Small and Medium Business

Which is better, to create a comprehensive application that integrates an entire area of a business, or to solve a small problem with a quick and easy program? I think that in enterprise applications, to look at point solutions and not expand to an entire area of a business is difficult. But as you can see in nearly every business, there can be great value in small database applications that solve a single piece of a larger problem. Here are the pros and cons of each tactic, let me know if you agree. 

Enterprise level, for this article, does not have to encompass an entire organization or enterprise. An application achieves enterprise level when it encompasses at least one major grouping of functions in a business. Most businesses have a few major areas of functionality that are loosely connected to one another. Inside those major areas are typically many smaller functions that are more closely coupled to accomplish the larger goal. All of the major areas of functionality make up the total organization.

As an example, let’s look at a warehouse that is used to store finished goods of a manufacturer before delivery to a customer.  The warehouse receives finished goods from the plant, holds goods, and then picks the order to send to the customer.  The interfaces between the plant and the sales team are relatively small.  With the plant, the interface is delivery of the product. With the sales team, it is to ship the order. Inside of those two tasks though, are dozens of smaller and much more highly related tasks. Someone picks up the new product from the loading doc, checks it for accuracy, maps where it should go, and records the location. They might need to reorganize their stock based on internal space needs. Eventually, they will need to decide which exact product should fill an order based on rules. They need to manage the flow of trucks, rails, shipping companies, or all of the above to get the product shipped. They may also need to check the product for damage while in storage and might have responsibility to load correctly.

The enterprise way of looking at this environment is to take each stakeholder in the warehouse from the interface with the plant, sales and shipping, and all the internal stakeholders and find out what is important to them.  Then, create a model of the process that is required, and rules that must be followed, to maintain order in the whole complex system. Invariably, each stakeholder has a different and limited view of the entire model. The designer looks at all the individual “facets” to find the underlying model of the data and the workflow.

Communication is typically the most difficult and time consuming part of any process.  A single person may put the product away, reorganize the warehouse, and then need that product many months later. There is a need to communicate the original locations and the changes over time in order to be efficient.  Even more problematic, is the same scenario performed by more than a single person. The more tasks, the more different people doing them, the more important reliable persistent data becomes.  If the model created, covers all the data that everyone needs in a way that is usable for all the parties, then the program adds to the efficiency level of individuals and the team.  Because it covers all the facets it is less likely to be inconsistent and more apt to increase efficiency. 

Businesses are highly complex systems.  The behavior of one of the “actors” affects other actors performing different activities in ways that are not important to the original actor.  Because the “other” activities are not important to my tasks, my rules take priority. If my behavior negatively affects the others results, I may not know or care.  An enterprise level program can decrease this negative effect by enforcing the enterprise rules, making the rule important to everyone. The system can also make it very easy for actors to follow the correct rule.  The enterprise level application can model the human rules governing the process and validate them using the program even for areas outside of a specific person’s area of responsibility.  This is where a high-level of benefit is obtained because all the extra work, extra talking, and extra conflict that people get into over these issues goes away.  Workflow becomes smoother and efficiency is increased in ways that are hard to predict, but easy to see.

But there is another way to think about it. Sometimes, there simply is not the budget or the time to think through the entire process. Sometimes, if you don’t have a programming team you can trust, there is a risk that you will not get the results you expected because the team will not truly be able to model at the enterprise level.  There are though, excellent results you can get from smaller, workgroup programs. These are applications that solve very specific task problems within a functional area. In the warehouse example, this might be a program at the gate, where the guard can check in a truck and the screen at the loading docs where the warehouse team is, can see who is at the gate waiting and how long. When a truck leaves a loading dock, the warehouse team can approve the next truck in line or can authorize another truck out of turn, if that would be the most efficient.  The guard can always see the status at the loading dock and the loading dock can always see the status at the gate.  This doesn’t take into account orders, where the product is, if the product exists, or a myriad of other details of the tasks in the warehouse, but it does solve a very specific problem and costs much less than the enterprise application.

