This also creates employee love for their work and most will spend their free unpaid time working on the project in an attempt to get it out there. Google gets this kind of work almost for free because it gives rather than takes from their employees and customers the ability to work on their dream projects. This is the new Google economy that every business must understand, the ability for businesses to stop marketing to the mass and create products that will still be found and sold in a large way but can be geared at a certain audience with specific tastes and loves.

Ultimately there are many more things that one can do to make their business more like Google, but the key is openness and throwing off the previous notions of success in mass in exchange for customer loyalty and brand honesty. If a business gives their customers control of the product, they will make it their own and love it, the final decision is still in the company’s hand but they can ensure success by welcoming the customer into the conversation more. Businesses need to remember that their customer does not have to come to them to have a controlled discussion of their products or services, the business must go to the customer by listening to their feedback and going where they are. The customers are already having a conversation about the product, the business just needs to find out where that discussion is going on and join in on that network. They also need to create a platform for the customer to work with and build on, this creates customer loyalty and brand respect. Finally a business must join the new economy by not over charing their customers for what only they can provide but instead offering them a free or low cost solution where the customer can do what they want and the business can manage the abundance from it. Using free as a business model is important whether one is implementing a free time for their employees to innovate or are offering a free service to the customer in exchange for data, customers and employees can go somewhere else for what one has to offer them, give them a good enough reason to stay. Google’s way of doing business has and will revolutionize every industry on the planet. With the ability to instantly gather and sort information steadily growing and getting better, we will soon not be able to run our businesses without these principles managing everything we do.

Hiring a Developer

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I find it a bit disingenuous when I hear people say that they are looking for a programmer to join their team and they can’t pay them much but instead are willing to offer them partnership in the firm. Yes I understand that for many startups that is what you have to do in order to get off the ground but in most cases the people making the offer have no development background themselves and or no desire to learn how to develop software and thus are leaving it on the shoulders of that lowly programmer they are looking to hire to solve all their problems.  I love start ups, that is I love working with the ones that have a solid business model in place to make revenue, as a programmer I wanted to give some insight into some of the things I’ve ran into and hopefully create a virtuous circle for both the company looking to hire and the programmer looking for work.

Hire by Knowledge not Language – I see this request a lot “Looking for a Python developer that knows Django” or “Looking for a PHP or Java developer” no education required. It is great to see smart programmers getting work in specific fields, but something I see most often is a Founder hiring a developer based on a language skill set and not on overall programming knowledge. Many college taught coders have the skills to jump from one language to another very easily but if you can’t afford them then the next best thing is hiring someone willing to learn concepts more than just a simple language.

Encourage Developer Education – This is too often something that is lacking in most start ups, so starved for meeting deadlines that they rarely cover coding basics or encourage their programmers to finish their degrees or take higher level classes. In many cases this is also a matter of dependency, if the programmer doesn’t have a degree then it’s going to be harder for him to move companies and find a better paying job down the line. This wouldn’t be a problem in any other job but in the world of development, it’s a kin to career suicide, you may not have needed a degree to do what you do but trust me in this line of work it’s almost vital to get good programming gigs past the age of 30.

Technologies change faster than Employees – Today’s PHP needs are tomorrow’s Python requirements and future Scala or other language necessities. I’ve seen companies drop good programmers because their needs changed and the coder they originally hired couldn’t keep up with the learning curve. If you hire someone out of high school, encourage them to go to college even if that means they are not at everyone of your nightly coding sessions, and if you hire correctly then you won’t be at every tech meeting trying to find the next guy with the next skill set every time.

Pay for work done and not for work promised – This is something that might get me in trouble with other developers but I see situations where companies will promise to pay based on project completion, this works well with seasoned developers that have been doing this for a while but not for newbies who have no idea what to charge. In those cases paying for what has been delivered will be better than having them deliver halfway work and it will teach them the amount of time it really takes to get something down. It’s called the laws of threes, everything will always cost 3 times what you estimate, take 3 times as long as you calculate and have three times the number of bugs you expect. Keep that in mind when you hire and you’ll have a better idea of when things should get done verses when they will get done.

