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In This Issue: Lessons Learned: Don’t Idolize A Solution | Rack Adapter, 23″ to 19″ | Benefits of AOC HDMI Cables | News to Start Your Day
The CK Daily – Lessons Learned: Don’t Idolize A Solution
I have been writing about some of our “lessons learned” over the last several months and today I want to talk about “Don’t Idolize A Solution”.
For a very long time, I have tended to represent concepts with phrases. I have about 18 or so of these phrases now and somewhere along the way, someone called them Craigisms. One of the early Craigisms was “Don’t Idolize A Solution”. It came about when a staff member put off the responsibility for solving a problem that was in front of them by saying, for example:
In the case of a recurring problem with a vendor – “Well, we just need to move to a new vendor for this item”
In the case of a newly stained couch – “Well, we need to replace that piece of furniture anyway”.
It’s EASY to imagine a wholesale change being the answer to the problem at hand while HARD to think about how to solve the problem IN FRONT of you and execute on that solution. And generally the “idolized solution” is WAY harder than just dealing with the actual problem. I am not going to call it laziness because I think we all have the tendency to find a way to avoid doing hard things.
It is much easier to choose to do hard things when you know that you are building something better.
Many people, myself included, avoid hard things if the outcome is not meaningful to them. At my house, I may walk past a piece of trash or a kid’s toy lying in a flower bed 100 times if the mulch is patchy and needs refreshing. “It’s already a degraded situation that needs attention; what does the foreign object really matter? I will deal with it when we refresh the mulch.”
Wait a dang minute! You are telling me that I have to spend thousands of dollars to get rid of a toy lying in the flower bed? Really??
Right this moment I have some rotting boards on my barn doors at home. They are getting worse and worse. I need to hire someone to fix them but do I? Nope. I keep thinking “I really would like to replace those doors with motor-operated garage door style doors …. And I would kinda like to put some porches over those doors so I could park out of the rain … but what do I want that to look like? I need to get an architect to design something … but that’s complicated and expensive.” So I do nothing. Do I have to do all that instead of a few hundred dollar board replacement? Really? No, I don’t. This is idolizing a solution. I can fix the issue in front of me and take the time to decide if I truly want the rest of those changes made.
So, all that being said, when I jumped back into the day-to-day of CK I realized that we had been idolizing a solution for years, and it was impacting our customers and our revenue.
“Let’s switch E-Commerce platforms they said. It will be fun they said.”
No, let’s not and say we did haha.
Since the very beginning of CablesAndKits, we have always leveraged software developers, whether on staff or contract, to build and maintain our website and back-end systems. In addition to always being the way we have done things, it has also always been a personal passion of mine. I am pretty good at seeing the needs of the business and turning them into development tasks to be done and I enjoy doing it. Over time we have built so many features into the website that were not standard on the average website. Things like the ability to ship on your own shipping account, multiple logins for different team members, specialized ways to display certain groups of products, etc. But, we were falling behind in some areas that had become standard features in off-the-shelf platforms. Instead of putting in the work to build those features we somehow decided we should just re-platform. It seemed to make sense so we embarked on a multi-year SEVERAL hundred thousand dollar journey to transition to a new platform – that never happened.
The decision wasn’t necessarily a bad one but we could have resolved the issues in our existing system faster, easier, and cheaper than moving to a new system. It proved to be impossibly difficult for reasons I won’t go into here.
It could have ended well but … it gets worse.
Not only did we idolize a solution by choosing to re-platform rather than fixing the issues in front of us, but we neglected the existing site the entire time we worked on the move to the new system. SEO, broken pages, poor categorization, and even our Google Adwords management to a degree. The list of things we were not working on for that period of time is quite long.
The neglect resulted in much of the revenue decline we experienced in the last half of 2023. It wasn’t the only cause but it was a significant part of it. It is SO easy to “take your eye off the ball”. (See last week’s email about “Don’t expect what you don’t inspect”).
In late September, all e-commerce, product, and marketing folks (plus me) started meeting daily. We DOVE into the current website and just started fixing stuff. We did an SEO audit and were horrified at how bad things were so we got to work on that. Adwords, product pages, categorization, site search, product pages, images, content, and the list goes on. We just SAW WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE AND DID IT. No idolizing solutions. No excuses. We just plowed through stuff.
And today, almost 5 months later, we are still plowing. We have gotten more meaningful work done in 5 months than we did in perhaps the last 5 years.
“Disciplined people, engaged in disciplined thought, resulting in disciplined action” – Jim Collins
What solutions are you idolizing? Put one foot in front of the other and just get stuff done.
More to come …
Craig
Product Spotlights & Updates
Rack adapters are used to mount standard 19″ computer and networking equipment into (not so standard) 23″ equipment racks. By attaching these brackets to your 23″ equipment rack you create a 19″ opening which is needed to mount standard 19″ equipment.
Learning Center Article – Benefits of AOC HDMI Cables
You see all kinds of different technologies used for the widest ranges of communication. Among all of that, the primary way to send audio and video signals is via HDMI.
Today’s News to Start Your Day:
- SpaceX has filed to move its incorporation location to Texas from Delaware.
- Shares of TSMC reached an all-time high on after Morgan Stanley lifted the price target on its Nvidia.
- From wasabi to fried chicken, Oreo has always pushed the boundaries of flavor combinations. With new variations popping up every few months and offerings ranging from the outrageous to the OMG. Check out the most interesting and unusual Oreo releases and limited-edition flavors from around the world.
- Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander launched from Florida on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. If fully successful, the IM-1 cargo mission would be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years.