New INC. Magazine column by Howard Tullman

 

  

Don't Be in Such a Rush to Restart, or Rehire

As the economy returns to something near normal, companies and workers who have been sidelined might feel an urgent need to back into action. Just take some time to think this through before you do. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN@TULLMAN

One of the first things we tell our salespeople is that you never know when the buyer will eventually agree to make a purchase. So, notwithstanding the fact that it's painful to be pushy and that you're always afraid that you'll be wearing out your welcome, you need to keep asking for the order because, one minute after you let down your guard and take a break, will be the time when someone else jumps in and makes the sale.

Life isn't fair, but it's very fast. And if you're not quick, consistent and careful, life can easily pass you by. Being in a hurry in sales is healthy - in fact, it's a must. Elsewhere, maybe not so much. In matters of employment, being in a hurry is a mixed blessing. Which brings us to some of the complexities around the many companies soon to be in hiring mode, and in a hurry to do so, and the millions of people looking for those jobs who are in a similar rush.

In fact, just about everyone I know (on one side of the process or the other) can't wait to get back to work or to find work even though - whether they know it or not - they may not actually be ready. Now's the moment when it makes a lot of sense for both searchers and seekers to take just a little time to get their bearings. You need to identify what you're really looking for and avoid signing up or signing on just for the sake of getting something to do or finding someone to fill a slot.

As demand for goods and services explodes across the reviving economy, employers who have been shell-shocked, who are still somewhat fearful of moving forward, and who are rightly concerned about getting back into the game prematurely will soon wake up in a frenzy and decide that it's as easy as flipping a switch and running an ad to find the right people for prior positions. The fact is that the job requirements, the necessary skills, and even the overall nature of their businesses are likely to have changed in material, but not necessarily clear and settled ways. This will present new challenges, uncertain risks, and other difficulties -- like workforce right-sizing and retraining around security, safety and health issues.

And, in the same way, most job seekers (whatever they may subjectively feel, say, or admit to themselves) are also overly anxious and unlikely to appreciate just how different and risky re-entry can be when you've spent a year on the bench. If you ask yourself, apart from nerves, how you really feel at the moment about trains and planes and automobiles or how excited you are to be dealing with buttons, belts and zippers once again, you might just conclude that - while our brains are busy thinking about doing the right thing - our minds and our bodies are more than a little slow and sluggish about the prospect of getting back into battle. Adam Grant recently wrote a great explanation about our ubiquitous apathy - which he described as "languishing" - a mid-state condition between classical depression and flourishing. But I think when we look back on these times, if we do things right, it will emerge that this wasn't a condition, but rather a chance to make new choices.

Anxiety isn't the same as adrenaline and it's more likely to sap your energy than to provide the extra push you need to come roaring back. We're all suffering from variations of the Pandemic Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) and everyone needs to ease on down the road back rather than trying to jump from zero to hero in a matter of minutes. You can walk down any path as long as it isn't a plank.

This moment is especially risky if you're a new player in a new position because there won't be a lot of second chances or do-overs if you blow it the first time. Those old muscles aren't as limber as they used to be and, even more importantly, after a year with family and a chance for many of us to reevaluate what's really first and foremost in our lives, maybe we all don't have exactly the same old drive and desire to work like maniacs and set the world on fire. Depending on your political persuasion, to a certain extent, the world's been a dumpster fire for at least a year and honestly for the last four years and we all need a break.

It's clearly important that we all get back to taking care of business eventually, but at the moment, there's a bigger and more substantial barrier to getting back. We've learned a lot about living (and dying) in the last year and - as I've said many times, there's always more work, but you've only got one family. The trick is a new approach, which we now see is possible:  you can organize your day around your life rather than around your work. Taking care of your family and your own mental health and wellbeing is critical right now; so is making thoughtful and careful choices and plans about the way forward for you and yours. It's never too soon to be smart and a little selfish.

No company is ever going to love you like your family does; no job will ever make up for losing huge chunks of the early years of your kids growing up. Covid-19 sucked (and still sucks plenty), but it did give us each an opportunity to pause, reflect and reevaluate where we've been and where we should be heading. Don't miss the chance to catch up with, and try to make up for, the sometimes-ugly past. This isn't something that comes around often -- plus there's a good chance that you can also change the future.    

