Boss Life Page 21
“Are you hurt? So what did you do?”
“I left the groceries. I got him in the car, and he calmed down. When we got home he was smiling at me, but I was so”—long pause—“I was just so furious, I sent him up to his room.” I express sympathy, as there’s nothing more to say. Nancy stops crying and sits with a very sad look on her face. “I can’t take him anymore. I just can’t take this. What are we going to do with this kid?” I don’t know. In the short term, we have another week until he goes back to school. At the end of July, he’ll be home again, for five weeks. Nancy continues, “I can’t take him out by myself anymore. I just can’t do it. I never know when he’s going to attack me.”
There are four people that Henry pays attention to: Annie, the woman in charge of him at his school; Janice, his longtime babysitter; Nancy; and myself. Annie and Janice are in our lives because of government spending—they’re both funded by our local school board, because of its legal obligation to provide local kids with a meaningful education. Even giant autistic kids. But this week, Annie is on her own break, and Janice is available only now and then. Nancy has decided, sensibly, that she can’t go out in public with Henry anymore.
The rest of the day passes as usual: loud music, snacks, and car rides. But now every excursion is done by me. Nancy is afraid to be alone in a car with Henry, even if he’s in the backseat.
I have a lot of responsibilities. I try to stay strong, but sometimes it feels as if a heavy weight is squashing me flat. The disappearing sales, the vanishing cash, the non-existent income, the non-performing employees, and now this. I’ll keep trying to solve the problems I understand. And the others, like Henry? There’s nothing to do but ride them out. They’ll either get better or worse.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, I take Henry with me to the Monday meeting. He is usually good for an hour, sitting in my office and listening to music. If I get distracted, he’ll head to the refrigerator and start eating whichever lunch looks most delicious. Fortunately, we hold the meeting next to the fridge—I can talk to the crew and defend the lunches at the same time.
Finally, I have a snippet of good news. “We have more cash than we did last week.” I point to the number I’ve written on the board: $91,272. “We’re still down relative to the year, but it’s better than two weeks ago. Unfortunately, sales last month weren’t so great.” I point to that number: $62,000. “I won’t sugarcoat this. That’s the lowest since July 2008. Our backlog is three and a half weeks. That’s bad, too. But we’re trying to fix sales. We just had our evaluation from our trainer. We got one good tip from him already, and we start the classes next week. I’m sure this is going to work. We just have to keep going. Something will happen.” They’re all looking at me, as usual, with little emotion. “OK, that’s the meeting.” They head to work. I’m pretty sure that some of them are looking for jobs, but nobody will tell me that unless they find one. Henry has been good, so I give him a donut and we leave. Four hours to kill; then Janice can take him until dinnertime. After she arrives, I head back to the shop.
Bookmark: AdWords. Log in. Stare at the screen. It’s 94 degrees in my office. I’m keeping the air conditioning off to save money. We’ve had two inquiries this morning, then silence.
AdWords reports steady clicks for the past month, even as calls and sales are disappearing. Where did the boss callers go? What happened to them? Are they just not shopping anymore? On vacation? Worried about money? Do my headlines no longer appeal? Are the ads even running? What if Google is lying about showing my ads? Now, there’s something I can check.
I start running searches to see whether my ads show up. I start with our highest traffic keywords: “Modular Tables.” Yup, there’s the ad, but I don’t see a free link to our site below it, just our competitors. Now the keyword that drives our best organic results: “Custom Conference Tables.” There’s our ad, with free links right below it. Now “Boardroom Tables.” That’s the string that generates the most e-mails, and I think it’s the one that brings in the boss shoppers. Hmmm. No ad, and our link is in the third free position. No ad? I recheck in AdWords and see that, yes, I’m offering to pay $7.50 for a single click from that group. This is more per click than any of my other ads, by a long shot. So why aren’t they showing it? Is it just a fluke? I know they show different results to different shoppers. Maybe Google knows that it’s me doing this particular search, by checking my IP address. So I go out and search “Boardroom Tables” from my bookkeeper’s computer. No ad, weak organic result. I recheck “Custom Conference Tables.” No ad. Then “Modular Tables.” Ad is there. Back at my computer, I use Google to find proxy sites. I can pretend to be searching from anywhere in the country. I spend the next forty-five minutes channeling searches through cities where we have done a lot of business: Houston, Pensacola, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. Everywhere, it’s the same pattern. The “Modular Table” ad is running, the “Boardroom Table” ad isn’t.
