Business – Page 40 – Paper Street Enterprises

Managing Expectations – Both for yourself and for you partners

Well, if there’s one thing I came to realize during my vacation is that I have a strong tendency toward unrealistic expectations. And I tend to have this problem for both myself and everyone around me. In general, it can be very toxic. Let me explain a little more about my “issue” and I hope you can treat this as a cautionary tale.

For those of you that know me personally, you know that I might be a “tad” on the driven side. I work my ass off night after night for my dream of being able to focus solely on my software business. I love doing it and I also want the ability to work almost exclusively from home so I can see my kids grow up and not be stuck on the road. So, this drives me relentlessly, so that I work from the time the kids go to daycare until they come home. Then as soon as they go to bed until I can no longer think straight, then I repeat this process, day after day. Now, I’m realizing this might be borderline obsessive behavior. Now it’s healthier than booze or gambling… but potentially a problem. However, the real problem I’ve discovered inside of myself is that I expect others to have this attitude. It applies to both my personal and my professional life.

I often expect too much of my wife. I expect her to have the same “motivation” as me, and when she doesn’t, or more to the point, doesn’t live up to my ideals, I get frustrated and withdrawn, and end up working even harder. This isn’t fair to anyone. I build up these expectations in my head, and it causes trouble in my life. Now I’m noticing that I’m doing the same thing in my business life. The really stupid part is that instead of talking about the issue, I just bury it and expect people to get better magically.

I guess realization is the first step to fixing the solutions… step two is learning to express myself better in the first place. So, learn from my mistakes… keep your expectations realistic (for yourself and everyone in your life) and communicate those expectations. Good luck

Marketing – USP Revisited

Well, I’m back into the marketing world with a lot of my time, so bear with me. I’ll get back to SAP again, but if you’ve been reading my stuff, you know that I wear a lot of hats. Well, today I want to talk about the USP or Unique Selling Proposition. Now I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but for everyone else, the USP is what makes you the go to guy or gal. It’s what sets you apart from your competition. It’s what makes you special.

Now you may be asking, “Mike, why do I care about that?”. I know I would’ve been asking the same questions a year ago. The answer is simple. If you want to sell anything, and for you consultants out there this includes selling youself, you need to stand out. Let’s use me as an example. When interview for consulting positions, why should anyone want to hire me more than the other 10 people that applied for the position? It’s simple. I know Variant Configuration, Service Management and ABAP. (SD too, but that one doesn’t stand out as much). I’ve also been doing it for over 15 years. Now, 15 years sounds great, but if you’ve been in the business long enough you’ve met consultants that supposedly have been doing “X” for 20 years, but what they haven’t explained is that they’ve been entering data into the “X” transaction as a user for 18 of those years, and for 2 years they got to play with configuration. So to me, length of time isn’t my USP. I focus on the fact that not only am I functional, but I’m very technical. Again, you ask, “who cares?” aren’t they looking for a BA or a functional consultant? Yes… but in the companies that I’ve worked for, typically the best people can debug ABAP and show the developer exactly what they want fixed. It also instills a different mindset into the consultant. If you know how things work behind the scenes, it makes you more efficient and more creative in your problem solving. hence, why I use the functional and technical aspects of my personality to be my USP.So, ask yourself, what makes you special?

Now, the whole point behind why I’m talking about this is that I just recently read this in my Ultimate Guidebook to Google Adwords. A completely independent source of where I originally heard this stuff. So this tells me that it’s important. When I start seeing the same “big” ideas coming for multiple places, it means that it’s worth looking into.

So if you haven’t already, start spending some time figuring out what makes you stand out from everyone else. Then start formulate it into your own USP. You may never use it to outright, but being able to answer that question in your head gives you a great place to start when someone asks “Why should I hire you?”.

Thanks for reading.