APR 27, 2021

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

The Price of "All You Can Eat" Can Be Steep 

The strategy seems smart: attract customers by offering more for less. But it's not for all products and all businesses. Here's a four-point test to see if the pricing is right for your product. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN@TULLMAN

Recently I was watching the scene in the final episode of The Queen's Gambit where a collection of Beth Harmon's buddies, boyfriends, and boosters gather around the phone in New York City to talk to her in Russia about strategies for the big chess game the next morning. The conversation continues for some time and then Benny Watts, who's hosting the gathering, says to the other guys that they have to wrap things up because the international call was "costing him a bundle".

It's a great scene, but it left me wondering--when, exactly, did the concept of costly long-distance calls, along with so many other things we all grew up with and took for granted, disappear from our lives? It was just a given-- our parents beat it into our heads - that the further away the person you called lived from you and the longer you spent on a call, the more it was going to cost. Just like driving a car-- more miles, more gas, more time - simple math. Distance and duration meant you paid more money.

And then one day, they didn't. Was it some magic of physics or advances in technology that overnight shrunk the world and enabled us to use our cellphones to call anywhere - near or far - at no incremental cost? Was it due to deregulation or increased competition? Nope. It was mainly math, or to be more precise, accounting.

The change occurred when phone companies realized they were spending so much money each month to track and bill individual customers for their long-distance calls that it was more cost-effective to convert the entire pricing structure to a flat monthly fee, especially because that change actually meant that every customer was paying a little more, whether they took advantage of the opportunity to make distant calls or not. Not only did the new structure cut the telcos' operating expenses, but it also permitted them to grow their aggregate revenues. And the customers - by and large -thought they were getting a bargain.  The dirtiest little secret, of course, was that distance never did matter in the phone business because you were merely connecting circuits whether the calls were next door or halfway across the country.

There's an important lesson here for new businesses as well. While it's generally thought of as a bad joke these days to say that your pricing strategy is to make up any early operating losses by growing your volume, there are times when simple pricing strategies like "one fee fits all" or "all you can eat" do make a lot of sense and don't hurt the bottom line. It all depends --as most things do. The trick is to understand your customers and to understand the underlying economics of your business. 

In terms of customers, many years ago when I was first selling various services to car dealers, they would almost universally balk at paying fees on a per-vehicle basis. We had our own theories about why they were so hesitant, but it was clear that they didn't want to be surprised with a bill at the end of each month that might be higher than they had expected, or budgeted for, based on the number of cars sold or serviced. They were very good at doing the quick math and they would explain to us that if they sold 300 cars a month, their aggregate monthly fee would be some huge number, which they certainly couldn't afford.

But we also knew that the vast majority of our dealers and prospects would be lucky to sell more than 150 cars in their best months. They wouldn't necessarily admit that to us, but it was undoubtedly true. So, we basically used their own math (and hubris) against them, did a little reverse jiujitsu pricing, and proposed a flat monthly fee, which divided by 300 meant that their per-vehicle service charge would be a fraction (less than half) of what we had initially proposed. And they ate it up and thought it was a steal. And not one of them ever sold more than 200 cars a month for the next 5 years. We made out like bandits.

In the case of Cameo, the CEO, Steven Galanis had a similar problem. He was trying to attract athletes and celebrities who made millions in their day jobs (or used to) to work with his startup and create short, personalized videos for his customers. They could set whatever price for their videos they wished, but, of course, if the prices were crazy, no one would use the service. So, he took a different approach. He analyzed those multi-million-dollar salaries and figured out how much each of the players made per minute during the season, since it only took a few minutes for any of them to make a Cameo video. And it turned out, they could make more money per minute doing the videos for his company than they were being paid by the NFL or the NBA. Once again, some clever math to the rescue. And, of course, the pitch worked, and the business exploded. By the middle of last year, in the midst of the pandemic, more than 40,000 celebrities had joined Cameo's platform and more than 1.2 million videos have been purchased by consumers.    

On the other hand, when Groupon first launched its two-fer coupon program for restaurants, it was one of the worst things a restaurant could sign up for. Basically, the restaurant was agreeing to sell two meals for the price of one. The theory was that the customers would come back and maybe bring their friends. The reality was that the deals attracted, not foodies, but cheapies who never came back. Long story short-- it was the restaurants whose lunch got eaten, but not in the way they anticipated. They had all of the costs and virtually no comebacks. It made no economic sense because it didn't match their business model.

