Congratulations! You’ve been promoted to manage your very first project. You’ve demonstrated that you’re a good worker bee— you can make campaigns, prepare reports, and do whatever else you’ve been assigned.

But managing a project is a completely different matter. Now, instead of dutifully doing what you’re told, you have to figure out what the client wants, build project plans, coordinate between multiple people, and make sure things happen on time and in the right way. Being new in the position and perhaps even young (which makes it harder), you’re afraid that your co-workers and client might not respect you or that you don’t have authority.

Relax—use these simple techniques and it will be hard to fail.

First, get organized. If you are not organized yourself, there’s no way you can begin to think about tracking all the things that your teammates are doing. Are you using basecamp to track who is doing what? Every task should have a description, be assigned to a person, and have a due date. These 3 items are the building blocks of project management—who is doing it, what they’re doing, when is it due.

Use it for anything you could potentially forget about—people you have to call, stuff you need to read, even personal errands. You don’t need Microsoft Project Central or any fancy software—even the Tasks feature in Gmail is sufficient. Even a simple spiral notebook works just fine.

When you’re organized, you don’t have to worry about that one thing you know you were told a few weeks ago, but lost track of. Terrible feeling to be lost and behind—it’s like drowning. So don’t let yourself get there. Check your email twice per day and quickly take care of things by doing one of the following—do it, delete it, or delegate it.

There’s no other option. Don’t read it and then mark it unread. Don’t skim over things with the thinking that you’ll come back to it later. You gain massive efficiency by taking care of things just once—the first time. Plus, when you take care of things right away, they don’t fester into bigger problems that result in all sorts of drama later. I can’t tell you how many people I see complain about being busy or having too many emails, when all they’re really doing is just moving sand from one pile to another, getting nothing done.

Second, create a specific statement of the goal. If you’re lucky enough to have just one project to manage, this is easy. The client may want a website to do X in Y amount of time for Z dollars. Then you break down X into minute little measurable tasks that you assign out to people. Perhaps there is a Statement of Work you can reference where most of the work is already done for you.

In either case, you should check back with the client to affirm the requirements, if for no other reason that to show them that you care and to start building a relationship. Many first time project managers fail by hiding from the start, letting their project go down in flames while they bite their lips in silence. Perhaps they are afraid of looking stupid or whatever reason, but the net result of these good intentions is failure, all the same.

Establishing with the client that you are the lead—the person they can go to for anything—is critical to get you off on the right foot. It then takes the burden off your boss, who likely doesn’t want to step in and do your job for you. Your boss is busy doing other things and if they’re a good boss, will only want to step in if you are in trouble. If the client feels the need to relay requirements or other project communication with your boss, then they are saying you have failed to do your job. So you want to establish the requirements early and make it clear you are responsible.

Third, communicate actively with your project stakeholders. We like to use the RACI model, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

You are the R— meaning that you’re Responsible for the project success. Completely. The buck stops with you, even if so-and-so didn’t reply to your email or give you access to that particular system. It’s your job to stay on top of dependencies, as opposed to having a great set of excuses later when someone else fails in silence. There is only one R, else you have too many cooks in the kitchen.A is Accountable, which covers multiple people that are accountable for doing particular tasks. Sometimes you are the R and the A for smaller projects. But more often, you delegate tasks to engineers and designers who are on the hook for various things. And these folks will forget to do their things, do them improperly, provide excuses why it was someone else’s responsibility, and so forth. You are there to resolve these issues before they become visible to the client—you want to monitor this BEFORE you have slipped the schedule irreparably, and before the big emergency. A great project manager can see problems in advance, then escalate as needed.C is consulted, which means that you might need the expertise, advice, or permission of others to proceed. The C role is dangerous here, since a lot of people will want to be involved in your project, especially if it’s high profile and involves social media—something that everyone feels they are an expert in. To prevent meeting madness, where you’re unable to hold meetings because of too many people wanting to attend, make it super clear who is doing what in the Accountable section—the list of tasks.You’ll come across many corporate folks who will say they are responsible in some vague sort of way, upon which you politely explain your role, who else is accountable for certain tasks, and then ask them what exactly they would like to do in this project. If you’re suave, you can pacify these backseat drivers. If you’re too blunt, you’ll offend these people, even if it’s clear that they have no specific useful skills to the project or add any type of value.I is Informed. These are folks who you should keep updated, usually AFTER you have made a decision and have taken action. Only the Consulted people need to be asked in advance of a decision. Because most corporate folks attribute their value in direct proportion to how many meetings they attend (if you’re busy, then you must be in high demand and very important), you’ll have to fight to keep most folks in the I bucket versus somewhere else.The easiest way to ward off these folks is to publish meeting minutes. That way, they’re not afraid of missing something juicy from not having attended—they can merely read the summary. Ask yourself how many project managers are guilty of not publishing the meeting minutes? They’re the ones who are struggling and haven’t even gotten around to placing people in the RACI roles. Ironically, their excuse is that they’re too busy. The reason they’re too busy is that they’re wasting time doing nonsensical things to actually have time to produce things of value.There you have it. Nothing magical. But it sure works like magic. When you make it clear that you have a goal, specified the team and specific tasks needed to get to your goal, the waters will part. The cubicle dwellers will respect that you have a mission. Those who want to know what’s going on don’t have to call a meeting to waste the precious time of your team—they can just log into basecamp or read the latest meeting minutes.If the big boss decides to derail you because of the latest fire drill, you can confidently say “yes” to any of her requests, because you at the same time mention the impact to the work schedule you’re already on.

