We teed up today’s events with a huge change to our networking gear over the weekend. It involved new DNS routing as well as gobs of new equipment to increase speed, redundancies and security. Solid planning by Brian Gardner, our CTO made the whole thing happen in a lot less time than we anticipated. On Saturday night I got a call that all was good – and I enjoyed a stress free weekend.

Cogent Road’s main application, Funding Suite is a very complex application that connects to a multitude of third party mortgage systems. Unfortunately, our new Cisco firewalls had a firmware update that caused unanticipated issues when these systems tried to access Funding Suite. I’m not making excuses, maybe we could have tried simulating these connections in production – you know, hindsight and all the rest – but regardless our system was not operating fully.

What followed was a blur of texting, cell phone ringtones and cars pulling into the office all at the same time. Brian was already on the phone with Cisco hounding them for an explanation when I got in. I did what any good CEO would do – I set a Costco sized bottle of Excedrin on his desk and left.

The entire situation lasted about an hour…which seemed like two weeks. Seeing an engineer poke a smiling face and exaggerated thumbs up in your office door brings with it a special kind of relief only software folks can understand.

Then all hell broke loose.

No phones & no power. So how do we inform our clients?

I had just begun a joint interview (I could not make this up) about Avail with our industry’s most veteran technology editor and one of our large clients. Just as I finished an initial comment – everything went dark. And quiet. No computers, no lights, no phone. Just immediate dark silence – all at once. And it was still Monday morning.

Turns out a transformer blew in San Diego which took out a good chunk of the La Jolla area. This meant we had no power and no telephones. Every customer that called was greeted with what I would argue is the most awful greeting a customer could ever hear – a busy signal. Our software was up and running – our datacenter runs on huge back up generators. But our phones were flatlined.

It wasn’t until two hours later that the power came back up and our heart started beating again. Customers didn’t seem to mind the inconvenience – and some even shared their own similar stories. But, in the end, I’m glad to see this day end.

The funny thing is though, the market (especially the banking industry), tends to favor the tried and true. Why? Inertia I suppose. Companies do what they do – and get a bit itchy if you even hint at changing things up. At Cogent Road good software means applications stuffed with innovative functionality (read “stuff that never existed before”) which helps businesses get more done with fewer resources. And quite frankly this scares the crap out of our potential clients.

Case in point: Our AVAIL software. Rewind to February 2008.

My partner and I work closely with mortgage loan originators. While our Funding Suite application was designed to help these originators legitimately improve the qualifying ability of each applicant – many applicants simply could not qualify. After receiving the bad news, the applicant had nothing left but to walk out the door – without an inkling of what to do next. So about two years ago we began wondering if we could we create an application to help originators hang on to declined applicants until they eventually qualified. It was magic canvas time.

If this application was going to work it needed to generate a clear roadmap leading declined applicants to mortgage qualifying status in the shortest time possible. If not, these applicants would continue to drift about, or waste money with nefarious credit repair firms or futilely apply to other mortgage companies. By showing them the best actions to take right now, we could focus their energy – and get them qualified fast.

After burning through boxes of “scented” (my favorite!) whiteboard markers – we fleshed out a software application ultimately called Avail. It would eventually become the industry’s only automated mortgage qualifying assistant. It worked with the applicant for an entire year – providing four status reviews and updated strategies along the way. Clients used the software (in cooperation with their mortgage originator) to discover learn new behaviors that would legitimately improve the credit scores. Avail examined their credit accounts and revealed the types of questions mortgage lenders would ask about specific accounts in their credit. The software told them how to answer and what documentation they needed ready. Avail even showed the applicant how to get out from under their current credit card debt in the shortest time with the least amount of cash. It was an amazing application.

We expected huge results when we launched Avail in July, 2008. Instead what happened was, well –nothing. Did originators get it? Nope. Did they show it to declined applicants? Nope. Avail elicited some interest during demonstrations, only to be ignored in unison by our clients.

