Losers Have Goals, Winners Have Systems – Mike Taber – MicroConf 2012

0:00[Music]

0:07[Music] so a while back I decided to I mean obviously as part of the conference Rob but I were gonna put together presentations and I was trying to think of a good title for it and the the title obviously right here is not going to match what I'll be talking about well we'll get to the title later I will reveal it for you there's my twitter hashtag blog company etc thanks to Jason for allowing me to put in this slide couldn't have done it without you second thing I wanted to point out is completely unrelated to my topic I wanted to point out a couple of tools

0:48that I use for you know some of the businesses that I run and two of them actually happened to be sponsors so one of them is Varallo and these nice very nice graphs come from burello it basically does website monitoring and lets you know how fast things are so I've decided to put together a new website as maybe six weeks ago something like that and so I immediately threw a Varela on it and started hosting it and you can see the very the the first day what those those ping stats were and whether the page load times were can anyone guess when I switched over to WP

1:17engine it was right around April Fool's Day when I did the the DNS change but it took a couple of days for it to go through but I do encourage everybody to go through the sponsors they do have a lot of good things to offer on the USB Drive there is free services there haven't seen that before so I'm gonna tell you little bit of story first and then we'll get into the rest of the presentation and I want to take you back to Wednesday evening on March 23rd or 21st sorry and I'm soon there working it was probably about 10 o'clock at night and it was coincidentally enough on micro

1:53comm stuff and I say it there and I was like okay it's 10 o'clock it's kind of getting kind of late I haven't really been sleeping a lot lately so I'm gonna get ready to go to bed so over the next 10 or 15 minutes or so I decide that I'm you know I get up go upstairs brush my teeth to all that other stuff and I started having these pains like right here in my chest I'm like this is bizarre it's odd and then didn't think anything of it and then things started getting worse and it it was probably about over the next fifteen or twenty minutes or so that I

2:24decided that this actually might be a little serious so about two days before I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it at the time but two days before I had probably a similar episode where for about an hour I had these chest pains things kind of worked themselves out so I talked to my wife about it and I'm like yeah this this is getting worse this isn't good so I decided that you know I should probably do something about it and go to the hospital or something all in those lies because I didn't want to be like my aunt Eleanor so my aunt Eleanor lived to

2:59be like 96 years old and I have no idea how she made it this long because she would go through periods of time where she'd have various health issues and she would kind of ignore them or she'd wait she wouldn't really pay attention to them and I I distinctly remember the one time where she said oh well yeah I had a heart attack I'm like excuse me what and it turns out that she had a heart attack and decided to go to bed afterwards so there's a streak of stupidity that runs in my family which I am unfortunately afflicted with this is not necessarily my real aunt so I decided you know I got

3:40to be smart about this 10:30 at night you know I I'm not gonna go to bed with my chest feeling like this so of course I'm smart about it I Drive myself to the ER which in retrospect was probably not a good idea and I'm driving along and of course that occurs to me after I'm about two or three miles down the road and I get to the ER and I find out that you know anyone here who here has been to the ER before yeah how long does it take to get into the ER forever you could go in there but like your knee behind your

4:17ear and they will still make you wait two or three hours but if you tell them you have chest pains you're in in like three seconds so of course I know that whole thing happens they bring me in and I go through you know they're asking me all these different questions you know what you know we're you know about your yeah and it wasn't really about my health insurance but like more or less how long had been going on what I do I really felt like a lot of the questions were kind of keep my mind off things going to keep me calm so that basically

4:49so I'm sitting there at the ER and the nurse comes over and she says I okay I got to give you an IV I'm like all right I'm like well I don't deal good with needles I just I don't I mean you know kill a heroin addict you know if I wanted to be a heroin addict it would just kill it there's no way so she's like don't worry I'm really good with needles like okay she lied turns out it's not an IV it was a catheter and it's like a lot lot bigger worst pain that I'd had and not not down there in the arm so she gives

5:24me that and of course you know my body reacts the way that it does whenever somebody jabs move the needle my blood pressure spikes and I have passed out from it before which blows butt so I'm sitting there thinking to myself and of course my chest is killing me the entire time and it is still getting worse and I'm thinking to myself is this it am I even gonna make it to tomorrow so I'm thinking about my wife my kids were those nice funny t-shirts and stuff like that well the Rob's gonna be pissed that I can't make it to my crack off because that's what I was working on

6:00so as you can see from this this photo this photo was taken the next morning throughout 10:30 in the morning they have you go through a stress test if you ever have it have chest problems and that's where they put you on a treadmill and make you run until you possibly pass out and it got me to thinking it made me realize a lot of things about what's important and what's not and I did a lot of soul-searching after this you know I mean I'm sure everyone remembers you know last year Steve Jobs died and Stevie J says I'll let you guys read it because I want to read it for you but

