Talking vs. Doing: Business and the Ibis Ripley Suspension Design

 Bikes, Swine  Comments Off on Talking vs. Doing: Business and the Ibis Ripley Suspension Design
Dec 142011
 

Maybe it’s information overload or just the campaign season blues, but lately I seem even more sensitive than usual to the constant presence of bullshit. Certainly the world of business seems carved from a solid block of it these days. Examples of “synergizing your dynamism” are everywhere, but it really pisses me off to be reading an otherwise good article only to see if slowly devolving into random spew.

A key aspect of LinkedIn seems to be keeping us all connected, not only to each other, but also to a steady parade of articles with interesting-looking titles that often have little or no value. Consider this otherwise interesting article “Five New Management Metrics You Need to Know” LinkedIn directed me to at Forbes. Overall, there’s some kernel of value in an article about more practical ways to monitor business health and performance, outside of just reviewing sales numbers, but this train comes off the track more than once. Written by Greylock Partners venture firm guy James Slavet, whose firm invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Pandora, it becomes pretty obvious just how disconnected some of these people are from the daily functions of actual small business in America. Some of the article seems so rooted in bean bag chair Silicon Valley work-play as to be nonsensical to even the most ephemeral of businesses models–like “Metric 3: Meeting Promoter Score,” the idea that meetings should be evaluated to determine if they’re effective and worthwhile or not.

Most meetings suck. And they’re expensive: a one-hour meeting of six software engineers costs $1,000 at least. People who don’t have the authority to buy paperclips are allowed to call meetings every day that cost far more than that. Nobody tracks whether meetings are useful, or how they could get better. And all you have to do is ask.”

Gee, really? I guess my open mic meeting policy, where anyone could come in off the street and gather my key staff to talk about Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs wasn’t the right way to do it. Thanks for clearing that up.

Certainly there are businesses in the world that allow idiots to call meetings that go nowhere, but do you really need to fill out a questionnaire afterward for management to realize the meeting was useless? If so, then this amazing common sense insight will be discarded anyway, because the manager is the idiot calling the unproductive meetings.

Then there’s this insightful observation about criticism and reward, or something, explained with a highly insightful analogy to marriage,

You can learn as much from John Gottman as you can from John F. Kennedy about being a great communicator. Gottman, a psychologist, is the author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”.

In his research, he found that marriages that succeed tend to have five times as many positive interactions as negative ones. And when a couple falls below that ratio, their relationship falls down too.

The same is true at the office, where you’re often connected for years in relationships with people who can either become wary of your criticisms or eager to give you their best effort. Catch people doing good things. Never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly. Then when you have feedback on areas to improve, they‘ll really listen. It may be hard to manage to the 5:1 ratio at the office, but you should be mindful of the balance.”

First, having not read John Gottman, I have to hope he was somehow taken out of context here, though it’s hard to imagine how. So marriage partners who have more positive interactions tend to have better marriages? That’s some profound shit. Someone needs to tell the couples on the television show “Cops” that their marriages are in jeopardy.

And you’re supposed to “never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly.” Clearly someone needs to introduce Mr. Slavet to the term “patronizing,” which could have saved him a half dozen words, at least, thus increasing his productivity. Obviously, he’s not suggested being disingenuous, but glib shit like this dances over the actual work of management, which involves reading people and interacting with them honestly. This suggests a kind of golden mean ratio of compliments to criticisms, and adhering to that strictly would be as bad as administering only compliments or only criticism.

I made plenty of management mistakes running my own business, but if there’s one thing I did very right it was cultivate fierce loyalty, and I didn’t do it by telling people their hair looked nice.

In other business news more related to “doing” than “talking,” I think everyone who rides a mountain bike should try to design a bicycle suspension system. For one thing, you’ve probably done some bad things in your life, and this is one of the interesting methods of punishing yourself for past transgressions. That time you made fun of some other frame’s under-the-downtube water bottle position, or slightly high bottom bracket height? Trying to make your own will definitely pay you back for that.

Given that I geek out on other designs even more than usual right now, I love that Ibis has posted photos and some text about the development of the upcoming Ripley 29er frame. What’s profoundly depressing for me in studying what Ibis did isn’t just how amazing their design aesthetic or business seems to be (though they’re all ‘o that), but rather this unsettling notion: I would have kept refining it.

What the hell is wrong with me? Well, it isn’t the eccentric pivots that bother me–they aren’t that surprising to see more than one company now using, even though it’s tough to know what long term durability is going to be like. It’s the clevis, the structure that bolts directly to the shock and pivots off of the swingarm.

I love everything about the Ripley, and I love how Ibis sells and markets their products (they’re about as close to a micro-version of Apple as we get in the bike business), but even great marketing can’t take my eyes off the additional pivots on this frame. Sure, they’re not that big a deal, but why did you go to eccentrics if it tightened up your swingarm movement so much that you had to punt by delinking the shock? It seems even to go against Ibisinian design principles that have always embraced a “simplest design is probably the best” kind of aesthetic to introduce additional moving parts that have to be maintained. And it seems like an afterthought, which is weird. Ibis being Ibis and Dave Weagle being one of the only real thinkers in the entire bike business, they made great lemonade with that clevis by changing how it connects to the shock, which is great, but ask yourself how silly that piece would have looked if they hadn’t done that? You’d just be asking yourself, “Why didn’t they connect the shock directly to the swingarm?” I suspect they didn’t do that because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to, and that’s the only thing that bugs me about an otherwise amazing looking new frame.