The next morning I repeat my test. In every trial, both “Modular” and “Boardroom” ads are running. When I do proxy searches again in the middle of the afternoon, the “Boardroom Table” ad is gone. At the end of the afternoon, only the “Modular” ad is still showing.
Why does the “Boardroom” ad stop showing in the afternoon? Why is that ad so important? My old theory, back in April when inquiries started to drop, was that the economy was going down the toilet again. Then my Vistage group told me that they didn’t see this, and that I had screwed up my marketing. I believed this for a while, but then decided we were experiencing a seasonal dip—more calls from schools, less from bosses, because of the end of the school year and the start of vacations. But what if the ad that bosses like best isn’t even showing late in the day, when bosses shop for tables? I don’t know for sure that the “Boardroom Table” ad is the one that brings the bosses to us, but it used to generate the most e-mails, and “Boardroom” conjures up an image of big, expensive tables used by powerful leaders. And what are we showing instead? “Modular Tables.” The inquiries for those tables usually come from institutions that need flexibility because they can’t afford a dedicated boardroom. Cheapskates. These are not the shoppers we want.
So why does Google show the “Modular Table” ad instead of “Boardroom Table”? I think it’s because of the huge search volume related to the “Modular” concept. The click-through rates are really low, but that ad generates more revenue for Google. As my money starts to run low, they turn off the other ads and keep the “Modular” ads going until I’ve used up my daily budget. By the end of the day, when the bosses have time to shop, the ad aimed at them has disappeared.
I don’t know how long this has been going on, but the inquiries started to dry up in April, shortly after I introduced our new modular table ads. And increasing the spend didn’t help, probably because the additional money was wasted showing the “Modular” ad to more people. Google’s algorithm thinks that every click is a good click. It doesn’t care whether it helps me or not.
It looks like the “Modular” ad is sucking the life out of the rest of the campaign. It’s a theory. I can’t prove it. I don’t have enough information about which ad drives which kind of customer to call. So I could be wrong, but there’s no doubt that the “Boardroom” ad is disappearing by mid-afternoon. Is there some way I can tell Google to put priority on the “Boardroom Table” ad? That’s a great question, and I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out the answer, without success. Frustrated, I head home.
The next day is July fourth. In the morning, we take Henry to the local parade, which he enjoys. I persuade Nancy to watch him at home for a few hours, and I go in to work. I’m obsessed with finding a way to keep my “Boardroom” ad going without turning off the “Modular” ad. But I can’t find an answer. It’s incredibly frustrating. Google’s help features are almost useless, and AdWords doesn’t have a help desk. Like so many tasks I must do, there’s no
way to figure out the best approach. And I don’t have the time or money to hire a consultant.
In the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering what happened to the BigOil project. I haven’t heard anything since my e-mail on June 21. When we crossed into July, I abandoned hope. There’s no way we could make a late August delivery. Imagine my surprise, on the fourth, to see an e-mail from Shiva. Her direction: use the drawings that we provided. Fantastic. Those are almost useless. Should I sink a day into designing something that I think will work? Instead, I reply, asking whether the drawings show the location of the boxes, or whether it is schematic, and they might be somewhere else in the room. Further surprise: Shiva’s boss sends a drawing, shown to scale, with the boxes located. But it’s a very odd design, clearly done by someone who knows nothing about building tables. The dimensions are non-standard, and it will be very difficult to assemble. On the other hand: forty thousand dollars. I reply that I will have a design ready to send tomorrow. The following morning I decide that crazy won’t do. Four hours later, I send them a complete proposal, showing a practical design. Total cost: $47,884. At this point, I have little faith that I’m going to get this job. But I’ve done my best.
