SAVING THE FREAKING WORLD

30 Year Vision (Co-Starring Todd!)

I was reading Entrepreneur magazine the other day and they challenged people to be like Elon Musk. Basically they say he is able to attract and retain top talent because he is SAVING THE FREAKING WORLD. He has a grand planet spanning vision that we can learn from. The magazine suggested having your own 30 year vision.

So what is StretchSense’s 30 year vision?

A conversation:

Ben: Assuming you don’t have a heart attack at the prospect of working with me for so long, what do you want the company to be in 30 years?

Todd: What, you mean in terms of what we are or what we have achieved?

Ben: Both.

Todd: Well I have been thinking about this, I think that technology is separate and invasive. We have so many different devices that we rely on all the time, but the problem is that they stop us from being people. You are connected but can’t have a conversation. I want the line between us and technology to blur so that it is just always there but below the level of consciousness. With regard to our sensors they are just one step towards this total body integration.

Ben: I totally agree. I think of it in terms of muscle memory. You have all these low level processes in your body that are a triangle of cognition, action, and sensing. They operate at a level below your consciousness and yet profoundly affect how you interact with the world. I think technology needs to recreate, hijack, and interact with this muscle memory so that we rely on it intimately but don’t even know that it is there. Imagine in the future you will have reflexes that follow non-biological pathways and you won’t even know.

Todd: Marvellous!

REFERENCE: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235788

– Ben O’Brien

The word: redundancy

The word redundancy has negative connotations because it is generally associated with losing your job. The definition on google is: the state of being no longer needed or useful. You can understand how I must have felt when the word was used by one of my bosses to describe how I should be working.

I am not a founder of StretchSense but I have been with them since the beginning. In the first year I spent a lot of time developing the stretch sensor from something that was barely saleable to something that tickles the imagination. I was used to being “the guy that could” and got a lot of compliments for the work I was doing. As sales ramped up it became increasingly difficult for one engineer to be in charge of production, and naturally the time came where I had to hand over some of my work to new and eager employees.

I soon realised that holding on to the jobs that I loved meant that I would be overloaded with work. I had to accept that we needed more people that could do what I did, and more importantly do it even better than I! StretchSense is a start-up, and unless we have super bright people with the best ideas we will not be the best stretch sensor company in the world.

Redundancy does not have to only have negative connotations. Making yourself redundant in a start-up means that you make way for new people and encourage growth. Best of all you are concentrating your energy on moving up, rather than defending your post. So if you are working for a start-up, remember to let go of your pride and work on making yourself redundant.

Samuel Schlatter | Production Manager StretchSense

Chicken Delousing

My parents live on a lifestyle farm which is basically a giant muddy hobby. One night after visiting the family my parents started putting on hazchem suits. Michelle and I were intrigued so asked what they were getting up to. Mum responded: “The chickens have lice so we are going to catch and delouse them, do you want to help?”

I couldn’t refuse this once in a lifetime opportunity. Chickens on my parents’ farm are truly free range. There is no attempt to contain or pen them in whatsoever. My grandpa tracks them with military precision and ferrets out eggs from wherever they hide their nests. At night they roost in the trees in little lines along the branches.

I put on a suit and ventured forth into the darkness. The plan was simple. We find a tree with chickens roosting in it, Michelle holds a ladder against the tree and I climb up it. At night the chickens sit totally still, going bock… bock… bock… softly. You reach out and carefully grab a chicken and about two seconds later it starts screeching. You cover its head with your hand and it becomes totally calm again. The bird is passed to mum and dad and delousing powder is applied. Then it is let go. The amazing thing is that through all of this the other birds sit totally still. They don’t even move when you have to slide your hand physically between two chickens to pick one of them up. They just sit there and wait.

I don’t know what my point is, maybe:

• You can do astonishing things as long as you move softly and carefully.
• If you ignore what is happening around you, someone might pick you up off your branch.
• You need a ladder to catch chickens.