Overall if you stick with these concepts you should be fine with both hiring and keeping great developers, attitude is important as well and no matter how skilled a programmer is, if he doesn’t bode well with your organization or company culture then he’s not worth the hire. Remember that for a technology company your software engineers are your lifeline and the difference between success and utter failure, keep that in mind. You should also read this yCombinator article about taking time off to learning to code yourself.

Book Review of Twitter Power

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I’d been looking for a good social media book that just focused on using Twitter as a platform, as more of my friends convinced me to use platforms like TweetDeck to simplify my social media footprint I picked up Twitter Power 2.0 after hearing much about the writer. All in all it’s a great book for beginners, it covers the basic concepts of twitter pretty well and teaches you the do’s and don’ts of the platform. It also gives you some pretty easy to understand tools and how best to use them so over all a great book for those looking to get more from their relationships on Twitter. I’ve provided a basic chapter breakdown below from the book to give you a better idea of the topics discussed and I hope you pick it up and try some of what’s in here for your own personal or corporate brand.

Introduction: What Can Twitter Do for You?

Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Social Media Landscape.

  • So What Exactly Is Social Media?
  • Social Media, So What? Why Social Media Really Is a Big Deal.
  • The Different Types of Social Media Sites—Content to Suit Every Market.
  • A Closer Look at Microblogging.
  • Introducing . . . Twitter!

Chapter 2: What Is Twitter and Why Is It So Powerful?

  • Twitter and Its Successes.
  • The Power of Twitter’s Immediate Feedback.
  • Instant Access to Smart People 24/7.

Chapter 3: Getting Started the Right Way on Twitter.

  • Signing Up—Does Twitter Have the Web’s Most Friendly Registration Page?
  • Who’s on Twitter? Your First Followers!
  • Create an Inviting Twitter Profile.
  • Choosing Your Twitter Picture.
  • Designing Your Twitter Profile.
  • Designing a Commercial Background Image for Twitter.
  • Choosing the Right Colors.
  • Notices to Notice.
  • Tweeting with Your Mobile Phone.
  • Sending Your Very First Tweet.
  • Becoming a Follower.
  • A Word about Security.

Chapter 4: Building a Following on Twitter.

  • Quantity or Quality: Choosing the Type of Following You Want.
  • Quality: How to Be Intentional about Creating Your Own Network of Experts.
  • Quantity: Seven Killer Strategies to Reaching Critical Mass on Twitter.
  • Twitterank and Page Rank.

Chapter 5: The Art of the Tweet.

  • Tweet Etiquette.
  • The Benefits of Following before Twittering.
  • How to Join a Conversation.
  • How to Be Interesting on Twitter.
  • How to Drive Behavior.

Chapter 6: The Magic of Connecting with Customers on Twitter.

  • Identifying Problems and Soliciting Feedback.
  • Discovering Your Top Fans, Promoters, and Evangelists.
  • Your Micro Help Desk.

Chapter 7: Leveraging Twitter for Team Communication.

  • Twitter for Virtual Team Leaders.
  • Creating a Twitter Account for a Virtual Team.
  • Building a Team with Twitter.

Chapter 8: Using Twitter to Help Build Your Brand.

  • Create a Story.
  • Portraying Your Brand with Your Profile.
  • Tweet style—What to Say When You’re Building a Brand to Create Value and How to Say It.
  • Reinforce the Core Message.
  • Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.
  • Writing the Tweets.
  • Win Retweets.
  • Create Hashtags and Run Hashtag Chats.

Chapter 9: Leveraging the Power of Twitter to Drive Behavior in Your Followers.

