Five ways to run your business into the ground, as taught by a Billion Dollar Lab company

These five rules ensure any company will collapse given enough time. If your business or place of employment uses these methods, do yourself a favor and fire them, and look for employment else where. You’ll be happy in the end.

Rule number one: Hire poor managers, then, train them to be worse

This seems to be the biggest rule at the place I work. One of management’s most important tasks is to constantly train, educate, grow, and expand the skills of everyone underneath them. Instead of seeking out excellent management, or even better, creating a development program to hire within, my company has taken the easy route by choosing to hire the person who’s been there the longest and expecting them to understand how the company works and basic operations management. The result at both my current place of employment and a previous one is highly destructive. The educational programs in place are geared to only cover the bare minimum that the government dictates, there is no cross training or expansion of skills beyond what the job title needs at its base. Currently, someone who had been working as a courier for thirteen years got quickly promoted twice in one year after a long term manager who tried to do new things under her was fired, and now every system below her that she inherited has been slowly degrading while she fiddles around with the paperwork her secretary should be handling. Twice a year she comes in (did I mention she lives and works in another state?) to avoid eye contact, pretends that she has a relationship that inspires any of us, and discuss how we’ve been failing, or, to give us another layer of poorly written paperwork designed to make up for absent management.

Rule number two: Have an incoherent strategy that ignores market size, history, and needs

Friday I got a call from the person covering my shift while I was enjoying my vacation to learn that our facility in Los Alamos was shut down due to the rent being higher than the revenue drawn in. This was one of the highest volume facilities we have in the state. Instead of relocating, taking the time to understand the market, and trying to get new opportunities going, they did what they did in our Santa Fe office: shut it down. The result? The full time employee walked in Friday, got laid off with no notice (notice could have happened at least 30 days prior) and was handed two weeks severance. The long term result will be the same as the closure of our Santa Fe Facility: our reputation, our brand, is now associated with random closings, poor back end service, and the knowledge of the precious medium size stops that we can not seem to get that we will not be there for them when they need it.  Brand is how people relate to a business. There can be nothing worse for finding new potential clients with a reputation for frantic yearly closings leaving the customer who needs medical testing done. Insane.

Rule number three: Alienate your employees

I regularly get alienated by the incompetence of the people managing me, and finally the trade off of dealing with foolishness has approached not being equal to my compensation. Long term prospects within this company are a joke, and great for anyone who has the ability to just stick it out until they stay somewhere around the 10-13 year mark, when they’ll either be fired or let go for minor infractions in favor of new, cheaper labor, or forced quickly and with out training into management, where they will be blamed for the poor decisions of those above them. My current supervisor inherited his position after the manager in another state went through something like five front line managers in the matter of a year. He currently has to work an extra 2-3 hours a day unpaid for this privilege. Who in their right mind would ever go the extra mile to try to make the business work when they find out that there’s no point?

Rule number Four: Frantically micromanage your business when the end of the quarter numbers come in beneath your operating expenses

Consistently, management, instead of carefully counting beans, starting lean, and creating a money making machine up front, has made the choice of replicating the exact system they have in a different market with different starting points and failed four times to make something work that, by definition, can not. The best example of this is what happened to the communists in china with their five year plans; communal farms in the south, with regular wet weather and better growing conditions were modeled and forced on the north, and the result was a doubling in the size of their desert and a famine that killed, hundreds of millions. My company has tried for ten years (at least) to use this model of business growth and it just doesn’t work.  Management who is operating things has not been schooled properly, they do not understand the different types of operational management. Google recently went into a new phase in its life by recognizing that there is a big difference between start up management and the type of management which refines the new start up. Microsoft’s Steve Balmer is a perfect example of what happens when management and leadership become stagnant.  Management sole job is to be on top of every system underneath them, and at whatever level their at, to be refining each system and enabling each person to shine at what they’re doing. Shuffling papers, then complaining about it, is the definition of non management.

Rule Five: Change nothing

Homeostasis is death. Consistently doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results from what has been tested to be true is the definition of insanity, yet these things are prized and valued for some reason at my place of employment, and at too many others. The stink of death isn’t so much the smell, its the stillness.

Brand degregation, loss of productivity and participation with destroyed employee moral, incompetent management, and completely ignoring your market is the perfect way to run your business into the ground. Luckily, massive government contracts in other states have kept the business running here for some time and allowed me to stay employed, but, my guess is that most people don’t have other business segments in which to test bed bad business practices.

