Management

Striding the sidelines

Last week, while watching the BCS game between The University of Alabama and the University of Texas I was slightly stunned at the way that the eventual winner, Alabama, came out in the second half. After dismantling the Longhorns in the first half, the Crimson Tide essentially came out and played so conservatively that they nearly ended up costing themselves the championship. I’m not sure why teams do this — it is an affliction I notice at the professional level as well and it’s frustrating, and kind of boring.

So, what it is my point?

I suppose I don’t really have one.

Then what’s the relationship to marketing and advertising?

Games, like jobs have a beginning, middle and end. One needs to start strong and one needs to finish strong. The second half of an important game, and the second half of an important job are no time to go conservative. I say keep the pedal down as long and as hard as you can until you finish the job. You got to where you are by behaving (playing) a certain way. Don’t change it, don’t fritter away the opportunity out of fear of losing because you just may.

Billable, or fixed rate?

I read an interesting article (requires online subscription) in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (24 August, 2009) about the pending demise of billable hours at law firms. It appears that lots of large corporate clients, who also use outside counsel to augment their corporate legal teams, are driving some hard bargains and asking law firms to drop the highly profitable billable hours compensation model. Any time I see lawyers making less it makes me smile a bit, though, before I started getting too giddy, I kept reading. The article gives the impression that both sides are on board with it and that it’s pretty good for everybody involved. The article made it seem that there are some very open discussions between clients and vendors (let’s face it, if you work in client service then you’re a vendor) about what you get for certain agreements, and there is still the ability to revert to hourly for really large, complex cases. That’s when it hit me and made me jealous, for just a second, of the lawyers.*

The article, in its most refreshing passage, quoted a lawyer who said of these agreements that

a client can’t expect to have the absolute best team of [trial] lawyers from a firm and have the lawyers give up all the other work they could be doing on a regular fee basis to work 18 hours a day for months of time on a flat fee engagement.

Right there is the difference between agencies and law firms. I guarantee that even when an agency says we’ll work for that, and we’ll get it done for next to nothing, they never follow it up with “but we’ll put our b-team on it, they’ll work no more than 40 hours/week, we will not deliver our best work as we could for more money and we will ruthlessly manage your scope so that not a single comma will be moved, nor a logo enlarged even 1% after the allotted two revisions.” Sure, it’s written in scopes and terms etc., but it never happens like that in practice. Agencies, “invest in the relationship” and reduce their margins in an effort to hang onto business. Sometimes, this is warranted, but eventually it makes for bad relations between agency and client, as well as the team being put through the grinder by the client on one side and management on the other.

Agencies should follow the example of the folks in the law firms. Be blunt. Be up front. Be strong. Agencies have long worked on fixed cost projects, and have always striven to lock in long term retainers, but they rarely stand up for themselves within the frameworks of these agreements. Given the plight of so many shops today (though the market does seem to be stabilizing, somewhat), they will be more loathe than usual to stand up for themselves and say “this is what it takes to do this, We can work under this agreement, but you need to give us latitude and you need to understand very clearly that the scope means what it says.” I hope that large corporate clients and their large law firm-vendors acting like rational organizations and altering their relationships in the context of the current economic climate, can be a positive example to agencies and that the latter can learn a thing or two to help them down the line. Maybe, agencies need to hire lawyers to help with these conversations. Or, if an agency would rather not pay the hourly fee they, could talk to their outside counsel about moving to a fixed rate agreement and get some pointers for when they have the same discussions with their clients.

*Major Tangential Aside: Could you imagine an agency that got paid for every hour it actually worked for a client? Imagine if agencies were more like lawyers (used to be)? We’d all still be sitting in private offices with credenzas filled with booze a la Don Draper and the boys of Sterling Cooper (those were the days!).

The Dog Star, Sirius

“The dog days of summer” get their name because once upon a time Sirius, the Dog Star, used to rise at the same time as the sun during the hottest days of summer between early July and early September. Sirius no longer rises at the same time as the sun at this time of year (a result of precession, and, if my understanding of the latter is true, then it will be true again in about 25,000 years, give or take a millennium) but the term has stuck to describe this time of year. The ancient Romans and Greeks attributed the heat of these months to the anger of Sirius and they believed that this was a particularly evil time of year. While I would not go so far as to say that this time of year is evil — well, maybe I might — it certainly is a challenging time of year.

Whereas the ancients dealt with drought and potential crop devastation (still a reality for the modern agrarian) we in the small business world deal with another kind of drought — the vacation induced kind. Vacation, no doubt is brought on by another malady that the ancients associated with this time of year: sloth. During the spring and early summer we couldn’t respond fast enough to RFPs but since early July things have been quiet. The pipe was thin. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we are not alone. Colleagues at other shops are saying the same thing — “kinda quiet,” “a bit brutal out there” etc.. Contacts in other industries and professions are also letting us know that things are slow. The new business pipeline is key for many reasons. The obvious reason is it’s nice to be in the hunt for money. Another reason is that when you are pursuing it’s much easier to be confident about the future and keep the energy that you need to get a business off the ground.

All of this said, however, no sooner did July end than prospects started to look up. We live & die by our pipeline and it seems to be filling in again, pretty nicely. All one can ask for is the opportunity to connect. Now that the dog days are on the wane (though today’s weather would suggest otherwise) their attendant sloth seems to be diminishing as well — vacation season is winding down. It’s getting easier to connect and pursue and get in the hunt. Next year, hustling harder through late spring and early summer will help to allay some of this dog day slow down. If it doesn’t, I could always do what the ancients did: sacrifice a brown dog to Sirius, though that could turn into a PR nightmare.