  • Driving Followers to a Web Site.
  • Promoting a Blog on Twitter.
  • Twitter as a Resource for Post Ideas.
  • Driving Followers to the Mall.
  • Can You Put Affiliate Links on Twitter?
  • Driving Followers to Register.
  • Tracking Results and Testing Strategies.
  • Tracking Multiple Tweets.
  • Making the Most of Twitter’s Trends.

Chapter 10: Quick Ways to Make Money on Twitter.

  • Earn with Advertising on Twitter.
  • Offer Specialized Services.
  • Barter, Buy, and Sell Your Way to Profit.

Chapter 11: Beyond Twitter.com: Third-Party Tools You Will Want to Know About.

  • SocialOomph.
  • Twitterrific.
  • Twhirl.
  • Twitterfeed.
  • Trendistic.
  • Twellow.
  • TweetBeep.
  • TwitterCounter.
  • TweetDeck.
  • TwitThis.
  • TweetAways.
  • HootSuite.
  • TwitPic.

Chapter 12: Building Powerful Solutions on Top of the Twitter Platform.

  • So What Is an API Anyway?
  • What Can You Do With Twitter’s API? Automating Your Twitter Experience.
  • Creating Your Twitter App.

Chapter 13: Putting It All Together.

  • A 30-Day Plan for Dominating Twitter.

Chapter 14: Power Twitterers.

All in all like I said before it’s a great book for beginner twitter users, for those of us who have been using the service for some years now, it helps you focus your efforts in a much more robust and compelling way. Enjoy.

When Partners Bail?

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I recently received the other night what can be considered as the Dear John letter of the business world from a partner who no longer wanted to continue on one of the many projects that I’m apart of in the Tech sector. I was hesitant to go into business with the guy but the project was doable and potentially very lucrative and so I added it to my portfolio of work. He had asked me to help build a site for a very niche industry over a year ago but in the last few months I had been expecting this email for some time and it was a tough pill to swallow. I’m now left holding the bag asking what went wrong? Below are a list of my new general guidelines when finding or dealing with new partners to avoid these kind of events from happening again in the future.

Make sure your personalities work well together, one of the lessons I’ve learned in this experience is no matter how good an opportunity sounds or how tempting it is, if you and your partner are always butting heads then that may be a sign that you’re in for a long road ahead. I have many different people I work with and get along with them great but in this case my colleague was a detailed perfectionist and I’m more of a get it done now and make it better as we go kind of person. My philosophy has always been that perfect is the enemy of the good and when you focus too much on insignificant details and try to make something perfect it prevents you from getting anything of real value done out for a customer or client. I don’t care who you are, you’re never going to get something right on the first try so instead of trying to perfect something again and again my focus has always been to get something out the door, see if it’s worth continuing and then make it better. He was the resident expert within his industry but provided little to no guidance for me on how to start and with countless change requests and disagreements it was no wonder he bailed.

Never treat your partners like employees, one of the hardest things I have to deal with as a developer under 30 with multiple business partners on different projects is this mindset some older partners have that bringing in a younger Guy is like free labor or let them do all the work. In many cases it’s disguised with a “I don’t understand what you do” mentality thus they tend to act more like your boss than your partner or at least will try to. Many think that because they are more experienced you should agree with everything they say and it’s hard to stand your ground when a change or problem they say requires your attention is unnecessary and more a burden on your time and costing you money then it is for them. In this case the lack of initial direction forced me to take initiative and start the project the only way I could, by building it. As requests to change this or work that this way came in the general feeling I got was that my partner was acting more like a boss at times than an equal. The fact is he came from an industry that prided itself in taking orders and making rules and remarks on everything and that made it appear like he never really seemed to want to collaborate. Your partners are not going to take orders, they are going to try to do what they do best and neither parties should start pointing fingers early on.

