Category Archives: Business

Mixing it Up

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This is from my, “Really abstract thoughts” file…

Often you try to recruit leaders internally, because they’re familiar with your existing procedures. On some level this is good. But “familiar with your existing procedures” also means that they see things with blinders on. Sometimes I think you have to bring in someone without any of that institutional knowledge, to shake things up and move you in a new direction.

For example, there’ve been a rash of thefts from the library. People will sit there working with their laptop, get up to go the bathroom, and their laptop is stolen. (Part of this, of course, is their own negligence.) I couldn’t possibly know the full story, but it looks to me like CP is content with just writing reports for each theft and letting insurance handle it.

Why not set up a “sting” in the library? Put a few plainclothes cops (we have several!) in the library, “studying.” Get someone to leave their laptop unattended. Wait for the thief, who clearly is comfortable stealing things in public. And then, arrest him.

Similarly, there were two crimes this week where they caught the suspect on video camera. (Neither was exactly a major crime, though.) In both cases, though, they say they can’t identify who it is, and that’s the end of it. Why not show it to a student, who may well recognize it? Or why not publish it? The school newspaper is always desperate for material. We’d love to run a few stills from the tapes.

Too many people seem to assume that you need to master all the ‘cruft’ that existing leaders have. I don’t know nearly as much as the police chief, so far be it from me to have ideas. And yet I’m fairly certain my ideas would work. The “sting” might be a little over the top, but it beats the status quo of doing nothing!

Oh, another example! My digital SLR camera is basically a film SLR with a digital sensor instead of film. I never quite understood why you needed things like a complex mirror array or a shutter. Couldn’t you just take them out, and just sample the sensor for whatever time period you needed for the exposure?

It turns out, yes. There are a few little “gotchas” I wasn’t aware of, but mostly, they’re holdovers from the film world. People designing the cameras just still have that leftover baggage of the film era, so they keep making cameras with shutters and mirrors. A tiny little bit of R&D could probably eliminate the problems with simply removing them, and you’d end up with something with increased reliability, the ability to take faster exposures, and added versatility. But it looks like it’s going to take an “outsider” to get this done.

Yes, you need some existing knowledge to keep you in reality. But people seem to averse to letting ‘new’ people have ideas. And in my experience, they’re the best ideas. Getting the record industry to distribute music over the Internet took Shawn Fanning and, finally, a failing computer company in California. Why didn’t the record industry, with a multi-billion-dollar budget, think of it? (And, even now that lots of evidence shows that it’s doing well, many record companies are still digging in their heels!) Organizations get too big, crufty, and narrow-minded, which causes them to think that only the biggest, cruftiest, and most narrow-minded of them should be allowed to try out ideas. Why?! Do people like the “stability” of their old ways — selling CDs and booing the Internet, using unnecessary moving parts in cameras, and not catching criminals — even when the old ways are clearly the worst possibly way to do things? Are they so bent on sticking with what they know that they’re willing to lose?

Jobs I’ve Overlooked

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Kyle has a book called Gigs that I’ve been reading. Basically they interview hundreds of people with various jobs about what they do. “We feel that the world hears too much from ‘experts’ of all political stripes, and not enough from the people for and about whom they presume to speak,” one of the editors writes. Reading just a bit of the book so far, I’ve realized a few things:

  • People are people. So many people view people at work as just a human embodiment of a company, or merely as an ‘object’ with which they’re forced to interact. (Sidenote: spending some time in customer service should be mandatory for everyone.) A bus driver talks about the abuse she takes when the bus is late. A flight attendant complains about the time someone threw a hamburger in her face because he didn’t want it. The world would be a much better place if people could see that people were people.
  • I’ve narrowed my horizons far too much. I never considered that I could be:
    • A train engineer. He apparently makes about $90,000 a year and gets to see the country. The hours aren’t great, though, and I’d probably get bored.
    • A member of the paparazzi. I love photography anyway. This guy has a wild job. He doesn’t mention his salary (he works for a magazine), only that one of his photos got him into the “six-figure club,” referring to his revenues from a single photograph. He does claim to have been punched by Alec Baldwin, and mentions that he goes to the bathroom in his car because he has to remain vigilant. Those aren’t the working conditions I look forward to.
    • A porn star, although he makes the job sound less appealing than I’d have imagined.
    • Fisherman. It’s intense work, and risky, but he makes good money.
    • Casino surveillance officer. Watching hundreds of cameras. It actually sounds fun, though I’m not sure I’d be making the $40,000+ that jobs out of college are supposed to pay.
    • Drug dealer. He made good money!

