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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.

Great Father or Entrepreneur?

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When I was younger my father always had a saying, “You can either choose to be a good father or you can be a good business man, but you cannot do both to your full potential.” What he meant was that in the course of his life he had seen great men who where successful fathers at home with kids that absolutely loved them while remaining only mediocre in the business world, and in the reverse he had seen great men of industry who where indispensable in the board room and in starting companies but where straddling near the brink of failure as a parent. We have all seen it before, the successful business man with the spoiled kid who has everything except their father’s love and attention so they decide to act out or the poor hardworking father who slaves away at a job he hates and chooses to be less active in his career because he wants to spend as much time as possible with his children, it’s obvious looking at that line up which is the more honorable title. Yet my question to myself as a new dad and to all of you reading this is can you do both successfully or is the necessary focus required on one going to impact in the long run the other?
Obviously no successful business man with spoiled kids will really ever admit that he may have made poor choices as a father for the sake of his company. Neither is any successful father with a low paying job going to say that he didn’t do well in his career because to him the benefits of having a child that loves him overshadows that thought. It’s against our human nature for us to look at ourselves and try to fix our shortcomings and failures, people will always try to point to their successes and say “but look at how well I did in this area”. Ultimately I believe that only when we face our shortcomings can we truly be great, for some of us it may be too late to get that degree from MIT or make a million dollars by the age of 25, yet that shouldn’t stop us from making new goals that will help propel us into the next stages of our lives.
So keeping with the spirit of the new years I will say my new years resolution will always be this, to be a good father and a good businessman. Some like my own dad say it’s impossible, and having himself raised two kids on his own before he met my mother all the while being an executive of some very large companies, I may agree with him in most cases. Though I think it’s possible, like any other goal if I really believe in it and try my hardest to accomplish it then I will be in a better position than most. If I fall short I hope that I end up being a better father of course but how will I know unless I try? If I believed everything that everyone told me then I wouldn’t be as blessed as I am today so is this any different?
I think it’s a balance, as each business opportunity comes I will always make sure that those interests are in line with my families interests. It’s still too early to see if a meeting will interrupt a soccer game or if the stress of trying to play both sides will take it’s toll on my health. For the sake of my family and our future though I need to make sure I succeed in business, and for the sake of my son I need to succeed as a father. All the other titles of being a good husband and a man of faith etc are also important to me, but these two titles singlehandedly will determine the future of our family and I just hope that down the road when I look back I will have made the right decisions. Will you?

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?…

The Open Realestate Firm

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The Open Business Show is a new Podcast that takes a twist on Business Talk. Every week we will find a different business or industry and take it apart in order to show how it can be changed to thrive and survive in this new economy. Using the book by Jeff Jarvis called “What Would Google Do?” as our standard, we will look at different companies currently existing and go over what you could do if you are trying to compete with the big guys. This week we take apart the Real Estate business to learn how to make it better in a new more open format.

What is the Current Market Analysis? The real-estate business survived for a very long time on both lack of knowledge and or access to the MLS listings. If you wanted to buy a house you had to either hire or know someone with a real estate license so that you can see which houses are being sold in your area or put your house for sale on the Multiple Listing Service. The agent was essentially a middle man bargaining between the buyer and seller and this worked for many years and in some ways still works to this day. The problem is we now live in an information based economy and in this environment anyone who sees himself as a middle man is in dangerous territory. As consumers are getting smarter and smarter about what they pay for because of the internet, no longer can a real estate agent rely on just access to private information as a selling point for his clients. Ever since the MLS was forced to open it’s doors to less experienced agents or they would face anti trust regulations, the market has flooded with websites that will not only help you buy or sell a home, but a potential home buyer can reasonably do all the research they want long before they actually even need an agent to “show them the home”. Yet when the home owner needs to buy the home they have all the tools at their disposal to do it themselves and the only thing keeping them from skipping the middle man is a lame contract that most sign to even prevent the home owner or seller from going that route. This has to change.

What is the Current Market Problem? Since there are so many services out there that will both help you and or teach you how to buy and sell a house yourself and give you in depth information about both the current price of your house and or an estimated price of the house you’re looking to buy, real estate agents can no longer claim to be the only source for this information nor can they claim to be the best at it anymore. With sites like Zillow.com and others, users can get all the information they need both for the property they are trying to buy or sell as well as get neighborhood data from such sites as SpotCrime.com which merges local area crime statistics data with Google Maps to create a visual representation of neighborhoods to stay away from. There are plenty of other sites that offer similar kinds of services and we will talk about those later on.

What is the Current Market Solutions? The real estate market is currently grasping at every straw it can, it’s trying to adopt every kind of technology that it thinks will help keep it’s business afloat all the while neglecting the very core of it’s business. In many cases agents are becoming more selective when dealing with buyers and sellers but this won’t bring back the large benefits that most firms received on a per house basis in the past. In a situation like this most industries feel the need to increase their commission structures to keep up with the decrease in demand but this is also a bad ideas as you are driving more and more customers away from your business model and are essentially pushing them to go out and do the research themselves. By trying to become more and more of the middle man they are essentially eliminating themselves and forcing people to rethink their home buying or selling in the process. You don’t need a middle man to sell your car right? Then why do we feel like we need one to sell our house.

