Company Retrofits iPods with 240 GB Hard Drives!

(Fortune Small Business) -- Like many consumers, John Mayberry was looking to upgrade his iPod. The IT technician had 50,000 songs stored on his computer, but his 60-gigabyte iPod maxed out at 12,000 songs. And Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) wasn't helping.

Last year the company discontinued its largest iPod, a 160GB model, citing concerns about its design. Currently the largest iPod that Mayberry can buy is 120GB - or half the size of his music library.

That was the cue for Rapid Repair, located in Kalamazoo. In February the startup began retrofitting old iPods with a new 240GB hard drive. The price of the procedure, $300, was the same as the cost of a new iPod, and having the device hacked broke its warranty.

But Mayberry didn't care: He finally had an MP3 player equal to his music library. "I'll hold on to this one for a while," he says. He wasn't alone. In the first two hours the service was available, Rapid Repair received 300 orders - more than its inventory could handle. One month later the company had solved its supply problem and upgraded 500 iPods.

The 1.8-inch hard drives, made by Toshiba, are of roughly the same dimensions as regular iPod hard drives. Rapid Repair clears around 25% profit on each installation. Thanks to swift advances in storage technology, the company appears to have tapped into a market for expanded iPods that the computer giant isn't serving.

"You couldn't have made this business happen 10 years ago," says CEO Aaron Vronko, 26.
In 2007, Vronko launched Rapid Repair with a business school classmate, Ben Levy. Both technophiles, they shared an aptitude for fixing broken cell phones and MP3 players. A business model was born: By 2008 the company had 15 employees and was repairing some 500 gadgets a week, mostly via online orders. Revenues totaled $3 million last year.

By this summer, Rapid Repair hopes to offer the same upgrade service for Microsoft's Zune and other MP3 players. The company's new focus on upgrades involved a major shift in strategy.
"People don't upgrade because their devices are a little beat up," says Dale Ford, an analyst with iSuppli, a research firm based in El Segundo, Calif. "It's more because they think, 'Wow, look at what these new devices can do."

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Leaders: Take a Ride on the "Down Economy" Bandwagon

With a recession in full-swing, now's the time for leaders to re-evaluate and invest in their organization's employees and future. Seems like we've been preparing for this current recession for the past two or three years, constantly predicting it and staving it off as long as we could, all the while listening to the media tell us that it was just around the corner.

And now that it is here—and it is here—we're witnessing a new media-inspired cottage industry building up around the "down economy" and the bad times that are upon us. Every news story seems to have the addendum "in a bad economy" attached to it. I suspect that soon there will be a new "Recession Barbie" doll on toy store shelves, complete with a frown on her face and a copy of the job listings from the newspaper in her hands.

Well, so far I've resisted jumping onto the "down economy" bandwagon, not wanting to contribute to any self-fulfilling prophecy or culture of victimization that can make a bad situation worse. But after numerous requests, I've agreed to share my own perspectives about how leaders can survive and even thrive during difficult times.

Leadership Survival Tactics - The first thing we have to do is ask ourselves a fundamental question: do we believe things will get better? If we don't, if we believe this is the definitive end to any upside in the economy and that it's all downhill from here, then I'm afraid I have no good advice. Aside from moving somewhere that does have an economic upside.

But most of us would admit that this, too, will rebound. Maybe not the same way it has in the past. After all, there are some fundamental problems that we haven't yet faced. But even in the absence of that, there is a good chance that we will experience an economic upturn sometime in the not-too-too-distant future.

And if that is the case, our call to action is clear: use this time to invest in your organization's future, especially when the investment is not a financial one. The best place for an investment right now is in the general health of an organization. I'm talking mostly about improving the functioning of the executive team, and their clarification of and recommitment to the organization's values and purpose.

Doing this will require a little time and energy, but very little money. And it will yield significant returns now, and even more when the economy rebounds. How? A wise executive team will take this opportunity during slow times to build greater trust and behavioral cohesiveness. This will benefit the organization by minimizing politics and infighting, that are common during difficult times, and it will allow the team to make better decisions about which programs and employees need to be retained and which shouldn't.

All of this will allow the organization to emerge stronger than ever when the economy turns around, and with a meaningful advantage over competitors. That's because most of those competitors will probably flail during down times, frantically searching for a tactical way to swim upstream and defy the current, leading to even more frustration and angst than is necessary. In the end they'll simply be more weary and scarred and unprepared. Of course, like so much of the advice that people are repositioning these days for a "down economy," none of this is really new.

