Thu 25 Jul 2024

Random Thoughts and Occasional Musings Day 1

Posted by jtmcarthur under Communities, Marketing, Music
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When I chose to leave the corporate world in November 2021 and focus all of my attention on writing Act 3 of my life, I started capturing observations that came to me through the course of the day. Over the next few months, I’ll begin sharing some of  my Random Thoughts and Occasional Musings. Here’s the first set.

  • Musicians that refrain from  complaints about pay, rarely leave money on the table.
  • There is a huge difference between an ‘ask’ and an ‘invitation.'” One says, “Will you do this for me?” The other says, “Will you join me in this?”
  • You can control what you say, but not how others hear it. Never assume that what you’ve said is what others heard.
  • You get to vote on music you like. You don’t get to vote on what good music is, and you don’t get to vote on what other people like.
  • Most of the stories people tell about you are fiction, but are based in fact. That’s an uncomfortable truth.

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Wed 12 Jun 2019

My Days are Tech, My Nights are Music.

Posted by jtmcarthur under Uncategorized
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I’ve spent a good part of the last three decades helping technology companies and technology buyers. But I’ve always had a passion for music and emerging artists. There are interesting similarities between technology companies and emerging artists. Both technology companies and musical artists are in crowded markets, but both markets are full of opportunities. The solution to how to make a living, whether in tech or in music, is the same: Create a great product and get the word out to people who will care. With that in mind, I’m sharing a page of curated resources to use as a starting point for artists that want to connect with people who will care about what you’ve created. If you have resources you would like to share, let me know and I’ll review them. Feel free to comment here.  In the meantime, if you think that this growing list of resources could be valuable to you, follow this page – > Artist Resources

 

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Mon 6 Feb 2012

Two Books and What One Month of Measurement Has Taught Me

Posted by jtmcarthur under Analytics
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I ended last year by reading two books. The first was Competing on Analytics, The New Science of Winning. The second was 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. “Competing on Analytics” changed my thinking, and “18 Minutes” changed my life.

A core tenant of “Competing on Analytics” is that in order to make correct decisions, you need data.  Data requires measurement. And, as I’ve come to learn, it requires determining which data, among all of the data that one could collect, is the most important data.

A core tenant of “18 Minutes” is that getting the right things done requires that you decide, among all of the possibilities, the relatively small number goals that you want to achieve over the coming year. These are the things that you absolutely want to get done, and get done right. Another core tenant is that you need to evaluate each of your activities against those goals.  It suggests, among other things, that you start your day by evaluating what is on your calendar, not in your email InBox. Almost immediately upon rising, ask yourself,

What am I scheduled to do today?

Is my schedule consistent with progress against my goals?

If not, what changes do I need to make?

As I write this, I recognize that the above statements may sound very basic to some of you. Some of you already live your lives based upon very specific goals and measurement.  I suspect, however, that many more only think you live your lives this way, and haven’t actually taken the time to determine your personal goals, separate from everyone else’s goals. Nor have you decided what specific data will tell you whether you are making the correct choices in achieving your goals. I recently made that embarrassing admission to myself. It was especially embarrassing for me, given that I love science and studied, among other things, mathematics in college.

I won’t bore you with my own specific goals for this year, but suffice it to say that by measuring my time against my priorities, I have determined how long it takes me to complete certain tasks. I’ve learned what work is profitable and what work is less profitable than I had previously thought. I’ve learned the direct impact of diet and exercise on weight and heart rate. And I’ve learned that if I schedule things as soon as I make a verbal commitment, that I almost always keep my commitments.

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Sun 29 Jan 2012

Why Mark Leslie of VERITAS Keeps Coming Up in Conversations

Posted by jtmcarthur under Selling, Startups
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For the 3rd time this month, Mark Leslie was mentioned in a conversation or presentation. The most recent was at TiE Boston’s Annual VC Outlook Dinner. Actually, mentioned, is way too soft. He was cited, praised, quoted, and otherwise venerated. Mark has a remarkable story. He took VERITAS from 12 employees and $95,000 in annual revenue to over 6,000 employees and $1.5B in revenue, before the company merged with Symantec on July 5, 2005.

I first met Mark, when I hosted IDC’s StorageVision conference in San Jose in May 2000, a year in which we recruited Steve Luczo, then CEO, and now Chairman of Seagate, and Joe Tucci, then the newly appointed President and COO  of EMC.  Mark wasn’t the best dressed (that was Joe) or most poised (that was Steve), but he gave, by far, the best talk. The talk that was discussed three times this month wasn’t, however, his StorageVision speech. That honor goes to this talk: “It Always Takes Longer and Costs More.” On Page 15 of the presentation, Mark begins a discussion of the Sales Learn Curve (SLC), which is the sales equivalent of the Manufacturing Learning Curve (MLC). The SLC is critical, Mark argues, to knowing when to step on the gas with sales.