Some think you can build a lot of workgroup applications and stick them together to make an enterprise application. Don’t be fooled; this is nearly 100% doomed to fail. The analogy would be building a bunch of single story houses and deciding to put them on top of each other to build a 10 story condo. It is conceivable that the pieces will fit together but the odd’s are strongly against it working. Even if it does, the probability is very, very high that the resulting “Winchester Mystery House” of code and data will be difficult to manage and be inefficient. The Winchester Mystery House was built by an eccentric who felt like she would die when the house was complete so she kept building even when it was illogical, creating walls over windows and staircases that led to nowhere. Like the Winchester Mystery House, the patched-together programs might perform some of the functions, but be confusing and likely to give you inconsistent results. You would soon want something more elegantly designed.

There are significant differences in how you develop for the enterprise vs. for a work group solution. Developing an enterprise application means merging many views and definitions to find the underlying model of the business. One persons view is, on the surface, likely to conflict in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways from another persons. This functions in the every day work of a business because the parties are very context sensitive. Words that are used with different definitions in different tasks are used without confusion, mostly, by the organization because they all know the contexts. But when developing an enterprise version of the model, these conflicts must be resolved such that each person’s view gets translated to the others view with a free flow of information. This is why it is very unlikely that a series of work group applications will efficiently merge into an Enterprise Application.

A work group application, on the other hand, is used by people who are talking the same language or in the same “scope” so to speak. In this case, conflicts and missed communications are not likely and are much more easily resolved. So in the work group application, such as the application that the guard gate uses to communicate two ways with the loading dock, we can start with screen designs of what we want the communication to look like. These can then be used to create a model that will function in that context fairly easily, and the screen designs are familiar, so an operations person or business analyst can simply draw these designs with relative ease. Tools like Balsamiq make the process a bit easier for those of us who are not great at drawing and they also enforce, ever so slightly, a look and feel that can be created in code.

How far the work group application can be taken is dependent on many factors. There have been enterprise or near enterprise applications that have started as work group applications and grown successfully. But there is risk. You cannot know in advance how far the process will take you. You also cannot know in advance how well a group of work group applications are going to work together. What I can say from years of experience is that we have been called in numerous times when a work group app has hit it’s limit and there is nothing that can be done successfully or well, except start from scratch. Frequently, we have been called in when a less experienced programmer or company has started an enterprise level application with workgroup application skills. Again, the application will have hit its limits and the customer rarely understands that it is the programmers fault. The good news is that in those cases, where a work group app is simply outgrown, it is likely to be a great deal of help in building the specifications for the enterprise application. If that is understood, then it is easier to accept the rewrite. If you have an advantage to gain from the work group application in terms of direct return on investment that exceeds the cost quickly, 12 months or less usually, and it can help you understand the bigger issues, then work group applications make a lot of sense.

In summary, the workgroup application is a terrific solution to specific problems; it is weak when the limitations are not well understood. The enterprise application is more costly to start and requires more design and architecture but is more likely to bring higher and longer term value.

Custom Application Development is not for every business. In many cases there are standard programs (off-the-shelf) that can perform all the tasks you need sufficiently. Also programs like Microsoft Business Systems Accounting and Quickbooks and many others can and should handle standard accounting tasks. These programs are good at what they do because Accounting is a very standardized process and is unlikely to be your competitive edge.

However, small business is a reflection of the management team and frequently of one or two people who start a company. Just as personalities are different, companies are different, and have their own personalities. It is frequently the case where two companies that make competing products or have competing services, actually operate completely differently. In the competition for both customers and great employees, that personality can make the major difference between mediocre results and great success.

So how does Application Development fit in? There are operations in many businesses that require a great deal of information and frequently need to be acted on by many people over a process. Getting the right information to the right people at the right time using paper is cumbersome. Computers have aided that process by managing and (frequently) not losing the information on someone’s desk or in their briefcase. However, applications that are standardized, cannot handle the specific personality of your business, and if that’s your niche or your competitive edge, then custom application development becomes an option.

