Open Business keynote at DrupalCamp Montreal by Liza Kindred

See also: http://digitalrhino.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/liza-kindred-from-lullabot-presents-keynote-at-montreal-drupal-camp...

Background in arts and fashion.

Asked to start working 5 hours a week doing business stuff for Lullabot.

I'm a minority owner in Lullabot. Owned a fashion business before. Always been interested in using businesses to do good in company.

Most people in the audience here on Sunday, by show of hands, worked for large businesses or universities, rather than freelancers or small businesses.

I believe that you are all busy, and believe in openness, but don't necessarily have the time to apply it day-to-day.

[Seeds / traditional knowledge video. "An individual does not create an idea on their own."] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqtkb-dNA3c

Open seeds, open software, open business principles: It's all the same, and you already know how to do it.

Open is sharing your slides [she took James' "what is open?" slide.

Today's virtue is truthfulness, so if there's something you really want to know, today's the day to ask us.

I've been talking about open u

openness is one of the five major areas used to describe human personality.

glasnot is synonymous with openness

(Yes Liza, I was alive for all of the 1980s.)

"How many have read
"I hadn't either."

good examples and bad examples of people applying open principles to business.

http://socialsignal.com - good

koumbit.org - from what i understand, you took these principles and made it founding principles. Good!

threadless t-shirt company - designers get paid. Good!

Content "Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free" – Bad!

Radiohead's free album - - they still sold enough through traditional topped charts in - good job!

For a long time, it was Moby and the Onion that were the Drupal sites we talked about. Snippets

Camel cigarrettes OpenCircle card-- and she just scribbled it out, didn't even talk about it.

Lullabot's been doing great.

In the process of moving all of Martha Stewart's web properties to Drupal.

How did we do it?

Making mistakes. Made a lot of mistakes.

Angie [the most important person in Drupal 7 today] had a pretty epic mistake i want to tell you about. Her first gig was It was a coup for us, a small company. We got to fly over

She is not the webchick you know and love today

long hours, working late at night.

I think she literally worked a 24 hour day straight through. She thought she'd done the data input right, and crashed.

One of them, from the UK law department, went to go log in, and some other information came up, from the

Angie was called out of her slumber and had to fix it.

Ended up ok, they're still on Drupal. She was mortified at the mistake she had made.

She was convinced she was going to be fired. Her big dream that Lullabot would not also

Matt and Jeff and I were talking about it, and the decision was made that from now on Angie would be the expert on data. And she was sent for a massage.

My own first great Lullabot mistake. I didn't understand about booking hotels.

Ended up having to pay $17,000 for hotel rooms.

David Birns, new to Drupal, super talented, new to Lullabot, not Drupal, he d

thousands of dollars, none of it came to us.

We called and said "Lullabot loves you, can we have your credit card number again."

At the end of the call Jeff said Dave made this mistake, i want to give you the big fail award.

"It must be safe to tell the truth." Lasting relationships matter
Management's job is to build the capacity to recover when mistakes are made– not to prevent them.

Leon Wood, 1912: 90 percent of the boots fell apart in water. He replaced all of the boots that went out. Today, L.L. Bean does $1.5B in business– started with one giant mistake. [But they wouldn't take repair or replace my backpack, or even give me something off a new one, when it fell apart after five years, so they're not so good anymore.]

Angie calls it: "room for stupid"

have faith
in what you do, in what you charge

Planning to do a big survey both of shops both for

When we started, consultants were expected to work 20 hours on client work, 20 hours on Drupal. It's shifted a little bit,

In order to take a project, it has to have two of these three things:
- nice client
- good budget
- fun

And one of those has to be that its a nice client.

No Bad Client.

So we say No a lot at Lullabot.

When i came to Lullabot, i was working 5 days a week, and my job was to tell people no.

So many inquiries that Jeff and Matt didn't have time to say no.

I'm really good at saying no. A client nicknamed me the Velvet Hammer. This client was wanting us to fly in all our people for this emergency thing over the weekend. But he felt really good at the end of the phone call.

[to ask: So how did you say that?]

When we filter out our clients and set god boundaries, we end up with a lot of open space. When people are only working 20-30 hours a week on client stuff.

What do we do with this open space? Give it away.

Some episodes reach 20,000 listeners.

We paid our people to write the Drupal book. We pay Angien for [some of] her Drupal 7 work.

I love to cook, i love to eat, i love this quote. "Follow the [great] chefs. They out-teach, out-share, and out-contribute their competitors. They give away all their secrets."

Wouldn't your competitors just take it? A company is incredibly lucky if it has fans who come back to learn more.

Book to read:
Open Business Models by Henry Chesbrough

Create and then capture value.

Who made those cupcakes? http://getbaked.ca

Russel Simmons: a fascinating entrepreneur: You are already giving back by running a business that creates jobs.

DrupalCon Chicago, we will put on our first-ever fashion show.

getting to be 25 full-time workers.

Omar: Full size limit?

Liza: Have discussion all the time about how much we want to grow, and how to do it sustainably. We don't want to grow unsustainably. Personally I do not want to manage a business of more than 50 people.

Q: How do you sell/talk about open source in regards to promotion?

Liza: Getting easier, especially in government. Security guy for government giving reasons why Drupal was very secure. But also the open government movement.

I don't think there's one way, but hit them all- sharing.

Omar: Clients asking for non-disclosure and non-compete. Koumbit's had hurdles there.

Liza: We sign a lot of those, especially NDAs.
As far as what is contributed back, we haven't done the 100% contribute back pledge. We negotiate. But we still co

Q: You didn't mention competition.

Liza: We don't have any.

Q: How do we eat the next up the chain, the proprietary business's lunch?

Liza:
When we started doing training, there was a guy running a well-known Drupal shop at the time, and he said you can't do this, you are going to train our competition. He's out of business.

We refer a lot of business to other companies, train a lot of other companies.

There's a lot of sphere to collaborate.