At home, whenever I find a few minutes, I continue to search for a way to prioritize my “Boardroom” ad. I finally find the answer, deep in the Web site of an AdWords consultant. It involves reorganizing the entire account so that the ads I want to emphasize are in a separate campaign, with their own budget. If structured this way, I can ensure that the ads run over the whole time I specify. I’ll make separate campaigns for “Boardroom Tables,” “Custom Conference Tables,” and “Modular Tables,” and leave the rest together. Four campaigns, four buckets of money.
The reorganization should be easy—the equivalent of dragging files from one folder to another—but it isn’t. Google provides no mechanism for moving an ad from one campaign to a different one. Instead, I will have to manually re-enter all the information from the old campaign in order to make a new one. Each line of text needs to be correct. Each bid needs to make sense. That’s a lot of work—there are dozens of ads, and hundreds of keywords, each with their own bid amount. This is not work that I could pass to an intern, even if I had an intern. It’s both boring and important at the same time, like so many of my duties. At least it can be performed on a laptop, at home. So I get started on Friday and work whenever I can. I do most of the work late at night, after Henry is asleep.
Sunday morning: I return Henry to his school, then head straight to the shop to finish up the AdWords project. After a couple of hours, I’m one click away from activating the new campaign architecture. Will it be effective? Will it bring back the bosses? I don’t know. The theory I came up with a few days ago still seems plausible, but I’ve devoted most of my time to figuring out a way to put it into effect, not to coming up with another alternative. But things can hardly be worse, so I press the Save button and the changes go into effect.
—
MONDAY, JULY 9. I deliver the numbers. Cash in: $17,510. Cash out: $30,317. I started last week with $98,009, ended with $85,202. New orders? Just one, worth $9,636: a billionaire’s girlfriend has decided to enter the fashion business and needs a large table to lay out dress patterns. He called and asked for a beautiful Mission-style table, ten feet by four feet, to be delivered as soon as possible. I tried Bob’s trick and scheduled a call to review my proposal for later that afternoon. The proposal didn’t take long to make, and the second call yielded a credit card number. Just that simple—this time.
The other nugget of good news: fourteen inquiries, a surprising amount for a holiday week. I explain my adjustment to the AdWords campaign and posit that the jump in calls is the result. And I tell everyone that the sales team is having its first training session today. All in all, this meeting has been more positive than those of the past few weeks.
At ten-thirty, the sales team drives four miles to Bob’s office. This will be the first of our monthly company consultations. We’ll also be going through eight group-training sessions, once a week. Bob starts the meeting with a preview of today’s session: an introduction to sales, considered as a profession. He’s clearly given this talk a million times. My bullshit detector is on high alert. As he continues, though, I relax. Somehow he manages to draw us all in, with interesting questions about our goals in life. His responses indicate real concern for each of us. This is a different Bob. He’s less sales-y, more interested in the challenge of turning a bunch of woodworkers into closers. An hour and a half goes quickly. On the way back, I ask the others what they thought. Everyone is surprised at how well it went—Dan and Nick, in particular, had not been impressed when they first met Bob three weeks ago. He seemed to be arrogant and unsympathetic back then. He was much nicer today.
When we get back to the shop, Nick finds an order for a huge table, forty-two feet long, worth $31,362. His client is a smaller woodworking shop in Ohio that had built a lot of cabinets for a local college. When asked to build a new boardroom table, they realized that they didn’t know how and turned to Google to find a source. Bob, the owner, has been very worried that the college will try to buy from us directly. He’s kept us from any direct interaction with the client. We’ll sell to him, he’ll sell to them. The deal is structured in four payments. Bob gives us his credit card for the first: $8,000.