Be willing to learn what your partner does in order to share the workload evenly. I think its a mistake to enter into any partnership where you haven’t at least done what you partner is doing. I always say don’t hire someone unless you’ve done the job first so that you can tell where you’re partner is at and better understand their dilemmas. Also don’t just ask them to teach you but take initiative and try to teach yourself, if your partner needs help because the workload is too great, asking him to teach you is akin to doubling his efforts.

Go all in or go home early on, if your partner isn’t 100% committed he should let you know and not lead you on for the sake of hoping that he has at least a foot in the door if this thing takes off. In my case I was responsible for development while my partner handled sales and content. After months of development we finally launched a beta and started seeing bug reports come in. Things weren’t perfect but the software did what it was suppose to with a few minor things to be addressed. Again because of the perfectionist angle I felt some hesitation from my partner to bring in any customers. As things progressed I found myself handling what few customers we had myself and every time I would forward a lead to my partner he seemed to give up on it right away and had no follow through. Though what got to me the most was when in that Business dear john he wrote that he had decided early on not to sell the product because it wasn’t built his way and led me on for months to believe that he was busting his but in sales but nothing was coming in.

Have a plan B and C incase you’re left holding the bag. If you follow the advice above you should hopefully never need this but its always good to plan for the just incase. One of the main reasons I have multiple partners on multiple projects is exactly to avoid situations like this from bringing me down physically as well as emotionally. If someone leaves I have more than enough people interested in what we are doing so that the business isn’t solely dependent on one man’s experience. Yet considering this project itself was a niche industry it will be harder to find a replacement but not impossible. Having a backup of people you’ve met while working on a project isn’t back stabbing or unfaithful, it’s hedging your investment and common sense. I said I would leave the door open incase they ever want to return but it was less about wanting them back and it was more about being civil.

In the end I learned lessons that I will take with me on every venture I start or run, having a positive attitude even when you’re pissed as hell helps, you can’t ever really take it personally it’s just business. I hope that in the future I will take better care when picking those I work with and I’m glad I learned of my former partners attitude early on before too much money was on the line. You live and you learn I guess.

Book Overview of ReWork

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With it’s short two to three page chapters, ReWork seemed like a simple enough book to read and go through. The ideas were very different than anything I’ve read and after researching the company 37 Signals I understand why, they are essentially an old fashioned profits company using modern day tools. The concepts and principles they address would have worked in the days of Henry Ford with the Model T or Ray Crock with his burgers. Focus on making money and on the customers, not on anything else. The best line in the book is that they don’t build their software for the Fortune 500 companies, they design them for the Fortune 5 Million small businesses that need good products. I loved their brash and to the point ideas which I’ll share a bit below chapter by chapter.

FIRST

  • The new reality – This explained the new realities of business, very good jumping off point.

TAKEDOWNS

  • Ignore the real world – This helps you focus on your business and not the competition.
  • Learning from mistakes is overrated – Winners always win again, losers rarely get a second chance.
  • Planning is guessingWhy grow? – Stop planning for your success and start making it.
  • Workaholism – The employee you think is doing the most work may be wasting the most time, look for efficiency over dedication.
  • Enough with “entrepreneurs” – Rename yourself as a Starter instead of an Entrepreneur or be forced to be looked at as a joke.

GO

  • Make a dent in the universe – Do something truly amazing in your industry.
  • Scratch your own itch – Solve a problem that you want solved before you solve it for anyone else.
  • Start making something – Don’t just talk about the product you think would be great, make it yourself.
  • No time is no excuse – You can work a full time job and still follow your passions, if you really want it.
  • Draw a line in the sand – Don’t add things just because your customers want it, you make your products great, not your customers.
  • Mission statement impossible – Don’t just say you have a mission statement, let your work show others.
  • Outside money is Plan Z – Don’t trust anyone else to finance your business, it will lead to the downfall or loss of your business.
  • You need less than you think – You don’t need fancy offices to run a business, restrict yourself on purpose.
  • Start a business, not a start-up – Forget about starting a business just for the sake of starting one, create something with real value.
  • Building to flip is building to flop – If you’re not doing what you love now, you’re in the wrong business.
  • Less mass – Don’t try to grow big, make your profits grow big but keep your company as small as possible.

