Last one of these mid-week extra newsletters; with this done I’ll have paid my imaginary debt to society for lazing about in July. The topics gonna be scintillating, I can already tell. I might not work much, but when I do, it’s often in providing specialized culture industry services to small businesses.
Small Business Outsourcing
Small businesses are necessarily worked by generalists, because the world is complex, and if anything increasingly so. A single business endeavour is by definition an independent stand-alone performance unit that has to provide its own support services, which ends up meaning that as a proprietor you get to work a wide range of necessary tasks. The smaller the business, the more difficult it is for the generalist proprietor to provide for all facets of the business with their own skills.
For concrete examples of the kinds of support services most businesses need, consider things like accounting, regulatory paperwork, marketing, IT servicing or even just plain cleaning services, which most people could probably manage themselves, but it might also be more cost-efficient to outsource that and focus on more specialized labor yourself. (That’s interesting, by the way: some of the outsourcing you want to do is because the work’s too specialized for you, while some is because you’re more specialized and would waste your time doing easier work. That’s optimizing for you.)
A common issue that small business has with specialty outsourcing is that the overhead of hiring specialty help is often too high to justify the work, as the small business simply has relatively few needs in any given area. For example, if you only need IT services once a year for five hours, you’re unlikely to have efficient established means of procuring that service; it’s more likely that you don’t like to think about it and you don’t know what to do when the need arrives. My experience is that this often leads small businesses to be underserviced in specialty task segments; non-essential work is not done at all, and critical tasks are paid for at crisis rates when they do crop up. The problem doesn’t present on fields that the proprietor (and their small organization) can take care of themself, but in e.g. marketing and IT services it’s not uncommon for small businesses to not run a very clean ship. Things are done badly, or not done at all.
I haven’t planned my particular brand of small town layaboutism for it, but in practice I end up consulting with small businesses over IT and culture industry concerns a lot. Sometimes for the heck of it, sometimes for pay. Proprietors generally have 20th century things like accounting well in hand, but commonly a small business cannot fix a printer or whip up an advertisement in-house. It doesn’t exactly help that small business proprietorship in Finland has steadily become an old-people lifestyle, so many proprietors might have amazing work skills (I mean, “put a tractor together blindfolded” level) while being quite clueless about e.g. ‘net stuff and other such more recent developments. More exotic needs can range anywhere; one of the more amusing things I’ve been doing over the last few years is refitting and maintaining a CNC stone milling machine.
There’d be a business in just producing civilization services to small proprietors with a rationalized pricing structure, for anybody interested in being a freelance business manager. My current theory is that the way accounting services are rationalized between small businesses should be the model for other kinds of specialized outsourcing as well: a single accountant, through their own small business, hires their services to many businesses that each don’t have anywhere near enough accounting work to justify hiring an accountant.
You might be under the impression that this is what businesses already do for e.g. marketing and IT services, and it may be the case with somewhat larger and more professional corporations, but from what I’ve seen of small business, at least around here the usual case is not that you have marketing or a computer nerd on retainer. The usual case is more that the firm doesn’t have plan for these areas of the business at all, and when critical service need occurs, the proprietor hires service on a project basis. If the firm has problems with computer equipment, for example, the proprietor marches into a computer store to ask for help (basically, to buy new equipment).
The issue with ad-hoc outsourcing is that it’s organizationally fairly inefficient in many situations:
Treating symptoms: If you service an aspect of the business only when a critical need emerges, that means that you’re never putting any work into the basic foundations. Even if you bring in skilled experts to fix the crisis situation, their work is less efficient and only amounts to a short-term patch job. If you only ever pay attention to a specialty aspect of the business when it absolutely prevents you from doing what you’d like to do, then the entire system needs to be rebuilt every time you want to do something in that field.
The agency problem: If your IT guy is actually not your IT guy, but rather just a computer salesman, it’s possible that the solutions you get for your problems will be fairly biased towards buying new equipment. That’s just the way it is. Using a specialist on retainer is better in that people are more likely to be loyal in regular business relationships. If you treat your every IT problem as a one-off deal, that’s what your expert help does as well, and what reason do they have then to not rip you off?
So it’s interesting how much inefficiency I see in these fields, and how I’m called in to put out fires. You’d think that there would already be a steady business in accounting office type support services for small businesses in need of computers, graphic design, writing work and other such white collar specialties. For some reason the average small business seems to be fairly under-serviced, though.
The transition problem
A stab at explaining why small businesses tend to be under-serviced in specialty outsourcing departments: it’s difficult to determine when your business is large and profitable enough to justify expanding investment in support services. The available services may also have prohibitively high retainer fees (e.g. minimum billed hours per month). Neither of those are laws of nature or anything, they could be fixed with elbow grease, but they’re certainly institutionally stable situations that could persist over decades and explain a lot about why a small business doesn’t just sign on with some “IT guy” to provide them with stable and cheap IT services tailored to their needs.