There are so many more I haven’t read. Slaughterhouse human resources director? Chief Executive Officer? (I’ll do it!) Clutter consultant? Crime scene cleaner? Taxidermist? Bar owner? Buffalo rancher? Food stylist? Anchorwoman? (Err, man, in my case.) Television station receptionist? Carnival worker? Squash instructor? Transvestite prostitute? Mother? The possibilities are endless for me! College professor! Bounty hunter! Prisoner! Town manager! Psychiatric rehabilitation therapist!

Grand Central

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I signed up for an account with Grand Central. It’s a limited beta, but they eventually had a slot for me.

Essentially, I give out my GrandCentral number, which rings in multiple locations. (Currently, my cell phone and my school desk phone.) But it treats calls more like e-mail: I can set up ‘rules’ on what calls get through and what calls don’t. There’s voicemail which I can listen to via the Web.

I have a few invites, if anyone is interested.

Wung Fah

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We looked into the cost of hiring a coach bus for the day. $1,300.

Multiply that by 5 and you can buy a used coach bus. (Granted, they’re easily $200,000 new, but there are a ton of used ones, and they’re the type of things that are usually driven until 1,000,000 miles or so.)

Assume 200 miles. (This is actually way, way more than we need.) 8 miles to the gallon. (You may do better.) $3/gallon. That’s $75 in fuel.

Assume you pay the driver very well: $20 an hour, and that we have the bus for 8 hours. (He surely makes less, and we don’t need 8 hours.) $160 in labor.

I want to start my own bus company. (More for being hired out for the day than anything than being a Greyhound / Fung Wah, though.) I think I could do it for a lot less.

Buy something like this, spruce up the interior (carpeting?), and re-install the seats, and you’ve got one heck of a bus with 750,000 miles of life left. And, apparently, 100 gallons of fuel already in it…  $10-15,000 buys a nice, complete bus.

$750 a day… Assuming $20,000 fixed costs, you break even after 26 days. You have variable costs (fuel, labor, insurance), too, but really, I think that if you could book the bus regularly, you’d do well.

Oh, and there are lots of little “extras” you could do. Replace those huge old TVs with a few LCDs. Probably under $1,000 total cost if you do it yourself? And, in lieu of showing a movie / TV, you could always do an airplane-style display of where you are or something… Or show ads! No direct value, but I think it’d raise the perceived “value” of the bus.

You could invest your profits into a budget limo service. You compete in the taxi market, not the limo market. If I had the choice in riding in a 12-year-old limo (after removing the garbage from the floor?!) or riding in a taxi, I’d pick the limo. Although I wager most of the costs there are variable costs: labor, insurance, maintenance (probably big on a really old American car?), etc. But really, you’re paying less than it’d cost to buy a used taxi. And this one is even less!

Zune

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The poor Zune has so much going against it. For one thing, they decided to make it brown; the most delicate way I’ve seen this put was something to the effect of, “The Zune team decided that brown was the hot new color. No other marketing team has reached this conclusion.”

I don’t like DRM, not even on my iPod, but the thing the iPod has going for it is that it’ll play that DRMed music. A lot of people complained that the Zune didn’t play half the formats of music they had.

And then there was the “orgasm screen,” a really bizarre screen during the installer that’s probably Not Safe for Work. Also probably NSFW is their logo upside-down, although that can be considered more bad luck than poor planning.

But I still gave them credit for trying. They have a terrible market share, but they tried.

Well! They just released the “Zune 2.0,” and, well, see for yourself. They did ditch the brown, although they also introduced “diarrhea green.” But I think this is even worse: the old one made me think, “Good for Microsoft, designing their own MP3 player.” Now I think, “Wow, it’s a bad clone of the iPod.” The looks are just too similar. They added some features, such as more video codecs, which is great. WiFi syncing to a computer? Awesome idea.

