14 years and a big year at that

This is a cross post. Please comment on the original post on the official Schipul Web Design Company Blog here.

September 1, 2011 is the 14th anniversary of starting the company. 14 years. Considering I was unable to hold a single job for more than 2 years before this (if you exclude teaching on and off at a gym in college) this is impressive for me to stay focused for 14 years. But my job has changed. Years ago I realized that the company had grown to the point that I, me personally, was no longer the one building web sites. Rather my job transformed into growing people. And I enjoy and try very hard to surround myself with brilliant, hard working people with positive attitudes. Turns out they make great employees and they challenge me to grow at the same time.

14 is kind of an awkward age. I think if you are married there isn’t even a recommended gift from de beers given it isn’t a multiple of 5. (Wait. Sheesh, I just looked it up. 14 years is traditionally ivory? What the heck? Do NOT send me any ivory people. Really. Elephants look better with their tusks IMHO.)

And this is my second blog post on blog.schipul.com. I have submitted other posts, but as I was reminded when I mentioned to Katie that I was writing this post, apparently “snark” isn’t appropriate on blog.schipul.com.  I must reserve that for my own blog or the Chron. Thus my previous posts were rejected by Katie for official publication. Hopefully this one makes the cut!

Back to the 14 year thing. Obviously I am incredibly grateful to my family and friends who helped me start the business. There truly is no such thing as a self-made-man, woman, entrepreneur, whatever. We ALL get a TON of help in both sweat equity, money, advice, support and every other type of help imaginable. Nobody can do it alone. The media likes to tell the story of a modern day Galt charging forward solo against the odds. It doesn’t work that way. It takes a network of support to start a business. And I had that network 14 years ago and I still have it now. And as I have said many times, the biggest supporter I have ever had is my wife Rachel. If Rachel had not gone back to work in 1997 when I quit my job the company wouldn’t exist at all.

In the early days, huge thanks to Paul Bieniawski, Scott Pederson and Javier Avellan as well. Starting a company is like moving apartments when you are young; everyone says they are your friend, but suddenly they are busy and can’t help on that particular Saturday. Rachel, Paul, Scott and Javier freed up the time to help me and were truly paid in pizza and beer (yes really). Our first server was built on the floor of Scott’s kitchen using left over alpha hardware and a case, motherboard and CPU purchased on Harwin. (Tip for future entrepreneurs – NEVER use “alpha” hardware. Uuuugh, that server was rough. But it got the job done.)

Employees – the team – the heart of the company. I appreciate Jennifer, Rodney, Aaron, Jenny, Katie, Eloy, Kerry, Lyndia and the entire team. We definitely would NOT be celebrating 14 years without all of them. And that’s not even listing some of our former employees who made huge contributions, helped the company move forward and then went on to follow their own path. Their impact was felt and moved the ship forward. And a special shout out to Ellen M, my very first employee, who is awesome despite having gone to t.u.

Clients - we are here to serve our clients and without clients we wouldn’t exist. Saying thank you to our clients, letting them know we understand we work for them, and that we appreciate them, can’t be repeated often enough. So if you are a client reading this - THANK YOU!

I have a lot of history of the company to write. Forgive me if I am missing something and I’ll try to get it all organized by the time we hit 15 years.

So if I didn’t write a blog post at year 10, if I didn’t write one at year 11, 12 or 13, why now? Because 2011 is different for us. We have not had a year this transformative in the company’s history since 2001 when we shut down network consulting services and started programming codebase (now called Tendenci.) In fact our theme this year is “Go Big or Go Home” which I borrowed from Aaron’s team goals. That Aaron is a wise man.

