PART II: THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE

Contact us:
fbosson@thebossongroup.com
209 333 7786

WHAT ABOUT THOSE PESKY SOCIAL MEDIAS?

There has never been a time in the history of our country’s business infrastructure when we had at our disposal such a diverse myriad of free venues which could, potentially -when working in harmony with a greater strategy -have an enormous impact on your bottom line! This is true for every company no matter how large or small. But as we discussed in Part I, this blog is meant for the larger portion of our clientele, the small to mid-size business.

Before the onset of theses free venues (Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and the plethora of RSS opportunities etc.) companies went to great lengths to deliver their message:

· Paying big money to create videos (television commercials, online videos etc.) in order to get their name, message and business products or services in front of their proper audience

· Contract expensive marketing programs to deliver messages whether through complex mail systems or costly email programs

· Find ways to engage their clients in relevant conversations which would demonstrate their superior awareness of the industry as it applies to client needs (conferences and conventions)

· Find creative ways to certify your rightful position in a crowded marketplace and display the significant solutions you offer

· Spend a lot of money to clearly define your core competencies so clients won’t dismiss you as a small package but rather view you as a unique adjunct

In fact these forums validate some distinct market positions through which (when used with other more traditional business tactics) you can communicate directly with your client privately and all just for what it takes to know which to use, why to use them and how you anticipate they will impact your company.

Consider that in the last ten years we have seen an explosion in social media sites including; FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube and others. Now ask yourself, how are you using these networks to augment your sales?

“How are you using your social media?”

The Bosson Group interacts with many different types of businesses but we always start with their digital presence. Almost every time we begin our analysis we run in to the same problem; a poor digital position and an even worse understanding of what their cyberspace experience should include and why it should include what we recommend! Our job is to come in to a company define the market needs from the buyer’s perspective, provide solutions, structure, definitions, strategy and sales. The first thing we see virtually on every site and almost invariably is series of social media icons. And just as they almost always have some hyperlinked social media icons, they have an unused social media programs.

“I hardly ever use them?” “I don’t know why I have them!” “I don’t have time for them? “ “I have no idea what to do with them?” “I’ve got them but I don’t know what they do or how they can help me!”

In almost all cases when we talk with our clients about how they are using their social media programs, one of the above statements or questions is the response we get. If you are one of those businesses that has no idea why you have the programs or what to do with them; this blog will be useful.

If you are one of our clients and using our Tethered Communities™ sales solutions or you are using your own inside sales program then this little blog will provide critical information in making those ghostly hyperlinks power tools.

How and why should I use social media?

As we are primarily interested in addressing those companies that tie their efforts to inside sales which is almost all of our clients and most small to mid-size businesses. Let me say that most of the information in this blog will relate to an inside sales environment. And let me address why I expect this applies to all small to mid-size businesses. The reality for sales today is that to maintain the costs associated with an outside sales force falls to much larger companies with money to burn (and burn they will). By default, small to mid-size companies don’t have the cash flow for such a frivolous waste of their money. They are by nature of the beast, forced to conduct their business over the phone and through email so the addition of these social media functions are likely to impact their business significantly either way.

But that’s not bad news that’s the good news. If you start your company off learning the proper habits and carefully analyze how and what works best to acquire the most predictable outcome, then you are building a productive long term telephone sales and marketing program. This way as your company grows you can manage and anticipate your growth far more accurately without falling into the outside salesperson trap. Every business owner knows that it’s important that they deliver the right message to the proper audience.

Today’s business owner also knows that they should be using their digital tools like the website, emails, SEO to develop their business but they are uncertain and confused about how they should go about it. Let’s clear up some misconceptions and bring this into focus.

Social Media as a Strategy

If you are one who sees all of your social media links as one big black hole sucking up your precious time and resources, it’s time to bring your use of social media under control.

• Don’t think of them as all one kind of thing doing the same thing in different formats. Each has a unique structure and speaks to your audience in a very specific manner – understanding how each application works best and designing your free media to get the most out of each platform will help you make sense of how and why you need each format
• Get to know your audience as they relate to each social media and exploit those venues that make sense to you and don’t engage those that don’t
• Use them as individual strategic steps; each contributing in a different way to educate, inform and entertain prospective buyers with the overarching goal of driving buyers to your website where they will conduct business
• Remember everything revolves around your website, so design your site to do business and not to act as an online brochure.

The Website

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in a little time but this should give you some basic guidelines on how to make your website more than one in sixty million online bookmarks. You website should be built to do business. If a buyer can’t hit your home page and in under a minute answer these three questions…

• Why me?
• Why you
• Why now?

…Then your website doesn’t work.

Clients often tell me that they have the problem of explaining why they are unique – forget about that. Every site is unique – if they are at your site they want to know why it’s where they should spend their money. Few people surf the web to read sites and if you structure your site properly it will be visual, quick and easy for the client to understand who you are, what you do and what makes you special. Social Media sites express your individuality - your site is where you should conduct business.

If you are a consultant or if you offer complex services that require that people leave information about who they are and what they need, then provide that ability for them in at least three different formats. Every landing page should have:

• Testimonials (when relevant) upfront and where they can be seen
• A picture story about what you do or who you are (what you do if you do something – who you are if they are buying your time)
• Calls to actions everywhere
• Click-thrus to access clearly spelled out services and products
• Options to call, email, access your people or the person
• Video introduction to products and services and if you can include in under a minute the unique position you hold in the market – that to
• A resource library at the bottom of the page for access to linsk, news, information, employment etc.
• A navigation bar absent “Who we are” “Mission” or “Company History” (put these in your resource library if you feel they are relevant)

SEO

If you are spending money on SEO services STOP!

Let’s end the talk about SEO here and now. If you don’t have a Wordpress site or a self-managed site with a built-in Content Management System, get one. Until then if you have your managed site, take the time to make sure your webmaster knows how to get all your key words in the places they should be. Don’t forget that Google owns YouTube and you will be seen there as well (keyword section). Start using a blog and distribute it to prospects, they will be seen by search engines. Send your blog to clients and prospects through email.

If you don’t know where and how to use keywords and set up your SEO and you don’t think your webmaster does either then go to YouTube and find about a zillion tutorials on them. Or Google SEO and learn all the tricks and continuing changes search engines make to insure clients are reaching the right company the first time they type something in.

Google is not interested in whether you get a fair shot at the first page and companies pay a lot of money to have their names show up there. So the best you can hope for is to get your name on the same page as larger competitors. You don’t go do a private bakery because it’s cheaper than Walmart. You go to a private bakery because it has better bagels than Walmart’s pre-made fifty pound bags of bagel dough! Don’t pick a fight with Walmart.

If your buyer is looking for cheaper and doesn’t care about quality, outcome, attention to detail and personal interest in their success through your specific offering then you are probably not the solution they need. I tell all of my clients that they need to bring their sales conversation to a place and time absent their competition.

FACEBOOK

Think of FaceBook as digital geography. This doesn’t mean that you need your buyers to be local to get value out of FaceBook but that’s how it should be used. If you think about “Starbucks” and their FaceBook protocol then you understand the “geography” concept. How many people get “new products” and deals from Starbucks on their Facebook?

Use FaceBook to pull together your products or services in way that makes it logical for buyers in a digital geographic community. If you offer services in financial consultation nationally or internationally than make your efforts through FaceBook take on the look and feel of the general community of financial services as they relate to the whole of your industry. It’s a digital geography – it simply means that you are a part of the conversation that is relevant to the client-base either because you are local or you are a part of the larger online community that deals in similar aspects of your industry. You carve out your place by location or industry – you make it relevant by providing services or products in a way that is consistent with the person you want to visit and re-visit your FaceBook page.

