This is our first weekly issue of the Mobile Display Monitor. As I have mentioned before, we are trying to ensure that the content is not only more timely, but also in more digestible “chunks”.
It has been my observation over my working career that most industries have a clear rhythm. It’s hard to run a business (or a life) without some routine and a rhythm can help. We humans are, arguably, little more than a bundle of habits and tying those habits to particular times or periods helps to reinforce them. However, the timescales and tempos of different businesses can be very different.
My first job was in the steel business where we had a new product every ten years, “whether the market was ready or not”! Customers talked about products and technologies that were introduced more than 25 years before as “unconventional”. One of my proudest moments as a salesman in those days was in winning business from a client that my company had been trying to sell steel to for 30 years. When I say client, I mean the same individual, not just the company. By the time I met him, he was the Purchasing Director, but had always bought all the steel since he started at the company as a clerk in the purchasing office. I had the records of plans and visits over many of those years and it took me around three years to get the business, but I got it. That was a very different pace than the PC industry.
When I joined my first company in the PC world, the pace was very exciting, but there was no long term sales thinking. A relatively small amount of time spent working on long term relationships boosted sales very quickly. I remember asking, on the first day, where the customer files were? “Do you mean the invoices?”, I was asked. “No”, I said, “I mean the plans, the correspondence, sales history etc.”. The response was “that’s a good idea!”. I suspect that the organisation in the PC sales industry is a bit more like the steel industry, these days.
Anyway, when I started Display Monitor, in 1994, we started reporting on the projector business on a weekly basis. Nobody could believe, then, how fast we were! The A/V industry in those days ran at a much slower tempo than the PC industry, as it was based on lamps and optics, with relatively slow innovation. Others were publishing news on a monthly basis and with production delays between news and publishing. That made us look really fast, but our newsletter business has been on a weekly rhythm for 20 years.
Now we have acquired not only the MDR, but also the Display Central website, where the news is often first published, and the Display Daily free newsletter. That means a change from the weekly beat, to a daily one. That’s quite a challenge as staff have worked the weekly routine into their lives, or worked their lives around the weekly routine. We’re starting to get there, but it will take us a week or two to get really going!
I’d welcome any feedback on the weekly newsletters, our format or content at [email protected]
Bob
