Mike Huber

I put together a couple more HDR photos (high dynamic range).  These are a couple of shots around the house.  I posted the best exposure one shot followed by the HDR photo.

 Single Shot

HDR Photo

HDR photography takes multiple photos of the same scence shot at different f-stops and combines all of them into one photo.� You can do this with PhotoShop and other programs.� The results are very interesting.� As you have three shots of the same scene with different lighting, the HDR allows you to take the highlights and shadows from each and include them in your final shot.� See the images below….what fun…Click on the image to see�them in ‘full size’…

This is just slightly adapted from an image found here.  Humorous but basically true.  Notice no time is shown talking to the customer and getting feedback.

This came to me in an email but I do not know the origin of the story.  Perhaps, the person that first wrote this could respond and I can give them credit for a truly heartwarming story.

In 1986, Mikele Mebembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University.
On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mikele approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant’s foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mikele worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Mikele stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Mikele never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Mikele was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mikele and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mikele, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mikele couldn’t help wondering if this was the same elephant. Mikele summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mikele’s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

One day one, a large lake contains only a single small lily pad. Each day the number of lily pads doubles, until on the thirtieth day the lake is totally choked with vegetation. On what day was the lake half full?

The answer is on the 29th day.

It takes 29 days for the first half of the lake to fill with lily pads, but only twenty-four hours for the lake to become overwhelmed.

Welcome to the 29th day.

Imagine that the proliferating lily pads represent the expanding array of changes that face us. Daily changes occur but businesses cannot absorb the repercussions fast enough to keep pace.”

Now, substitute the word “changes” with “competitors”.

The online world is constantly changing. The old mantra about the speed of change in online is every online year is worth 7 in the offline world. With that amount of change and time compression, how do you keep up? How do you innovate?

How do you change your website in order to hit a moving target?

How do you put your mind around all the changes to make sense of the different opportunities and how do you frame those opportunities within your corporate mindset to implement them and to return a positive ROI?  You do it by studying the competition, by studying web site best practices and taking these disparate pieces of information and putting them together to form new web site layouts,  new products and new sales opportunities.

Online selling is about studying competing businesses and why they are successful. It’s about studying why they make the decisions they do. And then, it’s about looking at the current products available for you to sell and melding them with the disparate pieces of information you’ve gleaned from your competition and coming up with innovative new products that build revenues exponentially.

It’s the 29th day, an expanding array of changes and competitor’s products face all of us in an increasingly compressed time frame. It’s time to make changes in your website strategy. 

What do you do?

Contact me, I can help.

I’ve been thinking about developing new business and through conversations and a number of books and articles I’ve read, I’ve come up with a model to grow business. I’ll be adding content to this diagram over time. For now, take a look at the diagram with this in mind:

Companies can grow selling the same product to the same people.
Companies can grow selling new products to new people.
Then there is the combination of the two above.

Companies can grow through partnerships and through “co-opetition” with other business competitors.

Companies can grow by integrating new products, partnerships and co-opetition through established processes and systems and procedures.

Companies can grow by creating new processes, systems and procedures with new partners, new products and new collaborations.

Companies can also grow by acquiring new businesses that compliment their current mix.

Same Product - Same Customer
Sell more of the same to your existing customer base. Some of the ways to do this are creating volume discounts, ugrading contracts, etc. This is one of the easiest ways to produce more revenue because you already have relationships with your current customer base and giving them more for a lesser unit cost based on volume is one of the most basic ways to grow their commitment.

Same Product - New Customer
Find customers that “look like” your current customer base and market to them. Benchmark against your current marketplace to determine the levels of sales to pitch. This is an easy way to add more revenue because you know the current customer base is using your products and look alike companies should be able to use your products as well. The scope and size of the “pitch” is easily determined by what your current customers are doing.

New Product - New Customer
Can you develop products that are similiar to what you already sell? They can be add-ons to current products, complimentary products or any kind of product that enhances your current product line. You are selling these new products to your current customer base so it’s easy to get the appointment, you already know their business so you know it something they would want/need to buy.

New Product - New Customer
This is where it gets more difficult depending on how much this new product diverges from your current product selection. You have to create new relationships, develop new marketing, maybe even develop new sales approaches. This is one of the more risky approaches but if you have the right product for the marketplace, it will pay big dividends.

Forward Integration
Can you get into the business of your current customers? Can you create new channels to do what your customers do? Can you use the Internet to go directly to the consumer? How would this effect your current relationship with your customer base?

Rearward Integration
Can you get into the business of your suppliers?

So this all seems straight forward and simple, right? But how do you look at this holistically to get the highest return on your time investment? How do you look at all of this with the existing processes and systems that you have in place? Do you need to add resources, change processes to grow your business? How do you do this effectively and efficiently?

Lateral Integration
Is it time to change your organizational structure to include self-directed work teams?  Is it time to close non-profitable operations?  Is it time to expand?