Almost every company I’ve talked to measures the cost of sales. But where organizations differ is in the costs that are included in the cost of sales. Mark includes:

  • Marketing
  • Product management
  • Product marketing
  • Product  support
  • Sales engineering
  • Sales

Some of these costs are more fixed than variable. Marketing, product management and product marketing don’t need to grow linearly with sales. Support, sales engineering, and sales costs are, however, more directly proportional to revenue.

Since more sales means that the fixed costs in the cost of sales calculation decline as a percent of sales, many startups are tempted to hit the gas early on deploying sales and sales engineering resources. But until they have gone through the iterative process of perfecting the sales process, this approach just burns cash.  Instead, he stresses the importance of  investing for learning in the early stages, making iterative improvements in the sales process. When the sales process is perfected, then, and only then, should a company put the “Pedal to the Metal,” making significant investments in sales and sales engineering.

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Sun 22 Jan 2012

What Startups Can Learn From My Local Restaurant

Posted by jtmcarthur under Customer Service, Marketing, Viral Marketing
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In last week’s post I talked about the importance of a start up knowing the percentage of customers that would recommend their product or their company. There’s actually a name for this metric. It’s called the Net Promoter Score or NPS. Here’s an article that provides a way to calculate your NPS.  In order to have a high NPS, you need more than the right product. You need the right customer experience.

I’m always a little shocked by companies that see unhappy customers and fail to take immediate action. My wife recently took her car into the local dealership for routine service.  Between a post-doctoral fellowship, an active private practice, and several non-profit board seats, she’s very busy. So she wanted to know how long the service would take. The answer was, “No more than an hour.” After a two and a half hour wait for her service to  be completed, she was obviously steaming. She complained to the service manager, who apologized and then sent her on her way.

When the post-service customer satisfaction survey call came, she gave candid answers. She was not satisfied. Less than 24 hours later, she received a call from the service manager apologizing profusely, telling her to call him directly, the next time she had her car serviced. He then offered her a complimentary car detailing service along with a polite recommendation that she wait until the winter season was done, in order to get the maximum benefit from the detailing. The coupon for the free detailing arrived the next day in the mail. My wife was somewhat calmed by the gesture, but still doesn’t mind repeating the story of the dealership’s poor service.

Now, imagine how different her reaction might have been, had the service manager, to whom she expressed her dissatisfaction before she left the dealership, had then offered her a discount, or a free detailing service. Her anger would probably have been assuaged immediately. What if it didn’t require the service manager’s involvement at all, but the clerk at the service desk had been empowered and taken the initiative to make things right? What if the dealership’s response had been as it was for me at a local restaurant, when the waitress offered my meal for free, because I had to wait too long to be served. Rather than a detractor, I became a promoter, for her willingness to proactively do the right thing.

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Sun 15 Jan 2012

The Most Important Number for an Early Stage Startup

Posted by jtmcarthur under Analytics, Startups
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I met a few weeks ago with a friend who is the CEO of a startup company based in the Boston area. He’s not a first time CEO, and he’s had at least one successful exit, selling his company to a major system company. How good was the exit? Lets just say that he didn’t have trouble raising money, when he was ready to do his next venture. When he did his last round, it was significant and at a very nice valuation, by IT infrastructure standards.

I think data is important, and I like to know what corporate executives care about, so, now, every time I meet with a startup company, I ask the CEO what they measure. Typically on the finance side, I’ll get answers like revenue, cash flow, burn rate. On the sales side, they tell me they track new customers, number of deals, repeat sales or renewals, and average deal size.  And on the development side, they will track the total number of bugs, sometimes by criticality, and the bug retirement rate. These are all good things to measure, so, if you are measuring these things, good for you.  And if you’re not measuring them, time to break out a yardstick and some monitoring tools.

My very successful friend gave me one more number to track before all others. Given his track record, I paid attention. The most important number for him is the percentage of customers that say they would recommend the  solution to a colleague. He actually has someone call every single customer and ask only one question:

Would you recommend our solution to a colleague?

This is not the same question as “Would you be a press reference or allow us to do a case study on your installation?” That brings with it the usual baggage of legal and PR approval processes. No, for an early stage company, this question, “Would you recommend our solution to a colleague?” encapsulates the only truly important metric into it. It answers the question, “Am I building the right product?”

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Fri 5 Aug 2011

How We Learn, The Importance of Video

Posted by jtmcarthur under Marketing, Startups, Storage and Data Management, Virtualization
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Last summer I spent an enormous amount of money when I purchased the Torque game engine, so that my oldest son could try his hand at game development. In order to maximize my son’s success and seeing that there were many in-depth books available to learn how to use Torque, I offered to buy him a book as well.  But my son assured me that it was unnecessary, since he already knew how to program in Torque. That seemed odd to me, given that he had never had the software before, but turns out, he learned how to program in Torque by reading websites and watching videos on line. Increasingly, that’s how the latest generation learns. And thanks to a growing library of videos stored at sites such as YouTube, and contributors such as Khan Academy, you can learn how to do almost anything, including most of the math you will need to graduate high school and pass the first year of college.