• Host conversations that make sense to the people and companies that occupy your digital landscape.
• Every time someone leaves a business card, asks for information online and provides their email or any time you are using the phone and acquire email addresses have a process for developing that lead.
• Create your CRM, and begin to cultivate new leads on your social media.
• Have a short but convicting email to send them to in order to convince them to “like” your FaceBook page (we will discuss invitation to other venues)
• Liking your page generally happens because you are hosting a variety of information, headlines, news article and comments all valid to the people who populate your geographic online community (buyers, Human Resource Managers etc.).

In other words, don’t just talk about you and your company, make your FaceBook a page where you moderate discussions on a variety of topics relevant to your population and not just your business.

If you are talking about serving people in a general location, talk about the community, the town, the area. If you are carving out a landscape by community then host conversations, links, articles and information that relates to the person or company in that community. Nothing gets a client’s attention more than showing them that you are current in the industry and have strong opinions and observations about how current events can improve their company culture.

Pictures of your family, your vacation and any other personal material are totally inappropriate so keep them off. Don’t use your Avatar from some online war game as your profile picture anywhere at any time. Keep your profile points business relevant; no one wants to know your relationship status as it relates to business

TWITTER

Probably the most misunderstood and maligned of the social medias, Twitter stands alone as one of the most enigmatic digital strategies. This platform, when used in conjunction with a probably structured FaceBook , LinkedIn and/or RSS pages, acts in concert and independently of any other strategy beside your website.

It is easier to tell you what Twitter is not then to help you understand what it is.

• It is not a popularity contest where ten thousand random and unrelated viewers are just stacking the list to make you appear important - this is extremely transparent and leaves your prospect asking whether you don't know how to use Twitter or you are falsely trying to inflate your Twitter value with anonymous followers
• It is not a competition to see how many followers you can get - look at who chooses to follow you and look for people that you think fit your purpose on Twitter - which may be altogether different then the message you create in LinkedIn and different form either in FaceBook
• It is not a place where you as a professional go to make inane comments, clichéd and spent quotes or links to riddles and jokes
• It is not a place to spend hours of time fooling around with icons and symbols in an effort to repeat a story told a hundred other times or one that has little or no value to the audience

So, what is it? Recently, The Bosson Group, after years of development has produced a first-of-its-kind in preemptive analytics tool, Tethered Communities™ (now Trademarked). This process maintains over 2000 fields of data which are compressed, compared, valued and defined by 12 different analytical programs (including our own organic algorithm for extemporaneous conversations specific to a particular function). We used Twitter as a way to build a following of people and companies that might regard our findings and follow them to determine both accuracy and relativity. We did this with calculated invitations to an entirely new level of prospective client as a way to prove our value. We may have only 400 followers but the body of them are key people in the industry (Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News Financial., Jim Cramer, Moody’s etc.)

What does Twitter have to do with me?

Twitter is an excellent format to provide definition and depth to who you are and what you do. Create short but meaningful statements that link your reader (follower) to information in your resource library or directly to pages within your site related to your products or service

• It is a place to tie yourself to important information and announcements in your company
• It is a place to define the character of who you are and what you do
• It is a place to continue to show your clients and prospective clients that you have your finger on the pulse of your industry and you know what’s happening
• It is a way to gradually bring clients to important locations in your website or on other social media platforms

Twitter is a digital organism and like any organism you must continue to feed it or it will die. This is a social media and it is contingent upon you to look for and invite the followers you feel will get the most out of what you say. This is definitely a place where you can show your astuteness, intelligence and awareness.

If someone offers you 10,000 followers for $500 and you think that’s a good deal. You are not using Twitter properly.

LINKEDIN

Now we are entering the first of my two favorite social media platforms; LinkedIn and RSS. LinkedIn is one of the most underrated and underused venues in all of cyberspace. Here is a place where you can start or join discussions in your field or vertical markets and get seen by some of the real innovators and leaders in industry. You can explore cross-sections of your market as wells as following new industries to round out your opinion and knowledge base to make you more fit for discussion engagements in LinkedIn. It is a place where you can personalize your position and personality in cyberspace.

LinkedIn is unique in the way in which it can level the playing field for you. Here you are equal to any other President or CEO and you opinion is as qualified and regarded as any other. You are for all intents and purposes on equal terms – take advantage of this opportunity but know your stuff before you make yourself known. Naturally when you are in the company of intelligentsia , some of the good glitter can rub off on you and some of the bad stuff rub against your prospects. But, two simple rules can help you here:

• Don’t debate issues in which you are not certain you can at least hold your own on and secretly believe you can win.
• Don’t engage in conversations that end up being cyber-slanted arguments with people you do not know and are on an equal level with you. The last thing industry leaders want to participate in is an argument between two potential vendors.
• Take the high road and bail out of any hostile conversation without even a good-bye. The sooner ended the sooner forgotten. Besides prospects will respect you for not wasting their time in what otherwise may have been a valuable discussion –pick it up at another time when you archenemy is not participating

Twitter is a place to go and make your presence known – especially about all you know in the presence! It is also a motivation for you to begin reading, studying and educating yourself about the entire culture of your market. A couple of well written and thought out conversations have more than once led me to a new or prospective client.

RSS (REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION)

We are now taking over 90% of our clients into YouTube, blogs, online radi for a number of different opportunities; “How To’s”, “Did you Know?”, “Learn This” and so much more. With over 20 million people visiting YouTube every day we are using this process in concert with other venues such as LinkedIn and FaceBook and Twitter to help create significant positioning for our clients.

But it isn’t just YouTube it’s so much more. It’s using the technology of the web to digitally enhance our client. It’s a way for us to engage our client’s prospects and our own prospects in a time and at a place that is absent our competitor. Whether we are doing time-lapse photography for construction or monetizing learning events on YouTube’s private channel, we are finding new ways to define our clients using online RSS (radio, blogs, videos audio even Webinars) .

In online programs we are teaching our clients about making videos without spending a fortune. What to say and how to get it in front of the right audience. We are helping them with webinars, radio blogs, blogs and even online meetings like Webex.

Many of the places and events that we have clients involved in are no cost forums. In these cyber-channels we can help our client’s find and define their voice. We use our own proprietary highly graphical, totally interactive, instant notification email, AlphaByters.com to communicate to vast numbers of prospects for as little as .60 cents per contact (that includes an introduction and communication with a potential client under controlled circumstances).

SUMMARY

By blending these individual social media components in cyberspace to obtain a specific goal, we are able to educate, inform and entertain prospects outside of our website – leaving our website the responsibility and focus of conducting business with our clients; new and old.

Our rule of thumb is one hour per week per venue. That’s all the time you should need to create, build and engage prospective clients through these FREE venues. If you are using these venues properly and with regularity, you can expect to see real results with a direct impact to your business in as little as six months.

For more information email frankb@thebossongroup.com

Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alpahbyters.com
209 333 7786
209 642 2821

Next in Part III, We will talk about the phenomena of Telefluence and our own highly graphical, permission granted, instant notification email program Alphabyters.com. Learning to combine strategies to make better use of your phone for sales

TO PHONE OR NOT TO PHONE

FIVE PART SERIES ON SELECTING, SUPPORTING AND EXECUTING INSIDE SALES

Over the next five weeks we will look at the different ways and reasons that companies are moving part or all of their outside sales to inside sales and what they need to know in order to get there. PART ONE: TO PHONE OR NOT TO PHONE looks at the two most common reasons that many companies are migrating as quickly as they can dial it in from outside sales to inside sales.