Marketing – Google Adwords some of my initial experiences

Well, I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to start experimenting with Google Adwords. So far, I’ve seen some good and some bad parts of it. Quite frankly, it can be very confusing. So, here’s some of my early experiences with Adwords, and if you happen to have some pointers, please let me know =)

Adwords is very intuitive (for the most part). You start by making an account, then you create a campaign, then you create an ad group, and finally an ad. All and all, it’s very straightforward. Anyone could do this, and start spending money. Now the trick begins to occur in finer points of adwords.

First, the keywords. This is where the first part of confusion comes in for me. Reading the keyword page feels like a foreign language. It has cost per click, but I’ve come to find that it isn’t necessarily true. You can have your ad show up in a lower place, and then you don’t pay as high of a price. Apparently, as your ads improve, you pay less as well. I’m far from experiencing that yet 🙂 Next up, your keywords can have quotes around them “keyword” and that means an exact match only. If you put brackets like [keyword] then it will only return if that exact phrase is encountered (I think) and finally, if you add plus signs +keyword +more, then everything with a plus sign must show up in the search. While it doesn’t sound like rocket science, putting together the right set of keywords seems to be an art form.

Next up, the Ads. Now this is driving me absolutely crazy right now. I have about a dozen ads. all of them include the term SAP, which is a trademarked term. I get this status about it being approved (limited). But for some reason, every new ad I’ve done since then keeps getting rejected because of a trademark term SAP. I’m very confused. I keep trying different variations, but so far, no luck. If you have any suggestions how to overcome this, I’d love to hear it.

Anyway, those are my early experiences… more to come. Thanks for reading.

Business – Losing that Big Quote

Well, don’t let the title fool you, losing is only temporary in my world =) (at least that’s what I’m going to believe). Found out that a big proposal we did a while back didn’t make the cut. So… how do rebound from that? Very easy… at least this is my plan.

1. Get as much information as you can on WHY you weren’t chosen. I’m lucky and I’ve met my contact several times so I’m hoping he can give me some insight as to why we weren’t chosen. There are obviously some possibilities. Were we over priced? would it take too long to deliver? are we missing key functionality they needed? are we just too small, and they didn’t feel we could support them properly? maybe it was all of the above. But first and foremost, getting some clues about why we were not chosen will help guide us in the future.

2. Don’t give up. I’m still looking at this like a “delayed” opportunity. Some clients move quickly, others don’t. If the prospect moves slowly, it means there’s a still a chance to get yourself into position to at least fill some gaps. Our Rapier product is undergoing a major renovation… when all those new pieces are in place, I plan to present them again… maybe we can get a partial deal. Regardless, in this business things change quickly. If I can adapt our products quickly enough, it might get us back in the door.

3. Learn from it. If it’s price, well, I’ll be honest, I don’t plan to compete on price. If it’s functionality, I know I can build it. I just need more time… perhaps more resources. It would mean giving up some of my control issues on our development… but I’m trying to let go… its just that right now, we don’t have the budget to pay for much. All our cash goes to tradeshows and marketing… hard to justify another developer… yet… but everything will get a second a look.

4. Stay positive. I was beaten down this morning when I found out… it was already monday, and I was exhausted from traveling. Finding out the big proposal wasn’t going to happen really was a kick in the teeth. But I started to look for the positives. Still can try for a partial sale, maybe it was too custom to be reused, the prospect moves slowly, which gives us time to adapt… Above all, stick with it. I still believe in my heart we are about to turn the corner on this endeavor. The instant I stop believing that is the instant we fail.

Anyway, like everything, we are constantly learning. So take it from me, inside of every kick in the teeth is the wisdom you need to take that next big step. Ours is coming soon =)

Thanks for reading.

Development – Be Careful when Switching Gears

Today I wanted to talk about a general thing I’ve experienced, and I’m slowly learning from. Switching gears. By that I mean jumping from one project to another. If you’ve checked out the products we’ve designed, you’ll notice that there are some very different items in the list. Some are SM, some are PP, some VC and some even MM and WM. So what? So… it means they are are all radically different from each other (and perhaps I’ve wandered too far away for some of them, in search of more sales). Inevitably, it’ll happen though. Even if you only have 2 different projects you’re working on, you might be asked to jump over to the other project… so, how can you make that as painless and efficient as possible? try this approaches..

