Build It

What goes around, comes around

Recently, I had the burning need to find a certain document that was buried somewhere within the expansive paper archives of our building in Foster City.  The Chief Engineer had been looking for weeks, to no avail.  I decided that I should be able to go up to "The Library" and easily uncover what I needed, as if the Chief wasn't looking hard enough.  Spoiler alert: I was wrong.

The Problem

There was a mountain of disparate and disconnected documents, cabinets and binders full of paper, no true organization, various forms of media between paper, blueprints, sepias, plans, and digital documents.  It was a true "needle in a stack of needles" moment for me.

Needless to say, I never found the document I was looking for.  I gave up after about 45 minutes of pulling dusty plans off the top of shelves.   The whole experience brought me back to my days at BarkerBlue in a few ways: 1. I had visited this actual room while with BarkerBlue, and 2. I went there in order to try and convince the Owners at that time to pony up and scan all those rusting documents.  That call was also fruitless; poetically causing the frustration I was dealing with recently in trying to find this particular document.

I remember being frustrated at the time that the Owner did not see what a problem this outdated archive actually was.  How the inability to find documentation quickly (if at all) was a real business cost and risk to their operations.  I knew what a resource a scanned, tagged, and searchable archive of  30 years worth of documents could do for them, but they couldn't see it.

Fast forward 7 years, and I am now in the Owner position, wishing I had called that Salesperson 7 years ago to get to work scanning my archive.  This particular document, if not found, quite literally could have an implication of thousands of dollars.  Not to mention, I spent almost an hour looking for this thing, which has its own monetary impact to my projects and actual salary.

The Realization

Having a new perspective on this, I think I figured out the reason why my sales pitch fell on deaf ears that day.  As the Owner, looking at this monumental pile of stuff, the notion came to me that I had no idea where I would even start.  Deciding what was important, what was a duplicate that I wouldn't want to pay for, what was irrelevant.....a seemingly impossible task.  

It's a terrible excuse, but that's the realization I had.  I would probably turn my sales-self down just because I could not fathom starting the process.

The Takeaway

What would I tell myself of 7 years ago, knowing what I know now?  The Owner-me recognizes the problem, and understands the real life impact of lost documentation.  The Owner-me can probably justify the costs of the service.  I think the Sales-me should have done everything possible just to scan a few sets of drawings to start that snowball.

We actually did this in real life at BarkerBlue, successfully, with two pretty big tech companies in Silicon Valley.  We won those battles by showing them how we were already storing their current construction documents, and that it would be so easy to grow their archive by adding the old stuff.  We had momentum going into it, which mad the decision to add to the archive that much easier.

Staring at that pile of disjointed information was overwhelming.  Frustrating.  It seemed impossible to tame, but it would have been better if we had just taken a single step 7 years ago.

Blueprinter Redux - Follow Up

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about making the word "blueprint" cool again, I saw this article in the San Francisco Chronicle talking about how the public much prefers the word "hospital" over the marketing-speak term "medical center" which is so in use these days.  Here are some excerpts:

"a national survey of 1,027 American adults...showed that way more consumers prefer the term “hospital” to “medical center.

Considering that swarms of U.S. hospitals have transformed themselves to medical centers over the last few years, that’s pretty funny.

Marketers, business gurus, consultants, and others with big contracts and fancy suits convinced hospital executives that “hospitals” were old fashioned, quaint, and way too 20th century. "Medical centers” were cutting edge, high-tech and truly trendy. 

The survey...found that U.S. consumers think a “hospital” would have a wider range of services, would provide better care, would be more up to date and would have more physicians...who are experts in their fields, according to the survey, often by lopsided margins.

“The conventional wisdom for years has been that the word ‘hospital’ was tired and old-fashioned,” said Steve Rivkin, founder of Rivkin & Associates, a marketing and communications consultancy. “As a result, hundreds of hospitals have dropped the word and renamed themselves medical centers.”