How do you know if this applies to you? Do you have databases that have sprung up in Access or other personal databases that are now being relied on by many people? Do you have someone who is creating huge unwieldy spreadsheets that many people need to keep updated? Do you have a person called a programmer or ‘Access guru’ that you fear will one day disappear? All of these are indicators that you have a need. Other indicators are frequent questions around the office like “Do you know if …”, “What is the status of …”, “Who knows where we are with …” These are indicators that the right information is not available when needed.

Squaretree has analyzed many companies over the years and helped a good percentage of those. Sometimes we decide with the client that Custom Application Development is not necessary for the circumstances, the systems and processes are likely to fit just fine in a standard program. Many times however, we are able to steer a company through a successful application development cycle that results in a reliable and manageable program that meets their needs, saves time and money, and increases productivity.

We run into the statement “I’ve got a guy…” a lot.* (gals, see note below)    The corollary is “I am using someone I’ve used for a long time…”.  Both of these are understandable.  We are in an service area that is very customer intimacy centric.  Customers have to trust us even if they really don’t know what we do or how to really measure success.   So here is what I tell my sales staff when they run into that question.

1.  So you have someone you trust, that’s great. They are there when you need them night or day, quickly to fix things?

2.  Can I ask you a question?   How often are they the hero?  It shouldn’t be that often

3.  If they have to be the hero more than twice a year or so might it make sense to at least have a second opinion on your network architecture?  It may be just right but you may be paying for heroics that are not really necessary.

* Sorry gal’s I’m just the messenger here and I’ve never actually heard “I’ve got a gal…” although we’ve hired some pretty terrific network engineers who happened to be women.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization.  Have you noticed that there is no end to the number of people who have sprung up to tell you they can increase your rankings in the Search Engines.  There are packages, programs, services and consulting all stating that it is imperative you be on the first page of searches in order to get clients.  It’s so important that you should easily be able to get an ROI of many times the dollars you shell out.  So is it so important?  Will you get more customers?  If so, how do you tell the snake oil sales people from the real thing?

Here are a few tips.  First and foremost if your site is not converting people from lookers to customers then bringing more people to your site is not going to do any good at all.  100 anonymous lookers a month are exactly as valuable as 10,000 lookers a month unless you can convert some percentage of lookers to customers or at least prospects.  Before you spend ANY money on SEO make sure you have an idea the percentage of lookers become prospects, then you can begin to evaluate an SEO effort in real terms.

SEO is a big subject for a short blog post and there are plenty of sources of information on the web about SEO.  Any real SEO specific effort is likely to be expensive, either in your own time or in buying someone elses.

Now with that in mind here are some facts:

1.  The search engine’s usefulness to it’s constituency is bringing links to search users that they find instantly relevant to what they were looking for, even if they are not good at searching.

2.  The better a search engine does #1 the more people will use it and the more opportunity the search engine has to sell advertising which is their source of income.

3.   On-Site SEO: One area of Search Engine Optimization focuses on how your site is built in the first place.  This includes having features on your web site that allow the robot’s from the search engines, mainly Google, to recognize your site as having any relevance to someone searching using a specific term.

4.  Off-Site SEO: Once a search engine decides relevance the next thing it will attempt to do is prioritize based on importance.   Although all the criteria used by search engines is not published one that is well known is influence.  Influence includes how many other site’s link to yours and how important are they.  There are some really complex algorithms that attempt to measure the quality of the links.  If you are a car repair shop and the link comes from an awards page on Edmunds.com it is likely more meaningful than if it comes from your mothers blog on cooking.com.

On-Site SEO should be understood by your web-master or web designer and should be part of any web site redesign.  If your site is over 4 years old someone should look at it to find out if it meets modern search engine expectations.  If not then it’s likely time to do some housecleaning and updating of the look and feel and navigation as well so use that as a time to make your site search engine friendly as well.  Do your On-Site SEO with your knowledgeable web designer at that time.

