1807 Hendricks Ave., Jacksonville, FL 32207 904-399-4411 info@ngenworks.com
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday July 23, 2010
Thanks for all of the positive feedback and suggestions on the new proposal video blog post. This time I’m focusing on the new client survey. Once we have the new survey wrapped up, I’ll be happy to send everyone a preview.
Again, this is off the cuff, so enjoy me struggling through 15 minutes of talking to myself. All the best!
5 Comment(s) Filed under: Business, nGen News, Process
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday July 16, 2010
Maybe you guys thought we weren’t serious? Just to show we are we made a logo!
This September the nGeneers are heading to Atlanta for one of the best conferences of the year, Web Directions USA. We really want this to be a fun getaway, so we’ve decided to take 50 of our closest friends with us.
You can party with the nGeneers from Jacksonville to Web Directions USA by registering for the conference using the code “nGenExpress.” But hurry, only the first 50 people to use the code will get this free trip complete with refreshments of the adult variety.
Worried you can’t afford the ticket? Well the nice people at Web Directions USA are offering our nGen friends an additional $150 off the normal ticket price. That’s even better than the early bird pricing!
Don’t worry; we’ll bring ya home, too. Checkout out the awesome lineup of speakers, it’s gonna rock.
Get your ticket to ride soon, cuz this bus ain’t gonna wait!
5 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday July 2, 2010
Greetings everyone and welcome to the first nGen video blog post.
Recently we’ve been changing a lot of our documents to be more in line with the direction we’re taking the company. Today I wanted to talk about the changes to our proposal, but nobody was around! So I thought I’d tell my video camera I got for Father’s Day.
This bad boy is about 20 minutes long, one take and no edits. You can only imagine how long it would take to write this out let alone read it. Hopefully this format can let you put it on in the background and listen, or sit back with some coffee or a beer and laugh at me.
Either way I hope you find the information on our new proposal enlightening. Please share your input and ideas!
17 Comment(s) Filed under: Business, Process
Posted by: Carl Smith on Tuesday May 25, 2010
Over the last month a lot has happened that has been redefining the choices we have as we reposition nGen Works. The biggest involves the increase in current and potential work coming into the shop, which, of course, means we have more money at our disposal to change our course. While I’ve consulted with my fellow nGeneers quite a bit, ultimately the choice falls on me to decide how we respond. It’s been tough to write before now because I’ve been a little confused. Hell, I’ve been scared. I’ve tried so hard in my life not to make decisions based on fear or greed, and this decision could easily fall prey to both.
An obvious, and traditional, business choice would be to grab as much of the new work as we can and find a way to get it done. Of course, that would mean personal sacrifices from the nGen team as we all work more. In the last month we’ve pursued this path a bit. What I’ve found is that everyone is willing to do more. I know that good people respond to a challenge. But when an ongoing challenge becomes the new normal, eventually people wonder if it’s really worth it.
One option to deal with the new demands is to hire more people. Personally, I’d like to have a slightly larger team. Not out of necessity, but so we can choose to do more. Last month Travis Gertz joined the nGen team. He was already a friend and we knew he had skills we needed. More importantly he was funny as hell and we already loved him. We knew he fit in. It was an easy decision. We didn’t hire a designer or front-end coder, we hired Travis. If we continue to grow as the potential workload increases we would eventually have to hire someone we don’t know. That feels greedy and risky to me. At that point I’m gambling the great chemistry we have to capture more dollars. Once the team’s chemistry goes, the care and concern starts to falter as some really talented and loyal friends will start to ask what happened to the way things were.
Another issue that starts to become evident if we grow for growth’s sake is that my life will change considerably. I am having trouble managing the new business flow as it is. We have more than 18 solid opportunities that are in a proposal phase. Try as I may, I can’t manage this many opportunities and still have any kind of life. Those of you who know me know I started nGen Works to be with my family more. This moves me squarely in the wrong direction. One option is to hire someone to come in and help me with the new opportunities. I have two very good friends I’ve considered to play that role, and both times I’ve gotten cold feet. Part of the reason is fear that this increase in new business is just an anomaly and we won’t be able to sustain them financially if it wanes. The other side is the fear that we’re throwing gas on a fire and it will continue to grow. If that happens, I’ll get sucked into other new issues that arise and still lose control of my time while accelerating the discomfort of the current team.