“Go Big or Go Home” is definitely not a typical theme for a conservative businessman running a company during a recession. But in 2011 we effectively “doubled down” as they say. Instead of running from a recession, we charged into it and reinvested while cutting costs and reinventing our products. Go big or go home in 2011 means this year we:

1. Tendenci - Finished the rewrite of Tendenci version 5 on the Amazon server cloud. The rewrite started in January of 2009 and we had a few clients moved onto the new version in 2010. But only in 2011 has our dedicated team of programmers started to really build the recurring revenue and functionality to rival Tendenci 4. I can’t speak highly enough of the team. Writing software ALWAYS takes longer than you want and costs more. That has been the case for us with the rewrite of Tendenci. But it IS done and live on client sites like Discovery Green in and ThinkLA. We look forward to converting our other 400 clients to the latest version over the next few years.
2.  SchipulCon 2011! - We had our first Tendenci user conference in 2007. We tried to do it again in 2008 but Hurricane Ike had other ideas and instead we cancelled and had a giant party. I know, a dot-com kind of thing to do, but if you remember the time after Ike we all needed a bit of healing and beer heals.  In 2009 we renamed it SchipulCon and had a great event at our long time client the Houston Zoo. Well, you guessed it, we are DOING IT AGAIN! Please check out our speakers and register for SchipulCon October 6,7, 2011 at client Norris Conference Center at CityCentre in Houston.
3. Silicon Valley - we opened an office in Silicon Valley in March of this year led by April Kyle. We are learning to speak Californian and finding they aren’t so different from us! West coaster? Give us at call in the valley at 408-430-3137!
4. Business Processes - kind of boring to talk about, but we have completely reengineered our internal processes from accounting procedures to better utilization of SugarCRM and switching time tracking and moving our email to the cloud. It hasn’t been completely smooth, but it is building a foundation for us to continue our growth unimpeded. Thank you to the team for moving with the cheese in 2011 as we grow! And it helps our clients by improving our efficiency which allows us to reinvest in YOU!
5. Tendenci self-signup - by the end of 2011 smaller organizations will be able to self signup for a much lower cost Tendenci site for their organization. We have lowered our costs by moving into the cloud and we are passing those savings on to our clients to enable more and more small associations to take advantage of our technology at an affordable price. (Special shout-out to former employee Glenbot who has moved on to a VC backed firm. Without Glen’s contributions to Tendenci 5 over the last few years we wouldn’t be this close. Thanks Glen. I appreciate the beautiful code dude.)

And to our competitors who told our clients we had “stagnated” and had “stopped updating Tendenci,” … um…. ooops, meet T5 baby! Rockin the cloud for a bigger and better future. Two and a half years of serious double-down and rebuilding was hard to endure, but we are near the finish line to the ultimate benefit of our clients.

And the team has done all of that in the fourth year of a recession. Call us crazy, but we figured there would never be a good time to do any of these changes, so why not do them all at once? Why not Go Big or Go Home in 2011?! And we are doing it. And I couldn’t be more proud of our employees or more grateful to our clients and everyone who has helped us not only this year, but every year for the last 14 years.

Please join us for SchipulCon and get some brain candy. We are here to serve you. We are reinvesting to serve you better. And as always, we are appreciative of Houston and the community and friends that have supported us for so long. Thank you!

Ed

This is a cross post. Please comment on the original post on the official Schipul Web Design Company Blog here.

Leadership at the Expansion Stage

From: Leadership at the Expansion Stage: Dos and Dont’s

The key defining attribute of expansion stage organizations is that they are expanding rapidly to capture a market opportunity and capitalize on their product or distribution advantage. It then behooves the leader to be even more aware of the rapidly changing circumstances, especially when it comes to how they affect the wants and needs of his or her constituencies (customers, partners and employees).

Being generally resource-constrained, younger companies typically try to stretch their people, encouraging them to wear many hats and multi-task, and of course no one is more overloaded than the CEO and his or her management team. In such a situation, it is very easy to focus on hard KPIs such as sales, marketing return, net promoter score, etc., and rely on those numbers and trends alone to manage the company. Yes, those numbers are good indicators to help one “manage” a business — planning projects, organizing people to execute according to a plan, controlling the pace of the project and ensuring its output. But that is not leading! It’s just supervising the execution of a plan. To really assess the situation, numbers alone are not enough because they do not tell the whole story — especially the human dimension — and it requires the leader to be extremely perceptive and responsive to changing circumstances in order to push the company ahead.

