As Labor Day approaches I can’t help but think about the success of this country.  America is a young country but quickly grew to global leader with guts, sweat, blood, hard knocks and tears.  Our ancestors gave us a great foundation to work off of.  It is our turn to continue to strengthen that foundation.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to own and run Galvin Technologies,  web and software business in Indianapolis.  We would not be successful without the hard work and knowledge of our staff.  Everyone at Galvin has an opportunity to make a direct impact on not only the company but the industry too.  This is type of work that continues to make this country strong.

Thank you!!

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Thank You, American Workers

Last weekend my wife and I joined some friends and we all took our children to Holiday World for the first time.  All of us agreed that it was the best family amusement park we have been too.  While I was there I was impressed with how the amusement park was run that I enjoyed taking some business lessons from the park.  Here they are:

• Treat everyone one and it will have a positive trickle effect.
• Know your target audience, market to them and service the heck out of them so they keep coming back.
• Create value added benefits and don’t be afraid to market them (Holiday World advertises their free soft drinks and how clean their park is)
• If  you can clearly describe what you are good at then that will be spread to potential customers by others.
• Always make sure your improving as a company.
• Train your employees everyday.
• Everyone wants to be said “hello” to.  A simple “hello” and “thank you” goes a long way.
• Offer enough incentive to bring people to want to buy from you and keep buying from you.
• If your workplace is clean and organized then so is  your business.

Although Galvin Technologies is a web and application development company doesn’t mean that it can’t take business lessons from an amusement park.  The weekend gave our family many memories but it also taught me some valuable business lessons.  I look forward to going back there.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Business Lessons Learned from My Visit to Holiday World

Then today on the way home from work I was listening to ESPN Radio and they were talking about Strasburg as if he has been playing the game for 10 years and has been the greatest ever.  He pitched one game, did awesome and now for the next game he pitches there are even higher expectations on him than his first game.  I trust he will deliver because Strasburg seems like the type of player who will continue to get better and better.  Tiger knows it, Peyton knows it and Applie knows it – you have to constantly get better because your fans expectations or your clients expectations will always be high.

Athletes know this and businesses know this.  We know that we have to constantly get better as a business and we know our competition is getting better.    But more importantly, our clients have expectations and those expectations are high.  Just like Strasburg we have to go out there everyday and perform better than the day before.  This is part of what makes this “game” so much fun!

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Expectations – Exceed Them

Here are just a few small ways in which your clients will not only remember you, but they will look forward to your next meeting.

1.       Be Present – Be intentional when dealing with clients.  No one wants to feel as though they are an inconvenience.  Give them your full attention by looking them in the eye and focusing on what they are saying.

2.       Be Trustworthy – You need to be seen by your clients as someone they can trust and rely upon both personally and professionally.  Follow through with your commitments and be mindful of the persona you are projecting. 

3.       Be Grateful – Never forget that your client had other options but chose to do business with you.  Let them know that you appreciate their business and that they made the correct decision.

4.       Be Personal – Your client is more than their business; they are also individuals.  Address them by their first name.  Take an interest in their personal lives.  Show them that you are not only interested in their business; you are interested in them.

Never forget that the simplest thing like making eye contact and showing appreciation can make or break your relationship with your clients. 

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Treating People Well (or Flies and Honey, which ever you like better)

In 2006 Galvin Technologies started implementing Salesforce.com into the company.  Since then our company has purchased several licenses spread throughout our employees.  It has become an application that is necessary to the health of the business.  In addition, Galvin Technologies, an Indianapolis Web and Software Development company, does Salesforce.com project development work for clients. Over the past four years I personally have become a Salesforce junkie so I wanted to share with you my 5 favorite things with Salesforce.com.

1. No Software – Salesforce.com runs off this tag line.  Is is a SaaS application and runs in a hosted environment.  We don’t have to install any software or buy any hardware.
2. Workflows and Business Rules- Using Salesforce you can develop business workflows based on various business rules.  For example, one of our custom workflows allows for easy processing of new work orders.  When an opportunity’s stage is set to “SOW Signed” and Contract Signed = “Yes” then a Sales Order Form is automatically generated populated with fields from Salesforce, attaches a copy of the client work order and contract, converts it to PDF and sends it to Accounting and Production for processing.  What use to take 10-15 minutes for someone to do now takes as much time as it does to click a button.
3. AppExchange – Hundreds of apps to browse and implement into your Salesforce account.  A few of our favorites are the ExactTarget Application, FormFactory and TimbaSurveys.
4. Usability – Hands down, Salesforce.com has one of the best usability features I have seen.  It is simple and understands how the user navigates throughout the application.
5. Client Support – Salesforce.com would probably consider Galvin one of it’s smallest clients but the personal support is remarkable.  Every time we submit a ticket to Salesforce.com it is followed up with an email and a phone call.  When the ticket is closed they follow up again with an email and a phone call confirming I am satisfied.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

