Category Archives: Consulting

March 14, 2018 · 10:48 am

Who Are Those Guys?

I don’t know if you remember the classic film “Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid,” but I thought of it as I was reading this morning. Paul Newman and Robert Redford play the title characters who spend much of the movie being pursued by a group of men determined to bring them to justice. Every time they think they’re in the clear, the posse turns up again, at which point Newman or Redford asks “who are those guys?”

I suspect that a number of my former colleagues in television have had a similar experience over the last few years. I remember having one back in the 1990’s when ESPN became a major presence in sports. In the late 1980’s, we used to laugh about them at our TV sports sales meetings.  After all, even though the industry, spurred on by the 1984  Cable Act, was wiring the country like crazy, cable was barely in half the homes. Even as late as 1992, Springsteen told us there were 57 channels and nothing on.

Then BOOM. TV ratings started to dive and cable ratings started to climb. The peach baskets the broadcast networks used to stick out the window and fill up with money started to take a lot longer to fill up. Who were those guys? Well, we identified our competition and started to extract payments from cable carriers just as our cable brethren did. Things we different but more stable, and the broadcasters began buying the cable content providers.

Things continued to change. I’ll let the CEO of Turner (as quoted in Digiday) explain what happened next:

All of a sudden, our biggest competitors are no longer Disney, Fox, NBC, CBS and other networks; it’s these “digital companies” that are coming in and taking two-thirds of all digital ad revenues and 85 percent of the marginal growth in digital ad revenues.

Who are those guys? The point that any business can take away from the TV experience is this. Someone is always chasing you. You have something they want, whether it’s customers, market share, technology, data, or just plain attention. Like the posse, they’re going to be relentless. Unlike the posse, it’s never going to be the same guys all the time. You need to be attentive and take countermeasures, hopefully not like Butch and Sundance do by jumping off a cliff.

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March 7, 2018 · 10:49 am

Pay Me Now Or Pay Me Later

One thing that frustrates me is some folks’ inability to understand cost and value. There have been a few times over my last decade of consulting when that inability manifests itself in a particularly bad way. I’ve begun work with clients on more that one occasion where the client has spent a lot (in one case, close to a million dollars) of their seed money to build websites that didn’t accomplish what the client needed them to do. Most of the reason for this was that they hired the lowest-cost option. They failed to see that the value they needed was in their provider understanding the client’s business and delivering a solution that met the business requirements. Instead, they hired someone who made them a beautiful website that was fairly useless from a business perspective. That’s cost vs. value. They saved on cost and failed on value.

Startup companies are notoriously short of funds. Often the founders are working without pay and the thought of paying consultants, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals is anathema to them. That’s a big mistake. I worked with another startup that took intellectual property advice from “a friend who had done this before” instead of a lawyer. I noticed a potential problem with their name immediately but they were happy to go with their friend’s advice despite my asking about a legal opinion. As a result, once they launched their brand, they received a cease and desist letter informing them that they were infringing on another trademark. That resulted in a major depletion of their remaining funds to rebrand and to pay a lawyer to respond to the C&D. Cost vs. value in action.

What’s my point? If you’re venturing onto new grounds, hire some guides before you get lost. You’re going to be paying these professionals at some point and you might as well do so early on. Yes, it’s a cost you don’t think you can afford, but the value you receive can prevent very expensive mistakes and will ultimately save you money in the long run. Had I or any reasonably smart consultant been involved early, we would have talked about what analytics we needed from the website to make actionable business decisions before we worried about anything else. Every dollar spent on the site afterward would advance the business’ goals and not to making art rather than commerce.

Pay us now or pay us later. I think the sooner the better. You?

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March 5, 2018 · 12:16 pm

You’re Naked

One of the things that can kill you in business is believing your own BS. As a former salesperson (we are really ever NOT salespeople?), that’s hard to admit, but let me explain what I mean. Let’s look at our products and services first and then let’s take a look at ourselves.

I know what I’m good at and what services I can provide. I also know my limitations. When I speak with potential clients, I’m very upfront about both of those things. It’s about setting expectations and not overpromising. If someone needs help, for example, with art, I’m not your guy. If they want help understanding UX, however, I can help. Need basic SEO work? I can do it. Need a lot of backend coding? Not from me, you don’t.

If you sell anything, it has limitations. Failing to acknowledge them leads to underdelivery and that leads to failure. If you can’t recognize and admit where the boundaries are, you’ve got a problem.

The same principle holds for us as managers. The higher up we go, the more we have people around us who are unwilling to criticize or challenge us. While our responsibility gets larger, our circles get smaller. In some cases, a leader makes it a point to eliminate anyone who contradicts their own view of themselves. I always felt this was inversely proportionate to the executive’s strength as a leader. I’ve worked for bosses who welcomed challenges to their opinions and for some who wouldn’t tolerate and dissent. Needless to say, the staff would kill for the former and abandoned the latter as soon as they got a chance.

I read this about former President Obama and his interactions with an unnamed musical artist on the basketball court:

When asked what he could learn about someone from playing basketball with him, Obama talked about self-awareness—singling out “a singer, a musical artist” whom he once played a pick-up game with, someone who was “ballin’” and came “with an entourage,” but utterly sucked on the court. “His shot was broke… he had no self-awareness and thought he was good,” Obama said. “He surrounded himself with people who told him he was good, even though he’s terrible.”

That’s my point exactly. We need people to tell us our shot stinks and that we’re naked, just like the little girl in The Emporer’s New Clothes. It makes us better managers and if we accept the feedback about our products or services, better salespeople. Who doesn’t want that?

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