"The conventional wisdom is wrong,” said Sandra Bauman, founder of Bauman Research & Consulting, noting that it shows that consumers favor ‘hospital’ across the board, and that results were consistent across lines of gender, age, income, race, region, household income, household size and educational level."

This is exactly what I was talking about.  The industry is tired of being called a hospital, so it invents a convoluted two-word phrase to replace it, yet the consumers think much more highly of the old-fashioned term than the new fangled one. 

That to me is the biggest take-away from this article.  The end-users themselves attributed more and better services to the name they knew best, not the name that was created by the hospital industry.

Was anyone ever really convinced that "reprographics" was the better term?

Here's a link to the article: http://bit.ly/jtNtGy

Here's a link to the study: http://bit.ly/kA0s6k

 

Jared Willis

 

 

Blueprinter Redux

Walking to work this morning, I saw an ad on the side of a bus for a new hospital in San Francisco. The ad stated that they weren't just making a plan for better healthcare, but a blueprint. 

Ironically, it wasn't an actual blueprint, but rather a regular print on blue bond. 

The point is, I got to thinking about the word "blueprint" and how difficult it was for us and the industry to distance ourselves from that "dirty" word. It was nearly impossible. That word just stuck with people and it's obvious that it has a clear and easily understood message for the general populace. 

Instead of tearing your hair out over whether you are called a blueprinter, maybe the adage of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is best here. 

What if you could could re-popularize the term blueprint?  What if you could take the power back from that word by giving it a different meaning?  Make blueprint cool again by having it mean something totally different.  Don't change the word; change what it means and what it says about what you do.

"Blueprint" is actually a pretty good word, it just has a bad connotation for reprographers.  It's only 2 syllables, 1 word and pretty much everyone understands what you mean when you say it.

I know that we spent a lot of time and money trying to get rid of that word and erase it from our customers' minds, but maybe it's time to put that word to work for us, and not against us.

 

Jared Willis

The Doctor is in...or at least should be

A friend in Repro wrote me recently asking for my opinion on a task he had been assigned by his boss.  Essentially, he was tasked with creating a Powerpoint deck that he could show to potential customers to "educate" them about the company and what they could for the potential customer.  

I had kind of a long-winded response, but liked how it came out so I will post it here.  I have removed the names to protect the innocent, but it would help to understand that this guy's boss has retained a bit of an "old school" sales guy (OSSG) to revamp the sales process.

Here's the email:

"My opinion, and you can choose to share this with your boss or not, is that prescribed and staid Powerpoint presentations are useless, or at the very least, not as effective as we’d like them to be.

People do not agree to meet with salespeople, mostly because they do not want to get a long drawn-out presentation they can’t get out of.  Also, people don’t want answers to questions they’re not asking. 

I always like to think of what happens when you go to a doctor.  The doctor does not come in and talk to you about all the things he’s capable of fixing/curing, or about all the people he has successfully cured in the past.  He comes in and says, “So…what’s wrong?”.  You then proceed to tell him your pains, for which he prescribes the EXACT thing that you need.  You then walk away a happy customer.

Now, you may say, “but a doctor’s capabilities and history of happy patients is important” to which I would respond that yes, it is, but that information is best left for the doctor’s website or some other promotional material (marketing) which draws you in to call the doctor for an appointment.  When meeting with a patient/customer, you should really only be talking about what ails them.  I think everything else is hot air.

What I always tried to do at while in Sales was to go into meetings and always first ask the question, “So…what’s wrong?” and then tailor my approach based on their answers.  A pre-prepared Powerpoint deck would have been antithetical to my sales strategy and I think to good sales in general.  Plus, it would have killed my chances of showing them I was different and worthy of their business and trust.

Privately, regarding the OSSG, I would caution your boss that the OSGG is from an older school of sales.  It is just not a Xerox & IBM sales world anymore.  30 years ago, before the internet, clients didn’t know anything about your products or services (if they weren’t already using you) and couldn’t independently verify facts or lies about your competition that you told your client.  Customers are much more savvy these days.  There is simply so much more information available to everyone via the web that they might know more about your company that a new rep will.  I think OSSG's intentions are good, and I’m always for education of clients, but I think this is going about it the wrong way.  