PART TWO: EXPLOITING THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
We will cover what a company must know about inside sales before moving their sales experience inside. Which digital programs will best support your unique brand and model? What other less obvious ancillary digital applications must be integrated into the overall process? How does your Internet experience support your online and over the phone sales? What is Telefluence and why should you know about it?

PART THREE: INSIDE SALES VERSUS INSIDE SALES
Companies struggle to determine how much of the inside sales they should take responsibility for and how much they need to pass off. How does marketing work in this new digital landscape with inside sales? What type of inside sales will best work for you? What are the challenges in hiring, training and converting to inside sales?

PART FOUR: GOOD MATH – BAD MATH
This is a bottom line look at each component, how long it will take to get your program up and running, and what kind of “other” costs you can expect. How to build out a realistic ROI? What is an inside O.R. and why should that matter to you? How to count your beans and have enough left over to run the show? Creating a budget with milestones and timelines that make sense and when you can expect to see your money start returning!

PART FIVE: BUILDING YOUR OWN INSIDE SALES PROGRAM
Companies are stacking inside sales components one on top of another like a Lego Log fort but is that really what you need or should do? How do I build an inside sales force and what should I expect and when should I expect it? Should I outsource? What are the pitfalls to inside sales? How is the inside sales culture different and what will that mean to me and my employees? What should I outsource? How do I use online meetings, social media, email programs and digital appliances to support, analyze and compliment my sales program? How do I insure I capture the knowledge I build into this program and maintain it for the company’s security?

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PART ONE: TO PHONE OR NOT TO PHONE

Today many companies are looking at their sales approach and trying to figure out how they can move their outside sales inside. Plagued by rising costs, inefficient use of time from outside salespeople and increased competition companies understand they are faced with the imminent need to construct an intelligently balanced, hybrid, inside sales experience and the race is on to build the best mousetrap. But before we look at the actual construction of these unique, growing in popularity, cultures, let’s understand why they are a matter of absolute necessity in most cases.

Cost and Reach

An average outside salesperson spends less than 40% of their week in front of buyers. Most outside salespeople have support staffs which set appointments, send out sales and marketing materials and develop written communication and more in some cases. On top of the redundant attendant costs for each outside salesperson, the average outside salesperson is not trained and is therefore unproductive using the phone for cold calls and lead generation. Even when they are available for the phone and are even somewhat productive, it isn’t like the other 60% of their time can simply be spent on the phone. With 40% of their time in front of buyers they spend another 10% of their time preparing for each call and drive time, to and from each call typically consumes another 20-25% of their week. When you add up all the numbers there is little time for them to be on the phone. Even if you consider how much more work can be done in the car today, that work can only be done if you are trained and structured to conduct business the moment you get in a car. Imagine the time it would take to program in all the calls you would have to make to generate new business while in traffic (hands-free).

When you consider the costs for an average outside sales force equal to the same results needed from an equally constructed inside sales force – your cost factor is somewhere around 2.5 to 1 dollars outside costs to inside costs. And this is an average – if you use the services of a company like The Bosson Group for the construction of the inside model , the end result will be much more efficient and professional , with a cost factor of 4 to 1 dollars outside to inside sales.

Costs for the outside salesperson compared to the equally successful hybrid inside position today simply make outside sales an untenable alternative.  Compared to a decade ago when better than 75% of the Fortune1000 Companies supported expensive outside sales forces to today when less than 10% of those same companies maintain an outside presence or have severely restricted their outside sales programs. More companies today are opting for cleverly constructed inside sales teams that can make good use of social media, email programs and the myriad of other tools so readily available in our digital landscape.

But the more important issue in choosing between inside and outside model is not the cost. Hard to believe, right? The real issue today for any company making this decision is the company’s sales reach. Today we have shrunken the world to make global sales not only possible but necessary. Emerging markets overseas (please don’t even get me started on China) are becoming realistic targets for most company offers. If you had to put feet on the street in order to sell to a global market you better expect to stretch out your ROI significantly. Don’t take my word for it, do the math yourself.

So for the practical reasons of cost and reach today’s leaders are forced to reconsider their sales model and strongly consider a 100% inside sales practice. Constructing a sales cycle that excludes outside salespeople means companies have to be more aware of which digital tools will best augment their sales program. They need to understand sales as a more abstract structure and how to build their inside sales force to convey that same sense of personalization over the phone. For most companies converting outside sales to inside sales in any variation on the theme requires the assistance of professionals like the team at The Bosson Group.

The company looking at the various social medias, SEO and YouTube will have to know which elements work for them by answering the bigger questions of the “why” and “how” for each process. Then each environment will have to further understand why each digital element from their website to their email campaign is important to the way they influence and impact the buyer. Where one company may find their reach is effective by exploiting Facebook another may find that they can make a more beneficial impact using YouTube. Having access to many different and often “no” or “low cost” marketing elements is only useful if you know how they will integrate into your system and ultimately improve your chances of getting to the “yes”. In the end it’s all about constructing a process that is cost effective, pliable, powerful and deliberate… with good math to back it.  

 Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
209 642 2821
frankb@thebossongroup.com
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alphabyters.com

A Peek at Peak Oil

I don’t know how many of my faithful followers are old enough to remember the scare of the 1970’s when gas stations literally ran out of fuel. For a short time in our lives a long tome ago hopeful and sometimes frightened commuters formed lines sometimes thirty or forty cars long, bumper to bumper hugging the "far-off" skinny of the road leading up to the gas station pumps waiting for their turn to purchase oil. Cars just sitting with there, windows down and drivers patiently and some not so patiently, waiting for their chance to pump some of what little gasoline there was to spare. Many stations rationed gas altogether. In those places you'd pull up to find you could only get ten gallons per car, sometimes less. Once in a while you would be inching up closer to the pumps anticipating your turn in line only to see the owner come scrambling out of his office head down, taking no questions and slapping up a cardboard sign on which he had scribbled “No Gas” and dashing back inside for safety.

For many of us living and commuting back then it was a nightmare. You planned your week around when you would get your gas, because no matter when you decided to do it, there would be a limited amount of stations opened and a limited amount of gas to get. You would have to find the location and plan on spending as much as an hour or more waiting your turn. I don’t know how many people I helped push up to the gas pumps because their car had run out of fuel while waiting. I do remember it happening to me once. The crowds were generally tame and polite – but there were under-rumblings deep below the calm surface of many drivers and I think if it had gone on much longer or gotten much worse, we would have seen tears in the fabric of our society. I guess, even though I was young, I was struck by how sheer that fabric actually was - when I deep down had thought it to be much more durable.

Peak Oil became a term with which we were all too familiar. It meant that the earth had reached the point of producing the most crude it would ever produce and from that point on the amount of crude we would develop would be on the decline. We had “Peaked” and now although there would be fuel, it was not going to be replenished. The fact is that it wasn’t quite true – not literally anyway. We had more oil and they developed new ways to find and covert fossils from the earth into crude for your car. But the idea of “Peak” oil is a valid concept. Oil is, in fact, a limited commodity and we are running out.

In 1973 it was an embargo by the oil producing countries in the Middle East. That, we were told, was the reason we were in so much trouble. I don’t know how many people believed that – we knew that as a country we had enough petroleum products in our own backyard to handle the situation, but people further up the food chain, for whatever reason -politics, conservation or greed - decided to slow the flow down to a trickle. It scared us… it angered us… and that was back in 1973. Can you imagine where we are today in terms of availability of fuel? Can you imagine what would happen if the pumps had crumbled pieces of brown cardboard scripted merely with those two words “No Gas”?

