Spira was please to be a sponsor of this where we had a booth right alongside one of our business partners, Avanti Software.   Personally I found it to be an enjoyable couple of days meeting new people and connecting with some of our customer user base that we rarely get a chance to meet face to face. 

Trade shows and industry events are more than just ways for vendors and suppliers to sport their wares, they are a great way to network, exchange ideas, see emerging technology trends in your industry and keep an eye on your competition.

Some people hate trade shows, but in my experience they are what you make of them.  The nice thing about the PSAC setup is that when the education sessions are on, exhibitors can join in and attend.  Now admittedly the OH&S Legalities session wasn’t my cup of tea, but the Performance Management Tool Kit Session was informative.  There is always something to learn and it helps those of us selling into the petroleum services industry stay informed about some of the challenges facing our customers.  There can be business opportunities hidden within those challenges.

All in all I very glad I had the opportunity to attend the PSAC Conference and expect to be back next year to take it all in again.  Plus it allowed me to spend some quality time with our VP Sales, Craig Latimer which is always entertaining.

The first thing that I noticed is that the yards of many oil field service companies are empty.  If their yards have little or no equipment in them, then the companies are out in the field working making money.  When you see company after company with yards full of equipment, well that is typically a bad economic sign.  Empty yards, however are generally a good economic sign (unless of course the office looks boarded up and out of business).

The next thing I noticed was that there are trucks hauling stuff everywhere.  In the city, on the highway and at the truck stops there were lots of truck hauling lots of equipment.

But probably the the best unofficial indicator that I know of for the Grande Prairie region is the level of pick-up truck sales.  I have an in-law in the business and last year was a great year and this year is proving to be strong as well.  Prior to the slowdown in 2008, pick-up sales slowed as well.  So it would seem pick-up sales might be a great leading indicator of the oil patch economy in Grande Prairie.  I suspect that this would be true in Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Lloydminster, Red Deer and any other city or town that relies on oil and gas for a good portion of the local economy.

So next time you are wondering how things are doing in the oil patch, call someone at a dealership to get the scoop on pick-up truck sales and while you have them on the phone ask them if the oil field service company’s lot across the street is full of equipment or empty.  Right now in Grande Prairie both of these things are indicating that the oil patch is chugging right a long. 

Unofficially of course.

Over the time that I have been at Spira, we have had offers from a variety of companies to enter into strategic partnerships.  My task was to determine the benefits of joining together and determine how to weed out the good companies from the bad?  The promising thing is that there haven’t been any really bad companies, per se.  But there have definitely been a few that make no strategic sense to get involved with because there is no business value to the relationship. 

If there is no business value in the relationship, it is like dating a person you have nothing in common with.  What is the point?  You end up never doing anything together which is the opposite of what a relationship is.

How does one determine a good partner from a bad one?  Nothing worse than getting involved with a company and finding out later that they do not run a good business.  A bad strategic partner can do a lot of damage to your reputation.  Particularly if you are referring your own customers to them and they are not performing to the level expected when you first forged the partnership with them.  Thankfully there is a lot of good information on the web about this very subject.  

I by no means profess to be a guru of strategic partnerships but here is what I found on the web that was useful for evaluating strategic partnerships.

Don’t settle for the status quo. 

If the relationship is not adding any value or increased business then it’s not worth your time to keep it in place.

Investigate their reputation and allow them to investigate yours.

Call their customers and find out what their thoughts and opinions are and expect that they will want to do the same.

Think about the long term.

Partnerships are like choosing a spouse or friends.  Unless you are like a Hollywood celebrity, you typically aren’t looking for a short term wife or a temporary friend.  Having said this, make sure that you do have a way out if you find out later that your partner has the business equivalent of a drinking problem.

Put it in writing.

NDA’s, partnership agreements and reseller arrangements are crucial.  Don’t shack up, get a justice of the peace wedding and a marriage license at a minimum.  A pre-nup is a good idea too so you know who gets the kids if the partnership ends.

Put some effort into it, make it work.

Make plans, hold events and cross-promote each other’s businesses.  Just don’t sit and do nothing.  Strong partnerships like strong relationships are built by both companies making an effort, putting in time and building trust and goodwill.

