Sometimes You Need a Pro

Before today, I had fished Lake Lanier (here in Atlanta) with very little success.  I filled up a tackle box with lures, watched Youtube videos and spent a lot of time on the lake, but basically had been shut out. No doubt, I had been more successful on a one-acre pond my mom owns. 

As the busiest lake in Georgia, I was convinced Lake Lanier was "fished out".

But today was totally different. We loaded up our boat with fish. Were we lucky or had we become great fisherman overnight?  

No.  We hired a professional guide.

Mack Farr has been a fishing guide on Lake Lanier for more than 30 years.  In fact, he he has never had another job!  With him as our guide, less than a minute into our first cast, we were pulling 8-10 lb. fish out of the lake.  After three hours, three of us had caught almost 150 lbs of fish. 

You would think if you "teach a man to fish" he would learn to fish the same way with the same results next time, but in this case, I don't think so. "Captain" Mack has exactly the right equipment for what he does (much is his own branded merchandise). But even with identical tools, I probably would strike out again if Mack wasn't in the boat with me showing me exactly what to do.

The life lesson is that, to be successful, sometimes you need to hire a pro.

  • If you want to catch fish, don't hire me. You need a pro like Mack.
  • If brain surgery is required, I definitely am not your man.
  • But, when you need to hire ERP consultants (or you are an ERP consultant looking for a job), you should call Enspire Partners.  

Don't Waste a Failure

The University of Alabama has won the national championship in NCAA football four times in the last eight years under the leadership of coach Nick Saban.  Many people see Saban as the best coach in football, possibly ever.  They will be ranked #1 when they play the FSU Seminoles to open this year’s college season.

But they lost last year.  Once.  On the last second of the last game.

They were 14-0 going into the championship game against Clemson in January.  In the final game of the previous season, they also had faced Clemson and beat them for the championship.  They led the entire game this year, but Clemson came back and scored on the last play to win the game, 35-31.

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Losing is painful, but losing at the 11th hour (in games and in “real” life) can be a killer.  I think it is natural to sulk over a loss or to push back and blame others or your situation (or God, if you are so inclined).  When asked yesterday about the loss, Saban would have been fully justified in saying: “We have been the best team in football over the last decade.  We were the best team in 2016, and we were the best team last year except for one second”.  Or, he could have said: “We beat Clemson the last time we played them.  We lost to them in January, but we would like nothing better than to have another chance to play them for the championship this year.” 

Both statements would be true, but he had a better answer.  Saban said: “We don’t want to waste a failure.”

He is saying, as hard as they worked last year, and for all of the pain they felt when they came up short, they are using their loss as an opportunity to get better.

The Atlanta Falcons had a similar outcome last year – getting to the final game and leading only to lose on the last play.  The motivational phrase they are using this year is “Embrace the Suck.”

I am a very competitive person, and in my job, I get lots of opportunities to embrace failure, because in recruiting there is nothing (but pain) for coming in second place.  Most of the time, I think we can learn lessons from our failures with the goal of not repeating them.  Other times, we have to accept there are things out of our control that may cause a deal to break, and the best remedy to a loss is to work a little harder and put another deal together that turns into a win.

We are having the best year in our six year history as a company with many wins, but we want more.  Let me know how we can help you.

TonyF

Our new website!

We needed to update our website for several years.  What we had available since our company started was a Wordpress site my brother and I developed over a weekend six years ago. 

Taking this on during a slow time over the July 4th week, I thought I could knock it our pretty quickly...not so fast!  To be sure, I encountered many of the classical problems associated with development:

  1. The consultant who first presented the project to me (aka my daughter) helped me get started, but usually you have to take ownership to get things set-up the way you want.
  2. When you take existing data and put it into a new platform, in many ways, the platform choice causes you to reshape the data to fit the skin instead of the other way around.
  3. Sometimes you are tied to integrating into legacy tools (in this case, our Jobs search engine) whether you want to or not.
  4. Version control is a real problem. Making minor changes often creates massive rework.
  5. If you really care about the details, it will take a lot of time to get things like you want them (and even then you have to make compromises).
  6. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  When I asked my QA team (aka my wife) to look over the site, she tore into some of my proudest features. Understanding I couldn't fire her, I had to listen to what she had to say. 
  7. Perfection is probably not achievable, and even if it was, your perception of perfection probably doesn't mirror that of your audience.  Even my own perceptions of things I liked and didn't like evolved as I went through the process.
  8. The joy of go-live!!
  9. The re-calibration of your happiness when people who have put one gazillionth of the time you have into this site are able to point out veryobvious issues that can be improved. 
  10. The whole exercise made me appreciate Steve Jobs more...

So, we look forward to our comments. If there is anything you like on the site, you should probably credit my wife and the other people who helped to critique it. If there is something you hate, it is my fault alone.

Whether you are awe-struck or feel pity for the designer of this website, I hope you find reason to do business with us in the future.

TonyF