The business owner wasn’t as interested in tracking what each individual staff member was doing as much as finding out what each staff member does, ensuring it’s documented, and making sure there were “systems in place”. At that point he had recently converted his practice management software from Practiceworks to Dentrix and two staff members had already quit. There was real fear of losing all “tribal knowledge” of how his business was ran.
Observations
One of the first things I do when I start a staffing model is to simply observe what is going on in the office. For the first two weeks I would ask questions, watch processes, and document as much as I could. If there was a name for a process I would use that – otherwise I would create a new name for it. I started identifying positions and roles (they can be different) and then placing the newly quantified tasks into ‘piles’ under each type.
Documentation
To document the process I setup the office with Google Apps and used the Google Sites portion of it to create an Intranet for the company. Each staff member was given their own company email address which they could use to login to the site as well as share calendars, documents, and email each other. Distribution groups were setup for different team members including the front office, clinical team, and the “everyone” group.
Employee Turnover
After a short while, a clear picture began to emerge. There weren’t just issues with cr0ss-training, there were issues with the staff themselves. It wasn’t long before there was more staff turnover. It was like they were “jumping ship”. The decision was made to get some new leadership into the organization so the long-time manager was fired in June. I became the interim manager and began to re-build the new staff.
Changes in Hiring Practices
One of the first things I focused on was “getting the right people on the bus”. We sought after and hired people who cared about people first and had a great personality. We had learned that those are two things that can’t be taught so those were the most important things we sought after. We didn’t settle for a person just because they filled the position and at some times were working with a crew of as small as 3 people while we continued to look.
Changes in Processes
Once we had the right people in place we began working on the proper processes. We started using checklists to ensure the critical morning and nightly procedures were completed. There were many times when they were not and the staff did not like using the checklists at first, but over time they learned to first appreciate them and then not need them as it became second-nature. This helped a brand new staff have consistency and learn faster.
Changes in Technology
While the old staff did not understand technology innately, the new staff embraced it. They began using email to communicate, began referencing the Intranet for critical information (the previous staff kept an old Rolodex on the front desk that contained all of the information they’d ever reference – this was typed up into one page on the Intranet affectionately titled, “Rolodex”). And a new wireless camera system was setup to take patient photos.
Changes in Marketing
We signed up for Demandforce and Angies List. We began using Google Adwords and revamped the website. We added more social proof, more testimonials, more web pages, and more blog posts. We added more social networks, posted more often, and were more engaged with our patients online. As a result, referrals from the Internet went up along with web site visitors. We used Google Analytics to track the progress.
The Result
By first focusing on the staff, then the process, then the technology, and finally the marketing – we had the right people who were given the right instructions for the best technology, which was supported by the best marketing techniques. The result was an initial boost of 116% the first month, followed by an average increase of 72% for the next five months compared to the five months prior. How can I help you get similar results?
Google Reader has been discontinued. We want to thank all our loyal fans. We understand you may not agree with this decision, but we hope you’ll come to love these alternatives as much as you loved Reader.
Sincerely,
The Google Reader team
While I have used Google Reader on and off for years, I don’t use it now. However, I still know and care about the value of RSS as a publishing syndication platform and feel that Google has hurt that by creating a monopoly of sorts by buying up RSS apps then killing them.
Hacker News (HN) chimed in when bambax said, “The killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+: since Google can’t kill Facebook, they’re willing to hurt themselves instead — to cut their left arm so that their right arm can grow stronger. If this is indeed the case, it’s very shortsighted.”
In another HN thread about the economics of “Evil Google“, RockyMcNuts said:
It’s not the RSS reader. It’s the open publishing ecosystem. Most clients point to Reader as the central feed aggregator. Most publishers point to Feedburner as the central publisher. Google seized the commanding heights with Feedburner and Google Reader and captured all the publishers and the clients, and now they’re killing the ecosystem. I don’t see why they couldn’t have integrated Reader into Plus without killing the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are moving into news aggregation, and Google is killing a successful news aggregation system. I don’t understand their strategy, but it’s seems sort of like, we want everyone on G+ and we don’t care how heavy-handed we look or how early adopters feel, and we don’t want an open ecosystem that people can use to pipe content into Twitter and Facebook.