There is one thing that I think they got right, though. They failed the design, they failed the color choices (again), they failed having safe-for-work backgrounds in the installer screen, but they have a DRM-free music store now. I didn’t think Apple could lose its edge, but now Microsoft and Amazon are both offering DRM-free songs. And you know what? I don’t think I’m going to get my songs through iTunes anymore. Now that Linux is my primary OS, all the songs I bought from iTunes don’t play due to DRM. Apple’s got to do something, or it’s going to start losing, at least on music sales.

Hosting Ideas

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I have a lot of excess capacity on this server.  The ‘basic’ hosting industry is shot to hell: $3 for 100 GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth might be considered expensive. (It goes without saying that they won’t actually let you use that much.)

But here are a few markets that aren’t touched on enough:

  • Personal selling and hand-holding to businesses that don’t have websites. Three thoughts here:
    • $50 a month is a normal business expenses. Someone who comes and talks to them and gets them their very own domain name? That’s practically a bargain! I bet their credit card processing bill is at least five times as much, and that their phone bill is at least twice as much.
    • The type of sites I’m talking would be static content, and wouldn’t even need to be updated more than a few times a year.
    • Keeping a live mirror on another server would be awesome, and it’s something almost no one does.
    • Web design (and product photography!) could be offered for additional costs.
  • Hosted services. There are people out there who want a blog and their own domain. $5 a month is entirely reasonable and in the “Why not?” category of expenses. But they’d get nothing but access to their own WP blog and some space to upload posted files. They couldn’t set it up themselves, which would permit a few things:
    • Security: they’ll all be running the most up-to-date version.
    • Caching: Default WordPress gets 4 hits per second after rigorous benchmarking. Unsurprisingly, many ‘untuned’ servers go down very quickly when they get linked to. I don’t know if I’d survive digg, but I can at least improve things.
    • Convenience for the customer!
    • Theoretically, reduced disk access if I could install it once and have everyone else work off symlinks. This is probably more trouble than it’s worth in practice.
  • ‘Personal’ wikis. I keep a MediaWiki install for my class notes. It also now houses my to-do list, a wishlist, and a list of gift ideas, among with various other thoughts. It’s an incredibly handy way to set things up. Plus, by virtue of being a personal wiki, it’s not going to get a lot of traffic. Again, something like $5 a month.

I don’t have the energy or time right now to aggressively pursue these. But I think all 3 would work pretty well.

Social Skills

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I’m hardly in the upper echelon when it comes to social skills, but I’m going to post this anyway…

I’ve come to the conclusion that a person’s social skills are one of the most important things they learn. The problem is that they seem to be learned solely through trial and error and observed experiences: no one ever teaches you anything formally. Some people are naturals. I just read an article about Obama, and he’s definitely one of them. Most people here, being a business school, have pretty good social skills. But we’ll periodically mingle with other schools. At a big convention we went to last year, I realized that some of the people there had terrible social skills, to the point of being somewhat creepy.

I think it’s somewhat industry-specific. In the business world, you need strong social skills. If I’d gone on to become, say, a programmer as I once considered, it wouldn’t have been as important, but it’d still be very important.

I view this as a sort of crisis. Too many mal-adjusted people are passing through our schools. In my opinion, it’s one of the most critical skills, and they’re just never getting taught. Let’s cut out history and replace it with Socializing 101. I never did like history anyway…

Mint

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Kyle was raving about Mint this morning. I just came across it on Digg and looked into a bit.

It’s got a very attractive website, and PC World raves about it. It’s sort like Quicken, only Web 2.0 based, and very, very spiffy. And free.

It’ll keep up to date for you and everything. All you have to do is put in all your bank account numbers.

I’m very eager to try this service. Except that I steadfastly refuse to put all of my bank account information into a website. Especially a startup one. If Paypal provided it, I might trust it. If my bank provided it, I’d definitely trust it. But a startup? Honestly, I think it’s safe and secure. It’s got some big names behind it, and it looks too ‘big’ for it to be one scammer. But that doesn’t mean I’m in a hurry to give them all my financial data.

