Coding on a Budget

Being Proactive Instead of Reactive

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:30:31 -0600

Recently my buddies Ryan and Keith started up a new blog called Business is in the Details. It's all about how you can make your business better by providing better customer service, targeting your ads, and general nuggets of goodness that people simply forget to do over time. It didn't take me long to spot a problem with a business that was worthy of a blog post.

At a location I work at, there is cable internet. The cable was physically pulled away from the pole by an oversized truck. In the same parking lot about 50 yards away is a company that contracts service work for our cable provider. Having that line working is mission critical, so instead of calling the cable company, I simply walk down to the cable contractor's office.

I was met at the front by your typical middle aged manager type personality. I told him our internet was down because our cable is physically down. He said, “Yeah, I saw that coming in to work. Are you the one who did it?”. I told him of course not, but I need that line up as we're losing customers and money without it. “Sure, we'll fix it as soon as you call the cable company and make a service ticket.”

My blood pressure instantly jumped. In my younger years my knee jerk reaction would have gotten the better of me and I would have no doubt insulted the man by explaining to him the amount of idiocy involved to come up with just a statement. Instead age and wisdom won out and I just laughed a little and walked out.

Let's examine what's wrong here:

A company that exists to fix another companies infrastructure knows about a problem before the customer and does nothing to fix it.

Company management wanted to find someone to blame.

Will not take action without a work order from cable company.

So after spending 45 minutes on the phone, getting transferred to multiple states (and most likely countries), I managed to convince someone that I did not need to reboot my router as I was holding the downed cable line in my hand. I was assured the problem would be fixed within 3 days. Actual repair time was completed around 1pm, but that's over half the work day. The work was of course done by the same people I visited that morning – the same company that shares my parking lot.

Here's what should have happened:

The contract company sees the line down and repairs it.

Contract company then places the service call or asks me to place the service call.

Ticket get generated and instantly closed. Paperwork handled, everyone gets paid.

I don't lose a day of work and my blood pressure remains stable.

Is it so odd to expect people will proactively do something without being told first it needs to be done? Apparently yes. Sounds odd, but if you stop and think about it – happens all the time.

Entrepreneurs in general are proactive people. So proactive in fact that most CEOs do not come with an off button, but that's for another post. You need reactive people to carry out your vision, they're called employees. Most people on the planet only do something as a response to someone else. The problem is management. The job description is to balance being proactive with being reactive. An owner of a company hires management to proactively take care of certain things so the work load gets distributed. Management reacts to the people he manages and the customers that are not happy with those people.

The conclusion – my poor customer service experience is a direct result of poor management of a company that represents a bigger company. Disclaimer: I didn't like the big cable company before but my dislike has grown because of the actions of a company they employee.

Taking a step back: Reasons they didn't just “fix” the problem on sight

Against company policy. Too much of a liability to climb a pole without a work order.

We might not get paid. The big cable could have in their infinite wisdom passed the work order to another company 3 counties over.

Generally too much effort or just a no care attitude.

Whatever the reason, the damage is done and while my patronage will not make or break them, I'm often in a position of decision making when it comes to which internet carrier gets installed. They will certainly lose a few future customers I could have sent their way.

The death of a company..

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:24:48 -0600

Not my business, at least not yet. Maybe I should say the death of a good idea because the business in question is more likely more funded than ever now. The spirit is gone, the original mission scrapped, the original members moved on to bigger and better things. What is left is a shell of a company motivated by shareholder approval and the requirement to generate large profits. The company in question is GarageGames.com and the situation is big corporate buyout lovin'.

It's really amazing any company survives at all. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail within the first five years.

I'm torn. I've been on the wrong side of two buyouts and I've seen first hand how great it can be. The formula is the same:

The owners start acting weird, you know weird when you see it.

They start asking for inventory numbers, how many servers do we have, etc etc.

A group of people you've never seen before hang around and start calculating how much the company is actually worth.

Management tells you there's nothing to worry about.

People start resigning left and right, you start hearing jokes about how the rats are the first to jump off a sinking ship.

You interview for your own job.

People panic and start choosing sides.

The new regime starts identifying those who still hold loyalty to old management and eliminates you.

The new regime starts identifying those who had problems with old management and promotes them.

There's a reason I watch Office Space at least twice a year. It reminds me to work harder to avoid this cycle again. I'm the loyal guy, I don't really chose to be - it's just my personality. Here's what it looks like from an owner's point of view:

At the start of every week, you know that by Friday you need X amount of money to meet payroll.

You're worried about billing and your credit line at the bank eating any and all profits you may have had.

