Being Grateful

I'm a selfish guy. I tend to focus on my wants and needs over other people. It's not something I'm proud of. Over the last few months I've become more aware of my thinking and behavior. I've also noticed that many of the people I most admire are very focused on others, not on themselves. These are also some of the most successful people I know. Perhaps our instinct to be self centered helped us survive through the eons. It's a hard habit to kick since we are wired for it.

I'm no expert on how to transition from being "me" focused to "others" focused but I believe it starts by being grateful. Too often I focus, in this blog and in my life, on problems. What's wrong with something. I tend to gloss over and undervalue all the amazing people, places and things that intersect my life on a daily basis.

I started to write a grateful list. But then it started to get really big and it hit me that being grateful doesn't require itemizing everything in your life you are grateful for- and I was starting to think it looked a little like bragging "hey check out all the awesome people in my life!". So instead of posting a list I have decided to find ways to show my gratitude to all the wonderful people in my life. Mostly I want to do a better job of communicating this gratitude with my words and actions.

So here's a start: to all the amazing people I have in my life- family, friends, neighbors, business associates, employees and everyone else: thank you for being in my life, I am incredibly grateful to you all.

Process, Product, Practice and Profit

We've been doing a lot of soul searching at SmallBox lately. What products do we want to offer? What kind of clients do we want to work with? How do we become crazy profitable in 2011? 

One particular struggle we have had is taking on projects that have no related process. Often we have done great work for customers but at the expense of profitability, customer experience and company culture. I don't mind being a little messy during the start up years but it is pretty unforgivable for a grown up business. 

The clarity I'm coming to can be summarized by these 4 "P"s- Process, Product, Practice and Profit. In that order. 

Process

If you don't have a process then you don't really have a product. In our case we have a pretty solid process for designing/building marketing websites but not so much for e-commerce, site audits, web applications, etc. So we have been walking away from business that doesn't have a related internal process. We have also been treating our process with the respect it deserves. Many elements may seem obvious but all the pieces have come together from years of trial and error. If there is a special sauce then the process is the stock and the team is the flavor. But process is just the beginning. 

Product

This is what the client sees. It is both the end product (the website) and their experience. The later is an area we have often come up short. We start down the project path hand in hand but somewhere along the way things get messy. The end product is almost always excellent, in my humble opinion, but the client can often leave feeling less than fuzzy about the experience. We weren't managing expectations. This is of course rooted in our process. Product=flower and process=soil.

Practice

This is about creating muscle memory. Doing things the same way over and over. Like basketball drills. All the checklists and milestone templates in the world can't replace a team that is in sync. It's a beautiful thing when it happens. We have done over 100 websites over the last 5 years but we still need to practice and improve. Many times the misses are around hand offs between teams, integrating new team members and client communication. You might think that practice comes before product but the reality is that every paying project is practice when you have an active, growing, always improving process. Practice also involves looking at the tape- reviewing what worked and didn't work and making changes. Ignoring the tape is lazy and stupid but we have been guilty of that many times over the years. No more.

Profit

The best P of all! This one has been a little elusive for us. We have had great quarters and not so great quarters. Overall we have been fortunate to grow over the past 5 years with double digit growth every year. But consistent, substantial profitability has been hard to come by. I believe the reason lies in our tendency to still behave like a start up- take whatever comes to us, ignoring mastery of a process for specific products, not reviewing the tape and making changes. I know now that profitability comes from a product with a rock solid process. This will clarify our value proposition in the market and create numerous efficiences internally. Sure, we might have fewer products which means turning away business but the products we have will be much more profitable than all the random engagements in the past. So going forward we have decided that if there is no process in place then there will be no product offering. Doing fewer things better.

Would love to get some input from other business owners on this post.

Anatomy Of A Modern Conversation

My last post on this blog was titled "John Lennon, My Kids and Me". A little tribute to the Beatle on the 30th anniversary of his passing. This post was automatically sent to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts via TwitterFeed. I also reposted the blog on the music site I run - Musical Family Tree. Over the course of the day I had many separate conversations on this blog, Twitter, Facebook and Musical Family Tree. I also had a "real" conversation via a client today who saw the post on my LinkedIn page.

This is what a modern conversation looks like- one piece of content being discussed in different ways by different people on different platforms. The only constant is me and the content. Some users will cross over between platforms but for the most part I find users tend to just engage regularly with one platform, where they feel most comfortable. You have to go to where they are and have the conversation on their turf. Although I sometimes wish I could have it all under one roof I realize that the specific culture and flavor of each community would be lost. It's a lot like regional dialects. Even with globalization we aren't seeing them go away. It creates a sense of community and place.

In the digital world, like the "real" one, people want to gather in small groups and have meaningful conversations. Let's not fight this, it's a very human thing growing in the digital soil.

