Business Bricks

We moved on Tuesday. We got five quotes for removals: four of the firms did a standardised quote over the phone & one sent a rep around to do it in person. We went with the & one. If you don’t send a rep, you save costs. But you convert less leads to sales and you send a van that costs more because it isn’t exactly the right size.

Not sending a rep is a false economy.
Like cheap paint brushes are a false economy.
Bendy buses ditto.
And call centres.
And uncomfortable seats.

But what else? Every time you cut a cost, it might be a false economy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cut costs, but that you’ve got to get very good at weighing up known costs against unknown side effects. Hint: cutting the selling part of the cost of sale (by not sending a rep, by setting up a call centre) is nearly always a false economy.

It’s been kind of quiet round here of late. But that’s about to change as [1] Jo (my missus) and I are in the family way. interior elevation is shown left. baby’s eta = 18 May. and [2] we’re about to move from the city to the seaside, and to a slightly more roomy work/ live place. As of Tue 28 Mar BB’ll be at Flat 3, 36 Vernon Terrace, Brighton BN1 3JH. Footnotes: [i] If I’m away from your screen for a few days next week, and again in May, that’s why [ii] I plan to spend a lot more time working and writing on Business Bricks the next six months and less time freelancing and working on other projects [iii] thanks to all 46 commenters who suggested alternate cities to move to last Nov.

I’m proposing to start a new regular column here sometime soon, tentatively titled How to fix ________. The ________ can be anything you like: BT, your homepage, Mickey’s cash flow crisis, the cafe industry, your brochure, the FSB etc etc. (The idea came from an essay I wrote ages ago called How to fix the Film Shop Fixing the Film Shop.) I’ve not settled on a format yet (it will involve my answers AND your answers) but what would really help would be if you could email me any ideas for ________ that you can think of.

old school lobbying = representing
new school lobbying = harnessing

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has 195,000 members, ffs. Old school logic goes that an archaic representative body has more clout than the 195k small business owners it represents. Latest exhibit: PaymentScorer – a very well-intentioned, but very unambitious project to name & shame late payers. It’s a table of research drawn from some plc annual reports. By putting out a quick press release ready-written for Daily Hell sub-editors, the FSB might draw a bit of pr on page ten. How to fix it: why not speak to the techs behind TheyWorkForYou (say) and build a site to harness the knowledge that comes from 195k members? Let members name & shame late payers (no to research by researchers). Ask them to post the context (because late payments only really make sense in context). A bit like the Shitty Tipper Database only without the anonymity. Heckle over.

“Squatters have registered huge numbers of names, certainly, but they can’t register names as fast as 26^n grows.”

“the fact that she’s able to accurately size dresses based on this simple rule is another reminder of how misleading it can be to rely on asking people about their potential behavior.”

Of course, the thing to remember is that for every proverb there is an opposite proverb that makes just as much sense.

The $39 Experiment. Man mails 100 letters to 100 companies with unexpected and expected results.

Joel Spolsky’s “Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected” (nine words) doesn’t quite match Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” (four words). But it’s a good definition even so.

The Consumerist: “God, we love PR talk. It’s so close to human English but it’s got an underlying poetry all of its own.”

A quick and miscellaneous list of advertising links compiled by Mind Hacks’ Tom Stafford.

Stop the focus group
Stop Cillit Bang
Stop the Tescopoly
Stop AOL’s email tax
Stop saying can’t
Stop overpackaging
Stop worrying and relinquish control
Stop robots
Stop Dixons
Stop stealth mode
Stop spam

John Maeda’s Pg Up key broke. Thing is, he reckons he’s more productive without it (”Page Down works fine, so it’s easy to move ahead in a document. However without a Page Up key, I find myself forming a rather progressive attitude of never looking back”).

An experiment in recall: ask twenty-five Austrians to draw twelve logos from memory (attempts at the Peugeot logo pictured left). See also Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! — a similar experiment, only with elevator pitches, not logos. Make of it what you will.

Frank Demmler puts a case for not divvying up shares 50/50 or 33/33/33 or 25/25/25/25.

MacRumors thread via S vs. N. “I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!”

Meetings are evil. But if you don’t agree, here are nine tips to make them productive (via Kottke).