Archive for 2016

Unsophisticated clients are the bane of any consultants life. “I want an eBay clone. I have a $5,000 budget.”

No. Just… no.

Entrepreneurs that try to get me to invest probably shouldn’t approach me with their “limited time offer” and “an exclusive round” pitch.

I have been in business a very long time and I have written long-form sales letters for a very long time, I know how this game is played.

Take your amateur scarcity tactics and go home.

“Will you introduce me to Elon Musk?”

Uh? What? We just connected on LinkedIn and you want me to just professionally introduce you to Elon Musk.

“Hey Elon, we’ve met a few times at some gatherings and you probably don’t remember me in the slightest. This is a guy I don’t know that wants me to vouchsafe for him and make an introduction.”

Awwwwkwaaaard!

That invisible line you cross as an entrepreneur when your mindset moves from “I can do this for free, it would be cheaper than having her do it” to “having her do it would be cheaper than my time.”

Every time I’ve lowered my prices to be the cheapest, to win the contract by any means and beat out the other guy, I’ve let someone down.

My client.

My vendors.

My employees.

Myself.

At the end of today, if you were asked to sign the work that you did, for all the world to see, would you be proud of it?

Everybody wants to be the boss. Nobody wants to do the actual work.

A “boss” should be willing to do most of the work, it’s how you earn that title. That isn’t to say you should be doing most of the work, that’s why you’re the boss.

“I’m the boss. My job is to tell everybody else what they should be doing.”

It is amazing how many people are willing to declare “I’m the boss and you have to do what I say” merely because they said so.

With the mainstreaming of LinkedIn most of the “influencer” content is banal.

Personally, I think it is time for a little revolutionary disruption. Who is with me?

Politicians make for great project managers.

Patriots make for great makers.

A “great place to work” is never true.

It can’t be.

A company might be a great place to work if you are a designer. But that same company probably sucks if you’re a software developer.

A company might be a great place to work as a marketer. But that same company sucks if you are the billing department.

Find out what type of employee you are building your company to attract, then build the company so it is a really great place for that type of worker. Then, make it a really good place to work for everyone else.

“We need a rock star [full stack, senior developer] with at least 5 years of Word and Excel.” said the internal company recruiter at the networking gathering. “You know anyone like that?”

“Are you developing plugins?” I asked.

“I don’t know what those are.” responded the recruiter.

“This person with five years of experience, they need to know how to develop custom software, macros and addons for Word and Excel?” I pressed.

“No,” the recruiter replied, “they just need to know how to use Word for writing emails or documentation. We use Excel for tracking everyone’s time.”

When people in Silicon Valley talk about diversity, they really mean gender.

And sometimes they mean colour.

But they never mean age.

I predict that chatbots and chat interfaces will be all but dead inside of a decade with only a few outliers that “did it right.”

Do you pick your nose?

Everyone picks their nose.

It’s not the fact that we pick our collective noses, it’s what we do afterwards that separates us, and is also what counts.

The same can be said when it comes to creation of your mobile app. What you do with it after you have developed the app is what counts.

One of those two things, you want it to be as sticky as possible.

I will leave it up to you to decide which one.