As if I needed any excuses to take coffee meetings (I don’t), Mark Suster has provided some great ammunition for those not inclined to partake:

I know I’m getting repetitive. It is with great intent. Whatever amount you’re getting out and talking with prospects, customers, employees, recruits, competitors, press, investors, potential investors … it’s never enough. [...]

For almost everybody else I work with I know that a little more dedication to coffee meetings would have a positive impact. Your biz dev discussion that goes nowhere today will plants seeds in somebody’s mind 18 months from now.

Yet most of us resist the coffee meetings seeing them as a distraction from: shipping our release, refining our business plan, working on our new website, etc. You have to do both. Wake up early. Turn coffee into late-night drinks. Never eat lunch alone.

I couldn’t agree more.  Early in my career I didn’t understand the value of eating lunch with colleagues and friends other than as entertainment.  I didn’t understand the value of meeting with people outside my firm.  But I learned. I learned that these incidental, accidental contacts can be very valuable.  So I started behaving in a way that increases the odds of these happy coincidences.  Meeting people for coffee, organizing lunch meetings, meeting with people in various cities when I travel, and making sure I meet with people outside my own business and my own industry. Also, being open to take meetings from people when I don’t see a direct relevance to my business.

On the whole, it has paid off handsomely.  At a minimum, I’ve become much better informed about Austin, about my industry, and about other people’s businesses.  At best, I’ve formed connections that will help BP3 and my own career for years to come.  I’ve certainly managed to hire some fantastic people on the basis of personal and professional connections made over coffee (and lunch).

So get out there and buy some coffee.

(disclosure: the author owns a few coffee-related stocks, and he is definitely talking up his own book! )

Great blog from Adam Deane on “the Go-Live Milestone“:

It’s an important hurdle for the vendor. It’s an important hurdle for the customer.

Attitudes change. Tensions evaporate. Management and end-users are happy. The euphoria kicks in.
Pink tinted glasses get put on again. Life is lovely

“Go Live” is probably the most interesting time in the life of a project.

The future looks bright. People start talking about replicating success, excellence centres, rolling it out to the whole organisation, to their customer’s organisations, to their customer’s customers… world domination.

But for a developer, “Go-live” is just a formal milestone in the project. You get the pat on the back from management, enjoy 5 minutes in the sunshine, and then back to the drawing board.

I think that one of the great failures of many consulting firms and IT groups is that they don’t celebrate enough at go-live.  Although, as Adam puts it, the real milestone for developers is dev-complete-  at BP3 we always reward Go-Live. Because dev-complete isn’t the finish line.  It is close, but it isn’t the finish.  And getting software to production in Fortune 500 companies is hard.  It is worthy of celebration.

Do software developers celebrate finishing a product release?

Do sales people celebrate making the sale?

You bet they do.  It is important to keep this culture of celebrating success in consulting as well.  Don’t let Go-Live just be another day on the calendar.  The team that got you there are your heroes, celebrate accordingly.

We have a process improvement case study.   Someone scheduled our all-hands meeting for BP3 in the midst of a heat wave that has set records all year long in Austin, TX.

A quick analysis was performed – corrections for the next process run were clear – schedule later in the year (October), pick a different location (Minnesota for example).  But the real question is how to fix the immediate process failure.  Sure the meeting itself was in the air conditioned confines of the fabulous Stephen F. Austin… but outside was an oven.

Not to worry.  Process improvement yielded a sure-fire way to cool down, with a low probability of failure:

Sure, not everyone jumped in the lake, but many of us embraced this process improvement with gusto, as you can see.

If the lake didn’t work, we could call in reinforcements.

I’ve said it often, but the people in your business – and on your projects – matter.  Doug Turner writes on his blog, with a slight twist to an old time-management proverb:

Well the issue of throwing more people at a solution and not getting to it any faster still exists, but now we have a new problem. Not only are we attempting to solve a problem by just throwing resources at it, we’re not even throwing the right resources at it for it to get accomplished at all. If you don’t begin with the right team, you’re not going to get the results you were hoping to get, no matter how positive your outlook, or how insistently you promised your superiors the job would get done.