The best way to do off-site SEO is by becoming actually influential.  This is means creating great content, and your great content nearly always has to come from in house.  But the good news is this is likely how you get clients now, by being really good at what you do.  Now instead of telling people face to face you just need to write the content, get it on your site and then find people in your industry or similar who find your content interesting enough to link.   Industry associations or other business associations you belong to are a great place to start.

SEO is something that you do while you are doing the rest of your Marketing.  Being aware of SEO is primary, specific SEO efforts are likely more costly and less valuable than most would have you believe.  And first and foremost make your web site convert lookers to customers before you spend any effort on SEO, that’s just good priority.

We had the wife of an important employee of an important client call us today and let the receptionist know that this was an emergency.  It was mid day Friday and they were leaving for 2 weeks vacation in the morning and the laptop they would use to connect to the company Citrix was set up with two profiles, the wife’s and the husbands.  The husbands profile would not connect to the internet ever since he installed a wireless headset.  Our engineers were very stressed about how to handle this because the persons house was a good 40 miles from the office and being this was a new client we were not sure if they expected to pay for us to go there and fix a private computer in a persons house.  The wife had said it was an “emergency” so we spent some time finding the decision maker at our client and the answer was, if he wants it fixed he will be responsible for the trip or for bringing it to us.   But it was an Emergency right?  Of course they would want us to come up.  Of course they did not.  What the wife had really meant was it was an “urgency” because they were leaving the next day.  Once we said that he would have to bring it down in order to get it fixed the work around was clearly the better option for them.  The work around was simply to use “her profile” on the laptop and he could get on the company Citrix.  Easy work around, no harm no foul and no need for 40 mile one way trip on the spur of the moment.

Some people might scoff at this as “oh sure the client wanted us to come to Cameron Park but it wasn’t important enough for THEM to actually make that trip”.  I say the real answer is communication.  The customer was sharing the need to have an answer quickly if a reasonable answer was to be found.  Our helpful guys heard this as “gotta have it fast” and translated “it” into fixed and “fast” into all costs, which came out to “Got to have it fast at all costs”.  The wife/customer was not out of bounds agreeing to allow our guys to come to make the drive.  In her  mind if that’s what the expert said was the right thing to do then that’s what they are paid to do is make those kinds of decisions, they are the expert.  But once the decision was made to toss that effort back to the customer, the customer correctly made the decision that the trip wasn’t worth it.  Problem solved in the best way possible given the circumstances.

The greatest impediment to communication is the illusion that it is actually happening.  Make sure when you hear important or urgent that you don’t decide to hear important AND urgent.  It’s the easiest thing to do but it’s also the easiest thing to validate.  Make sure your client understands what you are hearing so they have an opportunity to confirm it.

What does it cost you to provide the revenue generating service or product upon which you and your employees depend for a living and your customers depend for value?  Can you break down that cost into individual parts and determine if, in fact, you are getting the best value for your investment?

While it is likely these questions are of interest to you they are rarely easy questions to answer.  There are some industries though, where if you answer them correctly you can devastate the competition.  These are likely industries where one or more of your raw materials are in short supply and variable in quality and therefore value.  If you can capture the highest value product by paying a little more, then create the finished product for the same or less than your competition then your product can be higher quality at the same or lower cost.  Your competitive edge then is being the preferred customer of the raw material because you can pay more AND the preferred vendor of the finished product because you are the higher quality at the same or lower cost.  How can you achieve this?  By tackling that difficult problem of knowing your input costs through the entire product or service creation better than anyone you compete against. Once you know your costs and how to minimize them, it is also critical that the behaviors that minimize cost through the organization be easily and reliably replicated.