When you boil it right down, having great partners makes perfect business sense.  First off, as a company we can’t do everything ourselves so it makes sense to align ourselves with other businesses that complement our products and services.  Secondly, they offer great networking opportunities to get in front of prospects that no amount of cold calling, email marketing or web marketing could accomplish.  Third is, great companies are also out there looking for other businesses to strengthen their own product and service offerings and there is strength and legitimacy in numbers.

Why am I writing about this in a blog?  Well I have had some excellent meetings and phone calls with a number of companies over the past two and a half months and I am in the final stages of solidifying some exciting new partner relationship for Spira.  This blog article is actually just a teaser to these announcements coming in April.  Stay tuned to our website for these announcements and for some of the planned events that we will be participating in with these companies.

As the Marketing Director at Spira Data Corp I am responsible for research and lead generation for our sales department and I am amazed at how difficult it is to find any relevant information on the internet beyond a name and address on a great many companies.  In fact, often the only reason I find a name and an address is because of old school directories such as the Yellow Pages® or free directories that list everyone and regurgitate dubious advertising content in the sidebar of their webpage.  Last time I checked the Yellow Pages Group (YPG) was not all that healthy financially and if they go away how the heck do you think anyone will ever find your business?

Seriously, if you operate a business and you want customers, you need a website or at a minimum a webpage in a business directory.

A few times a month at least one of our sales guys comes from a meeting with a prospective client that has contacted us (through our website) an they ask me to find out more information on them.  Lo an behold when I Google them, they have no website.  Not on page one, two or three of the Google search results.  Oh there is generaly a few breadcrumbs to link to such as their Profile Canada, 411 or Hotfrog listing which has their company name, address and some type of map, but nothing of substance on wht they do and who they are.

When I can’t find something on a company, I will go back to my sales guys and ask them if I have something incorrect with their name or URL and ask them how big the company is or if they are new and they haven’t got their web page up and going yet, and when I find out that they have been around for 20 years, have 40 pieces of equipment and 60 employees and I can’t find a website I am truly baffled at this.  Its almost like you are hiding from customers.  “Don’t find us we don’t want any more business. We like it that way!  Customers!  Who needs them?”  Uh… pretty much every business out there.

10 years ago, creating a website was a much newer and less understood process and phone books were still common place.  10 years ago, if you wanted a website you found yourself relying on a friend’s brother who freelanced on the weekend and could build it for you cheap and you weren’t sure it was worth the effort.  Nowadays, it seems everyone can build one for you and the new mantra is search engine optimization (SEO) through content, content, content!  Maybe that’s why some companies stay away from the web.  They think that they need to keep it current, full of blog posts, news and photos and update it every week. 

Before the web, they looked at their Yellow Page ad once a year and had a smattering of business card ads in local newspapers or magazines and relied on word of mouth.  The pressure of keeping a web page current seems like an overwhelming task.  It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.  Word of mouth is essential, but sometimes people can only remember a name of a company and don’t have any contact details at hand so a person will still need to go looking for more information and guess where they go to find it?

Think of it this way.  Take the money you spent on other forms of advertising like the phone directory (if you don’t spend money on advertising, please stop reading here the rest of this is irrelevant to you) and use it to create a website.  You might have to spend a little more to get it going in the first year and then expect to spend less in subsequent years.  At a minimum you should try replace your quarter or half page ad that people used to thumb through a phone book looking for, (the internet is the phone book now).  After that is is up to you how much more you want to add.  Any website designer can incorporate the basics of SEO into your website when they are constructing it and if you want to dive deeper into SEO, look it up.  On the internet of course.  Plenty of free information circulating around the web for you to take advantage of.

Of course if your company does not have a website then you are probably not reading blogs such as this one so this article is probably falling on deaf eyes anyway.  But if you are reading this, please consider getting a website.  It will help people find you when they are looking for services in your area.

What does this have to do with Spira and our software?  Not much really.  Its more of a rant from me because it takes me way longer to research your company if I can’t find you on the internet.  So if for nothing else you will make my life much easier.

I am not sure what your office environment is like but at the Spira office we spend a large part of our day tackling and solving problems.  I mean, when you get right down to it the whole focus of our company on both a software and consulting front is to solve problems.   We work on the problem of getting operational data to and from the field in an accurate and systematic fashion. 

At Spira we spend a lot of our day overcoming problems, and that can be mentally taxing after a while.  Maybe “problems” is a bad word to use.  Challenges!  That sounds better.   Often we do not hear about the successes of our software with our customers, just the problems, (sorry, challenges) and that can impact our own perception of the good things that our software and our service provides to our customers.

