Standing out in a Crowd

Noah Lukeman’s book, How to Write a Great Query Letter, is for writers looking to land an agent, but it’s really about how to get yourself noticed in a crowd. Too aggressive, and it’s as if you’re a terrorist. Too gimmicky, and you’re a clown. None of the above, and you’re part of the crowd.

The book fulfilled its promise in another way: it was compelling reading like a good query letter should be. I was tired and sleepy but it made me sit up and take notice.  No how-to book has done that before.

In my business, I must reach out to potential clients who don’t know me. The book made me take another look at techniques I have tried in the past and I finally understood why they didn’t work. It made me take another look at techniques I am using now and how to make them work better.

No wonder it’s a 5-star book on Amazon.

But there’s more to it than that.  To quote,

Be the cat

The ox

Much to do,
Lists, lists of lists,
Time management,
Multi-tasking,
Sorry, I missed it — the devil was in the details.

The cat

Sleep,
Mouse vigils,
Learning their ways,
Pounce!
Guess what — God was in the details.

New Year Resolutions

From Barron’s Round Table this week, quoting Marc Faber,

With a few exceptions, the U.S. doesn’t produce anything. It is a consumption-led economy. When the economy expands, the U.S. imports from other countries, such as China, which increase industrial production and capital spending.

There are only 2 industries where the US is still a leader.  Yeah, software is another, but it is no longer US dominated. 

1. Life sciences, which includes Biotech, Pharma, Medical Devices.
2. Defense.

The two couldn’t be more different in their character.  We will be targeting both of them, Early Stage IT for Life Sciences and Quantitecture for Defense.

So where’s the Resolution?  Focus!  Early Stage IT marketing will be focused on the Life Sciences only.  Quantitecture marketing will be focused on DoD only.

Other ideas (I get new ones every day) will be put on the back burner for a few months.

Don’t Pause

We were editing a piece of music the other day using a popular program. Nothing fancy, just wanted to cut a 15-second part of the audio from the middle and splice the ends together. It wouldn’t cut.

WTF? How can you have an editing program that wouldn’t cut? Nevertheless, we dutifully read the instructions. No help there. We must have fiddled with that program for an hour before we realized that if you pause the song, the program wouldn’t cut — you actually had to stop it.

It’s obvious why, once you think about it. Pausing implies that you intend to resume. If you cut a piece of the song out, the program could potentially lose its resume-point. A really sophisticated program would have tried to keep track of the cutting and adjust the resume-point. The designers of our program solved the problem by just disallowing cutting when paused. Simplicity wins!

So too in life.

It’s a popular metaphor: “our challenge is to change tires while going 80 miles an hour”. No! Productivity is not the challenge. Getting things done without dropping the ball is not the challenge.

The challenge is discovering a new song, and that requires giving oneself the silence to hear faint stirrings. Opportunities like this come only a few times in a lifetime.

The Pause button stands in the way of a new song!

Toward the Sanctuary

The architecture in Before the Law is drawn in words, not pictures.  I suppose everyone’s mental picture is different, mine reminds me of houses of worship.

Outside, grandiose and imposing, designed to inspire awe. Leave your ego at the door as you enter. You will have no use for it inside.

Inside, the drama of worship. Candles, bells, pews, hymns, words of wisdom. Distractions all, but helpful in their own way.

Go further in, until you can hear the silence. Your own silence.

What’s this? The sound of your inner wars, evocation of the grandiosity you thought you left far outside. Wars from decades ago, deeds, words and thoughts that shaped you — like chisels shape marble.

It’s dark now. The chisels have fallen silent. In the sanctuary, you can not see, only feel. There is no one here.

What you came to worship was your inner self.

Transparent Billing and Collecting

12/24/08 update: A customer-visible version of this post was posted on the Early Stage IT blog.

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It feels like the first of a series of posts as the thought process for billing and payments evolves for Early Stage IT.

There are 3 main problems to think about:

1. Different perceptions between us and the client of the value and fairness of the billing.  It’s a problem with a subset of clients. We need to have a billing system that is transparent.
   • What do clients want? Billing that they perceive as fair. They say they want billing they can understand but what they really mean is, billing they can agree with.
   • What do we want? Billing thay can’t disagree with.
2. Our clients, being start-ups, are strapped for cash.  Their cash situation can change quickly and we need to have some certainty of payment.
3. Would we work for equity instead of cash? No. We are not venture capitalists. We don’t know how to evaluate future worth of a company and invest in it.