What’s funny is all of this opportunity is showing up before we reposition the company. A lot of friends and nGeneers have suggested it may be silly to change anything with such a bright future in front of us.
One of the obvious reasons you reposition a company is to become more profitable. There’s nothing wrong with making money, and nothing wrong with making more money, especially if you’re doing something you already know how to do really well. At the end of the day, money is necessary, but feeling like you’re going somewhere in your life is more important. People leave high-paying jobs all the time to pursue something that inspires them. For me, this repositioning has been about staying inspired. I didn’t realize that at first, but I do now. In order to stay inspired we have to feel like we’re doing great work for great people. Right now, I’d say it’s a mixed bag. We have some great clients, and we have some we took because we had to. Ideally, we can get to a point of profitability and cash flow where we no longer have to take any projects. Actually, I think we’re already there.
Last week, I told a fellow nGeneer that we took a project because we needed the money, and missing payroll would be more painful than doing this project. Afterwards, I heard those words playing in my head and I realized I was wrong on two counts. First, we wouldn’t miss payroll. For seven years that’s been my goal — make it through the next two weeks. nGen’s reality has changed but my mindset hasn’t. Second, it would be more painful to keep taking projects for the money than to miss a payroll. Because then it becomes a job, not a place you hang out with friends and create cool stuff.
This weekend as I was crunching numbers and evaluating who else we needed on the team, I realized I was looking at everything wrong. It’s not about evaluating us, it’s about evaluating them. Just because prospects have enough money doesn’t mean that we’re a fit for them. And just because they don’t doesn’t mean we aren’t. When I look at that list of 18 opportunities, fewer than half of them are exciting. Of the half that’s left, seven have been awesome to talk with and want to focus on the process not the price.
Maybe there is no business Utopia. But there are some amazing companies. That’s the goal of this repositioning. It’s got to be about creating a way to work that is fun and profitable for us and the prospects we choose to work with. Some people may say that sounds like a cocky pipe dream. I couldn’t agree more. That’s precisely why we’re going to haul ass down that path starting right now.
As always, we look forward to your input and feedback. And, if you hadn’t noticed, Jeff has been dribbbling a bit here and there- and here on some new ideas on how we present ourselves.
7 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Carl Smith on Wednesday April 14, 2010
Since February, I’ve spent most of my free time working on a new process for how nGen works. It’s been a lot of long hours, and a lot of fun. Mainly because there was no one to tell me I was crazy or it wouldn’t work.
Well, that’s all over now because I’m about to share some of these thoughts with you.
Personally, I’ve always been infatuated with business models. Whenever we get a new client, I always want to understand everything I can about their business. Sometimes I’ve been accused of wanting to be a business consultant, which would be awesome, I’m not gonna lie. But there’s a deeper reason for finding out as much as I can about a client. The more we know about a client, the better our chance for success.
There’s one major flaw in this approach. We’re assuming the client knows about their business. And, not to sound condescending, many of them don’t. They may know bits and pieces. Facts and processes. But not the bigger picture of why they are successful, or why they are failing. This isn’t necessarily their fault. It’s just hard to get a good vantage point when you’re in the business every day. As an industry, we often start solving problems by turning to the users of a product or service to see why it’s working or not. We have to observe them using online tools and communications to see where the disconnects are. This is a really important part of finding the solution. But I think there is a step that has to happen before that if we are really going to help our clients, and therefore ourselves, be successful in the long run.
With that in mind, we’re adding a “Getting to Know You” phase at the beginning of our process. Not a simple questionnaire asking about key players in the company, but actually spending time with those people. Not inquiring about company culture, but getting to experience it and hearing about successes and failures from the employees themselves. By spending time inside the organization, we can understand what the true promise of the company is.
