Welcome to the dark side
Quick test for George. What is the capital of England?
This is the Dragon's Den project I would take on. This is where eCommerce could make a difference.
In sight of Whitby Abbey, overlooking the harbour and watching the steam train run through Glaisedale along the river Esk, the provenance is good for gothic items, from mystical dreamy Whitby, or magical wands, made in sight of the mists on the moor..., you get the picture.
A skilled chap is making wooden nic-naks. Wooden goblets with freely moving rings, carved in situ on the stem. Mortars and pestles soaked in kitchen friendly something, so they can be used. Tea lights and candlesticks with mystical gothic symbols, viking runes or woodland flowers. It's no different from any other craftsman, except, the provenance. Would you rather buy a magic wand from a man in a suit in some industrial estate, or from a magical place, made by a man who looks a little bit scary?
Access to the right customers and travel costs, things that will affect your project too, have prevented any hope of business success. eCommerce might be the way forward for all of us. So far it has been a costly labour of love. The pricing model was wrong, based on second hand shops, not the intrinsic value. A customer isn't buying a bit of polished wood, but a cherished memory, a connection with a time and place. Or in the case of wood that has taken hundreds of years to grow, touching history. A keepsake to pass on. That is what is worth the money.
We did trials of upping the price of Celtic Crosses from 1.50 to 25.00 and sales went up. This is a lesson taught on business courses. Making your product more expensive makes the customer value it more.
What of the eighty or so other ventures, set up by desperate people with their redundancy money, which came and went. They had skills and a product, but no market. They had costs in many forms. Most had done a Business Enterprise course. Give me five things that are unique about your company? It's my company... Yeah right. The business plan is hiring premises to these lambs to the slaughter, or selling items to them which they are going to try and sell on. That is not ethical. I would not do it. Please, bring people to the world of eCommerce, where they keep their redundancy and don't borrow, but build up.
Business networking can show you what happens in a world parallel to yours, introducing you to metadata and targeted advertising with openess, not competition. You are not making items anyone would associate with Whitby, and even if you were, you haven't got gnarled hands and a slightly evil look which would authenticate any witchcraft items. Your wooden items hanging by the door to ward off evil spirits, are not made in sight of Dracula's graveyard, by a man who looks like he buried him, are they? Provenance is what makes this different from the usual woolly cats, recycled furniture or driftwood ornaments.
The goal is to make an amount of money that would temporarily lift the lives of one family. Perhaps to form the basis for an on-going business, that might one-day even expand to provide employment for others.
Creating a web site is not the goal. It is merely a tool towards achieving the goal and as such, it has to be used well. The amount of money to be made, might be more if we think things through, than simply rush in. The amount of work necessary could be reduced. Pitfalls could be avoided. Sounds obvious that the customers will still be out there but we only get one shot at them. Therefore we should be planning a successful campaign rather than a damp squib. The time issue of now means unprepared. It's the "Ready, fire!, aim" that won't achieve our goal of significant money. Yet preparing becomes contentious to the point where, next time, I'd invest time in selling the idea of preparation.
What as a plan seemed likely to flow forward easily, came up against a variety of unexpected problems and learning curves. Maybe these would also occur is similar projects ?
The cliche, "as a team, no one person holds all the answers", became, none of us knows the answers and we don't even agree on the problems. Whoever sees the problems, it's up to them to fix and while they are doing that, everyone else is saying, what are they wasting their time on now!
Management of Change. What we are trying to do is different from what has gone before. To get from the discussion and questions phase, to actually doing something, was not a case of having a discussion once and answering questions to the recipient's satisfaction. Oh no. It has to become ingrained. Understanding is temporary, it goes away. The mind mulls over what has been spoken and comes up with more questions, or needs clarification. There is an Arabic saying, you have to forget something several times before you remember it. In the work towards making money, this talking process is necessary to understand what we are doing, or not doing, and why. It isn't a nicety, because without this, there is no progress and we are just going round in circles. In retrospect from an earlier life, one quick answer here was, "Get it in writing and stick to the agreement", but would that be missing the point, that understanding and getting it right, are more important in the long run.
