off ramp, not cliff

Hi everyone.

And thanks for tuning in.

This is PowerPivot, where we talk about how to be business leaders with ethics.

This morning, I got an article in my inbox.

I subscribed to a number of, of, of news aggregators because

I can't keep up otherwise.

And one of the news aggregators sent me an aggregation that included a Wired article

about how Meta is hitting the brakes on Portal, AR glasses and other hardware.

That's their headline.

And I wanted to talk for a minute in perhaps less poetic form, about the

responsibility that we have to our people.

When we create something.

One of the challenges that I have had, and that a lot of my friends have had

on an ongoing basis is getting really bought into a particular product.

And then having that product disappear.

Because it's not sufficiently profitable, because it's not sufficiently on brand,

because a new CEO or a new somebody else took the helm of a company.

And, you know, it's, it's not small companies alone that are doing this small

companies do this often because as small business owners, we are trying to find the

place where we have sustainable business, where we won't go out of business, where

people won't be just left high and dry without anything that we provide, where

we won't have to close up shop entirely.

But when Google does it, or when Meta, which is, you know, Facebook

and then changed their name.

When, when those companies do it, it makes it very hard to trust that we can

lean into relying on their software.

And this is true of any company that starts to build a really robust user base

and then build out additional features.

If you're taking away features.

If you're taking away products, you know, Google, and it's like Google

music, play shuffle, shuffle nonsense, and now it's YouTube Muisc but it's

different and it's subscription.

And like, where does that leave the people who bought a ton of music

inside the Google play ecosystem.

Well, you can download it, but then what you end up with is a bunch of

files with no metadata that your music player can use to sort it.

So one of the things that we don't talk about a lot is the, is the

ethical responsibility we have to our customers to provide what

we told them we would provide.

And it's hard because our survival is part of the picture.

Right?

As, as a company, we can't, we can't.

Afford to to not make business decisions, especially small companies, right?

We can't afford to not make good business decisions because if we do the company

folds and we don't provide what, what we're providing at all, one of my client

companies provides PR support for people.

If they fold entirely, then nobody gets PR support.

So they have to make some decisions based on what will keep them afloat.

One of my client companies provide sales support.

If they don't continue to provide sales support their company,

clients then are without sales support and have to scramble.

You know, if somebody is doing an event production piece, I, I spoke to somebody

recently who's who had a PR support person who specifically was hired to

do their PR for a particular event.

And then the person pulled out like a few days before the event;

left the company, scrambling.

The company pulled it off, to their credit, but, we can't just be like,

oh, nobody's affected by our decisions.

People are affected by our decisions and it's not just us.

And it's not just the people in our companies.

Although I talk about that a lot.

It's also the, the people in our ecosystem, the people who have

bought our products, the people who need us to provide something.

If I decided to switch learning management systems, I still have to

provide, you know, some kind of access, some kind of transition period, some

kind of warning something for my people.

I can't just suddenly not provide it.

I mean, I can, but it's not ethical to do so if I have any other choice,

Now I may not have any other choice.

Something may go desperately wrong.

And I just can't.

But as long as I can, I need to make sure that people have at least enough warning

to, you know, download the products that they purchased or to access the

products that they purchased, or to ask me the questions or to have access to

me, whatever it is, we can't just stop.

And in an economy that moves this fast, that's hard because sometimes you sit

down, you do a little, you know, review of where you've been and where you're going.

Like maybe you're using the intensives planner or maybe you're not, but

you, you sit down and you, you do an evaluation of where you are and you

realize that this product is draining you or that product has basically no

return on the investment you're making in it, but somebody's relying on it.

And so you need a dénoument.

You need- you can't just throw people off a cliff, you need a gentle letdown.

And how do we provide a gentle letdown when we ourselves are under stress?

Well, as intensives, it's not in our bones to do gentle anything, and it's certainly

not in our bones to do gentle letdowns.

And so what's really important, especially if you're intensive, is that you get

somebody who is less emotionally wrapped up in the process than you are on board

in the room immediately, and be like, okay, I need to get rid of this product,

or I need to, to transition out of this.

How are we gonna do that gracefully, how are we gonna take a, a good look at, at

who is relying on this and how they're relying on it and make sure that they

have the opportunity to make the shift.

Here's another one.

I've been trying to switch off of my current learning

management system to a new one.

And the reason that I'm trying to do that is because they told me that I would

be allowed to continue at the old fee structure, even when they implemented

a new fee structure and then they just emailed and said, you have a month.

And then we're changing your fee structure to the new fee structure,

which doesn't work for me.

It's not.

It doesn't make business sense to me.

So I need to be shifting, but they- because they told me it was gonna be

okay, I stopped thinking about it.

If they had said from the beginning, "Okay.

Yeah.

In four months we're gonna be transitioning everybody

to the new fee structure.

So if that doesn't work for you we would encourage you to start figuring

out what else you're gonna do now."

That would've been ethical.

They didn't do the ethical thing.

And that's now why I really wanna switch.

If I can't find a good platform to switch to, I may have to stay with them in

the same way that I have to stay with Facebook and I have to stay with other

platforms that I'm not thrilled with, but it will not be because I'm not looking.

I will be constantly looking for a better platform with

better ethics, until I find one.

Even if I have to carry on with this one for a while.

So what they've gone is they've gone from me being like, okay, that's taken care of.

I've thought about it.

It's stable.

To me being like, where am I going next?

Where am I going next?

And there are other kinds of services that I constantly

have a "where am I going next?"

Because I don't trust those companies.

If I'm relying on a service from Google, that's not part of their core

suite, I'm always looking for something else because I never know when I'm

gonna have to jump because I never know when that ship is going down.

If I'm relying on something from Facebook, I'm always looking for

an alternative, I'm always kind of alert to better possibilities.

And those two providers specifically keep my attention because they are

so big and they provide so much to so many people and I'm embedded in

their ecosystems in, in a couple of ways, but that doesn't make me happy.

I would rather be with somebody who's super stable, who just provides what

they provide and provides it really well.

Even if it means I have six different products under my, under my belt because,

those six products are the best at what they do, but they interface really well.

Integrations are becoming, I think, absolutely the key.

Specialization and then integrations.

So much better.

Because otherwise, you know, like when I signed up for Clickup, Clickup

is project management software.

It's great project management software.

It's pretty terrible CRM, which is what I originally signed up for.

So now I'm using a product called Dex, getdex.com, highly recommend, that

a friend of mine pointed me to, she knows the founder and it's a, a small

startup, but it sucks in the data that I need from the places that I needed to.

I want it to have a lot more features and a lot more integrations, and I want it to

be a lot more robust, but it does the core function that I need really, really well.

And part of me wishes that like it were part of Clickup, but part of me

would be really happy if they just had a nice, deep integration available for

those of us who have both products, because I want Dex to continue to be the

brilliant, all-it-does-is-keep-my-Rolodex organized product that it is.

And then I wanna be able to connect my Rolodex product to my project product.

And I wanna be able to connect that with a very deep integration, but I don't

need them to be owned by the same people.

I don't need them to be developed by the same people, because I would

worry that it would get neglected.

if it came under the umbrella, say, if Dex became part of Clickup, I would be worried

that Dex would get neglected and that it would be developed half-heartedly or not

at all, or that it, they would launch new features without really testing them.

Because it's not their core product, it's not their core focus.

So we have a responsibility to develop what we do well and to provide it well.

And if we have to provide an offramp, to provide an offramp and not a cliff.

Thank you for tuning in.