The Fein Line

As I've written before, I work at a great start-up company, Digital Lumens.  We make energy efficient industrial lighting and are growing quickly.  In fact, one of our biggest challenges right now is hiring.

We have a bunch of jobs listed on our website. Current listings are:

• Applications Engineer
• Firmware Engineer
• Mechanical Engineer
• Software Engineer
• Software Quality Assurance Engineer

If you are interested in one of these positions, you can send your resume.  And, even if you aren't the right fit for one of these, you can refer someone to us.  If we hire them, we'll pay you $1500!

And, keep an eye on our careers page.  Additional positions will be added soon.

If energy efficient lighting isn't your thing, maybe you're more interested in working in a great arts organization.  I'm on the Board of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, and we're hiring a Senior Financial Manager.  The job description is on Harvard's web site, or your can directly contact them via email.

Please apply if you're interested, or pass along to someone who would be!

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...unless you ask them the wrong question.  Then they are merely deceptive.

Here's an interesting lesson on figuring out the right way to present financial analysis.  First some background:

This is based on a sales proposal we recently made at Digital Lumens.  We make energy-efficient intelligent lighting that can reduce lighting energy costs by 90% for industrial customers.  These lights are often eligible for rebates from utilities, and sometimes those rebates are proportional to the amount of energy saved.

Our light uses LED technology, but our current main competition is from fluorescent light fixtures.  These fixtures are an improvement over prior technologies, but not as efficient as LEDs.  What fluorescent fixtures have going for them is that they are a pretty cheap commodity these days.

We had a situation with a customer where their local utility had put a significant incentive in place for warehouse fluorescent lighting.  Because LEDs are pretty new for this application, they hadn't yet put in place a big incentive for LEDs.  So, we were at a significant price disadvantage.  Here's an obfuscated view of the numbers:

Current monthly lighting energy bill: $5,100

Fluorescent fixture upgrade cost, net of aggressive rebate: $15,000

Fluorescent direct energy savings: $2600/month

Simple fluorescent payback calculation: 5.8 months

LED fixture upgrade cost, with only a modest rebate: $70,000

LED direct energy savings: $4700/month

Simple LED payback calculation: 14.9 months

When you only look at energy savings, the LEDs are a tough decision here.  They have a higher initial cost than these inexpensive fluorescent fixtures, partly due to the aggressive rebate.  A customer could easily decide to buy the fluorescent fixtures as they are almost free and are paid for very quickly.

But, there are other components of ownership: tax incentives, maintenance, and the chiller effect.

This application is cold storage -- refrigerators and freezers.  The cost of keeping those cold and frozen dwarfs the cost of light.  And, LEDs have a benefit of running much cooler, greatly reducing the workload of the chiller.  You wouldn't run an oven inside a freezer, so why have a hot light inside?  This allows customers to capture an additional 40% or so of their lighting energy savings as reduced load on the chiller.  Think of this meaning that our 90% savings with just LEDs is really more like 140% savings.  In this case, you can save more than 100%

With this factored in, the fluorescent payback goes out to 18.8 months while the LED payback is reduced to 9.5 months.

If you graph the total cost of ownership month by month, it looks like this:

With the total cost of ownership view, the LEDs very quickly become cheaper than fluorescent, despite the significantly higher initial purchase price.  And, with the sort time horizon, we offered the customer a financing proposal so that they could match the lower initial cash flow of the fluorescent fixtures and still eventually get to the lower cost path of the LEDs.  That's a win-win for everyone.

Most importantly, it shows the value of digging into the numbers and understanding all the components of the total cost of ownership, even if industry convention is focused just on the simple payback.

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you liked my Jon Stewart reference last week, you'll appreciate this follow-up.  No rant this time, but it's amazing how Jon gets to the point of news stories when virtually no one else in the media can.

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Probably not.  But, last night Jon Stewart presented a compelling case:

Despite the politicization that has happened with the Ground Zero Mosque issue (it was covered by Fox News without much hubub until the issue was brought up by some conservative bloggers, and it became a rallying cry), I think that the underlying problem is our diminishing freedom and tolerance in America.