What is the Industry Core Business? I feel bad when I have to break a business down to it’s core components because in many cases the people within the industry scream out and say, “but we do so much more”. In honesty they do and we have to give them credit for that, but when someone is making a decision worth thousands of dollars to them on whether or not to hire an agent or try and research themselves, the last thing they are going to do is listen to you as you try to explain to them why they need you. Real estate agents need to break down to the core what they do that no one else can so here we go. I will explain these more as I talk about what a Real Estate company needs to do to be an open business but there are three main things that are apart of it’s core business model, 1) It has access to show off the properties 2) It can help with processing and doing all the paperwork for the client and 3) it can aggregate all of the necessary information on a single property and be basically an answer and questions service. I’ll talk more about these later but for now just know that anything an agent does outside of these three things is ultimately replaceable and utterly disposable.

What is the Industry Myths? The industry thinks that they just have to wait for the market to come back up for them to start making huge profits from commissions again. This is short sighted as it’s focus is only on the sale as it happens now and doesn’t take into account the idea of protecting it’s business for the future. When I say protecting I don’t mean doing something that will prevent others from competing with you in the future but in many cases that is what the industry thinks needs to occur. Like an animal cornered against a wall, many agents have their home owners sign long and complicated agreements in order to ensure that when they show them a home or sell their home, the agent will get a cut never really allowing the home owner to change his mind or change agents in the process. Many homeowners skip coming to an agent because of these legal contracts and firms are focusing more on the myth of keeping the status quo over disrupting it. Starting your own website or going at it on your own isn’t going to solve your problem, fundamentally changing the way that real estate agents work and make money should be the core strategy for any aspiring young seller hoping to break away from the mold of the establishment they work in. Most importantly, loose the big fancy Mercedes and drive something reasonable and or cheap, whether I am a buyer or seller, I don’t want to have this idea that I will be soon paying for your next vehicle upgrade when we close escrow, simple and not flashy is the key.

What is the Industry Cannibalization? When I say that you need to disrupt your industry, I really mean it. Be willing to do things that most in your industry would consider suicide, a real estate agent should consider reducing his commissions to almost nothing if it’s possible and instead charging for a sort of a la carte service. Many say it can’t be done, they say the amount of time they spend on a client is barely worth the commission they already get but what they are forgetting is that for many clients, the sticker shock comes at the end when they see just how much they paid in commission and this is what the agent should show people to make an a la carte system work. What you think you are loosing in sales when you reduce your commission you make up for in volume if you are efficient with what you do and how you do it. If you think distributed and you think in terms of volume, there is no reason why an agent can’t sell or help buy a few dozen houses a month. Another thing to consider is whether you want to buy houses or sell them, if you focus on just helping your customer sell houses, then you can put all your focus on that, if you help them buy then your efficiency can be geared in one direction and you don’t find yourself trying to sell your own houses to buyers that don’t want them. Double dipping is dangerous in any industry but for some reason agents think they can do it successfully and get away with it. Aside from removing commissions for a basic services business done in bulk and or specializing in only one side of the sale or the other, the most important cannibalization that an agent can do is to be honest with the customer and teach them the industry secrets. You know what I’m talking about, things you would usually take advantage of by keeping from your clients should be open and on the table. When a customer asks you why you do something differently than other agents, you should be more than willing to tell them and throw any future agent that person may have under the bus. In any industry no one wants to be the outsider everyone hates, but if you do it all successfully then when you start selling more houses at a steady pace than your competition you’ll find there are a slew of other hungry sales people wanting to learn how you do what you do.

What is the Industry Competition? Though Google Maps and Craigslist alone can be seen as a major competition to providing users with valuable information and can show an individual what they’re potential home will look like from the outside and they can travel the neighborhood, there are plenty of similar Mashups that give even more great information for users. HousingMaps.com is a mix of Craigslist and Google Maps showing users listing of housing for rent and for sale in most major cities while it also allows people to filter and drill down to a specific price range. Yelp.com and FindbyClick.com allow you to find nearby restaurants and stores letting you know what’s around you when you are making the decision to purchase a property. WalkJogRun.net shows you jogging paths within a neighborhood for those users on the go. Sites like WikiMapia will provide users with pretty much any information they need about an area while Flickrvision combines both Flickr and Google Maps database information to show you the most recently uploaded photos within an area in real time on a map. Site’s like Fizber.com do much of these mashups as well pulling data from various sources into one powerful search engine. On the part of commercial realestate there are sites like Business Planet (http://rru.worldbank.org/businessplanet/) that mashup how hard or easy it is to run or do business within a certain area both in the US and Internationally. Even Forbes magazine has gotten into the competition with their Americans Living Well mashup (http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/04/towns-cities-real-estate-lifestyle-real-estate-top-towns_map.html) showing where Americans are living the best provided by ZoomProspector.com. Zoom aggregates local data such as Population, labor force, job growth rate and median age as well as what neighborhoods have people with more Bachelor’s degrees or higher, have more white collar verses blue collar workers as well as average house hold incomes and median home values. They do an insane job at calculating the average commute travel time for an area as well as proximity to the nearest interstate and many more variables automatically. Basically these companies are in essence competing with Real estate agents to give more accurate and timely information to its users than an agent could ever hope to gather.

How to make it an Open Business? So how would I start an open real estate firm, well the first thing you need is to focus on your core business model. If you are planning on reducing your commissions down to barely anything then you should consider how you will make money in the long haul through other services and fees. Explain to your customers what the benefit is of going through you verses the other guy and show them in a big way just how much they’ll save if they go through your firm. Obviously you are going to need a website, but how your site works and what it provides your clients speaks as much about you as a salesman as does your personal sales pitch. Many people think it’s hard to set up a site that’s more than a catalog but if you use open platforms like WordPress and other tools that are relatively free and or cheap to implement, then you can spend any money you had set aside for internet marketing on making tools that will both aggregate the information your clients need as well as integrate their experience with social media online.