Moving into our discovery phase armed with this information, we can find the disconnects between consumer perception and company reality. Then we can leverage nGen Works’ skills to help bridge that gap.
There are a lot of reasons why this won’t work, so let’s look at a few of the big ones.
Clients will say no
Most clients will say no, they don’t want anyone coming into their company and asking a lot of questions. Especially with the top brass.
Costs too much
The additional hours to do this will cost thousands on top of an already significant investment.
Takes too long
Clients need to get to design quickly to show internal audiences. This will add weeks to the process.
Clients are hiring a web firm
That’s valid — they are looking for a company to help them launch a website or application. The rest of this seems unnecessary. Or, if it is a good idea, there is a better company to handle this.
Damn it, look at what you made me do. I’ve gone and talked myself out of it. That’s it people, show’s over… just selling websites here. Move along. But then again, there was that quote from Guy Kawasaki: “When it comes to building great websites, there are only two places in the world that can do it. That’s Silicon Valley and South Dakota.”
Yep, South Dakota, home of Electric Pulp. How the hell do these guys in South Dakota have an industry pioneer like Guy Kawasaki singing their praises? The answer is in an inspirational quote from Stefan Hartwig: “It takes one. You get one outside of the area.” Stefan was talking about getting one client outside of their geographic area. Once they had a single success story, they could show other prospects and say location isn’t an issue. I think this applies to anything outside of what’s expected. So that’s my stand. It takes one — one company to give us a chance. Then we can point to that project and say here’s why it worked so well.
Assuming of course it does. 8^)
3 Comment(s) Filed under: Business, nGen News, Process
Posted by: Fred Boyle on Thursday April 8, 2010
Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me use the word workation but haven’t been quite sure what I was talking about. I doubt this is a term I created, but I’ve not heard it before. So what is it? A workation is simply a working vacation.
I came up with the idea to do this late last year as a way to fulfill my desire to travel more and see more of the world. For most of us, however, taking expensive vacations and time off isn’t easy. Plus, a vacation isn’t quite the same experience as living somewhere for a while. You don’t do or see the same things on vacation as you would living there.
Taking a workation is really made possible by working somewhere such as nGen Works. Because of nGen’s “work where you’re happy” philosophy, our tight process, and the great team, I’m able to do my job from just about anywhere. We can chat via IM or video, coordinate project tasks in Basecamp or even go old school and use a phone. The only tricky part is working around time differences, but we’ve grown used to that working with Jeff Croft.
So why am I talking about all this? Well, at the end of the month I’m heading out to Seattle for my first workation! I’ll be there for about eight weeks to experience day to day life there. Why Seattle? It’s a city I got to visit while presenting at the EE Roadshow last year and enjoyed it a lot. I also have several friends there, new and not so new, that will help make my first workation easier. I’m sure I’ll meet many new people while there and make even more friends.
So what’s next? Depending on how well this first experience goes, I’m thinking of finally going to Europe and doing a workation in the London area late in the year. But one thing at a time.
3 Comment(s) Filed under: nGen News
Posted by: Carl Smith on Monday March 22, 2010
Most of March has indeed been madness. Getting ready for, attending and recovering from SxSW has turned the last three weeks into a blur.
Rather than attending sessions, I spent most of my time tracking down people I thought might hold some of the keys to business enlightenment. After speaking with five people running some of the most successful shops on the web today, I realized there is no silver bullet for success. You can see this when you look at the commonalities they share. And the differences.
Things the majority of top shops have in common:
Things they differ on:
The slippery slope of talking to these amazing people was a desire to emulate them. But that would fail — if I learned anything, it’s that you have to be true to yourself and what you believe in. Although it wasn’t a question I asked, there was one obvious similarity among everyone I spoke with: They are dedicated to their companies and employees with a passion uncontested.