So much easier said than done.

I Just Need a Website, That’s All I Need

caller: I was calling about a web site

developer: cool, that’s what we do. how can I help?

caller: I have a simple site and I need some updates. not much really, just a few changes. is that something you do?

developer: yes, what is the url?

caller: well I’ll need you to sign an NDA before I give you the url. can I fax it over?

developer: no (thinks: “do I still have a fax to email gateway working? hmmm”)

caller: what?

developer: we just met and you want to fist bump attorneys?

caller: no, i just don’t know how else to protect my intellectual property!

developer: you have a site now, right?

caller: yes

developer: live on the internet?

caller: yes

developer: …… long pause…..

caller: ok, I see your point.

…. 45 minutes of spec requests and contract pre-negotiation convo takes place here….

caller: so basically that’s it. my brother-in-law said he could build it for $225 dollars but I wanted to call around and get a few options to see if I could reduce the cost. He’s not very good actually.

Thoughts going through your head as the dev:

1. developer (option 1): so you have a job board and you want to enhance a few features of monster.com to allow for a commission and affiliate structure?
2. developer (option 2): so you have a great e-commerce idea, have been reviewing amazon.com and found a few ways to improve on their theories to sell widgets?
3. developer (opti0n 3): so you want to have a self sustaining site that makes you money with no effort invested while you work at your current job realizing the money-for-nothing potential advertised on TV?

Resolution: have you heard of Crowdspring?

#respect #withAllDueRespect

Men, ask yourself, are you still a sexist pig?

This is a cross post. Please comment on “Men, ask yourself, are you still a sexist pig?” on Chron.com.

Yup, I’m calling the men out on subtle sexism. A lot of men, probably me too when I was younger, have a problem with their women making more than them. Rachel, my wife, made more than me for YEARS after we first got married. This was in the early 90s and I would argue that we have made a lot of progress reducing sexism over the last 20 years, although certainly it still exists.

So here we are in 2011. And if you ask a guy “would it bother you if your significant other made more money than you?” they will, based on my small sample survey, still say “YES!” It bugs them. They feel that men SHOULD make more than women. No particular reason, just because. If you follow the first question up with “Do you consider yourself sexist?” They say “NO!” – but they are. And I’ve wanted to say this to them, but I just didn’t have the data and really I have other battles to fight. Then I saw this editorial in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle.

Scott Burns: A bad decade for jobs — especially for men

Hey, guys, I’ve got to confirm some tough news: Women have become the new men. While the Atlantic Monthly went a bit overboard last year in an article titled “The End of Men,” the economic statistics aren’t encouraging.

Truth is, the gals we like to impress so much with our manliness have wiped us out when it comes to the game of Bringing Home the Bacon. That’s not hyperbole. In the first decade of this century, U.S. Labor Department figures show that women have gained 2,119,000 jobs. During the same period, men gained a piddling 54,000 jobs.

This is the kind of score you’d have if the Yankees played against a Little League team, or the Dallas Mavericks played against a very small high school.

Basically, we guys never had the ball. Women got 97.5 percent of all the new jobs created between 2000 and 2010.

versus

In the 1990s, men won 46 percent of the 18.4 million new jobs created. In the 1980s, men won 41 percent of the 19.5 million jobs created.

and apparently this is particularly true for cities like Houston.

One group of women out-earns their male competition. Researcher James Chung of Reach Advisors found that unmarried women under age 30 and without children who lived in large cities made more money than their male counterparts. Specifically, he found that this group of women earned more in 147 of 150 major cities, with the premium reaching as high as 17 percent in New York

and this one has gotta sting a bit if you still think “he-man-caveman-should-make-more-money-than-girl”

“One way in which college-educated married men have gained financially is that they increasingly are likely to be married to the highest-income wives.” Now men can go to college in hopes their B.A. or B.S. degree will lead to a coveted “MR.” degree.

