How I compete: I treat my clients like GODS.

At the height of the most recent economic boom, I barely knew who my customers were. They came clamoring to me for services and I distributed myself among them aloofly, and sparingly dained to ration my greatness to only those who were deserving.

 

Well, maybe I wasn't that bad, but we were a bigger organization back then, and it was generally understood by my co-workers that clients were not allowed to talk directly to me. There was a structure and an order, and it worked like this: A receptionist answered the phone. She directed the call to tech support or sales, or to some other department. If there was a new order or technical issue, this information would filter up to me only after all of the paperwork was done, media was prepped, and anything of a higher priority was completed.  And simpler projects and issues were often times handled by technically skilled employees below my who would occasionally only need some hints or advice from me to get the job done themselves.

 

I never really knew from one day to the next what I would be doing, or even why some things would come back around or get cancelled.

 

A few times I would be poking around someone else's desk looking for post-it notes or something and their phone would ring. I'd pick it up, "Sheri's Desk" I would say, for instance, if it happened to be Sheri's desk. The caller would ask for Sheri, and I would tell them that she was not at her desk but that she might be back shortly, and then I asked if perhaps I could help them? They would ask me who I was, and I would say "I'm just one of the programmers around here".

 

Interestingly, that kind of anonymity occasionally revealed interesting insights into people's opinions of our service. And, it is for that reason that if you look at all of our employees on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, one of them is not a real person. Heh.

 

But I digress. Enter the recession. Our business is flying along, full speed ahead, when WHAM, it is slammed by a heat-seeking missile. One of the engines explodes. Trailing thick black smoke and twinkling little bits of shattered debris, we start to roll over and dive. The sales department pulls back on the stick while engineering works feverishly to give it more power. Accounting deftly begins damage control, while management starts tossing out dead weight and dead bodies.

 

But it isn't enough. We're flying upright, but we can see by the numbers on the board that it is not sustainable. We're going down, and there's nothing we can do about it.  And even if we found a way to maintain altitude, the troublesome economic landscape is inflating upwards, towards us, looming larger and larger with each passing moment.

 

And, to top it all off, our ship is old, out-dated, and the enemy who took a shot at us is still back there, etc. etc. etc.

 

OK enough with the stupid metaphor. You get the picture.

 

So what did we do to solve our seemingly impossible problem?  I'll tell you more about it next time, and of course, it's no real cliffhanger. Aside from personally doubling down in a dark corner for 11 months reinventing my "aircraft", the answer is in the title of this story.