What other platform has such ease of opt-in as RSS? There are email newsletters and Twitter. Both require that the publisher does some sort of action. With RSS it was/is automatic. That is/was the beauty of it. I keep talking about it like it’s dead. It’s not dead. Google Reader is dead. I asked a friend if he still used Google Reader and this is what he said:
I definitely still use it. I probably will wait until the last week of June to commit to a new solution. I’ll probably go with Feedly, but I’m not sure if they let you pick any website, etc. Also, I don’t know how they accommodate custom searches [like Google Alerts]. I’m going to wait until there is an opportunity for a mature alternative. I also have questions about how the web will attempt to syndicate in the absence of Google reader. I know people are saying that the shuttering of reader is a pronouncement of Twitter winning vs. RSS. But, Twitter isn’t an adequate replacement for RSS and leaning on newsletters is a step in the wrong direction. I’m all questions and all ears.
I remember the first time I saw Google Reader. A coworker had invited me over to his house and while there he told me he wanted to show me something cool. When I walked over to his computer he proudly showed me how he had collected all of his favorite information into one place. He was able to sort through article after article with the spin of his mouse wheel. It was glorious. I signed up for my own account and quickly began adding RSS feeds from sites I wanted to follow. I quickly became inundated with more articles than I could read in a day. I started to get discouraged and eventually I quit.
Marco Arment wrote in The Power of the RSS Reader, “The most common complaint I hear about inbox-style RSS readers such as Google Reader, NetNewsWire, and Reeder: that people gave up on them because they were constantly filled with more unread items than they could handle. If you’ve had that problem, you weren’t using inbox-style RSS readers properly…If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed. If you find yourself hitting ‘Mark all as read’ more than a couple of times for any feed, delete that feed…The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere.”
RSS is not a curator of content, it’s an aggregator of content, but sites like Reddit and Hacker News are kind of both. Articles are collected there and self-curated by the community. Compare this to Fark, which is a news aggregator curated by Drew Curtis. What RSS doesn’t do is filter out all of the mediocre or non-relevant articles that inevitably appear over time no matter how targeted the blog. Far better to find a community around a subject you like and have articles aggregate and share there. This is the difference between Twitter proper and Twitter lists. The former is mostly noise and the latter is much more concentrated. Apps like Hootsuite can also help curate with search lists for keywords.
I signed up to test Amazon’s eCommerce Software, Amazon Webstore, mostly because of these two factors:
List Amazon.com items on your own Webstore to augment your product selection
Take advantage of additional services such as Selling on Amazon, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Amazon Prime on Your Site to grow your business and improve customer satisfaction while reducing your Webstore fees
I liked the idea of being able to just pull in Amazon products to your store and having Amazon fulfill them for you. It all sounded so easy. It wasn’t.
Contrary to other parts of Amazon, I found the site incredibly hard to use and very slow. It takes up to 15 minutes for an item you’ve posted to appear on your site. When I went to figure out how to cancel, I couldn’t figure that out either so I did a Google search and ran across this Amazon Seller forum post, which cracked me up.
redknight781 wrote: It’s built for techies by techies and not for those that are more interested in sourcing and selling. It’s the worst sitebuilder on the internet. mpowell624 wrote: I will go farther and say that it is the very worst experience I have ever had with anything technological. I have basic knowledge of coding and I would rather try to make a website out of twigs and berries.
You used to have to call Amazon to cancel, but now to cancel your Amazon Webstore, simply make your way to your Amazon Webstore Subscription page and click, “Cancel Webstore”. You can do this as long as you don’t have any outstanding orders.
Mindvalley Insights recently emailed me an article entitled, How to Avoid Entrepreneurial ADD and Pick the Most Viable Ideas to Pursue, which I thoroughly enjoyed and prompted me to write this post. Below is that 7-minute talk where Vishen, CEO of Mindvalley Insights, shares how he uses the principal of leverage to pick business opportunities.
This video is about how to choose opportunities that you either come up with or are presented to you. Vishen does it by quantifying leverage of existing and possible future opportunities. He uses his own businesses as examples, so I’ll some of my own companies and their subsequent opportunities: Telablue > Watershawl > Costpub/Tenet Marketing > Webories > Content Motors > A/B Insights > Coconut Oil > Apps/Database/Tracking. Vishen says to draw relationship lines between the different businesses/opportunities to see if there are any ways that one leverages the other. The more leverage, the more likely you should do it.