But there's an equally important lesson here if you're in the right kind of business. It's all about the incremental/marginal cost of serving additional customers. If you're filling seats in a class that has space, if you're streaming an online performance on the web, if your product is digital and replicable at almost no cost, or if you've got people and resources just sitting around or excess capacity, then these are the kind of economics that make sense.    

And those are the criteria you need to use to evaluate any "two-fer" or "all you can eat" deal.

·1  The deal needs to drive new users and incremental revenue. It can't replace or cannibalize existing full-margin revenues.

· 2  Your business can't be subject to capacity or size constraints.

· 3   The deal can't require you to spend or invest a great deal of money upfront.

· 4    The deal can't give you cash flow or other float problems.

If these few tests are met, it makes a lot of sense to take a look at the opportunity. If not, it makes more sense to walk away.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

How Cameo Became a Star

The company, which connects celebrities with fans via paid videos, just reached unicorn status. Cameo is a great example of how a slow-burn strategy can catch fire and scorch unsuspecting competitors. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN@TULLMAN 

Chicago is all abuzz about the new unicorn in town. Cameo, a 4-year-old startup that allows users to buy short, video shout-outs from celebrities, just completed a new $100 million round of financing at a valuation of more than a billion dollars. The list of new strategic and growth investors led by e.ventures reads like a tech Who's Who (Amazon, Google, SoftBank, etc.) and the newbies join an existing A-list VC roster headed by Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The irony is that when the business was started a few years ago as two young guys trying to talk B- and C-list has-beens and never-wases (plus some new and old jocks) into making a few bucks recording videos on their phones for complete strangers, pretty much everyone thought it was a joke. Who would agree to do it? Who would care about the people doing it? And, of course, who would pay for it? While maybe everyone has their 15 minutes of fame, Cameo was chasing people who had burnt out long ago or missed their moment completely.

What no one realized in the beginning (when the entire Cameo team shared a modest glass-walled office at 1871, Chicago's premiere tech incubator) is that this is a near-perfect example of how new competitors can enter a market at the very bottom - and get ignored or ridiculed by all the existing players -- while slowly and steadily improving their offerings. Cameo moved continually upstream, grew its presence and share, and is now poised to pounce.

This is exactly what China did to sectors of the American steel industry. They started by producing and delivering cheap, dirty and low-grade rebar (those rusty stakes you see sticking out of concrete at every construction site with the little orange caps), which no one else in the U. S. wanted to produce because of the low margins and associated workplace pollution problems. And then, in just over a decade, the new entrants developed clean mini-mills and came to be a significant player in the production of most specialty steel in this country. Change China to Japan and you've got the same basic story with film and copying machines. If this process sounds somewhat familiar, it's the core concept behind Clay Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. Start small and moderately priced in potentially large and under-appreciated markets, or in markets that were largely monopolized and taken for granted. Serve your customers most basic needs, innovate and iterate constantly, and move so quickly that the incumbents can't keep up with the pace.

Cameo never worried about the quality of the videos on their folks' phones -- although the quality and smarts of those phones exploded, which didn't hurt. Smooth, polished and slick was out. In fact, the more informal, the more ad hoc, the goofier some of the early offerings were, the more authentic and real they seemed to the end users in an age of fake, plastic and manufactured everything. In a way, everyone was in on the joke and the hokier the performance, the bigger the bang.

These days, some 1,300,000 videos later, there are more than 40,000 celebs and other personalities of all sizes, shapes, ages and histories competing every day on the Cameo site to make videos and make someone's occasion instantly memorable, for a fee. The talent sets the price for their own videos and Cameo takes a cut of each transaction. Last year's revenues look to have been around $100 million.

And, as sad as it is to say, the COVID-19 pandemic couldn't have come at a better time for Cameo since everyone who was anyone was stuck at home along with the rest of the world looking for something to do in the way of work.  At the same time, digital gifts are safe and easy to deliver. As the business and the transaction volumes took off, it turned out that these celebs could actually make some real money in their spare time. The company says that more than 150 of their best "creators" earned more than $100,000 each last year.

All good, you say, but who's really being disrupted? That's what the world doesn't really know yet about Cameo, even though Steven Galanis, the CEO, talks about it all the time. He says that Cameo isn't really about the videos -- those are mini-Trojan horses for the real score. It's about building a two-way marketplace between celebrities and their fans where just about anything - any task, any request - can be accommodated and bought or sold.