Avoid the content trap

One of the things that I’ve found as a producer of marketing and sites for the web is that the most underestimated and misunderstood part of a job is often content creation. On many projects content is one of the hardest aspects of a job to scope. Certainly, one can scope number of revisions, estimated page counts, etc. — but there are all sorts of gray areas within content creation, especially on websites. Sometimes there is existing content that “only needs to be edited,” “or content that’s already been created but needs to be given “a consistent voice and tone” Unless these, and myriad other content-related are nailed down and discussed in depth prior to the start of the job they can be become morasses that sink a job. This is actually a larger topic than this post will cover, and I’ll come back to it at a later date. What I want to share now, though, is how important it is to not short-change your site development process by forgoing a copy writer or content creator and taking it all in-house. There are three reasons for this that I see and am happy to hear more from others, so please comment away.

1. Assuming responsibility for writing site content puts extra burdens on either you, the business owner (the person in a small business setting with the most knowledge of the company), or on your staff. Content creation can be laborious depending on the depth and breadth of the site being built. Your time and your staff’s time is better spent on core competencies and responsibilities like running the business, client management and new business development. Placing content writing responsibilities on staff or yourself means that full attention is given to neither the needed content, nor core responsibilities.

2. Professional copy and content writers are much more experienced with this type of work. This is what they do for a living, and by including them on your site development team you are tasking them with something that is their job and for which they are paid (see point 1 above). This professionalism and experience permits a writer to say things more succinctly and efficiently than you and your staff often-times can. A writer does not completely relieve you of responsibilities, you and your staff, will still have to collaborate and work with them, but mainly in an advisory and review capacity. Efficiency will be gained all around.

3. Creating your website, or revamping your website is an emotional process as much as it is a creative and technical process. Diving into a site build or site redesign will really force you to look at your company’s offerings and define your company in a very public way. This emotional aspect often makes site builds much more challenging than anticipated at the start of an engagement. Bringing in a copy writer or content specialist adds an objective third party to the process who can help to navigate some of the issues that arise when developing one’s site content. This objectivity is useful for the very reason that site owners and staff have biases (often positive, sometimes not) that can impact the copy and content creation process and lead to too much, diluted content.

Bringing an extra resource onto a job does cost money, and in the current situations all business owners are looking for ways to save money — we understand that as well as anybody. Often, budgeting for a copy or content professional will save you and your staff time, and money down the road. It will also help your site, which is a large investment to be the best that it can be and therefore help to better represent your company to current and future team members, the public and, even more importantly, to current and potential clients.

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, we were on vacation. We drove to Dawsonville, GA and back, and stopped in Richmond, VA, Asheville, NC and Staunton, VA along our journey. We drove a sizable chunk of the Blue Ridge Parkway and saw a lot of country along the interstates, US-Highways and State Roads. We passed many farms and properties of varying sizes in various states of upkeep or benign neglect. One thing kept popping into my head as drove along: the people who live in these rural areas, across from pastureland and fields seem to be connected to the earth in way that many of us in our urban and suburban environments are not.

Of course, as a tourist passing through, I project onto the setting but there is something in the agrarian model that is appealing, a set of standards that must be followed in order to achieve success. You plant your crop at a certain time, harvest it at another. Watch for insects, fungi and other controllable pests and hope that the uncontrollable doesn’t come and wipe you out. You follow that rhythm year in and year out and hopefully with vigilance, hard work and some luck you succeed. There is a timelessness to the properties by which we drove, earned of perseverance, and the very probable reality that the farm has passed down through at least a few generations of successful farmers/entrepreneurs.

There is a lesson in this model for all of us in non-agrarian pursuits, I think. We are in the midst of a nasty economic blood-letting. Unlike the summer hale storm that devastates a sorghum crop, however, this nastiness is of our own making. Everybody forgot about following the basic business ingredients of hard work, perseverance and commitment. Instead, everybody chased bonuses built on the performance of shaky derivatives and other exotic investment products that should have given more sober people the yips. Now, nobody knows what is to come on the other side of our current economic issues.

It seems to me that there is a very real chance to remake our economy and the way business is done. This will fall largely on the entrepreneurs and the risk takers currently working to create their own niche and define the future economic reality for themselves, right now. One thing I do know for sure is that in this new future we need to hue to the time-tested examples of hard work, straight dealings, and solid and honest delivery. It’s time to get back to the basics.

Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix

The other day, kicking around in my pantry I came across a box of “Jiffy”corn muffin mix. As far as iconic branding of consumer packaged goods go, I’d put Jiffy’s near the top. On this day though it was not the Jiffy Blue, nor the interesting mix of typography on the box-front, nor the close-up of the finished product that caught my eye — the front of the box was actually facing away from me. What caught my eye was the line, at the top of the back of the box, above the “Jiffy” logo, and the prep directions: “Great products since 1930.”

The parent company of “Jiffy” is Chelsea Milling, located in Chelsea, MI. It has been around for nearly 200 years but introduced the first ready-made baking mix in 1930. This was the first year of the Great Depression, and, one would imagine, not exactly a great year for new product launches. Yet, 79 years later, “Jiffy,” now in 21 varieties, can still be found in pantries and cupboards around the country.

Though seemingly ubiquitous now, ready made mix was a technological leap forward, and no doubt a costly investment for Chelsea Milling. They took a gamble going to market in 1930 and it paid off. As I start my own company in a downturn I find reason for hope in the “Jiffy” story. It reaffirms for me my belief that in flux there is opportunity if you are courageous enough to pursue it. In an environment as challenging as the one we face now (though not as challenging as 1930) I’m seeking inspiration and finding that examples of smart risk taking and savvy management abound — even in a box of corn muffin mix.