Freedom and tolerance go hand and hand.   If I am going to be truly free, you have to be tolerant of me.  And, vice versa.  We all want our freedoms.  But, are all the people who cry for freedom also willing to be tolerant?  Interestingly, many people who hang their hat on freedom and liberty are also the ones who are the least tolerant of those who are different than themselves.

On the Ground Zero Mosque issue, critics are making a big leap from Muslim religious center to terrorist HQ.  Hey, if you really think that those Muslims are terrorists, why not have a nice centralized location where we can keep our eyes on them?  More seriously, if any Christian or Jewish religious location was being similarly characterized, there would be a lot of backlash.  Timothy McVeigh was both a terrorist and a Christian, so maybe we should be kicking all the churches out of Oklahoma City.

I've been lucky enough to have some international visitors stay with our family recently.  Their own country, Kyrgyzstan, is facing a lot of internal strife.  One of the benefits that our family has received from this visit is a new appreciation of what is greatest about America, or at least the concept of America.

Our strength comes from our diversity, and our tolerance of diversity.  The influx and acceptance of new people keeps us vibrant and entrepreneurial.  Our meritocracy and the rewards of hard work and ingenuity continue to provide incentive and opportunity for us all.  Our multicultural background keeps us creative, relevant, and culturally leading edge.  That freedom and tolerance provide the bedrock of what is special about America.

I've had it with the divisive politics of America.  Both parties succumb to it, regardless of who starts it.  The overall divisive atmosphere creates actions and reactions that are more aimed at trying to appear on the right side of the politics than on the side of freedom and tolerance.

Frankly, this is the area where I am most disappointed in President Obama.  There is no doubt that he's had to face a lot of tough situations, and that he was willing to take on big issues.  But, he was best positioned to take the high road on freedom and tolerance.  Those don't have budget impacts and can appeal to people from libertarians to the far left.

Yet, he hasn't followed through on closing Guantanamo and putting those captive there through some sort of legal process.  This should showcase our legal system and our belief in it.

He was wishy-washy on the Ground Zero Mosque issue rather than strongly defend a group's right to put a house of worship on their own property.  Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for having the courage to take the right position here.

He hasn't closed the freedom loopholes in the Patriot Act, leaving us all susceptible to having our privacy violated without due cause.

He hasn't take a strong stand in favor of gay rights, including gay marriage.  Someone's love of the Red Sox doesn't threaten my love of the Yankees.  Why should someone's love of another of the same sex threaten my love for my wife?  Overall, we should be lauding people loving each other in committed relationships.  That provides the foundation for our communities and our families.  If you are truly pro-family, as many who are against gay rights claim to be, you should scorn those who get divorced.

Despite my dislike of the views of those of you who may disagree with me on the issues above, I'm very tolerant of your right to hold those views.  If we all practice more freedom and tolerance, it will be easier for us to solve more of the issues we face.

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is another post in my occasional series about Sales, after my recent session at the Momentum Summit in Cambridge.  The first post summarized the session, and the second post talked a bit about sales compensation plans.

One of the most important things you can do in setting up your sales compensation system is to figure out how to get your people to work as a team.  Again, most of my experience is in the area of high-tech business-to-business sales.  Some of these ideas won't apply, or won't apply in the same way, in other sectors or business models.

If you sell your product through resellers or partners, you need to consider them part of your team, at least in terms of compensation.  Whatever discounts or commissions they get will motivate them to work in a certain way, and your own people should have parallel motivations.  One of the surest ways to fail is to motivate your own people to compete against your channel partners.  Your company has many inherent advantages vs. your resellers.  But, if you determine you need resellers, you have to be willing to make some sacrifices in order to make those resellers successful.

Why would you need resellers?  Maybe you need more 'feet on the street' than you can afford the direct cost for.  Or, maybe your product is best sold as part of a total solution with other products.  Maybe you need to take advantage of customer relationships that your channel partners have that you don't have.

If you have resellers in your sales model, you should really commit to them to the exclusion of your own direct sales efforts, at least for the same type of accounts.  Your own people may target larger accounts, accounts in different market segments, or some other segment, but make that distinction clear up front.  What's more effective oftentimes is to have your staff support your resellers' efforts by prodding, answering questions, providing leads, assisting in closing, etc.

