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[A98]A Tale Of Two Kitties

by Jack Deal, Jac

If we accept this general definition, the next thought is: how does it apply? 'Yeah, we know what it is - but what does it do?'

Sometimes fate puts us in funny positions and in this instance my case studies involved two similar businesses, about the same size, and in the same industry and at the same time. Both were struggling financially.

Upon my initial analyses, both businesses had good growth potential and would be profitable. Both had very similar problems and both had owners that were ego-driven hard workers.

There was never a question in either company of the willingness to work hard. There was, however, a great deal of difference in the willingness to do what needed to be done.

After the initial analyses and employee interviews it was clear that both owners were holding their businesses back. Both owners acknowledged they were a problem in their own companies.

The owner of Company A became convinced he was such a problem that, for his business to grow, he paradoxically had to leave it. He turned his decision-making and management over to me and several key employees.

The owner of Company B also acknowledged he was part of the problem, but decided that by working harder, he could overcome the problems he created.

The first thing we did at company A was to fire some minimal employees and hire some better ones and give them added responsibilities.

The absentee owner of Company A expressed his concern at doing this but accepted it. He understood there was no alternative.

We made some tough decisions and at every opportunity there was praise from me on their efforts. They made mistakes but the mistakes tended to be small ones so they learned from their mistakes and moved on.

After several months at Company A, some very interesting developments occurred: (a) a fierce company loyalty developed among all employees; (b) they would not let the absentee owner make any decisions;

(c) my intervention became less and less necessary - all employees constantly discussed how to improve productivity and deliver more value to the customer;

d) profitability increased to the point that all employees got raises;(e) morale steadily improved; (f) Company A began to gain market share.

Company B took a different route.

The owner did not want to fire any minimal employees because he had become a friend and "father-figure" to them. The owner began to work longer and longer hours. He began to distrust his best people.

After several months, some interesting developments occurred in Company B: (a) the stress level of all employees went up; (b) several key people quit;

(c) Company B was not able to attract good employees; (d) employees began to resent the micromanagement style and looked for ways to get back at the company;

(e) more and more intervention was necessary on my part to keep the status quo; (f) profitability decreased and customers were lost.

Six months later, the results were not surprising. Company A was growing steadily, morale was high and their employees were the highest paid in the industry. Employees enjoyed coming to work and worked very hard. They constantly were looking for ways to improve and look for new customers and markets.

Company B downsized and filed for Chapter 11. Employees were discouraged and many began looking elsewhere for work. Customers noticed that Company B was in trouble and took their business elsewhere.

Several years later the ego driven owner of Company A sold out and received a handsome sum for his efforts. About that same time Company B folded and the ego driven owner cashed out about even.

It is ironic how the same force that creates a company can tear it down.

While many might be satisfied with blogger.com or one of the other hosted blog packages the more far thinking blog owner is going to want just a little more control. This is going to mean hosting the blog yourself.

Now assuming that you do not feel the need to buy expensive windows based hosting for your new blog you will very likely feel drawn tot he more popular and less expensive (free) Linux based solutions. Almost invariably this will mean Apache, php and mySQL. It's not guaranteed but it is extremely likely.

Regardless of the final choice of platform it is vital to understand that not all blog packages are the same. Not even those with a common heritage.

Take my personal blog as an example. First I purchased a rather egotistical domain name and then I obtained hosting for it and then finally I choose to locate the best blog package for that environment.

I located a pretty comprehensive comparison and used it as the basis for my choice. One platform (Blog:CMS) seemed to have all the things I needed. Well documented plug-in system, forum, wiki, multi blogs, multi members and a photo album.

However as I started to work with my freshly installed blog platform cracks started to appear. The first time a user looked at the wiki they got a page of error messages and would have to hit refresh to read it.

The forum software was from an other project and the code was out of date. So was the wiki. In fact each “element” was not at all fully integrated to the core.

The XML-RPC system was disabled which meant no pings, no trackbacks and no external API. This meant no joining in the “blog conversation”, no alerting the major lists and a total inability to use desktop blogging tools.

Worst of all the visitor satisfaction all those one time errors. This would mean no return visits, few new visitors and a lot of extra hard work.

My platform was a total mess.

In short it was dead in the water.

To make matters worse the user support was manned by an arrogant, rude and unhelpful young man with English as a second language.

Fortunately it was revealed that this blog platform was a “fork” (where the code is taken in different directions by two or more groups) from another platform. This blogging platform was called Nucleus CMS and it was very well supported. It did not have a built in form but it did have a range of plug-ins that would enable it to co-operate with a number of different forum packages each of which were stable, mature and free.

Furthermore all the core functions all worked and so the blog was not crippled.

I moved in a second and have never regretted it.

But what did I learn?

I learned that just because a package promises hundreds of features it is no promise of quality.

I learned that whatever platform you use it is vital to ensure that the support is good.

Most importantly I learned that the only way you will know what platform is right for you is by trying them out and doing a little quality research.

At the core these two platforms were almost identical and yet it was something as subtle as the attitude of the developers that made the difference between a useful and a useless platform.

It is this that is overlooked most often.

Even if you spend two million on a “perfect platform”, that does everything faster than you can dream, when something goes wrong it will be the support team that you will turn to. If that support team could not care any less or if the development team can not be bothered to provide a security fix then your multi-billion earning blog becomes a pile of rubble over night.

When you select your blog platform it is some of these apparently minor issues which can cripple you. Take a lesson from my experience – even very similar blog platforms with almost identical code can be worlds apart from each other.

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About Author

Both Jack Deal & Matt B are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Jack Deal has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Health and Web Development. Jack Deal is the owner of Jack D. Deal Business Consulting. may be found at. Jack Deal's top article generates over 2240000 views. to your Favourites.

Matt B has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet. . Matt B's top article generates over 5400 views. to your Favourites.