“Drawing upon our technical expertise, and demonstrating our loyalty to our patrons and our staff, PureGeek aims to provide unsurpassed customer service to our community.”


That's the PureGeek Mission Statement. When I was told that I was going to have to write a mission statement, I quailed. I started looking around to see if Scott Adams was lurking nearby sketching me for an upcoming Dilbert cartoon. The buzzword laden silliness that issues from the Mission Statement Generator game at Dilbert.Com was the first thing that leapt to mind. There was no way, I thought, that I could write a mission statement. Then I got to talking to John, a coffee shop acquaintance, over at Evo's Coffee house and he settled the issue for me. He said that he has been in several situations throughout his life that have led to his being required to write a Mission Statement and he had learned that it's not as difficult, nor as lame as I'd been led to believe. He said you need to keep three things in mind when you write a Mission Statement:


1. Vision

2. Purpose

3. Values


He said those are the questions that your Mission Statement must answer. What is your Vision Of The Future, for yourself and your business? What is Your Purpose; why are you doing this in the first place? What are Your Values, and the values that will determine the way your business conducts its affairs? Well, it turned out that I had known my Mission Statement all along. I had been telling it to people for years. All the time I was planning this venture, and all the people that had asked me why I was doing it, what I expected it to be, and to do, and how I expected to differentiate myself from the others already doing similar things in the Ashland area had heard my Mission Statement. Well to be fair, they had all heard a bit more than that. Now my task was to condense the answers to those questions down to a statement, rather than a manifesto. I finally did that, but the manifesto still clamored for release, so I am writing this explanation of the Mission Statement as a way of expounding on the ideas behind the Mission Statement.


So here it is again: “Drawing upon our technical expertise, and demonstrating our loyalty to our patrons and our staff, PureGeek aims to provide unsurpassed customer service to our community.”


Catchy huh? I'm starting to really like it. Let's parse it, shall we?


“Drawing upon our technical expertise...”

This is the Vision part of the equation. My vision of the future for myself and my company is that when someone has a question about computers or the Internet or anything that relates, I want them to think of PureGeek first. I want them to think of the technical experts that run the place, as well as their honesty and lack of bravado. I want us to be recognized as among the foremost experts in the field locally. I want people to know for a fact that we don't know it all, and that we don't pretend to. I want them to know that if they ask us a question, they will get either a correct answer, or a definitive location of the correct answer. Just for a quick example, if someone asks anyone at PureGeek about Macintosh/Apple stuff, there is nobody here who will try to answer that question. The reason for that is we are not the Mac guys. We just don't use them. And why would we guess at an answer when Alan B. Oppenheimer lives right here in Ashland? If you have a question about Macs, Alan is your guy, just call Open Door Networks. And if someone wants a “Real Website”, we will gladly give our opinions on what makes a good site, and what doesn't, and give the novice website owner an idea of the different types of sites she/he could have made, but when it's time to build the site? We send them to Project A. Creators of Site-in-a-box, an award winning website content management system, Project A can create a beautiful and functional site for any customer. As for laptops and other computer repair needs, we don't like to take apart other people's laptops, because at some point they want them put back together again. Pierre Petetit, at Personal Computer Technologies is the one to help with those. He has the contacts to get the laptop parts, and the tools to install them. Pierre has a shop in town and when someone needs to be able to drop off a computer for repair because for whatever reason they don't want a repairman in their homes, we send them to PCT. Pierre, conversely isn't that fond of leaving his shop unattended to go into the field, so if a customer isn't too excited about dismantling their computer and transporting it to the shop, he often refers them to PureGeek to have their problems solved onsite.


So I guess the term “Drawing upon our technical expertise...” actually means “Drawing upon our technical expertise and our knowledge of the local tech community and the industry both locally and industry-wide.” We know things. And if we don't know the thing YOU need, we can most likely send you to the ones that do!



“...PureGeek aims to provide unsurpassed customer service to our community.”

We're skipping to the end for a moment, we'll get back to the middle soon. This is the Purpose part of the equation. Why are we doing this? Well, Bill Weston and I have worked together on and off for over ten years in this industry, in this market. We started together at InfoStructure, Bill as one of the brilliant minds that kept mind.net's services up and running in the early days of consumer-grade internet, and myself as the Head of Technical Support, supporting our customer's entry into this brand new world of of the World Wide Web. Then Bill went to work in New Orleans for a couple years, and I eventually parted ways with InfoStructure. Bill returned to Ashland shortly after that, and just in the nick of time. I had been hired by the Ashland Fiber Network temporarily, until they could find a new network administrator, and I needed a little help with a couple projects that were over my head. I suggested that we contract Bill to help out and he wound up landing the Network Administrator job now so ably manned by Chad Sobotka. Most recently Bill and I both did time at Ashland Home Net.