Similarly, it works best if your own people are set up to collaborate in some way.   At Digital Lumens, we have sales teams that consist of an inside sales person, a field sales person, and an application engineer.  They work on the same accounts and are compensated as a team.  Deals can be closed by the inside or outside person.  The application engineer can do sales presentations in a pinch.  By collaborating, they can cover more ground, cover for each other, and divide up the work.  Our field people are the most senior, and they tend to lead their teams.  We use salesforce.com to keep everyone on the same page and to capture information about all the sales activity.

The basic rules of our compensation plan is: 1) there is no motivation to favor direct sales over reseller sales, 2) everyone on the team is compensated for all the sales activity in their territory, and 3) if we end up with some sort of complicated commission split situations for sales that cross territories, etc., I use the wisdom of Solomon to figure out what to do.

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With apologies to one of my favorite Monty Python sketches:

In February, March, and April, I wrote a series of posts about a serious issue with the Massachusetts municipal health care system.  These were spurred by articles in the Globe by investigative reporter Sean Murphy.  Sean's first article is here, and my first post on the subject is here.

Here's a short summary:  If you like in Massachusetts, chances are that your city or town has had a very rapid growth in the share of its budget that is used to pay health care costs.  In addition to the health care inflation we all feel, many cities and towns have very sweet deals for their employees: very low or no co-pays, very high benefit levels, very low employee contribution toward premium costs, and the ability to get health care for life after a small number of years of service.  In addition, many cities and towns don't force retirees onto Medicare after age 65, instead paying their health care costs until they die.

The biggest obstacle to fixing this has been the cities and towns' ability to negotiate with municipal employee unions on changes to their health care plans.  Most haven't been able to get their unions to give up the sweet deal they have.  Instead, cities and towns have asked the Legislature to allow them to unilaterally change their health care plan as long as they make it no worse than the state employee union plan.  Although it would be better if each city and town cleaned up their own mess (as my town did), that task seems so daunting that it would be better for the tax payers in the State if the Legislature allowed a unilateral change.

Unfortunately, the effort to fix this problem died a quiet death in our legislature at the end of June.  Sean wrote about it in the Globe at the time, but I missed it.  I wrote to my Representative (Charlie Murphy, who has replied very thoughtfully in the past), but he has not yet replied.  I'm disappointed that this opportunity to make our tax dollars go further has been lost for now.

In the meantime, keep after your city or town to negotiate for a more reasonable health care plan with the municipal employees.  Some towns are getting this done, and it is critical for both our fiscal health and to let us allocate our tax dollars to more urgent priorities.

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, Fred Wilson posted about Immigration Reform.  I agree with him on the need for immigration reform and am glad that he's supporting Sen. Chuck Schumer in his efforts to push this through Congress.

Our country's greatest strength is its ability to take people from all backgrounds and to unite them with a common set of values that cuts across cultures.  Universal values like freedom, democracy, the presumption of innocence, and opportunity are magnets to people all across the world.  When we compromise these, even in the name of our security, we actually lower our opportunity and increase our risk.

There are been several disturbing trends in immigration over the past decade.  First of all, many people in the country mistake followers of Islam for terrorists.  Or, even followers of other religions (like Sikhs).  This creates a lot of ill will toward citizens and immigrants who don't happen to be Judeo-Christians.  Shame on us -- we have to remain open to people of all backgrounds who embrace our American values.  Moving away from that just reinforces the terrorists' message.

Also, the large number of Hispanic illegal immigrants has equated immigration reform with opening our borders to a large wave of Hispanic immigrants.  I'm not in favor of opening the borders to anyone who wants to come in.  But, I do think that we should always welcome hard-working people who want to live by our values.

We do need security at the border to ensure that people only come in through legal means.  But, we have to recognize that we have millions and millions of people who have been here for a long time that took advantage of our porous security and lack of policing employers.  If they couldn't get a job, illegal immigrants wouldn't come here.  Only a very small number of them come here with the intent of committing crimes, so we shouldn't criminalize the rest.

We're about to welcome into our home two family friends from Kyrgyzstan who are coming to the US until things stabilize in their home.  When you hear how immigrants and visitors view the US, you realize that we shouldn't take for granted how powerful our long-term values are.  And, we have to guard against compromising them and cutting off our greatest strength -- being the magnet for the world's best and brightest and integrating their diverse thinking into high-energy inventiveness.

Posted by Mike Feinstein at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)