If we passed peak oil in 1980 then we have been on the decline since. With more countries demanding more petroleum, America is just another consumer pulling up to the Middle Eastern gas pumps. It’s not going to take long for the bottom to start racing up to the top. Then we won’t have to bottom out, we’ll be crushed between a falling ceiling of gas availability and a rising floor of gas and oil costs.

It was in 2005 the famous Hirsch Report came out declaring that our situation on oil and gas use here in America had gone from frustrating to downright horrifying. The report presented to Congress in 2005 stated that we were in a crisis level of fuel dependency to availability. That was six years ago. Why all of a sudden are things getting that much worse? One of the big reasons is the sudden success of China and their need for several hundred times the amount of oil they needed only a decade ago.

As more people flood the highways and more countries move their populace closer to their idea of middleclass, the demand for energy fueled by petroleum will escalate from something of a problem with soaring prices and gas rationing to a sudden emergency order to remove cars from the highways; maybe letting you run your vehicle on alternate days or weeks – who knows? This could occur within the next two to three years.

So what to do?

Tethered Communities ™ by the Bosson Group is the only viable and proven method for taking fixed positions in a work environment and successfully transferring them to home, making them less costly and more effective. This one element will provide an enormous relief across America’s economic landscape.

Deconstruct and Reconstruct

The program uses our proprietary analytics tool nTelegenz® - a one of a kind, Preemptive Method of Analytical Processes instead of a Predictive Method of Analysis. What’s the difference? Predictive Analysis is what it sounds like…a guess, a good guess, but it’s a guess based at what will happen rather than what we know now. Preemptive Method means we have a plan for solving the problem today.

nTelegenz® compresses over 2,000 fields of data reconciled by a dozen analytical programs, algorithms, statistical and organic data analyses, economic and historical comparisons, expansions, contractions and our exclusive Rganx® program which provides valuation of fluid, dynamic job processes like conversations, both extemporaneous and on script , in sales or customer support.

Using this model we are able to deconstruct any fixed job position (office based) and reconstruct that same position as a more productive and cost effective remote value. We can then pick it up and set it down anywhere to work flawlessly - whether you are in an airport, hotel or working from your home. As an at-home program, we provide seamless home to work environments that are more effective and less costly than the traditional fixed positions.

Let’s look an example:

If you were to take a company that only had 5,000 employees and you were only able to take 5% of that workforce and successfully move them to a home work environment, you could:

• · Take 250 cars off the highway at rush hour every day
• · Have over 75,000 actual days of car use per year eliminated (300 days figured in)
• · Free up 3,750 gallons of gasoline a week
• · Reduce the use of more than 180,000 gallons of gasoline per year (48 weeks with holidays and vacation)
• · Reduce our carbon footprint in traffic by 1.5 tonnnes (estimating every car emits 2.6 tonnes and more than half of this is used for transportation to and from work)
• · Reduce costs for your company by 1.5 million dollars (costsin addition to basic salary include some taxes, health care, workman’s compensation, utility costs for equipment, utility costs for energy in the office, office space, depreciation of equipment and so much more - based on a yearly income of $26,000)

That’s huge, right?

The Top 2,000

We did some checking and here is what we came up with:

· There are 1,956 (almost two thousand) companies right now in America which employ in excess of 5,000+ (five thousand plus) employees. In fact they employ 39,798,812 employees (almost forty million) paid employees sitting in offices around this country.

Let’s say that we exercised nTelegenz® to deploy Tethered Communities™ for the top 1,956 companies in America. And, to be conservative, we were only able to reduce the number of employees to work from home by 3% (that number is deliberately deflated for expression purposes only. Realistically we can expect to reduce this employee number by as much as 8% to 10%).

But let’s look at 3%, using the same low numbers we did in the one company example of 5,000. So, it’s 1,956 companies moving 3% of the nearly 40 million people to a seamless home to work environment would:

• · Take 1,193,964 (one million, one hundred and ninety three thousand, nine hundred and sixty four) cars off the highways in rush hour everyday
• · Total 358,189,200 (three hundred and fifty-eight million, one hundred and eighty nine thousand and two hundred days) HIGHWAY FREE DAYS EVERY YEAR
• · Free up 17,909,460 gallons of gas every week (seventeen million, nine hundred and nine thousand, four hundred and sixty)!
• · Save more than 859,654,080 (eight hundred and fifty-nine million, six hundred and fifty-four thousand and eighty) GALLONS OF GAS SAVED PER YEAR!
• · Reduce our carbon footprint by 1,790,946 (one million, seven hundred ninety thousand, nine hundred and forty six) TONNES PER YEAR.
• · Cut costs for those companies by $7,163,784,000.00 SEVEN BILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY THREE MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS SAVED IN ONE YEAR ALONE.

Would we need to ship jobs overseas anymore? I think not! Could we significantly reduce our dependency on foreign oil? You betcha! And how about some other fairly legitimate observations:

• · Once we deconstruct a fixed position and reconstruct it as a remote position, we increase productivity by as much as 10% when eliminating redundancy
• · We allow corporations to hire who they want as the best person for the job because they are no longer dependent on location
• · Simpler functions that are sometimes cobbled together with other tasks to improve efficiency tend to do just the opposite, while in this scenario you could find the right person to work only the hours required
• · Companies can easily begin to outsource tasks that drain employees and middle management of key time; spam, sales calls, emails, outside sales and a host of other interruptions in any key position

The Bosson Group is the only company that has taken a scientific approach to solving America’s two largest economic problems; fuel and loss of jobs overseas. You don’t have to have 5,000 employees to use Tethered Communities™ either. This program is scalable and it is designed to help smaller companies evaluate and select sub-contracting components that better compliment their environment and personality.

Take the time to talk to us about Tethered Communities™ for your company.

Frank Bosson
CEO
The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
frankb@thebossongroup.com

Tethered Communities™ Finally Trademarked

Recently we won our Trademark approval for our seamless home to work environment process, Tethered Communities™. All of sudden I have a new found respect for small businesses that acquire that designation. I’m not talking about the hundreds and maybe thousands that merely use the Trademark (™) without having jumped through all the hoops fairly and legally battled to establish their products and services as something unique and not yet defined in the massive litany of Trademarks.

Clearly for our little company, this is a major victory. I don’t know that we will ever have the opportunity to produce an actual instance of this complex and incredibly powerful alternative to traditional work and labor force structuring. We are simply well ahead of the curve. I started building this concept over twenty years ago when I believed it was just a matter of time before we hit the “energy” wall and needed intelligent alternatives to “what going to work” looked like.

I began testing the program in the late 1980’s when I built the first of its kind work from home Telesales and Telemarketing company. Within a year I had over 500 people working from home and working on accounts like American Express, Lucent and even Ameritech. I’m not sure they knew exactly what they had gotten themselves into until it was too late but, once on board, my system worked so well that we were out performing any contractor these companies had ever known. We were more efficient, less costly and far more productive.

Before the Internet was even a thought, we were communicating weekly, and sometimes daily, with over 500 people working from home. I will admit those first years were crazy. We had grown so big, so fast that we consumed the top three floors of a deserted bank building. I remember that in the postal area of this old deserted bank they had this room with over a thousand mail slots. Every Friday afternoon the mail would come in or be dropped off by our 500 telemarketers. In their packages were their production reports, leads, hours and information on their project. And every Friday a small army descended on the “Mail” project.