Turns out, like most new software applications, Avail simply took a while to catch on.

Flash forward. Today as a group, our clients enroll thousands of happy applicants every month into Avail. Large percentages of these initially declined applicants qualify for their new mortgage within six to nine months. In fact, we recently received a call directly from an applicant who had tracked us down simply to say thank you for building the software. Are you kidding me?

I love the software business.

BTW: Click here if you want to see a video demo of the Avail product.

 The contrast between the enjoyable journey that could have been, and the one we actually experienced related in many ways to the tribulations small businesses face while moving toward their goals. When employees don’t understand the company’s values and instead perform work in ways they think best, the company creates an environment that generates opposing wind and waves. Effort is diffused, ideas are misaligned and ultimately customers pay the price in poor service.

In our first ever attempt to align everyone at the company – and get us all paddling in synch so to speak, I created a 45 day long blitz designed to teach specific departmental values, while also encouraging individual ideas and contribution. Here’s how it worked.

To keep things simple, I divided the company into three groups – and then assigned a specific value to each group.
Group A:   Those that interfaced daily with existing clients
Value:         Cultivate loyalty. (Increase our client’s motivation to remain a customer for life.)

Group B:  Those involved with marketing and selling to prospective clients
Value:        Cultivate desire.  (Increase the prospects desire to become a Cogent Road customer)

Group C:  Those involved with management, engineering or back office work.
Value:        Cultivate innovation. (Increase the ability to create better ways of doing things)

Lastly I assigned one overarching corporate value for all groups.
Value for all employees: Cultivate Excellence. (Increase our ability to become the best).

On Monday morning, June 1st we kicked off the blitz – complete with posters and a blitzed themed office decor. As employees filtered in to the office that morning they were presented with a small, newly sprouted plant in a colorful pot. Each pot was preassigned to an individual employee. On one side of the pot the label read (in the case of a customer service employee, for example) “I am cultivating loyalty”. On the other side the main corporate value, “I am cultivating excellence”. The idea for the blitz was that every employee was to “cultivate” his or her plant – the plant symbolizing their designated values. Each person had free rein to come up with any idea they wished to make the plant grow and no one would tell them what to do. The only rule was that during the week, the plants had to remain in the office. At the end of 45 days whomever had the largest, healthiest plant and also best demonstrated innovative cultivation tactics would win a very nice prize.

During the blitz employees could not avoid reading and re-reading their own departmental value and the overarching corporate value clearly labeled on their plants. As they thought about different ways to “cultivate” their plant, they would also be learning how to think and execute ideas on their own. They exercise encouraged self management because no one was telling them what to do or how to do it. I believed the blitz would strengthen our corporate innovation muscle. To further stimulate thinking and ideation, we offered weekly prizes to individuals that submitted department specific ideas in alignment with their values.

The results were beyond my expectations. New bonds formed as people interacted with others not normally in their sphere. One example was the customer service reps carrying plants into programmer’s offices in hopes of placing them by the window for the day. And we laughed uproariously at some of the wacky ideas people had to cultivate their plants. (FYI, washing a plant’s roots will not help in the least).

In the end, Linh, one of our tax product managers won a 40” flat screen TV with a plant many believed had to be on steroids. Quan (or “Q” as he is known around the office), came in second and won a night on the town for he and his girlfriend.

And Cogent Road won too.

For us at Cogent Road, the past year drove home a single point that is, without hesitation, the most important business lesson our company ever learned. Rather than simply telling you, let me illustrate the answer in the following example.

In highly stressful situations the mind absorbs data and feedback very intently. Talk to anyone involved in an automobile accident and invariably you’ll hear the same thing – the experience seemed to happen in slow motion. What actually occurs is that in times of great danger the human mind processes visual information at significantly higher speeds. So fast and with such clarity that events seem to slow down as our brains absorb nearly every detail.

Our body’s natural response to highly stressful events is one of survival. Without conscious thought our nervous systems takes command of every bodily function, sifting through a myriad of possibilities – and finally choosing a course of action with the greatest possible chance of success. And there it is. What instinctively occurs in the blink of an eye also reveals an important business truth.