If the client decides to change his mind and increase the scope of the project (they would never do that!), then you can say “yes”—AND the impact is $X and Y days to the timeline. You never say “yes, but”, which is arguing with them. You say “yes, and”. Let them trade off between time, money, and scope—pick two, as they say.

If you follow these three steps I this orders— to get organized, be clear on your goals, and run the RACI project management model—you’re well-protected from every angle. People will marvel and how well you manage and what a good job you do. By making the model clear, everyone knows what is expected, so there’s little room to hide. The typical corporate cubicle monsters who are looking for a big company to hide in will know they are not welcome. And you’ll be spending less time dealing with the same old excuses, and more time doing things that you enjoy.

How do you fare against this model? Are there certain techniques that work well for you? Perhaps you have a horror story to share (names kept anonymous to protect the guilty)?

You ever been to one of those gas stations along the highway– the one that can charge $7 a gallon because the nearest gas is 40 miles away?  They can charge whatever they want.

Until recently, there was no other place in Boulder for stringing tennis racquets. 22 year old CU grad, Matt Prater, has a love for tennis. He made his high school varsity team as a freshman and hasn’t put his racquet down since.  Now, 8 years later, Matt is a professional tennis instructor teaching his students twice a day, seven days a week. On top of that, he strings tennis racquets for his students.

His tennis stringing business naturally evolved. He started by stringing his fellow high school teammates to make a little extra cash.  Soon, he bought a stringing machine, purchased various reels of string, and found himself with a business.

Whether his business was buoyed by his love or perhaps the lack of competition from the only other Boulder tennis shop in town, it’s hard to tell what drove his growth. Part of what irked Matt was that the competition took over a week to do a restringing.  For kids that have only one racquet and didn’t want to go a week without playing, that was unacceptable.

So he started Next Day Racquets to set a new standard in town. Not only is is service better, but he charges only $20 plus the cost of strings. And as any young entrepreneur, he has put his business on Facebook, to tap into the social crowd.

Have you been a happy customer of Matt or perhaps have some advice to provide him? We look forward to your thoughts!

It’s about 5 am and I’m on my way to the airport again.  If you’re an entrepreneur like me, you know it’s a difficult and lonely road that usually ends in failure. If you are not a start-up or business owner, you can safely ignore the rest of this article.

Those who aren’t entrepreneurs might not appreciate the path we trod. I’ve witnessed many a well-known, now super successful, entrepreneurs spend their last dollar on a lavish client meal, miss payroll more than once, and even lose a wife in the process. And all the while, people come and go. Perhaps the #1 complaint I hear from successful business owners is how hard it is to find good people– folks who won’t flake out and can think for themselves. You, as the business owner, are the only one who cannot call in sick, blame that other guy for your mistakes, or make excuses to the client.

And it would be a mistake for you to try to get your employees to care as much as you do. The reason you’re alive and progressing is simply because you persevere until the point where you reach your goal.  This Boulder tennis pro wrote nearly 500 consecutive posts when he started out and now ranks on the first page for searches such as Boulder tennis instructor. Another friend has been doing SEO for 3.5 years and this morning we had a conversation about what a trip it has been. She started knowing very little and now is well-connected.

