Geldmus and I like to go to a local repertoire
theatre to see movies we've missed, and the other night we saw the The
Aristocrats, a funny movie about a vaudeville joke that comedians tell
one another when they meet between gigs and laugh among themselves.
Afterwards we went for drinks and some pizza at a favourite institution,
Foni Bulloni's, where we found regular Wednesday's Wensley, who hails from Brazil,
and Lily the Lackey, ready to serve us drinks and a late dinner.
Instead Geldmus began serving up his riff on The
Joke to which I added my take, and we got progressively more and more
rowdy with it.
And it was OK. Neither Wensley nor Lily the Lackey
cared and it was Siva's night off, so no one but exceptions ruled. If
there's one thing Geldmus taught me early on and that we've used well
since, is that you can get away with anything as long as you are smiling
and having some harmless fun with it.
Another important thing Geldmus taught me was that
if you own a business you should, as much as possible, keep your
overhead in a briefcase and your cash in your pocket. Now that nugget of
course is much more valuable in business than a hand me down vaudeville
joke like The Aristocrats. Riffing off a business nugget and riffing off
a journey joke simply don't equate.
When we started Portable Holes Inc., the first
thing we did was empty out Pronto's tool shed. We had no sales and
wanted to save our seed money for things that mattered, like making
sales happen, so the Saturday after we decided to go into business, we
moved stuff into Pronto's basement, hauled more stuff out to the
driveway for people to sort through, (made $673 bucks!) and kept a
couple of callipers, right angles, hammers, screw drivers, two dremels
and a work bench. It also meant that when we got started, everything but
the $673 was about sweat equity....we focused on marketing tactics and
operating activities that required more time and energy than money.
And overhead in our collective briefcase. There
was me, Pronto, as you know already, Slide Rule, Overseer and
Holdsidahl-deGedder. We'd gotten angry at our employers and decided we
could do what we wanted better together and in a different way to a
better kind of customer. And Slide Rule had a couple of ideas based on
some discussions with myself and Pronto. We approached Watson and Gloria
and the rest, as they say, is history
There are other pithy sayings I have learned over
time by which I guide many of my actions and decisions.
One of the first things I learned was "if you
don't go fishing, you don't catch any fish". It's a cousin of course to
Wayne Gretzky's "you miss 100% of the goals you don't shoot for". Since
then, whenever I make a sales call, want to ask someone for a favour, or
embark on an important project, I think about it as fishing, and what
tackle and bait to use. When its a big step, I also think of a Japanese
saying, "unless you enter the tigers den, you cannot take the cubs".
That one helps me puff up my chest and be brave and confident.
Of course it helps to ensure we have a quality
product and back it up with good service. That one comes from "quality
is the best advertising" and " a man's good deeds remain largely
unknown, but his bad deeds are broadcast far and wide".
In overseeing operations, we look overall and into
the future via scenario painting and planning and matrix modeling,
while we apply key predictive and performance balanced scorecard
measures to what happened and what we hope will continue to happen well
for us.
We also don't report in quarters but in four month
triads that end on April 30, August 31 and December 31. Three reporting
periods per year, three key issues per year.
"Five possibilities in a blue sky bring a golden
mean somewhere" so longer term tougher problems are dealt with down to
deep root causes. No one makes headway
continually fighting the same fire over and over. Eliminate or
fix once and for all. Avoid means changing operating model if necessary
to avoiding and outsourcing that part of business you cannot do well.
The parts of the business we keep
we manage in briefcases, in
computer memory, from facilities that reflect our operations, using
methods we've developed to manufacture and deliver Portable Holes to our
customers. It's true what Drucker said that a business looks
like what it does. Certainly in our case. But we do also say it loud and
proud in our tag line so there is no confusion.
Back to aphorisms, the "pay peanuts, get monkeys"
happens and governs remuneration decisions everywhere, just not for
everyone in a particular business. Most businesses want to
treat employees they value reasonably well and I think we know what it takes
to keep good employees here because we adopted those strategies that make sense.
The overall measure though for all employees are the dollars and cents
because, I suppose, that is the most concrete measure. Things such as
effective leadership, clearly communicated expectations, training,
promoting a safe, courteous work environment and such are nice and
desirable, but these working conditions are simply all around and part
of where they work and who they work with. A paycheque pays the bills.
So we at Portable Holes make sure its not peanuts.
On the other hand, as with all bills we pay, I
look to my grandmother who said "take care of the pennies and the
dollars will look after themselves" and my own father who used to say
"retina quod habes", which means "hang on to what you have". Both are
good for curbing loose spending.
Now I don't want to leave you with the impression
that we here at Portable Holes Inc practice "management by pithy
sayings" to a fault. We actually know the wind and waves are actually
favourable, not to the ablest but to the most opportunistic navigator.
Its the being there among a group of choices when the customer is ready to
buy.
We take a hopefully pragmatic and realistic look
at all aspects of what we do, and from there we try things, and try to
find or develop the best
strategies, technology, and business methods we can.
Only when lessons are important and applicable to
business do we pay attention. Take the three Laws of Beer, for example.
Say you're gathered with friends and up getting a
beer.
The First Law states that if you ask any of your 4 or so gathered
friends if they'd like one and they say no, then if you get only enough
for those who've asked, someone will change their mind when you're gone
and you will not have brought enough.
The Second Law states that if you've asked and they say no; and you
think, well, someone's almost finished and will change their minds, and
you take some extra, then they won't change their minds meaning you'll
have brought at least n-1 too many... but you'll still be OK because
there will always be one person guzzling down what they have to take
advantage of your foresight.
The Third Law states that no matter how many beer you bring, at least
once during your gathering,, one of at least 4 or so of your gathered
friends will insult your taste in beer, but declare it great because
it's free.
Now I'm not saying these three laws are as
profound as Newton's more famous hypotheses, but their impact is
inevitably felt by more than beer aficionados everywhere. Market
forecasting is only guessing and ending up as close as you can to your
best guesses, and huge dollars are spent by large companies and certain
industries getting those guesses to work out. Love the advertising guy
who questioned which half of the advertising dollars was wasted.
But it's still good to know these first three laws
because the Fourth Law says that when large dollars have to be committed
spending, the more special the beer, the more thinking about getting one
out of the fridge on spec.
I like these kinds of laws and aphorisms because
they are like folk wisdom and road maps and a language of experience
that resound with an energy of leveraged meaning and understanding of
something more complex in simpler formulae.
Like "it all means nothing if the cash register doesn't ring (enough)."
Which I must now attend to because later we've
organized a family gathering and I'm promised for that too. You know
what they say. Family is everything.