Small businesses analogous to accounting offices do exist in the marketing and IT fields that I end up fiddling with, but I don’t see them offering full-service retainer contracts to other small businesses; the pricing structures are always focused on billing per diem and closing accounts off after the immediate needs have been served. People probably have good reasons for working the field like this, but it does lead to situations like this one old guy who has three computer units side by side in his office because every time he goes to install a new software, the computer store guy sells him a new computer instead. Just uses different computers for video editing, Excel and his email, he does. Would never happen if he had an IT guy taking care of his equipment, however part-time.
Why was I writing about this, again?
Well, sometimes I stop being moody and instead go help some people with their whatever-problems. Been doing a bit of that recently. Editing some grey literature, a quick advertisement for a honey farm (the proprietor looks like a bear, which works), and of course the magnum opus, a new sign for my sister’s restaurant.
Isn’t it purty? I suggested angling the sign a bit to make it more lively. The main road goes past the restaurant’s face perpendicularly, too, so the angling should make the sign just a tad more visible to the road than it’d be otherwise.
The sign board is from the old Hollivoot restaurant (used to be a few blocks north and on the other side of the road). The old taping on it was for a pretty different style of sign, less readable from the distance. My main concern with the new one was that you should be able to distinguish the “kyläravintola” (“village pub”) descriptive declaration from some distance away. Just in case a tourist wanders to town and doesn’t know where the restaurant is.
I’ll need to whip up a new roadside sign design as well, preferably this week. It’s a good example of the kind of small business specialty outsourcing I pondered above: my sister even explicitly could just make her own sign, she used to be in media industry herself, but it’s just more efficient for somebody with the tools at their fingertips to do this sort of thing. Having the skills in the family, at least, is better for getting some long-term consideration into what you’re doing.
Catchup: Coup de Main #56
This was last week’s session, so we’re caught up on the campaign! Teemu has again written an after action report on the foibles of the murderhoboes:
Session 56 proceeded apace with the same group of rogues, knaves and hopefuls as last time, namely Bob the everyman, Sven the berserker, Artemur they fey deer (and Fisto), Kermit the hermit and Ælfstan, the otherworldly psionic monk. Once again, they stood in the chamber of slain goblins and slaughter, intent on descending once more to plunder whatever still remained in the old tomb.
Fisto is Artemur’s dog, a pet who’s followed him across worlds from historical fantasy Europe, his plane of origin. I think I’ve heard some rumours about Fisto possibly retaining for Artemur nowadays, what with their increasingly fey nature.
The group spent many long whiles down in the old, time-forgotten grave in their honorless task, but their plundering was, for the most part, uneventful. It seemed that the tomb had spent its vitriol for the living already, and the group was allowed to go about it unmolested. The only time violence was wrought, it was unleashed by the party against a revenant that did not even have time to rise from its stone coffin before Artemur and Sven struck it down mercilessly. The party did, also, spend a considerable while in consternation over strange, worrisome slime that seemed to consume living flesh and lurked in a pool of water, guarding some shining treasure. This, however, also died without true incident, lured to consume the body of a goblin and burned away.
When all was said and done, the party had scoured a few more burial chambers and a study room of some sort, as well as thoroughly gone through the areas they had before simply passed through. For their troubles, more gold, gems, burial coins, strange potions and amphorae full of oil was to be their prize. They did, also, wrest an axe made of pure silver from the hands of the aforementioned, unfortunate revenant, possibly the most noteworthy find. It was clear that the weapon was not ceremonial, as it did not bend and deform as the soft metal should when struck against a table, but neither did it cut. A puzzling find, to be sure.
The party then returned to the surface and made camp, intent of returning to town the next day. They spent time inspecting their many finds, content that much gold would be theirs as soon as they could sell off the stuff, although some small amount of hesitation remained about their intent; was it right, and more importantly possible, to simply cart off all these riches and sell them when, by law, they could not rightly said to be free plunder? Most did not concern themselves overmuch with the morality of it, reasoning that if undead and goblins stalked the tombs, then the no one could by any means claim that they were watched after dutifully. It was supposed, though, that Father William, the cleric who had pointed them towards the burial mound in the first place, would likely not agree – and by extension neither would the law.
During the evening, the mystery of the strange silver axe was also solved; it was determined that while the axe cared not for dead, lifeless things, it bit into living matter with great abandon, felling trees with light strokes and opening up a careless thumb like butter. A great find, although one whose use as a warrior’s weapon was not straightforward. It was, ultimately, given to Bob the everyman to wield. He, a lumberjack by trade, was greatly impressed and pleased with it.
As the party was settling in for some well-deserved sleep, two ragtag locals happened by, carrying the carcass of a pig and a net. They explained, with great gusto, that they were intent on hunting and slaying the dragon. Their plan, in all its elaborateness, was to lure the beast out with the dead piglet and then throw a net over it, thus capturing it and taking it for ransom.
