Sales, sales and more sales – happy days
So - a little yellow sticky has been sitting on my monitor since early May screaming ‘BLOG’ at me. The good old fall back of ‘diversion therapy’ kept raising tasks which just had to be done. Alas, I can ignore the blog no more ……….
So what has been happening in April and May? Answer – everything!
Firstly, we have now sold more in this year to date than we did in the whole of last year. So, I think we can confidently say: “We are pleased with sales”! What is more, the prospect list is long and therefore life is good. That doesn’t mean to say we are complacent – just full of the joys of spring!
Of course, success provides challenges of its own. The most obvious is the rapid ramp up in support requirements for the customers. Suddenly you have a new level of support enquiries and a whole raft of new customers trying to get up to speed.
There is also a need to manage the business, guard cash flow, not over expand, still keep customer service levels high, keep the momentum up, etc. It’s always a balancing act. I’m already looking at what we need to do this year to keep the momentum up next year.
In my last business (CDC Solutions), having grown slowly to around 15 people, we shot up to around 70 in the space of three years. That may not be massive growth compared with the likes of Google, etc - but it is certainly an uncomfortable rate. The key is getting people up to speed and ensuring that they understand what the company does, its direction and what we want to do. Its easy when its ‘admin’ stuff such as accountancy, etc. It harder when its product knowledge which is the key requirement.
There is, of course, the need to bring in new skills. However, most of the time it would be ideal if we could just clone the people we have. There are not enough hours in the day (especially if you want to stay married) to do everything. Life would be so much easier with a cloning machine. The last thing you want is a load of new people all desperate to do a good job but not really understanding the business, running around doing ‘stuff’. Mainly because it then takes ‘un-doing’ or ‘re-doing’!
I’ve seen it in partner companies when the expansion has been rapid. Suddenly you are talking to a load of people who know less about their company, its history, products, clients and partners than you do. They don’t understand you or what you do and find comfort in stuff (such as people/technologies/application areas) which they do understand. So there is a subtle change in direction which is not a result of any strategy nor is it intentional. Its just a direct result of new people find their own comfort zones. Lord preserve us!
Moving on ……
In the meantime we have been working to get our Malaysian development and test center established. When I last reported, I noted that we were to fly out to Malaysia for final interviews for the Malaysia Development Team Leader. Well those went well and we have our Malaysia Development Team Leader joining the company on the 25th June. He will be in the UK for a week’s induction/training. We also have recruited a senior developer and are actively recruiting additional developers. The Malaysia office opens on 1st July.
There will be challenges. But with modern collaborative and communications technology (PleaseReview, Instant Messaging, VOIP, email, and the internet) we believe that a seamless working environment is achievable. It’s our intention to have the Malaysians very much as ‘part of the team’ rather than a separate organisation to which we ‘throw projects over the wall’. Watch this space.
Another aspect of the business on which we have been working (or more accurately, fighting the good fight) has been a support system. The requirement started out quite simply. With the rapidly growing customer base, we were constantly providing the same information and knowledge in emails to customers and prospects. The obvious solution is to capture it in a knowledge base so we didn’t have to re-work it every time.
Having taken a look at what was available, we decided that we would look at solutions which provided an integrated knowledge base with support ticket management. Our requirements were simple. We had a few basic functional requirements and needed a system which could expand with us. A brief market search identified what was, apparently, a suitable system so we installed a test copy, gave it a brief test and purchased a license. A month later we threw it out! Lesson learned. This time we approached with caution, refined our requirements (and dropped a couple of the complex ones) undertook more market research. After a couple of trails we finally settled on the open source OTRS.
So far OTRS is working well, we are populating the knowledge base and are introducing customers to the system on an ‘as needed’ basis.
From a product perspective, having released PleaseReview 3.2 in March, we will be releasing v3.3 in mid June. Version 3.3 is known internally as the ‘integration release’ as its primary role is to enhance the integration capabilities of PleaseReview. Whilst we have always had comprehensive APIs, it’s not until people start trying to embed PleaseReview functionality in 3rd party applications that you really spot the holes. The holes have been spotted and duly filled.
We have also undertaken preliminary testing with .NET 2.0. The initial indications are that the port is well worthwhile as the performance can improve as much as 10 fold. Thus the current plan is to have the ‘.NET release’ (v3.4) out towards the Autumn (aka Fall).
On the travel front it’s been a quiet May. However, I’ll next be at the DIA annual Meeting in Atlanta. Perhaps I’ll see you there?
Finally, let me give you an idea of the sort of stuff a company like us faces on a day-to-day basis. We logged a determined hack attack on one of our web facing servers recently. I understand that it was a dictionary attack (probably from a zombie pc). The attack was trying to guess the password at a rate of about five attempts per second. Tim Robinson (our CTO) calmly pointed out to me that “it would still take more than the lifetime of the universe to guess any of our passwords at that rate – an estimated 271,363,820,339,984,102 years”. What he didn’t mention until further questioning was that the attack was on the standard ‘Guest’ account on a Windows server. The Guest account is, of course, disabled.
When I asked the team if posting this information would compromise us in anyway I got two answers. Answer #1 from Jason, who takes the lead in managing the infrastructure, was “nah - perfectly normal stuff” and answer #2 was from Tim who mentioned that the timescale estimate might give away the length of the password – but I think he was joking. Strange sense of humour these techies have :~).