My favorite, if you can, finish up what you’re working on. Right now, I’ve been working on a big Web Dynpro addition, but there is interest in one of our MM utilities. These 2 things have nothing in common. So I chose to finish up the piece of the Web Dynpro that I’d been working on for the past 2 weeks. Why? because when you shift gears, you forget what you were doing, you have to spend an hour or so remember where you left off, and what you still wanted to do. If you have the option, get yourself to a good stopping point before you move on. It’ll save you a lot of time (and headaches).

Multi-task when you can. I know this is a little counter-intuitive, but if you can spend even an hour a day on the first project, you’ll keep all your ideas fresh (even things as simple as where to put the breakpoint). This will keep you from forgetting where you left off. Option 1 is still better, but this will help without diverting too much attention away from your new priority.

Take good notes. (often you’ll do this one no matter what). Be sure to not everything you haven’t done yet, maybe little techniques you used that you might forget (I use this blog for that), or even just bullet points of what you were working on, and where to start when you can return to this. It sounds obvious, but I’ve forgotten to do this more than one.

I know, none of this is rocket science, but keep this ideas in mind. We all get pulled away from what we “want” to work on, in order to do what we “have” to work on. So make it as easy as you can to jump right back where you left off. Thanks for reading.

Marketing – Using Linked-In Ads

Well, in my never ending quest to improve my marketing skills, I’ve been trying all sorts of random things. Linked-In ads is one of the pieces that I’ve been trying. I’ve had mixed results using Linked-In ads, so i thought I’d chat a little about them today and give you some pointers.

First off, if you haven’t used Linked-In Ads, it’s another form of pay per click (PPC) that you can use to try to connect to all the people on linked-in. You can find it by going to: www.linkedin.com/ads. Now for me, this is my first foray into PPC. It’s actually pretty simple, but keep in mind that I’m still learning (right now, I’m learning about Google Adwords, so I’m sure I’ll have more pointers on that coming soon. =)

Anyway, start simple, make yourself an account. You connect the linked-in ad account to your linked-in account. From there, create yourself a campaign and list all the groups you’d like to market to. Now, connecting to a lot of groups in Linked-in can be good, or it can be a spam attractor. (As a side note, be sure to watch your email settings for each group you join, or your inbox might end up pretty cluttered). Now for each campaign you can assign how much you’re willing to pay for each click, what groups are assigned to each etc.

Now, the most important part is the ad. The ad gives you the option of a title, a little text, the ability to point to a linked-in page or a website, and even add a logo. You can make a bunch of these ads under a single campaign. Now the real work comes in from making different variations of the same theme over. Make a bunch to figure out what might actually attract someone to click on it. But remember, this is only the click… it still doesn’t mean “interest”. So here’s what you need to think about… you want people to click on your ad, but only if they are really interested. Every click means you have to pay… if you get a lot of people clicking, but no one requesting additional information, you’ve just spent a lot of money for nothing. If no one clicks… well, then it was wasted effort. You’re looking for the sweet spot.

I’ve been doing linked-in ads for around 9 months. Initially, I got no hits for a few months. This is likely for one of 2 reasons. One, every ad must be viewed multiple times before it “generates” interest (got this from marketing books). The other option… my titles just weren’t good enough to generate interest. So, you might need to keep tweaking your titles and text… over and over and over again… Now if you have ads that are working well, but aren’t getting clicks… I’d suggest adding even more detail to the ad… Either way… it’s a lot of trial and error.