I remember the color coded shopping carts – and I will never forget the squeaky wheels moving back and forth over the high gloss hardwood floors. First every package received had to be shoved into the right telemarketer slot in this enormous mailroom. The incoming packages had to contain all the information in the right order or they were tossed into another shopping cart to be sent back to the telemarketer who would have to fix the report and return it the next Friday (yup, they would lose a week’s work). We simply had too many people to allow them to make mistakes that we would have to fix during our very busy week. They learned quickly what had to be done and how it had to be done if they were going to get more work and, more importantly, get paid.

From the incoming packages that recorded all the work from the week prior, another group would scoop up over 500 packages in five painted shopping carts (one color for each client project) and deliver the first round of production recording where each package was opened, the contents analyzed, new leads prepared everything attached put into a color coded manila envelope which was then tossed into the coordinating color coded shopping cart. From there they moved to accounting. Here the envelopes were opened and, depending on their payment order, each telemarketer’s work was reviewed and calculated credits added to his or her profile in the computer (the old ones with the lead screen and green fonts). Credits made it easier to figure a telemarketer’s pay because they were paid in different formats; some hourly, others commission and some by appointments. The credit system allowed us to track the telemarketer by their job and the each credit equaled a dollar figure. The envelope was then filled with a revenue report that would be signed by the manager of that client and telemarketer, neatly tucked into the proper manila envelope and moved to the next department.

The Billing Department would then figure out what we were to charge each client. Using the production reports generated by the telemarketer, each accountant was trained on each client’s system of revenue. They would create the bill for the client and add that dollar amount into a separate report which logged telemarketer’s credits converted into dollars. This was a sophisticated report which I envisioned. It calculated the fixed and variable costs of the company for each preceding week. Our company flexed up and down considerably every week. One week we had 24 people in training, 16 people working sales, and a staff of eight or ten people to answer the phone, run errands, etc. and of course somewhere between 490 and 540 telemarketers working from home. I had built out a very complex but accurate spreadsheet that could account for all the factors - fixed and variable, from heating and AC to gas in the cars and pizza on Friday and Saturday nights which we would calculate to within a few dollars each week.

That final telemarketing report was neatly folded and put into the same manila folder, tossed into the appropriate shopping cart and then brought to my office. An enormous room; my office had a grand oak desk and seating area by a large window in the far corner. In the center of the office there was a huge conference table. There I would sit with the ten top managers and we would pore over every telemarketer report both those on the computer and those in the manila envelopes with the color circles pasted on the front. Are the hours right? Was the compensation to the telemarketer correct? Were new leads in the package? Were the hours accounted for? How much were we charging the client? Had the cash count been right (Oh, yes, we would always bring in somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars in cash every week) What was the telemarketer grade (Each week they were graded on performance - three bad weeks and you did not hear from us again)? Once we had all this done I would sign each and every report which would then go to Bob. Good old Bob, who would sift through all these payment and billing reports to match against my giant spreadsheet to enter in all the data and prove out the week. By Monday morning I would know, within pennies, how much money we had made or lost the preceding week and when you’re billing in excess of $100,000.00 a month that was no small feat.

Once the leads left my room, they were rushed over to the mail room in the appropriate color coded shopping carts. There, once again, the “Mail” army would begin putting every completed envelope in the corresponding telemarketer’s mail slot on the other side of the massive mail room.

Finally, by end of day Saturday, over 500 packages had been received, calculated, audited, refilled with new work, organized, billing completed, pay calculated and were ready to go back out. The march would begin on Sunday morning. Car after car drove up to the vacuum tubes that used to send deposits back and forth from the bank and now served another purpose. A telemarketer drove up, put his or her telemarketing ID in the tube and it was sent off to Monica in the little glass room. She handed the ID to one of ten runners who would dash off to the mail room, one floor up and over, find the appropriate slot, match it against the name and run the envelope down to Monica. Monica would take out the agreement sheet and read to the telemarketer his or her account balance. Once they agreed, the paper was sent out for their signature and then back to Monica for her signature. Then, at long last, the tube, now filled with the telemarketer’s work, was swooshed out to the waiting telemarketer who emptied the tube and sent it back to Monica to repeat the process. This same process would occur over 500 times until the late evening Sunday. On Monday morning we started the process once again.

Those were the first ever Tethered Communities™. They existed about five years before the Internet. I sold the company. I didn’t want to but the price was too good to ignore and the work was exhausting. Even back then I knew America needed to start developing an intelligent process for moving people from office work to work from home and that they would need to create sound and accountable environments where managers would be assured that their people were productive. We were smartly reducing the need to overbuild structures while continuing the senseless migration of talent moving like nomads across the American landscape looking for each new corporate mecca. We put 500 people to work from home and not one of them lived further than 30 miles from the office and we could have sold anything, anywhere.

I miss the days when my life was that busy and that much fun. I know that I’ve had some amazing adventures in my life because I always wanted to try what I thought no one else had. I never stopped believing that someday America would wake up and start looking for an alternative to the way we conduct work in an effort to reduce in-house costs, gridlock, and dependency on foreign fuel and as a means to stabilize our economy. We are at that place. I can only hope that someone sees this, reads about Tethered Communities™ or decides that the way we do business needs to be recalculated. I’ve been ready for 20 years…now I guess it’s up to someone with the vision and guts to match mine.

Tethered Communities™ is the process of deconstructing everything in a singular fixed job function - or department or elements of a function- from the hardware and software to the emails and conversations to recreate them more efficiently in a remote structure. I created the proprietary mathematical process “nTelegenz®”, which calculates statistical as well as organic values to take apart a work position and reassemble it to be more effective; removing redundancies, compressing activity and eliminating dead time to reduce costs and making them more productive. The real value is that you can pick a Tethered Community up and set it down anywhere and it will operate more effectively than ever. Our program invites companies to move these positions to home offices to create seamless home to work environments but they can work just as well in hotels, airports and even cars.

By creating the proper Tethered Community you are reducing over all pay, easing gridlock, reducing dependency on fuel, creating flexible key positions allowing your company to have a global reach without the cost of global presence while stimulating local home building activity and by way of economics eliminating our need for overseas employment. This is easily one of the smartest economic moves America's corporate entities could approve. The argument of maintaining control and exercising management becomes moot when you compare moving positions to homes in America as opposed to moving offices to India.

We’ve come a long way from color coded shopping carts and an army of “Mail” room specialists. Now we use the Internet, math and analytics to reduce real costs by as much as 3-8% and increase net profits by 2-6%. It was just an idea in the 80’s now it’s a certainty –America will adopt some form of work from home regiment. How we get it done will determine whether we get it right or fumble with the process until someone figures out what we at The Bosson Group already know. You can read about Tethered Communities™ on our website, learn about it in my many white papers or now, you can look us up in the USPTO. Who knows, maybe someone will see this and wonder whether it all makes sense to try it. If you do, contact me. I don’t have the painted shopping carts anymore but I've got the program down to a science. An actual and real science. How cool is that?

Frank Bosson
President, The Bosson Group
209 642 2821
frankb@thebossongroup.com
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alphabyters.com

Something rotten…

There is something so Sinatra about these days…

“Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again too few to mention…
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption…
I planned each chartered course, each careful step along the highway…”

As 2011 ends and the election year of 2012 begins we face again the grim reality of an economy that at its best is stalled and at its worst without denial, still declining. So what is the President to do?