The transparency question boils down to them knowing about work to be done and its projected cost before we start doing it. We have to be diligent about getting them to approve estimates and their revisions, incorporating these into the delivery process.

The collection question is trickier. Here is a proposal for my friends reading this post, please let me know what you think. Amazon FPS is a payment service which can be used for billing.  Most companies may already have a relationship with Amazon and we would just ride that relationship for our billing purposes. What if the process ran as follows:

• Around the 20th of the month, we provide a client our best estimate of the following month’s expenses.
• By the end of the month, the client prepays those expected expenses
• After the end of the month, we bill for work done and draw from the pre-paid account. Any discrepancies are carried forward into the following month.

The thing I don’t like about the proposal is that it is unusually distrusting. At the same time, we are not a bank and can’t afford to run on “credit”. We need to manage cash flow.

Early Stage IT

That’s the name of the new business.  The web site is up: http://www.EarlyStageIT.com.

I talked about it at the 128ICG meeting last week.  The presentation went well, I thought. 

Much to still do:

• Size the market.
• Figure out the channels.  
• The descriptions of a couple of partners are included on the web site.
• Establish rates and the economics of the business.
• Crucial question for early stage companies: will we accept equity in lieu of cash?

Reassessment

One of the first things when starting on this journey was to create a project plan. It wasn’t one of those “wishful thinking” plans. It was realistic, with plenty of buffers built in for setbacks and revisions. The expectation was that there would be a contract in hand by Thanksgiving. Until about mid-October, we were on track. Two unforeseen setbacks:

1. Collapse of the Financial Services Industry causing me to start looking at other industries.
2. About a month consumed with a personal emergency.

So let’s say that the two setbacks account for 2 months. Plus Christmas, let’s say 3. The new target should be mid-February.  Since the first deadline has been missed, without any real prospects on the horizon, even mid-February looks iffy. I went to see John Chory last week as part of a TiE Mentoring session. John does a lot of work with emerging companies.  One of his suggestions:

• Offer to be a CIO for such companies. 
• They don’t have a lot of money and they wouldn’t want to part with equity for this. 
• However, they would pay for work done and would be excellent references.
• This is how he got his start and has gone through 3 boom and bust cycles as a lawyer for emerging companies.

So here’s a few ideas:

• CIO for early stage companies. Pros and Cons:
  • I used to do this at Fido, supporting 5 start-up companies.
  • Know how to get the word out: all the local Venture Forums.
  • Know how to get the work done.
  • Position as a separate business unrelated to Quantitecture.
• Deeper dig into Quantitecture.
  • The availability paper has been sent and we should hear about acceptance.
  • Concentration into Virtualization.
  • Marketing remains a challenge.
• Possible product company with some ex-colleagues

I would like to take a week or two, possibly through year-end, to decide the next course of action.

After a hiatus

The last post was over a month ago! I was able to prepare a paper (and an accompanying application) for publication but not much else.

I needed the time for personal reasons and was glad to have had it.

Risk Management

My company is not really selling a set of skills, it is selling risk management. Hire us and we will help you manage the high risk of IT projects, is the message. The issues are as much behavioral as they are technical. We can help quantify the risk, but to be successful our recommendations have to be adopted.

Thinking of our offering as a risk management offering allows us to draw lessons from other disciplines. The financial markets, for example, are another area where risk was not managed properly. David Brooks offers that the whole discipline of risk management is undergoing a revolution. Are there lessons here for my consulting practice? I don’t know but I’ll find out and look for innovative thoughts on risk management — perhaps recast the business that way?

Would risk management be a better way to position the company? Here is an easy way to gauge it: the survey results are ready to be rolled out.  Two messages will be crafted, one a risk management message and the other a more traditional message. I am planning a freebie training for the right team(s) if they qualify. Their applications will provide a chance to evaluate the respondents and further gauge the level of interest in the offering. It will also provide valuable insight into whether one message “sells” better than the other.