PROGRESS

  • Embrace constraints – Artificially restrain yourself and you find out just how much you can accomplish.
  • Build half, not half-ass – Don’t add all the features your market gives, do the ones you think are most important.
  • Start at the epicenter – Get in, get down and get dirty.
  • Ignore the details early on – Don’t worry about the details, worry about the big picture.
  • Making the call is making progress – Sell, sell and sell some more.
  • Be a curator – Be careful with what your company is doing and how it’s doing it.
  • Throw less at the problem – Don’t use money as a means to solve a problem, use your brain.
  • Focus on what won’t change – Features come and go, the basics are forever.
  • Tone is in your fingers – Enough said.
  • Sell your by-products – Recycle your short comings and ideas as a by product of what you do.
  • Launch now – Don’t start tomorrow something you can do today.

PRODUCTIVITY

  • Illusions of agreement – Get it down now, not get it down in writing.
  • Reasons to quit – Be willing to quit and move on to something better.
  • Interruption is the enemy of productivity – Have a time of silence at your company, a few hours of just work no communication.
  • Meetings are toxic – Don’t start them or have them and if you do restrict them to less than 30 minutes.
  • Good enough is fine – Trying to be Great is the enemy of the Good.
  • Quick wins – Getting in quickly is better than a slow loss due to perfection.
  • Don’t be a hero – Don’t try to save something you don’t want to save, focus on the now not the past.
  • Go to sleep – Get rest, you won’t be any better at something if your exhausted.
  • Your estimates suck – Over estimate and under promise.
  • Long lists don’t get done – Don’t make lists, make decisions of what you can do now.
  • Make tiny decisions – Same as the last chapter.

COMPETITORS

  • Don’t copy – Imitation is the great form of getting to second place.
  • Decommoditize your product – Make something that no one else can compete with.
  • Pick a fight – Find your opponent and be better and more agile then they are.
  • Underdo your competition – Give less features than your competitors by making it simpler for your users.
  • Who cares what they’re doing? – Ignore the noise, focus on your company, products and customers and forget about the rest.

EVOLUTION

  • Say no by default – Be willing to tell people no and then find out if what they want is a good idea.
  • Let your customers outgrow you – Be willing to offer your competitions number to a customer that needs more than you can provide.
  • Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority – Focus on priorities more than feelings.
  • Be at-home good – Keep your home in good company.
  • Don’t write it down – Do things now and not later if you can.

PROMOTION

  • Welcome obscurity – Be glad that no one except for your customers know about you, keep competition in the dark.
  • Build an audience – Create a community of people that like what you do.
  • Out-teach your competition – Train your customers, don’t just sell to them.
  • Emulate chefs – Do what celebrity cooks do.
  • Go behind the scenes – Show your audience how you run your company.
  • Nobody likes plastic flowers – Be honest and direct to your customers, not fake and pretty.
  • Press releases are spam – Ignore the press crowd, they hinder more than help.
  • Forget about the Wall Street Journal – Media is self serving and only wants their interests over yours.
  • Drug dealers get it right – Emulate Drug dealers not in what they sell but how they run their businesses.
  • Marketing is not a department – Teach everyone in your company how to handle marketing, not just a select few.
  • The myth of the overnight sensation – If you do it right people will think you came out of nowhere when you’ve been around for decades.