On top of all of that, people are so used to instant gratification, that I think they want to get right to the point.  It’s probably a little sad that the theatrics of drawing out the sales story may be gone, but that’s the way it is.  There’s no replacement for a well-performing salesperson, but I think it’s silly to force people to take the journey with you to get to an answer for their pain.  “First off, let me tell you about the 50 year history of my company (by year), then give you highly specific technical details about the equipment we use, then I’m going to list 15 things I do that you have no interest in without mentioning the one you really care about and lastly I am going to leave with us both feeling unfulfilled and wondering why when I call you tell me that you are happy with your current vendor.”

 

Jared Willis

Innovation by force

I read a great quote this evening that really made me think about the extent at which you should listen to customers and the point at which you stop listening and try to ram something down their throats because you know it's better for them.

The quote is from Henry Ford:

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, 'A faster horse'."

Construction can be incredibly entrenched sometimes.  People are reluctant and resistant to change.  Sometimes, clients don't know what they want until they have it.  Sometimes, you have to ignore the "no's" and keep going.  

No one really wanted a faster horse, they just didn't know yet that they wanted a car.

Jared

Deadly data overload in Reprographics

The front page of the New York Times the other day carried this story, "In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly". Here is some quoted text from the first few paragraphs:

"When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the operator of a Predator Drone had failed to pass along crucial information about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

But Air Force and Army officials now say there was also an underlying cause for that mistake: information overload.

At an Air Force base in Nevada, the drone operator and his team struggled to work out what was happening in the village, where a convoy was forming. They had to monitor the drone’s video feeds while participating in dozens of instant-message and radio exchanges with intelligence analysts and troops on the ground."

I share this awful story with you to make a larger point about information.  Our problem used to be a lack of information and we are quickly entering (if not already there) an age of over-information where the true desired skill will be the ability to intake, organize and accurately represent information to the end user.

We so often run up against projects/companies using a wide variety of tools to manage information: Box.net, Sharepoint, CMiC, Prolog, ftp, Projectwise, etc.  Most of these companies I talk to feel secure that by having these tools/databases, they are providing for information sharing and collaboration among their team members.  I submit that without the right tools/people in place, you are actually hindering the process of communication, sometimes with disastrous results.

The above example of the civilian deaths is the extreme example of what can happen when there's too much information, but it's not a big leap of faith to imagine a Subcontractor not knowing which document out of 20 that he should utilize and subsequently endangering the project schedule or budget.

Information Explosion

Lately, When talking about what I/we do in the reprographics industry, I increasingly refer to us as the Librarians of the Library.  Everyone in the industry talks about the death of print, but few look at the explosive growth of information, particularly in construction.  While plan printing has reduced drastically, your clients are dealing with volumes and volumes more data than they ever have before.  The relative ease of creating information these days (AutoCAD, email, site photos, PDFs) means that authorship has gone way up where everyone on the project creates a meaningful document multiple times a day.  That information is all important and it can be incredibly overwhelming if not controlled.

When selling your solution, don't talk about its ability to hold information.  Storage space and ability is cheap.  Talk about your ability to get the client down to what they want, right away.  Talk about your team's ability to be the Librarian in the Library that controls the documentation, organizes it and makes it relevant and easy to use for the team.  

FM'd Employees

I believe there's a market for reprographic companies to provide employees on jobsites that will act as the Document Control person.  We are already seeing this happen in our market where Contractors are designating a Project Engineer (aka: someone who's never done this before) and creating a Document Control role.  If you can place that person on-site, not only do you have the experience with construction documentation organization/fulfillment that they don't but you will be more likely to get them to use your document management solution on the project.

And, if we have to talk about a printing angle, what better way to ensure that you're getting the maximum amount of output than employing the Traffic Cop!

I believe many Reprographic firms are struggling with how to maintain their relevance in their Client's eyes and the shift in thinking to being true information managers will be the wave of the reprographic future.

