This has been the longest I’ve ever gone without a post on this blog, so sitting here 15 minutes before I need to leave for the first appointment of my day I’ve decided to break the silence. The lack of posts right now is pure and simply a lack of planning that I could have forseen very easily.

I’m currently facing my most challenging month time-wise in over a year. The amusing part of it all is that I’ve known about it since August and no real surprises have come up - when you’re running a business, going to school, and teaching business labs looking months ahead is mandatory. My mistake was not writing some posts ahead of time and not choosing to write posts over a period of several days during October. This would have solved the problem as catching 20 minutes here and there is much easier than justifying using a free 2 hours to work on the blog instead of a client site, particularly with so many deadlines coming up. Lesson learned.

What exactly have I been so busy with?

Tilted Pixel

My website development business has been reaching and exceeding the already ambitious goals that I had set out for it. Clearly I have something that I can further develop and grow, a process that I will write more on when the really exciting stuff starts happening in January. At present I’m constantly working on client sites as well as planning out the future and dealing with the administrative details that come part and parcel with a growing business.

I had the opportunity to give a short presentation about the company to an MBA entrepreneurship class at Laurier, which I found to be quite the experience. The question period went massively overtime until it was finally cut at 40 minutes, double that of the actual presentation! MBAs definitely are a lot more inquisitive than undergrads.

Business TA’ing

I’m a teaching assistant for first year business at Laurier, something I’ve always wanted to do and which has taken the place of the volunteer economics tutoring that I was involved in the past two years in. Three hours of teaching a week, TA meetings, office hours, and of course marking. I never really had the time to accept the position, but wanting to do something and passing it up when you do have the chance is very hard to do.

It’s proving to be a very rewarding experience and I’m learning at least as much as my students are.

Yes, I’m Still Working on a Degree

I am working towards a Business and Computer Science double degree, a five year program that I’ll be in for quite a while still. Looking back a ridiculous amount of changes and progress have occurred since I started, and looking at everything else that is going on it feels weird to be a student too. I have 12 hours of lectures a week, of which I usually manage to attend 10. The wave of midterms and assignments that come in October have played a very big role in making the month so busy.

All in all it’s proving to be an interesting four months and furthermore a busy October. After this week you may start seeing some thoughts from me again.

I recently switched cellphone carriers from Bell (one of 3.5 carriers we have in Ontario) to Rogers. There is a 30 day cancellation notice required, which I happily gave a couple weeks ago and was told that my next bill would lower the plan pricing so that I would only be paying for cancellation date + 30 days. Sounded fair to me. I get my bill and of course there is no discount so puzzled I call up the customer service. It turns out that my credit will come on my final (Nov 1) bill* Fine, so will Bell refund me money when my Nov bill has Bell owing me? Oh of course… in 6 to 8 weeks.

* if you haven’t had the pleasure of spending exorbitant amounts of money on phone service in Canada an explanation of the billing process is in order. Each bill received contains the charge for the next month of service plan as well as any extra usage charges for the previous month. Therefore the Oct 1 bill was charging me for October’s service and any long distance I used in September. My phone service ends partway through October.

Bell has effectively scored a 3 month interest free loan from me and every single other person in the ranks of those leaving their service. Is this final move to squeeze every dime from their (former) customer base really going to affect me? Of course not, but this kind of treatment is exactly the sort that leaves a bitter taste. Although I wasn’t satisfied with Bell as a carrier perhaps I would have subscribed to their DSL service or their satellite TV. Clearly this will no longer happen since I’ve experienced their customer service first-hand. This little rant leads nicely into the point of this blog article…

Companies Are Losing Easy Profits By Devoting Exceptional Resources to Alienating Hard-Won Customers

It is well-established that it is far more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one. If acquiring new customers is so difficult it should make sense to do everything possible to keep your customers, and certainly a business should not be actively devoting resources towards the opposite effect. There’s no doubt in my mind that at least the executives in major companies acknowledge that this is true, but this truth becomes lost the further down you dive into the structure of a corporation. Each department has its own responsibilities which in turn spawn its own priorities, objectives, and metrics of success. If these metrics are left to be devised strictly on the basis of the department’s role, then a billing department may be concerned mostly with maintaining a healthy cash flow by collecting money due as quickly as possible. Sounds reasonable enough, but if that’s your only metric of success, where is the motive to maintain high customer satisfaction (something that the entire company presumably cares about) and not take actions that will hurt satisfaction?

