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As I’m sitting in the airplane flying home from the March 1 meeting in San Fran, I’m reflecting the last 2.5 years (when Adobe acquired BC).  As a collective group of Business Catalyst partners, the boiling point of our frustration has hit an all time high over the last 2 weeks, but we as partners have been through various phases of “boiling” over the last few years. As if you don’t already know, I’ll state the obvious. Business Catalyst Partners are quite a resilient group.

I’m going to group my thoughts around the biggest takeaways from the day. These takeaways are from my perspective.

Takeaway #1: Partners have a permanent seat at the decision making table.

They want the BC partner network, not just to exist, but to thrive. “We need you”

As I’m thinking about how to respond to you about this point, this simple story from my life keeps coming to mind.

My son, Connor, likes transformers, the little action figures that turn from a machine into man-like robot. He worked hard in school one quarter so his mom took him to the store to pick out a new transformer. He picked the one that turns into a jet. When he got home he spent hours learning how to “transform” the transformer. For those of you with little boys at home, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There are a TON of little moving pieces on those toys. However, he worked really hard and I’d say he became an “expert”. He was showing me how fast he could transform it, which caused me to open my big, fat, competitive mouth. I said, “Hey Connor, let’s have a race and see who can transform it the fastest. The loser has to wear their underpants on their head and run around the house 5 times.” He quickly agreed to the bet. Clearly, he had no concern about me beating him. Here’s the way I justified it. I’m a lot older than him so surely I can do better than him. Realistically, I had never performed this task before. I barely watched him do it.

He went first and completed it in about 30 seconds. Impressive! To be honest, I was a little nervous. He handed it to me a little apprehensive because he knew I had no clue what I was doing, After all, he worked very hard to earn that toy and he didn’t want me, Mr. Know-It-All breaking it. Nonetheless, he grabbed the timer, reset it and said “Are you ready?” I’ll keep a long story short by saying the next 5 minutes went a little something like this.

• First Minute: He laughed at me
• Second Minute: He rolled his eyes at me.
• Third Minute: He was getting annoyed
• Fourth Minute: His was irritated.
• Fifth Minute: I broke a piece off his toy. So, he took it away. Luckily the piece I “broke” was actually detachable so I avoided another trip to the store. He was not happy with me at all.

It lasted 5 minutes instead of 31 seconds (which would have been when I lost) because I was trying to figure it out on my own without him. He offered to show me before we started, but I didn’t accept. Even during the five minutes of torture, he tried to help me but I didn’t accept. It was only after he was angry with me that I realized if I had just spent time with him originally and let him show me the ropes, the race could have been a lot more fun. I had to apologize, man-up and let him show me how it works.

Most of you are probably wondering when I’ll get to the part about me running around the house 5 times with my underpants on my head. Unfortunately…or maybe I should say fortunately his mom didn’t think that was such a good idea when the bet was placed. I got the “quit acting like a child” look from across the room. Secretly I think she was saving me from embarrassment.

Going into the March 1 meeting, there was a truckload of very obvious “rubber meets the road” issues. Things like ignoring the partner network, lack of reasonable support, little differentiation between paid and unpaid partners, bugs, product evolution, etc. However, as I thought about this information, I recalled how time and time again we have told them about the issues over the last 2.5 years. If we merely tell them about the issues again, will they be able to solve them. Then the light bulb went off for me. They are trying to solve “partner problems” without any partners at the table. Sure, March 1 was the first “invite”, however a permanent spot at the table should be the #1 takeaway. They can’t solve our problems unless we are there. Likewise, we can’t force ourselves to the table; they have to let us in. On Thursday, Adobe invited us to walk arm-in-arm with them with a permanent seat at the table. This is far and above the biggest win for the community.

What does this mean? We will start with monthly meetings to discuss key partner issues and how to solve them. Likewise, we will break down the key items and ask members of this collective group to investigate and address them, together. Things will become much more concrete over time with clear processes. Over the next couple of weeks it will be about this group “getting our ducks in a row.” This is massive for the community. I cannot overstate this enough.

Now, between us, if they ever push us away from the table we’ll all pitch in and buy them a big pair of underpants and make the run around the office 5 times. :)

Takeaway #2 Business Catalyst is a BIG part of the Creative Cloud

Adobe’s new offering, Creative Cloud, is massive new initiative. If you were at MAX or watched the videos after MAX, you know that Creative Cloud is pretty much all they talked about. I’m going to be very light about what I say here because this is very sensitive at the moment, but what I can say is this. BC is a big part of the creative cloud. This means of the mass number of products Adobe has, BC is cemented into this new initiative. What does this mean?

• It is getting big time Adobe investment.
• Business Catalyst is being taken very serious at Adobe. I know you might be thinking “why wouldn’t they take it serious” but at massive companies like Adobe they have hundreds of products all vying for attention. BC has that attention in a profound way.
• The value of your BC partnership is going to go WAY up. From a branding perspective as well as the amount of experience you have as a BC partner. Imagine if you were one of the first people to get behind Wordpress and once they “blew up” as a company, you’re long-standing experience would be a sought after attribute when clients become exposed to BC.

The importance of BC’s inclusion in Creative Cloud will become more obvious over time.

Takeaway #3: Business Catalyst (the platform) is evolving.

Let’s own the fact that product evolution has been slow. The features our customers require have not been delivered at the pace we hoped. Some might argue that almost nothing has been delivered, that matters to our clients, for a very long time (I actually fall into this camp). However, I learned quite a lot about where things stand at the moment.