Now somebody just needs to ride one.

The Bike Shop vs. Groupon

 Bikes, Swine  Comments Off on The Bike Shop vs. Groupon
Sep 022011
 

“Though rubber-banding a photograph to a roly-poly super ball increases its utility, its picture quality plummets after playing just a few rounds of fetch. Put a photo in a durable place with today’s Groupon: for $45, you get one 16″x20″ thick (1.5″) gallery-wrapped canvas from Canvas on Demand (a $126.95 value).”

That’s the text of a Groupon promotion I just received. If you somehow haven’t heard of them, Groupon is the daily deals business phenomenon currently valued at $30 billion dollars, though by the time you finish reading this, it might be $40 billion, or $200 billion, or $25 bucks. Much like the text of their promotions, Groupon as a company tends to bury a few facts inside a cute dumpsterload of rambling nonsense.

Now meet Rob. Rob used to be the lead bike tech at a bike shop I owned once upon a time. He’s now opened his own shop, Cycle Symphony, and it has all the makings of a quality shop.

Like most bike shops, Rob’s business model is relatively straightforward: he sells consumers products and services. His success or failure will ultimately depend on attracting customers and keeping them happy. Much like I’d done with my shop, Rob is catering to serious cyclists, and for anyone with a deep appreciation of mountain bikes and technology, his shop is downright amazing. I doubt you’ll find a larger collection of one-off custom made mountain bikes anywhere in Pennsylvania. And I don’t mean a Specialized with a Gore cable kit and some read headset spacers. I’m talking frames made only for Rob, most by famed frame builder Frank the Welder. Check it out.

Unlike Rob’s small, local shop, Groupon is a Prime Mover, an innovation-driven company and a potential major engine preparing to help salvage the struggling American economy, just as Pets.com did in the late ’90s. Whereas bike shops in America only employ people, Groupon Employs People! While bike shops out there just sell stuff, Groupon Sells Stuff! The difference should be obvious to you, but just in case, I’ve set forth some key distinguishing features:

1. Innovative Business Model

Bike Shop:

  1. Sell goods and services.

Groupon:

  1. Convince retailers to sell their products and services for at least half price.
  2. Take about half of the half they have left as your profit.
  3. Funnel as many customers as possible to them to clean off their shelves at drastically discounted prices.
  4. Dramatically increase customer base of the retailer to now include a zombie throng of new customers who expect everything to be at least half price.

2. Funding

I started my bike shop with about $25,000. Rob’s also doing his best to keep things lean and efficient. His first step was doing, as opposed to looking for those who can do for him while he powerpoints venture capitalists and dreams up phrases like “organic monetization.”

According to Groupon’s SEC filing, they spent almost $400,000,000 on marketing so far in 2011. And marketing’s not their biggest expense. Their administrative costs in the first two quarters of 2011 account for another $452,000,000. That’s nearly a billion dollars spent in just the first half of 2011. What are they buying with all this money? One word: talent:

A spaghetti noodle, much like a swimming-pool noodle, maintains its shape until it’s exposed to boiling water or sat on by children. Savor pasta’s forced flexibility with today’s Groupon: for $12, you get $25 worth of Italian fare at Tuscany Square Ristorante in New Castle, PA.

The chefs at Tuscany Square Ristorante recreate traditional Tuscan recipes, simmering savory sauces to ladle over a menu of pasta, steak, and seafood. Adept hands construct house-made lasagna, layering soft noodles between strata of bubbling homemade marinara and meat ($12.95). A 10-ounce slab of Choice sirloin ($16.95) ages for 30 days and debuts mature and ready to assume the responsibilities of pleasing a palate, filling a stomach, and refinancing a mortgage.

Chefs drizzle the chicken piccata with white wine, capers, and a spritz of lemon ($14.95), and they coat a grilled salmon fillet in pepper-berry seasoning that, like a cheerleader, has an enthusiastic kick ($16.95). Diners can fill their bellies in the more-formal setting of the dining room or munch in the more laid-back lounge, which is equipped with a full bar and three flat-screen TVs to ensure patrons won’t miss reruns of their favorite sports games.

That’s from one of today’s deals. Think you could’ve written that there, Rimbaud? Of course not. A huge part of Groupon’s absurd operating expenditures can be blamed on the exotic acquisition needs of their writing department:

  1. Seed clouds with magical eggs to lure and capture a live Care Bear.
  2. Force Care Bear to smoke cigarettes and watch gruesome footage of World War II narrated by Bob Saget.
  3. Buy copy of Microsoft Office.

Anyway, that’s why my next venture won’t be in retail, but rather an SaaS (not entirely sure what that is, but it’s very hot right now, and sounds like “Sass!”). I’m working on a cutting edge cloud-based consumer-facing social network management and motivational system for success-driven companies who like Web 2.0 sites with big font sizes and rounded corners (small fonts and sharp edges are so Pets.com). Four hundred times each day, auto-generated profanity-laden criticism of your company will be automatically created, distributed to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and some seriously huge social networks in China you don’t even know about, and then searched out, compiled and sent right to your customer service department, offering consumer-centric Fortune 500 companies a better idea of what consumers actually think about their companies. I’m right now putting the final touches on the artificial intelligence algorithms and hiring an app developer.

I’m accepting initial rounds of funding now (investment offers under $10M will not be considered, though I appreciate your interest). I have a good feeling I can land Groupon as my first client.