First and most importantly real estate firms need to allow people to see the house, firms should remove the aspect of seeing each agent as a salesman because in many cases the information about the property is readily available to the home buyer and few buyers really pay that much attention to the “sales” pitch that the agent is giving. The idea of having the client drive in your car is a bit too sales oriented as well, I’ve met agents who plan out the path from a list of houses the clients have chosen and give them Google map directions to follow while they drive in front with a motorcycle for two reasons. Number one, the customer has a better idea of where the house is and can drive back by themselves later on if they want to take a second look but number two is that the customer doesn’t feel hassled by the agent.

Secondly you need to set up your business so that you are both a real estate firm and an escrow service, in some states the laws may forbid this but the core idea is to be efficient so provide the service of filling out the paperwork. If you let them know that you are not making a dime or very little from commission and thus saving them a ton of money in the process, they will be more likely to pay for your services whether they close escrow or not. Selling a home is the same way, you are the expert, what lawyers do for legal paperwork your firm can do for estate sales and save the customer a ton of money and you a ton of extra unneeded work in the process. The third part of the core business that a real estate firm should remember as part of it’s core business is that it’s an aggregates information. Yes I said all of those others sites have all of that information but instead of thinking you can compete with them you should use them and the information they provide in an automated fashion so that you can answer any and all questions your customers have without having to do much research if any at all.

If you’ve decided to focus on only helping home buyers buy a home then your site should take advantage of all those services I’ve listed above and bring them all together on one page, you should also allow buyers to select their homes in an almost shopping cart style on your site and in the end provide the drive by drive directions from Google Maps and others while letting them visit the properties themselves if they’d like or have you meet them at each house for a small fee. This way they don’t have to feel pressured to go through you and you are still making money whether you make a sale or not. You don’t even have to be the one to show them around either, have an intern or other worker do the drive around and you can use your more valuable agents on closing the deal on the home for the home owner. By removing the commission on the home’s value you are essentially asking your agents to sell your services and it creates a virtuous circle where the agent isn’t worried about how small his commission will actually be and can focus on getting the lowest possible price for the customer. This way the home buyer may be more likely to recommend your services to others they know if you continue to reiterate how much they saved by going through you verses other firms. This how Geico and others make a killing the insurance industry and it’s how the real estate market should work. By providing a service you also avoid the pit fall that many agents get where they spend a ton of time showing people houses and in the end the buyer decides not to buy or they could never afford it in the first place. There is a huge market out there for home buyers that simply want to look at a house without the pressure of an agent, charge hourly or per house with no strings attached, either way that can be a whole other side of your business.

If you’re going to focus on selling homes then your website has to be somewhat different, you can actually have one site for selling and one for buying but don’t mix the two together. If you are selling the home then you need to make your site more internal than external, your site should be the home page that you refer people to in order to get as much information about the property as possible and have a set of questions that your client can answer for people but you also need an internal system to really push this information out to other sites. Zillow and others have built in API’s not only to garner information but for home owners to post info on their properties. Part of your “services” could be coming in and taking gorgeous pictures of the house with a professional DSLR camera, it can take less than 30 minutes and the right angle to post as many pictures to your customer’s page as possible. You can also post a YouTube video on your site with a short overview of the house.

Too many in the industry think that they need to do something fancy like put a 360 degree camera but the truth is that if you post as many gorgeous pictures as possible or as much relative video as possible you will do more for your client than they can ever imagine. Then your system should allow sites like Zillow and others to point to your site for more information on the property for sale. Have at a minimum 30 pictures of both the inside and outside of the property, also have a quick walk through video so that people get to see the home and if you do a good enough job you can even sell your services to other agents who may find it worth partnering with you for their clients. The secret is to not be afraid of competition but to out do them in such a way where they know they cannot compete with you at your level and come to you for help. What we need is a social network for houses where people can view everything possible about a house from one central location and follow the house on twitter and other platforms. Again automation is the key to making sure that you aren’t putting more work into this then you have to.

If you don’t plan on focusing on just one part of the business that’s fine, though I always advise people to do one thing and do it really well, your area may not be suited for this sort of approach and many home sellers also want their agents to help them buy their next house so you have to consider your market. Yet you have to keep both businesses separate almost as religiously as newspapers keep their ad business and their writers separated. Yes that may seem like twice the work on building two separate sites for two separate businesses but these are all selling points you can present to your customer. You can let your customers know that your business only does one side or the other, yet in the cases where you need both in one package you can tell them that your sister company can help them out with the other side of the business deal all the while keeping it under the same umbrella. The important thing here is to let your customers know that you won’t be trying to sell them a house that is yours more than any other and that you are solely focused on getting the best deal possible for them or vice versa in selling and getting the highest price possible. Again you are cannibalizing your industry by giving them the inside secrets and thus you are seen as a more trusted source for your clients.

Either way whether you are helping to buy the homes or you are setting people up to sell them, have a menu of services that clients can check out in your office and on your website. Putting the prices right out there in the open brings transparency to the industry and it may not make you as much per customer as you are use to making but it will help you move more houses and or provide more services in the long haul. The days of agents putting a ton of time and effort into getting a massive payout at the end are relatively over and you need to think of your business in the long term and not just your next sale in the short term. Also on your sites and or services you should offer something that’s unique to your location, there is a ton of information that is out there for you to aggregate for your clients, but there are some things that are unique to you and where you live that these services simply cannot ascertain.