In my opinion business fail for one reason – they stop trying. I’m not being trite; the business leadership simply stops thinking about they can do to change and improve. In stressful market conditions, these business succumb to fear, which is to say the literally shut down creative thought completely. That is to say the response is entirely contrary our natural inclination to stressful events. Rather than assessing possibilities, they stop thinking and choke off their very lifeblood – which if it doesn’t kill the business outright, it nonetheless leaves it crippled and weak.

My partner and I learned that in good times or bad, we must continually think about how we can grow our business. This means creating an environment which fosters knowledge sharing, crazy ideas and healthy debate. And most importantly it means taking the action you feel is best, despite anything fear may throw at you.

I know what I am saying is true – because Business Spaces, our new workflow automation system is a direct result. Cogent Road management spent countless hours thinking about how we could use existing resources to provide new solutions to the mortgage lending market. We filled up whiteboard after whiteboard with ways in which software could help mortgage lenders get more production from fewer people. We designed improvements over existing paperless solutions while incorporating ways for lenders to enhance the overall experience for their borrowers. Client response has exceeded our expectations.

While a deteriorating market environment kept screaming at us to hunker down and cut spending – we did the opposite. We assessed the market, thought through our options and realized that to grow we’d have to act on the best one.

I encourage you to do the same.

With the quickened pace of our California software company just hours away, and the quiet stillness of Tennessee only hours past, I’m stuck in a place that’s got me thinking just how important having a clear vision of who you are and what you want to be is to the success of your business.

You can learn a lot by watching chickens. Or fire ants. Or the way horses respond to a looming thunderstorm. Nature, for all practical purposes, is reactionary. The response may be simple, the way fire ants pour out of a hole made in their ant hill in such volumes it looks like blood streaming from some mortal wound. Or nature may respond complexly and more slowly, as in the way a tree will grow too tall for its own roots as it strains for light in a dense forest. Yet, no matter how beautiful, nature is a well orchestrated symphony of cause and effect.

Man, however is not a part of this symphony. We sit outside of nature’s rules in much the same way as the composer transcends the boundaries of the symphony being played. Man is gifted with the greatest of all gifts, an ability to envision, a capacity to create.

If you are a business owner, or an aspiring one, my weekend excursion into nature has compelled me to share one bit of advice: You will be successful if you continue to think and create. As you strive after your vision, you will grow. Become reactionary, (which this weekend has taught is the natural way of things) and you will stagnate. Keep creating. Keep growing.

My partner and I began Cogent Road with a simple vision – provide loan officers with innovative software that can help boost their business, and ultimately their incomes. This caused us to think about different ways in which our software could deliver this vision. Rather than trying to be a specific type of company, we focused solely on helping our clients. We began in 2001 with a credit platform we leased from a third party. As we thought about our vision, we created different ideas in which credit could be used to increase our client’s business. This led to ideas on how we could help our loan officer clients help their own client’s, the borrowers. It led to ideas in which credit could be used to increase our client’s word of mouth business from referring sources and previous borrowers. The led us to create Funding Suite, and in turn the concept of credit proofreading, which we believe to be the most powerful business building strategy a loan officer can use. And credit proofreading is leading us into new software offerings for loan officers that Cogent Road could never have anticipated just a few years ago.

Reflecting back on a weekend lived right out of the pages of Field and Stream, I realized how much we, as business people need vision. Perhaps for the first time I realized how contrary to nature a creative vision actually is. And likewise how difficult. Vision takes thought, and thinking may well be the hardest work a man can do. So it goes that I encourage you, wherever you find yourself right now, to begin creating. Begin the work of thinking about what you want to do and why you want to do it. Then by all means get to doing it. Break free of the reactionary nature of your industry, your competitors or even your own habitual way of looking at your business.

You possess what nature does not – the ability to create. Now get composing.