And it’s not about skill, intelligence, or other factors, though these, as well as luck, play a minor role. So don’t worry about things like that or even what the “competition” is doing.  Odds are they are dealing with the same issues– finding and retaining quality people.  The race goes not to the best php coders, of which there are many, but those that see it through.

I’d recommend connecting with other entrepreneurs who can identify with the issues that we face. It could be a formal group you pay for such as Vistage or EO– or it could even be a local chamber of commerce, meetup, or another group. Whatever the case, keep at it and here’s to your success!

P.S. If you’re over 35, congrats, as 80% of high tech startups are founded by folks like you.

One of our new clients was held hostage by a programmer that built a custom CMS, when WordPress would have done just fine.  This programmer also did his own hosting, which failed quite often, allowing him to bill the client for time to fix things.  The client was complaining about being held hostage and here is my response to him.  If you are a business owner, consider whether you have chosen folks who are world class in what they do.  If you service clients, consider if parts of the service you offer are available today elsewhere for free– painful as that may be to admit:

Let’s just say this– your site gets so little traffic that there is no reason for this sort of thing to EVER happen. You should not be in the business of hosting, nor should this fellow.  That’s why there are the GoDaddys, The Planets, and Amazons of the world, who have invested significantly to solve generic issues like this.  It would be akin to you want to get a ride to the airport and the cabby saying that he has to stop to fix his custom-made car.  

That cabby should just buy a car from one of the big auto manufacturers and drive that.  Yet, if he really is a car hobbyist, he should do that on the weekend in his garage, not charge his paying customers.  This is something we see quite frequently in our space– engineers that prefer the fun of building your own when off-the-shelf works great and costs almost nothing.  That’s why this fellow decided to build his own CMS when WordPress does almost everything you need, is the world’s most popular CMS, and is free.

However, it’s more fun to learn how to build your own, you get paid for it, and you can hold your customers captive if you make mistakes along the way.  The problem of custom software is that when only one customer uses it, it’s likely to be VERY buggy, as it hasn’t been time tested by millions of customers. And when there’s only one developer, you’re limited by the time and knowledge of one guy, who is unlikely to be world class in PHP, content management systems, hosting, and whatever other topics.

In our world of website stuff, we see one man shows all the time on a suicide mission to try to beat the world in multiple ultra-competitive niches.  Me, I like to make sure we do a few things world class where we have a unique advantage (such as Facebook advertising and local lead gen) and leave the rest to where we can buy off-the-shelf software or partner with the other companies that are #1 in the space.

hat do you think?  It will be pretty hard to argue this– to say that because of one of two particular requirements for your site, that it justifies doing something completely from scratch versus using something free and easy.  But we see this all the time.

Jack Welch, who used to run General Electric, talked out being #1 in every area they compete or to get out. If you’re not winning or have a unique advantage, you’ll eventually get crushed.

Yesterday, I had the honor of being part of the Privacy Roundtable put on by the Federal Trade Commission, held at the University of California at Berkeley.  The other 6 panelists were Chris Conley from the ACLU, Tim Sparapani of Facebook, Nicole Wong of Google, Erika Rottenberg of LinkedIn, Lillie Conley of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Ian Costello of Living Social. I want to thank Peder Magee and Michelle Rosenthal of the FTC for inviting me to be part of this esteemed audience.

Highlights and personal observations:

• To what degree is privacy an issue and what role should regulation have?  Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook echoed a similar response that users are, for the most part, quite savvy.  ”Users trust us” and because of that fact, they feel safe to share their lives with their friends and community. “And we trust them”, by allowing communication to flow relatively freely and to not have a heavy hand in regulation.  Technology changes so fast that it’s difficult to write rules that would inadvertently cause friction, since “data is the lifeblood of social networks”.
• Portability is key: Nicole mentioned that Google engineers have a penchant for starting their own movements– and one of them is the “Data Liberation Front”, where they want to allow users to be able to migrate or remove their data freely if they so chose.  Of the couple dozen services that Google offers, the majority of them do allow you to leave freely and easily.  For example, you can export all your gmail and relationships and move to a competing service.  Users knowing they can leave freely at any time, as opposed to having to act on it, has been important to transparency and growth of their services. Erika of LinkedIn and Tim of Facebook noted that there are many social networks– the bar for entry is low and users can pick up their data and go.
• “We absolutely compete on privacy“: There are dozens of social networks and search engines out there and the leaders are those that maintain user trust. Google has cross-functional privacy teams that meet regularly to review issues and ways to give more control to users. At the same time, implementing fine-grained privacy controls is difficult– to allow users to place their friends into groups and even place sharing rules at the individual message level is an engineering challenge.  
• No one size fits all: It’s nearly impossible to set smart defaults on what data is shared with whom. Chris Conley of the ACLU noted that a gay student was outed when friends in his hometown discovered that he was a fan of a GLBT page on Facebook.  As an aside, the relationships between people are so powerful that we can predict who you are just by knowing what your friends like and do– we don’t need to know much about you. 
• A free model creates incentives for advertising abuse: Third party developers often have to choose between playing by the rules or maximizing their earnings. There is certainly a trade-off.  This trade-off exists for the social networks themselves, too, as they do not charge a monthly membership fee (LinkedIn being an exception).  Yet, market forces encourage playing by the rules in the long run, since short term abuse by running deceptive ads will hamper long-term growth, as this Dennis Yu guest post details.  The crowdsourced feedback model, where users can report bad behavior, helps create a self-policing system.