This is similar to the advice Cal Newport gives, which I highlighted in How to Work a Life of Purpose: build up a body of work that you can leverage for future work. Become so good at what you do that you can do it anywhere any way you want. Whatever you have invested all of your adult working life and school on would be silly for you to not leverage going forward. Whatever you’ve been working on the most is unique. It’s rare and therefore valuable. You know what problems your industry has and are also able to create solutions for those problems. Maybe you’re not interested in solving them, but if not you, then who? There is no one with your perspective other than you.
If you truly possess a competitive advantage, let me recommend that you do not diversify but instead leverage that skill-set to the maximum. Whatever you do, do it better than anybody else (and if you are one of these unicorns, I applaud you – send me your business plan and let me invest in your venture). – Ching Ho, Restauranteur | Designer | Adventurer
While your “station in life” is a British phrase referencing your status in your community, I feel that it’s a negative term used to keep people in their place and so I’ve decided to commandeer it for a more positive use. The context of this article is about the different stations in your life. You do not have one station in life – you have many – and that’s a good thing. (Note: if you’re looking for how to improve your work life, try this article about how to work a life of purpose.)
My brother lives in Bargersville and drives to Terre Haute most weekdays. It’s an hour and a half commute by car. In the morning he stops in the kitchen for breakfast with coffee (Station 1). There he’s greeted by one to three kids, depending on their sleeping schedule. When low on gas he stops by the local gas station (Station 2) where he recognizes the clerk, makes small talk, but feels uncomfortable calling them by name (even though he knows it). When he gets to work (Station 3) he’s greeted by his coworkers – some happy to see him. For lunch he goes out to the same restaurant where he talks to the same host and the same waiter. Again he knows their name, but doesn’t move beyond small talk. After he gets home he goes to his garage (Station 4) to get his mower and heads off to his first lawn client (Station 5). Occasionally he might go to our parents house (Station 6) for dinner or to drop off his kids so he can go to a nice restaurant (Station 7) with his wife.
My Friend’s Stations in Life
My friend lives in Nora. He lives five minutes by car from his work in a walkable neighborhood right next to the Monon Trail. In the morning he stops in the kitchen (Station 1) for coffee before sitting at his desk in the living room (Station 2) to read his email before heading off to work (to check his other email). He rarely stops at the gas station (Station 3) anymore and while he lives near two Starbucks (Station 4), doesn’t go there as often anymore. At work (Station 5) he’s greeted by several coworkers, but most days he goes home for lunch. When he does go out it’s usually with coworkers and he doesn’t take the time to learn more about the staff at the counter. He doesn’t know their names and they don’t know him. When he comes home at night he’s greeted by his neighbors as he drives by or when he goes for a walk with his family. On the weekends he might go to his local hardware store (Station 6) and on Sunday his local church (Station 7).
My Stations in Life
I live in Tipton, but work mostly in Carmel, but travel all around the Indianapolis area. It takes me about 45 minutes by car to get to my first job each day. My wife wakes me up, makes me coffee and breakfast with a side of water. I sit down at the kitchen table (Station 1) to eat. While I’m eating my wife makes my lunch. By the time I’m done eating she has packed my lunch in my car with coffee to go. My kids are now awake, wait by the door, and demand kisses before I leave. When I arrive at my first job (Station 2) I get a few nods. Afterwards I may go to my second job (Station 3), to Starbucks (Station 4), or to my friend’s house in Nora (Station 5). If my gas tank is at a quarter or below I’ll stop at the gas station in Tipton (Station 6) on my way home. When I walk in the door I sit down to dinner, then get up to go check on the garden (Station 7). On Sundays I go to church in Noblesville (Station 8). Some weekends I go to parent’s homes (Station 9).
How to Improve Your Station in Life
Appreciating what you have and be thankful first. If you’re not first happy where you are now, you won’t be happy ‘there’. The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence, it’s greener where you water it. Your community is made up of your stations in life and it’s up to you to be thankful, appreciative, engaging, and involved in order to get the most out of it. By helping others and continually adding value to your relationships, you will build a stronger community and improve your stations in life. If you don’t live in a walkable neighborhood, walk around. It will become walkable. If you hate where you live, don’t move (yet), first find what you like about it and practice focusing on that. Be the change you want to see in your community. Start with yourself – the only thing you can change. Don’t try to change too much at a time – the longest journey begins with the smallest step. So get walking!
My son is 4 years old. He was born the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. He collects things to build with in hopes that one day I’ll take the time to do that with him. Right now he’s asleep, right outside my door, on the floor, next to his red bucket of things to build with me.