Even during good times company leaders should be investing in the health of their teams. But with so many shiny opportunities in front of them, they often fail to slow down and do what it is best for the long term. Now that there are fewer and fewer of those shiny opportunities, there is no good excuse. ..and that may turn out to be a good thing!

For more on Lencioni, read the recent Incentive Interview at incentivemag.com.

FORD: Even IF Sales Fall; Company Can Survive.

Amy Wilson and Philip Nussel Automotive News February 26, 2009 - 11:49 am ET

Ford Motor Co. today said it has enough cash to survive 2009 without help, even if U.S. industry sales drop to an annual pace of about 9 million light vehicles and stay there for the year.
Ford auditors signed off on the company's annual report to U.S. regulators without issuing a "going concern" statement. Ford finished the year with total cash and securities of $15.7 billion -- down from $33.0 billion at the end of 2007.


Echoing previous public statements, Ford management wrote in today's report that the company should survive the 2009 downturn. General Motors isn't so sure. Its auditors are expected to raise doubts about the automaker's ability to stay alive this year.

Things could get worse -
But Ford cited two scenarios that could change its opinion:


• A further decline in U.S. sales beyond current assumptions of between 10.5 million and 12.5 million total vehicles. That is a new forecast for Ford. The company lowered its assumption from an earlier forecast of 11.5 million to 12.5 million vehicles.
But Ford added that even if U.S. sales fall 20 percent below the midpoint of its assumption -- to 9.2 million vehicles -- it "would not exceed our present available liquidity." The risk that industry sales could decline to volumes below that level "is remote," Ford said.


• The company must spend more money than expected to bail out suppliers and ensure parts deliveries. "It is reasonably possible that our costs to ensure an uninterrupted supply of materials and components could be higher than our present planning assumptions by a material amount," the company said.


But Ford said that even under most of the worsening scenarios, it should have enough cash to survive. The company's report said: "Therefore, we do not believe that these reasonably possible scenarios cause substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern for the next year."


GM will have 'going concern' issue -
Earlier today, GM said it likely will receive a notice from auditors who will assess the risk that the automaker might not be able to continue as a "going concern." GM, which has been kept afloat with emergency loans from the U.S. government since the start of the year, posted a net loss of $30.9 billion for 2008.



That ranked as the second-largest annual loss for the 100-year-old automaker, behind only the $38.7 billion deficit recorded for 2007. Last week, the auditing firm Grant Thornton said such notices may be common as auto companies file their annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


"It's important for the public, the supply base and all of the parties involved in restructuring the auto industry not to overreact if they start seeing 'going concern' opinions," Kimberly Rodriguez, a principal in Grant Thornton's restructuring practice, said in a statement.

Dave Versical contributed to this report.

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Another Day: Peering into the Creative Genius of Brian Wilson

How does one of the most highly regarded pop musicians in the history of the recorded song still manage a successful career some 46 years after his first single scaled the charts?

“By being inspired to want to make someone happy,” Brian Wilson responds in a matter-of-fact tone.

Wilson is a rejuvenated, roadready musician with energy to burn when EQ magazine interviews him on a sunny L.A. day. Clearly, this wasn’t always the case. The legendary figure— best known for his contributions to the Beach Boys during their peak years, writing, producing, singing, and playing bass on masterpieces such as “Good Vibrations,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and “California Girls”— was near mad and a total recluse for two decades. From approximately 1968 until 1988, Wilson was entrenched in a battle with drugs and a variety of mental illnesses. An infamous ’70s Rolling Stone cover story depicted an overweight Wilson wrapped in a multicolored terrycloth robe, wandering the halls of a local allnight pharmacy, and rumors of Wilson being diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated for a drug-induced stroke saturated the media. It appeared Wilson was destined to become just another casualty of the rock-and-roll lifestyle—not at all unlike Pink Floyd’s founder, the late Syd Barrett.

With the help of family, friends, and more than a few therapists, Wilson eventually reclaimed his mind and his music, re-entering the world as a solo artist with 1988’s BrianWilson. A series of albums of varying quality and commercial success appeared between 1990 and 2004, culminating in Wilson’s full embrace of the album that almost never was—SMiLE. Assisted by pop provocateurs the Wondermints, wife Melinda, and longtime engineer Mark Linett, Wilson tackled the unfinished SMiLE project—an album that was conceived 37 years earlier, and was considered a catalyst in Wilson’s ensuing mental breakdown. The resulting release was a tremendous success, hitting the Billboard charts at #13, garnering Wilson his first Grammy, and proving to the world that he still had the goods to create the glistening pop music found therein.