HIRING

  • Do it yourself first – Try a job first before you hire someone to do it.
  • Hire when it hurts – Only hire someone when it’s costing you real money to do it yourself.
  • Pass on great people – Turn down great hires for the right kind of employees.
  • Strangers at a cocktail party – Don’t allow your business to be come too impersonal, know everyone personally.
  • Resumes are ridiculous – Ignore a resume, test out employees and then try them on a temporary basis.
  • Years of irrelevance – Forget about the work history, look at innovation.
  • Forget about formal education – College is good but not the defining factor for hiring.
  • Everybody works – You need to work as hard as your people, only then do you show them true leadership.
  • Hire managers of one – Hire people that don’t need to be managed.
  • Hire great writers – Hire people with exceptional writing skills, this is important for any position.
  • The best are everywhere – Your best hires can come from anywhere, be willing to look there too.
  • Test-drive employees – Hire people on a temp basis and then take them on full time if they work out.

DAMAGE CONTROL

  • Own your bad news – Be honest and forthcoming when you make a mistake.
  • Speed changes everything – Be quick to respond to problems, don’t linger thinking about how you’ll spin it.
  • How to say you’re sorry – Be sorry when it’s your fault and don’t pretend you’re perfect.
  • Put everyone on the front lines – Have everyone be accountable directly to a customer.
  • Take a deep breath – Get through problems with a sense of collective patience and calmness.

CULTURE

  • You don’t create a culture – Figure out who your employees are, not who you want them to be.
  • Decisions are temporary – Be willing to change your companies direction at the drop of a dime, literally.
  • Skip the rock stars – Don’t hire the famous guy to solve a problem, there’s no real proof that he can solve yours.
  • They’re not thirteen – Your employees are all adults, treat them as such and don’t coddle them like children.
  • Send people home at 5:00 – Make everyone leave when it’s time to leave, they will be better for it.
  • Don’t scar on the first cut – You’re going to get burned, deal with it and move on.
  • Sound like you – Be yourself in business
  • Four-letter words – Be willing to curse if the situation demands it, again be yourself.
  • ASAP is poison – Prioritize what needs priority, don’t make everything a priority.

CONCLUSION

  • Inspiration is perishable – Your ideas will fade away or no longer be good, work on them now not later.

These ideas are powerful in the right hands so I definately suggest anyone either running a business or planning on starting one read this. A must read for the Technology crowd as well.

Book Overview of Delivering Happiness

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This book is great for those who are in the customer service business and would like to see an example of a company truly committed to the concept of customer first for everything. Tony Hseish tries to ignore elegance and the importance of speaking well and writes the book in the same format that he talks and though there are many grammatical errors which he chooses to keep in the book, the founder of a billion dollar company does a great job at explaining his feelings not just about how he started his online shoe business but goes into massive detail about what he sees as the necessary things companies need to do to maintain a good corporate atmosphere as well as presenting the customer with the wow factor in every sale. Below is an important breakdown of the ten corps principles talked about in the book.

Top 10 ways to improve customer service…

1 ) Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department, it has to come from the top.

2 ) Make Wow a verb that is part of your companies every day vocabulary

3 ) Empower and entrust your customer service reps, trust that they want to provide great service, no escalations to a supervisor

4 ) Realize that it is Okay to fire customers who abuse your employees

5 ) Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to up sell, don’t use scripts

6 ) Don’t hide your 1800 number, it’s a message to both your customers and employees

7 ) View each call as an investment in building customer service brand, not as an expense you want to minimize.

8 ) Have the entire company celebrate great services, tell stories of wow to everyone in your company so that they know how to act.

9 ) Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service.

10 ) Give great service to everyone, customers, employees and vendors.

Click here to order Delivering Happiness

Book Overview of WWGD?

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In WWGD? Jeff Jarvis tries to reverse-engineer the success of the fastest growing company in the history of the world, the one company that truly understands how to succeed in the internet age, and then takes those lessons and applies them to a number of industries, companies, and institutions, from carmakers to restaurants to universities to governments.  Below is a breakdown of some of the most important points in the book, it will help give you an idea of the important of openness.

1 ) Rethink your Customer Relationships
- Give the people control, we will use it. (Dell Hell)
- Your worst customer is your best friend.
- Your best customer is your partner.