I had a fear of a massive back-log of orders which couldn't be fulfilled, for which we've taken all the money up-front. My nightmare based on the New York Cup-Cake company. PayPal, Visa etc have an automated "Out of stock" response for just this type of business and they can apparently take the money, when the goods are sent. Or so I'm told.
Can you even send wooden items to ... ? Google found sites dealing with export restrictions.
Could we scale up, providing employment ? I'll come back to this, because it is an example of government bureaucracy.
Could we automate the ordering process to standard sizes ?
Could we use designs which are easily adapted for different markets ?
You might be thinking that any twelve year old, for a school project, might be thinking of such issues. The country's best comedy sketch writers could not have imagined what was occupying me. Hey I did say I wanted Dragons Den!
"So what have you done with your first two orders?" "What orders?" "In your e-mail intray, sent to you from your website" "Oh I just delete all the e-mails I receive, I never have time to read them..."
"We need some samples for the website" "it's too cold to be in the shed"
The concept of world-wide visibility as opposed to local craft fairs, might only sink in, if we get more orders than ever seen before, willing to pay unbelievable prices. Currently any discussion of preparing for a rush of orders, or a contingency plan to train the wife, meets with "Don't be daft, I've never had more than two or three orders at once. A hundred! That's never going to happen!"
The measure of success is surely sales. I'd accept how many customers, or orders, or how much money. Site visitors is only interesting to you reading this, because the site has been active for a long time now, without any Search Engine Optimisation. We have achieved a base-line for what it is to be quietly sitting on the internet. Once we put meta-data in and we are actively trying to sell, what difference will that make? At the moment we have Search Engines checking the site, swarms of naive hackers and the regular friends and family. 140 hits a day might be one or two new people a week, but they are all coming from the wood-working community. These are not people looking to buy, but looking for ideas, so they can go down to their sheds and make one. Turning the website away from them, to people who will look for an "anniversary gift" instead of technical terms like "captive ring" or an "offset" anything, involves splitting the friends and family aspect onto FaceBook and changing the website to people who have got no interest in wood-turning. This has met with resistance.
Government Bureaucracy surprised me. I thought that my project would be welcomed.
I’m sure at the top that would be so, but the implementation of good ideas, is by people who have no real enthusiasm for them, but who do have default behaviours which are important to their own sense of place in the world. Like the Star Trek song, come in peace, shoot to kill, good intentions everywhere are frustrated by the people who carry them out. If we see that pattern, how might we overcome it? Please think and contribute. History shows this is a ubiquitous problem.
The work concept was the first brick wall. I thought this type of speculative work would lend itself to hobbyists trying to improve their lives, more than as a dependable source of income. That a network of volunteers could help with any surge, or until we've adapted to a regular flow of many orders. That a project creating a transition, should have common ground with the Unemployment Exchange who want that same transition. We could at least create an attitude of trying and gaining skills, amongst those who just see no jobs, provided by others and therefore give up. I thought, rather than be unemployed for month after month, let’s try something new. It’s not stopping anyone from doing work which isn’t there. Boy was that wrong. Unemployment is a cul-de-sac, not a cross-roads. The path to getting out is limited, by bureaucrats. Opportunities are taken away for fear that you are working the system and the need to get people into any employment, rather than suitable and sustained employment. The courses which are provided are questionable, but don’t improvise openly. There is no shared goal of trying to get unemployed people back to work. There are the rules, with important people to apply them, not interpret them.