SxSW was perhaps exactly what we needed at this point in our transition. If we work really hard, we could be considered among the top five in our industry. That may seem really cocky, but I believe in our team and I know we could get there. But that doesn’t answer the question that started us on this journey: How can we be the best partner for our clients and their more holistic needs for success on the web?
As always, we look forward to your insights and feedback. Before you ask, I won’t go into more specifics on information that was shared with me in confidence. I am happy, though, to tell you anything you want to know with regards to how nGen does things.
Knuckles. Blow it up.
13 Comment(s) Filed under: Business, Interweb, Process
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday March 5, 2010
In our post last week I said that succeeding on the web wasn’t magic — it was hard work and talent. nGen Friend Martin Ringlein felt differently. He said:
Something amazing happens when you have the right people working together … I like calling that something “magic.”
Damn it, Martin, really? Calling us out on our own blog? Well, you’re right. This week we thought a lot about magic, except we call it ideas. To us, that’s the tangible part of talent and teamwork. And while we were saying that there’s no magic in SEO or social, we’ll take that back, too. Ideas are everywhere, in everything we do.
In many ways, our job is to both create and protect ideas through the entire process. We become their champions, and we have to hit potential clients in the head with that before they hire us. No surprises. They are hiring a team that will tell the CEO “no” and would rather be fired than be ineffective. This doesn’t mean we’re confrontational; we’re as nice as they come. But if we have a good case for doing something new and someone says “no,” then we have to ask ourselves why we’re there.
So what kills ideas? Who is the enemy that lurks in the shadows of every project?
In my experience, these are the bad guys:
So rather than build a new process around how we can work effectively and get the answers we need to create an amazingly effective solution, we started building a process around creating and protecting ideas so that they can survive long enough to live or die in the wild. The funny realization is that this process also revolves around working effectively and getting answers we need.
The outline for the new process is nearly done, but as with everything, it’s in flux. In fact, the new process encourages ideas throughout the process so we anticipate delays as better thoughts rise to the top. Once we’re close, we’ll give you a peek.
As we’re working on process we’re also working on how we communicate our philosophy. In my humble opinion, we stumbled on something powerful this week.
We’re moving the conversation from interruption to contribution.
It’s time to let clients know that nobody cares about their products or services; they care about what they can do for them. We realize we now have to aim that focus at ourselves.
As always, let us know what’s going on in your world and any thoughts you have for us on the transition.
4 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday February 26, 2010
I’m sure this happens anytime a company tries to change themselves. You have moments of clarity, you outline your plan of attack and… the phone rings with a great opportunity. Or worse, the pain in the ass that you thought was dead and buried rises up from the ashes. This week definitely had its share of those situations, as well as the usual things you have to do to keep a business running. There’s no way around doing our day jobs as we’re positioning ourselves for the future. But we’re not letting that slow us down; in fact, we’re implementing some of our new thoughts and approaches in the work we’re doing right now.
In addition to the usual, it also was a week of great conversations and insights.
Something struck me as I was reading Trust Agents this week, mainly because they said it. What’s going on in the web industry today is a lot like video game psychology. I promise this won’t hurt.
As most of us start playing a game, we fail a lot and learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s fun, but there comes a time when we get stuck and quit playing. A few finish the game without getting hung up on something they can’t solve.
Okay, it’s not really cheating. The cheat codes are built into the games and every video game site has them listed. Or maybe we use a walk through that helps us get around a particularly sticky situation. Either way, we went outside of the original game and kept going. Eventually this gets boring because it’s too easy.
The rare few use the built-in tools that games now offer to create their own levels or they actually learn to program and create their own games. They make the rules and they decide what works and what doesn’t.
In so many ways, this pattern defines what’s going on with the web industry as we see it right now. There are a lot of people playing by the rules as they know them. They create websites for clients and that’s pretty much it. They do okay if they’re talented and some do really well. But others cheat and convince companies that they can get them easy money by getting them to the top of the search engines and attracting a big following without much work at all. They go from industry to industry, changing the terms but continuing to do things that take advantage of the web and don’t really help their “clients” at all. Then you have the companies who create a new game. That’s absolutely where we’re trying to get to at nGen Works. A new game where we can help clients succeed over the long haul.
