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New Years Resolution: 2017

By on Jan 4, 2017 | 0 comments

2016 was an absolute whirlwind of a year for me. Over the past 12 months, I have … Began flight lessons at San Carlos, CA airport in the Bay Area (SQL!) I got married to my wife, Jennifer Travelled internationally to Bali and London Left San Francisco for a new home New Orleans, driving the 1,600 or so miles from San Francisco to New Orleans in the sweltering heat of July Arrived in New Orleans to find our air conditioning was broken (doh!) Led five idea-stage businesses through a 12-week intensive accelerator (thanks Idea Village!) Adjusted to leading my company 2 time zones ahead and 1,500 miles away from my closest colleague Went into a partnership with 2 other real estate investors to invest in a residential real estate deal here in New Orleans …and I’m sure there was quite a bit more that I’m forgetting! With that in mind, I wanted to publicly state my new years resolution. Do less, but focus more on what I do Just the act of *reading* my bullet-point recap of 2016 makes my heart speed up a little bit. Guess that’s the introvert in me 😉 Here in 2017, I really want to reduce the amount of projects/moving parts that I’m involved in and put more energy into the projects that remain on my plate. My 2017 new years resolution: Engage in fewer things, focus more time/energy on the things I do. — Mike Krass (@mikekrass) January 3, 2017 This realization hit me when I read a random Twitter users take on productivity. Instead of posting a story about ‘how to be insanely productive and destroy huge to-do lists’, I distinctly recall her update said “Instead of hacking my productivity, I want to reduce the number of things I have to do and focus only on the truly important ones” This idea really hit home for me. I’m taking her advice and sprinting with it into 2017. So … what do I want to focus on? I’d love to finish flight school and get my private pilots license before our annual family beach trip to Florida at the end of May. I want to bring 10 non-profit clients onto the MKG client roster, specifically to share the awesome opportunities of Google’s Grant program for non profits that gives away $120,000 – $480,000 in FREE resources to non profits every year but yet so few NPO’s actually apply and manage those resources (ahhhhhhhhh!!!!) by the end of the year. I want our real estate project to get off the ground and get all 4 houses we bought/fixed up rented by the end of March. Last but not least, I want to continue embedding myself in the New Orleans tech and startup scene. I want to find a BIG IDEA to work on outside of MKG, so bring me the best you have...

Community Feeds the Entrepreneurial Fire

By on Sep 27, 2016 | 0 comments

For those who weren’t aware…   I  moved to New Orleans two months ago!   Since the big move from San Francisco I’ve been running my business here, joined the Idea Village as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for their Fall Digital Media accelerator and been looped into a Co-Curator role of the local TechStar Startup Digest. Phew! Over the past 2+ months I’ve met with leaders from professional organizations such as Idea Village, Propeller, 4.0 Schools as well as quite a few startup founders themselves to get a read on the local entrepreneurship landscape here in New Orleans. What is interesting is that from the largest professional organization down to the smallest startup (yahoo sole founders!), everybody has indirectly touched on a common theme: “How is my business/product/service going to make a positive change in the New Orleans community?” Notice how I haven’t heard the lines “…and this is how I’m going to change the world” or “…my product will create an entirely new market to service” Instead, Entrepreneurs (defined as startup founders, intrepreneurs, extrapreneurs, etc etc) here in New Orleans are actively trying to make their own neighbors life better from day #1 and solving local problems first, as voiced by the community. Back in San Francisco, all I ever heard was “my startup my startup my startup” – unless I missed some big group kumbaya meeting that was held each week, it seems that entrepreneurs in that market simply don’t give a s*** about the community itself. Granted I’ve only lived in New Orleans for about 70 days, but in my 5 years living in San Francisco I never heard this kind of talk. Let me share a few examples of civic engagement that I’ve run across. A colleague at the Idea Village who was a varsity swimmer in college leads a youth swim league based out of Tulane University’s Riley Athletic center – for free. He loves swimming and wants to help mentor and coach the next generation of swimmers. Last week I met the founder of Nola Brewing Company and he promptly said “Here’s my phone number call me literally anytime of the day or night.” There was no expectation. It’s unlikely I’ll ever buy something from him directly (indirectly, I love an ice cold Nola Blonde on a hot summer day) but he wanted me to know that as a newbie to the area, I had a friend in him. Pardon my french (hey, we ARE in Louisiana …) but people here frankly just GIVE A SHIT about the local community in a way that I’ve never seen in a “traditional” startup powerhouse city like San Francisco. And that’s really refreshing. Allow me to take the hint from my new neighbors: I’m only an email away from meeting new people and helping in any way that I can. Hit up my contact page and get in...

