The Right Direction

Good morning! The weather this week has been incredible. It's a great day to be at work--in fact, every day is a great day to be at work when you love what you do. I've been working (feverishly) on my top three imperatives and have been making some headway. It's exciting to see the effort unfold into change and progress. Everyone has been asking how the new job is going. I must say that sometimes I feel guilty for having so much fun at work. I love the creative side of my job, and how it ties into the operational side. For example--finding a company who will manage promotional products, set up a website for ordering and manage the budgets of 5 different branch offices for those products not only streamlines things from my end, but helps us reign in the budget. And the website management is free. I must admit that not all of what I do has an operational benefit though. The other day I put the cover art together for our new employee benefits guide. Although I'm sure the employees will benefit from the book, my artwork just makes it look a little better.

I spoke yesterday with Cameron Avery, CEO of Elastic Digital. I was considering engaging them on a grid campaign--something I've seen before with the big tech companies (VMware, NetApp, EMC). It's a fantastic tool, but I think it's a bit out of our 'medium business budget' reach for now. Cameron did, however, share some fantastic insights and tricks of the trade. I hope to be able to work with this spunky Aussie again sometime soon.

Although it continues to FEEL like we're headed in the right direction, it will sure be nice to see the first fruits of our marketing focus.

S-E, S-E-O!

I met today with Ryan from Infogenix. Great guy. SEO (search engine optimization) has quickly become a very technical field--driven to new extremes by the likes of Google. I liken it to the auto industry. Men used to be able to fix their cars with a hair pin (or bubble gum), a pair of pliers and a ball ping hammer. Now, you have to be a computer genius to hack into your car's mainframe. SEO has also become very complex. Google (Bing and others) crawl through your site to see just how great it is, they look at all of the other sites to see how great your site links are too. Then they check to see if you've manipulated the system in any way. If you have, say goodbye to your site rank. You'll be lucky to ever show your face in cyberspace again--unless you know Al Gore--the inventor of the internet.

Maybe my expectations are too high (they typically are), but I expect the service providers I pay for to not only execute as promised, but to give me insights into my own business that may have otherwise been missed. Maybe this comes from my 10 years in client services--always answering to a client and always looking for new ways to 'WOW' them. But, this is the kind of service I expect.

There are no magic keys to turn--just a lot of hard work and leveraging of resources.

Ohhhh! The numbers!!

It's always about the numbers--the click throughs, the site visits, the bounces, the customer contacts, the email addresses and, ultimately, the bottom line. In this case, it's all about RMR. Much like the cell phone industry, we live and die by the recurring monthly revenues--the cost of monitoring. I spent a few hours today looking at the numbers--the analytics and the customer data. Maybe I should have eaten a lighter lunch, but by the end of the day, I'm dragging a bit. Aaron, the genius programmer (the real Napster) walked me through the highlights and limitations of our customer database. I could never be a programmer--or an accountant. I think the story is fascinating, but that's the 5000 ft view. At ground level, it's like reading a book letter by letter. That's not for me. I did learn that snailmail is our only hope for now--with the limited number of email addresses we have for our customers. That's another beauty of online sales. You ALWAYS get the email address.

I'm pretty excited about SafeLife. The more I learn, the more appealing it is to me as a DIY home user. I haven't really discussed product yet, so maybe now is a good time. One of the coolest features of the 2Gig products offered on safelifealarm is the remote monitoring from your smartphone. You can log into alarm.com from your phone and see the camera feeds at any time. You can also rewind the video to see what happened prior to you receiving a text message stating that one of your sensors was tripped. Check out the demo video here: http://www.safelifealarm.com/securitycameras.html.. 2Gig also integrates with z-wave technology, so you can control your thermostat from your smartphone, turn electrical outlets on and off remotely and even lock and unlock the front door from your smartphone. It works on Blackberry, iPhone and Android. Another appealing feature is that it's all wireless, so you can install it easily and take it with you when you move. I'll be working on some easy installation videos over the next month or two and will post them when they're available. Now all we have to see is the NUMBERS!!!

High Schools these days...

I wish everything was as easy as Facebook. Select your campaign title, select your photo to upload, what age group do you want to target, men, women, interests, location, etc. Facebook pretty much hands you targeted marketing wearing gold-plated diapers. Forget about Farmville--Facebook ads are a better investment of your time and money.

So, being the new guy in charge of marketing, I get a lot of the junk mail and phone solicitors. I got a call the other day from someone who identified himself as a contractor for Ben Lomond High School. He was calling to solicit ad space on a poster that will benefit their sports program. What has the world come to?? Remember, back in the day, when students had to earn their keep? Sports programs would use students from FBLA and DECA to sell their ad space. I guess now we contract that stuff out to non-students. These people, no doubt, make a nice percentage of the sales. It reminds me of the pizza coupons the kids sell door to door where the school makes a whopping 30% of the profits. I guess students have better things to do with their time these days--like playing Farmville on Facebook.

Hand writing expert

Day 5- "They" say your signature says a lot about who you are. I believe this is true. However, it doesn't take a handwriting expert to tell me my email signature is saying too much. How much is too much? Well, with the Mountain Alarm Logo and the safelifealarm logo stacked in there as well as all of the social media links, it's looking more like a novel than a signature. I'm open to pointers...