One day I took him out to a junkyard I used to drive by when my wife and I each ran a paper route. We were trying to keep from losing the house and were behind on our mortgage. The bank made us a deal. They said we could stop paying for a while, and then make a big balloon payment at the end. I didn’t see how that was much better, but I signed the papers anyway.
Kevin wanted to build a rocket. (That is my son’s name.) But what he really wanted was to fly in a rocket. We’d go in the closet and I’d simulate a launch sequence. He never bought into it. I kept saying, “You just want to fly up in the air, but how are you going to get down?” (Safely, I meant.) He wasn’t concerned with that. He just wanted to fly. And I was going to help him build a rocket.
When we got to the junkyard, there was no longer any rocket parts laying around. We saw a train. I stopped. We raced to get out of the car. He pointed at the train. It was exciting. When we got home I found some parts in my shop and we built a small rocket model, about three feet high. It wasn’t much and he didn’t care for it. He wanted something he could climb in, something he could fly.
One day I came home and he had built an airplane out of scraps of wood he had found and some tape. I thought it was pretty cool so I gave him some more wood to see what he could do. We even made a video of it. He seemed to be more creative with less. There isn’t much in his bucket – just some wood, a marble, a miniature cardboard cutout of Superman, and some string. He wants to fly, but most of all he wants time with his dad.
We were able to make that balloon payment and keep the house. Shortly thereafter I went full-time in my own IT/web consulting business. I helped a lot of people, but somewhere along the line I forgot what I was doing, and who I was doing it for. I stopped asking how I could help other people and was only focused on myself and what I could do. I had to get back to my core values, but i didn’t know what they were. I seemed lost. My son doesn’t know what he’s going to build, but he knows that if he collects enough of the parts he wants to see in the finished product, the end result will be something he can be proud of. That’s what I started to do, too.
My first value was more of a mantra: help people. If I wasn’t helping someone, I didn’t want to do it. While this seems simple at first, there are a lot of things you can do that are not helpful to people. Some are annoying, some are exploitative, and others are just downright harmful. I wanted to help make the world a better place by helping people. My second value was: add value. In every transaction, interaction, and blog post I wanted to be adding value. I don’t want to be noise, I want to be a part of a community where my clients and I look forward to seeing each other.
One of my favorite scenes in any movie is in Apollo 13 when the engineer at NASA dumps all the parts on a table and says they have to make ‘this air filter fit in this air system’. That is like a dream come true for me. I would love to have that challenge. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have made two different air filter systems for the same ship, but there’s something about the puzzle element that fascinates me. I wonder if that’s what my son feels when he’s building. I hope I’ll soon find out when he wakes up and I make time to build.
Recently Dove did a study that showed men think they are better looking than they actually are, but a similar study was done in 2010 and before that in 2009. I probably think I’m better looking than I actually am, but what I’m more concerned with recently is that I may think I’m better than I actually am.
For the last year and a half I’ve had this inflated notion that I’m ‘more than just an IT and web guy’. “I’m a high-level thinker!” I’d say to myself. “I think at a systems level. I can synergize data. I can run a big company. It’s easy for me to make money. I can do anything.” The problem was that while I was busy thinking about better ways to run a company or businesses I could start, I wasn’t really doing anything. I was really just running my mouth.
Work is Hard
The moment I was forced to do some of the things I was claiming I was ‘so good at’ I found the tasks extremely hard to do. Solving big problems is not easy. Setting up an ecommerce site is not easy. Going to work everyday is not easy. I had to get over my dream of doing nothing and realize that I’d always be doing something – and so I had to get better at whatever it was I was doing.
What I was doing was IT work, web design, and online marketing/SEO. But because I had spent all of my free time thinking of new business ventures, reading about startups, or hanging out with friends, I wasn’t spending any amount of time becoming a better IT guy, learning more about web design techniques, or discovering new SEO and online marketing strategies.
To be fair, I was learning new things about marketing. I recently learned about things like market sophistication, multivariate testing, and content marketing. I was able to apply this new knowledge to clients who needed to use market segmentation to create separate marketing campaigns for different target markets. It also came in handy while writing the marketing strategy for a business plan for one of my customers.
