The seat-belt sign is still illuminated.

Please stay in your seat.

Ok, you fixed the technical issue. Your customer saw it working. They’re excited, and they pat you on the back.

But you’ve only done one third of the work. The customer is pleased, but you may still have work to do. You still need to:

- test a few more things

- enter a work summary (for billing purposes)

- enter documentation

- schedule another follow-up appointment

STOP! You can’t do that – the customer just told you they have to leave. And if you didn’t establish the next appointment, you may disappoint your office’s admin team, and you may go home with items to “memorize”: details about the work, passwords that need to be written, configuration changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Worry now, not later

“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which
actually happened.” – Mark Twain

Are you worrying... enough?

One of my most memorable business experiences came around 1993 when we produced a presentation for around 400 car dealers for Nissan’s Northern California sales region.

We had a young employee with me there primarily to assist and observe. We ran the presentation on two computer systems, one for backup. I was rather stressed in the hours that preceded the event, testing headsets, checking the artwork one last time, testing the switch from the primary system to the secondary system in case anything should go wrong.

Around one third of the way into the presentation, the main computer froze. Computer systems back in the early 90′s were much less stable than they are today, and this presentation was ambitious in its use of animation and sound effects. Read the rest of this entry »