My favorite passage, however:

With knowledge work especially, it’s the people and team you assemble that are going to make or break your solution. It’s not how much money can you, or can’t you, spend. It’s not how much time you do, or do not, have. It’s the people & their skillset that are going to help you to succeed. This is key to being successful.

You could just swap out “knowledge work” with BPM.  Doug’s blog ties back to a point I’ve made time and again with customers and colleagues, and on this blog:  an hour of labor is an input, not an output.  The hour of labor of the “right person” for a project is valuable and highly leveraged.  The hour of labor of the wrong person for a project is no better than no hour of labor at all.

It isn’t just an issue of trying to cram too much work into too short a time – if you have the wrong people, sometimes it just can’t get done.  And this is why it is so important for BP3 to build the best team we possibly can.

We love our office space in Austin so much, that we have committed to twice as much of it.  The Austin Business Journal covered the news, which is gratifying:

The professional services firm, founded in 2007, said the added space will make room for its five new employees. BP3 will lease another 1,437 square feet adjacent to its existing 1,800-square-foot office at 7000 N. Mopac. The expansion will open Sept. 1.

We’ll be adding more people to our team before end of year, but hopefully this new space will hold us over for years to come. The building is in a fantastic location, and we love the open layout.

So we just completed our first company all-hands meeting.  Previously, the closest we’ve come was having our two co-founders meet for coffee on Sundays, and the near unanimous attendance we had at bpmCamp 2010 at Stanford University.  The short version of how I feel about this: why didn’t we do this sooner?!

We included all the crucial elements of a good company meeting:

1. Food.  We ate our way through some of Austin’s best restaurants.
2. Fun.  We carved out time for getting out on a boat on the lake the last afternoon.  But we also made time for checking out the local Austin bands playing on 6th street (a shout out to Empty-Handed Vagabonds and to the lead singer of Dysfunkshun Junkshun).
3. Location.  We held our meetings at the historic Stephen F Austin hotel.  The second floor balcony is a fantastic way to unwind and socialize after a day of business meetings, and the hotel itself oozes character and history. Often people ignore the setting of their meetings-  but this stuff matters!  The space you meet in affects how you think, how focused you are, how intimate the meeting feels.
4. Content. Sure, we reviewed important company metrics and business goals. But we also put a lot of content together individually to give everyone a chance to hear what  everyone else was up to.  I was really impressed with the quality of thought and content that was presented – and more impressed by the discussion that followed.  I learned a lot over the two days we met – about our team as well as about the topics they discussed.
5. Team.  Because we have a distributed organization, we have limited opportunities to gather in one place.  This is a really special team we’ve put together, and getting everyone in one place just made it more obvious how good they are.
6. Surprise.  We also had a surprise guest-appearance from Phil Gilbert, VP of BPM at IBM.  The Q&A session was memorable, as his take on the BPM space.
7. Shirts.  You’ve got to have shirts at a company meeting.  We rolled out fresh polo shirts and a surprise t-shirt addition to the lineup.

Often people will ask me why they should join up with BP3 instead of contracting – or why someone else would join up instead of contracting.  I guess if you don’t try it out, it is hard to understand the difference – but this sense of team, of building something bigger than any of us can do alone – it is very powerful.  I think everyone in attendance could feel how special this was.  You just don’t get that kind of validation and gratification as a solo artist.   You don’t get this sense of family.

So we’re building a company.  And investments like this are required to reinvest in community and team.  To say thank you.  And to give everyone a sense of the possible.  Our company meeting just made it clear to our team (and to me) why we’re special.   Thanks to everyone on the team!

I have been informed that “BP3 All Hands Meeting” as an operating name lacks a certain “flair”.  We’ll work on  branding for our event.  We might just call it “Getting the Band Back Together“.

Really insightful comments from Jack Dorsey on being “CEO”. Mirroring Steve Jobs’ notion that focus is about saying “no”, Jack talks about editing:

We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go – all these things that we could do – but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.