John Lennon, My Kids and Me

It's no secret that I'm a big Beatles fan. I've been one since around 6 years old when I discovered Sgt Peppers in my parents record collection. It was magical stuff then and still is now. I was only 9 when John Lennon passed away but I still recall it clearly. It was my first real experience with death. Any earlier deaths in my life, my dad's dad for instance, happened when I was younger and seemed abstract. Lennon's death was strangely real to me since I had connected so strongly with his music at an early age.

I've done my best to pass this love along to my kids and so far it's happening. They love Yellow Submarine and many of the more psychedelic songs from the middle years. Psychedelic music is really just kid's music if you think about it. They ask me questions like "which ones are dead again Daddy?". I tell them stories about each Beatle, what songs they wrote, instruments they played, things they said...

I'm proud that my oldest daughter Ramona, 10, can now pick out the Beatles pretty consistently whenever she hears them. I recently set up a turntable in her room and gave her the Blue and Red albums. I feel it is my duty to counterbalance the obligatory Justin Bieber infatuation that strikes all modern pre-teen girls. I was slightly horrified to see Bieber posters in her room recently right next to a vintage Elvis pin up I had given her. Elvis is one of her other classic faves.

When I was in college I became obsessed with John Lennon's solo catalog one summer while working in a record store. In particular his first two solo records- Plastic Ono Band and Imagine really impacted me. There may not be a more honest record in existence than Plastic Ono Band. It's full of rough edges. Musical open heart surgery. I distinctly recall spending a week really mourning the loss of Lennon. It hit me hard for some reason, the thought that I could never have the chance to meet this person, that he was permanently gone from the earth, his unique muse was no longer with us. The scope of that loss seemed insurmountable at the time. What use was it trying to make music when you can't even get close to what he achieved? Thankfully that thought passed after a few weeks.

With today being the 30th anniversary of his death I have to wonder how his impact will grow or fade in years to come. So far he seems to have only become more relevant. Maybe the world that creates a John Lennon has passed us by and we are living in time where the cultural soil cannot grow great artists. I hope not. But I do know that no-one has come close to filling his shoes these 30 years since he passed.

Thinking About Site Content, Wishfully

Wishful thinking can invade a project or relationship early on. I blame high school romances, the ones you thought would last forever, where you could only see the good in the other person and not the obvious to everyone else issues that were heading down the track. In my experience with building websites wishful thinking almost always clusters around content.

We enter every client relationship thinking that content wrangling couldn't possibly be as bad as last time. It almost always is.

This content monster has two heads. The first head is the client's. The client thinks they can write, they do it all the time- right?, so they commit early on to writing the site copy. They make this commitment, usually, without any idea of how they are going to fit it into their already busy schedule. They make this commitment because they want to save money. I get it. But what they don't realize is that the project will almost definitely be delayed while they struggle to find time to fit copywriting into their schedule. Deadlines will pass and the project loses momentum. That first blush of excitement we both felt at the kick off meeting has now completely withered. We are now deflated and completely bummed out. Where has the love gone?

The second head is us, the agency. We are letting this happen, it is really entirely our fault. We know it's going to happen. It happens almost every time, dammit, and why haven't we figured out how to solve this problem? The reason is that we want to meet the client's budget and content is the first, and usually only, thing that the client can reasonable take on as their own. Also, we are being lazy, afraid to have that hard conversation- "in our experience clients can't write Web copy". We don't want to lose that good feeling we all have about working together. This is where the wishful thinking comes in. We tell ourselves- hey, they know their business so it just makes sense for them to write their content. But it still ends up being a trainwreck. We are not controlling the process. The client doesn't know how to build websites, we do, but we are being led when needing to lead. In dealing with this issue routinely after having built 100+ websites the last 5 years I've finally had enough.

Here's the solution we are going to implement. Communication, Creation and Control.

Client Communication- no more wishful thinking at the beginning of the relationship. We will set expectations during our initial conversations and maintain that throughout the project- "we welcome your involvement in creating content but we won't wait on it or expect it to be Web friendly, so expect us to have billable hours on content creation and optimization".

Content Creation- we are in charge of site content, not the client. The client will have a window of time to get us whatever content they have but when that window closes our copywriter will work with those assets to create Web friendly site copy. From that our designers will create any needed graphics assets to go next to that page copy. All of this will be governed by a....

Content Control- a shared Google Spreadsheet with nice color coding to show what content is due, when it's due, who is responsible, etc. We will share this with the client during their content window. If they want to create their own site copy, awesome, we look forward to working with it as long as it's delivered on time. But we will still review, rewrite and optimize for the Web.

In the end this is really about creating and controlling the total client experience. The new website experience should be like a trip down the Tunnel Of Love not a trip to the dentist.