You may remember the hilarious SNL character Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber. If not, here is a link to the hulu site.
Theodoric of York (clip)
It’s certainly easy to laugh at the ignorance of our ancestors. Then again, I wonder if we’ll be proud of all the things we “know” 100 years from now…
What is the moral?
- Speak only of which you are certain?
- Stay off the cutting edge, because it could be wrong?
- Avoid toads and leeches?
No, Nah and Nope.
Rather, I would suggest that it is the following:
Know what you know. Learn what you don’t. Challenge both.
This holds true for many areas of life, and it is specifically applicable to business. Leaders who fail in this regard risk being obsoleted.
Do you think that video providers are experts in all aspects of their own business? What about their suppliers? Competitors? Are they experts in their customers businesses? If they aren’t, how can they possible meet the needs and requirements of their customers?
The MVaaS providers that will succeed will be those that:
- Understand what they know about their ecosystem, with special consideration for their customers,
- Learn about what they don’t know,
- Continually challenge it all.
My college hockey coach used to say, “If we’re not winning, we’re learning.” Today’s economic “lessons” are a great case in point. While many of us don’t feel like winners when we look at our stock portfolios, if we step back, we can observe what we’re learning on a macro level about the way we do business. To name a few:
- We’re cutting out waste, with a great case in point being restaurants who seek ways to keep food costs down by reigning in portion sizes, tightening up line operations and buying more local produce to keep transportation costs down. Managing multiple operations without racking up expensive driving miles is easier now than ever, thanks to such powerful tools as MVaaS.
- Energy companies are developing alternative fuels, like sun, wind, and even algae (really, check it out)
- Workers are learning different ways to be effective, making telecommuting more than just a way to work in your pajamas.
- Automobile companies are down-sizing their vehicles to come into line with acceptable fuel consumption levels
- Another silver lining: you can get a killer deal on a truck or SUV…or a house in Detroit.
A friend of mine asked me the other day how my business was faring. He wondered whether the recessionary environment was hurting me given the fact that many of my customers are in the retail and restaurant markets where times are pretty tough lately.
While I wouldn’t say that the recession is good for business (tighter budgets are never a good thing), there are some positives. For one, if operators are worried about growing profitability and can’t do it by driving top line revenue (visits are down, it is tough to add new units), they can certainly increase profits by addressing the bottom line by managing their stores more effectively – this is a great lead in for MVaaS discussions.
If that’s not enough, recessions can also cause an increase in the amount of activity that loss prevention groups (big customers of video solutions) need to track. There’s an article on this in that bastion of literary excellence, The USA Today, 
titled “More consumers, workers shoplift as economy slows”
So while the recession is not doing me any personal favors (nothing like watching the stock market lose a couple points a day and paying $4.25 a gallon to get you pumped about our nation’s economy) it may in fact be helping me out on the company side.
About a week ago, two Envysion colleagues and I had the pleasure of meeting Micah Baldwin, head of business development for Lijit. The purpose of our meeting was to gain some perspective on blogging and to learn how we might make the MVaaS blog more appealing and dynamic. Micah generously shared his blogging philosopy:
- Write as if no one is going to read it
- Blogging should be fun
- The currency of blogging: comments and links
As a marketer, I share Micah’s philosophy that the ultimate currency and the epitome of viral marketing is when your blog starts a conversation about your service. The conversation can turn into an inquiry, which can spur a service demonstration, which can turn into a sale.
Blog on.
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In my post yesterday, I introduced the subject of the Birthday Problem. Did you try to guess at the answers?
For those of you previously unfamiliar with the Birthday Problem, I suspect that your guesses, unless you took pencil to paper, were rather inaccurate. It is still surprising to me that you need only 23 randomly chosen people to have a greater than 50% chance that two people share a birthday. And at 47 people you are at 95%.
Why is this important? (excluding the pure profit producing potential by wagering with friends)
To me, the Birthday Problem illustrates the sometimes surprising results of probabilities. It’s a cliche that “statistics can lie.” This can be true. But there are also important conclusions that can be inferred from the judicious extrapolation of data. It just takes providing the proper tools and someone who knows what to do with them.
This is how I view MVaaS. What is the probability that mistakes discovered at one location are repeated at the other locations? What is the probability that corporate endorsed best practices are followed at all locations?
Would our guesses by any more accurate than they were for the Birthday Problem?
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While our country celebrates its birthday today, here’s an interesting problem from the field of mathematics. I first learned of the Birthday Problem in a statistics class I took at NYU (at least I remembered something, Professor Melnick).
In summary, the Birthday Problem calculates the probability that at least two people from a randomly chosen group share a birthday.
At the extremes this is easy to understand. Excluding leap year, there are 365 potential birthdays. If you have a randomly chosen group of 366, it follows that the probability is 100% that at least two people share a birthday. The outcome is absolutely assured. Conversely, if two people meet in the street, and compare their birthdays, if is very unlikely that they will be the same.