My 5 Favorite Things with Salesforce.com

Originally, Steam was used as a way of purchasing and downloading Valve games online, as well as being the epicenter for Valve’s online multiplayer games. Despite starting relatively small and in-house, it was rather obvious just how important Steam was to the gaming community. Now, gamers could download and play the games as opposed to driving to a store to purchase a CD that could very easily be scratched or destroyed. Now, Valve has over 25 million users, over 1,000 titles from various different publishers available for purchase and download, and is estimated to control roughly 70% of the digital distribution market. What also makes Steam special is the ability for one user to download the same game on multiple PCs because each user has their own account name and password that can be accessed anywhere. If you download Half-Life 2 on your home computer, you can access Steam online via your laptop and download Half-Life 2 onto that one, as well. Thus, you don’t have to buy two different copies of Half-Life 2 to install on two different computers; the license-to-use needs only to be bought once.

You don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy the benefits of a Steam-like system. Businesses around the world are using similar systems known as Software as a Service or SaaS. Through an online third-party group (the gaming world equivalent being Steam), the user can access business applications and get software upgrades via the internet. This eliminates the need to equip every device with its own personal license for the software in question, greatly reducing cost. The compact disc also becomes irrelevant, and concerns about damage to the disc are rendered moot. The SaaS model of software access, for the usual monthly fee, is an innovative way for businesses to obtain access to software needed as opposed to licensing every unit in the business for use.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Software as a Service: Licensing Multiple Units in the Digital Age

In business it is important to get the right people in the organization and build around them.  Form a good team, with good systems and the players (employees) will produce.  The leaders have to be respected and execution has to come from the top down.  Don’t detour from your game plan and know who you are.   Execute efficiently and the company will succeed.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Business Lessons from My High School

Ok. You have decided to make a monumental decision: you are going to hire an architectural company to build a new house for you. After months and months and what has to equal hundreds of thousands of dollars, you drive to your new home, walk in and…realize things aren’t quite right. You flip the switch for the garbage disposal and the upstairs toilet flushes. When the dryer runs, the air temperature drops thirty degrees. This is not what you had in mind. You have wasted lots of time and lots of money on a product that, in the end, was nowhere near what you wanted.

This is a legitimate concern in the software engineering and development world as well as any other type of construction. It’s easy to just build a house or just design a car if a customer asks you to, but there is so much room for error and disappointment, cost in both time and money, that we choose a little more intimate of a route. Not only do we develop websites for our clients, but we also develop business systems. To do this in at our most efficient level, we go over the functional requirements of the system with the client and follow that up with use cases.

Some sites can be basic, flat html pages, where the user can visit multiple pages via links and learn about the company, the products the company sells, and navigate pages without really doing anything other than that navigation. For example, a florist shop – let’s call it Fiona’s Flowers, based out of Tampa – has a website with a few pages that give the company’s bio, some contact information, some pictures and a list of various plants and boutiques one can purchase at the shop. All in all, it’s not much more than an online Power Point presentation that the user navigates. One can’t buy anything online, nor can one compare prices to other companies when Fiona boasts that her prices are the best in the area.

Now let’s backtrack and say Fiona hasn’t had this business designed yet, much less a website, but she knows what she wants there. She comes to us and says, “Hey, I’m going to be building a floral company. I have nothing except my idea and how I want it to work.” It is then our job to define the functional requirements – what Fiona’s system has to do – for the business system and the company. She has to have customer’s able to purchase online, has to have a shipping service and options for shipping, has to be able to compare prices for each and every plant she sells with the competitive market, etc. We end up with a laundry list of the client’s desired functions for their system because we want to design a complete system for you. Software engineering is, in essence, no different than engineering a car; what are the pieces and parts I have to build to make all this happen?

We’ve listed what the customer wants and documented what this product should do, and now we have a laundry list for system purposes – the functional requirements. Once we have that, we lay it all out into modules, creating a model for everything from application to the storage database. After looking at this list and modules, each building block in the application model, we start creating use cases.

Let’s look at an insurance company, for example. One objective for a use case, the process associated with it, might be creating a quote and saving it to the database for future viewing. The functional requirements are the ability to print the quote, generate a pdf file for emailing, etc. A use case for this quote creation would documents the flow of a user’s steps to creating a quote, from interface appearance, generating a quote number, attributes of the policies available and coverage, and so on and so forth. The use case basically walks through the steps of how a user uses the web page of the insurance company and its components.

