For Whom the Bell Tolls, Part III

My original posting singing the praises of VOIP and Vonage in particular (for those of you who haven’t tried Voice-Over-IP, it’s still working great and unbeliebaly cheaper than traditional phone service) was met with a criticism by my colleague Tom Bartel, who said Vonage in particular didn’t allow him to keep his particular phone number.  This is something that varies carrier by carrier, area code by area code.

So Tom tried an alternative service in Colorado called Lingo.  So far, he seems to be having the same positive experience that we are in NYC.

Email Marketing 101

We just published a book!  Sign me Up! A marketer’s guide to creating email newsletters that build relationships and boost sales is now available on Amazon.com.  The book is authored by me and my Return Path colleagues Mike Mayor, Tami Forman, and Stephanie Miller.  What’s it about?

– At its core, the book is a very practical how-to guide.  Any company — large or small — can have a great email newsletter program.  They’re easy, they’re cheap, and when done well, they’re incredibly effective.

– This book helps you navigate the basics of how to get there, covering everything from building a great list, to content and design, to making sure the emails reach your customers’ inboxes and don’t get blocked or filtered.

– Our central philosophy about email marketing, which permeates the advice in the book, is covered in my earlier New Media Deal posting (which is reproduced in part in the book’s Preface) — that customers will sign up for your email marketing in droves if you provide them a proper value exchange for the ability to mail them.

– I’d encourage you to buy the book anyway, but in case you need an extra incentive, we are also donating 10% of book sales to Accelerated Cure, a research organization dedicated to finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, in honor of our friend and colleague Sophie Miller.

More postings to come about the process of writing, publishing, and marketing a book in 2005 — boy was the experience we had different than it would have been 10 years ago.

Everyone’s a Marketer, Part III

Along the lines of my "Everyone’s a Marketer" series of postings, Seth Godin put a finer point on it today.  If Everyone’s a Marketer, then you can easily make the case that the CEO is the CMO.

Who Wants to Get Hit by a Bus, Anyway?

Fred had an accurate if somewhat morbid posting today about succession planning, one of the many higher-order HR tasks that small entrepreneurial companies are particularly bad at.  He’s completely right — for one example in our industry, you only have to look back about 9 months or so to Phil Goldman’s shocking death to see the impact it had on Mailblocks.  I’ll have to post on succession planning in a startup in more detail sometime soon.

Boiling the Frog

We boiled the frog recently at Return Path. 

What the heck does this mean?  There was an old story, I’ve since been told apocryphal, we told a lot back when I was a management consultant trying to work on change management projects.  It was basically that:

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap right back out.  But if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and then heat it up to boiling, you’ll boil the frog because it never quite realized that it’s being cooked until its muscles and brain are slightly too cooked to jump out.

How have we boiled the frog?  Two ways recently.  First, we let a staffing problem sneak up on us.  We were short one person in a critical area (accounting and business operations), and we had decided to try to go without the extra person for a month or two for cost-savings reasons.  Then, another person in that group unexpectedly left.  Then, another person in that group got seriously sick and was out for several weeks.  The result?  We were down three people in an area very quickly, without a proper pipeline of candidates coming in the door for any of the open positions.  So for a period of time, we can’t get the things done out of that group we want to get done, despite the heroic efforts of the remaining people in the group.

Second, we have had an Exchange server problem that has been plaguing one of our three offices for six months now (no, the irony of an email company having internal email problems isn’t lost on us).  In retrospect, the first time we had a big problem with it, we should have dropped everything, brought in an outside consultant, and done a rapid-fire infrastructure upgrade/replacement.  But we were truly boiled here — we kept thinking we’d fixed the problem, the situation kept deteriorating slowly enough to the point where the productivity of this one office was seriously compromised for a few weeks.  Happily, I can report this weekend that our IT team is cuting over to our new environment — "the promised land," as they call it.

How do you stop yourself from getting boiled?  I think you have to:

1. Recognize when you’re in a pot of water.  What areas of your company are so mission critical that they’re always at risk?  Have you done everything you can do to eliminate single points of failure? 