Anyway, it was great to get out of the solving challenges mode for a while and just converse and interact with customers on a people level.  And I thought our 50th Customer Party was a great way to do that and we hope you felt that way too.  Turns out there are a lot of great people working at our customer’s offices and we have a great deal more to talk about than just data.

Congratulation to Badger Daylighting on being our 50th Customer!  Our hats off to Jon and Chris Molyneaux at Double Zero Pizza and to their amazing staff for providing a fantastic venue, great service and exceptional food.  Can’t wait for the next event there!

I think one of RIMs biggest mistakes was one of complacency mixed with a bit of arrogance that their product was unassailable.  That is deadly in any business, let alone  the business of technology.  Its one thing to stick to your guns, but anyone doing research at Research in Motion probably could have figured out that their phone business was in for a serious attack after handling an iPhone for 5 minutes.  I am not a guy that hops on many bandwagons and, this next statement is no revelation, but the iPhone® is truly a great product.  Its enjoyable and easy to use and it is secure.

So are there lessons in this for our company?  Absolutely.  First, off don’t be complacent or arrogant.  Second, keep a sharp eye on your competitors and third, be willing to change directions if there is a compelling market shift that either makes your product obsolete or there is a real opportunity to grow your business.

So are we abiding by these lessons at Spira?  It’s a tough question to answer at times because it can feel like you are getting everything wrong.  But if one steps back from any situation and looks at the bigger picture, the answer is, for the most part yes we are. 

We are continually investing in our product (lesson 1).   We also stay very aware of competitors in our market space (lesson 2) and we made a strategic decision to defer development on one handheld project and focus development on our iPhone product (lesson 3).  We are presently faced with strategic decisions about where are product development resources should be placed moving forward as well.  These three lessons stay in play at all times.  These same lessons can be applied to companies that use our software for their field data capture.

Most good service company operators stay current with new technology and processes that improve the product and service offering to their own customers.  Surprisingly though, many of these same companies have  administrative process that are inefficient and in some cases border on atrocious.  It is an odd dichotomy where a company is cutting edge in one area of their business and in the technological stone age in another. 

Our sense of the oil field service market is that, right now is not a time for complacency (lesson 1).  Why?  Many companies are looking for a competitive advantage over their competitors (lesson 2) through lower general and administrative  costs, faster and more accurate operational reporting and value added services to their customers.  How are they doing this?  Through better field data capture using software like Spira (lesson 3).

Change is being pushed down on oil field service companies by large E & P companies that require electronic data exchange with their e-procurement systems and faster turnaround on providing field tickets and invoices.  Adaptive field service companies are wanting to provide more than just billing data to their customers as a way of differentiating themselves from competitors.  These same companies are getting close to real time measurements and reporting from their field operations. 

If you own or work in a field service company, beware!  There are many forward thinking companies in your market that are making your business model outdated.  What are you doing to meet this change?

Now, you would never confuse me with an Apple geek (or is the PC guys that are geeks? can’t remember), but Steve Jobs is one of the personalities that is larger than life and that you just want to read more about.  Even though I know the Apple and Jobs story at a high level it was still a great book because it touched on areas of Jobs’ private and business life that I previously knew little or nothing about.  For instance, I didn’t realize the level of impact he had in Pixar, nor did I know about some of his odd eating habits and his hygiene issues early on in his career.

On a product and technology level what I found compelling was Job’s relentess pursuit of the perfect product.  Sometimes to his or the company’s detriment.  Good enough didn’t cut it.  But at the end of the product creation process, he and the people at his companies were able to pull together a variety of seemingly unrelated technologies into one device or movie (in the case of Pixar) and create products that completely re-defined how we used an looked at cell phones, computers, music, movies and much, much more.

On a business level, I found it intriguing how both control and creativity co-existed within the same company.  Job’s insisted on almost complete control over product decisions right down the the most minute detail but fostered an environment of creativity, idea exchange and brainstorming from his engineering, design and managers right up to his board of directors.  He was brutal on them if they had half thought out ideas or he thought they were idiots.  But he kept tapping the best of them for new and innovative ways to incorporate ideas into Apple’s products.

