Boss Life (16 page)

We're all sitting around one large table. Ed Curry asks each person to give a brief statement about the score they have given themselves, adding whatever detail they wish. As it happens, I'm one of the last to speak. Business scores for everyone else range from seven to nine. Orders are coming in. Nobody else is crying doom or seeing sales slowing down. When it's my turn, I give a recap of my situation and explain my theory that, as a broad indicator of business confidence and activity, my business is the canary in a coal mine. Inquiries are falling because fewer people are shopping. Sales are falling because those who do shop are choosing cheaper options. Everyone's pulling back on spending. Get ready! Rough water ahead!

No heads are nodding in agreement. Keith DiMarino, who owns a company that stores and shreds documents, raises his hand. Over the months, his advice has been blunt but intelligent and on point. “Let's start with one thing,” he says. “Whatever is going on here is your fault. You did something. I don't want to hear any more whining about the big world collapsing and poor me being a victim. I don't see it. Nobody else sees it.
You
have done something to make things slow down. Even if your story is true, and we're all doomed, it doesn't matter. You have to fix it. It's your problem. You. Stop complaining and get started.” This is not what I want to hear, but nobody else has different advice. Further discussion focuses on what I might have done to mess up my marketing. I don't know what to tell them. I haven't made any changes since early March. Our Web marketing is working fine—page views are steady, within the same range that they have been for the last year. But incoming calls and sales are collapsing.

As I leave, Sam Saxton pulls me aside. “You have to call my sales guy. He'll help you. Just call him, have a meeting, see what you think.” I remember that Sam had urged me at the last meeting to call the consultant, but somehow, between Germany and everything else, I haven't done it. I've never hired a consultant before. But Keith told me to start fixing things. The next morning, I call Bob Waks. We arrange for him to come out to the shop on the twenty-third.

I don't find time to look at my marketing until Saturday. On the weekends, the shop and office are quiet. I want to think everything through, and this requires focus.

—

OUR MARKETING EFFORT
, in its entirety, consists of four interacting efforts. First is product development, the group of things that we offer for sale. Second: the Web site, which presents our offerings to the world. Third: Google, both free search results and AdWords, which directs people to our Web site. Fourth: the sales department, which responds to each inquiry with a proposal. I've made no changes to this overall structure since 2009, when I launched a new Web site. So if I did something to degrade our marketing, it must have been on a smaller scale. So which effort is the most variable? Where should I start looking?

The problem is that I've tinkered with all of them for years. I constantly develop new table designs, photograph them, and put them up on the Web. Google makes note of these changes in some mysterious way and then shows our site in a better or worse position. We have settled on a basic game plan to respond to incoming calls, but Nick, Dan, and I each have different design ideas, writing skills, and graphic sensibilities. I don't always have time to review what they send out. And nobody looks over my shoulder. Any one of us could be losing sales without knowing why.

I decide to start with Google. I have access to enormous amounts of data, in both AdWords, which looks at my paid search results, and in Google Analytics, which looks at all aspects of site performance. I log in and start looking through both sites. They are bewildering. Google's interface allows me to examine every possible aspect of my campaigns in multiple ways. There are statistics, graphs, change records, hundreds of links to rearrange the view this way and that, pop-up screens with more information, little warnings and suggestions, modeling tools to game alternate scenarios, et cetera, et cetera. If there's a malfunction hiding in all that, it's not obvious where and what it might be.

AdWords serves my ads each day, at a wide range of costs for each click, until my daily budget—$450—runs out. It's not clear exactly what time that will happen, as the cost of each click is dependent on a bunch of variables. Google shows my ads about sixty-five hundred times a day, and from that we are getting about a hundred clicks. Only a couple of the clickers contact us—our average for the past two weeks has been two calls a day. A year ago, the same inputs were producing 3.2 calls a day, and our sales were much better. Nothing I can see tells me what's different this time.