He had hoped that this economic quagmire he stepped into when he was sworn into office, would by sudden chance or by way of this vaporous economic “cycle” economists trout out like a powerful thoroughbred kicking at the sand and snorting into the face of all detractors, declaring “see everything comes back around…it’s just a cycle” But alas it did not, in some mysterious and unexplainable way – “Advance to “GO and collect your money” - resolve itself. Had it, he would then stand proudly at the bow of this mighty economic super ship, throw out his arms wide as if he alone embraced and represented all the solutions to our problems , while tucking the blindfold he has worn for all these years swiftly and adeptly into his back pocket, proclaiming to a recovering nation that finally, he, President Barack Obama, brought us back from the brink of fiscal annihilation and we could, with our new found wealth, once again clog the highways and discuss our lousy jobs at some distant Starbucks,

“And more, much more than this, I did it my way…”

He would throw back the curtain of OZ and humble himself deceitfully

“Yes, there were time I’m sure you knew…
I bit off more than I could chew…
But through it all I had no doubt…
I ate it up and spit it out…I face it all and I stood tall…

In 2008 a man who had nothing to lose went for broke. He had some pretty clever people helping him understand this magic trick he would have to pull off – but that’s all you need…the right people with enough smoke and mirrors and you can make anything look like it’s gone away.
But the economy was not on some ridiculous invisible clock that rolled around with curious precision to reset itself at “good to go” every time it failed. Sometimes, like in 1929, it fails and that’s just about it. But he had another curtain further back and he stuffed this curtain with a few trillion dollars. He tucked that money away like an old gypsy woman filling her mattress because she could not nor would trust the banks. His mattress – very intricately woven into his plan- was ironically what that poor old woman so dreaded, and for good reason…they were Obama’s five banks.

The Washington Post lead with this headline last week (Jan11-2012)

Obama defies Congress with ‘recess’ picks

Nominations could provoke constitutional fight

And the article went on to say (in portion)

“Pushing the limits of his recess appointment powers, President Obama on Wednesday bypassed the Senate to install three members of the National Labor Relations Board and a director for the controversial new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — moves Republicans said amounted to unconstitutional power grabs.

Mr. Obama said the appointments, which he previewed during a campaign-style speech in Ohio, were necessary because Senate Republicans have blocked him at every turn. But in making the move, he rejected three precedents, including two in which he played a part,that would have blocked the appointments.”

“For what is a man, what has he got…
If not himself than he’ has “not…
To say the things he truly feels…
and knot the words of one who kneels”…

And with the swoop of a very underhanded and controversial move he appointed his personal liaison to the five big banks where he had stuffed our money those many years ago. Now he had a person he, himself had put in place - his personal goon - setup to go out and get those nasty banks, now very, very wealthy from the interest three trillion dollars can get you over three years, to get onboard his plan and whip this economic disaster and turn it around once and for all, by golly. And so we arrive at the second part to Mr. Obama’s 2008 re-election plan. Otherwise known as,” now that I have stolen 3.4 trillion dollars and hidden it from the public – how do I get it back into the public and take full credit for it?”

The article told us the rest…

“I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Mr. Obama said in Shaker Heights, drawing applause from his audience. “When Congress refuses to act and as a result hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.”

end quote from article...

And with these words and his previous dirty deed, the checkmate was put in place. Now these noble men moving to the marching orders of this brave and independent political figure will somehow manage to get trillions of dollars into the economy and spark employment like tossing a Molotov cocktail into the dried wood of a southern California forest.

We are about to see the magic. Get ready…Get set…

“The record shows I took the blows…
and did it my way …”

It sure was slick – good going B.O.. For the rest of Americans fooled by this terrible deception it is once again time to mosey up to the government’s sloppy seconds trough and feed; at least through this year and most of next. Kinda’ like that chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral – it don’t get better than this!

“Yes, it was my way”

He didn't just beat all republican contenders, he separated himself from his own party choosing to throw them under his fast moving bus and become the President of the people. In all fairness others have trodden this pathway - some not so righteous others more so - from the famous to the infamous. No doubt our beguiling Mr. Prez B.O. put a whole new swagger on this dagger. Oh’, don’t it hurt so good!

Frank Bosson

CEO, The Bosson Group

Wring in the New Year

Well, it’s the beginning of 2012 and we’ve been reading and talking about this year in virtually every capacity and category there appears to be. Frankly, this year’s conversations of final doom are rivaled only by the great computer date-rollover debate of Y2K. You remember that one, right?

So what will it be? Do we believe a rock tablet dug out of the rainforest predicting the end of the corn people? Or, are we inclined to look at our economic future with a cynical eye and wonder when and if we will finally recover; if “recover” is even the right word (hint and spoiler “it is not the right word”). Are these the days of the apocalypse or the days of the some miraculous halcyon beginning? Like most prognostications, the answer is more like a little from “column A” and a little from “column B”.

I’m going to make this short - a pleasant change from my previous writings, huh? Consider this a New Year’s gift from me to you. So unto the question at hand; are we in the last days or the first? Are we counting down on the Mayan calendar to utter doom or are we in the final throes of the most devastating economic meltdown in the history of the vast majority living today?

To address the first question is absolutely mandatory. Every generation since man first became man has believed that they were living in the end days. If you read the New Testament the writers and the readers were convinced that they were witnessing the final days. Surely they felt that way during the collapse of Rome, Bubonic plague, the Little Ice Age, World War I, The Great Dust Bowl, World War II and even Y2K. Have to do a shout out to my man Harold Camping who has not once, not twice, but thrice (look it up) predicted man’s demise. Yet, in every case we humans have muddled through and carried on. So is the myth of end times just that, a myth?

I don’t think so. If anything is consistent about the story of life it’s that to every season there is a beginning, a middle, and sadly, an end. I think we can all agree on two things; there will be an end and we are really, really bad at predicting when that end will come. So, for the purposes of this blog we will address the next year respectfully submitting that the Mayans meant something far different than the end of mankind. And, if the end comes, well, not enough people read this blog (2012 coincidentally but that’s including me at two different email addresses) that my words will come back to bite me that bad.

Show me the beef!

Does anyone remember Clara Peller’s raspy inquest? Well, for those reading who are television advertisement challenged, Clara’s friends were admiring a big fluffy bun when they lifted the top bun to reveal a miniscule patty evoking Clara’s wrath and the iconic phrase, “where’s the beef?” The ad was an enormous success for Wendy’s and entered American lexicon permanently when later that year Mondale leaned over when Gary Hart repeated his “new ideas” phrase to hear Mondale respond “where’s the beef?” Thus was born a phrase and a classic argument in politics. I hear what you’re saying about this latest blog...So where’s the beef?

Rabbit out of the Hat Trick

Think back and recall the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency, when he muscled through a bill he called the “Stimulus Package”. He got that money, remember? He got three point four trillion dollars. I remember seeing graphs trying to explain to me what 3.4 trillion dollars looked like. Hey, I’m a working stiff - you don’t have to convince me it’s a lot of money. But what happened to all that money. You haven’t you seen much of that 3.4 trillion spread around, have you? No? I didn’t think so. As a matter of fact I don’t know anybody who can account for even a fraction of that money.

As the legend is told from Capitol Hill, that stimulus money, which we not only did not have but based on our famous “faith” economics, could not - even in our wildest dreams- possibly asseverate, was handed over to three or was it five major banks to be used to stimulate our battered economy nearly four years ago. So where’s the money? If the banks kept it and are not obligated to explain to the President what they did with it, we may be up a three trillion dollar creek without a proverbial paddle.

If on the other hand, as I strongly suspect, Obama has kept a big stash of that cash for right now, we are about to see the biggest rabbit pulled out of the hat trick ever played out in front of a barely alive global audience. I think Mr. Obama knew all along that he would need something extraordinary to renew a sagging presidency in his end days – he kept that money for exactly this moment in history. If I am wrong and he is not as bright as he appears then he has squandered the money or it never really had the value he thought it would. Either way, if there is no money for the rabbit in the hat trick we are in for a very, very bad 2012.

