almost profitable

Posted on December 3, 2008

I had an interesting chat with a friend today about what it means to be almost profitable and businesses that are perpetually stuck, with profitability just out of reach. It seems to be a problem that some companies never manage to get away from.

The problem is I’ve seen a lot of companies where almost profitable is the status quo, sometimes for years. I’ve seen these companies increase staff, sales and turn over but still profitability is just out of reach because costs also go up. For them the only way out is to change something fundamental.

In times like these the first reaction is to restructure the business and let staff go, but this can backfire – lower the number of sales staff and you’ll likely cut your turnover, cut support staff and your customers might suffer directly, cut technical staff and can you keep up with the risk takers?

Unfortunately some of the businesses, and the ones I’m talking about need a more radical change. And something that fundamental can be difficult to swallow because it often involves someone admitting they were wrong. A very difficult conversation when you’ve been selling everyone jam tomorrow.

Hopefully some of the people in this position realise that, as other commenters are pointing out, now is possibly one of the best times to take risks. if you could change anything about your company, what would it be?

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Working from home

Posted on October 17, 2008

I’ve been working form home for quite some time now, in the beginning I lived alone and I worked from home a few days a week. Working the balance in an office with real people. I found I was far more productive when I was in an home than in an office, mostly let’s face it, because people had to pick up the phone to interrupt me.

Recently things have changed, my partner had a little baby girl and we’ve moved. The house is bigger and I now have a room which I use almost exclusively as my office, which is a good thing because previously I’ve been working from a series of one bedroom flats and that just wouldn’t work now.

Headphones and a door that closes

I have both and think they’re infinitely important. My daughter is very young but between myself and Becca there is the policy that if the door is closed I’m busy. Unless someone is bleeding to death I don’t want to know- we treat the closed door much like we’d treat it if I was working in an office half an hours commute away, if it wouldn’t be important enough to call me away from work in the car, then it’s not important enough to call me away from work here.

Sometimes, even with the door closed there can be a fair bit of noise and things to distract me, I have a good pair of headphones which acoustically seal me off from the rest of the world.

Working Hours

I try to keep my working hours 9-5, just as I would with any job. Mostly because that’s when everyone else is working and if I need to talk to someone, or if they need to talk to me they’re most likely to try. I’m pretty flexible about it though and unless I need to deliver something I’ll sometimes take a few hours off during the day to do the dishes, go do the recycling (everyone else goes on the weekend, but it’s almost always quiet weekday mornings) or just spend some time with my daughter to give my partner a break. I make the time up evenings and weekends, but for the most part you’ll find me adhering to the same schedule as the rest of the world – I just get to stay in bed while the rest of you commute.

Works for me

Working from home works well for me, it takes discipline but to be honest it’s not as hard as some people would like to make you think. Also for those bosses out there that don’t trust staff to work from home – if you can’t trust them not to bunk off at home, you probably can’t trust them not to bunk off in the office either.

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Hiring startup hackers

Posted on October 16, 2008

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently about how to go about hiring hackers. Well not just recently, it seems to be common thing people ask, because it’s one of the hardest things to do. You’re using an interview, or even a series of interviews to try your best to determine if the person is going to be up to the task.

The problem is of course, you’re really just determining if the person interviews well, or if they’re the graduates that they’ve got good marks. The real problem is of course neither of the two matter because neither of them have much if any bearing on how good a coder a candidate is going to be.

The problem is exacerbated in a startup because unlike some of the more successful bigger players you really can’t afford to take people on a trial basis for 6 months. What can a startup do?

There are a lot of universities that run placement programs for their students, programs allowing them to get real industry work experience. I’ve also worked in companies that made it a policy to hire students for internships then offer the best jobs once they’ve graduated. It was a great way to get talent.

What if you need to hire to fill a more senior role, or you’re not hiring at the right time of year? Student internships usually start once at the same time every year so unless you’re looking for fill a role then, you’re shit out of luck.

I’ve toyed with the idea of a ‘hacker camp’, getting all the candidates together, and paying them to work as consultants on a project – then hiring the best into permanent positions. All the candidates need to be free to work on the project, and a lot of people would be pretty scared to leave a job to take part and some jobs would prevent them from working on the project, so running it over a weekend might be a good idea, but it limits the scope of your project. You’d also still need to have interviews, to make sure you were getting candidates who were really interested in the job, and also to weed out any candidates you knew were totally unsuitable.

I think it’s important that a ‘hacker camp’ should produce something at the end of the weekend and you should get as much of your existing staff involved as possible. To make the cost easier to swallow you could even go so far as making the deliverable a new feature or part of your existing product but that’s not as important as actually delivering something, because that will be the bottom line when it comes to integrating them into your team.

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Is it better?

Posted on September 29, 2008

After reading this post what Jamie said hit me as well:

This is when I realized how trained I was in the processes at my former workplaces. This email would have been delayed until it was perfect[...] After fixing this there would be another thing and then another thing. A 2-day project would drag on for a week of redesign, approval, and development[...] It’s one thing to read Getting Real [...] It’s another thing to actually practice the principles. [...] That part is trickier than you think.

I don’t think it’s just Jamie and I don’t think it’s just his former workplaces. We’re all trained to make excuses not to launch, it’s endemic in the culture of most organisations. We endlessly pay lip service to the principals of release early and release often, agreeing in principal
with the principals – but put very little of them into practice.

A manager’s role is to facilitate an organisation’s march towards better – all too often it’s a weak manager that needs constant input on projects and at the root it’s fear of inadequacy on their part that builds a culture of ass covering. It’s obvious that at 37 Signals they don’t suffer from being crippled organisationally when executive decisions need to be made but executives are absent. Their staff are trusted to make decisions and they’re empowered to release better features.

When your last change was ready to deploy, when it was better than what was there, did you release it? If not, how long did it take you to get from that point to actually releasing it and how many people had to give final approval?

Why not empower your staff with a simple test – Is it better than what we have? No flow charts, no organisational hierarchy; just a simple question.