We’re often asked at BP3 why we don’t do X, or Y, or Z.  (Insert your own favorite ideas)

Before we offer any new service, offering, toolkit, or product, we take a long look at whether that is in-line with what we want BP3 to be when we grow up.  If you diffuse the focus too soon, you lose traction in your core market.  We think we have a lot of ground to cover doing what we’re doing before we need to branch out – but we have one or two innovations in our offering that we’re going to keep investing in. When you work with software vendors with as broad an offering as IBM has, it is tempting to widen your reach – and it becomes even more important to edit your service offering, to focus on your core competencies.

When we edit at BP3, process is our filter.

Steve Golab of FG Squared writes in the Austin Business Journal:

I hate to break it to you. The phrase “thought leadership” has jumped the shark. A social media Web tsunami has spun out over the past decade and made it easier for everybody to claim an area of thought leadership.

Maybe thought leadership is overused. But so is “jumped the shark”.  Steve’s premise is that people who are really good at what they do spend more time doing and less time talking about what they’re doing.  He has a point:

Coming up with brilliant ideas, launching innovative products, developing great new approaches to problems is indeed thought leadership. Combining your assets together in a different way to create new value is indeed thought leadership.

Merely talking about your ideas — typically reinforced by speaking at events or getting coverage in the press — is not.

Inside your organization, communication and leadership can be done while doing – in other words, you can lead by example.  And people in your organization will be aware of it, and they’ll talk to you and understand your way of thinking.  If you’re a “thought leader” they’re going to be influenced by your thinking.

But if you want to influence people outside your organization you have to transition to writing or social media that can reach people outside your organization.  I think the point Steve is missing is that to be a “thought leader” you need to excel at both doing and communicating.  All the brilliant ideas in your head don’t lead and don’t communicate by themselves.  On the other hand, pure communication skills alone won’t cut it.  You have to be deep in your area of expertise.

Adam Deane’s blog post put me in a commenting mood, but I thought I’d share on our own blog as well.  Apologies for muddling the terms Adam used – I used “independent” to reference an individual contractor, and “pureplay BPM” to represent a vendor focused only on BPM services.  He does a great job of calling out the challenges and pros cons of different types of consultants, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t write an essay-length comment in response… content follows:

Interesting post. I’ve put my thoughts on this subject together previously here:
http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2010/03/why-we-need-pure-play-bpm-consulting-firms/

The problem with one-man-band – if you find a great one, they’re a big help to a project and bring specialization to the table. But they’re not a team. They don’t have other experts with a range of skills to fall back on. When they get out in the deep end, they’re (usually) on their own. Yes there are google groups and wikis and the like – but there’s no one else in the boat with them. The problem for the consultants themselves is that they have to be working and selling at the same time. And if they sell work, but the timing doesn’t work for their current project, they have conflicts. And if they wait to sell until the previous project is finished they can end up with significant bench time. Added to that, they often get held over the barrel on rates because customers assume they can’t afford to sit out the market and wait for a better deal.

Vendor-consultancies, when done right, are a big value-add to the ecosystem. They do have an inherent conflict, in that they can’t really blame a product short-coming for their having to do extra work on a project. Often, when there is a product shortcoming, they’re asked to do work gratis to make up for it. The temptation to “camp out” is much less when the vendor is small – the vendor wants those consultants freed up to redeploy at new-sales customers. So actually the problem is the opposite- the problem is trying to retain consultants long enough on your project to make a difference.

Independent consultants- I call them pure play BPM consultancies – are actually more valuable in the implementation phase than the selection phase. Too many independents will suddenly fail to have an opinion about the “right answer” during an eval – they want to be part of the implementation regardless of what product is selected. I’ve always thought that that was a bit of a cop-out. You need to form an opinion during the eval and present your findings and opinion and why. Otherwise, what is the customer paying you for?

Also, a good pureplay consultancy will have a better balance between the twin evils of running away too soon and staying too long. Why? Because their mission in life isn’t to sell more customers, it is to sell more value. More value to one customer is easier than more value to 1000 customers. or 10. But also, they’re not likely to be big enough to back up a bus and unload 100+ consultants at your door. And because their exposure is smaller, it is easier for them to walk away and go to another customer opportunity when the time is right for the current customer – without laying off the team or having them sit on the bench for months, as might happen at a really large firm.