Jared

Hidden Costs

First of all, I apologize to all 5 of my readers for not updating the blog recently.  My wife and I welcomed a baby girl on September 7th and that has taken up a fair amount of my time, as you can imagine.  Now onto the post.

I saw a news story this evening, talking about how MySpace has been caught sharing user's information with their advertisers.  They claim that there is no identifying information in what the advertisers have received, but I think it's fair to assume that the data contained information on how to better market to those affected users.  

This story follows an very similar story from Facebook recently, which did a similar sharing of user ID to outside companies and marketers.  Additionally, Google was recently caught collecting information on wireless networks and even user names and passwords via their Google Earth cars driving around neighborhoods.

There is a justified and large uproar over these revelations that these companies are, in essence, selling your data to companies to help market to you.  I can't say that I'm much surprised as there is truly no such thing as a free lunch in this world.

A while ago, I met with a customer who, when complaining about the costs of our service, told me that he just goes on YouTube and gets videos, for free, of course then asking why we didn't just give it away for free.  This trend continues to this day with our clients expecting something for nothing, just like they get on the internet.

These large internet companies, with thousands of employees, do not and can not operate without profit.  They are making money off you one way or another.  

Clients need to understand that you need money to keep your doors open and continue to serve them.  They need to understand that you're out to make money and you deserve to get paid for your services, just as these so-called "free" services are getting paid for theirs.  I think if you can be open with your clients, most will understand that you can't do things for free and even the price sensitive clients will be able to come to a middle ground with you on how/what you charge.

If they continue to demand something for nothing, go along with it, then sell their name to an ad firm.  

 

Jared

Information Super-Highway Robbery

As part of the TypePad service, it provides you stats on who has visited your blog and how they got there.  Often, hits come via Google searches for reprographic or construction terms and TypePad shows you what people have looked for.  (I actually get an unprecedented number of hits from people looking at the photo that I took of the new bridge over the Hoover Dam).

Today, one of the Google searches that someone did was this, and I quote:

"reprographics places are charging outrageous prices for cd"

This is the first of it's kind that I've ever had, and in case this person comes back looking for the answer, here's what I would say in response to your query.

I still hold the belief that the media does not define the value.  If you look at this argument from any other industry's viewpoint, you will see that one should not define how much something should cost by whether or not you could physically do it using supplies you found at Office Depot.

The simplest example I can think of is software developers like Microsoft or Apple.  The hard costs for them to burn the latest OS to a CD and package it up for sale is probably $10.00 per package, if that.  Do you, as a consumer of their goods, truly believe that you should only pay $10.00 for the value of what they're providing you?  If you buy a new bestselling book, is the value of that book somehow limited by the cost per pound of the paper and ink they printed it on?  Why are those any different from reprographers charging you a cost to have a perfectly organized, easily accessible format to access drawings?

You should really be complaining about the Architects.  Think about it.  If they get 4% of a $5 million job ($200,000) as a fee, and produce 100 pages of drawings for you, they are charging you $2,000 per page!!!  Larceny!!!

Additionally, you used to pay hundreds of dollars for a set of drawings in paper, and I would venture to say that the true cost of that paper wasn't that much.  Why did you feel it was okay to pay hundreds of dollars, for the same information, in paper format?  What made it more real for you?  Weren't we still organizing and making the information consumable for you?  Are you any better served by receiving AutoCAD files straight from the Architect?  

I get what it looks like.  I get that it looks like we're trying to rob you for something that you could burn right now on your computer.  However, I will say that there is a lot more going on to produce that pretty and perfect CD than you realize.  Reprographers are not charging that much money because they want to.  They do it because they have to.

Jared Willis

An open call for reprographic standards

I recently completed my CSI Construction Document Technologist certification.  The CDT certification demonstrates that one understands the processes and documents inherent in this complicated process that is construction.

The major tome of reference for your CDT certification is the Project Resource Manual (PRM).  This book covers practically every single aspect of planning, design, construction, operations and demolition.  From contractual language, to document definition to project delivery types, it is THE resource for construction professionals.

