Vexxt?

My second-favorite tv show is a cartoon that I watch with my kids-Phineas and Ferb. (Yes, I’m unabashadly a tv watcher!) True to proper cartoon form, there is a bit of a formula to the show and there are a couple of things that you need to know. First, it’s perpetually summer for these guys. Second, they are always looking for the next cool project to occupy their time.

So, each day starts with a question from Phineas, “Ferb, what do you want to do today?”.

At which point they go off and build some amazingly sophisticated (perhaps impossible) machine for their summertime exploits. During the build sequence, there is always ALWAYS someone to ask them, “aren’t you a little bit young to be…” (insert specialized skill here). And, the answer is always “Yes, yes we are!”.

Finally, Phineas and Ferb are blessed with a big sister that is always trying to catch the boys in the scheme and provide evidence to her mother. For the record, this never pans out the way she would like.

So, let’s start to fit this back into the real world of business. There are several rules that we should follow from Phineas and Ferb:

1. Do something extraordinary each day. Some of the best advice I’ve followed is to work ON your business, not IN your business. Follow that one and you’ll see exponential returns.
2. Don’t worry about the rules-who cares if you’re too ‘young’ to be doing this. Massive action is better than paranoid preparation. We all strive towards perfection, but there is a point where good enough is good enough.
3. Someone is always out to get you. Don’t let that get in your way. Momentum wins!

The vexxt hiatus is over…we traveled to china for the adoption of our daughter. This trip was about family, and getting all of the paperwork done so that we could bring our new daughter home. But, I took every opportunity to soak up a unique culture and the nuances of daily life in china. From this I bring a few observations:

• Space is at a premium. Retail space is at a potentially higher premium. We visited several of the local shopping districts; from clothes, souvenirs, jade, electronics, traditional medicine…you name it. In a lot of these areas the stores were essentially stalls packed with goods. Merchandising consisted of showing everything…and hiring young workers to talk with passerbys and lure them in. There was a carnival atmosphere to it; lots of loud music and noisy teenagers. Generally, there wasn’t empty wall space (or if they had it, counter space). It was completely filled with merchandise. Some of the stores spilled onto the sidewalk, they had so much stuff for so little space. Takeaway, you have no excuses to not make do with what you have.
• There is no apprehension about asking for the sale. At home, we visit a store in a traditional mall and feel ignored by the sales stuff. There we walked in and were shown merchandise samples by at least 2 employees- at the same time. And no one was deterred if we weren’t interested. And, the sale wasn’t over when you purchased something…they would keep pulling out merchandise until both feet were out of the store. Takeaway, keep asking for the sale.
• There is a huge workforce…restaurants had double to triple the number of employees that I expected. There was someone to take the order, someone to deliver the order, someone to serve the order, someone to pour the tea, someone to deliver napkins, etc…Customer Service is alive and well in China.
• There was no point of sale system at a lot of the stores…including bigger stores. Purchasing items frequently involved someone hand writing a ticket that you take to a centrally located cashier. You paid the cashier and brought your receipts back to show the clerk that originally wrote your ticket. Then they gave you the merchandise. Takeaway, not sure here…I say get a point of sale system for any retail operation.
• People are far more advanced technologically than we give them credit for. In the US there is the notion that China is still undeveloped outside of it’s factories. That is not true. Everyone has a cell phone…and everyone is proficient at communicating with text messages. The internet is very accessible, and the younger generation is probably just as wired as we are. Right now they have the upper hand in outsourced manufacturing, this will spill over in the knowledge management/IT fields.
• Production quality is outstanding for their television programs and commercials. Gone is the idea of state run, low-budget entertainment. Quality is not taken for granted.
• There is no concept of a line or queue. Clarification, there may be a line, but that never stopped anyone from ignoring it and proceeding to the counter. Takeaway- if you need something, go ask for it.

I recently took my son to the Children’s Museum to see the various exhibits. Especially one of our favorite parts of the museum—the ‘funhouse’. There are two rooms that offer visual illusions and/or induce vertigo.

Since I’m not the tallest of guys, I prefer the room that makes me look like a giant. I can stand in one corner of the room and appear 8 feet tall on the observation camera. Or, I guess I could go to the other end where I appear to be less than half of that. Either way, the different angles and scale changes really affect your perception of an otherwise simple room. My son loves to position us so that he looks the taller of the two (not too much of a stretch, but still…).

The other room is absolutely normal. No visual illusions there, or so it seems. But, it’s built on a slant that you don’t realize until you’ve stepped inside. Once you enter the room it’s obviously tilted, significantly. But, it’s enclosed so that everything appears level. Your inner ears (and gravity) tell you the opposite.

These are exactly the little unexpected changes in perception that give us pause. And teach us something. The real estate market has tanked and no one is buying, right? Not really. There is always a market, you just have to work a little harder to avoid becoming invisible.

I saw a house for sale recently that I drive by daily. Only this time the sign read “Waterfront Property”. There is no real waterfront in this area. We aren’t by the ocean, the lakes aren’t that close, so what were they doing?!

They were referring to what is probably the smallest creek. ever. In the backyard, you could see a teeny-tiny line of water running through the property. They weren’t lying, and they weren’t particularly serious.

But, they were getting a much deserved second-look from everyone driving by. I don’t know if it was the real estate agent with a sense of humor or a badgering homeowner, but it was brilliant. You could see people chuckle as they passed by.