6:48basically I thought about it and I said am i happy with my accomplishments and I you know have I done the things that I want to do am I going to get to the places soon when I make it through the night am I going to get to the places that I want to do to want to get to so I started thinking about you know a lot of other things and just doing various research on what would you know kind of ultimately end up being some of the other things that I would put in place for myself and what the future might hold for myself and just to be clear I'm

7:20not dying apparently it's I don't know my my doctor seems to think that the the weight-loss plan that he put me on is probably pulling my chest out of whack and that's what was causing the pain thanks but one of the things that I came across was this quote and it was winners versus losers and it says my philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems does anyone know who said that our favorite comic strip artist and what he was talking about was he put together this process where he would go to the gym and he he would go there as very specific time every day he would go

8:00these days a week and you know his intention was to go there workout for X number of minutes and then he would go and then he would go home and he he went to the gym one day and he decided you know I'm here I've already gotten here you know most people kind of get over that hurdle and they say well yeah I've already done all this work I may as well just work out and he's like nope not gonna do it and he has a blog post about it where he basically talks and says that he some people would look at and say well you failed

8:27you know you failed to meet your goal you you know you're a loser you know you didn't you didn't succeed he's like I don't look at it that way basically it wasn't me that failed I was trying to work on this system the process worked the process got me there and I just didn't work out that day it's not that you know I'm failure it's not that I'm a loser it's that I just didn't do those things for that day and that process was in place so the topic the the actual title is losers have goals and winners have systems so I'm going to talk a

8:58little bit about the the systems and processes that I've kind of put in place that have kind of helped me through and if you're not technical try not to hate me for this so this is a CPU pipeline which outlines some the basics of how processor executes instructions from you know code or whatever so you'll see that there's waiting instructions then based on the clock cycle things get moved through and there's you know like a fetching state where the instructions are fetched from disk and then they're decoded executed and written back and the problem comes up is when you're trying to execute things in you know

9:35from code whether it's assembly or what-have-you you'll run into these conditional statements so any if statement on the planet is going to cause what's called a conditional branch and that conditional branch means that you get to that first stage and let's say that this is it really is only for clock cycles to get through most modern processors take anywhere from 20 to I don't know I think it's like an 80 or 100 at this point and what they'll do is you basically have to wait until you have gotten through that entire pipeline to figure out whether or not the next statement that is right behind the one that if statement that

10:09you're executing is actually going to execute and it's going to be useful and the problem with that is that you don't necessarily know the answer to the work that you want to do until you know 60 80 clock cycles later so what the the chip have done is they've said well let's do this speculative branch prediction which basically says we're going to execute that and we're going to try and predict which if statements are going to be executed and go this direction versus the ones that go to that direction and I'm gonna kind of gloss over and ignore the things where they're doing things in parallel and going down both branches

10:40because it's probably not interesting but the idea is that is it possible to take something like this and use it in your business can you get more done by pipelining the things that you do instead of waiting for that stuff to you know kind of work its way through the system and then measure the results and then implement them so it seems like a reasonable question it's like how does this apply to my business and it doesn't there there's two fundamental flaws with trying to implement this so the first one is that predicting the future is a lot harder in real life than it is with

11:18a processor because the processor typically has a lot of other data points to go off of and you're able to you know it's basically able to make that predictive analysis and say well you've gone in this direction 300 times I assume you're probably gonna go there again because you're most likely in a loop the second one is that when in real life the work that you're throwing away has quantifiable costs with a processor you're losing a few clock cycles which at 3 gigahertz you know you've got a million millions and millions of them all in a second so it's not that big a deal to throw away 300 or 500 or even a

11:53few thousand of them because it's not a big deal because the people sitting there are sitting there clicking on the buttons and stuff and you notice all this other multi-threaded stuff that's going on but the problem is in real life you can't do that it just doesn't work however you can still use this concept the reason that supey you branch prediction works is because it's reasonably certain that that work is going to be used so how do we guarantee that this work is going to be used or at least increase the likelihood that you're going to use the other work that you're going to be pipelining and the

12:24answer is really to differentiate between the types of work that you're doing so there's two different types I was a very broad spectrum of different types of work but I kind of narrowed it down to just two there's you can build processes implementation plans and then there's the the part where you're actually executing them and you should be focusing on number one build those processes build those systems that will actually do the work for you you shouldn't be actually necessarily doing the work you should be building the processes and systems around them and it's not to say that doing that work if it makes you happy is inherently