At my son’s recent High School graduation honors ceremony, there were probably 20 women to 3 guys who achieved the highest honors in the senior class. The guys have checked out. But somehow they don’t think this is going to relate to the real world when they get a job later. And the men are really insecure about this, and I have written about insecurity and the dangers that go with it in the past.

If America is a meritocracy, if business works like it should, then women SHOULD be making more than men. Because they are EARNING it. And if men have issues with this, let’s call it what it is; insecurity and sexism. So ask yourself, are you still a sexist pig?

This is a cross post. Please comment on “Men, ask yourself, are you still a sexist pig?” on Chron.com.

 

what are people paid for?

New post on Chron.com on What Are People Paid For? This is a cross-post so please comment on the Chron site if interested.

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Ed Schipul

Two questions I like to ask in the interview process are below. (Oh don’t worry, most job applicants don’t take the time to google things like “schipul interview questions” so I’m pretty sure I’m not giving anything away.)

The first question is quite simple:

What is the goal of business?

The answer is simple:

To make money.

Now before you run me out of town on suspicion of being a citi-group-harvard-educated-asset-denuding-specialist, I’d like to differentiate between a business and the leadership. A business is a cold-hearted piece of paper that lives and dies on the oxygen of money. This does NOT mean the leadership can behave themselves in an unethical way. It just means that the business itself lacks a soul and that the soul must be transplanted in through ethical leadership and ethical employees working to create “greater value than cost” for clients. And the business must make a profit or at some point it will fail. And we all would lose our jobs. That sucks. Thus profit is good.

I would say about 50% of the applicants get the “what is the goal of business?” question correct. 25% say it out right. (I like that group.) 25% say it apologetically like they are embarrassed to admit they like money. (Baroo? Ya, check it. Money is awesome.) And 50% of the applicants just ramble on about “providing a service” and “interacting with customers” and “making management happy” and blah blah. For those applicants I always wonder “gee, are they going to work for us for free?” Yes take care of the customer, but you have to make a profit or you aren’t a business, are you? You can do both.

Regardless of the answer to the “what is the goal of business” question I always explain the correct answer and why. I wish someone explained that to me when I graduated from TAMU with stars in my eyes and a political science degree, bent on saving the world. (Then life happened. Now I’m a capitalist. Harumph. I’ll get another go at it when I retire.)

Regarding social responsibility I highly recommend reading James O’Toole on “The Ethics of Human Capital.” From the article:

I believe it can be argued reasonably that the creation of an ethical corporate culture is the prime role, task, and responsibility of a virtuous leader. For that to be the case, an ethical corporate culture would be defined as one in which all the stakeholders of an organization are treated with due respect. That is, the legitimate needs of customers, owners, suppliers, host communities, and employees would be both acknowledged and addressed by an organization. – James O’Toole

The second question I like to ask? It’s about compensation. It is:

What are people paid for?

I’ve never had an applicant get this one fully right. They usually respond with “taking care of the customer.” And I ask “so everyone in customer support at Amazon makes exactly the same?” They say “No.” I ask “Why?” and nobody gets it. My response is below (Note: I googled it extensively but can’t find the original source. This is my interpretation and if you know the source please tell me?)

What are people paid for? People in a business are paid for two things; responsibility and expectations.