If anyone out there has some good advice, I’d love to hear it… I’m learning things slowly… but if anyone can speed up my learning curve, I’d love it…

Thanks for reading,

Project Management – Redesigning your baby

Well, lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on the rework of Rapier. I’m sure you’ve noticed some of my posts in the past. My original baby, Rapier, started as a crazy idea I came up with on a plane ride home from my project in Boston. Rapier started as a BSP application, then when I realized that BSP was a dying technology, I moved to ABAP Web Dynpro. Now, I’m moving to add a ton of new functionality to the application that started it all.

Now, with all of these new ideas, it forces you to revisit what you originally designed, and come at it from a new perspective. While that sounds obvious to any developer, it comes with a price that I’m not sure everyone realizes (I didn’t at the time). When I first converted to Web Dynpro, I left most of the original structure intact, and focused on the web dynpro conversion and understanding that new coding. Now that I’m full blown into version 2 functionality, I’m realizing there are a lot of pieces that could be designed better.

This post is to remind you that a simply adding new functionality comes with a lot of additional work. For example, I’m looking at adding a new product designed around the field service engineer. There is a lot of shared functionality between the 2 products. So that required me to reevaluate all of my tables and classes, so they could easily shared. Suddenly, this meant that all of my tables, classes, etc. needed to be created under a new shared namespace. All of those items then needed to be swapped out of the existing code, etc. Get the picture? simply letting my code be reused, caused a huge chain reaction that took almost a week to reconcile. And all of this wasn’t changing any functionality. Just renaming things.

So, the word of advise for today is to remember that when you redesign, add plenty of time to your schedule. If you choose to do it right, it’s gonna take longer than expected. It’s worth it in the long run, but everything comes with a price.

Happy Independence Day

Just a quick wish to you for a safe and happy fourth of July. I also hope you stop to remember exactly why we celebrate this holiday. Our founding fathers worked very hard to provide us the freedom and liberty they so desperately wanted, yet didn’t have. Now today, every day we lose more of that liberty and more of those freedoms in the name of “security”, “political correctness” or “entitlements”.

Today, remember all the things you love to do and be grateful that a couple hundred years ago, our founding fathers earned that for us. And be vigilant, because Ben Franklin said it best:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”

Variant Configuration – SSC Creating a variant table using variantTable

Well, if you’re anything like me, variant tables are a staple of your model. So, being able to add variant tables into your SSC model is obviously a requirement. While the entry of them is substantially easier then entering them into CU60, it still comes with some hassles, mostly just understanding the syntax. So I thought I’d share the basics with you today on the variantTable statement. First, here’s a sample of a variantTable statement:

variantTable MOTOR_TYPE {
name “Motor Type”
characteristics
RPM_QTY primary,
CYLINDER_QTY primary,
MAX_HP,
rows
“1000”, “2”, “50”;
“2000”, “4”, “100”;
“3000”, “4”, “400”;
}

So, when you see it like this, it’s pretty straightforward.
The characteristics are either key fields (primary is the key word used in SSC) or just straight values. Enter in all the cstics that you need for columns.
The next piece is the rows. You need data in your table. I’ve shown 3 rows, with 3 columns, but obviously, you can do more 🙂 The big thing to notice is that each value has double quotes (“) around it, then you follow it up with a comma (,) to show that you’re moving to the next column, and finally use a semi-colon (;) to show it’s the end of the row.

And that’s all there is to it. The variantTable is extremely handy, and now you know how to enter one into the SSC. Hope it helps you out. In a future post, I’ll talk about using the table in a constraint. Thanks for learning with me =)

Website – Test your contact page

Well, I just learned a valuable lesson (the hard way as always). I recently got a voicemail from a perspective customer trying to get in touch with me. She mentioned that she had sent us an email from the contact page, but I never got it. Needless to say, that was weird… so the first thing I did was go the contact page and send myself a message… strangely enough, it never came through. So I went to the webpage configuration… and found that the email that was set up didn’t exist. UGH!!! so now I sit and question how many leads did I miss out on???

Anyway, learn from me, test all of the methods on your website that can be used to contact you. contact pages, phone numbers, etc…

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