The guts of BC are still being overhauled. It’s going to take more time. This is not what we want to hear, but at least it’s transparent and honest. As I went into this meeting, I made a false assumption that basically nothing had been done to overhaul BC (which was part of the “v3” promise). However work has been done. Lots of it! It’s just not something that’s easy to show off. Most of the updates are happening at the infrastructural level. I’m not referring to servers, DNS and all of that stuff. I’m talking about the baseline code necessary to launch BC well beyond any level you can currently imagine. As a programmer and a visionary, I cannot stop thinking about the possibilities. I also realize I’m leaving you on the hook here, but anything I tell you from here on out will make your eyes roll into the back of your head (that is unless you are a geek like me). I saw it with my own eyes. It’s freaking awesome. They are doing this correctly. If you’re not patient you’ll regret it later. Now that I am one of the partners at the table, I’ll be able to help share more about this over time.

One thing we agreed to in the meeting (our first decision made together) is that we need to lose the concept and label of “v3”. “vX” anything means it has a relative begin and end. In traditional software development that works, but in a SaaS world it’s counterintuitive. It might take a bit for this label to be removed from our nomenclature, however it will happen. The other reason it will be removed is that v3 means different things to different people. I’ll bet if we all wrote our definition, it would be drastically different. I’ll even bet that some people can’t define it. We need Adobe to resolve this issue so we can all be on the same page all the time.

Takeaway #4: Adobe Cares

I know you must be thinking, “If they care, then they have a funny way of showing it.” I could not agree more. That’s why we are now at the table to help with this. They think in terms of “Adobe” and that the rest of the world thinks like them. This is normal human behavior. This gets to my point. They are human. I saw an unreal level of transparency and care in this meeting. It pains them quite deeply when the negative feedback comes flowing in. Now, I’m by no means throwing a pity party for Adobe. I’m just as hard on them as the next guy. However, it’s important to me as a partner to see a human emotion come from the people working on the product I’m wrapping my reputation around. We see “Adobe” but there are real people behind it that lose sleep at night when the negative feedback comes flying in. I saw that on Thursday. It was very healthy for everyone.

Summary

The final thing that we as partners communicated to Adobe was that accountability would be at an all time high. They accepted that.

I personally promise you that I will do my part to represent the community in a big way. If things aren’t going well, I’ll tell you. If they’re going great, you’ll quickly know. If you have any feedback, good or bad, feel free to email me at jason@simpleflame.com. I will do my very best to answer your emails in a timely manner. I get over 100 emails a day that require my attention so it might be on a night or weekend, but just work with me. I’m invested in this community with 3 brands and hundreds of thousand of dollars. I have a lot to lose if BC and the community fails. If anyone has a reason to hold Adobe’s feet to the fire, it’s me.

Last week the team at SimpleFlame decided to surprise Jason Tinnin before his actual birthday,  January 19th. Although we enjoyed a great pizza party, there was no cake. The birthday cake was to be a surprise from Jason's lovely wife Amy and reserved for his true birthday, which was today. As a surprise to all of us and even to Jason, Amy thought carefully about the selection of exactly what kind of cake to get. It couldn't be just any cake, it had to be the perfect cake. So, I thought I would blog about it.

If you haven't heard the story, Jason and I love giving each other a hard time, all the time. We are both type A personalities and are hyper competitive with one another - it simply brings out the best in us and what we are all about at SimpleFlame - hard work while having fun. We both enjoy golf and that is where everything is left out on the table.  In 2010, Jason played some of the best golf in years.  Quite frankly, we have had some rounds come down to the last couple of holes. Handicaps make things as fair as they can be and it sets the stage for us. I can't really describe it. But it is such a blast for both of us, especially when its really hard to have a little time to ourselves as we run and operate our businesses.

Needless to say, Jason is a PC guy while I'm a Mac guy. Our latest bets involve stickers and the rest is history! Notice that there are only two stickers on the laptop.  However, the type mentions 3 golf rounds.  Here's a sneak peak of a new colorful sticker that will be applied soon...

As a creative I'd like to give Amy a total thumbs up on her creativity and selection. Amy, you picked the perfect cake, the Apple Cake!  The team here at SimpleFlame all had so much fun with it. And lastly, Jason, I look forward to many more golf rounds, many more business ideas, and many more opportunities to bust your chops. To a great friend and business partner, Happy Birthday!

Your bud,

Cesar

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of keynoting the MarketSTL conference here in St. Louis. I met up with some old friends from last year's event and even had the chance to meet some new friends from a local, St. Louis creative agency, The Loud Few.  They were doing an awesome job of keeping their twitter followers updated by providing real time updates as speakers made important points in their presentations (#marketstl twitter timeline).  Although I was listening, I was also following along and I experienced just how powerful Twitter has become.

There was one point in the day where the conference room we were in was getting cold. A mere mortal would have gotten up, walked out, found a maintenance guy and asked them to turn down the thermostat. However, this was a conference room full of social experts and Lisa Keller (@lisackeller) and Erin Steinbruegge (@steinburglar) would have none of that. They sent a tweet out to @lumiereplace and asked them to turn down the A/C.

So what happened? Not long after the tweet, a maintenance man walked in and turned down the thermostat. A quick "thank you" went out from the girls to @lumiereplace and all was good. Kudos to @lumiereplace for being a big brand that "gets it".  

This has me thinking; I wonder if I send a tweet to @cesarkeller to bring me a sandwich, if he will be as reliable as @lumiereplace. Let's see.