I don’t see the trend toward more independent consultancies however – at least, as related to credit crunch – the credit crunch simply isn’t easing for small businesses. At all. They want 3 years of history. But also, there are really good job opportunities for these folks – they can capture much of the value of being independent with much less risk. And, if they join a small consultancy (like, say, BP3), they have a chance to build something bigger than themselves – contribute to a team and a mission.

There may be a trend toward more independent consultancies, but I think the causes are independent of credit.

For what its worth, I hope my comments don’t come across as knocking vendor consultants nor independents. I’m just aware of the shortcomings (and strengths) of both situations, having done both myself  Now, as part of an “pure BPM consultancy” I feel good about the tradeoffs we’ve made and the kind of company we are. But so much of “what is right” for a consultant depends on their own individual situation – and I’ve seen dramatic exceptions to the downsides I’ve mentioned (people who get great rates, and have a “team” of supporters despite not having a literal team, etc.). I’ve also seen vendor consultants do a great job (as Chris Sanchez says – the mission is successful product launch for the customer – that’s not a bad mission! )

In fact, I think there’s a very symbiotic relationship between the three “outside” consulting groups we’ve been talking the most about- individual contractors, vendor consultants, and pureplay consultancies. individuals can augment the skills or geographic coverage of the other two organizations, and tend to be people with a lot of industry experience. Vendors are very focused on that initial successful deploy – but paired up with a pureplay consultancy that is more long-term focused, you often get a good blend, presuming their is a good working relationship.

Sanooj brings up a great point about “internal” consultants. I haven’t played that role personally, so I’m less qualified to comment. But I think it has its own challenges  I do know that when we’ve been able to partner with a good internal consultant, we often get very good results.

Steve Blank’s process for teaching entrepreneurship – The Lean Launchpad – is a bit like the process for teaching the startup process.  It is a fascinating evolution to observe as it develops; and the results are impressive.

I recommend reading the whole series of posts, but if you are the kind of person that reads the last chapter first, or likes to eat dessert before the entree, then have at it.

So what is this Lean Launchpad class in his words?

Business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, existing product and existing customers, but in a startup all of these elements are unknown and the process of discovering them is filled with rapidly changing assumptions. Experienced entrepreneurs realize that no business plan survives first contact with customers. So our goal was to teach something actually useful in the lives of founders.

Building a product is a critical part of a startup, but just implementing build, measure, learn without a framework to understand customers, channel, pricing, etc. is just another engineering process, not building a business. In the real world a startup is about the search for a business model or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model. Therefore we developed a class to teach students how to think about all the parts of building a business, not just the product.

Clearly the use of the business model canvas to capture assumptions and iterate over them is a big step forward compared to previous approaches (not that that was the only innovation).  We’ve used the business model canvas at BP3 to explain our business model, and we’ll likely use some of these techniques to tweak our business model in the future.

One of the key learnings:

3.  The process worked for all types of startups – not just web software but from a diverse set of industries – wind turbines, autonomous vehicles and medical devices.

I thought that was pretty telling.  A good process for a startup should work for more than just web software startups.

If you think you’re doing something that is just too damn creative for a process, read Steve Blank’s blog on startups.  The process may not be tightly bound or automated, and doesn’t need to be.  But there *is* a method to the madness and it can be repeated However, the outcome isn’t guaranteed to be successful – it is a startup after all.  Part of me wonders if the BPM community would be willing to accept that idea of following the process but still having an indeterminate outcome… interesting discussion to have!

Marco Arment is the creator of Instapaper, a great reading app for webpages, blogs, etc. that you want to cache for reading later on your iPhone, iPad, or browser of choice.

He recently announced an “extended vacation” for his free app:

Maintaining a second configuration of the app incurs direct, significant costs in development and support. Furthermore, the Instapaper web service that powers the app costs a good amount of money and time to operate every month. So Free users have a direct cost to me.

On the website, this cost is defrayed by ads from The Deck, but people using the iOS app might never visit the website. So Instapaper Free has an ad from The Deck in its list screen. It’s unintrusive, its advertisers are respectable, and it pays well. It’s the best ad unit I could ask for.

But it still makes far less than paid-app sales — the increase in app sales with Free’s absence exceeds this many times over. The math to explain this is simple: most Free users won’t give me anywhere near $3.50 worth of ad impressions.