I’m excited to see how regulation adapts to the growth of publicly shared data across an increasing number of devices.  Certainly, privacy is not “dead”, nor can it be unilaterally and suddenly be stripped away from hundreds of millions of users. The problem with regulation is that it applies not just to the bad actors hiding in the shadows, but also to the good guys.  And abuse may not necessarily be of malicious intent. Should there be sufficient examples of unintentional sharing– perhaps a senior citizen’s health records are accidentally revealed because a mobile app accesses that information on this person’s phone or a woman’s child is publicly revealed to be autistic– and we’ll potentially have laws like HIPAA come down.  Lack of harmonization across countries on privacy laws makes this even more complex.

I concluded in my final remarks that oftentimes regulation as a solution is a blunt tool– like trying to fix a broken watch with a sledgehammer.  Education is the right answer, as that will help minors and adults alike in being able to protect themselves.

If you’re a stay at home parent, your job options are typically quite limited.  There are a range of multi-level marketing opportunities,  get rich quick schemes, insourced call centers, and general selling of questionable products. But a few major trends have converged:

• In the last year, we’ve seen stay at home moms become addicted online gamers, playing daily for hours a day.
• Mobile has become huge– look at Google’s acquisition of AdMob and the rise of FourSquare and Gowalla.
• Social networks such as Facebook comprise up to 25% of pageviews in the United States.
• Small businesses are fleeing the yellow pages and moving ad budgets online.

Thus, the confluence of local, social, and mobile is a “perfect storm” for stay at home parents to service this flood of small businesses. The tightened economy has accelerated this shift, as businesses are scrutinizing their dollars more carefully. The lower cost of getting online and tools that provide more effective advertising further the trend.

And moms are going to be there to benefit from this. To serve local businesses, you need local resellers.  And those folks– the hidden army of local entrepreneurs– are already in their communities.  They will be more effective at selling and servicing the people they already know and trust.  Would you rather buy from a hard pressure sales guy calling from a NYC boiler room or from the person your kids have known for years and lives next door?

Add to that the fact that small businesses are starting to demand transparency, and you have stay at home moms that can show how much business their online marketing efforts are driving.  If you’re a business owner and your analyst can show you what you spent (down to the keyword and click), as well as how many calls it drove (down to the actual recording of the call), how can you argue the ROI versus another form of advertising?

In a few weeks, the folks at BlitzLocal will be unveiling the new Blitzlocal platform.  Yes, it slices, dices, and chops– but more importantly, it’s a user-friendly interface that nearly anyone can use.  If you can play Farmville, you can play BlitzVille– the game is slightly different, plus you earn real dollars instead of virtual ones.

If you are a stay at home mom, stay at home dad, or someone who is looking for a bit of extra income, shoot me an email at dennis@blitzlocal.com and you can get on the waiting list.  

In the last couple months, we’ve been testing with some alpha users of our system and I’m quite impressed with the results.  A lot of people said that having an external analyst force was not as reliable as having an internal sales force that bangs on the phones. Others said that it was impossible to find folks who could both sell and service clients– that the operational efficiency of having one contact was a cost savings not possible.  And most folks said that our model of being transparent with our pricing and actual spend (we spend 70% of every dollar we collect) was suicide, since the other guys spend half that and are able to maintain a healthy margin.