In all three workplaces that we shared, we saw examples of both stellar and abysmal customer support. At InfoStructure we were both in positions whereby we could reward stellar customer service and correct abysmal support. At AFN, we got to interact with all the AFN partner ISPs and had first hand experience with who was providing stellar support and who wasn't, and exactly what they were each doing well, and what they were each doing poorly on the technical support front. And in all three instances, we were in agreement that it was more fun to be helping people than to be explaining to them why we were refusing to help them. There are horror stories all over about the lack of support some customers have received from Charter, Qwest and other huge corporations that don't value their customers and view them as just another asset the company can claim to their stockholders. There are even three local ISPs who have outsourced their technical support duties to people in other cities and other countries because it costs less, and the support is “good enough”. Well we just can't believe that people will sit still for “good enough” customer service, and we believe that they shouldn't sit still for it, and we believe that if they had a choice, they wouldn't sit still for it. So our purpose is exactly as stated: To provide unsurpassed customer service to our community. These people, these fellow Ashlanders, these friends and family, these family of friends and friends of family, deserve better treatment. The Ashland Fiber Network is a beautiful thing and Charter, and Qwest can't touch the speed, reliability or the localness of the service. With a product that superior, why do these conglomerates have even a single customer in the City Of Ashland? We believe that they shouldn't. We aim to provide the best support of the best broadband product in this market, and we think that our fellow Ashland citizens will reward us for our efforts with their business.



“... demonstrating our loyalty to our patrons and our staff...”

Now back to the middle and most important part of our Mission Statement. This is the Values part of the equation. The phrase “...loyalty to our patrons and our staff...” is laden with import. First of all, although it sort of calls two ideals, loyalty to patrons and loyalty to staff, I stated it as one statement on purpose. I submit that there they are the same. I believe that everything you do or say, every policy you enact, enforce, or through hindsight, do away with, must answer loyalty to patrons and staff. Some businessmen will tell you that often the two concepts are dichotomous. Hogwash.


In the large picture if you are remaining loyal to your customers, you are helping to ensure the health of your business and therefore providing job security to your staff. Is that enough? NO! If you remain loyal to your staff, you will probably get some of that loyalty back, and your staff will do good work, thereby ensuring the health of your business and your customers' ability to continue to get the service. Is that enough? NO!


“The big picture” is by definition short on details. When you look at a satellite image of the Rogue Valley, it's a big picture. You see the hills, the rivers and lakes, maybe the roads and the larger land marks, and you get a pretty good idea of what the area looks like. But does it tell you what it is to live here? Not by a stretch. The details of the social and political differences between Ashland and Medford. The economic and social impacts of the timber industry's curtailment, and the resentment felt by those displaced workers and their families. The constant ebb and flow of the tourist industry in Ashland as each Oregon Shakespeare Festival season comes and goes, and both the resentment of some Ashland citizens that their town has become defined by that tourist trade to the detriment of the locals, and the relief of others that the tourists are back and they can go back to work and pay their bills. The same with the Southern Oregon University students. Here they come! There they go! And whether they are here or gone, as with the tourists, both states have their own ups and downs. The big picture doesn't show the important details.


When discussing customers and staff, it is easy to get lost gazing at the big picture. It is easy to let the bottom line obscure the line items. Every customer is an individual human being with their own worries and cares and likes and dislikes. Every employee is an individual human being with their own worries and cares and likes and dislikes. How they feel about the environmental issues so prevalent in southern Oregon, how they feel about the influx of tourists and students, democrat, republican, libertarian or green party, christian, jewish, atheist or agnostic, single, single with kids, married, married with kids, in a relationship not in a relationship, straight, gay or both, they all have personal lives that have little or nothing to do with your business. You cannot be all things to all people. You cannot please all of the people all of the time. There's a sucker born every...oh wait, that's something else. What I am trying to say here is that there are actual live people behind every customer number and employee number, and that if you lose sight of that and run your business as though those people were just interchangeable cogs, you are doomed to fail.


It is my assertion that having happy customers when you have nothing but apathetic, disgruntled, overworked and underpaid employees is impossible. Does a well paid, well-gruntled, engaged staff who love their jobs and love their company, and love their boss assure happy customers? No, but I think it's definitely a large chunk of the journey well behind you if you have those things. Too many bosses, behave as though we, as a society, are still in the time at the infancy of the industrial age, when there was a literal line around the block of people waiting to take your job if you didn't take enough crap fast enough. Sorry bosses, those days are over, and good riddance. Now you have to treat people like fellow human beings. There are even laws to facilitate this. Unfortunately they don't go far enough, and it is up to us as responsible businessmen and responsible human beings to fill in the gap.


My speech to new employees says in part, “This job is not the first priority in your life, and it shouldn't be! I don't even care what your first priority is – Wife? Kids? Both? Significant Other? Church Function? Concert? Movie Opening? I don't care! What I do care about is that you are able to attend to your first priority, and I will help you in that however I can. In return I hope that the company might come second, and that you will help me help others meet their first priority.” This is an attitude that I have found to be if not unique then extremely rare. This is how I ran things as the head of technical support at InfoStructure and it worked pretty well. We had a good team and everyone helped to make sure everyone got their first priorities met, and that the company had enough people on duty to keep things running smoothly. I never refused anyone time off, and we rarely had anyone abuse the system, because as a good team, we had jelled into a group of friends and nobody wanted to leave their friends in the lurch just because they wanted to go out of town for a day or two.



“Drawing upon our technical expertise, and demonstrating our loyalty to our patrons and our staff, PureGeek aims to provide unsurpassed customer service to our community.” Vision, Purpose, Values. Once I knew what I was trying to say, I realized that I had already been saying it. Boiling it down to its essense turned out to be easier and ultimately more meaningful than I had suspected that it could be. Our Mission Statement is just that: It's a statement of our mission, and I think it came out okay : )