It’s four years later and Wilson has returned with That Lucky Old Sun, a full-length homage to all things Los Angeles. Back in the Wilson camp is long-time collaborator Van Dyke Parks (the man responsible for the entirety of SMiLE’s lyrics), engineer Linett, and Wilson’s faithful 11-piece backing band, including multi-instrumentalist/coproducer Scott Bennett and the Wondermints’ Darian Sahanaja. Emboldened by SMiLE’s rapturous universal welcome and several successful tours—and surrounded by what amounts to a loving family of familiar musicians, orchestral arrangers, producers and engineers— the 65-year-old Wilson has created what is arguably his best album since Pet Sounds. With songs such as “Oxygen” and “Midnight’s Another Day,” Wilson recaptures the magic of Surf’s Up and Pet Sounds with ambitious sonic experimentation. And tracks like “Good Kind of Love” and “Going Home” find Wilson singing with a confidence and clarity not evident since his youth, turning out the kind of sun ’n’ fun-loving ditties that made him a household name in the first place. That Lucky Old Sun even references the gorgeous lost Beach Boy’s track, “Can’t Wait Too Long”—a classic example of Wilson’s musical prowess and vocal genius.

After the premier of That Lucky Old Sun at London’s Royal Festival Hall over a year ago, EQ decided to paint an explicit picture of how one of the world’s first and foremost musician/producers tackles the album-making process. This story isn’t about Wilson and his crew’s miking techniques, or tracing signal paths on a track-by-track basis—it’s about exploring the creative process of one of the most mysterious, misunderstood, and unmistakable artists alive.

PART I: BRIAN WILSON ON BRIAN WILSON
Known to be elusive even after his recovery, securing an interview with the former Beach Boy was challenging. But we caught up with him at Capitol Records HQ in Los Angeles for a very brief interview. It immediately became obvious that there would be no lengthy explanations. Instead, what we got was a candid look at the self-perceived simplicity of Wilson’s creative process.

What inspired you to write a concept album about L.A.?

I didn’t write the concept; I came up with “That Lucky Old Sun” theme song. The concept came from Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the lyrics for the narration about L.A.

Why did you want to cover “That Lucky Old Sun”?

I liked it. I thought it was a good African-American spiritual song to do.

The record is very upbeat. Did you feel emboldened coming off the success of SMiLE?

We were riding the crest of the SMiLE album, but we weren’t sure if it was going to be better or worse than SMiLE. Now, I think it is better.

I can see why. It is a rock and roll album that is also very orchestral. Scott Bennett said you worked out the songs at his home studio. Did you arrive with the songs fully fleshed out, or did you work them out at his studio?

I wrote the songs. Then, when I got to Scott’s studio, he and I played around with the arrangements.

You didn’t find the process faster or slower than how you used to work?

A little slower, but it was more efficient.

What sparks a song like “Good Kind of Love” or “Oxygen”?

The chord pattern comes first, then the melody, and then the lyrics.

I’ve read that you would hear the entire production of a song in your head before you entered the studio. Did it work the same way with That Lucky Old Sun?

No. I hear it as we go.

Do you prefer the digital way of recording to the old days of analog?

Yes, because you can make pitch correction a lot better.

Are you tough on vocalists when you arrange their parts?

Yes, because I want them to be right. I want them to be good.

Is it difficult for the background vocalists to grasp your concepts?

No, not really. I go to the piano and sing and play each part for each person. Then, they record as a group. It usually takes from two to 20 takes for them to get it. It varies from song to song. I can’t remember which song took the most takes. I sing some of the bass parts on the album, too.

Scott Bennett mentioned that one of your trademarks is that the bass vocal part is very atypical.
Well, the singers get it very quickly.

There are no breaks between songs. What determined that?

My wife and Scott Bennett and Darian Sahanaja all teamed up to sequence the album. They are responsible for that.

What inspired “Oxygen”? It seems very autobiographical. . . .

It is the story of my life. I laid around and didn’t do anything and was lazy. One day, I started exercising and I started eating right, and getting better sleep at night—stuff like that.

What inspired the melody for “Oxygen”?

What inspired the melody? Nothing. I just came up with it. I usually try out ideas on a synthesizer— a Yamaha.

That and “Midnight’s Another Day” are both very frank and honest. Where did you find the strength to put those feelings in song?

I needed to express myself so I just did it.

What inspired your original stacked vocal harmonies in the Beach Boys?

Ah, a bunch of different influences. I couldn’t even mention them all to you. Bach, for sure.

What music are you listening to now?

I listen to my own stuff, the Beatles, and a station called KTRH-FM 101 in Los Angeles. I listen to “oldies but goodies” all day!

Brian Wilson today...still putting out those Good Vibrations!

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