And who is really being disrupted and about to be blown up? Some of the worst people in the world -- talent agents, music label heads and managers. As Hunter Thompson used to say: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."  

Once you (and millions of others) can use Cameo's channels to ask Snoop Dogg to do whatever, it won't take him too long to wonder why he needs any intermediary to take care of business. He's already killing it on Cameo, and now non-fungible tokens, NFTs, provide another whole channel for musicians and others to directly connect with fans. Snoop recently observed: "There is no platform or middleman filtering my message anymore." The fat cats in the entertainment business may not know it yet, but their days are numbered. Every day, it seems, the world turns upside down on someone who thought they were sitting on top of it.

Cameo is coming for all of them. The one thing we know for sure in the startup world is that the wolf climbing the hill is always hungrier than the wolf on top of the hill.

BOOMER CAFE: What every boomer can see: Netflix is crushing it!

 

What every boomer can see: Netflix is crushing it!

Boomer Work  •  April 10, 2021  •  1 Comment

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One of many things the pandemic has changed in our lives is our television viewing habits. Baby boomers, like others, are cutting the cord to cable and satellite providers, and replacing them in record numbers with streaming services, mainly Netflix. Chicago entrepreneur Howard Tullman, who pulls no punches, writes for inc.com that by successfully rejecting the broadcast television model with which we grew up, Netflix is crushing the traditional broadcasters, because it is a quality product, and we will pay for that. He asks, how can we thank them?!

I’ve heard it said that TV ads are the penalty you pay for watching cheap and endless crap for free. Network television is effectively a tax on people who can’t afford something better – they have to watch this junk and the endless ads as well if they want any sort of entertainment. Network TV has become the shop window for every creepy and frightening ad for the perils of aging and dysfunction, the threat of every newly imagined and cleverly named disease, combined with incessant reruns of shows we hated from their debut. There’s also the traditional flood of car and beer ads — never mind that the average age of a new car buyer is likely to be an aging boomer.

Howard Tullman

If you’ve begun to painfully realize that the aggregate number of ads, as well as time consumed, in any 30-minute slot of prime-time television seems to grow every few months, join the club. Likewise, the bulk of cable programming is no better than the rubbish the big broadcast guys promote except that – as hard as this is to accomplish – the ads are even worse, more crudely made, and dumbed down as well. But at least they provide regular employment for broken down old jocks flogging Medicare supplements and hearing aids while otherwise unemployable or shameless actors pitch reverse mortgages and end-of-life term insurance.

This is precisely what “broadcasting” was always intended to be: a tool to reach the masses via one-size-fits-all, lowest common denominator offerings with the least objectionable material, so that you don’t change the channel. And all of it delivered through a framework to support the ads and advertisers that paid the bills. And the whole thing worked pretty well for all concerned except the viewers. None of us was really a loyal or grateful customer – we just didn’t have a better alternative.

When cable came along, it promised massive amounts of programming choices, but there was only one distributor– the dreaded cable company, selected by local government. This is why cable was always a grudge buy. There was no competition, you paid for a bunch of junk you didn’t want, and the cable company owned the local politicians and rate-setting authorities as well. Sweet deal, but not for us.

But now, if you’re willing and able to pay for the privilege, we have streaming solutions and a growing flow of podcasts (and a few well-done vodcasts) that – with the exception of Peacock, which seems like a glorified invitation to a digital root canal – represent a new attempt at narrowcasting. Smaller, more affluent, self-selecting and better identified audiences composed of folks who are actually anxious and interested in seeing the offered material and, of course, also willing to pay for it.

The entire initial premise of Netflix was that by trading your privacy and viewing preferences and choices for automated personalization you could have the system select and deliver higher-quality, more tailored, and more entertaining suggestions, recommendations, and content for you. The content was as good as anything else out there, and the discovery element was real and serious. But what has become more and more apparent is that millions of us were looking for and willing to pay for ad-free and uninterrupted entertainment.