Is a conversation about a subject, or the words used to convey it? Could we be a little more thick-skinned to reach an outcome, not a quagmire? Don't mention the dwarf word. In my mind, dwarves exist in forests, making stuff, out of wood no less, and they are happy. Well they might be, but the politically correct people, they are not very happy about anything. There are no words we can use to describe a situation, because they have all been hijacked by the politically correct brigade. Not by those with a diminished inherent zest for partaking fully of all life has to offer. “Please don’t call them disadvantaged or disabled, I find it very offensive”. Judgement on me was palpable and foremost in the conversation which should have been about helping people. I only won by holding up my phone and saying, "How many disabled, sight-impaired, limbless invalids or any other word that offends you, have you got in your phone and let's go through mine". Needless to say, they had none. Annoyance aside, the government websites guarantee that disabled people will not lose money if they are working less than ___ hours per week or earning less than ___. I have yet to find a disabled person who believes them. The fear is that some jumped up bureaucrat will suspend their benefits immediately, pending an investigation. There is no way to talk sensibly to the bureaucrats, not even to get advice or run an idea past them. Whilst it is possible to have benefits stopped immediately, it is not possible for that bureaucrat's boss to immediately say "Don't be silly" and re-instate the allowances. Nor is it possible to appeal in a timely manner, before bad things have happened like the rent not being paid and the children having to move school, again. I was, naively perhaps, seeing the official side, written in black-and-white, which made perfect sense to me and is in line with what government ministers say. I have to say though that there is a real fear of losing benefits if the subject of part-time or restricted work is even raised, to the point where I had to ask questions out of area. People are not going to try, because they believe, mistakenly perhaps, that junior bureaucrats see work as an all-or-nothing approach. The aim is trying to make money honestly and declare it, with the expectation not of future riches, but probably of financial failure at least in terms of time, effort and diverting what little income they have into trying. At best an inconsistent or insufficient income might be generated, but trying is up against an all or nothing response. This is not the spirit of what is written, there has to be something wrong here. I thought it just applied to people on Disability Living Allowance but no, it seems if you are in receipt of anything, you cannot do voluntary work or train! The good people trying Sir Norman Tebbit’s "Get on your bike" to pay taxes, are up against the system, or at least a mis-understanding of the system, genuinely preventing this.
I am guilty too with my “We work for free, in the hope that…”, being similar to exploitative Zero-Hours Contracts and thwarting the Minimum Wage. If you judge by the words not the sentiment, a low grade person with a decision to make is going to destroy opportunities.
Meanwhile I've done a set of Business Enterprise courses and could not give you a syllabus of the things which any of us need to know, let alone where to find the information. I received a sheet with about 95 organisations that I could look to for help, but no idea about what sort of help. Interestingly, talking to students doing business studies, they are no better equipped. My action plan is, and please don't take this as a challenge to the state, to ignore the laws and the dire warnings until I can find any that apply to me. There are not enough hours in the day to go researching for things which should be available. "Ignorance is nine tenths of the law" might not get me off the hook, but if I'm trying to obey the law, whatever transgressions I or my client inadvertently commit, cannot really be a crime?
Dec 2016 update. We haven’t yet achieved any success and probably never will. Despite an open goal, which could make an existing hobby at least financially supported if not profitable, with the potential to become a sustainable business which could be passed on to the grandson.
There were things which could be done differently next time. Unfortunately next time came about twice already with other projects and doing things differently still doesn’t work. I can reduce the failure and recognise earlier where it’s going wrong.
The goal here isn’t to achieve the annoying formula from the TV series Dragon’s Den, where perfectly good businesses are dismissed. That isn’t going to change lives for the better. Trying to make things succeed, is a lot more thought provoking.
The quick fixes include transferrable skills, for me. Things with a learning curve, which are now copy-and-paste. They were worth achieving, because doing something for real, in a dry run, identified the gotcha’s.
A proof of concept for increasing site visitors, showed our visitors were mainly search engines, would-be hackers and regular friends, until we changed the wording on the site and within weeks we had people looking to buy and lingering. Although we made it slightly difficult for them by not having anything for sale or the ability to place an order. This knowledge was achieved by having our own web computer where we could log everything, using the Firewall, Wireshark and IIS. During a Business Enterprise session with a Search Engine Optimisation guru, he was interested in what I’d been able to learn, because he’d only ever worked on sites remotely. His words of wisdom, that meta data on a picture, used to describe it to blind people, will be read and indexed by the search engines, so use it wisely.
A photograph is going to be out there for ever. It needs to be good. It’s an investment in light bulbs and cloth for the background, but also in making different samples. Never have the same thing twice, unless it’s on an animated gif or a zoom-able picture.
A contacts page might be standard to everyone else. First lesson, have a second addressee in case, “Oh I never read those e-mails anymore”. Second lesson, anti-spamming security is a multi-faceted problem.