Well, it’s good to know that we have some early success here– that you can find those eager, dedicated moms out there that might not initially know much about SEO, PPC, or any of those acronyms. They have kids to take care of and other responsibilities, so they’ll put forth great effort.  If you believe in them and also give them the right systems, they can succeed and place the high dollar consultants to shame.  What a way to root for the little guy (or girl)!  Our experience so far has affirmed my belief in the goodness of humanity– that success is possible for anyone given the right attitude and effort.

I get pitched a ton of ideas and most of them are pretty good. No doubt, it’s a GREAT idea! Odds are that it might not be truly unique, as is typical in web entrepreneurship. However, the winner in the space is the first to properly execute. No experience founding a company before, don’t have a lot of money, need engineering expertise? Have no fear. My advice for you is to go out and buy “Founders at Work”– which has interviews with a dozen web entrepreneurs who went on to found Yahoo!, PayPal, and other ventures. Find out what it’s really like in taking something from concept to a multi-billion dollar reality– it’s probably not what you think.

Already have in mind an agency you want to pay to develop your concept? Don’t do it. That agency likely has solid experts in PHP, Facebook development , WordPress, or whatever,— but if you look at the stats, rarely does a tech startup succeed by having agency development resources. Unless you have a TON of cash and don’t need inspired engineering, the odds are not in your favor going this route. The catch-22 of agency work is that if these folks were so great, why aren’t they building their own ideas? Analogously, if you’re such a great stockbroker, then why aren’t you building your own portfolio? Great tech startups need a technical co-founder. If you’re paying a contractor or worse– an agency– you’re not getting someone who is sleeping, dreaming, and eating your idea, 24×7.

Ideas are a dime a dozen– execution is everything. And rarely can one person summon the energy needed to pull it off, even if you have all the skills needed. You might also read “Hackers and Painters” which goes into detail on how great builders, innovators, and engineers in the web space are the same thing.

So first order of business, before you’re looking at hiring other people or spending money on marketing is to find others who will join you in the cause. Let those other guys spent a year chasing those VC dollars, while you focus on execution, are absolutely frugal with every dollar, and have a lean, hungry team looking for results.

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to meet Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot. His tips, while seemingly anti-VC, are right on target. Fail quickly by releasing early– then you can suck less faster. Don’t release your product for free– charge for it. Start demoing on real customer, not your friends who will say what you want to hear. Focus on results, not on powerpoint presentations. Don’t go pitch everyone you know– you’ll end up spinning your wheels. And ignore those naysayers (often friend and family) who mean well, but serve only to pull you down.

Good luck on your idea!

I’m not talking acai, crush, or consumer scams. This post is about how to avoid the most common form of business failure. The moral of the story- “In God we trust… All others pay cash.”

A designer I know is a nice fellow. Great design skills, great intentions. Yet we paid him $6,000 cash up-front and he has yet to return a dime of it, despite promises over the last year. Initially, we paid him a few thousand dollars, against which he did decent work, but was slow in responding. Joel was busy trying to build a big company- hiring lots of people, big office, and big expenses. If you ever read the E-Myth, by Michael Gerber, you know of the girl who was an excellent baker, opened a bakery,  and was soon out of business. Great at baking cakes, but absolutely zero business sense.

This fellow was the same way. As a one person firm, he could easily keep track of his projects and he only had to worry about himself. But with no project management in place or any kind of structure, he soon found himself pursued by a number of angry clients- all wondering what when project deadlines came and went. He tried to hold them off by making assurances and then personally working harder on the weekends to catch up. But he was trying to do the work of a full team- and soon went out of business in the fall of 2008. He brought in new business partners and tried again- with the same results.

We worked with Joel on a payment plan, in the hopes that our investment in Pixel Envy wouldn’t be a total loss. I believe he paid us back about $200 of the $6,000 over the last 8 months. Since then, he has disappeared, ignoring our messages, in the hopes that this is one of many problems that would magically go away. Instead, that got him in more trouble, as it damages his personal credit, puts him in the hands of a collection agency, and tarnishes his reputation. He signed contracts that commit Pixel Envy to design projects with BlitzLocal and there is a paper trail where he acknowledges the debt.

What can you learn from his situation?

Just because you do what you love doesn’t guarantee success. If you want to grow beyond yourself- and form a team- then you need to know how to run a business. That skill has nothing to do with how well you know PhotoShop, Google Adwords, or PHP. It has everything to do with being able to organize projects for bulletproof delivery- making sure you have the right people in place and a system that has built in checks to prevent failure from happening. It means breaking down projects into concrete tasks that are assigned to people with due dates. We use basecamp for project management, but there are a dozen other tools that will track tasks and “whine” when someone is behind on something.