One of the tactical errors that some of the erstwhile and flailing Netflix competitors have made is to offer a basic, less expensive service with traditional ads along with ad-free access at an upcharge, which seems to me to simply reinforce the depressing message and reality that these days only paupers, morons and cheapskates watch ad-riven network programming. If these competitive vendors had the courage of their convictions and believed in their own offerings, they’d go with a single price structure. Thinking that you can buy eyeballs and subscribers with bait-and-switch expiring offers or deep, short-term discounts (“Get 2 issues of XXX magazine for $2 and then we’ll charge you $50 for the next 6 months.”) hasn’t worked for the few survivors in the high-end magazine business. That pricing matrix is unlikely to be a solid, long-term strategy for streamers either.

But it’s going to be very interesting to see how long the new ad-free models can be sustained and whether their managers can resist the constant pressure from the market and their investors to further monetize their captive viewer eyeballs. This is the constant debate we hear every day about Twitter and others and it’s a nasty disease that no industry can withstand for too long.

But in the case of Netflix, the debate ignores a very critical data distinction. Netflix can sell actionable targeting data about its users – demographics, habits, tastes, interests, spending cycles — to advertisers without permitting them to show a single ad on Netflix itself, which would jeopardize the customers’ experiences.

You already know how this works. You look for something on Amazon or search for anything on Google and – surprise of surprises – suddenly half the other places you visit on the web are showing you ads relating to the products and services you recently researched. Targeting your travels on the internet is easy as pie. Amazon does this a lot better than Google because Amazon, unlike Google, knows your purchase behavior as well so they won’t waste your time or try your patience showing you ads for stuff you bought two days ago.

But Netflix never even has to let you know how the magic works. And even if you ask, much like Facebook, they will likely tell you that all the data they sell to third parties is anonymized so that while the ad targeters “know” your interests and preferences, you should feel comfortable that they don’t really know who you are.

So, the modest good news is that you’re unlikely to see ads on Netflix any time soon and, if their competition has any smarts at all, they’ll be careful not to put their toes in that ugly pool of sludge as well.

—————————————————————————

Howard is author and co-author of several books, including his newest, “You Can’t Win a Race With Your Mouth: And 299 Other Expert Tips from a Lifelong Entrepreneur.”

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BALLOON - CHECK OUT THE TULLMAN TEMPLATES

 When I partnered with @BalloonPlatform as a Flight Template author, I knew this was going to completely transform the way we all collaborate. Flight Templates are built for every team in every industry. Pretty amazing what asking a couple questions can do.

BALLOON FLIGHTS LAUNCH

Today, I’m excited to announce my partnership with @BalloonPlatform as one of their initial 25 Flight Template authors. Balloon is on a mission to eliminate groupthink from collaboration and amplify all voices in the workplace. Check out my templates here: getballoon.com/templates

 Today, I’m excited to announce my partnership with @BalloonPlatform as one of their initial 25 Flight Template authors. Balloon is on a mission to eliminate groupthink from collaboration and amplify all voices in the workplace. Check out my templates here: getballoon.com/templates

Rand Paul is a dangerous fool

 Watching Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) debate science with Fauci during committee hearings is like watching Albert Einstein being disputed by his dry cleaner. Fauci is often reduced to making obvious points in a patient voice. Fauci deserves his Presidential Medal of Freedom just for his heroic forbearance.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

The New Meaning of Slacker--And Why You Should Be One

Never mind those work-averse goofballs of the past. The gnarly interruptions in global supply chains recently have demonstrated the dangers of just in time everything. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN@TULLMAN

 

Any number of words in the English language have been redefined over the years and they've come to mean entirely different things. Some have come to be complimentary ("sick" or "ill"), some are disparaging (I dare not give a "ditzy" example), and others are now hateful and politically incorrect if misapplied, used in jest in the wrong company, or used by the "wrong" people.

Apparently, for example, you can be called a "thug" by our President if you attack the Capitol, but not by a sportscaster if you flagrantly attack another player on the basketball court and break his nose. It's a very slippery slope these days and a page right out of Alice in Wonderland where Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." 

Nonetheless, I propose that we start today to rehabilitate the word "slacker" and cut the poor noun some slack. I'm not really sure when calling someone a "slacker" became a term of derision. In the beginning, it was far more hilarious than hateful. Richard Linklater's 1990 film Slackers brought the definitive persona to the big screen. Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats in the mid-90s added to the oeuvre. These were all basically amusing portraits of a bunch of young comedic doofuses living an alternative (and modestly attractive) lifestyle.