This is the perfect breeding ground for policies like taking money from a customer that you aren’t owed and returning it three months later (whilst not extending payment terms anywhere as generous to customers). It certainly provides a rosier cash flow and opportunity for a nice interest return on money that isn’t yours. The costs of these policies are charged to the company in the form of reduced sales and lost customers, but the department responsible for these costs does not directly bare them (and may in fact be rewarded for its high performance against the metrics set out for it).

On the outside the company appears to be growing miniature heads moving in different directions and causing the corporation to sabotage itself needlessly. This inconsistency is noticed by both employees and customers, creating resentment in both groups towards the corporation and its suicidal tendencies.

But I’m a small business owner and don’t have a large bureaucratic organization. How does any of this help me?

As a small business it’s tempting to blindly copy what the big boys do since they are making money hand over fist. I’ve fallen into this trap many times myself, happily creating my own virtual bureaucratic procedures with no thought as to their real effect. It’s unlikely that a single corporation will change its ways as a result of this post, but if you are a small business owner you have the agility advantage to quickly re-assess how each aspect of your business operates and realign it with the overall company strategy and beliefs.

Should you really require 60 days notice to cancel a service just because Mega Lawyer Driven Corp Inc. does? What kind of refund policy will avoid needless resentment towards your business? Does your existing customer support focus on making life easy for the customer or easy for you? Are you nickel and diming people (*cough* activation fee *cough*), which could be costing you return business, referrals, and larger contracts? What sort of policies have you enforced on customers that are a nuisance or are based on using punishment to coax desired behavior?

Don’t bother spending money on advertising that extols virtues which only parts of your company follow. It’s a basic fact that people hate feeling lied to, cheated, disrespected, deceived, or otherwise treated unfairly, no matter what section 10 paragraph 4 of your “service” agreement might state.

I spend long hours figuring out the next moves in my business along with all the other aspects of my life that somehow have to be mashed around it. Some of it’s on paper and much more is in my head, but rest assured it’s all very real planning. Yet in all that wonderful planning there is a very strong “follow your gut” current. At the end of the day it seems that this current is what really drives things forward and makes it all happen even as well-laid plans fall apart.

I heard Angela Mondou speak yesterday at the Chapter 4 Entrepreneur Week event and she said one thing that stuck out above all else. She was talking about being strapped into the backseat of an F18 fighter on an air combat training mission, wondering what she had gotten herself into as she fought just to stay conscious in the thing. She proceeded to draw a parallel point that went something like “As an entrepreneur you will always have situations when things seem overwhelming and you stop and ask yourself ‘what the heck am I doing here?’”.

That certainly has rung true for me many times (often this is accompanied by overwhelming deadlines or a web server deciding to develop some bizarre quirk), and it’s in this kind of mental wake-up that I look back and wonder how I even got to where I am now. It all moves much faster than the conscious part of my brain can ever hope to adjust to, and that’s where intuition has to be secretly steering it all from the backseat.

What I’m doing with Tilted Pixel feels right and in just a year it’s gone from a name that I was able to snag a .com domain for to something infused with meaning. There’s a certain energy radiating off the name that didn’t exist and I’ve noticed that energy reflect itself in me and in the people that I meet with. Every day this entity becomes more defined and more real. It has hit some amazing goals such as reaching key revenue targets and becoming a federal corporation last August.

I cannot possibly say that the above is the result of a well-laid plan. If anything it’s intuition that determines what the goals should be, and the plan is merely the slave tasked with reaching those goals and making the necessary changes whenever the goals shift.