12:59wrong it just means that you probably provide a lot more value to your business by building the systems as opposed to actually implementing them so where can we apply this there's a lot of different places in your business and throughout your business you can pipeline the vast majority of the systems that you know you that you have whether it's you know a be testing or niche evaluation I mean there's there's a whole list laundry list of these things that you can essentially pipeline you can build systems around you say this is how I'm going to do this this is how I'm going to analyze this and then

13:32you can follow that process use your goals to measure how well that process does not necessarily to you know just to reach those goals I mean some people will say yeah my goal is to reach 200,000 and revenue by the end of I don't know next year but how are you gonna do that or is what you're doing repeatable and this is really what that that whole idea is about is focusing on those things that you find that are going to be repeatable so next I'm going to talk about some of the things that I've done and some very explicit things it was a very explicit examples so how

14:12many people here listen to the start of the rest of this podcast so a good good a good number of you how much time do you think that we actually spend on the podcast an hour what about the editing the transcript transcription all that other stuff that's that's exactly right we don't do any of it so we use a virtual assistant for that it's not even us talking on the podcast we script that out too so basically what we do is the first 10 episodes or so we did everything ourselves we did all the editing we basically we do it in audacity we basically imported everything figured out however however

14:56ething was supposed to work what we wanted to do with it figure it out who to use for the transcription services and everything else and then we brought it in a VA who basically does everything else for us so our process for recording the podcast is either he'll put together the outline for the podcast or I will and then the other person will review at some point before we record it and then we record the episode and then we dump it in Dropbox and that's the last thing that we do in regards to touching that podcast before it goes live that's it there are times where we will have to

15:25also go in and make some of the the show notes and stuff but the extent of our involvement with that process is very minimal and as you can see roughly 180 hours of work saved over the course of the past what two and a half years or so something like that it does cost money I mean we don't charge for the podcast but it you know has cost us money to do that but think about that in terms of evaluating your time Jason has a phenomenal blog post on valuing your time as a founder of a company at $1,000 an hour and if we were to apply that to

15:59that that's $180,000 that we theoretically saved by by doing this at a cost of a mere $3,000 which is is an insane way to look at those things but it really does work it allows you to focus on the things that really do matter that fundamentally matter to your business so the second one is a website that I set up probably it was probably six or seven weeks ago all the time the chest pains of course and so what I did was I basically said I'm gonna hire a virtual assistant to edit these videos created a bunch of videos these videos are very very short they're probably 2 or 3

16:37minutes in length each and you can see from the the time that it takes to read edit that raw video it takes anywhere from 10 to 15 times the length of the raw video in order to edit it and that's to do a good job to make sure that you know you have things folks ooming in or you are you know highlighting different things or moving the screen around etc getting rid of any weird things in the audio because a lot of times when you're doing recording for a screencast that you want to have professionally done or look professional you'll do some things and then you say

17:08it shoot I meant to say that a little different or you you know stuttered or something along those lines and you have to backtrack so then there's you have to separate the audio and video lines and it's a real pain in the neck but once you've figured out that process you can outsource that you can send it off to somebody else and these are my anticipated savings for the next ten to ten weeks or so I know that it would take me at least 10 to 15 hours of work in order to actually do it myself on a weekly basis I'm outsourcing it it's gonna cost me probably eighteen hundred

17:37dollars to have that done I already have customers lined up for this who are already willing to pay me if I have it done in the next four weeks I've got one willing to pay me five hundred bucks so another example is developer onboarding training so I've started outsourcing some of the different things that you know the some of the fun underlying code for a couple of different projects I have and there's a few different things that go factored into that so Camtasia Studio and Snagit those things are really great tools 329 bucks you can get them there's tons of alternatives out there as well you get those things go to

18:14screencast.com they've got a free subscription service two gigs of space on their servers you can do permissions based password-protected folders and just basically hand off those videos to people send them a link send them the the username and password for those folders and if you ever need to change them you can it's not a big deal so I documented this process for setting up my development environment and took me about two hours or so to do and the frustration that will save me for never having to do that again is just absolutely priceless because that's a complicated process it's a complicated things like oh you have to have things

18:48in this folder versus that folder make sure that this is uppercase and etc you can have that all documented you document at once you can talk through it in your screencasts and you know it's very very simple to do very so one of the questions you might have is well can this is great this is this is awesome for use in VA so it's great way to leverage people who are not necessarily tactical but can you do it for other things can you do it for code can you do it for product development the answer is yes so I have a product that I've been overhauling and I did

19:20catch some flack from people on the podcast about spending some time on him and these are the things that I looked at when I was justifying whether I was gonna spend my time outsourcing that stuff or not and I found a c-sharp webforms developer on oDesk took me let's see here in 24 hours I had I'd say eighty people apply to the job I actually had to shut it down after that because there was just so many people applying for that and I was only offering I think the range was $9 to $18 an hour and I found one $11 it's 11 dollars and 11 cents to be specific he