Going through this entire book, where chapters upon chapters are dedicated to seemingly every trade needed to build a structure, I was struck by the fact that there couldn't have been more than 2 full pages dedicated to document management/reprographics.  A trade that is so integral to the success of any project gets treated so lightly in this manual for how to build a project from A to Z.

An open call to the IRgA

As I've written about before, reprographics is probably the worst treated and least organized building trade.  We are the only trade:

• that does normally not have a contractual relationship with the project
• that is not really a subcontractor, and not really a supplier, yet not a major team player
• that is the hub of project communications, yet is judged on the basest of unit pricing
• whose work can get taken down to street and copied at any time

Most every other trade on the jobsite has some sort of an agreement with the project defining their responsibilities, rights and obligations for that project.  This agreement demands a level of service to the project, but also protects the trade from the project.  Many of these agreements have been standard practice for dozens of years, are developed by national organizations and work to serve the best interests of their members.  I feel that it is time for the IRgA to develop such a contract.

I also call on the IRgA here so that it can lend its gravitas to the process and get documents like this included in resources like the PRM and accepted by other national groups like the CSI, AIA and AGC.  I don't feel that this can be a process only spearheaded by individual companies, no matter how large.  It must be professional; it must be accessible; it must be standardized.

The times they are a'changin'...

In this era of electronic revolution in reprographics, of increased competition and technology ready to outpace most firms, I think a standard reprographics contract may be more needed than ever.  A contract that places reprographics firms in the true center of information exchange, that gives them security from losing a job for no reason and helps them maintain profitability.

Now this isn't all for reprographers benefit alone.  A standardized contract would help project teams better understand the importance of accurate document management on the project as well as helping them to better define the flow of documents on the project from the start.  Lastly, I think one of the most frustrating parts of reprographics for contractors is the inability to price out our services.  I don't think contractors like asking for square foot price anymore than we like giving it.  Contractors want lump sum pricing or guaranteed maximums and with a standard contract, we could develop a methodology that both protects the reprographer yet gives the contractor more peace of mind.

The smart people in the room

Now I am the last person that should be figuring this out, but there are a lot of smart people within organizations like ReproMAX, the IRgA and ARC and I imagine that via a coordinated effort from the IRgA we could develop some simple, standard agreements that would at least be a start and help all reprographers advance and get our collective acts together.

Jared Willis

The high price of nothing

Listening to talk radio this afternoon, I heard Charles Osgood (of the Osgood Files) talk about some of the financial issues facing radio (and specifically talk radio) these days.  He spoke about how radio was struggling with an issue that faces traditional news outlets: the reduction in staff due to budgetary constraints.

As part of the reasoning for these constraints, he listed the inability for traditional media outlet sources to make money over the internet for their content.  As I've written about many times in the past, there have been very few traditional industries that have figured out how to maintain revenue levels once content goes digital.  This has been a large part of the death knell that has sounded for newspapers.

Osgood was not necessarily lamenting a drop in staff in the printing department or ad sales, he was mostly talking about the loss of journalistic talent which drives the papers and talk radio stations.

This got me thinking about a seemingly unavoidable scenario: what happens if no paper/radio news source can figure out a way to remain a profitable business?  What if all the great content that we expect from people like the New York Times is no longer available because the business model just doesn't work anymore?  What price might we be paying long term, by refusing to pay short term?

My guess is that many people won't know what a good thing they have now until it's gone.  I would bet that, should traditional media sources like major newspapers disappear, people would be in support (in hindsight) of paying $0.50 for their daily digital version of the paper.

The internet has done a great disservice to society in the sense that it has made everyone believe that if you get it on the internet, there was no cost to get it up there and therefore should be no cost to get it out.  I fear that all digital content providers (newspapers, music publishers, reprographers) will get so beat down by people demanding something for nothing, that we will all wake up one day and realize there was indeed a very high price to be paid for that content.

Jared Willis