Also documented are the specific business rules applied. The customer enters information on the screen  and clicks “save.” The next step would be applying a business rule according to what is laid out in the use case – what has to happen. A quote number needs to be created. What numbers are generated? How are they generated? These are business rules that have to be applied to meet the functional requirements discussed earlier. What happens if the driver’s license isn’t validated or wrong information is entered? What happens if a license number has expired? These are logical business outcomes that need to be very clearly laid out. If a user wants to take a policy on Dodge Viper and the business isn’t willing or able to take on that car value, what is the process that needs to occur that sends a message of refusal? The response is documented in the use case.

---

We fully disclose to the client what we are going to develop before rather than during the building process, which makes construction both cost effective and easier to understand for everyone.

---

Use cases are important because it forces both our client and us to agree on everything that is going to happen. We get sign off on everything before we sit down and design the product. We fully disclose to the client what we are going to develop before rather than during the building process, which makes construction both cost effective and easier to understand for everyone. It’s not only a system for agreement, but it gives the developer, who doesn’t make much contact with the client until the use case is developed, a very specific idea of what they’re going to be building and how to go about doing it. As the blocks agreed upon in the functional requirements are built, what we had previously discussed and agreed upon is enforced.

So, back to the house example from the very beginning. If we built houses, we would sit down with you and discuss – and agree upon – the functions for everything in the house. This switch will turn on the garbage disposal, this will turn up the heat, and this will lock the door. There’s no room for confusion or the possibility of a devastating mistake either on your expectations or our construction. The whole purpose is to get confirmation that what we’re developing is in essence what you need before the product is created. It saves you money. It makes us efficient. And it makes the products stronger, better, and faster.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Functional Requirements and Use Cases: Avoiding Accidents and Mix-ups in System Engineering

A friend of mine mailed me a copy of “Leadership is an Art”, by Max De Pree. It is a short read but very inspirational and informative. I got through the first couple chapters and I feel compelled to list some of the points I find important. This list is only from the first couple chapters. As I read on I will try to share more with you.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Leadership is an Art

Tight rolled pants was a fad we all followed.

Define Your Requirements
When making a technology decision you must first determine your business requirements. When we engage into an application development project our first group of deliverables consists of a functional requirements document. This document outlines the functional requirements necessary to the business processes. When this is done first then it makes decisions and budgets much more accurate and profitable. But typically we see companies following “fads and bandwagons” of new and popular technology. They use these technology fads because their competition is or they were sold incorrectly. As a result poor decisions result in lost profits. But when you instead become a pioneer in the application you are accelerating your momentum for for success. You are defining the requirements and the direction for your business.

Don’t Overreact to New Technology
Collins states that “leaders of good-to-great companies respond with thoughtfulness and creativity, driven by a compulsion to turn unrealized potential into results. They do not take reactionary measures, defining strategy in response to what others are doing. They act in terms of what they want to create, and how to improve their companies, relative to an absolute standard of excellence“. Don’t let the technology fads overwhelm you. Instead, know the direction of your business and the technology can be created to enhance that. A client of ours shopped for ERP software packages to run their business. Because of the complexity of their business and because they were first to market with a product they determined to custom build the application based on their specific business requirements. As a result, not only are they a leader in the market because of their product but their competitive advantage has become their application and how their business runs on it. Now, their competition is coming to them requesting their software to be implemented into their business. They have become the pioneer and leader because they did not follow a fad or jump on certain bandwagons. They are growing because they know the direction their business needs to take and they have defined the application to support it.

Why Are You Joining the Social Media Fad?
In another document supplied to me called “How Clients Buy” published by RainToday.com it indicates that social media/online communities are near the bottom of the list of what influences companies to buy professional services. I agree and disagree with this statement. I disagree with it because social media/online communities help create popularity which generates brand awareness and familiarity, which happens to be the most popular way clients buy professional services. So social media/online communities can help get your foot in the door but it can’t close the deal which why I agree with the statement. Don’t hide behind social media/online communities. Not all of your buyers on there or even worse the wrong buyers are there.
Have a specific strategy with measurables. We use SalesForce to measure all of our activity, including that on social media sites. So I know exactly how profitable our business is from online activity as well as how much time we should be spending in those communities or what online social activity I need to improve.

Post from: The Galvin Blog

Technology is an Accelerator: Be a Pioneer and Not a Follower