I have fifty-eight ad groups, each serving a different ad tailored to a set of similar keywords, 403 in all. Each of these ad groups behaves differently. Some get a lot of traffic, but a very low percentage of viewers click my ad. Some are the opposite. I can't tell which ad groups prompt the most calls, e-mails, and sales. When I've asked people which ad they saw initially, nobody seems to remember. And since we don't sell directly from the Web site, the answer to this question isn't in any of this data. I can see that I'm spending a lot of money on clicks and that this seems to be producing the same number of views and clicks as it did a year ago. And yet our calls and sales are dropping. Why?

I spend a couple of hours clicking this way and that, getting more and more frustrated. There is only one consistent message from Google, delivered in a variety of ways: I should be spending more money. I am missing clicks that are available with a larger daily budget.

What to do? If I make a bunch of changes at once, I won't be able to tell which ones worked. And I could make things worse. I don't put much stock in the messages recommending an increased spend. Of course Google would say that. It's their business. If they were really trying to help me, the interface would be more user-friendly. They seem to be drowning me in facts without providing any way to make sense of it all. I head back home, still worrying.

—

MONDAY ARRIVES AND
I give another honest/discouraging speech. It's a repeat of the past two weeks: sales slow, cash disappearing, but we aren't out of work yet, so keep going as fast as you can. After lunch, I receive a curious phone call from an office furniture dealer in California named Jim. “I've got your proposal for Cali Heavy Industries here,” he says. This is Dan's job, the one his contact at Cali Heavy told him we were getting. Jim tells me, “I really like what you guys have done in this proposal and I want to find out more about your company.” I tell Jim our story, and he says, “I love this. We could use somebody like you. The big manufacturers can't handle really large custom tables. I get stuff like that all the time, and I have to pass on it.” He promises to be back in touch if any of his projects include custom work. This could be another outlet for us, like Eurofurn, but we wouldn't have to copy another company's style. We could do our own work, our own way, and just sell more of it. The dealer would get a healthy cut, but if they were selling a huge amount of other furniture at their normal prices, they might accept a smaller markup on the custom jobs, so that they can offer a spectacular table as an extra incentive to their customers. This could work out well. Between Eurofurn and dealers, I could decrease my reliance on Google.

Dan's happy, too. “I've done a ton of work for Cali Heavy. I just sent them complete plans of our table. My guy says the purchase order is coming any day now.” He's been saying that for more than a month, but sometimes it takes these big companies a while to do the paperwork.

—

AFTER EVERYONE HAS LEFT
on Monday, I log in to AdWords again. Inquiries have slowed to a trickle: twelve last week, eight the week before. Then I take another look at my Google budget, the maximum amount of money that they can take from me each day. I determine this amount, along with the ad schedule. I run my ads from eight a.m. to ten p.m. Eastern time, so that they are showing on the West Coast after the end of their business day. Google shows the ad when it receives a search string that it thinks is a good match for one of the keywords I have chosen, and charges me if somebody clicks on the ad. The cost for each click varies, depending on how much I offer to pay for it, how much other advertisers want to pay Google to show their ads, and whether Google thinks my content is a good match for the original query. When the summed cost of all the clicks I receive each day exceeds my budget amount, Google stops showing my ads.

Like Saturday, Google is telling me that my budget is too low. They promise that spending more money brings in more clicks. They have a helpful tool where I can punch in different daily budgets and see how many clicks they think I will get. For instance, it might cost me five hundred dollars to get a thousand clicks, a thousand dollars to get fifteen hundred clicks, and two thousand dollars to reach 1,750 clicks.