The PayPal “Out of Stock” limit is a simple copy-paste-and-edit solution to the New York Cup Cake problem. When you’ve got your first 48 orders and are thinking how long that will take you, more come in and they’ve all paid and expect delivery. Fortunately PayPal lets you set a limit. No more payments taken until you’ve dispatched.
You are reading this because our failure is a surrogate experience which you can hopefully translate to success in your project. So far it’s been capability which was on a learning curve. Now we need the mantra “Well I would have… oh”. Time for deep thought and I don’t have the answers, but I am coming up against these same problems in other projects.
The elephant in the room here is my own prejudice. A lifetime of managers who were above the detail, dismissing worthwhile ideas, not enabling what they wanted to happen, being distracted by the latest fad and forgetting that they’d committed workers to do something else. I thought that if something is required and do-able, planned out with the Prince2 methodology of finding the problems and fixing them until there is an unbroken chain to success, then it just needs doing.
A succession of minor set-backs masked hidden issues. How do you find what is perceived to be a personal problem by one person, when it isn’t being discussed? Asking questions doesn’t work. Spending time together so any concerns might be expressed, or talking to others who might have different conversations, didn’t work. Things which should click into place were not because..., then we’re fixing insignificant or irrelevant problems which we think will enable progress, but the real problem still exists. These hidden problems are different on all my projects, but they always exist.
If you want to know if someone has understood and has a shared vision, you get them to repeat it back in their own words. Or better still, they explain it to someone else. Preferably days later and of their own volition because they are excited by it. Or so I thought. Certainly none of that worked. I hate to say it, but all my managers who ignored details and just concerned themselves with outcome or nothing, were right. Of course, I like to think that in a war game, the good bosses would beat the bad bosses every time and there is a business model for businesses which do things better, or do things others cannot do. I’d still like decisions to be based on a bit of thought, but my learning curve cannot yet deal with hidden problems. Not only are they thwarting me, but I’m spending too much time working on things when the end game is, it’s all lip-service. The Dragon’s Den “Go away” becomes not giving up, but maybe early recognition of total failure. If based on character, it ties in with Sir Richard Branson’s “Choose someone based on their character”, which might be nuanced along the line of Lord Taylor’s “Poverty of aspiration”. Those quotes now seem deeper than I’d understood.
In retrospect there was an indication that things were not working and never would. It’s not that there was no outcome, which I can accept when we don’t know what we are doing, everything is a learning curve and much of what we learn turns out to be irrelevant. It’s that there was no effort towards achieving success. Ten minute tasks were never happening. There was no jotting down of ideas during an evening of watching TV. Where the majority of people see a measure of outcome as being success or not, I should have seen no sporadic effort, no sustained effort, no commitment. Just superficial interest. Words alone. I think that’s something a woman could have told me.
Open goals and failure is becoming a regular feature of my life. My experience applied to similar projects, easily identifies the same problems but still with no solution. We all agree on the goal, but we are failing in the maze of decisions to get there. We are travelling on different paths. Our perceived problems are invisible to each other, our efforts mutually dismissed as wasting time. Perhaps at that point, effort ceases. Yet every time we regroup to check our collective goal, we think we’re in full agreement.
In BBC Radio 4’s the Bottom Line, business leaders with runaway successes were interviewed. Including Rovio Entertainment whose Angry Birds was their 52nd game. They each mulled over why they’d had success with one thing and not previously or since. The change from a would-be start-up to a success required a different leader, not simply a different set of skills. They didn’t delve into why or what, but this applied to the workers as well. Looking deeper into this, what is special about workers in a would-be start-up, as opposed to someone doing a repetitive job for a wage ? What qualities should we look for and how to test for them ? A willingness to work for free and to learn? Perseverance?
The path to success has many broken bridges. Some are illusions of problems which aren’t really there or can be ignored for now. Some are of people’s own choice. Choosing to fail, the give-up mentality, being fazed by problems, thinking that working for yourself isn’t work. They break the path. Can we work around these character traits? Or recognise them quicker?
Whilst this project could still succeed, the lessons I think I’ve learned, will now be tested by applying them to Client Project 9, Irish leprechauns, making Irish keepsakes, in Ireland, for the Irish, but you can buy one if you pay.