1. People are paid first for their level of responsibility.
   1. With power comes responsibility. Responsibility is hard. A manager should usually make more money than their employees. They have more responsibility.
   2. Responsibility does NOT mean strictly “management.” We have some awesome employees with huge amounts of financial or technical responsibility that are compensated for this while they don’t directly manage any “people.”
   3. Level up – organizations should give employees the ability to take on responsibilities that are smaller to prepare them for more responsibility later. Examples are things like managing the training schedule, managing interns, advanced reporting and research to help business decisions, keeping the break room clean, making sure we have paper in the printers. All of these things are responsibilities. If you are above cleaning the coffee pot you won’t work at our shop. (But I get that some people worship MBA’s, I am just not one….)
   4. Most applicants agree that paying people for their responsibility is fair. Tenure is nice, but younger more ambitious employees can and do pass up more senior employees in compensation. That is fair.
2. People are next paid for “what they are EXPECTED to do.” This one is more complicated. The good news is the employee is in complete control of managing their superiors’ expectations of them. Examples:
   1. Events – Events change expectations.
      1. If your star quarterback just won the super bowl they should be paid quite well next season. But wait! What if the day after winning the super bowl they crash on their motorcycle and shatter their throwing arm in 10 places? Well, then their new pay rate is zero. Harsh, but that one event completely changed your expectation of what they will do next season. To protect the other players and the owners, you can’t pay someone you think isn’t going to do anything the same as someone you think might win the super bowl. (Hopefully football teams take out insurance to take care of their players!)
   2. Tasks – Small tasks EXACTLY equate to bigger tasks. Humans are consistent like that.
      1. If you ask someone to clean the coffee pot and you get a delayed “<pause….> OK” then you can BET that is exactly how they will treat your 100k/year annual account. The applicant will TELL you they will differentiate, but once they settle in, small responsibilities are the best indicator of how they will handle larger responsibilities. An intern who doesn’t want to load the dishwasher to help out on their first day is best fired immediately. Pride is deadly. Servant leadership rules.
   3. Training – consume training like candy.
      1. Training is good for the employee because nobody can ever take knowledge away from you.
      2. It prepares them for greater responsibility (see 1 above)
      3. It means they are ready for new opportunities down the road. “Just in time training” is crap, be trained BEFORE the opportunity happens or else it is just an “event” and not an opportunity at all.
      4. If you don’t know a technology an employer is looking for, invest $30 in yourself and learn all you can at sites like Lynda.com or YouTube. (Side note: last Thanksgiving they asked me to ‘carve the turkey’. Why? Why would you let the guy who doesn’t spend much time in the kitchen ruin the bird on the most important family meal of the year? Luckily, I solved it with training on turkey carving. True story.)
   4. Hard Work and Initiative.
      1. Ideas vs Results – A well meaning employee says “hey I have this great idea for the company!” An employee that you expect will rock the world later has an idea, prototypes it, takes it as far as she can take it without company resources, and then schedules a meeting with you to go over “initial results and research.”
      2. I once had a sales job applicant interview with me and he started the meeting by showing me a six page marketing plan he had developed for the company. He presented it in its entirety and I was floored! Who wouldn’t expect this guy to be a rock star? (Side note: the plan was completely wrong because he didn’t know our revenue model. But WHO CARES?! This guy’s initiative and demonstrated work ethic was unbelievable. Sadly I lost him to a competitor.)
      3. Tabitha, who recently joined the company, set herself apart by doing her entire resume as a pop-up book. A skill she learned by watching YouTube videos in less than a week. THAT is initiative. And I am very glad she joined our team before a competitor hired her!

Compensation is a loaded conversation. Job applicants always have some idea of what they think they should be paid (not what they are “worth” but what they think they should be “paid” – big difference). The ones right out of school are told some industry average, some too high, some too low, by the University. Those numbers don’t add up. And I have yet to talk to an applicant who says “the school told me I should be able to create X value for the corporation. I realize the money paid to me initially is earned by the other workers and I really appreciate them taking a risk on training me.” Ya, that doesn’t happen. Ever.

See? That second question, what are people paid for, is a LOT more complicated. But there is an answer. And YOU are in control of setting expectations of yourself. So in many ways, people are very much in control of their income. They just frequently prefer to hide behind the “management hasn’t promoted me” excuse without working hard to increase their responsibilities and the expectations of what they will do in the future.

I would love your feedback on this post. And despite the last paragraph of my last big post, on this one I welcome your IDEAS! – Thanks!

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Chron.com on What Are People Paid For? This is a cross-post so please comment on the Chron site if interested.