Year after year, fiscal quarter after fiscal quarter, we watch our hazy half-heartened government officials pull out their pink paint rollers and attempt to paint a rosy economic picture. Didn’t the White House tell us last year that unemployment had finally stabilized and we could count on the American economy to start a slow but steady recovery? That wasn’t quite true, was it? In fact in the last three years there have been 8 (count'em 8!) government presentations to different sub-committees promising that the great recession had ended and bright days lay just around the corner. And after three years, eight different studies, analyses and conclusions we are still sinking in the most toxic economic nightmare we have ever witnessed. If they said it eight times and meant it then they are very stupid. If they said it eight times and didn’t mean it, then they are very cold blooded. Either of those two options do not bode well for you and me.

Joblessness, homelessness and hopelessness -oh my!

The fact is that jobs have hit a low we can’t even compute any longer. Many people don’t realize that in the jobless count given to you by the government they do not list all the people who have simply run out of benefits. Nor do they mention the tens of thousands of independent contractors who are no longer working but never showed up on the unemployment ranks because they are not counted in those numbers. When housing went down it took with it all the ancillary businesses that support housing - and that’s just about everything in America. Years ago we got out of the “making it” business and into the “servicing it” business. We do not have the huge steel mills, car manufacturers or clothing factories – they’re gone.

I promised to keep this short so I won’t go into the whole history of American manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution and the shortsighted avarice of outsourcing in the last two decades. Let’s just say we are very much like a soldier who has long since fired his last round and now faces the enemy swinging wildly with the butt end of his rifle.

Clara eventually found the beef!

In a 1985 commercial Clara Peller, who made “where’s the beef” popular, sold the phrase out to Prego when she declared in their sauce she had finally found the beef. So what is it Mr. President? Have you found the beef?

I suspect Mr. Obama is as bright as he appears. My guess is we are about to ramp up from candle light to nuclear blindness – overnight and just in time for a re-election. Let’s say for the sake of argument that our newly minted president understood in 2008 that no one he knew (and he kept company with a rather intellectual bunch) the depth or constitution (no pun intended) of the economic misery we had stepped in when that mortgage bubble burst. And let’s further say that when he took office he had the wits about him to acquire that money not for some instantaneous and frivolous state funded fribble but to do exactly what he needed to get done – bring him a second term.

The Statue that blinks

If I am right we will suddenly see an influx of cash on a scale that will make the Statue of Liberty blink. The great and not so late President will turn out cash like a drunk on a spending spree. Remember Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions (forgettable maybe but ironically similar)? In Brewster’s Million’s Pryor has a set amount of time to give away a million dollars in order to inherit the equivalent of ten times that.

In this scenario Mister Obama has a few months to flood the economy with so much money that, unless you are deliberately nailed into a dungeon and buried under three feet of fresh cow dung refusing to work, there will be a job for you. Now I’m betting he doesn’t know or care whether this errant dump of feloniously acquired cash will start our economic engine but more to the fact it will get him re-elected. We have to put on our politician hat to understand a politician who can see no further than his or her next term. For the President the stakes of this gambit are ever greater.

So, if I am right. Be prepared to be dazzled. The next four months will see America come to life. If Obama is smart, the money gets invested in the small business engine which is the life blood of our economy. If he is in bed with big business, it will be consumed (inhaled like a junkie on a line of coke) by the greedy Fortune 500 who will promise him employment through his re-election. After that the jobs will dwindle away and the fortunes kept in the top offices of America’s most despicable CEO’s - a trillion to get us up and working and two trillion to keep their lifestyle when the money and the jobs evaporate like water in a shallow puddle on the Texas panhandle in mid- July.

If by err of heart, will of mind or blind luck it ends up in the hands of entrepreneurial America then, just by mistake, Mr. Obama may restart the American engine and slowly relight this darkened world. If he is like most politicians, he will do this with blind ambition or blind abandon but either way look for a good 2012 and 2013. If he decides that even though he can’t have a third term and wants for the good of all mankind saying “what the heck, let’s throw the peasants some cake” – then who knows - he might just become the most beloved President since FDR.

Either way…unless he’s blown the wad, it’s a going to be a good year…a very good year.

God Bless
Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
frankb@thebossongroup.com

P.S. Sorry, Jaffe but I am a Christian first, an American second and a business guy third. So if you don't want to do business with my signature then I guess I don't need your business.

The Inferred-Structure Part 2

America is Falling Apart – Literally!

Roads and Highways

Americans drive 3 trillion miles a year, spending 44 hours stuck in gridlock. Moving over 47 thousand miles of Interstate roads built over fifty years ago, we access another estimated 4 million miles in connecting roads that run through our countryside, small towns and primary cities. All of this is a part of a mad collection of criss-crossing paved and unpaved travel ways built or trodden down over the last four hundred years to make this the most complex road system in the world.

The only time in history anyone ever attempted anything on this scale was 2,000 years ago when the Romans built over 83,000 miles of roads and that was built over a similar period of four hundred years. Their roads, ostensibly built to accommodate troop movement over vast spaces in record time, connected all parts of the known world to the ancients. At that time, all roads truly led to Rome. What started out as a means of moving armies brought civilizations from throughout the known world together for the first time in history. This troop movement strategy was not lost on the eyes of the modern leaders when Adolph Hitler used the German Autobahn to move his troops during his infamous Blitzkrieg. So impressive was that tactic that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as President Eisenhower, signed into law an Interstate Bill of 1956 that would, for all practical purposes, allow American troops to move quickly from one end of the continent to the next; east to west, north or south - to defend our freedom.

No other program in history matched the ambition and sheer volume of this task. Nobody moved more dirt…not the pyramids…not the wall of China – No one! Today, of course, many countries, including China, are working feverishly to construct the roads and highways they will need to connect their empires. China may end up with a far larger highway system than any country including the United States. However, fifty years from now, as fortunes change - and they will - China will face the same dilemma we are facing today.

Patch And Pray

No, it’s not a bumper sticker or a clever political axiom. It is the current U.S. policy toward road construction, reconstruction and repair. Across our country, as our dismal political planning and pathetic greedy corporate façade slowly peels away, we are facing the grim reality of a highway system that is not only broken, it’s crumbling beneath our feet. Cities and states that are bereft of any meaningful government assistance rely on “luck” to keep their roads operable. Over 100,000 bridges in America are in decay and some have risen to alarming emergency need levels. Of the estimated 200,000 bridges in America, both private and public, at least 77,000 need repairs right now! More importantly, 20 major bridges, estimated to access nearly 10 million commuters daily are in desperate need of immediate repair and range from the smallest of the 20; Colorado’s South Platte River Bridge over I-25 with a daily commuter load of 208,353; to the largest; New Jersey’s Route-21 Bridge over the I-80 corridor (the busiest bridge corridor in America) with more than 518,000 daily commuters. That’s over 725,000 daily commuters for just two bridges that are considered to be at emergency level need of repairs. Millions of people go to work every day with the pavement beneath their cars in critical condition – conditions that could give way any day!

It doesn’t end there. As we see more and more streets crippled by degrading pavement, sinkholes, potholes and rusted rebar poking through our bridges all decaying from asphalt to gravel right before our eyes, we have to face the sobering reality that there is no money to fix these problems. America relies on these roads to move all of her products from point of origin to the corner store. Whether it’s tools, office supplies or food for our local grocery stores, everything we rely on to build this empire upon, to comfort ourselves with or satisfy a nation’s growing hunger is, at some point, on a truck stuck in traffic on streets that are disappearing beneath their wheels. And what is our current method of dealing with these critical situations?