Since I always tell businesses to have blogs and social media platforms that go along with their sites in order to drive traffic, have a section on your site where you maybe explain the local real estate industry of say San Diego to home buyers. This is where you would give all the juicy secrets that you would eventually also tell people in person but it helps you create a database of information that you can refer your clients to down the road if they want to know more about something. Keep this info categorized so that clients can learn everything from why it’s great to live downtown, to why it sucks to live downtown or give them things to think about that most would never even consider like a calculator of local living expenses so that they can see if they can afford not just the house but the area in the long run, there are plenty of sites you can pull information from for that as well. Most importantly make your site automatic, too many people think that they have to enter in all the information they need for their sites but the less work you have to put into your site and information is being pulled from other sources the more time you can focus on making money and less on keeping your site up to date. In the end remember to innovate, be willing to take a blow at how you make money and be open to gutting your cash cow so that you can make more of it down the road. Let me know if you are in the real estate industry and like or plan to implement any of these ideas or if you are against them, either way we want to hear back from you.

You might be a Tech Geek if…

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I know you all may have seen or read these already but I wanted to update some of these for the more modern references to stuff that everyone in this industry can understand. Enjoy.

You might be a tech geek if you spend more time changing settings on your high tech gadget than you actually spend using it.

You might be a tech geek if when asked which operating system you use, you answer “In which computer?”

You might be a tech geek if you spend more time interacting with people online in one day then you do in a week’s worth of face-to-face.

You might be a tech geek if you know the square root of 65536 is 256 without having to do the math.

You might be a tech geek if you e-mail or tweet yourself notes throughout the day rather than writing them down and you send a reply to it.
 
You might be a tech geek if you check your e-mail, twitter, facebook, foursquare and gwalla before you brush your teeth in the morning.

You might be a tech geek if you consider 65536 and 256 “nice round numbers”.

You might be a geek if you snicker whenever someone asks what they need to do to make Windows run more smoothly.

You might be a tech geek if the number of computers in your house exceeds the number of major relationships you’ve had in your lifetime.
 
You might be a tech geek if you dual boot because you have your favorite games or software programs spread across multiple operating systems.

You might be a tech geek if you’ve ever debated the merits of running a 64 bit operating system over a 32 bit on your machine with yourself.

You might be a tech geek if you know what a router is, and you know what a bit is, but you’ve never heard of a router bit.
 
You might be a tech geek if you have the same basic night time habits of a movie vampire except for the blood-sucking part.

You might be a tech geek if you’ve ever been successful at catching or taking revenge on a spammer.

You might be a tech geek if you’ve ever written a useless program just for the “fun” of it.

You might be a tech geek if you salivate when you read the word, “upgrade” next to the title of your favorite gadget or software online.
 
You might be a tech geek if you can program in more computer languages than you can actually speak in real life.

You might be a tech geek if you can recognize the Linux Penguin the minute you see him in a picture and you know the penguin’s actual name.

You might be a tech geek if you have a PC for every person and animal in the house and still think you need one more. What if one goes down?
 
You might be a tech geek if you’ve gutted and rebuilt your computer 5 times since you last changed the oil in your car.

You might be a tech geek if you go into a computer store and takeover a discussion for a salesman on the specs and merits of a product.
 
You might be a tech geek if you and your companies IT department have a who knows more about computers contest…and you win.

Is IPV6 the next Y2K?

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Though my title may seem a little bit too dramatic, in no way do I want to equate or make people think that this is an issue that people need to panic about much like they did in the erroneous belief that the year 2000 would cause any problems with computer systems. Though this issue may not be that big of a deal it is important that non computer users understand what is going with IP addresses as it is fundamental to the basic plumbing behind the internet. As the transition from IPV4 to IPV6 begins to occur, people need to understand what it is and that it will effect them physically since a large portion of the population uses the internet constantly now and many businesses rely heavily on it.

Without getting to technical, the problem can be equated to what happened with telephone industry back in the early days of phones. As cities and communities became larger, the need to transition from a 4 digit phone number for every home to a 7 digit number and eventually to the 10 digit numbering system we have today in the US was vital to grow the telephone infrastructure. With the advent of cell phones the problem grew even more as people could now have several numbers not just for their home but for their families and the very early original system would not have had enough phone numbers to give to every user.

This is sort of what is happening to the internet, the current IPV4 infrastructure has a 32 bit address and though that still gives us a large number of internet addresses to work with we are coming very close to running out of addresses very soon. As every new device from smart phone to laptop and tablet device comes online and may require an address, when you consider that the problem isn’t just limited to the US but instead is world wide you can see how we will run out of ways to locate a computer to send information to very shortly. Current estimates that if we continue in the growth that we currently see shows us running out of IP addresses in the IP version 4 format some time in late 2011. Though the argument can be made that there are still millions of IP addresses that are being “hogged” by certain older organizations like Universities and companies like HP. That is still not enough to really fill the need when you consider that the internet grows exponentially every few months (meaning it doubles in size).