That sign wasn’t up very long, it changed to a regular sale sign; although that wasn’t up for much longer. We can only speculate if that contributed to someone’s decision to take a look, but it was obvious that a little tweak to someone’s perspective deserves a little extra thought.

photo by sean dreilinger

Art has always been more than merely painting pictures on canvas. But in the late 60’s it began moving in a very different direction. Suddenly the piece of art wasn’t so important to the artists.

Huh?

It wasn’t so much that the art wasn’t precious, its that the value was in the idea. Great, everyone has ideas. Anyways, they latched onto the idea of maximum efficiency.

In 1967, Sol LeWitt stated the following:

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Essentially, he said that it was his job to think of the art and that it didn’t matter who implemented it. Kind of like outsourcing the Mona Lisa…

So, let’s dial it back into business terms. We want the IDEA to drive the business. OR…you have to work on the business, not IN the business. Otherwise you’re just trading hours for dollars.

Still a little vague? To convert it into a usable concept for us, your idea must have value. Just outsource the details. The best way to do this is to focus on the end goal. You want customers, you want sales, and you want repeat business. You also want time. You’ve got to enable marketing and education to occur even when you’re sleeping. You have to put systems in place that solicit feedback, acquire leads and close sales on autopilot. If your customers keep coming, and your business keeps rolling along, you suddenly have the freedom to step back and let the machine run.

What will it take to get the machine started?

photo by gavinpr

Recently we purchased a bed for our son from a popular online furniture store. Once the bed shipped, the delivery people arrived with the bed, went to set it up–but the hardware was no where to be found.

They called the warehouse and the company was going to ship it directly to us. Then they wanted to schedule a follow-up so that the delivery team could assemble the furniture as an included part of the service. At this point we declined. We could tell it would be faster to set it up ourselves.

Several days later we received the hardware and began the assembly process. The final step is to put the finials on the bedposts. Well two of the four finials were scratched up.

We got customer service on the phone and let them know about the problem. They (again) promised to ship the pieces.

Days later we received the replacement pieces and…they were the wrong color!

Phone call to customer service…again.

Reshipping pieces…again.

That was the last time that they had to ship everything, but our order process lasted several weeks longer than it should have based on all of their mix-ups.

In talking to customer service the final time, they refunded the original shipping cost, approximately $250. Now, I tell you this story, not to complain about our shipping problems (we’ve dealt with this company before and felt that this was a rare situation), but in a roundabout way to illustrate the flexibility that they have based on understanding Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

This was not our first furniture purchase (nor our last with this company), plus they can safely assume that we will refer other families. This is the magic–we are worth far more than the net of our transaction.(In all probability, their average customer is worth more than we are based on average transaction value and number of purchases.)

But, you should note that we have multiplied our value a couple times based purely on our purchases and a couple of times based on the value of any referrals we make.

So…while they have a problem that they must solve in terms of fulfillment, they still are in the black and will not take a hit from absorbing multiple shipping charges (both ways for several of the finials).

Another result of understanding their customer’s lifetime value gives them the flexibility to truly enable customer service to take the appropriate action. Had our CLV been markedly lower than the refunded shipping cost, this transaction would have been a wash, and that offering would probably not be on the table.

I hate to feel like test subjects, but hopefully they are tracking the numbers.

More and more businesses are excited about web collaboration capabilities, but until it’s showing them real dollars in return- it’s a lot of optimism…

With that said, I would like you to look at Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University for his description of collaboration at Pixar. He gave a talk entitled “Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace” in which he offers some insight into the true wealth of collaboration—and at the same time gives us a new definition of cooperation.

In the video, he asks you to “think of the assembly line as a quintessential example of cooperation”. Person 1 does his job and the product continues on to person 2…and eventually all of the people on the assembly line have created a final product. We can even assume that they just made one of the best products in the world. BUT, each person in line is not making the quality of the next person’s work any better. They cooperate to finish the job, but their contribution doesn’t really carry on beyond that touch-point.
Cooperation has simply become a “protocol that allows us to not get in each other’s way”…

Collaboration is the flip side of that coin. And it’s where we can impact bottom line. He has created a view within Pixar that collaboration is the AMPLIFICATION of all involved. Your interactions with others become valuable when you are listening to, interested in, and interacting with people on different levels. Let’s suggest that the endgame is, in his words, to get a “hi-fidelity notion” across so that they can all go above and beyond the individual contribution. That seems easy to apply to a company like Pixar, but I’d like to offer you a small business example of collaboration that was directly responsible for increased cash flow.

Giant supermarkets have long generated a friendly competition for store/dept sales, decreasing shoplifting, etc. They developed a closed culture where they didn’t want to share tips for fear of giving their in-company competition any kind of advantage (or from losing their advantage). They used this air of competition to begin innovations within, by collaborating on their intranet. For example, a deli manager discovered a simple display trick that increased their shrimp platter sales by $200/week. When another deli manager used this tip in his store, he also saw the sales increases. This one tip was responsible for a $20K boost, but had they rolled it out company wide in the same time frame they figure it would have been worth $350K. From www.cio.com

What was a day-to-day operation of putting the shrimp out for customers became a chain-wide exercise in practical collaboration. And, quite possibly, the spark to alter views on their internal competition and how it can be redirected to increasing sales.

Everyone likes the idea of continuous improvement, but until you have the communication and buy-in you still have  barriers to entry.