As a mechanical engineer, I spent a lot of my early years going to customer sites and fixing issues, sometimes ones we created, sometimes not. I worked with maintenance, engineers, managers and execs. When you have a burner that isn’t working, and a customer is losing a large dollar value in product every hour, you have to talk to everyone.

I was never the most analytical engineer. I preferred hands-on work and real world problem solving. My dad was a construction worker and as a kid I used to go to his sites and help him in the summer. As I got older we built a racecar together. I loved that stuff. I have two things that I think helped me stand out in my career: Transparency and the ability to explain things across many levels.

I spent a lot of time explaining the problems to all of those parties in ways they could understand. I have done that in every job I have had.

The physicist Richard Feynman said “if you can’t explain it to a five year old, then you don’t really know it”. It is a good way to think about things. I read this blog post from Shane Parrish at Farnham Street that reminded me about the need to be able to explain things simply.

It dovetailed into something I have been thinking about with PhoenixGK, which is the question “how do you convince people that buying analytics for their 12 – 18 year old kid is worth it”?

The reality is that I have not spent enough time answering that question. You think because you see value in something others will too. People aren’t sitting around searching the internet for my company.

There is interest in the product, but if I can’t explain to them why they should buy it in a sentence, then they can’t explain it to anyone else and everything falls apart.

The charts and graphs are great, they have helped my kid. But if I can’t articulate how and why in a way people can repeat then I am not going to get many sales. The vast majority of people don’t know what analytics are for or how to use them. I have to change that for every person I talk to.

I think the answer lies in combining everything together in a streamlined way so that a demo doesn’t just show them everything they could do, but shows them in one or two “wow” moments how a keeper could improve their game just by looking at what I provide.

Easier said than done, but if it was easy someone would have done it by now.