But there is a lot more I could be doing. I wrote a post on Google Authorship Markup Validation in 2011, but I’ve yet to get it working on my site. My voicemail message still says my old company name and my Gravatar still reflects the old logo. I’m still trying to figure out video and I’ve yet to start an ecommerce store (one of my goals in 2013). However I did start an Amazon Web Store (Amazon’s eCommerce platform) yesterday to try it out. I was looking for something that would let me easily add products and I’ve found that finding suppliers is one of the hardest parts of setting up an ecommerce site. So far I’m not thrilled with it. Why? Because it’s hard.
Seeking Out Easy
James Altucher recently wrote, Why Do Anything? In it he writes about how he likes, “to submerge myself completely in water and just float for as long as I can hold my breath.” I used to do this. It was my favorite thing to do when I was on the swim team in high school. As soon as school got out I would race down to the locker room, get changed, and submerge myself in the diving well. I didn’t weigh very much then so I’d sink down about 10 feet until I reached an equilibrium and I’d just hover there, weightless and silent. Nothing could hurt me and all was right with the world – all but my lack of oxygen. I try to recreate this feeling when I’m in the shower, but it’s not the same. That’s the only thing I miss about high school.
In August of 2012, a little over a year after I first quit my job, I wrote a short post called Always Working. It was the first time I realized that I had a feeling where “I just have to work until [x]” happens. Later I had a dream about a hill behind my house. It was a place I had gone many times before and I knew it very well. There were trails, a playground, a parking lot, and a place to buy candy – all at the top of the hill. The only thing was the hill doesn’t exist in real life. It never did.
It was clear my perception of work needed to change.
Recently a friend texted me with the stark realization that he still has 30 more years of work ahead of him. I don’t know. It’s all about your mindset (what people used to call your attitude). To me, work is part of life – and you’re always going to be working – even when you’re not technically working. It’s great if you can do something you love, but it’s better to be better at what you’re doing. Be the best that you can be and things will get better. If you’re a farmer, be the best farmer. If you’re an accountant, be the best accountant. If you’re a writer, be the best writer. If you’re not the best, practice “deliberate practice” in order to get better. This is what great people do. If you want to be great, you have to try to be great – not just think you are great. No one becomes great by doing nothing. There is no hill in your backyard. You cannot float forever. You have to come up for air.
Slowly I Turned…Step By Step…Inch By Inch
Seth Godin recently wrote an article for Fast Company about how to build a company slowly and one line stuck out to me and it’s one that I’ll end with:
Sometimes the best way to be great at something is simply to become better and better at that thing, rather than hoping one or three bold and brilliant choices will reap a windfall.
Why Did Instagram Succeed When the Color App Failed?
We hope you’ve enjoyed sharing your stories via real-time video. Regretfully, the [Color] app will no longer be available after 12/31/2012.
That was the message posted on Color.com [Update 7/15/2003: The site is no longer up.], the domain Color Labs paid $350,000 to acquire in 2011 almost a year after Instagram was founded. A year later their photo sharing app would be on the way out while Instagram was getting bought for a billion dollars. What went wrong? Why did Instagram succeed when Color failed?
Color vs. Instagram
Color Labs was a start-up based in Palo Alto, California whose main product was a social application for photos called Color. It allowed people to take and view photos matched to a location. Color grouped photos based on a user’s friends so that they are more likely to see those pictures that are most relevant. Like Color, Instagram is an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and optionally tie them to a location. Unlike Color, users can apply digital filters to photos and share them on a variety of social networking services. It confines photos to a square shape, similar to Polaroid images, which along with the filters gave photos a retro look and feel.
A Difference in Startup Methodologies
Color Labs started after co-founders Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham received $41 million in funding between 2010 and 2011 from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank before the app had a single user. Conversely, Instagram was started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010 with $500,000 and teams of just a few people. As Instagram introduced successful products and attracted users, they slowly raised more money and hired engineers. Meanwhile, Color Labs spent $350,000 to buy the domain color.com (and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com), rents an office in downtown Palo Alto, California, where it employs 38 people to work in, according to the New York Times, “a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.”
Instagram’s $500,000 seed funding round came on March 5, 2010 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while Systrom was still working on Burbn. By February 2, 2011, it was announced that Instagram raised $7 million in Series A funding from a variety of investors, including Benchmark Capital, Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca (through Capital fund), and Adam D’Angelo. The deal valued Instagram at around $25 million and later that month, Facebook made an offer to purchase Instagram and its 13 employees for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. By May of 2012, the number of photos has exceeded one billion. Google offered to buy Color for $200 million in July of 2011, but Color Labs turned down the deal. They were later acquired by Apple (mostly for their patents and talent) in October 2012 for an undisclosed sum.