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Rob Hayes of First Round Capital at the TechStars office. They invest in seed stage startups. He said that the CEO has just 2 responsibilities- hiring the right people and making sure the company doesn’t run out of money. Two weeks ago, we had dinner with Dwayne Nesmith, who founded Viant- a web agency back in the boom days that grew to $100 million in sales. He laid out 3 types of companies that work in the agency space:

• Consulting companies that follow a cookie-cutter process. They do it the exact same way every time- a more sophisticated and expensive form of McDonalds. Should one person get run over by a bus, the project should be able to recover by putting another person of that function in. Easy to scale- look at Accenture or PWC or Iprospect.

• The high end consultant- The McKinsey model. You have a team of ultra high IQ folks who can be green berets. Not easy to scale, since there aren’t enough of these sorts of people out there.

• Finally, the franchise model, where each region operates independently of one another, but share in the name. Look at the Virgin group of companies started by Richard Branson. He doesn’t run any of these companies. Rather, he licenses his Virgin name out to a company and gets a cut of whatever they make. It’s a win for everyone, since Branson is a master salesperson, not a detailed company operator.

So look at the example of this designer who loved design, but failed at business. He jumped into business with a great attitude and great individual design skills- yet ended up broke with a bunch of unhappy clients chasing him. He didn’t decide up front which of these 3 models he’d choose to scale on. The choice for you might not be to hire other people. I know a lot of folks who make a lot of money by themselves without having to deal with the hassle of managing other people, projects, and partners. Just look at Markus Frind, who built Plentyoffish.com into a top 100 web property single-handedly.

If you decide to hire others, make sure you budget enough money knowing that about half of the contractors you hire probably won’t work out- it’s just human nature. We have lost a few hundred thousand dollars over the last 2 years from these types of incidents- most all of them good, well-meaning people.

Best ways to increase your success rate? Ask your friends who they use. Have a friend who is already skilled in what you are looking for interview candidates- if you want heart surgery, ask another heart surgeon, not a patient. Find folks who already have something going on and who would have to take a risk to join you (have skin in the game)

Best ways to increase your chance of failing? Hire kids who are in high school or college still- they don’t have professional level experience and will often flake on you. School competes for their time, too. Look at folks who have been at a big company for a long time- odds are that their edge died years ago. Hire folks who you can’t physically meet- offshoring can work, but this post is not about what could work, but where you are least likely to fail.

In case you are wondering, all the examples given are real mistakes I have made. I hope you can benefit from our losses.

////

Update: We have heard back from this designer and a year plus later, he’s agreed to start repaying back the money we advanced him.  This is an encouraging sign of how people can perhaps change for good.

Keith Wilcox is a stay-at-home dad blogging about his two kids and family life– providing a distinctly male perspective and quite outspoken.  Some examples: four exercises that will make you a better parent, busting your child out of a locked car, why talking to your kid in baby talk just infantilizes them, what to do with too many toys, and being a revolutionary parent.

There are tie-in’s to general psychology.  For instance, lavish praise doesn’t spoil a child. Studies show that the childhoods of successful leaders are absurdly full of encouragement– you just can’t encourage them too much, odd as that may seem.

Update:

For a list of top daddy bloggers on the web– check out this comprehensive list of 115 sites.

July 20, 2009:

• Keith is now ranking #4 on google for “unnecessary baby products“. And he has 467 pages indexed by Google, while my blog has only only 398 pages.
• For “cell phones suck“, Keith is now ranking #2.
• For “unpronounceable names“, #7.
• #4 on “avoiding cliques“.

If you’re squeamish, don’t read this– I warned you! BlitzLocal has two clients that deal with dying– one that sells discounted caskets, one that provides free funeral advice (a servicemagic for funerals).  Now to be an effective marketer, you have to really understand what your client does and get into the minds of their customers.  So in the last few months, I’ve read 3 full books on funerals and countless magazines and articles.  I now understand the minute details of how bodies are cremated (they have to remove metal and other objects beforehand, else it can explode at 2,000 degrees) how embalming occurs for organ donors (embalmers can magically rework a bag of flesh into what looks like a human, using wood and metal inserts), the decomposition of corpses even in “sealed” caskets (nothing will stop the elements), marketing tactics by funeral directors to extract your last dollar (every detail of their office is arranged “just so”), how you can conduct the funeral and burial of a loved one yourself (it can involve lots of dry ice and heavily scented perfumes), options for holding a “green” funeral (don’t be part of the several million gallons of formaldehyde that get into our ground each year– 3 pounds of formalin per body), and so forth.  Funny the places that internet marketing can take you.