You're bothered by employees wanting raises and new equipment you can't afford.

Management is busy making power point presentations that depicts everything is fine and the company is strong.

Employees are busily reading Slashdot.org and planning their afternoon StarCraft session wondering why management doesn't have a clue.

It's a non-stop stress fest on both sides and all the sudden here comes mega-corp with an offer you can't refuse. Here's the dirty little secret - businesses want to be eaten within 7 years. The idea is to build up your business to attract the attention of a larger entity. The larger entity will take the best of what you have, get rid of the rest, and try to make as much money as they can before liquidating whats left at the end.

There are very few small businesses who intentionally wants to stay small. You have your auto mechanics, dentists, dry cleaning, barber shops, service oriented in general who will never get past the one location mark. If they're lucky and in the right area, they can make a decent life out of it, but they would have made more money working for someone else in the long run.

The owners, now presented with a buyout offer now usually jump on it. It's a chance for them to cash out, take a break, and do neat things they always wanted to do before trying it all over again. The funny thing is, the stress is addictive, the attempt attractive, the gamble exhilarating. Being a business owner is nothing more than legalized gambling and the ups and downs feel the same. So now the owners go on a shopping spree buying up all the expensive toys they've always wanted. It may be a bookstore, it may be a farm, but it's not long before they're right at it again trying for the buyout again.

So let's take a look at the history of GarageGames:

Ex-Dynamix employees see the writing on the wall, negotiate to buy the engine they've been working on away from the company and bail.

Take the engine, sell copies + source for $100, call it indie and sell it anyone who wants it.

From the start it's cross-platform and works pretty well.

Form community around said engine, accept patches, repackage them and sell them back to new customers as new versions.

Just looking at the publicly available Torque Owner tags and crawling the site, it appears engine sales generated over a million dollars alone.

They gain enough status to get console developer licenses and port the engine over. Of course selling that version of the engine for a much higher cost.

Microsoft gains interest, GarageGames now a xbox ,xbox360 ,xna partner. Die hard c++ programmers are talking about how cool c# is. Linux support all the sudden becomes purely community driven.

TorqueX is the first GarageGames product to hit the market on time, no doubt some sort of bonus money from Microsoft. Jeff now questions Mac development and Linux development drops off the planet.

Things are quiet, promises of documentation and transparent development are made. Opengl continues to take a back seat to directx.

IAC offers big corporate buyout lovin'.

GarageGames assures its community that everything is cool and this just means more money to do more cool things.

GarageGames founders and superstars jump ship, the B team takes over.

Website takes on a web 2.0 look, engine price triples, and community functions are crippled.

Founders and superstars make new company, new engine, and back on the market to do it all over again.

Yes, it's sad to see something gutted like this. Yes, I was attached to the idea of GarageGames. Yes, I'll more than likely do business with PushButtonGames (even though I'm a complete Flash virgin). Yes, I hope to be bought out by big corp buyout lovin'. No, I don't like change nor how the process needs to happen this way to turn a real profit. This is just how the world works and it beats the alternative - your company fails, you go bankrupt, you feel like a failure and you just can't wait to do it all over again.

Rest in Peace GarageGames.com

2001-2008

Crazy Customers and How to Spot them..

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:48:06 -0600

They're out there lurking in the dark waiting to ruin your day. All businesses encounter at least one but they really hurt smaller businesses as they eat up time and resources. There is one basic rule a small business needs to follow - work on whoever is paying you the most right now. The crazy customer will monopolize your time, make unreasonable request, complain about complaining and then not pay you. I made a fundamental mistake - I started working before writing up a scope of work contract. It was a referral of a friend, so I didn't think much of it. He needed work done yesterday, I told him my rate and I went to work. So while I got screwed out of money, here's a list of how to spot the crazies and stop them before they do real damage:

Sending more than 15 emails a day.
Thinks 3 days is 2 weeks.
Calls you "bro".
Thinks a mysql backend is a magical thing only special people can understand.
Wants no scroll bars on IE maximized in a 1024x768 screen while in xp theme mode. (cause that is what *everyone* uses)
Thinks you can use a webcrawler to recover PHP code.
Wants you to work on 3 things at once and wonders why nothing is being accomplished.
Tells you he wants to start a social network for God called hisspace.com
Informs you what is easy and should cost money.
Tells you CEOs don't even make the kind of money you're charging.
And my favorite - Tells you that you are padding hours.