A Difference in Responses to the App
On March 24, 2011, Color Labs launched its first application “Color for Facebook” in Apple’s App Store and within a week released an update allowing users to see photos from events “Nearby”, a “Feed” of relevant photos, and a “History” of groups that users can participate in. In June 2011, less than three months after the company officially launched, Peter Pham left Color. When it first launched, the application had around 1 million downloads, but as of September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. The app was poorly recieved, attracting few users and many who did not understand what it was supposed to do. One reviewer in the Apple App Store wrote, “It would be pointless even if I managed to understand how it works.” Users were confused with the application’s user interface and purpose. Its initial rating in the App Store was 2 out of 5 stars.
For Instagram, the response was much different. It rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million registered users as of January 2013. Support was originally available for only the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, but on April 3, 2012, support was added for Android phones. Instagram for Android was released[18] and it was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day. An app rating under 3.5 stars makes users considerably more reluctant to download the app. With an app rating of 2 out of 5 stars, the Color app was doomed. Once entered into the cycle of bad reviews it was nearly impossible to break out as there were wasn’t enough new downloads or positive press to bring the average back up and over the 3.5 stars mark. Meanwhile, as of this writing, Instagram has 4.5 stars ouf of 4 on the Apple App Store with over 62,000 reviews.
A Difference in Purpose
Color was first meant to help you find and share pictures related to your location, but Instagram was solving a different problem. They were making mobile camera photos look better. The Color app only worked if other people were using it (a chicken and egg problem), while Instagram solved a problem people had right away. This could have been because Kevin Systrom had already developed a check-in app called Burbn. Josh Williams of competitor check-in app, Gowalla, said, “Early user feedback, coupled with a desire to avoid the check-in battle…led them to drop everything to focus on one simple feature: photos. They made the act of taking and sharing photos (many of which just happened to be location-tagged) fast, simple, and fun.”
In Summary
Color was a company in search of a product. They didn’t have much more than a mountain of cash when they started, but it was spent on things like numerous employees, fancy offices, and marketing rather than product development, user feedback, and customer interviews. Color may become a PR lesson for the future as they may become legends for squandering one of the biggest and most covered product launches in app history. On the flip side, Instagram already had a product they were trying out, were listening to their users, and created a new company based on the results. They continued to listen to their users and made their product even better. They didn’t hire a bunch of people or spend a lot of time talking about their company. Their product solved a problem, people liked it, and they used it. Each company had a runaway effect, albeit in different directions. Once those directions were set in motion, it was hard to change them.
In closing, I’d like to quote from Color’s about page, which says a lot about how the company thought. If you have a different opinion about why Color app failed and Instagram succeeded, please let me and other readers know in the comments.
At Color, we believe in the opportunity that the new mobile era presents and are excited about developing products that transform the way people share the stories of their lives. We work collaboratively, iterate often, and enjoy problem solving. Color is a company of entrepreneurs and innovators, highly skilled in their respective specialties, constantly striving to learn and grow. We’ve cultivated a very relaxed and informal culture and enjoy our extra curricular activities, which include but are not limited to: ping pong tournaments, ball pit acrobatics and impromptu poker nights.
A few years ago, I discovered a positive correlation between having places in my life where people know me and my happiness. I call those places “stations”. I noticed that the more stations I have in life, the happier I am.
What is a station?
A station is going into your local coffee shop and having the barista know your name. It’s going to a restaurant and having the waiter know your name. It’s having friends that you can stop at by their house or running into someone you know at the grocery store or going to church and having people recognize you and want to shake your hand. In order for those things to happen, you have to have positive interactions over time (which is one of the definitions of friendship).
A few years ago I started intentionally trying to build up my community. When i would go to a place that I knew I was going to probably visit a lot in the future, I would say, “Hi, my name’s Erich. What’s your name?” It seems simple enough, but you do it and then you try to remember it and say it eventually they they learn your name too. And the next time you’re there, you can start to ask deeper questions like, “How are you doing? How was your weekend?”, and then as time goes on you can get deeper and go as deep as you want to go. You get to the point where you can say, “Hey, that’s rough. If you want to talk about it, maybe we can go talk about it somewhere else,” and then you take that relationship from that place and you move it some other place.