I, for one, can read the writing on the wall and will be getting out while the getting is good.

Adventures in Micro Entrepenurisim

This weekend my Girlfriend and I got the opportunity to run a food booth at an outdoor festival in northern New Mexico, Watt5, about 30 miles north of Santa Fe. Both my Girlfriend and I worked our asses off. We about broke even- we were probably about 100$ short of it, which isn’t too bad for our first attempt, and not really knowing anything about the market. We met a ton of people, and in the end I can say I have another notch in my belt for a business start up, and I think this time it went off better than I could have expected. We both learned a ton, but in the end, for our first business together, I think we both did extraordinarily well.

Up until now my adventures in festivals have been purely on the passive/attendee side. One of my other blogs, http://www.festivalagogo.com, is dedicated purely to this activity. This weekend we took the lunge into being on the other side of the fence, trying to contribute something to the community we’ve been a part of for so long.

It kind of weirds me out that some people have this idea that business and capitalism is all about exploiting and taking and being a dick. The way some people think of business reminds me of the way some people were so willing to accept the doom and gloom of the end of the world prediction there was made for this Saturday- that there is only badness on the horizon and that we should all lament and freak out. While there are those kinds of exploitative and messed up people in the business world, there are also those kinds of people in any situation. The irony is that each business i’ve ever started has been ten times more work and responsibility than i’ve ever experienced as an employee of someone else.  Its a big part of the reason why I decided not to try to get the supervisor position that was available about a year ago at the place I work at now, the cost to benefit ratio is way, way off, and if anything, the worst position to be in is as a entry level supervisor with no hope for advancement in the next five years. Simply put, one has to give, on orders of magnitude more time, money, thought, and risk than any worker ever has to. I wish more people would try to start up small businesses in their spare time, even if its not something that you would like to do full time, I think it gives people a perspective on business that they could never understand otherwise.

I feel like, after this weekend, we did a fairly good thing. We fed a ton of people who would have gone hungry had we not been there, and we did it at reasonable prices with tasty food. We ran out of stuff and had to go back to town twice, which was a good thing. Pricing, organizing, transporting, setting up, tearing down, operating, accounting, marketing, cooking, and entertaining was a ton of work, I think both of us worked 16 hours straight for both Friday and Saturday, and at least another 10 hours straight on Sunday. Altogether this was a solid start to our run up for a gourmet food truck, which we are hoping we can get financed soon.

Seth Godin has it right- the factory- the part of the business that produces the actual product, really is a sideshow to all the other stuff that has to happen in the background.

We’re looking forward to doing another booth soon.

ps, mad love to the entire Watt5 crew, Braheim, Dave Decibel, and everyone else who helped make this a great time.

Days of Yore, Days Before.

Finding things hidden in new shores.

Discovery.

Discovery is something perfect and essential and necessary. Today- as in the now- has become not a game of discovery, but one of unrelenting updates. The uncertainty of time passing exchanged for the concrete now, served billions of times microseconds at a time. Discovery required danger, courage, … fear- hope- Real, tangible human emotions that were the price of growth, the necessary intangibles which each of us must pay in order to become.

Times have changed all that. We are the always on, always connected. The internet in our monthly data plans has turned each of us into the undirected Borg, ever certainly moving and breathing as one as each day progresses. There is no time for youth, growth, trial, discovery, and community. There is only the now, a now that is moving ever closer together.

There was a moment when I would look at a picture of something crazy, new, unknown, and see it as a challenge to meet. Take burning man- my first experience with it brought to my mind nothing but questions, puzzlement, and more questions. Where did this red painted naked man come from, and how did he get to this barren place with wild in his hair and dance in his limbs? Where did this vehicle with all these intricately cut patterns on it come from? What stories did it have to tell? What stories did the people who came upon it have to tell? Was love, or hate, or a mystical experience, or countless moments of humans interacting take place here? Or has it sat silent, with out purpose, waiting?

Why.

I can almost read your mind.  I  go to your facebook page and read whats going on in your life. Even the abstractions have patterns, flows, meanings. I don’t have to ask questions of other people, or travel to far off lands in search of some artifact that some bbc documentary on the tribes of burning man or whatever place was discussed in order to experience it.

This is the age of instant now, which makes secrets a rare prize. People expect the webpage to tell them all the answers about x, y, or z. The age of digital god, minus the substance that makes god, god.

Secret things, experiences, ideas.. made to be found but not readily accessible. This is new currency. There can be no value in the invaluable if the payment of discovery has not been exchanged.