“Patch and Pray” was first spoken to life by The American Society of Civil Engineers former Executive Director Patrick Natale. He wasn’t just talking about roads. Nope - the American Society of Civil Engineers had issued its report card on America’s total infrastructure and things don’t look so good. For “Patch and Pray”, Natale was referring to local government’s current policy toward fixing serious road, dam and bridge problems. There is no scheduled maintenance – no ten year plan – no step by step strategy…there is only “Patch and Pray”. Do what you can on the things that you can no longer avoid and pray that something else doesn’t fail. Road and bridge failure is reality of our times that is quickly becoming a certainty.
Electrical Grid
Our electrical grid is an archaic monstrosity which mixes fiber optics with metal cabling and copper wire to create an unstable power core that is on the brink of utter collapse. No one who has any affiliation on a professional level with our electrical grid denies that we have powered through, built over and combined technologies that are not only unable to communicate with one another but, in some cases, can cause failure by association with one another. When one set of protocols from the forties touches off another technology from the nineties, watch out!
No one is saying that we could have, at some point, stopped everything and said “let’s tear this all down and rebuild a new infrastructure in its place”. Undoubtedly this was going to occur as technology outpaced existing construction. Something had to give. The problem is not so much that we couldn’t stop and build it all properly. We didn’t stop to talk about co-existing codes of behavior and put a plan in place to marry these technologies. What was fiber optics going to mean to overhead electrical grids? What are we going to do two hundred years from now with spent nuclear fuel rods? At what point do we begin the process of shutting down sections of this out-of-date grid and bear a slight inconvenience for certain reliability in the future?
There were three major recent blackouts in New York City - 1965, 1977 (I was there for that one) and 2003. In 2003, a switch in Ohio overloaded a system that brought down a third of the east coast and plunged New York City into darkness for two days. Enron engineered power consumption, processing enormous overcharges throughout California. Californians stoically reached out to one another during these manufactured travesties to lend aid to the elderly in danger and hospital patients who faced grim conditions during rolling brownouts.
10,000 power plants of all sizes and shapes, from coal and natural gas to nuclear connecting 164,000 miles of power lines, dot a countryside littered with outdated transformers and unmanned control stations. We suffer 200 minutes of blackouts to Japan’s 6. With America’s electrical needs increasing by 20% per year and the ability to repair our existing grid at only 6-8% yearly, you don’t have to be a math whiz to see where this is headed.
Dams
Nobody knows for sure how many dams there are in America but the number is in the tens of thousands. Most of these dams get little if any inspection. Thousands are orphan dams left behind by coal companies that have long since left their coal camps and are no longer supervised. Thousands of levees like those in Louisiana are attended to by local farmers. Hundreds of earthen dams in North Central California are the only thing keeping the ocean from mixing with our fresh water supply in California and contaminating a water supply that would take years to recover.
In Texas there are seven inspectors for 7,400 dams and they inspected only 239 in 2007. Iowa has one full time and one part time inspector for a recorded 3,344 dams (they estimate) and they inspected only 128 in 2007. The list goes on and on. For states like New York and California the numbers are worse - much worse.

Drinking Water

Americans drink more water in a day than all of Africa consumes for any reason in a month. Potable water is a major concern according to The World Health Organization. Some estimates say that one third of earth’s population does not have or has limited access to suitable drinking water. As disturbing as that may be, we are using up this finite resource at an alarming rate. Not because fresh water doesn’t in some ways replenish itself, certainly it does at least in most advanced industrial nations including Europe, United States, Australia and Canada for example, but in many parts of the world it does not. And despite our best efforts water is becoming more important and harder to access in satisfying quantities.

We are consuming more water of poorer quality than ever in our history. More people putting more demands on limited resources and the natural ecological changes in global freshwater distribution make the future of available drinking water frightening. We read about floods consuming towns adjacent polluted rivers like the Mississippi and areas with normally sufficient rainfall experiencing drought; but because we can still turn on our tap and see water flowing we figure everything is okay. It may not be a problem right now but in the next two decades as more people live longer and birth into our growing population all reaching for potable water while surface quantities diminish, water will become big business. It’s the next fossil fuel where we will see extraordinary pricing.

And why is water suddenly an issue? Water in itself is not but pollution by a strained sewage system that is aging rapidly and seeping into our drinking water is a problem! America has to wake up to the fact that keeping Southern California green in lawns and gardens and the lavish, wasteful use of expendable fresh water to green Las Vegas simply cannot continue unchecked.

The average age of the American sewer system is 50 years old. The 85 mile Delaware Aqueduct is 70 years old and provides half the drinking water for New York City. Because it is leaking up from the ground at the rate of 25 million gallons a day it is literally sinking from below the small town of Wawarsing in upstate New York. Because there is no alternative source for shutting the water down, this town will eventually succumb to the rising waters and simply cease to exist. And because 25 million gallons of water a day to a city the size of New York is such a tiny number compared to what the aqueduct delivers, it simply doesn’t make sense to shut it down to fix it. Unfortunately for the big picture thinkers this is a self-correcting problem. Eventually the aqueduct will collapse, at least in the Wawarsing, area and the flow will be stopped by an act of ignorance.

Will we drink our own sewage? Yup. In fact in some countries recovering waste water to provide drinkable water is already a matter of fact. Here in the United States as our sewage system breaks down we will be forced to make that choice. Contaminates in some water are so bad that towns like Maywood, California (just outside Los Angeles) have only brown water to drink. The government tells them it’s safe to drink. Would you drink brown water with a metallic taste?

It sounds like something straight out of The Wizard of Oz…”Sinkholes, Sewage and Bridges, Oh my!” But we are good at listing our problems, if nothing else. Who has solutions?
Rather than going on with all the particulars of America’s decline, I will simply post the 2009 report card given on our infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

2009 Grades
Aviation D
Bridges C
Dams D
Drinking Water D-
Energy D+
Hazardous Waste D
Inland Waterways D-
Levees D-
Public Parks and Recreation C-
Rail C-
Roads D-
Schools D
Solid Waste C+
Transit D
Wastewater D-

America's Infrastructure GPA: D
Estimated 5 Year Investment Need: $2.2 Trillion

The Crime of Redundancy

Sooner than later we will have to put people back to work adding more cars to an already unstable highway system and insufferable gridlock. These expanded commercial areas will be placing more demand on our electrical system and calling for more sewer and water delivery. Dramatically off balance from decades of irreversible fluctuations in everything from market conditions to architecture, stretching our infrastructure thinner is not a solution we can abide.

The biggest crime in all this is not so much our needs but our insufferable ignorance and systematic abuse of the environment and the existing resources at our disposal. The Bosson Group has a plan to reduce the pressure on all these structures and provide immediate temporary relief. Believe it or not we have a program of abatement that will allow us to catch our collective breath and continue to support our economic appetite. We can reorganize and redirect our capital to fix the most badly affected portions of our infrastructure while reducing gridlock, dependency on fossil fuels and the demand for property needs including more unnecessary connections to water, electricity and road wear and tear.

By strategically deploying our telecommuting program, we can intelligently move large sections of Americans to work from home positions. Tethered Communities™ are seamless home to work environments that reduce employer costs, increase productivity and reduce the demand on power and fuel. These awful problems which are compounded by unemployment will become intolerable with a major shift toward employment.

As Americans we will have to face a grim reality and change our selfish “have it your way” attitude. We are going to have to learn to share and play nice with one another. By using Tethered Communities™ we can begin to ease the burden of redundancy. And in the end redundancy is the single largest factor contributing to our crumbling structure.

For more information contact Frank Bosson at frankb@thebossongroup.com or call 209.642.2821.