In the first installment, I had mentioned that Gantt charts used to take up an entire wall. That meant that they weren’t mobile, which required team meeting to be planned in the office where the Gantt chart lives. Now, with software solutions, you can take your project’s Gantt chart with you and your team can […]
There are some topics that get all the attention in the trade media. That’s usually because the subject is exciting or novel. Mostly those topics are product-related and form a constellation of gushing puff-pieces when exciting new products are launched. That’s not to say that every article about a new product is exciting. I once […]
One of the regular conversations I have with my clients involves leveraging Customer Relationship Management – CRM – tools to retain and engage their existing customer base in order to keep them coming back to spend money. How exactly that should be done is a lengthy conversation. The fact that it should be done is […]
I got a call from one of my dealers this week. That’s not unusual, someone calls me every day. That’s part of my job. “Lee, I have a problem.” — that was how the call began. What had happened was that he had driven out to a jobsite to install one of our cell boosters […]
There are a lot of ways to close a sale. The shelves of the business section of the bookstore are full of volumes on how to close more deals. Even when you account for the fact that every sales guru who puts up a shingle and starts selling books and seminars gives a different name […]
I’ve talked before about how my inbox is deluged every day with unsolicited product pitches — and most of them are garbage. I’m reminded on a daily basis of two key aphorisms. The first is Sturgeon’s Law: that 80% of everything is crap. The other, courtesy of tech entrepreneur James Altucher, is that “95% of […]
It’s important to be resilient. In this context, that means being prepared for the worst. Everyone knows Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” And there are others like, “The first casualty of every battle is the plan,” or “Every solution has two problems,” and of course, “You don’t need to go […]
I was recently meeting with one of my dealers and he expressed frustration at how may times he has to repeat himself on jobsites when communicating his requirements to trades like the electrician or the HVAC guy in order for them to do the thing he needs them to do, so he is able to […]
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the field troubleshooting systems. These days, as a distributor rep, I’m on the other end of the phone, fielding calls from dealers and helping them troubleshoot installations that use my hardware. Mostly, how I handle those calls is to walk through and confirm what they’ve already done: […]
Whether you’re working on improving yourself personally or professionally, it’s essential to have the ability to be introspective and analytical, in order to identify what you need to work on. That’s also true when you’re coaching others. In that, self-improvement has a lot in common with troubleshooting systems and equipment at work: diagnose, analyze, repair, […]
Some topics, when you review them every couple of years, you come to realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I remember all the prognostication ten years ago about cable cutters and the death of TV. Being me, I always took a more pragmatic, some might even say cynical, view. […]
Spring has sprung where I live, and that signaled the start of Spring Cleaning, both indoors and out. It was after cleaning out the garage and attempting to wash away all the grit from winter that I discovered that the hose bib had frost damage, and leaked into the basement when the tap was turned […]
One of my stock catchphrases when I re-share something on social media that I find odd or surprising is “Well, it turns out that haven’t actually seen everything yet.” That’s how I felt, and in fact keep feeling, when I see frequent mention in my newsfeed of this artist or that either releasing new material […]
Spend any amount of time coaching salespeople and you’ll quickly see commonalities amongst them. These include not only their strengths, but also, and maybe especially, their weaknesses. The most common trait salespeople share is fear of rejection. That’s not unusual. Everybody likes being accepted, few people seek rejection. And it’s a common, easy mistake to […]
It’s a truism that the first casualty of every battle is the plan. One of the realities of building things is that sometimes the plan gets changed. While ideally every eventuality gets considered and decided upon during the design and planning stages, we don’t live in an ideal world we live in this one. Consequently, […]
One of the topics I address regularly in meetings with my dealers is the pace of change, and that there are very few things you can count on to deliver top line and bottom line results long term. In these discussions I point out that the product categories I made a living on in the […]
I can’t think of two separate specialists on the jobsite whose work is more closely linked than the AV pros and the electricians. They’re so closely linked because even for small installations AV pros need to communicate with the electrician to specify locations and load capacity for the outlets that service their equipment. And with […]
Imagine my surprise when I received an email out the blue telling me that Ultraviolet, the movie library service will be ending its operations at the end of July 2019. Honestly, I’d mostly forgotten about Ultraviolet. So, curious after reading the email, I went to the website to learn more. Of course, first I had […]
If you’ve been in sales for a long time, you’ll have read a lot of books and articles on selling. And if you keep track of such things, you’ll notice that the majority of the time, the content focuses on cold calling: How to do it, and how to make it work. Conversely, there’s less […]
One of the most crucial pieces of advice I’ve ever received was, “Don’t decide for the client how much is too much. It’s not your job to say ‘no’ on their behalf.” Put another way, don’t be afraid of overselling the job; be afraid of underselling the job. This is a separate issue entirely from […]
One buzzword/acronym that gets thrown around a lot is CRM, short for customer relationship management. It can be a large, unwieldy concept and what CRM looks like for a business can be a lot like the parable of the five blind people, each trying to describe an elephant, by only touching one part of it. […]
The relationships between the various trades on a jobsite form a complex web of interdependencies. The two that are arguably the closest are the electrician and the AV pro. That makes sense, since on even small AV jobs the AV pro needs to specify locations and load capacities for the electrical outlets required for the […]
As I write this, Black Friday week has come and gone. The balloon has gone up, so to speak, on the holiday selling season. Regardless of which channel you work in and which side of the business you’re on, this time of year impacts you and you need to prepare accordingly. These days, working on […]
One of the joys of the AV business is that as networked-capability increases the performance potential of integrated AV, it also increases the complexity, which means increasing the potential for service issues. “Keep it simple,” is a great mantra to live by, but it only goes so far. However, network-connectivity cuts both ways and while […]
The connected era we live in is pretty amazing. A huge proportion of my job can be done by phone, text, and email. But there’s still replacement for meeting customers in-person. Even video conferencing isn’t quite the same. If you’re a sales rep there are a lot of good reasons to travel your territory and […]
So it turns out that I can still be surprised. That I’m not as jaded and world weary as I thought. That I have not yet seen everything. Long story short, we switched our home internet and TV from Shaw to Telus Optik. That necessitated an installer to come over with a new modem […]
I recently learned that at one of my dealers in small-town rural Alberta one of the two principals retired, selling his half in the business to his partner. Since most of my dealings were with the now-retired principal, and I didn’t know the other all that well, it seemed like a good idea to drive […]
Since I know that I have a reputation for aphorisms, let’s start off with this one: How you do one thing is how you do everything. Best practices are a drum that I beat on a regular basis. But that’s only because they’re important. When discussing anything, it’s often helpful to frame it differently, to […]
As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Gaming now occupies a place in end-users entertainment options that is as mainstream as a cable box. It’s entirely typical now for a media room or theater room install to incorporate at least one gaming console as a source and quite […]
One of the items that popped up in my feed this week was the news that Google no longer requires job candidates to possess a four-year degree. Further discussion among friends and acquaintances in the tech sector pointed out that this isn’t an earth shaking development. It’s been the case for decades that tech companies, […]
It’s not a particularly glamorous topic to write about, let alone read, but anyone whose work falls within the bounds of the construction industry needs to have a grasp of liens and holdbacks, since they affect all parties, including suppliers, subcontractors, general contractors and owners. The definition of a holdback is related to its context, […]
Some people fear change. Some people embrace change. And I suspect that for many of us it’s a mix of both, depending on the circumstances. Despite somehow having earned a reputation as some sort of “tech guy” I can be kind of stodgy. I’m definitely not an Early Adopter. I like to see how things […]