Am I there yet??

Day 4- (kind of) Up at 2am with a lot on my mind and could not wait to get into the office today. I was out, however, most of the morning participating in community outreach in the elementary schools in Ogden (near our HQ). Once back in the office, I met with Scott Sessions, VP of Sales for Mountain Alarm and www.safelife.com, for about an hour. Scott is a salesman's salesman--high energy, very focused, passionate, etc, etc. I was excited to hear about his book list recommendations and realize that at this pace, I'll need to buy an eReader so I don't have to rent a storage unit. Scott consumes books.

Afternoon brought a vendor contact in to talk. He's a local I met through the Rotary Club of Ogden. Dan walked me through his world as a manufacturer, how they interface with other manufacturer's products and what they do for us. My previous experience has been primarily channel sales and marketing, so a lot of it made sense. I guess I was hoping for more marketing dollars in the industry. My world was MDF. Here they call it Co-op dollars. Not much of a difference between the programs, but it's good to start drawing the comparisons and learning the new jargon. I did a little better with the names, but still didn't venture back down with the "bear claws", so I didn't embarrass myself too badly. It's a balance right now between just going in and talking to people in the office to the point of annoyance or simply walking quickly past their offices to get back into the groove.

Thanks to Chris and Clint at MarketStar for the Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard. I'm sure it will drastically improve my blogging skills. I was also surprised today with my new monitor. Randy said if I needed help "setting up my new television" I could ask him and wondered when I'd be showing the football games in my office. Once I set it up (25 inches of Hanns-G beauty), I completely lost my view of the other side of my desk. Hmm. I'm going to have to get creative. It sure did help as pulled up some of the graphics to edit though! Thanks to Mike and Aaron, the designated tightwads in the company, for letting this one through.

Getting down to the fun side of business

I'm sure over the course of the first few days here, I'll have time to go back and cover the history prior to my hire date, but for now (in day three), I'm going to focus on my first few days with Mountain Alarm and www.SafeLifeAlarm.com.

Day 1- Mike Bailey, CFO, took me around to do introductions with everyone. Dianne handed me three boxes of tea scones to hand out (strawberry was popular)--which was nice because it meant that my co-workers were actually excited to meet me (or at least pull a tea scone out of the box). I was a bit self-conscious about the tea scones because, let's be honest, they are something to be eaten at a tea party--and the sales and tech teams downstairs aren't the types to attend a tea party. If I had to compartmentalize them, I'd say the folks downstairs are more the "bear claw" crowd and the folks up here are tea scones or bagels. I digress... I'm still not clear about who falls where, but by the end of introductions, I had a better understanding of the company structure and a newfound appreciation for name tags (which we do not wear here). I'm sure I will continue with the casual, "Hey.....'you'......how are you today?" because I fail to remember my co-workers names for at least a month. I attended a staff meeting with Mike in the afternoon and was absolutely beat by the end of the day--setting up a new office is not easy work! I must say I was impressed that my name was on the office window when I arrived and Randy, our IT guru, killed every issue as it came up (like a well trained 'Duck Hunt' player. Debbie was kind enough to spend time with me walking through what has been done with Facebook, Google adwords, Twitter, et al. She single-handedly manages www.safelifealarm.com--which is the very cool DIY home security website that was launched earlier this year (late summer?). My goal is to swamp the site with orders and have her manage a multitude of minions that do her bidding.

Day 2- While continuing to call everyone "you", I managed to set up the rest of my office. I'm the marketing guy, so it has to look good. Of course, Mike said it was obvious I'm an 'I' personality, but I can appreciate that. I waded through the computer setup--tried to install xobni (my favorite Outlook plugin) and screwed up my whole Outlook/Groupwise setup. Randy used his voodoo magic to get it running again. I was also able to convince the powers that be (aka those who hold all of the money) that I needed something larger than a 15 inch monitor and 1GB of RAM (if anyone knows of an art program out there that runs on a gig of ram, please let me know because I swore on my life that there wasn't). I spent several hours of Aaron's time (he's our genius programmer here) picking his brain about past marketing campaigns, websites, the databases, etc and he was generous enough to let all of his email and phone calls pile up while I sat there in his office. I've heard rumors about Aaron--like he's the 'real Napster'. At this point, I don't doubt any of it.

Day 3- Finally...access to blogger.com came. Of course, I just put in the request this morning and Randy turned it around like greased lightning. Now if I could just get my iTunes to work, I'd be a happy camper. Looking at the new painting on my wall of a little town in Tuscany, I am reminded why I'm here--to blow the socks off of the sales department and (short-term goal) feel like I've earned my trip back to Italy and Switzerland next year. By the way--'Mountain Man' may not be the best portrayal of who I am or what I do, but 'Mountain Alarm Man' sounded too "superhero" to me. At this point in time, I could also call myself "Mr. SafeLifeAlarm", but Mountain Man sounded more like I deserve to sit down and eat a bear claw with the guys downstairs.