Essentially, conversion rates from free to paid were low.  But without the free option, many would pay that relatively harmless cost of $4.99 – because the app has that much value to a significant number of people (including me).

I love the way he sums this up:

If you’re a developer, you’re probably talking yourself out of making a move like this because you think Instapaper is a special case.

Every app is a special case.

Maybe you think I can only do this because Instapaper is already popular. But it built its popularity while charging “a lot” for an iPhone app from the start.

Maybe you think I can only do this because my blog is moderately popular among geeks like me. If so, I assure you that my blog’s audience is smaller than you think, and is extremely insignificant relative to the size of the iOS app market.

Maybe you think there aren’t enough people willing to pay $5 for an app with no free version. I used to think that, too. But I was wrong.

The short version: don’t assume free is the only way.  People will pay for quality, and getting paid allows you to invest in quality… and the virtuous cycle ensues.

If you’re in a business other than writing apps for smartphones… you might be convincing yourself right now that you’re case is different, your market is different.  But you have only to look as far as Ning to see that sometimes charging for your service, site, or product is exactly what you need to do to focus the business and make money.

Marco Arment’s Instapaper could come under the Apple’s guns in the next version of Safari, which purportedly will offer a “Reading List” feature.

Marco (rightly) concludes there isn’t much to worry about.  First, what is an instapaper competitor?

• Saving articles to read later — timeshifting — like a DVR for the web.
• Synchronizing the reading list between computers and mobile devices.
• Presenting the articles in a stripped-down text format on those mobile devices for optimal reading on their screens.

If another product doesn’t implement all three, it’s not really an Instapaper competitor.

His take is that the first version is likely to implement bullet 1, and maybe bullet 3.  Perhaps the next version will be an Instapaper competitor.  As he says, Safari already has too much going on in its UI, and Apple tends to be conservative about making changes to it.  But what if Apple *does* build this Instapaper competitor?

Marco has spent time building his defenses:

• Supporting other browsers (on other platforms).  Safari features really won’t play in audiences that prefer to use Firefox or IE or Chrome (especially on non-Mac systems).
• Integration with other apps – this is analogous to putting down roots in the space that other apps can take advantage of, but which feed back into keeping Instapaper alive and relevant.

He also understands that he doesn’t need to win the market to make a fortune (he estimates 1% would be a fortune).

When you’re in this situation, you’re really rooting for more visibility.  A small market-capture or increase in publicity and attention can have a big effect on your revenues and fortunes.  It sounds a lot like the BPM world, actually.  A rising tide…

His next point is about Starbucks – the number of coffee shops has increased dramatically since Starbucks came along – and although they place their stores aggressively near other coffee shops – the *good* coffee shops actually do even better.  The less-good shops tend to go out of business or change their business model.

Marco’s words:

My biggest challenge isn’t winning over converts from my competitors: it’s explaining what Instapaper does and convincing people that they actually need it. Once they “get it”, they love it, but explaining its value in one quick, easy-to-understand, general-audience sentence is more difficult than you might imagine.

If Apple gets a bunch of Safari users — the browser that works best with Instapaper — to get into a “read later” workflow and see the value in such features, those users are prime potential Instapaper customers. And it gives me an easier way to explain it to them: “It’s like Safari’s Reading List, but better, in these ways.”

This is exactly the problem the BPM vendors have had-  it wasn’t beating the competitors so much as it was explaining what BPM can do for you and convincing people that they need this BPM thing.  This is not a zero sum game when the market is a long way from being saturated. And in that respect, the BPM market and the “Instapaper” market are very similar.

And this explains a lot about why BP3 works well with partners that outsiders would probably look at as competitors.  Philosophically, we believe we’re growing the pie rather than competing over how big each slice is.

As a business, it is important to establish good habits.  And of course habit #1 is making enough money to keep the business alive.  An article titled “The Audacity of Getting Paid” really hits the mark.  The author uses Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr as cautionary tales:

I’ve been a member of the above three services for a combined total of 13.5 years, and have watched all three grow from small services in a corner of the internet to the front-page, well-known brands that they are today. All three have made the same tragic mistake: at no point did they say, “hey, we’ll give you (more features, fewer ads, faster service) if you give us some cash.” I would have (and still would) willingly paid a substantial sum to each.

