Transition Strategy Part 4: What’s the Big Difference?

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^)

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