Articles

Welcome to a Nexus-free, Android-free, Google-free blog.  You’ll read nothing here today (okay, maybe later) about that big search engine, fancy phones, tablet computers or other stuff causing geekdom to explode with glee. Let’s talk about Avatar math and why you may present numbers to your boss, bank, partner or other important folks that aren’t 100% accurate.  First things first:  Avatar has indeed reached $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales.  That’s a big chunk o’change.

Gone With The Wind
Don’t tell these two that a robot movie made more money.

And the movie pundits are correct.  After another $150 million or so, which ought to be a cakewalk, James Cameron will have directed the two highest grossing films in movie history. Box Office Mojo is one of my favorite sites on the web.  I’ve written about them before.  They combine my love of movies and my love of numbers.  And if you love movies and numbers, you should pop for a premium subscription or at least bookmark the place and trust them rather than some rip-and-read announcer. Because ultimately when you adjust ticket prices for inflation, Titanic is NOT the biggest grossing film of all time.  That little shipwreck tale clocks in at #6.

According to the inflation calculations, the top grossing movie of all time is Gone With The Wind.  The race isn’t close.  The number crunchers tell us GWTW sold 37% more tickets.  One-third more.   And they didn’t even have Celine Dion on the soundtrack. The usual suspects are all in the top 10:   Jaws, Star Wars, The Sound of Music.    That’s what made The Dark Knight such a story beyond Heath Ledger’s untimely death and gritty performance.  The movie is in the top 30 and passed The Jungle Book and Sleeping Beauty. Batman and The Joker almost caught Grease!   And last year’s Transformers sequel caught West Side Story.  Unless you’ve done a dive into film and theater history, you can’t imagine the impact of West Side Story on early 1960s America. Optimus Prime beat the Jets, the Sharks and Lenny Bernstein. Even adjusted for inflation.

So why all this talk about movies and adjusting for inflation?   Two reasons: 1)  The newscasters are technically correct, but gross dollars is the wrong way to measure success in this area. 2)  You probably do the same thing at work with a half-dozen calculations that are permanently etched in your spreadsheet.

Take ARPU — good old average revenue per user.   ARPU is going to swing like crazy depending on the industry, inflation and how many assumptions are made.   Think ARPU for anything connected with financial services was pretty last year?  But if I plotted the revenue from 1987 to 2009 while adjusting each new year, the comparison is finally meaningful. In 1987, when we last saw economic horror stories on the front page every day, a gallon of gasoline was 87 cents, a postage stamp was 24 cents a new car was just over $10,000. (hat tip: thepeoplehistory.com)  Does that sound like our world’s pricing today?  And if gas has quadrupled and postage almost doubled, shouldn’t we be making similar adjustments either looking back or looking forward? Your CFO will hate this idea.   Money is money no matter the year.  But make sure that time value of money is always in your calculations, even on a second worksheet if only for a legitimate comparison.   Because money during the last year of President Reagan’s presidency is worth a different amount than money during the first year of President Obama’s. Not doing this may mean that you’ll credit Avatar’s blue people with generating more revenue than the little green guy in E.T. The data is technically true, but the logic is specious. And when it’s your money, you need to make sure the logic is flawless.

Articles

The party's over - here's your back to work checklist

Welcome back to work.    We all have files and little things that must be updated each year.    I won’t even presume to guess what spreadsheets or documents need to be updated at your place.

Here is a checklist as 2009 flips over to 2010.

  • Change the copyright date on your customer-facing websites.  Nothing says dated like a 3 year old copyright footer.
  • Check your web forms.  If any of them (or your paper forms) were configured as 200_, last week was a good time to change them.
  • A new tax year has started.  Talk with your tax consultant or accountant, but if you were supposed to change your withholding or take any payroll actions, you should be dealing with that issue now.
  • My personal favorite for businesses with more than a handful of employees.  Every application that can be logged in from outside (even a blog) should be scrubbed for user name entries and passwords for former contractors, vendors and employees.  You should regularly do this, but using the beginning of the year as a double-check is a good reminder.
Articles

We were working with a client recently and the easy project management tools were proving to be too limited.  Although both can take a long period to learn how to effectively use, we already knew how to use Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Project.   Most of our small business clients don’t need that layer of complexity, but this client’s needs are global and involve multiple vendor-partner-collaborators.

Did you know that Microsoft allows free 60 day trials of its software? Why?  The same reason everyone who trials a product does.  In that 60 day period, you might find you really need or want the product.  So far, Microsoft is 1-1 with me.  I did purchase one piece of software and am now trialing the latest versions of the others.

Here’s the smart business practice:  even if I don’t buy, I’ve had a hands-on demo for two months at almost zero variable cost to the company. You can access Microsoft software trials (no, not an affiliate link) here.

Executive Summary:   If you don’t have a substantial cost of goods or time investment, let prospects try your product.  Stop clinging to a direct response model that requires a sale, especially with a software or service product.  Two things: don’t cripple the functionality because your goal is a purchase and make sure that the prospect would have an ongoing need for this offering.