Category Archives: Success Factors

General writings on building a successful business.

The Efficiency Advantage

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My first exposure to mobile computing was through my father. In the mid-1990s, my dad started to use an Apple Newton along with a Macintosh calendaring program called NOW Up-To-Date to keep track of appointments, customer contact information and the like.

There weren’t a lot of people carrying these devices around, but my dad saw the utility. He carried laptops early, he used the original Macintosh, he carried handhelds before others. I even remember him carrying a cell phone before most others. What does he do? He’s a piano technician.

Piano technician? You mean the guy that comes to my house and tunes my piano and fixes it when it’s broken? Yes, that’s the guy. You wouldn’t think of it as being a technologically-oriented profession, but he saw the potential early. He saw how technology products could make him more efficient, get him out of the living rooms of his customers and on the road riding his bicycle.

I tell you this because we had an interesting conversation last night about this woman he hired to make phone calls for him, set up appointments, and follow up with customers who haven’t called in a while.

How does he use mobile computing? He carries a cell phone and a handheld. He used to carry a laptop but now the handheld does what he needs. He calls customers on the cell phone and uses it for GPS capabilities to find his next appointment. He uses the handheld not just to see his schedule and contacts, but also to tune pianos with a cool little piece of software that assists his own ear in the tuning process.

But it’s the woman handling scheduling in his office that brought it all together. See, she answers the phone and she calls customers back promptly. The other day my dad got a call from an old friend that used to work with a different tuner. He has resisted working for this woman because, well, no one wants to step on each others toes. But she said she keeps having to wait, sometimes as long as two weeks, to get a return call and schedule an appointment. She likes how she can call and get an appointment with my dad today.

To our customers, that’s all it takes. A little responsiveness and they are satisfied. Gonna be late? Call. Need an appointment? Pick up the phone in a reasonable amount of time. Do the job? As efficiently as possible.

And, in the end, it just leaves more time bike riding.

Key To Success – Not What You Think

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I returned from vacation to a whole lot of work. But a week away did me good. I needed to clear my head. If you didn’t know, Infinity Softworks celebrated its tenth anniversary in January. That’s a mighty big accomplishment, given the flameout of much bigger and better funded companies than ours, and given the turbulence in the mobile space.

A few years ago I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what success is and how it is accomplished. There are all kinds of measurements: stock price change, units sold, number of customers, revenue. They are all legitimate measurements but none satisfying enough.

I was looking for the uber-measurement. You know — the measurement that summarizes all the others and brings a clarification and classification to the rest. But I was struggling with it.

Look at the breadth. My father has run his own business since the early 1980s. It’s a sole propietorship — my dad tunes and re-builds pianos in NE Ohio — but it is small and inconsequential compared to an Oracle or Microsoft, which started around the same time. He never had a stock offering and has mostly serviced the same customers for the past two and a half decades.

What separates Johnson+Johnson from Pets.com? Why has Microsoft made it 30 years when a lot of far more interesting companies have lasted only a few?

It was about five years ago that the most important measurement dawned on me. It has nothing to do with revenue or stock price or market focus or customers. Or, maybe better yet, it had to do with all of these things.

The one measurement that matters most is time.

Think about it: to continue a business for a long time, all of these items have to be there. There has got to be a solid business model that generates more cash in than cash out. There has got to be the right combination of revenues and expenses. There has got to be customers and some product that customers want has to generate that income.

But it is rarely a straight line or a hockey stick growth curve. Infinity Softworks’ growth chart looks more like a rollercoaster — some quarters are exceptionally good and some are exceptionally bad. Some years have been wonderful and some have been so bad I wondered why I bothered.

Look at Nokia. Okay, so now they are a powerhouse in telecom, the largest mobile cell phone manufacturer in the world. But Nokia was founded in 1865 as a pulp mill. This almost 150 year-old company has, at one time or another, manufactured paper products, bicycle and car tires, personal computers and footwear. How, you ask, did Nokia end up being the kings of cell phones? In the 1960s and 1970s, Nokia started manufacturing cables and digital switches (used to route calls). By the 1990s it was cell phones. It took Nokia 130 years to find a big market where they could be leader!

I am sure, in that history, Nokia had many successes. I am also sure they had many failures. But Nokia succeeded in one area better than most — they managed to hang around. Nokia managers consistently lived to fight another day, keeping their eye on new opportunities, waiting patiently for the right time and right product.

And that’s the real key to success.