Google tells me that I could be getting hundreds more clicks per day if I bump my daily budget up to seven hundred dollars. But the additional clicks may not be of sufficient quality to result in additional sales. AdWords doesn't promise that they will come at the end of the day from some previously untapped group of eager table purchasers on the West Coast, just that I will get more of them throughout the day. So who are the extra clickers? I presume they come because Google shows my ads to more people, even when the search strings aren't such a good match for my keyword. Some number of viewers will click on anything, often by accident. That doesn't mean that they have any interest in buying a big conference table. Google's definition of a success is a click. They have no way of knowing if I make a sale from that click or not. Because I've always had concerns about whether more spending will actually get me more income, I've set my daily budgets at numbers that I feel I can afford, which is about 30 percent less than Google's maximum recommended amount. That worked fine for years. But now, maybe, it doesn't. So I decide to roll the dice and do what Google has been nagging me to do. I increase my daily spend from $450 to $650. That should get me 90 percent or more of the available clicks each day.

—

THE NEXT MORNING
Nick has bad news. The Air Force job in Virginia has gone to another company. Forty thousand dollars that we had been counting on. I sympathize: “Those assholes,” and ask the obvious question: “What happened?” He tells me that he has had a bad feeling ever since he went on the site visit.

“It was a big meeting, with a bunch of companies. They showed a slide show of what they wanted—it was the proposal I sent them with our name removed. I thought it was a lock for us. After the meeting, I went to introduce myself to the officer who presented. He was standing out in the hall, talking to a guy from another company. They were laughing and joking, and they kept going on and on, so eventually I left.”

“You drove twelve hours to the meeting and back and you didn't even talk to them?”

“I've been e-mailing them proposals for months. They know who I am.”

“You should have talked to them so they would put a face on all those e-mails.”

“Yeah, I probably should have. I thought we had this one for sure, though. They kept telling me how awesome the designs were and thanking me for doing all that work.”

“Give them a call, see what happened.”

Later Nick tells me that he'd heard back from the guy: our price was too high. On the Air Force contracting Web site, I see that the job went to the outfit whose salesman had been joking with the officer. The winning price was three hundred below our bid. We'd sent pricing along with our proposals, and the officer probably showed it to the company they really wanted to work with. We've been played.

The next day we ship the three Eurofurn orders that we received in early March. We haven't received any new requests for quotes since I came back, so we only have to finish and deliver the prototype table. I presume that their sales are slow, just like ours. Or maybe they are waiting to see the prototype before committing to more orders.

At three-thirty, I have my appointment with Bob Waks, the sales consultant. He has a couple of inches on me, and I'm 6-foot-1. Blue blazer, golf shirt, tan slacks, tasseled loafers. Leather briefcase. Silver hair, neatly trimmed. Firm handshake. Laser-beam eye contact. “We finally meet! Sam has told me so much about you.” I take him out to the shop floor for a tour. Bob shows polite interest and then asks to see the sales office. He meets Dan, Nick, and Emma, and I show him a couple of proposals. Again, a polite but muted response. I'm expecting him to be amazed by our software models; I'm a little insulted by his lack of enthusiasm. We retire to my private office for further conversation.

“Why am I here?” is his first question. I describe our situation: falling inquiries, falling sales. I don't know why the inquiries are drying up. I'm not sure what's happening with sales. I've been through dry patches before, and they always corrected themselves eventually, but I'm afraid that this is going to be an especially rough ride. I'm almost out of work, and I can see that my cash will dry up soon as well. I tell him that Sam Saxton thinks he can help me. I hope that Sam's right.

“I'm not sure that I can,” is his surprising response. “I'm a little worried about you. Whether we are a good fit together. Guys like you can be good to work with, or very, very bad. You are a classic boss, Paul. You make quick decisions, and that's good. I don't have to fight my way through layers of an organization to get to the decision maker. If Paul Downs says it's a go, it's a go. The problem is when I tell you something you don't like. You might agree or you might fight me. If you fight me, we're wasting each other's time. I don't need the hassle. I have lots of customers. And I can see that Downs is a smart guy, you can think on your feet, and you can talk your way into anything.” Yup, that's me. “But you aren't going to like what I'm going to show you about how your sales ‘organization' isn't working. Your first instinct will be to figure out how I'm wrong about you. Then you'll start fighting me. Pushing back. Telling me how I've got it wrong.”