And although the author uses those three companies, and others are likely to point mainly to Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 style companies, this logic applies equally well to companies in services businesses.  The main difference is that the services businesses aren’t likely to have a trove of VC cash – so they’re likely to close shop quickly if they aren’t priced right, unless the service business is a secondary source of family income.

He concludes:

First, making money is easy: you must have the sheer audacity to charge for a product. Pinboard.in turned profitable in week one. Minecraft’s early sales helped bootstrap its development, and the developer has staffed up and found office space in the past six months to work on new features and new games.
…

The third lesson is for you, the user: if you use a product and don’t pay for it, you’re living on borrowed time.

I think this falls under the general heading: if it seems to good to be true, it probably is.  If you’re getting something for nothing, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.  If you’re getting a price that is too good to believe (especially for allegedly experienced or specialty-skilled resources) – then it probably is too good to be true.  But collectively we suspend our disbelief all the time (and then act shocked when we get a surprise down the road).

Joel Spolsky:

There’s a lot of stuff that’s accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange, but lunch is not one of them. Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.

Lunch is often wasted eating alone at your desk.  Get out there and eat with your colleagues and friends, and build the working (and personal) relationships that will enrich your life and work.  If I can’t have lunch with coworkers I meet up with old co-workers or friends to catch up on their lives.  It is a great opportunity for personal connection.

(Note: I recommend BBQ or TexMex)

If there weren’t already lots of reasons to like Mark Suster’s Blog, I have to admit, this article (“What Should You Do With Your Crappy Little Services Business?”) gives me another great one:

There’s a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry (and subsequently Wall Street) who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses.

It’s nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs. You’re a small fish.

So pervasive has this thinking become that on several occasions startup companies with profitable & fast growing tech services businesses have come to me wanting to change their companies to product businesses or to create “spin outs.”

I’ve seen that happen a few times as well.  In fact, Giff Constable had a great article about it.  We’ve even written a few ourselves.  Mark hits on pretty much all the points I would have made about a services business.  It isn’t just that services businesses are small fish – it is also that they generally can be self-financed.  The result is that the services business owners aren’t willing to part with equity cheaply, and at the same time, the VCs would likely want *more* equity in exchange for their cash because they’re not expecting the expansion to be as rapid if the service is a hit. And as Mark points out – at that point you have to swing for the fences, no more singles and doubles.

The biggest challenge in building a services business (truly growing it, versus just being an independent contractor) is financing.  His #4 financing option is bank financing – specifically he mentions Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Square1 Bank.  These are both fine institutions and if you can get financing from them, so much the better.  But if you need a line of credit or loan of less than $500k to $1M, you’re unlikely to get their attention.  That means you need to have a certain scale before you even try to work with those banks.  Surprisingly, we found large multinational banks to be more willing to finance our activities than these alleged startup-friendly banks.

Mark also has good advice for what to do with the product business within your services company:

• Use the products as a service sales machine – essentially a loss- or break-even instrument to get more services sold in or support contracts.
• Use the products as a key differentiator to win new business over other service providers.  The products could make you more efficient (allowing for lower bids for the same work), or allow you to more clearly tackle intractable problems.
• Use the products as a margin bump – allowing you to stay above “commodity” in the long run.

I’d add another:

• Use product as a badge of credibility in your market niche.  Much like writing a book or whitepaper or blog enhances your credibility (assuming they’re well-received).

Kudos to Mark for writing on this subject.

Because the founders give up.  Jason Cohen has written a great piece regarding the #1 reason that startups fail.  The founders give up and pack it in.  This isn’t quitting, to me – sometimes there are good reasons to quit your startup:

• Financial obligations are real – if the startup isn’t producing the income you need to live, you have to find other sources of income (aka a Job)
• Startups can be hard on family life – the work life balance isn’t…balanced… Sometimes people have to choose family or business – can you blame anyone for choosing family?
• A better startup idea/opportunity comes along – this might mean your startup pivots or it might mean a completely new business.