As soon as the customer starts telling you how to do your job - stop. When I take my car to get a tune up (and yes, all Linux people use car metaphors), I don't email my mechanic and inform him how to set the spark plug gap. People are good at different things, that's why I don't cut my own hair. Just because I own a pair of scissors doesn't mean I'm good at or even remotely qualified to instruct someone else at cutting hair. Some people spend a bunch of time behind a keyboard, but that doesn't mean you're a programmer or even a "computer guy". Owning a computer doesn't make you qualified to tell me how to do my job.

How can you avoid problems? It really depends on the scope of the project. If you write a little throw away application that takes you a couple of hours then it's not worth the trouble of writing up a contract. If they don't pay up, you're only out a couple hours and you move on. Anything more than that, take the time and do it right.

Contracts - do them. Write up a scope of work contract and make them sign it before you do anything.

Educate the customer - maybe they don't know all this computer stuff costs money. Software is expensive, custom software even more so. The bill can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Delays happen - this happens mostly when the customer starts asking for more than the original scope of work ie: the sugar buzz effect. Amend the contract.

Good luck with your crazy customer, I sure had a blast with mine.

Lunch with Jay

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:15:29 -0500

I broke from my normal routine of running to Dairy Queen and had lunch with Jay Brandrup who owns Kinetic Communications. We walked down to John's and I had the two-handed cheese burger. I highly recommend clicking on the tour link on Kinetic's site and see how completely awesome their building is. I've never placed much importance on the "look" of your workspace. I just want something that functional ie: a desk that will not break when I overload it and the most comfortable chair you can afford. However after visiting Kinetic's building I started to question my minimalist workspace attitude. How far can a home business go? What sort of business have I lost by not having a traditional office space with a server room that customers could tour?

It may sound funny, but some companies build nice looking "network operation centers" just so they can walk clients around. On just about every job interview I've been on they take me on a tour of the server room. Have I become so jaded over the years that the site of a rack of dells flashing, 67 degree temperatures, and the constant hum of fans just doesn't impress me at all? Does it still impress normal people? There's nothing "magical" about it - they're servers.. But in the back of my mind I'm thinking just maybe I'd have more customers if I setup such a room and walked people around it. Ah, but what customers am I after?

ChickenWare was meant to be a game studio. A virtual game studio at that. Why have all the overhead of an office space when there are plenty of tools and high speed lines available? The question has always been - how can I pay the bills while I'm making games? Well, the byproduct of building server/client games is having an infrastructure that's great for hosting. I have the hardware, the network line, the backup generator, and the UPSes. So I decided to attempt to pay for game making by selling hosting. One hosting customer wanted to know if I could handle basic tech support for their company. Sure, why not? They're good customers, they pay their bills on time, why not expand my services? Next thing I know I'm going to owner's house and doing basic tech support for his family. In reality, I'm doing everything but making games. I have no time nor the energy to code.

Enter Jay - I explained my situation and here's what he had to say about it:

Learn to say no.

According to Jay, you only have 100,000 hours of work in your lifetime. 40 hours per week * 50 weeks a year * 50 years. Do not spend a single hour doing something you don't want to be doing. You should also not do anything that is not your core business. In other words, I need to stop doing everything and just focus on game making even if it means losing money. I've always been leery of putting all my eggs in one basket. My friend Ryan has always told me to find ways to generate streams of income from multiple places. So I have the hosting thing, some veterinarian patient education software, consulting, and I teach college level Linux and programming part time. All of these keeping me from actually writing games. I'm tired and my time management isn't what it should be. Something has to give.

Kinetics is profitable because Jay does nothing but web design. You don't go to a neurologist for a rash, that doctor will refer you to a dermatologist. His company doesn't do hosting, consulting, brochures, etc. - it does web design. Anything else is outsourced to a company that specializes in that particular area. Obviously I need to change my approach as my current one just isn't working. As for the lunch itself - $30 bucks and an hour of your time is the cheapest education you can buy.

Trade Show

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:23:04 -0500

I'm at my first trade show.. Well, my first trade show geared for veterinarians and their technicians - TheSVCOnline.com . And well my first trade show where I'm a vendor. Usually I'm the guy walking around looking at all the neat-o things people are apparently making money on and thinking, hrm, I could do that. It's a bit different for doctors and such, they need to attend conferences to accumulate learning hours to maintain their license. Along the way to the speaker rooms, booths litter the walkway displaying the latest greatest crap they can buy. This year, my crap is among the wares available.

What is my crap you may ask, well it's not a new concept by far but it's one that isn't widely used in vet offices. Patient education - plain and simple. Doctors say the same things day in and day out all day every day. They also sketch out procedures on a whiteboard or paper. To me, everything is already handled by a computer or should be, if not - what rock have you been hiding under?