2 ) Rethink your Website Architecture
- The link changes everything
- Do what you do best and link to the rest.
- Join a Network / Be a platform
- Think distributed

3 ) Rethink your Public Persona
- If you’re not search-able, you won’t be found
- Everybody needs a little SEO
- Life is public, so is business
- Your customers are your ad agency.

4 ) Rethink your View of Society
- Elegant Organization (Mark Zuckerberg)

5 ) Rethink the Economy of your Business
- Small is the new big
- Manage abundance (don’t control scarcity)
- Join the open-source, gift economy
- The mass market is dead – long live the mass of niches
- Google com-modifies everything
- Welcome to the Google economy

6 ) Rethink the Reality of your Products or Services
- Atoms are a drag
- Middlemen are doomed
- Free is a business model
- Decide what business you’re in

7 ) Rethink your Attitude towards customers and competition
- There is an inverse relationship between control and trust (David Weinberg-er)
- Trust the people, they are smarter than you think
- Listen and never stop

8 ) Rethink your Business and Personal Ethics
- Make mistakes well
- Life is a beta
- Be honest
- Be transparent
- Collaborate
- Don’t be evil

9 ) Rethink the Speed in which you run your Business
- Answers are instantaneous
- Life is live
- Mobs form in a flash

10 ) Rethink your Imperatives and be willing to Cannibalize yourself
- Beware the cash cow in the coalmine
- Encourage, enable and protect innovation
- Simplify, Simplify
- Get out of the way (Craig New-mark)

The rest of the book is spent covering what happens when you take these principles and apply them to other industries such as a Google Energy Company, Google Airways and Google Automobile Manufacturer. Jarvis also goes over the ideas of recreating entire industries such as Insurance using a system of openness and innovation. Click here to order What Would Google Do?…

Tech and the Family

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There is a long history in the technology world of entrepreneurs and business men with strong family ties doing great things in this business. As I’m getting ready to be a father for the first time this month with our new son, I can’t help but think of how important family is in the decisions I make and the direction I take. Whether it’s Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, the Waz (for those who know who he is) or Jeff Bezos from Amazon who started their companies from their house garage or new examples like Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook who had to borrow money from his parents in order to keep his servers running, there is a long history of achievements in technology that simply could not have happened without a strong family support.

These men and in many cases women could not have started their companies or firms, could not have taken the time they needed to focus on making these wonderful tools we have today long before they had investors or employees without both the financial and emotional support of their spouses, parents and even kids.

I’m blessed to have a great family that is behind me while I go to school and try to work around the clock. I think my biggest motivation has been my wife and my son whom I know both depend on me making good choices both about how I spend my time as well as the kind of risks I’m willing to or not going to take in this business. I am small potatoes in this industry but I can’t help but look at the example of firms and businesses that have come before me and admire just how large the role family played in their eventual success. Larry and Sergey when they created Google had been pushed by their parents since kids to work on computers and to have a love for them thus had the skill sets and knowledge at such a young age to do some powerful things.

Those of us under 30 see our idealism as a strength and don’t necessarily equate it to a weakness though others that are older may either support us for our ideas or reject them depending on their life experiences. I’ve noticed when I talk about the things that I’m working on or hope to eventually get involved with, the guys that usually get excited are the ones that did it themselves while those who played it safe or whom had difficulties throughout tended to question everything but I see both as a positive influence for all of us to learn from

In the end I think that family helps those of us in the industry to accept responsability and have better focus on what we create. We know that our time to work on projects is limited and that if we want our family to be happy we will try to be as efficient as possible in how we spend our time so that they don’t suffer for our tech passion. I don’t think I would be as dedicated or focused to my ideas now as I would be if I weren’t married. I like how Gary Vaynerchuk said it, “Family is the first rule in business and without them you can’t do anything right…”, I paraphrased ofcourse but you get the idea. As a kid my dad got me involved in technology and I fell in love with it right away, I just hope I can pass that on to my son or daughter and that they love this science as much as I do.