2. Recognize when someone turns on the burner.  Do you know the early-warning signs for all of these areas?  Can you really live without an extra person or two in that department?  Is it ok if that server doesn’t work quite right?

3. Recognize when you care about the frog.  You can’t solve all problems, all of the time.  Figuring out which ones need to be solved urgently vs. eventually vs. never is one of the most important roles a decision-maker in a company can make.

Rejected by the Body

My most recent posting ("Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned") about a strange hiring incident at Return Path has so far generated 5 comments — a whopper for my blog.  You can read them here if you want.  They’re a little bit all over the map, but they did remind me of something I frequently tell senior people who I am interviewing to join the company:

Hiring a new senior person into an organization is like doing an organ transplant.  Sometimes, the body just rejects the organ, but at least you find out pretty quickly.

At least we found out relative quickly with this one, although it was more like the organ rejecting the body!

Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned

We had a very unusual employee situation this week at Return Path.  A brand new senior executive we brought in to the company to be our first ever head of HR and Organization Development resigned very abruptly after only a few weeks on the job, citing a complete change of heart about her career direction and moving on to a government position in economic and community development.  Unfortunately, the person gave no notice and provided no assistance with transition, and resigned by cell phone.  What a disappointment, especially coming from an HR professional!

After getting over my disbelief/irritation/rage (not easy, not a small amount), after communicating this difficult message to the company, and after sending a thoughtful-yet-cathartic note to the person, I sat down to think a little bit about how I could have prevented or at least spotted the situation in advance.

We interviewed the person thoroughly — 10 people internally conducted interviews, and I interviewed the person for almost four hours myself, conducting one of the most rigorous interviews I’ve ever conducted given how critical this position was to our organization at this time.  (The interview followed the Chronological In-Depth Structured interview format from Brad Smart’s book Topgrading — more on that in a future posting.)  I also checked five references on the person, all of which were sterling.  I had one outside person, an executive coach with whom I work, interview the person.  Everything checked out, and the person’s attitude and enthusiasm about the position couldn’t have been better.

My conclusion on the lesson learned here?  It’s “Sometimes, there is no lesson to be learned.”  There may be ancillary lessons around handling the situation once it became apparent, but I think the core lesson I’d hope to get out of this — that we could have done something different in the interview process or orientation or first few weeks to prevent or at least spot this ahead of time — appears to be nonexistent.  Hmmmph!

Sometimes It’s Worth Travelling 5,000 Miles for a 5 Minute Meeting

I re-learned this lesson shortly before the holidays.  We’re negotiating a big deal with a company out on the west coast, and we were at a tense and critical spot in the negotiations.  I knew that the only way to move the deal forward to a handshake and a term sheet was to meet face to face with the decision makers on the other side of the table, in person. 

So I got on a plane.  It wasn’t my first choice of activities, and although I was able to work a couple of other meetings into the trip, the trip was a long way to go for a really short meeting.  But it was 100% worthwhile, with a very specific mission accomplished.

As I mentioned in one of my earliest posts, it’s important to be "Present AND Accounted For" in business settings, and with everyone’s busy schedules and increasingly frenzied and multi-tasking office environments, it’s harder than ever to really get someone’s attention.  There’s just no substitute for looking someone in the eye and doing a real handshake, not a virtual one.

How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC, Part IV

Brad is making  new postings easy this week.  Here’s another good one from the VC’s perspective on liquidation preference.

How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC, Part III

Brad has kicked off his blogging year with a a good new post on VC valuations.  It’s along the lines of the ones he, Fred, and I have written over the past six months and has the wonderful line in it:

If you are negotiating a deal and an investor is digging his or her feet in on a provision that doesn’t affect the economics or control, they are probably blowing smoke, rather than elucidating substance.

Happy New Year!

Wait – A Closed Environment Isn’t the Be All End All?

Today’s announcement that AOL will be improving its web-based email access for members and opening a free version of the service for non-members in 2005 is a quiet cry of “uncle.”  What’s amazing isn’t the announcement so much as how long it took for AOL to get there.

What will this do to the email landscape?  Not much, in my view.  It’s too little, too late, to mean much of anything.