I live in the south east, things move slower around here, doctors of any kind move even slower than that. There are exceptions and they would be the young doctors coming right out of college wanting to use the newest things out there. When they get hired by a practice they are quickly promoted to the guy who now does nothing but express anal glands. They're so busy doing all the grunt work, they have no time to talk the older docs into buying new neat-o things. When they do, the old vets are very resistant to any change. Why should they? Their practice has been doing well for 300 years, why change anything?

My product is simple, you bring your dog in with a bum leg, doc says - oh his ACL is torn. Ummkay, what does that mean. Doc will then go into the same spill he's said hundreds of time. This spill adds up to hundreds of hours saying the same thing over and over. Hours translates to money and money wasted gets their attention. So instead of doing the spill, he just hits a button and the computer plays a video that tells the customer the same thing. Doc leaves the room to do something else. Sure, we're only talking 5 minutes, but 5 minutes every time adds up. Simple, easy to use, one or two clicks.

The current competition is DIA (dog interactive atlas or something like that). They take a different approach to patient education - overload them with useless information. It's interesting to see all the joints move in 3d and stuff, but really, how much information is Bob and Alice going to retain? Not much. Their system requires the docs to drive the presentation, or so it seemed, which keeps them in the room even longer.

What surprised me was how friendly most of the other vendors were - even to their competition. Across from me was Sal Longo who is part owner of Crosby Longo Architecture Studio (CrosbyLongo.com). What they do is create floor plans for vet offices and hospitals. That's it. Very nice guy, has been designing stuff for vets for 11 years and he told me all sorts of useful things about the trade show circuit. What I find interesting - a big enough market exists to support something that niche. His company does just fine if they only pick up one customer every other trade show they attend.

Beside me was some guy selling some sort of pills. You'd be amazed at all the things you can feed your animals. It's really no different than the vitamin supplement section in your local drug store. I don't know his name, but he didn't want to talk much. However on the other side was Casey Bishop, a salesman for Scil (scilvet.com). They sell all sorts of things like vital sign monitors and video cameras that go up your nose. Also a very nice guy, he shared with me the scared trade show list known only to those who keep up with such things. He said there is no one place on the web you can get all the information needed about all the trade show location, times, etc. He was also a fountain of information about vet trade shows in general.

The end result was very educational. I managed to give away 200 stress balls with PetsEd.com on it. I talked with a bunch of people and I think the result will be a better product in the future. Will it turn into something big and wonderful? Odds are no, I'm realistic about things, but at least I'm out there trying.

Insane Web Site Bids..

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:01:28 -0500

For Sale:

Car

I'm not sure how many doors you will need yet, I can show you models that look sorta, kinda like what you would get, but you can't sit inside. Also, the engine will be installed after you buy it based on your needs.

$100,000 + $22,000 maintenance fee per year.

I've recently been tasked with the job of being a independent, non-biased consultant to help decide which company gets to redo a university's website. The range of bids I've reviewed range from completely reasonable to completely insane. Let's back up a bit. How does it all work?

University staff and students complain about the current website.

They complain so much that it comes up at the next budget meeting.

University decides it would be a good thing to update site as college age kids make decisions completely based from your presence on the internet. Bye Bye Yellow Pages..

University assigns department to draft a request for bids and sends it out to the masses.

The masses bid. The University picks and cycle repeats in 3 years.

This time they decided to hire me out to review what each company had to offer. The list was thinned out to 3 bids.

One company bid $100,000 with a $22,000 never ending maintenance fee. Just to talk to someone who could answer my questions took a week. This particular company makes their money by taking over university server rooms (ie: computer services). It's really amazing what a company will outsource. So why not try to invade the web design arena of universities also?

Yet another bid $120,000 but didn't handle any sort of back end integration. They were offering what I call a brochure site - meaning static pretty html that could easily be translated into a nice pretty brochure. No back end scripting, just basic html. They also had no idea how to integrate with google search nor had a demo site of, well anything. The funny part is, this company specializes in doing website for universities - that's it. Included in the bid is a page of existing customers with example links - which are broke in firefox under linux. They also informed me they do not test the site with lynx, but are completely ADA compliant.

The third company offered everything, worked with google search, used PHP, and it was a local company. They tested pages in Firefox under linux and lynx. The best part, $36,00 bid. The problem is, this was the company that originally created the site they are now unhappy with. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with the current site other than the fact it's reached the magical 3 year old mark. This seems to be the time people become unhappy with any site and want a change of any sort. These are the same people that need to paint their rooms different colors now and then.

My recommendation was easily the third company - no question. Now it's up to the university to pick.