This is where a custom application can provide a big advantage over standard software.  If you use the same software that your competitor does then your competitor has the same opportunities to achieve the cost reductions.  You are limited in your tactics to methods that the standard software will support.  Your advantage is limited to being able to use the standard software better than your competitor.  The barrier to entry, should you succeed, is much lower because once your competitor sees your success they have the tools in hand to replicate that success, they just have to use it.

Custom software, on the other hand, is tailored exactly to your knowledge of your business.  The more information you can input into your software and manipulate the better and more granular your cost knowledge becomes.  When it is clear that doing something differently will make your costs go down or your quality or yield go up then changing the software to behave in that new way should be easier.  More importantly if you find a method that would not be supportable with the standard piece of software you are increasing the barrier to entry for your competition.

A company I worked with several years ago made their living buying a manufactured product that had seen better days (used) and selling pieces of that product in order to make a profit.  There were dozens of ways the product could be resold, whole for salvage, partial for salvage, pieces for reuse, pieces for specific salvage, and many others.  Each type of disposition had it’s own costs.  As a quick example:

• Sale as a whole salvage item
• - $100 = Whole Item Cost
• - $  25 = Labor to process from intake to sale as salvage
• +$150 = Whole Item Value Salvage
• =$  25 Profit
• Single part separation
• +$  75 Single part value separated from the whole
• - $  50 Labor to separate single part
• - $  10 Salvage value decrease of remaining whole
• - $  15 Inventory holding costs (space, time value of money, etc.) for single high value part

Separating the part from the whole becomes at best a break even. But, if you know your costs this accurately, and you can shave $20 off the three costs of breaking out the single part, now you can pay an extra $10 for the supply. Your competitor can not pay that much, or if they do they are paying too much. With overhead they could begin to loose money on every purchase. You either corner the market and make better profit on each of this particular item or you force your competitor to loose money which, over time, will kill them. Multiply this over hundreds of items which all could be separated in multiple ways and you can see that the modeling and management could be come extreme unless you had the proper tools.

While it is still a daunting task to get all the costs itemized, the potential value, especially if you can tightly control this information as a trade secret, is large. By creating a custom application and allowing only a few trusted employees to enter the key values under the proper protection agreements you can create a system that gives you a large competitive advantage AND a huge barrier to entry. The rules of the system are “under the covers” so even the employees who are working closely with the inputs and outputs and modifying the systems values still only see a “black box” when it comes to the rules. These employees might be able to do the same things in spreadsheets at a much lower cost but this makes it much harder to maintain the trade secrecy value of the information and the business far more dependent on that particular individual.

Every company is similar in one way; they all depend on people to get the work done at some level. People require communication and meaningful communication can often be difficult. I have had the pleasure of working with and studying many companies in depth in my career…

Invariably the hardest thing is getting people to perform and keep working in the standard or expected way. I think most of us know the story of putting some kids in a row; then you whisper a simple phrase in the ear of first child and ask them to whisper it down the line from child to child being very sure they repeat exactly what they heard. They will be rewarded at the end if the phrase the last child heard was near the phrase the first child remembers. Invariably, even with only a very few children in the line, the last child states a phrase that bears little resemblance to the original. Well, the same thing happens with adults too!

Now think about day-to-day communications around your company and you will see time and time again where what you thought you said did not result in the behavior or response you intended. Now multiply that problem among all the people in your organization and all the times that they depend on each other to answer a “how do I do this” question and you may see the problem in a new light.

One answer to this problem is procedure and policy manuals, but frequently it is easier to ask the person next to you to repeat the policy than it is to look it up. Then you repeat it to the next person that asks and guess what? You have just played the children game in real life. The first person got the policy from another person and repeated it to you EXACTLY as it was stated in the original document correct? Well, it is very likely that it was not exact, and so on and so on.

Computer programs are the interactive way of forcing consistent behavior. The policies are written into the program and the only way to successfully get the work done is to adhere to the policy, otherwise the program stops you, requiring that you “do it correctly”. This is the equivalent of doing the activity with the book open, checking that you did it correctly at each step. One way to solve this problem is to buy the “standard” program or the framework; these are the programs that were made for your industry or the SAP-like general programs that are meant to be customizable to any industry.

