Many employers are forced or make the decision to lay off or fire long term and costly employees.
Then seemingly days later add those same roles to their jobs list online in hopes of getting a ‘deal’ from some unemployed person with a lot of experience and talent or graduate fresh out of college, but pay them half of what they should be getting for the work they will do.
This type of business is short term and yields a high turnover as soon as those new hires find a better job somewhere else. In the end the employer who takes this approach loses their original talented staff, the trust and dedication of the remaining employees and productivity goes down.
The best way to avoid these kinds of problems is to do the following:
1) Use a lot of common sense and have plenty of understanding.
2) Give credit and praise where it is due.
3) Pay close attention to what all of your employees are doing for you and think deeply about what will be lost if they are gone one day for whatever reason.
4) Never do anything to anyone that you would not feel is right to do to yourself or people you know. There is nearly always other options available.
5) Always keep communication open as to troubles the company may be facing so that your dedicated team is prepared to support the company.
One of the best sources of new contacts and business is a trade show. I’ve been attending various shows since 2003 and find value every time. It is a great opportunity to catch up on new technology, keep an eye on any competition, getting the pulse of buyers and most importantly meeting new people in your industry.
Some of the shows we like to attend are CES, PMA, RetailVision, E3, Interop, CTIA and Photokina.
Attending a trade show is generally a great ROI, but having a booth is even better. You don’t have to go the uber expensive route with a large expo area near the doors. There are several great options for smaller companies.
Many times you can pick up a table near the back of the room at a reduced rate either well in advance of the show or with a few weeks of the show when they are trying to close out inventory. Our first few booths were under $1k.
No question, it was worth the investment. You’ll be amazed at the different type of people that stop by; your end users, potential resellers and high up executives with entourages.
If you are a more mature company with a longer roster of contacts you can do a hotel suite. This is actually the best bang-for-your-buck. Invite your contacts up for a private meeting with no distractions. It is best to pick a location near the venue. If you cant arrange this you may need to hire a driver or have someone on staff handle driving duties with a rental vehicle.
Attending in one form or another is the goal. Be in the space and be confident, attendees are open to hearing and trying new ideas. Get out there and shake hands!
It is really amazing how we all feel about our stuff. Stuff being our data, photo, music and video files for the most part. Even though we get all freaked out when we can’t open a document, play a song or view a photo or video; we get even more frantic when we lose our stuff. For one reason or another, we keep finding every excuse to get out of scanning our computer and files for viruses or push off backing up our stuff.
With nearly any anti-virus or backup software, there are now pre-defined defaults for scheduled system scans or backups that those companies designed because so many of us never would lift a finger or could not figure out how to schedule a virus scan or backup of our computer or files. Now that they have it automated, for whatever reason, we manage to find ways to disable it because we don’t have time or we feel our computer is crippled during the process so we can’t download more stuff. Ultimately, we end up pushing out the scheduled date for the next virus scan or backup to where there is a large gap in time between the last time it has been done.
Of course, when a virus has attacked our computer, our computer has crashed or we have lost our files some other way, it is a tragedy and we really see the cost of those songs or simply the time it took to donwload, organize, rename, categorize and/or produce all of those files. It is a good thing there is the ability and technology to recover many of those files through the use of software or in worse cases, through manual services.
Though these options are present and with the use of software they are not so costly, when recovering through manual services, hardware like hard drives, flash drives or flash cards can be very costly to ressurrect. To be as safe as possible, having a data recovery software application installed for any gaps in covereage and up to date anti-virus software as well as backup software with scheduled frequent scans and backups, we could all breathe a little easier and rest assured that the majority of our stuff would be safe from viruses, backed up or have the best chance at being recovered.
There comes a time when too many projects come in and the ability for the current development team to keep up is an impossible dream. What happens next is usually to determine the time to deliver the project versus the other projects that are due.
Then the questions come up, ‘Do we hire another internal permanent programmer?’ or ‘Do we hire a temporary consultant that is a well rounded programmer and can help on all of the projects?’ or ‘Do we hire a temporary consultant that programs in specialized areas for one or more of the specific projects?’ or ‘Do we look to outsourcing to a development team to take on one or more of the projects?’.
No company usually wants to nor can afford to walk away from a project. With the current state of the economy, most companies are less likely to turn down a project and also less likely to hire another employee.
Several companies are looking to outside consultants on a short term or even long term basis to get that extra work taken care of. Lately, even more companies are taking the route of using outsourcing due to general versatility and costs.
The offshore outsourcing development teams can be found mostly in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Even though one would think that software programmers should be the same when using the same programming language no matter where they come from, that is not usually the case.
There is allure for a young software company to use a software publisher to springboard in to retail. They’ve got connections, a distribution network, and deep pockets.
All you have to do is give them a gold master, some content and you can sit back and collect royalties every month. Publishers generally negotiate a 15% – 20% royalty to you. Their costs are artwork, boxes, marketing, travel, advertising, etc.
The idea is that you’ll negotiate a decent cut to collect enough royalties, build cash and then take over and enter retail across the board on your own. The stakes are larger, but it takes more money to play and the competition is fierce.
Without a strong online presence what makes you think you can handle retail on your own? It is important to do customer development and build a base of success if you chose this route. Unless you have a popular product, software publishing hardly ever works out in your favor.
Giving a publisher non-exclusive rights to your brand is dangerous. They can hurt previous relationships, take over your social media presence and you never know what is going on with revenue and box counts without an audit.
A better use of your money is to focus on how your customer finds and buys your product. Maybe it is only through organic search? Maybe your customer only shops at a Fry’s or MicroCenter? Maybe your customer is an iPod owner and you do biz dev with an iPod accessory company?
Where I DO think software publishing makes sense is in International markets. Using a publisher from another country is a great way to get access to new customers without having to have the relationships (especially Japan), the localization experience and you probably don’t have the means to do the constant traveling needed to set up the operation.
With the rush of starting and trying to grow a business, overzealous people can get caught up in which direction to go. The options are endless, there is a lot going on. Promotion, marketing, measuring, analytics, trade shows, blogging, social media tools Twitter and Facebook, hiring, office space, etc.
None of this matters until you identify a problem that (a lot of) people will pay money to solve.
That should be almost 100% of your focus starting out. You need to get out there and talk to people, call them on the phone, email them and pick their brain about what their pain is and how to mold your solution to alleviate their pain.
If you don’t solve the problem with a great solution first your efforts in marketing, promotion, trade shows, etc will simply not be as effective. With a mediocre solution, you can’t survive and eventually you’ll have to come around to the first step of solving the problem with a great solution.
Every retail software company started in a dorm or garage dreams of making it big. This vision generally means having rows of your product on the store shelves of Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, Wal-Mart, Costco etc. Who doesn’t want access to millions of shoppers and the ability to leverage your brand from retail?
Stop and think it through.
Retail costs A LOT of money. Tens of thousands to do it right when starting out.
Boxes + shipping – $1-5/unit (depending on volume)
Marketing development funds (MDF)
Ad dollars for flyers
Costs to distributors
Costs to retailers
Return costs if your product doesn’t sell
It is survival of the fittest in retail, especially in 2010. Starting small and conquering your niche on the web is better than trying to jump straight to retail with no running history, no understanding of your customer and low odds of success.
You need to solve a pain with your software, be Advil. There is a very natural process to it. Start simple, solve a problem and build cash. Jumping the chasm from a niche to a mass market product is the next step. Once you are making very solid profit, test the market with a regional retailer that has 50-100 stores, find success and then finally move up to the mass market retailers.
Friday, April 23rd, 2010 
Posted by Korey
View Comments - Filed under Industry News 