Some in the group were amused by the antics of these simpletons and even egged them on, but Artemur, ultimately one to care for his fellow man, managed to assure the two men that their plan was a foolish one, and only death and misery would come of it. The two would-be dragon hunters thus returned back to Brandonsford with the party the next day.
During the short trip back to town, Kermit the hermit was almost bewitched by a fey creature, a woman of unnatural allure that some supposed was a dryad. She had, apparently, taken a liking to Kermit’s pleasing mien, and tried to lure the simple hermit of the woods to elope with her (and, as many knew, to consume his flesh after mating with him). Artemur, a man of fey aspect himself, and no stranger to dryads, struck upon a realization in this moment and managed to wield a similar power against the dryad, charming Kermit back to the fold… though awkwardly the man now considered him a loyal and true friend despite them being relative strangers to each other.
In any case, the party returned to Brandonsford, and over the next few days tried to sort out their loot and carefully make inquiries about interested buyers. They were vexed to a great degree by the absolute wretchedness of the place, where neither rich locals with interest in religious antiques, or merchants with funds to buy such things could be found at all. None of their many riches, not even the candle holders of precious metals, garnered any interest at all in any of the locals. The local merchant only acceded to exchange their various gathered gems into coinage, no more. He also bought the amphorae of oil that the party had hauled out, but this all still left a great pile of riches to be sold. Despite Sven the reaver’s experienced hand in the matters of selling plunder, the fact that the locals were simply too poor and backwards was insurmountable.
Kermit the hermit was eager to simply bring their finds, at least the hero Brandon’s jeweled shield, to the church, but he was sternly warned off of such notions. Though at that point, Artemur struck upon a plan of his own, and agreed to go to the church with Kermit (though without the shield). Once there, Artemur waxed lyrical about their selfless task, and how they had succeeded in finding and reclaiming the sword of the hero Brandon – without forgetting to mention, of course, how he had received a great, noble and selfless calling to carry the magical weapon forth and use it to slay the dragon (and thus, it would not do to relinquish the blade to the church).
Father William was greatly impressed by this tale and overjoyed, but as Artemur’s talk turned to the miserable condition of the crypts, and how, for fair and truthful payment, the heroes could possibly reclaim many other relics of old and return them to the church, the cleric’s good mood soured a bit. Had they not, then, already gone and claimed such things? William was obviously not blind to the nature of adventurers, and quite clearly saw through Artemur’s slightly bent truth. Artemur, though, did his best to assure the man that his companions, men given to suspicion over their fellows and almost draconian themselves in the way they guarded any riches, would not cooperate without first receiving some assurance, preferably written and undersigned, that they would not be made to simply relinquish what they had toiled and risked life and limb for.
William, finally and a bit put-off, did produce a signed agreement that funds would be secured, and an expert brought in to look at the various relics the party had found, and that they would be duly compensated. At this, the party finally brought in all their many treasures and allowed the cleric to inspect them and dictate what he considered to be of historical and religious worth. The party was, ultimately, rather surprised how William simply allowed them to keep many of the finds without any comment as to the matter of ownership, and seemed to be totally fair in his dealings, carefully marking out each find in the written agreement.
The party, thus assuaged of their fears and happy that payment would be forthcoming after all, went out and pondered their next moves. The dwarves that the local smith had been concerned about were still, in all likelihood, as missing as before. Mayhap they should be looked at before the party finally set themselves against the foul wyrm?
Nice going. I particularly liked the dryad business, and how father William negotiated with the murderhoboes to retrieve holy relics for the church of St. Cuthbert and the Old Gods.
Reading Comics: Powers
I’ve treated myself to some idle reading lately by reviewing the Powers superhero-adjacent comic book. I’d read the original run in the ’00s, but Bendis/Oeming have done some more in fits and starts since then, so I just read it all through in review.
The premise of the series is that it’s a police procedural crime drama that occurs in a superhero universe. Supers-related crimes, in other words. The series is fairly good, what I would classify as “acceptable”. The writing is usually about at par with tv crime drama, which is already better than much superhero stuff.
The occasional dips to actual superhero stuff do not make any favours to the series, as it inevitably returns back down to its basic premise about a pair of homicide detectives working the “powers beat”, so the various catastrophes and “will they become superheroes” storylines tend to be both long-lasting and pointless. The series is at its best when Bendis, the writer, puts in the effort to set up and knock down a traditional crime story: a study on human evil wrapped into a clever crime mystery. The “old gods destroy Chicago” stuff is pretty lame in comparison.
State of the Productive Facilities
What with spending Monday reading comics and Tuesday running D&D, haven’t gotten much done since the weekend. We’ll see how the second half of the week shapes out.