So what has been happening in April and May? Answer – everything!
Firstly, we have now sold more in this year to date than we did in the whole of last year. So, I think we can confidently say: “We are pleased with sales”! What is more, the prospect list is long and therefore life is good. That doesn’t mean to say we are complacent – just full of the joys of spring!
Of course, success provides challenges of its own. The most obvious is the rapid ramp up in support requirements for the customers. Suddenly you have a new level of support enquiries and a whole raft of new customers trying to get up to speed.
There is also a need to manage the business, guard cash flow, not over expand, still keep customer service levels high, keep the momentum up, etc. It’s always a balancing act. I’m already looking at what we need to do this year to keep the momentum up next year.
In my last business (CDC Solutions), having grown slowly to around 15 people, we shot up to around 70 in the space of three years. That may not be massive growth compared with the likes of Google, etc - but it is certainly an uncomfortable rate. The key is getting people up to speed and ensuring that they understand what the company does, its direction and what we want to do. Its easy when its ‘admin’ stuff such as accountancy, etc. It harder when its product knowledge which is the key requirement.
There is, of course, the need to bring in new skills. However, most of the time it would be ideal if we could just clone the people we have. There are not enough hours in the day (especially if you want to stay married) to do everything. Life would be so much easier with a cloning machine. The last thing you want is a load of new people all desperate to do a good job but not really understanding the business, running around doing ‘stuff’. Mainly because it then takes ‘un-doing’ or ‘re-doing’!
I’ve seen it in partner companies when the expansion has been rapid. Suddenly you are talking to a load of people who know less about their company, its history, products, clients and partners than you do. They don’t understand you or what you do and find comfort in stuff (such as people/technologies/application areas) which they do understand. So there is a subtle change in direction which is not a result of any strategy nor is it intentional. Its just a direct result of new people find their own comfort zones. Lord preserve us!
Moving on ……
In the meantime we have been working to get our Malaysian development and test center established. When I last reported, I noted that we were to fly out to Malaysia for final interviews for the Malaysia Development Team Leader. Well those went well and we have our Malaysia Development Team Leader joining the company on the 25th June. He will be in the UK for a week’s induction/training. We also have recruited a senior developer and are actively recruiting additional developers. The Malaysia office opens on 1st July.
There will be challenges. But with modern collaborative and communications technology (PleaseReview, Instant Messaging, VOIP, email, and the internet) we believe that a seamless working environment is achievable. It’s our intention to have the Malaysians very much as ‘part of the team’ rather than a separate organisation to which we ‘throw projects over the wall’. Watch this space.
Another aspect of the business on which we have been working (or more accurately, fighting the good fight) has been a support system. The requirement started out quite simply. With the rapidly growing customer base, we were constantly providing the same information and knowledge in emails to customers and prospects. The obvious solution is to capture it in a knowledge base so we didn’t have to re-work it every time.
Having taken a look at what was available, we decided that we would look at solutions which provided an integrated knowledge base with support ticket management. Our requirements were simple. We had a few basic functional requirements and needed a system which could expand with us. A brief market search identified what was, apparently, a suitable system so we installed a test copy, gave it a brief test and purchased a license. A month later we threw it out! Lesson learned. This time we approached with caution, refined our requirements (and dropped a couple of the complex ones) undertook more market research. After a couple of trails we finally settled on the open source OTRS.
So far OTRS is working well, we are populating the knowledge base and are introducing customers to the system on an ‘as needed’ basis.
From a product perspective, having released PleaseReview 3.2 in March, we will be releasing v3.3 in mid June. Version 3.3 is known internally as the ‘integration release’ as its primary role is to enhance the integration capabilities of PleaseReview. Whilst we have always had comprehensive APIs, it’s not until people start trying to embed PleaseReview functionality in 3rd party applications that you really spot the holes. The holes have been spotted and duly filled.
We have also undertaken preliminary testing with .NET 2.0. The initial indications are that the port is well worthwhile as the performance can improve as much as 10 fold. Thus the current plan is to have the ‘.NET release’ (v3.4) out towards the Autumn (aka Fall).
On the travel front it’s been a quiet May. However, I’ll next be at the DIA annual Meeting in Atlanta. Perhaps I’ll see you there?
Finally, let me give you an idea of the sort of stuff a company like us faces on a day-to-day basis. We logged a determined hack attack on one of our web facing servers recently. I understand that it was a dictionary attack (probably from a zombie pc). The attack was trying to guess the password at a rate of about five attempts per second. Tim Robinson (our CTO) calmly pointed out to me that “it would still take more than the lifetime of the universe to guess any of our passwords at that rate – an estimated 271,363,820,339,984,102 years”. What he didn’t mention until further questioning was that the attack was on the standard ‘Guest’ account on a Windows server. The Guest account is, of course, disabled.
When I asked the team if posting this information would compromise us in anyway I got two answers. Answer #1 from Jason, who takes the lead in managing the infrastructure, was “nah - perfectly normal stuff” and answer #2 was from Tim who mentioned that the timescale estimate might give away the length of the password – but I think he was joking. Strange sense of humour these techies have :~).
posted by David Cornwell, PleaseTech Ltd at 1:49 PM
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