Jason relates a tale of how, even 4 years into a startup, the founder(s) can still be slugging it out with purchasing managers or trying to just get paid a reasonable (or regular) salary – all while paying employees and trying to retain them.  It’s tough to get the emotional energy up to keep everyone else motivated when you’re personally feeling defeated.

Although BP3 is not the traditional notion of “startup” – we’re primarily a consulting company – if your goal is to grow your business you will face all of these same issues no matter what the business is.  We’ve been through those lows – and I’ve always been thankful to have a co-founder in Lance, to lean on – but beyond that, to have a team to lean on that I can trust.  Jason’s cautionary tale of his conversations with a purchasing manager are… highly relate-able, let’s just say:

It’s about sticking through the tough parts, whatever your personal foibles or weaknesses.

Living through it, not beating it. I never have, to this day, “beaten” that PM, not emotionally, not if I’m being truly honest.

I’m not saying tenacity is all it takes. Just that without it, you’ll stop. It’s so easy to stop. There’s so many reasons to stop.

Jason persevered and succeeded – even though he never felt like he “won” the encounter with the purchasing manager.  I’ll just say this: Courage is not lack of fear.  Courage is doing what you know is right, even when you fear the outcome.  Courage is doing what you know is right, even when it may not be in your own best interests.  In business, this translates to running your business with integrity even when you fear that it may cost you business, or the opportunity to grow.  Risking the business outcome to know that you’re “living within your means” in an emotional, business ethics sense.  A good co-founder and good partners will help you remember that yardstick when you need reinforcement.

Getting through these tough troughs in a startup isn’t easy.  But it does make you appreciate the rewards on the other side even more.

Elliot Loh’s recent post “Management Begins at the Interview” (that link isn’t working, but this link takes you to the right page of his blog, it is the second post ) proposes that a co-founder be in every candidate’s interview process – to drive absorption of culture, mission, and philosophy of approach.  By doing this in the interview process, you achieve a few things:

1. You get their undivided attention
2. If they reject your thesis – your corporate culture and approach – they have enough information to get out before they get hired.  Help them self-select.
3. Equally, in a small company it is good for new hires to know the founder(s) are signing off on their hire.
4. Finally, it is important to have at least one consistent interview across as many candidates as possible.  It makes it easier to benchmark and pattern match good hires versus red or yellow flags that need to be explored.

Essentially, the interview is the tip of the spear for creating the kind of company you want to be a part of.  In a previous life, Elliot and I worked for a company that was maniacal about recruiting and recruiting process (and resulted in the start-up, CollegeHire, in which Elliot was a key influencer).  Where else could you do a couple hundred college graduate interviews every year, and still make time for the day job?

It was interesting to read his post and see some of the same takeaways that I have from that early experience.  At Tribe, Geni, and Yammer, it sounds like Elliot had ample opportunity to apply that philosophy.  Similarly, I had good opportunity to shape recruiting practices at Lombardi while I was there, building the technical services team from the ground up.

And now that I’m at bp3, we may not be hiring as aggressively as a venture-funded outfit would, but that just means we have all the more pressure to get it right when we make a hire.  And one thing I’ve learned: culture matters more than ability in the long run.  Some would argue the opposite.  But I can tell you – I can always find another person with the right abilities (or capabilities).  So I’ll take the one I can find that also has the right culture fit.  We tend to hire more experienced industry veterans at bp3, and so we don’t kid ourselves that we are going to remake an veteran’s work-life philosophy overnight.  We need to find people who are already in rough alignment.

One thing is for sure:  hiring great people is one of the most gratifying things you can do as a business owner.  Seeing them happy years into the job, that’s even more gratifying.

We’ve commented before on the economy, and hiring, and jobs.  As a small business, these are topics very near and dear to our hearts.  I’ve been waiting for the optimism that we feel, and that I see in Austin, TX, to start showing up in statistics.  Finally, it seems it might be.  ADP’s latest report showed and increase of 217,000 jobs in February (the largest increase since November 2006!). Small companies accounted for all but 13,000 of this increase.