What makes the Problem particularly interesting is how small a group you need to assemble to make the probability higher than 50%.
Without reseaching the answer (you are on the honor code), how large would you expect the group to have to be to make the probability 50%? How about 95%? The answers may surprise you…
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Independence Day in the U.S. is celebrated as the birth of the nation. Although independence was not assured (it took nearly eight years of war, and another five years until the Constitution was ratified), the signing of the Declaration of Independence was a pinnacle moment. There was no turning back for the colonists who signed the Declaration. It was truly “liberty of death” for them!
For our readers in the U.S. and elsewhere who observe this holiday, on behalf of Managed Video as a Service and Envysion, we wish you a happy and safe 4th of July!
I’m a little behind on my reading, but just read a great post from Brad Feld on how software companies can often forget to fix the little things in their application that may seem insignficant, but that drive customers crazy.
It would seem to me that the mark of a customer focused, highly successful software company would be their ability to take care of the little things as well as the big things for their customers. To do this, a company would need at least a couple of capabilities.
First and foremost, they’d need engineers that are smart enough to actually fix the problem. Given Brad’s appropriate characterization of how hard it would be to fix some of the little things that are bugging him (sorry for pun) lately, let’s assume that most software companies have that capability (if not, they probably don’t have that many customers and should be worried about the big things that probably don’t work either)
Second, they’d need the ability to rapidly fix the issues and get those fixes out to their users. I guess it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a user to have to wait a year for the next annual software release to have some annoying bugs fixed, but it is certainly better when the software company can push fixes and upgrades in a more continual fashion. MVaaS (and SaaS providers more generally) have a leg up here as they can push changes out to their entire installed base as frequently as they want – with most doing monthly or quarterly pushes of some big things and some little things.
Finally, and here’s where the most talented technology/software companies can fall down despite all of their technical prowess, the company needs a mechanism to hear what the little things are directly from their customers. Sounds like common sense, but if you don’t have a simple and easy way to ask for and collect feedback from your customers on the little things, your development team will keep cranking out the sexy new big things and will build an application or service that is really advanced (and really annoying to a not insignificant portion of your users)
That would be a shame.
Given the strong industry trends supporting video surveillance providers and the fragmented nature of the market, it is no surprise the the NRA LP show was filled with a number of competitive video provider offerings. I’m not sure how other industries work, but I’ve found that our market has a refreshingly friendly competitive environment. I make it a point to get to know as many of the CEOs in our market as I can – and most are very open to the dialogue and happy to share their experiences and their high level direction.
NRA LP was no different. I caught up with a couple of folks that I’ve known for a while and it appears that business is going well for all (but of course I don’t really expect them to tell me otherwise – it may be friendly competition but none of us are stupid either!) There are a couple of reasons that I think we are all comfortable being relatively open with with each other, one is that the market is so big there is room for a lot of players to be successful, and two is that many of us have all taken very different approaches to the market and as a result really don’t play in the same places.
Take Intellivid. I reached out and met their CEO, Patrick Sobalvarro, at the show. He’s a fellow MIT alum and took a similar career path to me so we had a lot in common. We also both run video service providers that target retail operators among others. If you read our product and services material we espouse very similar value propositions – taking video beyond security to provide value to operations, loss prevention, marketing, etc – all resulting in improvements in profitability. If you were an analyst doing research on the market with just our websites as your data, you’d think we’d be direct competitors and be wary of talking to each other in any meaningful level of detail.
You’d also be way off. We almost never see each other in the same accounts, and its not just coincidence that we aren’t bumping into one another. We have different approaches to the problem and as result we tend to appeal to different types of customers. Our MVaaS solution appeals to operators that have many locations and want to provide access to video to a variety of people inside (and potentially outside) of the organization. Our target customers value ease of use, ease of management and the integration we can provide with other business systems. Intellivid provides very impressive video analytic capabilities that are designed to help identify shrink, track customers movements and quantify throughput and other metrics. They tend to be in large locations that do millions of dollars of business and that can justify significant investments in video related technology. We tend to be in smaller locations that are often capital constrained (hence the appeal of the subscription aspect of MVaaS) Patrick’s average revenue per customer site is probably 5-10X of ours, but I’m guessing the addressable market of number of sites is quite the opposite.
Patrick has been in the market a bit longer than I have and was gracious enough to share some of his experience with me and some suggestions on specific areas where our solution might resonate. Patrick – it was good to meet you and thanks for the insight. Best of luck as you continue to grow your business.
It’s about time! John Honovich has produced a book on video surveillance. From my scan so far, this appears to be some of the first material I have ever seen which actually is vendor neutral and not slanted towards a love of some particular technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to read it either.
Check out “Security Manager’s Guide to Video Surveillance”
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