(no title)
ltbarcly3 | 7 years ago
Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.
You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.
You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor. Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.
Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.
Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
How do you fix this company?
jwdunne|7 years ago
I think Evernote sucks and they need to refocus, things that have already been said to death. But it's amazing how a narrative, storytelling, can make me re-examine my own initial opinion like that.
nwatson|7 years ago
I don't think Evernote sucks in whole ... I very happily pay for Evernote annually-renewed premium subscription, and it's great at doing what I rent it for ...
+ it accepts documents, scans, photographs, text in notes that I can put in categories
+ it clips web page content through browser extensions and saves them as notes
+ it accepts emails composed and sent to it, and emails forwarded to it, turning them into notes
+ it does great OCR on scanned/photographed notes and documents
+ it does great matching on searches, from both explicit text and OCR'ed content
+ the browser interface is great, the Android, macOS, Windows apps are pretty decent
... and that's all I want.
Evernote's seen their missed opportunities and has tried to catch up:
+ they want to be Slack with channeled- and threaded-messaging -- Slack works better
+ they want to be the business document repository -- I much prefer Confluence (or other Wikis) for structuring and storing long-term relevant information
+ they want to be an issue tracker
+ ... every other collaboration thing under the sun
They've been pushing hard on all these multi-user shared-content angles. It seems like both a technical and marketing challenge -- they likely are too boxed-in and the jump a customer needs to make to envision using Evernote's new business/multi-user/collaboration features is too big.
baldfat|7 years ago
They have all those employees but does Evernote do anything new to make people's life easier in a different way the past ten years??? I answer no.
baldfat|7 years ago
Fire the marketing team. (Seen this happened at colleges before)
Hire someone within from the floor as upper management that is the furniture expert. Give them actual power to ruffle feathers.
Hire outside a few middle managers from successful companies and pay them well.
CEO talks about how everyone needs to love what we make and do, furniture.
Company has managers work the floor for two weeks on a rotating schedule for the first 6 months. Each manager does two different jobs for a week each. Pepsi does this every year. Friend of mine was in upper management and he drove a truck and delivered products a week a year.
Restructure after 9 months and get rid of people who don't buy in who more then likely will leave on their own.
thirdsun|7 years ago
I like that idea. Let managers deal with the details of the product or service. Have them exposed to countless, tiny, everyday pains and problems, which are invisible when handling big picture ideas.
For companies that deal with digital goods instead of physical products temporary low level support rotation might be a chance to get higher level positions down in the trenches. Basecamp seems to use such a system: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support
kamaal|7 years ago
Management?
Why do you think those 300 people will work against their own interests?
lifeformed|7 years ago
What's the point of expanding? Would you even be making much more money per employee by growing huge? If I were the founder, I would much rather try to get the company stable, and have it become a passive income stream and have the time to make a new thing, instead of spending my life milking every last drop out of it until it becomes an irreparably bloated mess.
social_quotient|7 years ago
They hire talent with the same growth mindset... not the sustainability mindset. They don’t tend to think, “what moves do I need to make to be around 100 years from now?”, they think “how can I get 20x growth in X time”. Unfortunately now they are thinking “how can I keep my job”.
philbarr|7 years ago
bachmeier|7 years ago
I would argue basically the opposite. If you're selling sofas at $4500 and your main competitors are giving them away, you're only going to sell to customers that really like your particular sofa. If you sell them at $500, and they're quite a bit better than the ones your competitors are giving away, you might be able to stay in business.
ltbarcly3|7 years ago
Burn the furniture pile (or move it into a warehouse or build a fence around it or something).
Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).
As for the factory floor workers, optimize this later, sales is the focus so don't get distracted trying to optimize production until you forecast that it will fall behind sales. Get out and Sell! Get that furniture into stores.
Don't even fire the 300 people in the office, it's not worth the time you would put into it. Hire a consultant that specializes in downsizing to do it for you. Anyone who works in the office is considered contagious so no exceptions.
skuhn|7 years ago
Before you can actually accomplish anything at this furniture company, I think a few other things have to happen:
1. Who has the power to fire you? The owner is the obvious answer, but maybe there are more people -- perhaps they are people who report to you. What do they want done? Can you get some political capital by executing on those things, even if they don't really matter?
