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The Kevin Rosen Story, continued
A leader is true to his or her vision. A 50% solution was better than nothing but not good enough.
He wanted to partner with someone supplying something so central to his success. As an aside, his first web expertise supplier lost his business because they couldn’t supply the intimacy – the close personal exchange of information - that was a necessary ingredient in Kevin’s equation for success.
He demonstrates the ability to learn from experience and then move on to a better solution.
For him, the learning process had been valuable, even if the final product wasn’t as successful as he had hoped. Furthermore, he now knew what he did want from his web site, and he had a solid vision of how the site should operate.
For the redesign, Kevin worked with a small New York City-based web site developer. Immediately, Kevin knew he had found a match.
Because it was a small company, rather than a large production house, he found himself in direct contact with the designers and producers who would be rebuilding the site.
This also allowed him to take on a much more active role in the process: "I needed to be very involved in the development process because I wrote the software that we use to fulfill the offers.
I needed to play an integral part in developing the site as far as what information is needed- both the front end and the back end."
Implicit in this part of the story is Kevin’s commitment to rigorous effort. He stays involved but allows others to add the value that they can add.
The danger here is that someone in this situation might be tempted to micro-manage everything. It is important for a leader to know where s/he hits the end of their expertise and where other eyes and ears can generate additional value.
Kevin believes that the two most important functions of the web site are to generate sales growth and to increase brand awareness.
In that spirit, the new site focuses primarily on e-commerce. Twelve different specialty cheesecakes are offered, as well as gift certificates and collectibles. Users have the capability of creating their own personal address book on the site, so repeat orders and gift giving can be handled in a mouse-click, and orders can be easily tracked from the site.
Placing an order at juniorscheescake.com is as easy—and perhaps more convenient— than walking into the store or using the 800-number.
This ease of entry is crucial to bringing customers back to the site again and again. "We’re 85% there," says Kevin, who is aware that evolving technology means that there will always be room for improvement.
With approximately 5000 cheesecakes selling every week, it is clear that Junior’s Cheesecakes has the recipe for success.
I’m a big fan of solving difficult problems in a series of successive approximations rather than waiting for the perfect solution to emerge sometime in the future.
Kevin takes the successive approximation approach here. The first effort was fifty percent successful. Successive attempts and modifications have now resolved approximately eighty-five percent of the problems.
The next move will move them ever closer. The importance of this is that often times, with conditions and technologies changing so rapidly, that even a “perfect” solution ends up being perfect for only a limited period of time. Then, they’ll have to be modified.
The issue is to do the best you can in response to what you face and then work to get better as you go.
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