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You can find Working With Your Spouse Part 1 here. Bill and I love this clip from The Incredibles. We have the DVD and have watched it a million times with the kids.

Bill mentioned in a previous post that we are going to be taking shots of signs and posting about them. This sign in the picture isn’t terrible, but the logo has caught the Feature Creep disease. As some of you know we do logo design so we understand that sometimes the customer wants to include every aspect of the business in their logo. In this logo, it appears, someone actually attempted to include all ideas and form them into one logo. My guess on how the logo creation conversation went:

Owner #1: “We want to have a house in the logo because we do in-home care”

Designer: “Ok, good”

Owner #2: “Well, just with a house, people won’t get that we do in-home care, we should add people walking up a path to show that we go to the person’s house.”

Designer: “Ummmm, alright then”

Female Employee: “Oh, and we should put a heart to show everyone how much we care!”

Designer: “Well, I might be able to get that in there and make it still look ok.”

Owner #1: “Oh, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a hand reaching out and holding the house up! That way people would get we are offering a helping hand.”

Owner #2: “Yes! Yes! And we should copyright it all because what if someone wanted to steal all of our wonderful ideas.”

Designer: “Can I go now?”

We are currently setup as resellers with Sonicwall. We love the Sonicwall CDP appliances, but the problem is they make the process of purchasing an extended warranty and updates complicated.

Here is their current process:

You buy a CDP unit and you get a one year hardware warranty and 90 days of software updates. After the 90 days of software updates they send a notice and try to sell you another year of software updates that also extends the hardware warranty by a year (well sort of). It doesn’t actually increase your hardware warranty another year from the beginning of the hardware warranty……it extends it a year beyond the software update expiration. Ok, so this isn’t more than a rocket scientist can figure out, but it doesn’t make it easy to understand what I’m paying for. In the end I didn’t purchase the updates because it felt like I was being ripped off by not getting my hardware warranty extended a full year.

An easier process would be:

Sell the unit with a standard warranty and updates for the same time period. I would say one or two years. When it is time to expire sell the customer on extending the updates and warranty both for another year. This way it makes it clear what the customer is paying for and it makes it clear when things begin and end. People hand over their money with greater ease when they understand exactly what they are paying for.

Yes, we can be White and Nerdy and Ninjas at the same time!