One of the most uncanny aspects is that even if two companies look alike and are direct competitors doing exactly the same thing, when you look ‘under the covers’, they are likely very different from each other. The differences are, in many cases, one of the reasons why some customers go to one company and some to another. It may not always feel like this is the competitive edge, but the way you do business affects the way you communicate, and that affects which customers you will attract.

A standard program forces you to work in a standard way. To the extent that your niche is determined by the way you do business, you put your company at risk. For some companies, the determining factor is not the data that is kept by the computer; in that case it is very clear that a packaged program is just fine. A dental office, a doctor’s office, an insurance broker for a large insurance company that has software, perhaps a car dealer and others are businesses that most likely can be handled by a standard program.

But when you do things a little differently from the rest, and your adamant that this is important to you, then you are a candidate for custom application software. For example, one company services thousands of clients in small transactions but their competitive advantage is customer intimacy. Now how do you seem intimate with thousands of customers?

One of the things we built into the workflow was an easy way to remind the owner to send personal notes to clients on the schedule that they were used to, along with other services to help the owner get that accomplished easily. The program that all 100 employees work with every day embodies the rules of engagement that the owner has made a part of every transaction. New agents coming into the business cannot do it any other way. Training requirements are eased, consistency is increased, and the customers feel the close relationship without it killing the owner’s time. The business owner genuinely cares about their existing customers and can now put more time for new customers.

What is the effective lifespan of the computers in a business?  How do I know when I should replace one?

While there are no hard and fast ways to know how often you’ll have to replace computers, there are some guidelines that should make it easier to feel good about the decision when someone recommends a new machine.  Some of the factors to consider are how many people depend on the equipment for their productivity.  Servers are a particular concern because many, if not all of the computer users in your organization depend on the services provided by the server.  A workstation used by a book keeper is terribly important since the book keepers job is so clearly dependent on the computerized accounting system.   Laptops are vulnerable to repair more often than workstations because of their mobility.  Laptops also suffer from technical obsolescence more quickly than workstations as vendors become better at putting more power into smaller, lighter space. This makes it more valuable more quickly to invest in the newer laptop for the new features.
So what are the guidelines we have seen over the years?

1. Servers; 5 years

Servers are utilized by everyone in the company who are dependent upon computer services.  This frequently includes employees who never even use the computer. Payroll for instance, is typically dependent on services that stop if the servers do not function.  Most computer manufactures will call out 5 years as the “end of life” of server hardware and make it prohibitively expensive or possibly impossible to renew the warranty after that time.   Technology changes over a 5 year period frequently are such, that a new hardware refresh due to age, can also provide high levels of productivity improvement.  We recommend beginning to engineer the next 5 year solution starting 4 years after your last refresh.  You should recognize that for those companies using several servers the 5 year cycle may or may not be synchronized.

Desktop Computers; 5+ years

Desktop computers are, in many cases, made of a subset of the same parts as servers.  These parts, just like servers, tend to wear starting in the 5th year.  The difference here is that you can make a decision based on the cost of downtime that a particular computer-user can stand. The bookkeeper needs a reliable machine; unless of course you can send them home for a day or so anytime, even payroll, with limited detrimental results.  But many people who need a computer for their job often have a handful of things they can do while there computer is being replaced.  Our guideline for desktops is to expect them to last 5 years before you consider replacement, and then as long as it works after that, call it good.  You will likely get an average of 7 years, especially if you move the older machines downscale to the less dependent users.

Laptops; 3+ years

Laptops are mobile. Therefore, they take more of a beating than a stationary computer at a desk.  The laptop is typically an integral part of a user’s job as well or they wouldn’t need the mobility.  We recommend considering replacing your laptops anytime there is a new requirement and/or the laptop has a problem after 3 years.  We don’t believe you have to instantly throw it out at 3 years, many times particular laptops in particular jobs will last much longer, sometimes as long as 5 or 6 years.  But if anything happens requiring any real money to be invested in a laptop over 3 years old it is time to strongly consider replacement instead.