We did our part – hiring 2 more seasoned BPM veterans in February.  We still see more opportunity out the front window than we do in the rear view mirror.  BPM in general is still growing.  The software platforms we know best have a lot of market momentum.  We’re bullish on 2011, and on the long-term prospects of business process management and our consulting practice.

To put it in perspective, at some point this year, we’ll have a team 3x the size that we started with in 2010.  And we’re seeing other small businesses – often in service industries0 – picking up  hiring activity as well.  And the market for software developers in Austin has markedly improved.  Hopefully this is the beginning of a long, steady recovery.

Think we’re the exception to the rule?  Check out the results of the Austin Technology Incubator’s survey of technology companies in Austin.  81% are increasing staff.  34% of all respondents are increasing staff by more than 10%.  Only 5% of respondents are decreasing staff.  Key findings:

• 33% launched their company in the last five years. The median year founded was 2001.
• Approximately half (55%) were headquartered in Austin.
• 4 out of 5 were privately owned.
• 37% earned more than $10M.
• Software companies represented approximately a quarter of the respondents.
• 21% employed more than 100 people. 45% employed between 1 and 10 people in the Austin area.
• In 2010, 53% increased their headcount, 32% didn’t make any changes and 15% decreased their headcount

With spring already here, and SXSW starting tomorrow (unofficial events starting tonight), optimism is the word for the day in Austin.

So, not the most stunning headline.. but Forrester predicts that IT will continue to deploy business process capabilities…

Author Alexander Peters points out two formal processes IT will need to implement, in addition to COEs in the near future, to be successful:

I believe that IT organizations that want to sustainably contribute to enterprisewide business process optimizations need to implement two formal processes, in addition to deploying COEs:

1. BT governance, which ensures that business process executives, not IT, ultimately decide how to prioritize the development and use of BT services across lines of business.
2. BT demand management, which architects and monitors the enterprise portfolio of BT services and provides recommendations on how to optimize its performance.

I’d add a third “activity” to the mix:  BT consulting services.  Too many IT departments prefer to act as order-takers, or don’t see their mission as including advising the business.  But experience tells us that large businesses with rich IT heritage need the IT groups to consult to them.  Why?  Because IT personnel generally know the business logic that is hard-coded in software applications (or, hopefully, configured or encoded in rules systems).  IT personnel are generally more knowledgeable about the capabilities of the software that is in use to support various business initiatives.  IT has a real information advantage over “Business” in many corporations.

This information advantage can be leveraged to the benefit of the business as a whole if wielded properly.  Just as outside consultants can really help a business understand how to take advantage of new software packages (or deep capabilities of more established products, such as RDBMSes), IT personnel can better explain how to take advantage of long-running systems.

When you combine the pace of change in business, with the pace of change in software capabilities, with the pace of adoption of social technologies… Access to the IT experts is likely to increase.  The opportunity for IT to leverage their deep knowledge of systems and process is one of the best opportunities IT has to add value to their business.
It is also one of the likely greatest missed opportunities.

In a quick flurry of list-updating, the Process Cafe (aka Gary Comerford) has published a new “BPM Blacklist” of BPM bloggers and twitterers that he considers most-worthy of following (the top 10, as he puts it):

To qualify for the BPM Blacklist a blogger has to meet the following criteria:

1. Blog regularly on the topic of BPM, BI or BPMN
2. Produce good quality, informative posts
3. Tweet, be tweeted or retweeted regularly.
4. Has to be someone I read and follow

Criteria 1 and 3 are along a continuum. If someone hasn’t posted for a while but has been regularly tweeting good content then I can cut them some slack. Similarly if they blog a lot but don’t tweet regularly.

Of the available bloggers who meet this criteria I have then selected my top ten. This may not equate to your top ten.

His list includes some of the blogs I particularly like to read (Bruce, Adam, Sandy, the Ninja, Keith, and Max).

Marco Brambilla has published a somewhat longer list that I like better.  Maybe because our blog is listed in his results (!)….  Unless I missed it, they’re both missing Anatoly’s excellent blog, as well as John Reynolds’ more occasional posts on his Thoughtful Programmer blog (admittedly, he has a wider range of topics as well).  Perhaps we can get Jaisundar to post more on his Bouncing Thoughts blog.