On a personal level, it made me wonder (as I often do reading biographies about compelling people), if I need to develop some sort of odd compulsion (such as an eating disorder) in order to become hugely successful.  Be it Howard Hughes or Steve Jobs all the famous people seem to have some sort of compulsion. These compulsions are likely by-products of passionate personalities, but it makes one wonder if it would be a good idea to develop a compulsion to only eat green M & Ms or something to that effect just in case somebody wrote a book about you.

On the big idea front, the book speaks loudly to simplicity.  How can we take one more step out of this to make it easier for our users.  Less is more.  There is a paradox in this idea, in that it takes a great deal of complexity to make things simple.  Particularly technology.  And arguably, the less is more idea gets completely turned on its head when you consider the explosion of apps available on products such as the iPhone® and iPad® (Definitely more of those app thingies around).  But when you examine the app explosion, the apps that are most popular often do one thing really well and don’t try to do too much.  This makes them easier to use and more intuitive, which again brings us back to the idea of simplicity.

For me a great book is one that gets my mind going, sparks new thoughts, ideas and new ways to look at problems.  After reading it I found that I had all this creative energy built up in my brain that I could apply to my work and to a lesser extent on my personal life.  As I progress into 2012, I hope that I can apply this to Spira on both a marketing front and also to the creative process within Spira to help improve our product, our inner culture and bring more simplicity into our products.

Pick it up or download it, it is a great read.

A few weeks back our VP Sales and I were involved in a brief presentation with an outside development firm that was doing some visually stunning stuff with software presentation layers.  We were literally staring at this sales guy’s iPad® as he scrolled through stuff that completely resonated with both of us and that we could immediately see enhancing our current product offering.  My VP and I could hardly wait to get back to our office to talk to our developers about it.

A week later however, we held a customer forum where we floated the idea past several of our customers about incorporating the presentation layer into our product.  Well, the response was lukewarm at best.  Our customers had a perspective on the technology that we had never even considered.  I took this piece of information away from the forum thinking, “they have a valid point but, the benefits of what we were proposing would easily outweigh the costs.”  “Maybe they don’t quite get it,” was what I was thinking.  So I logged the information in the back of my brain (I took notes too, but notes don’t think) and allowed my subconscious to work on it.

A week later, I found myself in another forum listening to a long time customer (completely unprompted) explain why they would not do exactly what we were thinking of doing.  “What the Heck!” This person had a completely different reason than the other customers in the first forum.  At that point I started really questioning whether our initial enthusiasm about dramatically revamping our presentation layer when this same customer said something else that was the “aha” moment where all of the feedback fell into place.  Our enthusiasm was well placed, but not for the reasons that we thought.

Both customer’s comments didn’t invalidate our initial enthusiasm for this new idea, but they gave us some great market intelligence on how to correctly approach what we were considering, both from a marketing perspective and a development one.

I realize I am talking about these ideas in a purposely vague manner, but the message here is not to freely disclose to you a valuable piece of market information that we gathered.  The message here is to talk to your customers.  If you are listening they tell you some incredibly valuable things.  Most of us already know this, but if you get out of the habit of doing this, you and your company are missing out.

What was also great about the forum was that the attendees learned that several of the features or functions that they were looking for could be accomplished through minor configuration or report changes and required no development time whatsoever.

Next up is an iPhone User Feedback Forum on December 2, 2011 and a Payroll forum which will be booked in January 2012.

The next step for us at Spira is to present our findings to our Product Committee, prioritize the requests and enter them into our product release schedule.

The reasons we don’t sport a moustache, beard or goatee is that we either look perfectly ridiculous, it itches the heck out of us or our ladies are grossed out by them.  So lest you think that growing a Mo is just an inconvenience for us guys.  The fact is, when we have to go a month without any affection from our gals, well that is the sacrifice that we are making for the cause.  So our whining is completely valid.

What surprised me last year and this year about the Movember campaign is how many personal notes that I have received from men who have had prostate cancer affect someone in their families.  It reminds me that Movember is more than just hair and games but there are real lives that will be helped by this annual event.  In a world where there seem to be a great many cancer awareness causes for females, us men tend to be more quiet and subdued about our health issues and the awareness that Movember creates is exactly what we need.

Anyway, if you are looking for someone to donate to at Spira, please visit the Spira Stache for Cash Mo Page on the Movember site.

20 more days and counting until it comes off…..