Redesigns are funny things. Sometimes it makes sense to redesign something. Other times, it makes more sense to leave it alone. Often, a redesign is something that is done not because it needs to be done, but because someone wants it done because, well, they just want it done.
Regardless why something gets redesigned, it’s up to the designer to ensure that at the very least, the redesign doesn’t hurt sales and things just stay the way they were. The worst possible thing you can do is to redesign it, make it look pretty for the sake of looking pretty and so you can have something “fresh” and “trendy” for your portfolio, and cause your customer’s sales to plummet.
If you consider yourself an artist, there is a market for art. If you pay the bills as a designer, however, you need to recognize the difference between art and advertising: Art is 100% aesthetic; advertising is 99% strategy and 1% aesthetic.
Good designers know instinctively when a project is art or advertising.
Others, however, need to listen up and learn the difference through the use of a major-label example of the peril of art for art’s sake:
After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars. On Feb. 23, the company announced it would bow to consumer demand and scrap the new packaging, designed by Peter Arnell. It had been on the market less than two months.
The full story can be found over on AdAge.
Recently, I had a dilemma: I needed a logo. Actually, I needed two logos. And as any designer will tell you, doing a good logo takes time. A lot of time. And a lot of brainpower. Unless you have one of those “a ha!” moments where the perfect logo just pops into your head (and trust me, those moments are rare), a good logo will take 20-80 hours. Minimum. Now, I could proceed to blow 40-160 hours on doing these two logos, or I could spend the same amount of time working on code.
Was I capable of doing the logos? Yes. Do I like doing logos? I love doing logos. But I realized that I couldn’t do it all and do it well. If I tried to do it all (and I did at first) I would have wound up with a crappy logo and still a lot of code to write. Code is the eventual product, so I need to do the code; but I know a dozen people who could do the logo. So I chose to delegate: I swallowed my pride in doing the logo and contacted a buddy of mine about the logos, while I forged ahead with the code. As it turned out, I had an “a ha!” moment and cranked out one of the two logos I needed in short order. So I only needed my friend to do one logo. But it still saves me time, and time == code written. It’s bugs fixed and features added.
This whole thing got me thinking. At some point every small business owner needs to realize two things:
- You can’t do it all yourself
- You’re going to need support people, whether you hire them as employees or pay them as outside service providers
Another way of putting that is:
In the work world, you are one of two kinds of people: you’re either a Pauly, or a Silvio.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the HBO series The Sopranos, (like, if you were trapped under a rock for the past 10 years), Paulie was one of Tony Soprano’s men, and an earner. As one of Tony’s capos (captains), he was responsible for “doing his thing” and bringing in money. Whether it was extortion, loan sharking, boosting trucks, or running numbers, so long as he was earning money and kicking a percentage up to Tony, everything was cool.
Silvio, on the other hand, was more of a support figure. Oh sure, he kicked some coin up to Tony, but he was part of the family not because he was an earner, but because he was a strong support man. Tony came to Sil for advice and all of Tony’s crew hung out at the Bada Bing, Silvio’s strip club. And whenever there was someone who flipped and went informant to the FBI, Sil was there to help “take care of business”, so-to-speak.
So while Sil didn’t contribute as much to Tony’s bottom line as Pauly did, he was still in an essential role. He provided a secure, trusted place for Tony and his crew to hang out and have an office of sorts; as consigliere he provided Tony with much-needed advice; and when needed, he provided the muscle to take care of “other” business.
In a start up, it’s easy to try and be both a Paulie and a Silvio. Obviously, you have to be an earner, or what’s the point? And you want to minimize costs, so you want to take on as many support duties yourself as you can and resist outsourcing these tasks. But at some point, every successful start-up has a conversation between their inner Paulie and inner Silvio, and Paulie has to win; the support duties still have to be done, but they need to be done by someone else. Open the checkbook and outsource.
As businesses grow, they add employees. Initially, they add more Paulies to handle the additional workload and bring in more money. Support duties — such as accounting and IT services — are typically farmed out, since the needs are minimal. And other support duties — like sales and receptionist — are handled by the owner and everyone else in the office. As the company grows, however, they typically start to pull outsourced services in-house as the needs dictate.
And at some point, they need to hire some Silvios. Most small companies resist this urge. They simply give the additional support work to existing employees, and expect them to earn like a Paulie and support like a Silvio. This can only go on so long before the quality of one or the other tasks begins to suffer, and the employee — who is being pulled in two directions at once — will gravitate toward either the Paulie or the Silvio role. This is a natural progression, because no one can focus on two roles successfully for long. But at the same time, the powers-that-be try to wring every last drop of profitability from every employee.
Result? Tension.
The employer wants 100% profitability and 100% support from the same person. This person — like most — will want to do a good job, a job worth being proud of, and doing that kind of job requires them to focus. So one of the two characters will win. Either Silvio or Paulie. It’s human nature. But at some point, every small business must realize that they need a Silvio (then two Silvios, then three) if they are to continue to remain profitable and grow. Having a Silvio (or two, or three) means that other people can focus on what they do best: being really great Paulies.
But the biggest takeaway is this: business leaders need to be more of a Tony Soprano than a Pauly or a Silvio. So in reality, there are three kinds of people in the business world:
- Paulies: the earners
- Silvios: the supporters
- Tony: the boss
Business leaders need to be Tonys. They can spend the bulk of their time being an earner (Tony Soprano sure had his fingers in many pies) or being a support person (doing the books, or out selling), but the most important thing is they need to recognize the difference between Paulie and Silvio, and realize that at some point, they’re going to need some of both.