Many will try to make a huge deal out of this and say that the world is coming to an end and that the internet will crash if we don’t do switch and though that may be a bit much it is a serious problem that is for the most part being ignored in most circles. Most companies and organizatiosn create what are called sub networks or internal networks that don’t require an idividual IP for each machine and this has served us well for now but may not work as well down the line if the internet continues to grow the way it has been. The real answer to this problem has been for years now a new standard called IPV6, it gives us a 128 bit address so basically more room to work with numbers. Just to give you a point of reference as to just how large IPV 6 really is compared to the current address model, you could give a different IP address using IPV6 to every grain of sand on earth.

The problem becomes the adpotion of IPV6 has been very slow and companies have been waiting until it actually becomes a problem before they really deal with it. It won’t crash the internet or take down banks and institutions like we thought would occur with Y2K but it will be a problem for people using the internet in their homes or offices once the change over does occur. Though most large companies and institutions are having the forsight to buy routers and systems that are IPV6 compliant, most likely the small cable box or wireless router most people buy for cheap and keep at their home to use the internet may not be. My hope is that once the change over starts to happen that cable providers will figure out a way to help their customers in the transition by providing them with an internal system to accomodate them from having to buy all new equipment for their homes in a year or two.

The basic take away from this is whether you are a family with a single wireless connection to the internet for your kids, spouse and grandma or you are a small business looking to upgrade your computers and network routers or switches, it’s vital that you pay attention to whether what you are buying is IPV6 compatible or not. If this becomes an issue soon in the future and if companies don’t seem to transition well to the new standard as time goes buy you may see people are are forced down the line to buy all new equipment for their house or office when they just bought it a few years or months back. If you already have the equipment then don’t worry to much about upgrading, when the time comes and it will that you need to switch over you will have to deal with the issue at that point. If you are in the process of buying or are looking to buy new computers and routers then I would take this issue very seriously so that you don’t pay a ton down the line for this.

Most of the major manufacturers don’t see a need right now to offer IPV6 to their current customers for two major reasons, first it’s not a problem now so they take the same view as most in the industry and that is we will deal with it when it happens but second they see it as a positive because they know that in a few years down the line you will have to buy a new device and so by keeping IPV6 as an unecessary extra addon that they provide only to the more expensive versions of their devices they know they will be able to sell even more IPV6 machines when the change over actually does occur. It may not seem fair but it’s business, so be sure to only buy IPV6 compatiable hardware in everything you get and hopefully your devices, computers, routers and other machines will last you many many more years to come.

Boxee vs Google TV

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For those of you who don’t know what Boxee is, think of it as easy to use software that you put on your TV to access your movies, pictures, music and TV shows both on your computer and on the internet. Boxee was originally a fork of an open source program called XBMC that gave you a gorgeous interactive experience on your television to what your content on. Boxee took XBMC one step further by creating not just a more gorgeous interface and easy to understand controls but they synced their software with the Internet Movie Database or IMDb that catalogs television and movie information online so that when Boxee looks at your hard drive or what you tell it to look for, it also shows you where that information is available on sites such as Hulu and other television networks like USA, Fox, CBS etc.

Eventually they also added a social part of their programs which allowed you to watch YouTube videos that your friends posted on Twitter or Facebook and allows you to share whether you liked the movie, tv show or song you’re listening to for all your friends to check out as well. Yet the most impressive part of Boxee was their App development platform. With this feature the program took on a life of it’s own as companies like Pandora and Last.fm created applications to stream music into your tv from their website much like you can do through your browser or phone as well as it gave a way for internet TV companies like Revision3, TWIT.TV, Crank.com, YouTube and others including most recently Mevio to immediately give you a easy to use menu to watch their programming as well as post their live streams. CNN and MLB also created apps for Boxee and there is a growing number of developers looking to use Boxee as an open way to bring the web’s wealth of content onto your TV.

Now in lies the problem, with the launch of Google TV the guys at Google Labs have taken what Boxee has been able to accomplish one step further. Using a variation of the Android Platform which most people know for it’s implemention in famous phones like the Droid or Evo smart phones, they have created a way to search for content online that is very similar if not better than Boxee’s. The problem with Google TV is it’s difficulty of use, Boxee has the experience from XBMC and years of user testing to work from and thus they have a much simpler and better user interface for even the most novice of people to operate. Google’s complicated program not to mention it’s 45 minute install time makes it bloated and a bit user unfriendly for something as ubiqutous as a TV. Boxee has an opportunity here to really take a large chunk of this market from Google before they get better, it will take some time before Google learns many of the lessons that Boxee has had to learn and considering Google’s large amounts of capital and desire to enter this market Boxee does not have much time before a company like Google takes over the market like they did in so many other aspects. So how does Boxee do it?

Well currently they are following Google’s steps in allowing a third party vendor to creat a “Boxee Box” produced by D-Link that is pretty and costs around $200 for the consumer to purchase. Google TV can only be currently found on Logitec Revue boxes as well as a Sony special TV but Google has promised to Open Source the software hopefully in 2011. This is the trend that most people see the industry going in and for the most part can have some real success for both companies, so why do I feel this is the wrong move for Boxee? As someone who uses their product religiously, having given up cable almost 2 years ago first for XBMC and now an avid Boxee fan I see trouble in the future of the Company if Boxee does not plan a gorilla campaign against what is essentially a major threat to their survival as a platform. Currently Boxee offers their source code freely for anyone that wants to develop for it, they also have a version of it’s program that people can download for Windows, Ubuntu Linux and the Mac and Apple TV system.