– Ben O’Brien

Money Burning Bonfires

Every Thursday I go on a walk with every member of staff. This allows people a chance to complain, reflect, offer suggestions, and discuss worries in a confidential and non-confrontational setting. It give me a chance to coach, suggest, and advise. But mostly what it does is helps me find Money Burning Bonfires

StretchSense is growing rapidly and facing growing pains, these could be related to training, sales, marketing, technology, manufacturing, negotiation, financial, legal, quality control, or more. At any point in time one of these things is hurting us the most in the pocket, or what I call the money burning bonfire.

My job is to find the bonfire and put it out. The process seems to run in two week cycles: First we look for the bonfire. The best sources of this information come from short range financial forecasting and these one-on-one meetings. You will be amazed the kind of bonfire that can be burning under your nose. For example: “Ben, I am worried we haven’t built a sensor in 2 weeks because we keep ripping them during quality assurance, we have run out of silicone, 4 customers are really angry, and I am leaving to go on holiday”

Once the issue is identified we enter problem solving mode. We brainstorm solutions, talk to stakeholders, buy equipment, conduct experiments, solicit advice, and read about industry standard processes and techniques. Then we act to put the bonfire out. All this information gathering and decision making is useless unless you implement and execute on what you decide. Do not procrastinate. Find ways for stakeholders to want to change behaviours and habits, and be the consistent enforcer of your decisions. Finally you must evaluate the new process as you start looking for the next problem.

I really hate money burning bonfires.

– Ben O’Brien

My First Business Lesson

When I was at intermediate school a group of us got together to make a skit for the local talent quest. Top prize was $100 cash – a huge amount for a 10 year old.

At the time there was a drink-driving add on the TV. A man is drinking and has a crash into another car. The camera cuts to him sitting in hospital in a wheel chair looking despondent. His wife walks in and the man says sorry to her. She replies “don’t say sorry to me, say sorry to his kids”.

Our skit was tasteless satire. I don’t remember who came up with the idea – it wasn’t me – but it went like this: A remote control car drives across the stage and then crashes. A man is wheeled out in a wheelchair. He says “sorry” to his wife. She says: “Don’t say sorry to me, say sorry to the poor paraplegic hedgehog” at which point a fake hedgehog was also wheeled onto the stage.

This was comic genius. The audience loved it and we steamrolled through the early heats and soon found ourselves in the finals.

During this process we had a lot of time to improve, refine, and practice. Did we do this? No. We spent all our effort arguing over the split of the $100 prize. There were 7 of us, each had made different contributions, and we haggled down to the cent.

The final night came. We did our skit. The audience loved us to bits. We came second. Our prize was nothing. If we had spent all that time practicing, improving and refining and just done an even split on the winnings would we have won? We will never know but my first business lesson haunts me to this day. Grow The Pie.

– Ben O’Brien

Sales & Production Collaboration

The default interaction of the Sales and Production teams is an antagonistic, argumentative approach where sales wants to deliver a product to the customer at a certain price, but production objects to delivering on a tight budget. Let me break down the process:

1. Customer says: I want 100 “things” for 25% of the unit price
2. Sales asks production: can you make 100 things at 25% of the unit price?
3. Production calculates and says they can do 100 things at 50% unit price.
4. Production says no, and sales is forced to either say no (losing the deal), or ignore production (signing the company up to a loss making activity) All results are bad, lots of time was wasted, and morale suffers.

How can we break out of this? The key is to redefine the conversation and make it more collective and less linear. Firstly sales need to find out as much about the customers actual problem and budget as possible. Then go to production and say: “The customer has these problems and this budget. Can we define a thing that solves their problem for this budget?”

This results in a collaborative high level discussion. The answer might be no. You might need to make some guesses. You might have an off the shelf solution. Whatever the result, sales should take it back to the customer, maybe with production, and ask if they are happy with the proposed thing, or if they want changes. Then Sales should quote and close the deal.

Recognise that the dynamic is totally different, you are brainstorming and working as a group to solve a problem. The time cost is lower because you don’t argue as much. The information transfer between the customer and production improves, morale is better and so is performance.

– Ben O’Brien