Businesses

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I have a lot of business ideas that are extremely well-thought-out and that would almost certainly be great. These aren’t them. These are kind of vague ideas. But I think that they could be very successful, too. The reason I propose them isn’t because I want to make a lot of money with them, it’s because I wish these businesses existed. (So feel free to steal these ideas!) * A bank that doesn’t charge its customers fees. In my opinion, the bank should be happy I keep my money there. I have a lot of choices. In return for me keeping my money there, they pay me interest. That’s how it should work, as opposed to, “In return for me keeping my money there, they charge me fees.” If I overdraw my checking account, it doesn’t cost you anything to cover it with money from my savings account. That annoys me. Charge me $2.50 if you want, but don’t charge me $35. And pay me decent interest. I can get 4.25% at ING, and am seriously considering moving some money over there. Why would you even bother paying me 0.25% interest? You can charge non-customers a fee for using your ATMs, but if I’m your customer, you’d better not charge me. And if I use someone else’s ATM, they can charge me, but you can’t! (I don’t understand that one at all: if I use someone else’s ATM, I’m already angry that you don’t have an ATM in the area. Put one up, or cover my ATM surcharge if you want to do something. But charging me?!) * An honest car dealership with fixed prices. You might see a car for $24,567 at the competition. We might have it for $21,500. You can come walk onto our lot, write us a check for $21,500 and drive away in it. We won’t spring extra charges on you at the end–it’ll all be included in that $21,500. But you also can’t get us to go down on price: it’s a fixed $21,500, just like the price of a TV in BestBuy would be. We won’t try to pressure you into buying anything. When we copy your drivers license while you go for a test drive, we won’t secretly run a credit check. (Is that even legal?) Where would you rather shop? Unless you’re a skilled haggler, probably at the place that just has one fair price upfront. * Kind of bizarre, but a place that will come pick up dirty things, wash them, and redeliver them. Originally I thought about laundry, although you’d have to undercut on-campus laundry for it to be worth it for me. But then again I might pay slightly more if you’d wash my clothes (and do it well!) and bring them back folded and everything. Probably not more than $10 for a week’s worth of laundry, though. But last night I noticed that the dishes had again piled up in our sink, and got to thinking… We have no dishwasher. Not only is it a pain to wash them all, but they’d be much cleaner if they were cleaned in a dishwasher. Imagine if, when you came to pick up my laundry, you took the dirty dishes too, and brought me clean laundry and clean dishes later in the day. * A free recycling pickup service, or a trash-and-recycling service that discounts for recycling. I recycle everything in NH, just because, well, why not? Here, I can get 5 cents a bottle if I take it to a redemption center, but I never have. I don’t even know where I’d go. Recycling facilities exist, so I can still recycle things, but when I buy drinks here, I’m paying the bottle deposit! Imagine how much you could make if you had a ‘garbage truck’ that just picked up cans on college campus. Probably at least enough to pay for gas + someone to drive it and pick everything up. I want to feel like I’m getting my bottle deposits back. So why not have a trash pickup service that discounts if you recycle with them, too? The first two businesses are the better ones, I think. Both would be best if they had fairly low margins, but I think they could make a killing on volume. In this situation, it is better to consult with the lawyers for business owners in GA for any options to develop the business. If a bank opened up that paid you, say, 2% interest on

any money you had in your account and didn’t spring unexpected fees on you, wouldn’t you consider switching? (2% interest is moderate.) And if I were to buy a car, especially having never done it on my own, I’d feel much better going to a place that just had one price, as opposed to trying to bargain over a price. (The other element is that the sales staff would be honest, friendly, and helpful.) The last two are more of a stretch. There’s considerable expense in picking things up, and laundromats probably don’t make a killing anyway. A pick-up laundry service may not be profitable, and I don’t know if there’s really much demand for pick-up dishwashing. And the recycling bit was just more of a vague suggestion. But if any of these four businesses existed, I’d probably use them. (Especially if the bank had an attractive, easy-to-use website where I could do all my banking. OMG, and they could partner with Mint and store the financial information somewhere other than Mint’s servers.)