Many Boxee users run the software on their Windows or Mac desktops and or laptops but there is an underside of advanced users that are using the program straight from Linux and have dedicated “computers” which run only Boxee for their TV’s in every bedroom. For those of us that do this because we want the Boxee Box experience without paying the $200 price tag for a product that we can’t really mess with internally ourselves is very frustrating. We do things like increase the buffer rates for flash video and or have Boxee start up as soon as the OS starts up for a seemless transition, much of which would be difficult for the average person to do. Boxee needs to fix this problem by creating an OEM disk or basically turn Boxee into it’s own Linux Based operating system for both x86 and x64 based computers.

There is a precedence for this with the Mythbuntu operating system which basically turns your computer into a Media center but it’s impossibly hard to properly set up and has way more features than necessary. If another 3rd Party developer wanted to create this it would be relatively easy but the reason why I think this should be something that Boxee is doing is because it would give them better control over the platform and would also open the gates wide open for massive implementation into this market. A single easy install disk or ISO would allow even the most novice of users to take an old computer they no longer use and install BoxeeLinux overtop of it so that it’s a dedicated Boxee Box for their TV’s. It would simplify the process for Manufacturer’s wanting to develop their own Boxee Boxes and would saturate the market with machines based on the Boxee platform. This is important because unlike a cell phone in the example of the Android platform, Boxee can be easily installed on almost any computer and linux which would have to be the main kernel it would run off of is just as versitle.

OEM’s could build entire computers from old $20 dollar machines and sell them for cheap creating a market that Boxee still has control over since in order to use it you still have to create an Account at Boxee.tv. I understand Boxee’s apprehension in opening the flood gates for people to do buy sub standard Boxee machines but the ideal here is to take over the market and create demand for their service before Google does when it open sources it’s Android based software. Boxee has the benefit that it’s easy to use and even easier to implement so the faster they do this the sooner we the consumer can really start promoting their product to our friends and family without the expensive cost making them buy a Box. If Boxee doesn’t do this then Google eventually will and eventually Google TV will be as easy if not easier than Boxee and we will all forget about the company that changed TV for all of us.

The Open Textbooks

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The Open Business Show is a new Podcast that takes a twist on Business Talk. Every week we will find a different business or industry and take it apart in order to show how it can be changed to thrive and survive in this new economy. Using the book by Jeff Jarvis called “What Would Google Do?” as our standard, we will look at different companies currently existing and go over what you could do if you are trying to compete with the big guys. This week we analyze how the textbook industry makes it’s money and figure out how one can make textbooks and education more open.
What is the Current Market Analysis? Textbooks are expensive and textbook companies as well as schools and colleges make a killing in selling physical textbooks to students. They use tactics like yearly additions in order to bolster sales and loose money due to a large behind the scenes textbook resale market.

What is the Current Market Problem? It’s hard for college students to afford textbooks and even harder for highschools and middle schools to purchase them and keep up with the latest edition. Textbook info is usually outdated and no one legitimate is willing to canabalize their own pofits in order to fix it. With textbook prices ranging between 50 to 200 dollars, and the manufacturing cost only being around 5 to 15 dollars, you can see why they like those kind of profit margins.

What is the Current Market Solutions? The market is excited about the possibility of things like the iPad being the alternative and have already started building applications for both iOS and Android devices in an attempt to enter this market. This solution is near sighted in that both the cost of these devices will take years to address and most textbook manufacturers still wants the school or consumer to pay the same amount of money that they pay now for a textbook but as a digital product.

What is the Industry Core Business? If you remove the book printing side of making text books which many text book companies still think is their core business but is usually outsourced to a third party anyway and you remove the overwhelming price placed on a textbook that we all know is not sustainable over the long haul with more and more schools looking for a cheaper alternative and more and more students wanting a lower price, what exactly does a textbook company do anyway? They simply provide a learning tool for schools to use when they come up with their curriculum and with the advent of the internet much of this data can be found online anyway and much of it is either more up to date online than in a printed textbook as well as cheaper to get at.

What is the Industry Myths? The industry and the schools that support that industry think that the reason for buying a textbook over getting the same information online is because of peer review, they are assured mostly by the textbook companies that these issues have only the information that has been researched and agreed upon by the experts in the industry the book covers. Yet in many cases because of this need to rush a new edition to market, it’s pretty common that books come out with mistakes and in an attempt to get a totally new addition out many companies release information that has to be removed later on due to inacuracy. As many who buy and sell textbooks know, it’s a completely inefficient business practice but because of the high profit margins very few are interested in changing it.

What is the Industry Cannibalization? When you think of a textbook company as providing learning tools for schools and students to base their curriculum around, then you need to really consider what parts of your business still needs to be there and which are worth canibalizing in order to grow the business further. In an industry that is famous for backroom dealings and special gifts granted to school boards and university presidents for special consideration when their organization is ready to make a large order or assign a certain book to a certain class, it’s hard to suggest that textbook companies get out of the book industry all together and focus their efforts in the information business but this is what is needed.

What is the Industry Competition? With groups like the Open Textbook Consortium (http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/) and OpenTextbook.org who provide valuable free textbook information, it’s hard to believe that a textbook company can exist just in information alone. Many attack sites like Wikipedia and other user generated content as sub par and thus not fit for scholarly or university consumption. The point to make here is that someone who wants to enter this industry and upset the establishment has to look at it both from a utilitarian point of view as well as a political one. Much like the legs of a tripod, one can enter this industry strong and compete but first they must consider which legs to take down before removing the giant from it’s pedestal.