19:55spent two hundred and seventy five hours I've spent about 20 and the project has done at this point so that's two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars of savings and it cost me three grand another thing that I've looked at is last year there was this I forget what exactly where it was there was a discussion topic that a couple of people had had and it was the idea of this marketing Monday and marketing Monday is all about doing all of your marketing stuff on Mondays and basically if you're doing traffic analysis and you need to do these things on an ongoing basis basically set aside and it doesn't necessarily to be you

20:34know need to be Monday it could be any day of the week but set aside a full day to dedicate to those types of things and by doing that and you make it repetitive that's probably not something that you can necessarily outsource but it is a system and a process that you can put in place that will help you kind of focus on the things that are important the next thing that I did I know you guys were not going to be able to see this and I didn't have a slide for it but basically I put together these little they look like business cards I'll handle any I've got like four

21:11hundred of them if anybody wants some just come see me later but basically it says it's got a little maligned for your name for your email address there's no a little check box this is yes I would pay X dollars a month for that and if you're doing business analysis you're trying to figure out is there a market for my product does this idea have legs is anyone going to pay for it which is a very important part of it that nobody asks or most people don't ask they build the product first and then they try and figure out how they can find people to pay for it use these cards ask people

21:40and by putting it on paper you're basically asking them to make an upfront commitment and say yes I will pay for that and doing things like this is what are things that will fundamentally help you move forward so in the in the interest of transparency I've decided that I'm going to basically put out revenue numbers for the past five years or so and I will it's I will walk through them for you because there are a little bit awkward to look at and basically you'll see that these are our income numbers for the different businesses that I had back in 2005 is when I quit my job and in 2006 that's

22:30basically when things started really taking off for me it's also about the time that my wife you know was sitting there looking at things say well you know we're gonna have a baby soon I'm not so sure 2007 is when she quit her job 2008 I had a bunch of employees 2009 the entire economy tanked I talked about it last year at the at this conference but you can see over the last couple of years that despite some of those challenges starting to put those processes and systems in place is starting to pay off and I'd like to be able to show this slide in five years or 10 years and show

23:04that it's continuing to rise but in the interest of fair disclosure I'll say that this is not this doesn't tell the true story either so on this slide what you're gonna see is you're gonna see two different lines and that top one is the revenue line the bottom one is actual income slash profit it's you know if you take profit and drop out what my you know actual salary what I pay myself is the newbies but that top line is basically revenue and it shows a completely different story than that last one the last one showed that oh well things look pretty good but the revenue number if you see

23:39that revenue number it's going up and incomes actually going down and why is that and it's because I didn't put processes in place I hired employees I didn't have a good system for bringing them on board or trying to help trying to help put them in a position to help bring more business into the or bring more money into the business but over the past couple of years I've started putting those things in place and I'm hoping that this trend continues I also feel like and I think that some of the other speakers are probably be able to talk a little bit more to this point and see if

24:12my hypothesis on this is correct but if you look at a lot of the hockey stick curve growth growth curves for some of the larger you know so the startups you know that are doing quite well my suspicion is that the reason that they start getting that hockey stick growth growth curve is because they're putting processes in place and they're figuring things out and they're using the goals that they've set to help measure those processes make adjustments and then iterate so I I guess to kind of close things up a little bit you really have to do things that matter and not just for your business for yourself there's

24:59you know there's a lot of things that I could say here but I think that when you're looking at those things each person has their own views on what's important to them and what's not executing these processes is not inherently wrong if you enjoy the doing them by all means do them but make sure that you understand that you're doing them because you enjoy them not because it necessarily moves the business forward build the systems analyze what's working what's not and then iterate from there and the last part of advice I guess I'd say is building these processes is going to get you farther and it will get you there faster

25:38thanks alright we have time for two questions then we'll take a short break and see our last speaker any all right question was would you use that developer again that you found on oDesk and will you use that developer he's I put him on a different project yes hi there with the business card thing the name the email and yes I would pay X dollars for that did you what did he do with the car did he give it to someone today I had them made three days ago so alright okay it's a rather new process that I'm working on who what's the plan you put him to people give him back to

26:32you my plan is to find like if I'm analyzing a business idea basically and somebody says yeah that sounds like a great idea basically asked them for a commitment and hand it to them and if they're not willing to say yeah here's my name and email address and this is how much does an I pay then chances are as more of a loose commitment it's more of a your mother telling you they you know that looks great honey it's not necessarily a firm commitment that they are willing to pull out their wallet and actually pay for it are you expecting them to give you money there and then

27:01then no no it's I would pay for that if you had it built for example and then you get the card back yes [Applause] [Music] you