High Touch, High Value or Commodity?
Business is ultimately about making more money than you spend; that is a given. I would never suggest otherwise.
If you are running a commodity business, you focus on volume and keeping costs low; that is where the margins are made. Customers can go pretty much anywhere and get a similar experience. Wendy's or McDonald's? Best Western or Holiday Inn? Does it really matter which one you pick?
In sales people talk about the lifetime value of the customer; how much money is the typical customer likely to spend on your products and services over the lifetime of the relationship? How do […]
Calgary Businesses Giving Back – Zumba Party in Pink
A friend of mine owns a dance studio geared towards getting adults to go from watching dancers on "Dancing with the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance" to actually taking the plunge and taking lessons. Yes, if I can learn to do Step Dancing at my age and abilities… there is a course for you and you can learn to dance too.
Paula Callihoo is the owner and director of Calgary's one and only "Dance Through Life" dance studio. She is into her second year of keeping everything running and teaching lots of classes to boot.
You read a […]
Doesn’t Anyone Else Hear It?
I was at the local Tim Horton's to pick up my lunch today. They have those bread toasters with the conveyor belts. Over the last 2 months, the toaster has started screeching, progressively getting louder and louder every time I visit.
I can only take about 5 minutes in that place. I can't imagine meeting someone for coffee and trying to listen to the person attentively.
A while back, I asked an employee there if the noise bothered him. He told me you get used to it after a while. Kind of like that frog in hot water experiment I guess. (Come to […]
The Journey to Happiness Is About The Journey
I have been reading "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh. He is the guy who started LinkExchange and sold it for 200 million and then grew Zappos and sold it for 1 billion. Not a bad track record.
What is interesting is not the making lots of money part (well that is interesting too).
It is that he realized early on that it is not about the money (especially when you have a reasonable amount already I suppose). It is about the experiences you create and the relationships you build.
If fact, on professional networking… build depth in the friendships first and […]
Doug the Plumber
There are surprising similarities between the process of plumbing and building and supporting software. I didn't realize that until the other day.
Recently the pump that runs hot water through out in-floor heating stopped working. This was fairly easy to determine as:
- The floor was getting colder,
- The pump was not making it's normal humming noise, and
- It was overheating (the last time this happened I burned my fingers learning this).
The last time the pumped seized up I called in a plumber. I had to wait a week for them to show. Then they put in a new pump. The total cost was over […]
Do Optimists Make Better Entrepreneurs?
First Thing – Realists are Not Optimists
Most people don't want to be labeled as a pessimist, even if it is true.
It has been my experience that some people focus and dwell on the negative things as a habit or by nature.
When you are talking to them and feel the conversation is going into negative or blaming territory, you may be tempted to call them out; "why are you being so negative?" or "be patient things will get better", etc.
Someone who is an optimist by nature (temporary deviation) will pause, admit they are being overly negative, and then immediately brighten up […]
Software Post-it Notes
Keeping things simple we would have just used post-it notes and a whiteboard or wall. We have lots of concurrent projects and could have used up lots of walls.
But we also have remote clients, developers and testers.
So we decided on a software solution. This is what the OnTime Planning Board looks like with client names removed.
Of course it is all drag and drop.
Note that we are currently using 1 week sprints with two major releases for these types of projects. I have found that longer sprints make it hard […]
Pushing Out of the Comfort Zone
Recently we had a project where we received a rather complicated mail merge Word document that needed to be generated from a web site. If we could handle the Word documents directly, we would have a very flexible method of building similar applications for our clients in the future.
We looked at third party tools and several looked promising initially.
However, they seemed to fail on handling the nested if statements properly. The output in Word or PDF format was rendered incorrectly.
So we looked at using the docx (XML) format and the Microsoft docx SDK. The Word docx format saves the content […]
Old Habits Are Hard to Break
I was doing some more reading on the train this evening. We all know old habits die hard but we try to change them all the same.
This approach is totally wrong.
Other than intentionally damaging your brain (which I strongly recommend against) it is impossible to actively rewire or remove an existing memory map once it has been firmly established. The more you think about a bad habit, the more it becomes entrenched; not less.
Yet well intentioned people try to change themselves and others using the brute force method all the time, even though it almost never works. You just end up getting […]
Don’t “Tell” Me It Is Not Possible
Recently we building an application for a customer and we had to merge two existing PDF reports into one.
We already have a license for a utility that creates PDFs from HTML web pages. It can also append or merge existing PDFs into its output. But could it just merge two PDFs into one without printing a page first?
Well rather than waste time, our developer asked the vendor via e-mail support. The first attempt got dumped by their spam filter. The second took a few days to generate a response.
In the meantime our developer couldn't wait for the answer and made it […]