How to make it an Open Business? I think an Open Textbook company will embrace these initiatives like the Consortium and others as a source of information but will also provide their own internal network of data as an addon bonus to doing business with them. This bonus could include automatically updating schools and students with updated versions of their product when done in an electronic format or even providing free online tools as many already do to purchasers that compliment the purchase. These tools can include giving schools an online system for teachers to give their students homework if they choose that can be done electronically or providing teachers with fun in class ideas that don’t necessarily come with the book in the cases of classes that are considered boring like science and math allowing teachers to choose how they wish to use your textbooks verses just forcing them to follow your schedule. Not numbering your texts into chapters but instead using titles also helps teachers better plan their students reading requirements choosing to remove entire chapters from your work if they feel it’s unecessary for their class.

Automation is also key, textbook authors are also a large reason why the books are so expensive at times as companies try to hire the smartest and most well versed experts in the field and this comes at a hefty cost per book. Focusing on a system of shared information verses a single textbook author writing each and everybook may not be the most prefered method of right now but it’s where this industry needs to eventually get to in order to keep up with the change of pace in information. Whether that’s a system that automatically turns the information provided by these systems into a readable PDF that can later be printed or reproduced electronically without the need of an editor working with each page and wasting time making sure the “book” looks right is one thing.

Another important point is making sure that their focus is more on the interactive rather than the physical so in many ways the textbook company might sell the school cheap ebooks like the Ectaco Jetbook http://www.jetbook.net/ or something more akin to a tablet pc like the iPad or an Android based tablet for wealthier institutions with all the textbooks they need alread in them or as well as have the ability to sell these to students who may want to pay more for an iPad than to get the free cheap ebook from his school. What’s important to understand here is that you are selling a much needed service to a school that allows them to focus less on the textbooks themselves and more on the material in them. Automatic updates allow of content allow schools to make changes themselves if they wish to the content or request the company make the changes to future editions more quickly than the physical hardbooks of today.

Also price point becomes the biggest issue, just like in any other digital good like music or movies, books that essential start and are sold electronically need to be at a low enough price point that prevents piracy and allows universities and grade schools to be able to look at it and see it as affordable. Dropping your price too low may at first may prevent people from wanting to do business with you because they think your product is too cheap but your ultimate goal should be to reduce your price to the lowest possible point short of loosing money all the while allowing for the largest distribution possible giving you full integration into most schools and universities as possible. You ultimately don’t want to be the biggest textbook seller, you want to be the most available and influential source of information in an industry schools that prides itself in reputation and saturation.

Now you still want to provide physical books for those that prefer them but by creating an automated system for publishing PDF documents from the information that is always updated means that you can have a third party publisher like Lulu.com and others who focus on as needed publishing and since this is not your core business anymore you shouldn’t worry to much about the profits you are making from this side of the business. This is merely an extension to the service you provide for schools and allows them to transition from the old school world of printing books to the future of electronic book readers and tablets. Thinking distributed is one of the most important things to do in an industry where most of the companies try to do everything in house.

Finally making your textbook business more open means allowing for an openness of how you do business and letting both your customers and those who use your products know that you are doing your best to provide them the most modern system available while still ensuring them that they are taking the best path necessary to grow their school and their student’s learning experience. You need to show them that you will be there for the long haul so that they feel they can invest in your company since schools and universities are some of the oldest organizations in the country. In the end this is a sensitive subject as we are talking about the destruction of an entire industry that is so vital to our infrastructure, but only when new ideas are formed and invested into businesses that work can industries be changed for the better. Let me know if you are in the textbook industry and like or plan to implement any of these ideas or if you are against them, either way we want to hear back from you.

The Open Photo Studio

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The Open Business Show is a new Podcast that takes a twist on Business Talk. Every week we will find a different business or industry and take it apart in order to show how it can be changed to thrive and survive in this new economy. Using the book by Jeff Jarvis called “What Would Google Do?” as our standard, we will look at different companies currently existing and go over what you could do if you are trying to compete with the big guys. This week we analyze how to better allow your photo studio or photography business to compete in your neighborhood.

What is the Current Market Analysis? With the advent of the inexpensive digital camera, photo studios like Olan Mills and Picture People can no longer see themselves as the go to place for people who want a professionally printed portrait. Any soccer mom or artist with the right level of talent and enough starting capital to buy about $1000 DSLR Camera can now compete in their market and produce more professional looking images in one session than Picture People or anyone else takes in a day. They believe they are still in the picture printing business charging their customers and clients almost $20 per picture printed while throwing away thousands of dollars worth of unpurchased prints begging the question from the customer, are they’re prices ripping me off? Picture People’s popularity over competitor Olan Mills was mostly due to their professional upgraded look to their studios and modern picture taking methods and backgrounds which invited more modern consumers into the market. Their target consumer, young mothers with kids enjoy the atmosphere and believe that their employees are well trained in the art of good picture taking.

What is the Current Market Problem? My focus on Picture People has more to do with personal experiences but it gives a general mentality of the industry as a whole, Picture People actually has the audacity to say their pictures are Copyrighten in a vain attempt to prevent loyal customers from sharing and or replicating the images that are just too expensive to purchase in bulk. Printing unecessary photos for the sake of pushing the customer to make a rash decision to purchase the picture on the spot has less to do with open business practices and more to do with customer emotion and catching that instant sale. Many mothers wanting to have a momento of their children growing up spend a fortune on pictures they sometimes can’t afford and in many cases choose not to come into the store again because they’ve made that mistake once before. They also print large canvas images which they tell the customer is expensive to produce ($200) per large frame but then becomes a throw away if the customer decides not to purchase them. Though that is a profitable way to do business, it is not sustainable, eventually your customer base starts realizing that what you are charging them is not reasonable or fair and may choose to either pirate the images in which case you get exposure or money for your work or they choose to go into business themselves and or become your competition. When I asked an employee to not print the images and that we would be choosing the ones we want online, they acutually said they would be fired if they did not waste product, I feel for the companies investors and overall bottom line in the long term. To add insult to injury, they charge around $3 for image manipulation like making the picture black and white or sepia, something that literally costs nothing for them and is as easy as the touch of a button.