On Wednesday, Nick calls me over to his computer. “Remember when Sam Saxton talked about using a screen-sharing program to review proposals with customers?” I dimly recall the discussion. Sam had been emphatic about the value of doing this, and I had done nothing about it. “I think I found the program—it was called ‘Glance,’ right?” That sounds right to me. Nick continues, “I think this would be really great. We could show people our SketchUp models while we talk to them, instead of just static images.” We give it a try—he’s in his office, I’m in my private office. The proposals we send are nice, but seeing the model zooming in and out, looking inside, and coming up from underneath, it’s an entirely different experience. Nick asks whether it would be OK to try this with a client. He sent them a proposal and scheduled a call this afternoon to review it. When the hour arrives, Dan and I are sitting behind him. We’re curious to see how this works.
Nick calls the client. We wait while he rounds up a few colleagues. Nick starts by asking if there are any questions. There are: how many people will the table seat, how will it fit in the room, what about the woods, where will the data ports go? All this is clearly presented in the proposal. At least we think it’s clear, but maybe it isn’t. Eventually Nick tells the client, “Hey, I can help you guys understand the design better. I can show you the models we used to make the proposal, live, in real time.” He tells them what to do to log in. When they’re connected, we’ll hear a tone. We hear typing, then, “OK, we did it.” Nothing happens. Nick speaks to the client, “This can take a little while.” I’m counting seconds. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Finally, at forty-two seconds, we hear the tone.
With the connection made, Nick brings up different views of the table, zooming in and out, and pulling back to show how the table fits in the room. The questions change immediately—everyone is much more interested in what we have to say, and their confusion has vanished. Nick wraps up the call by scheduling his next contact, just like Bob told us to do. “Wow, that really was great,” I tell him. “I’m going to try that with my next call.” Dan says he’d like to use it, too.
Later that afternoon, I walk around the shop floor. The mess is getting out of hand. Having the whole crew do the cleaning isn’t working. On my way back, I stop to see Will Krieger. He’s been working for me for twenty-three months. In August 2010, a week after I had hired a new bench worker, Will called. He’d just been laid off and had seen the want ad I forgot to discontinue. I had nothing to lose, so I agreed to see him. When he arrived the next day, he didn’t look like much: T-shirt and jeans, long ponytail, scraggy beard and mustache, and carrying a
lot of weight. But his résumé was impressive. He’d graduated from a good trade school, worked in three different shops, and represented the United States in cabinetmaking in the 2009 WorldSkills Competition—the trade equivalent of an Olympic competition.
I gave him my standard shop test, a four-page document with fifty questions, covering mathematics and geometry, plan reading, machine identification, wood species, and safety procedures. I wrote it in 2007, when I was doing a lot of hiring, having realized that interviews told me little about an applicant’s skills. It’s proven to be a good way to weed out the bad applicants without much effort on my part. I let applicants take as long as they want, ask me any questions they wish, and tell them to double-check their work. Most of them take an hour, and some more than three. When I handed it to Will, he glanced through the pages, raised his eyebrows, and got started. He completed it in nineteen minutes—a new record—with a perfect score. I hired him on the spot.
Will has the rare combination of superb technical skills, an inquiring mind, and a winning personality. And he has helped me solve problems from the day he arrived. I started him in the finishing room. That job was being done by a guy I’ll call Old Crusty. He was high-strung, expensive, and lazy, but very highly skilled. He knew that if I fired him, work would stop going out the door, and clients would stop paying me for completed projects, and I’d be in trouble. So he did just enough to keep me from canning him, but not one bit more. It’s very difficult to find good finishers and I couldn’t be sure that a new hire would work out before I ran out of cash, so I had let the problem fester for years. While accepting my job offer, Will casually mentioned that he knew how to finish. So that’s where I started him. His skills were evident from the start, and Old Crusty knew that his power over me had vanished. He quit a week later.