Do you know the funeral rule?

A few years ago, Congress enacted a law to protect consumers from getting ripped off.  Some of the many provision include:

• a clause that prevents more than a 7 times markup on casket prices. So then you have to ask– if 7 times is illegal, then I suppose jacking up the price 6 times your cost is okay?  If the law is that you can’t charge more than 7 times your cost, then how badly were most funeral directors ripping folks off before?  Can you imagine Congress enacting such a rule in supermarkets, saying that Safeway is not allowed to charge more than 7 times what it costs for a gallon of milk or box of cereal?  You’d probably be incensed to pay $20 for a box of cereal (even my favorite, which is Blueberry Morning), but you might not have any idea what a $5,000 casket actually costs wholesale, would you?  And what are you going to do about it?  Shop around, come back on double coupon Thursdays, ask for the “scratch and dent” or coffins that are on sale?  No, this is the worst day of your life– your loved one has just died. Not all funeral directors are scam artists, but this is capitalism, folks. And there aren’t many mom and pop funeral homes– most are owned by large corporations that don’t change the family name or feel.  These corporations have executives interested in increasing the stock price and their bonuses.
• you can buy your own casket. Kind of like bring your own beer, but not quite.  The funeral director MUST allow you, if you so choose, to purchase your casket elsewhere and bring it in without an additional handling fee.  Of course, they will dissuade you that the caskets bought on-line (yes, even Costco offers caskets now), are somehow cheaper, more likely to break, might be damaged in transit, or might not get there in time (can you imagine the horror?).  What they won’t tell you is that they buy from the same place or that it’s as easy as going on-line and buying something from Amazon.com, minus the one-click option.  Look.  They are going to make a good chunk on you for embalming, the service filing papers, storing the body, and so forth– so it’s not like they’re not making money.  Have you ever seen a funeral home go out of business?  They’re doing okay, shall we say?
• they have to show you a price list. True, they have to break out the prices of each item, but they still will use every trick in the book to open your wallet.  For example, embalming is optional.  If you have the funeral within 48 hours of death, you don’t need to embalm. And if you do embalm– a horrible process that I’ll spare readers the details of what exactly happens– you don’t have to have the funeral right away.  You can even have the funeral a year later and the body will be just the same– just increase the concentration of embalming fluid.  Famous figures have laid in state for months at a time– it’s basically mumification.  Some funeral directors will charge for embalming even when the remains are going straight from the hospital to the crematorium– the family is none the wiser.  But as to what you “have” to buy– the list is endless. You can bring your own pallbearers, get your own flowers– you don’t have to ride in a limo from the service, nor do you have to hold the service at the funeral home.  It can be at a church or even your own home– but wakes are not as popular these days.  More people are living in apartments, but that’s not stopping them from putting the casket in the back of their pickup truck and carrying it upstairs to the second story unit.
• you can rent a casket. Yes, but the funeral director doesn’t want you to know.  And he will probably be “out of stock” of all but the cheapest steel caskets– and they’re all cheap, by the way. What used to be called a coffin is now called a casket.  What’s the difference?  None, except price.  There is a growing movement among other furniture makers who see the impressive margins that the coffin manufacturers are getting, to enter the business.  There are guys who used to just make tables and chairs– now they are making simple pine boxes for $250– a tenth or a 20th the price of what funeral homes charge.  Plus, you can even decorate the box as you choose with hand-painted images. And these wood caskets can be much nicer than what’s mass produced.  We have a lot of office furniture from Walmart and American Furniture Warehouse– it works just fine, but we’re not paying $2,000 for a table and a chair.

Want to find out more?  Have a morbid curiosity or perhaps you want to be armed with knowledge for when that inevitable time comes?  There was a funeral home that I often passed by to and from school.  They had a banner that changed every few weeks with a new witty saying.  One time, it said “Drop in now for a coffee, since you’ll be dropping by at some point anyway.”  You think my post in undignified?  Try paying 7 times the true cost to bury a loved one.