So maybe you start off by talking to someone at church but then after talking to them at church, one day you say, “Hey, maybe sometime we should go get coffee together,” and then you go get the coffee together. And then you can even start to combine these things when you have someone that you know that you’re bringing to a place where you know someone else, you can introduce to people and say, “Hey, this is my friend. I’d like you to meet this person.” Being a connector helps other people be happy as well. Because it’s not just your happiness, it’s their happiness too. It’s “community happiness”.
You are knowing them, they are knowing you. It’s reciprocal.
If you’re old enough to remember this show, Cheers, you know that when Norm walks into the bar, everyone yells, “Norm!” There’s been a couple of times in my life that that’s happened in real life. And it is an awesome feeling. You walk into a room and everybody goes, “Erich! Yeah!” They’re genuinely excited to see you. Everyone in the room is flipping out. It’s only happened like twice in my life, but I remember it vividly. And if you’ve ever gotten married, you know you’re walking down the line or you’ve gone to a wedding and there’s this receding line. and you’re walking out and everybody’s shaking your hand. After intentionally building up the community for years, one time I was just walking out of church (I needed to go to the bathroom or something) and I’m like, ‘just let me sneak out here’ and then left after right, people kept sticking out their hand and saying, “Hey, Erich,” “Hey, Erich,” “Hey, Erich”. It was like a freaking receiving line.
I was like, ‘Wow, I did it. I created community. This is amazing. I’m so happy right now.’
There’s lots of ways to become happy or have moments of happiness or be fulfilled in life. But community is one of them. It’s beyond happiness too. It’s about your life. Like literally. Like you’ll live longer if you have better relationships with people. If you have people that care whether or not you’re alive or dead. And they genuinely like recognize you. care about whether you exist you walk into a place and you’re just nobody and you go home and you’re alone and you never interact with anyone something happens on the physiological level and you just don’t live as long as someone who’s an active part of the community where people actually care that you are there or not.
When i was young, my dad told me one time, “If you want to have friends, be a friend.” And so I’ve tried to be friends with people. And because of that, I have friends as an adult. I even make new friends. It takes effort. It takes being the one to reach out and ask. And I have asked people and they don’t always do stuff, but they have told me, “I appreciate you asking because not everybody asks.” And if you want to go into the world of dating, there are girls that just don’t even get asked out. In sales, people don’t get the sale because they’re not asking for the sale.
Asking is such a huge thing.
I know it’s not really what we’re talking about but it’s a human thing. Even God says to ask Him for things.
Humans want to help other people. They want to be with each other. We are community-oriented people.
If you take a bee out of the out of its hive and just leave it alone, it’s going to die. The bees need the other bees to survive. Humans are the same way. Humans need other humans to survive. If you leave the population, you won’t die on day one, but like eventually you will. Everybody needs each other. So it’s not just the physiological, it’s also the emotional.
In summary, I have found that the more of them you have, the happier you are. And the way to cultivate stations is to reach out to people and build up your community over time.
Third Place
Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, made the term “The third place,” popular in his book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, but the “third place” is actually a phrase coined by contemporary sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg postulated in 1990 that the third place is, “a public place where people gather for the social satisfaction that they can’t get from the first two domains of the home and the workplace.” Oldenburg argued that the availability of such gathering places in America was lacking. Schultz turned America’s ‘lack of place’ into a business opportunity encouraging loitering and turning Starbucks into that third place. In this post I will argue that their is a direct relationship between the number of third places and happiness (in life and work).
Social Structure
In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell recounts the story of a town whose inhabitants rarely got sick. After a doctor named Wolf began looking into why, he “slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself.” The town’s social structure had multiple generations living under one roof, the townspeople talked to one another on the street, they cooked together in each other’s backyards, they went to the same church, and had “twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people”. In short, the towns people were a community and they had places they could go to congregate and interact. It’s these ‘third’ places that I call Community Stations.
Community Stations
If you went to a public school your teacher may have setup your classroom into stations. If you were in first grade there may have been a station for reading books, a station for building blocks or puzzles, and another station to watch an aquarium or greenhouse. These were all places you could go, sub-sections within the larger classroom to hang out with people like you doing things like you. When you grew up you may have been assigned a “work” station at your job and bought a “play” station for your home. In the 1800’s whole towns were built up around “train” stations and now every corner has a “gas” station for our cars. Third places like Starbucks are a “coffee” station – and like the stations set up around the classroom, is one where like-minded people gather to talk and share what’s going on in their work and their community.