My Thoughts on Scrum

By on Jun 16, 2015 | 0 comments

Our team has a new obsession. Scrum. Originally a working set of processes to deliver better quality software on time, Scrum has now expanded to professional organizations, schools and governments. You can read all about it here. More important, you can see how it works in the graphic below. Scrum has it’s own language. You’ll hear terms like… Product backlog. Sprint. Scrum master. Product owner. …and the list goes on 🙂 Instead of trying to explain every element of Scrum to you (just buy the book) I wanted to talk about one very specific element of Scrum. Introduction to Velocity Velocity is the total effort a team is capable of in a sprint. In plain English: You can calculate a numeric value of how productive your organization was over a set period of time (known as a Sprint) based on ‘Story Points’ (again, read the book). The idea is that your velocity should increase significantly each Sprint. Jeff Sutherland, one of the creators of Scrum, estimates that a good Scrum implementation should increase a companies productivity by three or four times! What is really neat is that you can actually chart your velocity to see how your productivity increases as a group. Which I’ve done below for our team.   We increased productivity by +32% in 2 weeks This entire conversation reminds me of the saying: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” We had no idea how much our team could accomplish until we began measuring productivity in more than the quantity of tasks completed. Again: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” I’m not asking you to become a kool-aid sipping disciple of Scrum. I’m just encouraging you to find a way to measure your team’s productivity. And then try and improve on that unit of measure day-after-day, month-after-month and year-after-year. Make my day: Share this story on social media...

Why Customer Satisfaction is Priority #1 for Growth

By on Jun 10, 2015 | 0 comments

It’s funny how perception changes as your business grows up. In our first year of business, we were obsessed with making our biggest (and only) customer happy. They represented more than 90% of our revenue and we would do whatever it took to make them successful. Need your floors cleaned? We got you covered. Did the barista froth your latte enough on the way in to work? Have no fear we have one of those fancy IKEA frothier for ya to use. Looking back on that first year, this obsession was both our best and worst policy. Why was it the worst policy? Well, that’s pretty simple: It could have put us out of business. A single email that said “we’re going to use a different marketing services vendor” would have done the trick. In fact, a year down the road that client did send an email to that effect. The email said that the entire division was being laid off. Adios, client! Yikes! Talk about having too many eggs in 1 basket 🙂 You said this could be good though … So how could this ever be a good policy? Much less the best policy? Well there are four reasons I can think of off the top of my head: 1) Trench Buddies Success becomes mandatory for you. Just like it is for the client.  It puts the same amount of praise and pressure on you as the it does on the client. It puts you in the trenches with your client. And guess what that builds… 2) Trust Quickest way to earn your customer’s trust? Put your own neck on the line alongside them. You can’t buy that kind of relationship. You have to earn it. The customer and your team will spill blood in the name of winning that battle and war. Trust me on that one. 3) Pen Pals (but more serious) Making your customer happy (can) require near constant communication. There’s never a day or two that goes by without … You communicating what is happening Why it’s happening What you’re doing to fix it or boost it 4) No Surprises Avoid getting caught with your pants down. If you constantly communicate with your customer in the trenches, you should never get a surprise phone call from your customer that goes something like “We’re going to take this business to another vendor…” Case in point: Just this week we took a piece of business away from an established competitor in our space. The client had hired a new VP of marketing (someone we used to work with) and she was evaluating their vendors. When this particular vendor failed to impress her, she asked us to bid on the business. They had never been in the trenches with her. We had. They had never had more than two phone calls with her. We had hundreds. Within 30 days, the competing vendor was gone and we had the business. In Summary … Treat every client you have as if they were your most important.  Too tough to do? That’s a red flag that you’re stretching your people too thin. Or you don’t have the resources to provide killer service to your customers. Or that you have too many customers. Think I’m even halfway correct? Then share this story on social media....