Printers; 7 to 10 years

The good news is that a good printer should last a very long time.  I have seen original HP Laserjet II printers still in service after 15 years.  If it’s working, keep it.

There are several ways to purchase Custom Application Development. It is imperative (for many reasons) that you understand how your provider thinks of the contract and what you are buying. There are many variations, but they can be categorized by three themes:

1. Staffing
In the staffing model you hire a programmer who has a resume indicating the skill you think you need to perform the programming. You may try to find the person yourself or hire a staffing company to do that for you. Either way, you are hiring someone whose resume indicates they have the skills to perform custom application development. The typical staffing firm is not capable of truly vetting the candidate other than checking the resume, checking references and past employers, and validating degrees and certifications. After that, though, you are on your own to evaluate, manage, measure, and get value from the person. You are buying hours for dollars period; it is up to you and you alone to get the value from the person for those hours. If you are not an application development person yourself, this is the most dangerous method.

2. Application Developers Who Develop a Product and Hand it Over
In this model, you pay a company or person to create a computer application for your business; you typically pay a flat fee but it could be based on a time and material contract. The end product is the program you use and you will have certain rights to use the product. The copyright and ownership of the product and most importantly the rights to the source code, though, remains with the code writing company and not with you, unless you specifically get those rights as part of the contract. This form of application development has advantages because you can hold the company responsible for fixing bugs and for keeping multiple people trained on the product, etc. because it is their product. They can also, though, sell that same product to other companies including your competitors.

3. Application Development as a Service
This is the type of Application Development that Squaretree provides. In this case, you are outsourcing the task of Application Development as a service to our company who provides this as a service to many companies. It is our core competency and therefore, your expectation is that we are very good at it and very efficient with resources. We do not develop product; we develop applications just like you would create for yourself if you had the expertise to manage programmers and analysts in-house. The added benefit, over the fact that it is our core competence, is that when you don’t have a specific need, you don’t need to pay for the expertise. The potential downside is that we cannot hold people to a job if they decide to leave or get hurt, any more than you can. Because this is a service, when someone needs to be brought up to speed on your project, that becomes your financial responsibility, same as it would be if you were hiring. The good news is that we know how to do that very efficiently and we know how to manage, evaluate, test, and produce in our core competency in a timely manner. As in the case where you were trying to manage Application Programmers inside your organization, you would have to pay for this effort, but in our case, it’s guaranteed; you would be charged for the successes we had at performing this task, not the failures.

Richardo Robles is a young and energetic guy in tune with the changing workplace.  He has developed with friends and partners an office environment that may be the next step in flexible space (http://capsityoffices.com).   But that is the only tease I will give you on that, you’ll have to contact him at one of the events that he is promoting during the Global Entrepreneurship Week, Sacramento.  The following is promotional from Richardo and the event organization:

Successful Growth Oriented Entrepreneurs Share their Wisdom at SacGEW.com

Now in its second year, SacGEW.com has a confirmed star studded collection of regional and national successful entrepreneurs sitting on panels during Global Entrepreneurship Week (G.E.W), November 16-22, 2009.  As the official Regional Coordinator for Global Entrepreneurship Week, SacGEW.comencourages all aspiring and current entrepreneurs to join any event produced in the region.    While there are others in the area hosting GEW events, you’ll find the highest  caliber speakers at the original coordinator of this week of awesome events, SacGEW.com.

All SacGEW.com events include multi-million dollar entrepreneurs talking about what they wish they had known and how they arrived at their current business.  In addition, each event is crafted with structured networking, designed and proven to connect an inspired entrepreneur to the next perfect person and opportunity.  Take a look at our line-up and buy tickets to the SacGEW events at http://www.sacgew.com.

One or more of these events could be well worth your time.

Bill