Personal Community
Your community is more than the 2 square miles around your home. It’s made up of the various types of community stations, the most important ones being your home, your work, the stores you visit, and your friend’s homes. Each station in your personal community is like a node on a network and like Facebook, the more friends you have, the better the experience. This network value is called the Network Effect. But unless you live in a college dorm or in a close-knit community like Roseto, you have to travel greater distances to these different stations. But the more stations you have, the greater the chance you will be able to interact with these stations and the greater the value of the community. This is why density matters and it’s why more communities are choosing to infill instead of building sprawl.
Walkable Neighborhoods
Alex Steffen talks about infill in communities being used to build denser communities, but there are already places like that: cities. I recently wrote about how people under 30 are moving into the cities and driving less, what Nathan Norris calls The Great Migration of the 21st Century. More and more people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, places where shopping, fun, and friends are all within walking distance. There is even a website dedicated to judging the walkability of a neighborhood. But you don’t have to live in a city to have a walkable neighborhood. Suburburban “sub-divisions” like these in the Indianapolis area can be specifically built to be walkable.
Business Networking
In my post about working in Indianapolis, I wrote about how on Thursdays I would start out at the local BNI meeting, then go to Subway where the local Sandwich artist would remember me and ask me about my business. After breakfast I’d head to Starbucks where I’d normally run into someone I know and begin working. At night I’d attend a meetup or go to a friends house before heading home. After going full-time on my own business one of the first things I noticed was how lonely I was working from home (like right now?). I wrote:
When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that.
Work Communities
My ex-wife used to work at a hospital with a man named Melvin whose job was to keep rooms stocked each day. He had worked at the hospital for many years and had developed a routine that involved starting out in the stock room and making rounds around the hospital, stopping to talk to various people in each location. These were his stations within the hospital and without them he would not have been as happy at his job. He needed the community that the stations provided him. As an IT and web consultant, my clients were scattered around the city of Indianapolis and it created many places I could go throughout the day. My clients became part of my community and added to my work enjoyment. It didn’t feel like work – it felt more like visiting a friend.
Seeking Stations
I lived in small, rural town where there wasn’t a whole lot to do. There was no coffee shop and none of my friends live around there. There was a bowling alley, a movie theater, and several gas stations. My kids liked walking to the gas station to get candy and occasionally I’d walk to watch a movie, but the only place for me to go to ‘work’ is McDonald’s or a local diner. One is depressing and the other won’t leave you alone. There is no place to ‘hang out’. It’s a walkable neighborhood, but where would I be walking to? I decided that there must be something to do there, it’s just that I didn’t have the information as to what that is. That’s when I got the idea for Seektivity – an app that lets you share activities and events going on around you – kind of like a Foursquare for activities instead of places. A lot of my friends thought it was a good idea. Shoutt has since come out with something similar, but it adds a ‘borrowing/lending’ feature. I shoutted in that town, but there was been no one listening (give me a shout out on Twitter).
I take a drink of my coffee and get a text from a customer. The room seems brighter now. I feel like I’m a part of a community – and for a second I am happy.
My friend lives in Nora. He lives five minutes by car from his work in a walkable neighborhood right next to the Monon Trail. In the morning he stops in the kitchen (Station 1) for coffee before sitting at his desk in the living room (Station 2) to read his email before heading off to work (to check his other email). He rarely stops at the gas station (Station 3) anymore and while he lives near two Starbucks (Station 4), doesn’t go there as often anymore. At work (Station 5) he’s greeted by several coworkers, but most days he goes home for lunch. When he does go out it’s usually with coworkers and he doesn’t take the time to learn more about the staff at the counter. He doesn’t know their names and they don’t know him. When he comes home at night he’s greeted by his neighbors as he drives by or when he goes for a walk with his family. On the weekends he might go to his local hardware store (Station 6) and on Sunday his local church (Station 7).
When we got to the junkyard, there was no longer any rocket parts laying around. We saw a train. I stopped. We raced to get out of the car. He pointed at the train. It was exciting. When we got home I found some parts in my shop and we built a small rocket model, about three feet high. It wasn’t much and he didn’t care for it. He wanted something he could climb in, something he could fly. 
One of my favorite scenes in any movie is in 
