Leading the way in business solutions
The story behind SF Revolution's conception and development is a fascinating one, even perhaps more so though is the concepts we attempt to bring back and keep focused on. In 199x, in a chance meeting, Henry Burnsides posed the question to Decline of the think-tank operation Decline inc, "What is a professional company? What defines professionalism."
Decline's response grabbed Henry's attention: "I have been asked that before and I think it is perhaps just a bad question to ask. Every company out there, with all their procedures, and products and what not, all no doubt consider themselves to be "professional" companies. So if what you asking me is what makes a company professional defined by what we actual see these companies doing, then it would be defined as, a lack of communication, both between departments, between upper and lower management, from management to employees. It would be bad accounting practices, embezzlement, fraud. Liberal use of power-point. Leaders more focused on spread sheets, and numbers rather than on what is actually happening on the floor and why, a lack of wanting to really understand why something isn't working. Embellishment of product descriptions. Over promising, profits before anything else, complex solutions where simple ones will work. Red tape, wasted expenditures... stop me when i say something you disagree with ok? I think though what you meant in posing that question is, "What is a professional company, not in practice but in theory of what one considers to be professional." Because if we define professionalism by actual what is practiced, it is something entirely different than what we would naturally want to attribute to that word. So if I am to answer the question I think you mean to be asking, I would first say it is about communication, on any level of professionalism, be it a company, a product, a website, an airplane, anything really. The Wright brothers flew the first plane, an incredible accomplishment, but was it a professional plane? No, there was no way to communicate with those on the ground. At the time was it needed? Well of course not, there were no professional airline companies and as long as you are flying a hundred feet in an empty field you don't need to communicate with anyone. It is the same for a website, it's first mission is to communicate effectively with its audience, quickly and cleanly what is about and how it can help you. Now by communication, I do mean an actual exchange, not one management telling another what it will do, but a two way dialogue of exchange, where things are explained, taken into account, considered and a solution is reached..."
What developed from this discussion was a "fluid" business model, one designed to expand and shrink, absorb, and repel. In house development became a focus as SF Revolution found it to be more efficient to open and build areas as need demanded it. In the words of Henry Burnsides, "It made no sense to outsource something like say web development, if we were going to use it more than once, and then it would become a resource we could offer to our customers, similarly when it came to say a client in need of commercial production, build the department, handle their needs, then offer it in the future. It wasn't a far reach then to look and say, ok we have a recording studio and production capabilities, so now we are a studio. We did it first with ourselves, and as we did, we were able to offer the concept as a solution to others. We did not want short term solutions and fixes, we wanted to create a self sustaining architecture of perpetual motion. We would do it, then show others how they could incorporate this concept."
DECLINE: "We wanted to build a company that could out expand everything around us, that would operate in beta. Not one that would become a lumbering dinosaur. Stay light and move fast, make use of everything around us, absorb it, store it, regergitate something new and exciting."
RISK MANAGEMENT: "Risk management? Nobody knows what it is exactly but you do it all time, its a waste to teach or explain, say you are in a building that is on fire and you make it out, that is risk management working successfully, say you get killed, that is risk management failure. SF Revolution? Well its a little like being a cross between a firefighter and an arson, we want to keep going back in, if you don't your company grows stale, and that's just as bad as being dead."
There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars. The world is a business, it has been since man crawled out of the slime. Our children will live, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality - one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock.
