I am wired for success. I strive to succeed. I fear failure. I study methodologies which feed success. I pay close attention to others who have succeeded. It is my personal belief that God, the Creator of all, has put within mankind a strong appetite for success. One of the lessons of success is that past successes help fuel future successes.

Don’t believe it? Try coaching a team of athletes who have never won. Nothing will energize them more than that first victory. All the practices, though important, all the peep talks, though inspiring, cannot provide the extreme level of energy that success pumps into the souls of the team members. Just ask my daughter Sara to tell you about the high school girls’ soccer team she helps coach.

As I return back to Greenville SC from Denver for about the 15th time, I am contemplating ways to expand The Worthwhile Company into the West. Making connections, learning of needs, seeking office space, searching for the right team, feeling out the business/technology climate, all these actions help me determine when the time is right to launch out into new markets. But for me, one of the most compelling reasons to expand comes from the encouragement of past success.

Each day I receive an email that summaries our income transactions for the day. I like these emails. It is sort of like getting up in the morning with a pulse, a daily reminder that the Lord of life has granted me the blessing (and associated responsibilities) of another glorious day of life! One of my joys is to use these emails to probe into the details of a customer we serve. It helps me learn how Worthwhile is serving them to make their calling more worthwhile. Today I ran across the following testimony from a customer of about two years. He said “Because of the inherent limits spoken language has with ultimately describing a sensation, I can really only express my experience with Worthwhile in barbaric sounds of elation. If considering Worthwhile, nothing in the world would give me more pleasure than to share these sounds with you.”

Wow! I can hardly express the joy and confidence that flooded my mind. What a privilege to serve a group of employees who are able to (and desire to) work together to serve customers with Internet technologies in a manner which generates this type of response! It empowers and energizes me to seize the opportunities of growth with great confidence that, by the grace of God, our past success will help generate future success!

Let’s go west Worthwhile!

We love it and we hate it. We can’t do without it and we wish we could sometimes. We are tantalized by it and at times tortured by it. What is it? Instant connectedness. The Internet facilitates it. The Web delivers it. Our dependency on it grows, at times like a lush rose bush, and at times like cancer!

My frustrating experience with Norwegian Cruise Lines online cruise registration has painfully reminded why every great website needs a Betty.

My wife and I signed up for our first cruise. We are looking forward to celebrating 30 years of married partnership and friendship by joining several friends along with the former president of our Alma Mater, BJU, for an Alaskan cruise on the Star Ship of the NCL. Part of the process involves an online registration at their website, where my frustrations began. I will spare you the ugly details and get right to my most worthwhile point.

The process assumed I knew things that I did not. For example my name. Now I know, you are thinking, man if you don’t remember your name then you probably need to avoid taking a cruise! You are thinking that because you are human, not computer. Humans are creative and flexible. Computers are fast and accurate. (good place to out in a reference to computational thinking)

What is my name, at least according to the NLC database? Why is that important? The registration process demanded that I start with my name, ship name I was cursing on (oops, lovely iPad/Apple OS auto fix of my mistypings, another blog topic), the date of our departure and finally, the most inhuman information of all – my registration number. The system wanted to make sure I wasn’t trying to hack in and take over the navigation of their cruise ships or something!

I tried every variation of my name I could think of – Dan, Daniel, Edgar (my full name is Edgar Daniels Wooster III, and when I refinance my house it takes about 10 minutes to acknowledge all the aliases I have). Finally in totally frustration I decided this website needed “the Betty function”. So I called Betty Fagge. She is the most awesome event organizer in the world. If I know she is behind setting up a trip, I want to go. I have traveled to China with her and my wife and I are looking forward to this Alaskan cruise, all because of her!

So Betty very calmly and patiently guides me thru the online registration process. It was a walk in the park, once we figured out my name, according to the NCL db, is “E Daniel”! You see, Betty is everything that a computer is not. She is creative, flexible and kind. This comes from being created in the image of One who is all these things and much more, but I digress into another great blog topic.

Now in this age of automation, can a business justify having enough Betty’s on the payroll so “frustrated idiots like me” can call in for a personal guide thru their online systems? Probably not. But yet never under estimate the return on investment value of great, human based, customer service that is only a phone call away ( wow, another worthwhile blog topic, guess my summer schedule is filling up fast). So what’s a business to do if they want software (defined as an automated solution to a problem) to interface between them and their customers? The sales answer in me says “you need Worthwhile” or you can do it yourself if you are ready to assemble a team with the follow skills and expertise.

1. Graphic designer – make things look great
2. Content designer – say the right things in the right way
3. Software designer – make it work right (correct, robust, useable, efficient, secure – just to name 5 of the 10 qualities of worthwhile software)
4. Database designer – make sure you are collecting and storing the data you and your customers will need
5. Production manager – to make sure all of the above are free to focus on their expertise and that everything comes together right
6. Network administrator – make sure the website is properly hosted (secure, efficient, available, expandable, scalable – you do expect your business to go I hope)
7. Search Engine expert – to make sure people find this great website
8. Interaction designer – to make sure the customer experience is worthwhile and enjoyable rather than worthless and frustrating. Hey, would someone please pass this blog to the folks at NCL please?

This world of connectedness can open up great doors of opportunity for your business or ministry, but to do it right, to provide worthwhile interactions with your customers, requires a growing body of knowledge and skills. This is one of the many things that thrills my heart to have the privilege of working with the great team of bit-building experts assembled together at The Worthwhile Company!