What is the Current Market Solutions? Companies like Picture People believe they have innovated their industry by getting rid of sit down fees and allowing customers to only purchase the prints they want but with the amount of waste they produce with all of their unpurchased prints, they didn’t seem to go far enough in reducing their overall costs thus ensuring the lowest possible cost to the customer. Walmart and others have stepped in and offered the cheapest possible cost for reprints and allowing anyone who wants to compete with the giant Photo Studios to not having to own the actual printing equipment themselves. Walmart will even ship it to their customers for barely nothing.

What is the Industry Core Business? At it’s core the photo business must now see itself less as a provider of the physical photos or portraits it use to print and more as a service for great looking images that can then be distributed both to the benefit of the company and the individual in the picture. Picture People and others have the potential to service a large customer base willing to buy images if they only reduced their prices and or offered ways for them to share their images that wouldn’t be hampered by useless and unenforcable copyright restrictions. The more that companies think distrubuted by letting other less expensive offers do the bulk of the printing and sharing business, the more the company can focus on it’s main business product, and that is taking fantastic pictures easily.

What is the Industry Myths? The biggest myth in the photo studio industry is that customers aren’t willing to first pay for a sitting fee (which you don’t really have to offer) and thus the industry feels it must charge an absorberant amount per image to cover costs and second is that they need to print and show the customers the pictures in the store in an attempt to convince them or trick them into buying the already printed image otherwise they will never make a sale. Though that may work for a small fragment of the population, what companies that do this miss out on is the power of economies of scale and the ability for one well taken picture allowed to go public may create a powerful influx of customers that would otherwise never have purchased from them due to pricing.

What is the Industry Cannibalization? Any industry that is semi-digital runs the risk of piracy and inventive and smarter competitors, giving away the control of your images to your customers may be seen as tad amount to suicide in this industry but this necessary cannibalization allows the company to find new lines of revenue it had never thought of before nor reached out to.

What is the Industry Competition? Companies like Sears, JCPenny and Walmart are seeing the benefit of beefing up their photo studios and though they are currently not at the bar of companies like Picture People and Olan Mills, they are coming close and have the ability to charge less and draw their already family centered consumers to choose them over more expensive competitors. The only way to capture both the high end customers that go to Picture People and the Low end consumers that have their photos taken at Walmart is to combine the excellent capabilities of the high end studios with the pricing structure of the larger stores, so how does anyone make any money? The answer is distribution…

How to make it an Open Business? So how would I structure a photo studio to both make money and provide a more open and free atmosphere for their consumer? First I would focus on the core product which is the quality of the pictures taken and the training involved with those taking the pictures. Picture People does this well and would be the best to easily transition to this model but anyone with the right skills can learn to train and manage a large group of low wage workers into powerful photographers. The most important thing in this model is that you not charge your customers for the physical photos themselves but you charge them for access to the pictures on your website where the user can then choose what they want to do with the image, give the user control and they will use it to your benefit.

Whether you choose to charge a sitting fee or not is not really a problem, if you focus on your core business product and prove yourself in the market as the best in picture taking, I doubt people would have a serious problem in paying around $20 for a 30 minute photo session where they have access to all the pictures they want automatically online. The last time I visited Picture People they actually had a bit of a change of heart, they started offering low resolution CD’s for $25 and a high resolution version for $100. They are trying to follow the model but are falling short on execution. Their low resolution versions where suppose to allow people to post them to Facebook and other platforms while retaining their logo at the bottom of the image, yet the system they used to add the water mark was horrible and in many cases the CD came with way less images than we had actually taken. A half hour photo studio came out with only 10 pictures, I understand they want only the best pictures to show up so they have to scrutinize and remove those that aren’t perfect. But in many cases they removed entire segments of pictures which we had to ask them to put back on the CD and those pictures where the best ones. Don’t choose for the customer, let the customer choose for you…

Ultimately the trick to making a photo studio run more open and efficiently is to create a backend system that does most of the work. Charging your customers access to your pictures online instead of just in a CD allows them to post the images they want to Facebook and other sites right then and there for you. This also allows you to put a back link to your site and not just a watermark at the bottom or side of the image. This linked traffic is way more important than just for people to know that the image came from you and that is what I think Picture People doesn’t understand.

Now I’m going to mention something that is considered sacralige but if someone is going to take your pictures to Walmart for cheaper, why not help them do it? Look you can charge an arm and a leg for images but ultimately you know the actual cost of printing and maintaining this equipment and so instead of trying to charge what you think the market will bare, think more like Google and charge the minimum you can bare. This is an important point because what you want is to charge enough to get the most amount of users or customers with the lowest costs in your industry. When you are the best at what you do and you watch your cashflow then your business will make more money than it’s making now and the fact that your customers will choose you over anyone else because you’re willing to buck the trend is great business. Focusing on economies of scale works and as long as you don’t loose your edge doing your main business, let anyone or everyone else work with you in your platform.