– geek out
PS: And Aaron… thanks for the logo.
There was a time, not too long ago, when if you had a problem with your car, you could take it to any mechanic and expect an honest appraisal of what was wrong. You could also go to a doctor with an ailment, and if he didn’t know what the problem was, he’d tell you “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” and you’d be okay with that. And you could hire a teenage babysitter without requiring three references and then doing a criminal background check on them and their entire immediate family.
Honesty. Integrity. Trust.
Things I learned to live by in the Marine Corps. And things that are sadly missing from today’s world and workplace.
In case the name of this website hasn’t given it away, I’m a geek. I love to make technology work for me (and others) and I love to leverage technology to save myself (and other people) headaches. Now, I’m also a frugal geek, which means I try to find the cheapest — and most likely free & open-source — solution available to solve any given problem.
There are times that I’ll compromise my frugality, however, if it means less headache to maintain it. For example, Apple’s MobileMe (nee dot-Mac) service… $100 a year for an email address and 20GB of online space? Pricey, in this day and age. But so many applications integrate with it for easy backup and web publishing that the tradeoff is worth it: non-geeks can easily publish vacation photos and backup their data without worrying about what FTP means, and if they need to connect via active or passive protocol, and so on and so forth. Another good example is OS X Server.
Now, let’s look at the tasks required of a small business server: filesharing, internal IM server, backup, email & web serving, maybe a print spooler, and a wiki. The frugal person in me says “You can do all that for free with open source!” And, the frugal person in me is right: I have my own server at home. It’s serving up files and iTunes; it has a Jabber IM server (Openfire); it has a project management server (Redmine) with built-in and integrated Subversion server for version control that was seamlessly installed and configured using a Bitnami stack; I have a RAID 1 that all important files are backed up to using a custom AppleScript that I wrote; it shares our printer and scanner with all the Macs in the house using the built-in device sharing features of OS X; and I can develop web sites and test them out on MAMP. Could I deploy this same solution at the office? Sure. But would it be easy to administer? Hell no.
There’s the rub. Administration is time, and time is money. If I’m busy administering something, I can’t work on other things like billable work. If I’m fixing things, I’m not making money. And that’s where OS X Server comes in. It makes administration of most things — filesharing, user accounts and permissions, IM server — really simple. (Some other things, like the VPN, were a bit tricky, but I’ll save that for another post.) And it offers something that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, commercially or open-source:
A wiki.
A good wiki.
The wiki that comes with OS X Server is so good, Apple could shrink-wrap it and sell it as a stand-alone product. I wish like hell that I could find something similar to run at home, but I can’t. Lord knows, there’s so much information that I could dump in there I’d spend the better part of a month entering it all in. But after it’s all in, finding information becomes easy. A keystroke or three. And I don’t have to remember which file in which folder inside which containing folder on which drive on which machine has that little nugget of information I’m looking for. It’s all right there. The problem with most current wikis is their interface is awful. Painful.
And that’s why I love the one that comes with OS X Server. It’s gorgeous. It’s simple. And it works wonderfully.
So I spent (and spend) a lot of time making wiki entries at work. I document everything. And I do mean everything. Troubleshooting flow-charts. Device manuals. Hardware specs. How-to’s. If I had to do it once, I (or someone else) is likely have to do it again, so I document it. Keyword-tag it. Photograph and label it.
And no one uses it.
I still get the same questions, and I still give them the same answers: it’s in the wiki.
Not that anyone cares. It’s so much easier to come and ask me, right? And when I tell them it’s in the wiki, more often than not they still want me to come and hand-hold them through all the information that I spent (and spend) so much time putting in there. Never mind the fact that it’s all right there, in plain English, and when they say “can you come show me?” I walk over to their machine, pull up the wiki page, and read it to them.
I don’t think I’m asking for too much: search the wiki, then read and follow the directions. And if you have a nugget of info, post it so other people can find it too. (After all, it takes as much time to make a wiki entry as it does to type an email to everyone.)
But instead of people embracing something that can make all our work-lives better, I get the same ”oh, here he goes again” roll of the eyes every time I mention the wiki; the same “I couldn’t care less” attitude whenever I casually mention that they should add some nugget of info into it. Fully 1/3 of my time is spent helping people who — if they would use the wiki — could easily help themselves, a fact conveniently forgotten when the subject of my billable time comes up.
But the wiki isn’t just about me. It’s about everyone. It’s about people sharing what they know. It’s about eliminating “silos of information” so that the company isn’t dependent upon any one person for that important piece of knowledge, whether it’s how to reboot the phone system, where to find cool free fonts, or what time the last FedEx pickup is at the drop box down the street. It’s about the office running smoothly when someone is sick or on vacation or in a meeting with a client; about being able to put your headphones on and get into a smooth flow of productive work without being interrupted every two minutes; about spending five minutes now to add some info to a wiki page to save 45 minutes down the line as you jump through the 18 hoops involved in retrieving the lost password to a stock photo website, where one person set the account up but everyone in the office shares it.
Wikis are about contributing to the whole, about making other people’s lives a little bit easier, about selflessly taking a few minutes of your time to write down some information to save someone else a few minutes trying to find that information later.
Wikis can make your work life a lot less demanding and a lot more productive. But they only work if everyone uses them. Otherwise, it’s just one person’s vain attempt to make things a little bit better.
– geek out
I had this great post typed up explaining why I removed the link from my LinkedIn page to this site. And trust me… There’s a great reason why.
But I pulled it, for reasons that I will make clear at a future date.
Till then, let me just say: I check my server stats. I know who visits this website.
Till that future date…
–geek out