Their attitudes, approaches, and antics weren't necessarily admirable, but they didn't mean any evil by it. No harm, no foul. However, over some relatively short period of time, "slacker" morphed into a moniker that meant lazy, drug-addled, pierced, tattooed; slackers came to represent a lifestyle that threatened to corrupt our kids with their work-averse ethic, weed and wild ideas. They could live in Seattle or Portland, but not on our streets or in our suburbs. 

But, as we hopefully near the end of our national nightmare, one thing that the pandemic taught us for sure is that - in our businesses - having a little slack is a pretty good thing. That doesn't mean bailing on the whole work hard thing. It just means having a little space and breathing room, a margin of error for hiccups and mistakes, and a back-up plan for when things go sideways, or worse. Running everything up to (and sometimes beyond) the bleeding edge - managing your inventory and supplies on a "just in time" basis and not accepting pieces and parts a moment too soon - turns out to a very risky proposition when your supply chain chokes, your customers swarm, demand spikes, and your shelves are suddenly empty.

The economic pain from this global lack of foresight and preparation won't end when the pandemic does. Try to get a critical electronic part for your Lexus and the dealer will wish you well, give you a loaner, and pray that the parts eventually return to inventory this summer. Last week, the Jeep plant in Belvidere, Illinois, which employs 3,600 people, shut down along with four other impacted factories because of a shortage of semiconductor chips. Lots less steel these days, it's all about smarts.

So, my new definition of a slacker is someone who is smart and understands that the new 3 R's of business are reserves, redundancy and resilience.  A slacker builds and manages his or her business in a way that incorporates these necessities and creates the "slack" necessary to survive whatever the world may throw his or her way. Here are three rules for becoming the perfect slacker: 

(1)  Adequate reserves are a critical component of your business model.

It's clear that virtually no business had the necessary cash on hand or other reserves (including lines of credit and other liquid assets) to survive a once-in-a generation economic disruption like last year's, but the experience highlighted for all of us the extent to which far too many firms were underfunded, over-extended, over-expanding and otherwise skating far too close to the edge of financial ruin long before the virus hit. As Warren Buffett says: "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

(2)  Redundancy is costly and unnecessarily duplicative -- until your base systems fail.

During the pandemic, almost every business in the U.S. and the government itself was at the mercy of outsourced and distant supply chains as well as victimized by a classic strategy that attempted to minimize the theoretical cost of holding excess inventory on site. We ignored the less likely but, in the event, far more costly prospect of completely interrupting production and manufacturing due to the unavailability of critical parts and components. Backups, onsite storage, alternative supply channels that aren't single-threaded, and business interruption insurance are all expensive undertakings. But modestly reduced margins are a reasonably fair tradeoff when the possible alternative is shutting down your operations entirely for lengthy periods of time.

(3)  Resilience means building businesses that can quickly measure, and then bend and adapt to, unforeseen stresses and circumstances without breaking.

For all the fashionable talk about agility and flexibility, the pandemic demonstrated just how brittle and hidebound so many businesses are and how painfully long it took them to react, adapt to, and respond to the new business conditions and constantly changing operating requirements that the rapidly spreading virus triggered. The tragically pathetic response by the Trump Administration (accompanied by the criminal and ongoing denial of the virus's severity) made things even worse.

Very few businesses have constructed circuit breakers, gutters, or other safeguards that effectively put a floor and some fail-safe curbs against the freefall debacles that we witnessed during the pandemic. Too many firms found that the metrics and measurements they had traditionally used in their accounting and management systems to respond to changes in their markets and circumstances were too slow and too narrow to capture the scale and speed of the shifts. It's too often the case that you only learn where the limits are once you've gone past them. Early warning systems, rapid response plans, and far faster decisions would have saved lots of lives and livelihoods last year.  

Finally, once things are rebuilt and again operating smoothly, implementing regular stress testing and failure drills are equally important and rarely done steps that will help protect your business. It's much like the need to periodically replace the batteries in your flashlight and smoke detectors.

These are another set of preventative costs that are easy to put off or avoid. It's just human nature - we're so happy to be back in business that we don't even want to think about any of the ugly alternatives. That's how they eventually come to bite you in the ass.

A word to the wise: it's only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are. Once you're up and running again, don't slack off.

SHAMELESS SCUMBAGS, PERVERTS AND DRUGGIES