The more we’ve read and researched, the more obvious it becomes that everything about succeeding on the web involves talent and hard work, not tricks. If you’re a web designer and you’re worried about SEO, don’t be. Just help your client write good content that hits on important phrases to their audience. Use the free tools and a few accepted and even encouraged techniques to help the search engines. Code the site following best practices. Encourage your client to search the web for people talking about their product or service and to gently join those conversations in a helpful way. It’s the same with social media. Find the groups to which you have something to contribute. Hang out and join in on conversations. Offer something of value. Encourage the people you reach to come back and share the good experience they had. Yes, there is more to it than I just laid out, but it’s not magic. It’s being smart, dedicated, honest and, most importantly, real.
So many people are so worried about their own investment that they ignore their customers’ need to understand what’s in it for them. Why should someone buy a product from you? What makes you interesting or different? What promise can you make and keep? What would make them tell others about what you are offering? Think about JetBlue offering unlimited flights for $599. Did they make money? Did they get a return on their investment? If I still remember it now and think they’re awesome, then I would say yes. That offer spread like wildfire over the Internet. I bet they got $100 million dollars’ worth of coverage as everyone started talking about the trips they were going to take and how great JetBlue was. That’s what the new world of marketing is about: Creating amazing value that’s honest and watching people thank you.
Right now we’re looking out a wide-open door at an overwhelming number of choices. To trim them down, we’re working on positioning statements. Words we can believe in that guide us in all the decisions we have to make. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, we’re still working on it. At the same time, we’re working on our own plan to find out what we should be doing and who we think would see value in it. And yes, we are starting to think about how we present ourselves. Personally, I’m feeling deep turquoise plays big into our future.
Again, we thank you for hanging out and seeing what’s going on. We plan to finalize our new positioning statement next week and once we do, we’ll definitely let you know.
8 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Posted by: Carl Smith on Saturday February 20, 2010
Before talking about the progress and decisions we’ve made over the past week, I wanted to say thanks for all of the feedback, well wishes and words of wisdom. It’s amazing to find out we have such a great group of friends.
Your input has helped me realize I need to be able to explain what we’re doing and why in a simple manner. So here goes…
So we can be a better partner to our clients. The online world is full of opportunities that we need to help them identify and leverage. If they continue to market themselves like they always have, they may not be much better off than they were, even with a professionally built site.
We’re figuring that out now, but the simple answer is that we will start projects with a full strategy that identifies how our audience interacts with technology, finds appropriate ways to communicate with them, defines the most effective web presence and recommends key metrics for success. We’ll also look at a more iterative approach to modifying our tactics as we start helping clients leverage what user behavior teaches us. Okay, maybe that wasn’t a simple answer. 8^)
If it makes sense for our client based on the research and goals of the project then we’ll recommend it. Tactics that we have the skills to provide, we will; for those we don’t have, we’ll turn to experienced partners.
Hopefully that helps clear up some of the questions I’ve been getting asked. Please keep asking — you’re keeping me on my toes.
Now back to today’s blog post.
The nGen team spent a week individually putting together their thoughts on who we should be. We then came together last Friday to share these ideas with each other. To clarify, this is very much ideas on who we want to be; there’s a lot of work to be done.
Our next steps include: detailing our new approach, writing narratives about the experience of working with the new nGen Works and outlining how we’ll communicate about ourselves to prospects and current clients. All of this comes with the ongoing education we’re putting ourselves through, from reading books and case studies to blog posts and presentations. If you’d like to keep up, here’s a list of what we’re reading and watching.
That’s it for now. Thanks for following along and please keep sending us your feedback and thoughts.
9 Comment(s) Filed under: Interweb
Where we talk about design, the Interweb, technology, business and other random office hilarity that keeps us from doing our real day job – taking over the world.
The Danger Room is the design blog/playground of nGen Works