You are coming into a dysfunctional place and at some level trying to make it functional. You will inevitably be subjected to backlash and are a candidate for host rejection, and you need tools to fight against that if you are going to succeed.
2. Find allies. This is a 500 person company, and you may be the boss but you can't be everywhere. People already inside the company could make great allies, but you have to worry about whether they are already too institutionalized or if there are political dynamics that you are unaware of. People from outside the company will be seen as outsiders, but may otherwise be more able to share your vision.
3. How long do you have to execute? The company is obviously burning a ton of money, so how much longer can that / will that be allowed to continue? You don't want to plan to use every second of that time, but knowing the order of magnitude (6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years) can be hugely helpful. Slow changes may be easier to roll out, but you most likely don't have 20 years to right the ship. If you don't have enough time to get to your end goal, then you need a new goal.
4. Is the product actually any good? What is the core institutional strength that you're working with? In this case, is the furniture actually made well? Is it made quickly? What do you have -- even if its a very small thing -- that gives you any kind of edge? Find a way to make that the core of your business.
5. What is the goal / what does success look like? This is the big one. You need to pick something (and get buy-in) and work towards that. Trying to fix everything about a company at once is doomed to failure. Trying to do twenty things and getting 10% on all of them is probably a waste of time. You need to be able to clearly articulate this for different audiences in different mediums in order to get the resources to execute on it. You may not be giving the same message to all groups.
In the case of the furniture company, I could see success as a few different things.
Option 1: Reduce burn and gradually spin down the business. This might sound like failure, but if you have no core strength and no way to get one, making the inevitable company collapse more gradual and graceful may be the best win you can get for yourself, the owner and the employees. If you had any customers, it would be helpful for them as well. This means figuring out who to cut in what order, what resources can be sold to return funds to the owner / other investors, and so on.
Option 2: Divide the business into the working and non-working parts, in order to contain and eventually excise the diseased parts. If the existing operating constraints and burdens are too great, you may need to give up on parts of the business.
Find teams or individuals who seem to execute well (if there are any) and quietly move them to work together on something that can be made, sold, marketed and shipped isolated from the teams that can't handle those tasks. You might need to outsource large parts of this vertical, or maybe even every part of it. Eventually you separate the businesses throughout a spinoff or an acquisition, unless you get the right signals and proceed to Option 3 instead. This is a way to succeed now without having to also pay off all of the debts of the past however many years (which you leave with the old business).
Option 3: Actually fix the entire business. You have all of that furniture piled up that people are taking for free, so that could mean that people will pay for what you make if only you sold or marketed it effectively.
This could also be a false signal. People will take things for free that they wouldn't be willing to pay for -- you have polluted your potential market by devaluing your product -- and you may not be able to overcome that. You also have the twin problems of the humongous historical costs and current operating overhead to produce product at this level. You will have to greatly increase your ACV or profit margins in order to not only pay for today's operating costs but to eventually cover all of the costs of getting to this point.
This option seems to be what Evernote has tried to do, by moving up-market into more enterprise-y things like team chat. I think that path is hopeless for them, and they will never achieve success that way. It might be too late, but they should probably try to get to a different successful outcome.
camelite|7 years ago
bpizzi|7 years ago
> How do you fix this company?
I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group). It's the VC/Angels money that allows such theoretical stories to be actually applied to startups.
ardy42|7 years ago
>> How do you fix this company?
> I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group).
That's a pretty lazy, ideological answer. They're giving away their product for free and there's no mention of a sales team in the whole story. Before you get all enthused with "creative destruction," someone could try laying off some of the useless employees and actually selling their product first. Destruction shouldn't be the first solution, it should be the last.
oblio|7 years ago
But they are also sitting on war-chests worth multiples of their yearly incomes (or at least a big chunk of 1 yearly income) and they are close to monopolies in some of their markets.
Even if they'd break down this badly, they'd be around for decades. Heck, IBM is still around :)
jjoonathan|7 years ago