Videos are also becoming an important medium for companies to get the word out, to explain, and clarify. So as an example, after a 2-day planning meeting with one of my clients, StorMagic, where I serve as a member of the board, I asked my son to record five short videos of StorMagic’s CEO, Hans O’Sullivan, answering simple, direct questions. Each video is less than a minute long and answers one or two questions on topics such as the background of the management team, the strategic focus of the company, the impact of recent announcements, and the company’s relationship with one of its partners.

Videos seem to be all the rage.  I don’t know what will come after videos, but it seems to me that for the next few years, at least, video will be of strategic importance in getting the word out about your company.

Hope you enjoy these.

StorMagic’s CEO Discusses Multi-Site Installations of SvSAN for VMware

StorMagic CEO Discusses the StorMagic Team and Recent Growth

More videos regarding StorMagic can be found on YouTube by searching StorMagic. You can even learn how to install and manage an SvSAN just by watching a video.

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Sun 3 Jul 2011

From TEDxBoston: The Value of an Interdisciplinary Approach

Posted by jtmcarthur under Collaboration, Marketing, Technology
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I recently attended the TEDxBoston conference. If you’ve never been, I encourage you to go.  This year’s conference was overflowing with both people and ideas.  For me, it’s a vacation from the day-to-day, an opportunity to find new inspiration, and a place to cross-pollinate ideas.  I never go to find more business, but rather to get better at what I do.

One presentation that I found particularly valuable was by Michelle Borkin, who explained her interdisciplinary approach to data visualization.  She brought together professionals from astronomy, who were working on how to get better 3-dimensional  pictures of objects in outer space, with radiologists, who were trying to get better 3-dimensional pictures of organs in the human body.  The results were both beautiful and amazing.

It would be easy to say “Outer space is very different from the human body, so it has no relevance to what I’m doing,” but she took the opposite approach and asked, “What are they doing that is similar to what I’m trying to do, and what can I apply from what they have already learned?” With all of the discussion around data generated on the internet, I kept wondering, during her presentation, what data visualization techniques can be taken from astronomy and radiology and applied to understanding consumers and influence.

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Fri 21 Nov 2008

Paul Gillin Shares Secrets of Social Media Marketing

Posted by jtmcarthur under Social Media, Startups, Viral Marketing
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I just finished reading an unedited, advance review copy of Paul Gillin’s latest book, “Secrets of Social Media Marketing.” If Paul is reading this post, he may remember that I told him I would read the book last month, but then, I also planned for the stock market to be up slightly. Things change, and you adapt.

In the book, Paul relates that he dictated much of the book into his computer and used speech recognition software to scribe his thoughts.  Since this was an unedited advance review copy, I gained some insight into the state of speech recognition software, which has advanced enormously over the past 20 years, but still makes amusing mistakes.

Paul acknowledges that at the current pace of change, some of the social media marketing tools he describes and the strategies he espouses will become relics and interesting historical perspective in 10 years’ time.   But, as we find ourselves in an economic downturn that appears deeper than anyone younger than 80 remembers, Paul offers some sage commentary on social media marketing that applies equally well to general business strategy.  Paul writes:

There are only two unpardonable sins in the current environment. One is fear…That leads to the other unpardonable sin, which is inaction.

Read Paul’s book and by the time you’re done, you will be gathering at Gather, twittering at Twitter, joining Facebook groups, and spreading link-love from your blog.  One thing’s for sure, budgets are tightening, and you and your companies will have to find innovative and less expensive ways to validate product concepts, find prospects, demonstrate to them what you can do, prove to them that you are alive, well, and can deliver something they want. 

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Fri 11 Jul 2008

The Downside of Internet Marketing: Why Print-Advertising Isn't Dead

Posted by jtmcarthur under Marketing
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About 20 years ago, I had a small consulting practice, helping very-small businesses migrate from typewriters and manual accounting systems, to automated ordering, billing, and accounting systems.  Within a year or so, I turned my few customers over to my brother, Ken, who was much better equipped to service them.  Ken was also substantially more knowledgeable in the area.  To Ken’s credit, he continued to service these accounts for years, even though he was geographically challenged with a separation of about 350 miles.

My first client has offices little more than a block from where my sons now attend summer camp.  So this morning, after dropping them off, I stopped by to see my former client.  He’s no longer using the systems we developed for him.  But they were good for more than 10 years.  So that’s not bad.  I met his in-house IT guy, the guy that replaced my brother and our systems.  The new guy says he also takes out the garbage and cleans the offices on Fridays, something we never did.  (more…)

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