Had a morning coffee the other morning with Hugh Crean, CEO of Farecast.com.

Meeting up had been on our respective todo lists for a couple of months - a victim of getting bumped by Farecast's recent acquisition by Microsoft.

Coffee meetings are often hit or miss - and this one was a direct hit. Lively discussion, fresh ideas, multiple takeaways. During the course of the fifty minutes, we took a crack at describing each other's services.

Hugh's explanation of what we do was one of the more creative ones I've heard in the past year - and he delivered our value pretty darn well. Didn't record the meeting...so Hugh please excuse any inaccuracies as I transcribe a portion of the talk from memory and notes.

"Mark - If you engaged an architect to help you with the layout of a kitchen remodel, would you propose that your dream kitchen have five rooms? One for the sink, one for the fridge, and additional rooms for the cooktop, dishwasher, and dishes? Didn't think so. Can you imagine? You'd go you crazy - having to unnecessarily open and close doors hundreds of times a week. Instead, you would probably request a layout to allow for convenient access to all aspects of the kitchen...everything within sight, the important things within reach. The goal - convenience and comfort in one of the most heavily used rooms in the house."

[The kitchen angle was one I had not heard...was interested to see where he was going with this...]

"So we agree that most architects and people have the kitchen thing figured out. So why in the hell have people in the workplace not been able to massively reduce the number of times they have to open and close doors to get the answers they need? We are constantly opening and closing files, shooting e-mails out from mobile devices, searching for things in sent items - asking questions about what's coming, what has happened, who owns what, where is the latest file, . Our questions often involve others, causing interruption and directly impacting productivity."

[He drew a diagram on the back of a Starbucks napkin. Five, non-overlapping circles. Outlook, Excel, Word, PPT, Internet. He then drew an oval over the top of everything and wrote Smartsheet inside]

"Here's how I see it. I use Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint constantly. I access the web constantly for a variety of services. My direct team and their respective teams do this as well. Occurs within every company I've been a part of. The problem with these five circles – this goes for nearly all business apps for that matter - is that they don't intersect with one another very well. They are powerful and useful in their own right, but the overarching organization and logical structure of the work managed in them is only as good as the manual effort that supports them. This reality causes each of us time to spend a material part of each day - fifteen or twenty percent? - searching, asking each other questions, calling meetings, documenting decisions, and e-mailing each other updates. Incredible that in the past twenty years a better way to address this problem hasn't come along"

[What Hugh describes is what I call the 'cost of doing business mentality', an often cursed, and frequently accepted mindset that 'work' simply entails having to deal with hundreds of inefficient, pain-in-the-rear issues stemming from not having EASY access to a technology that helps organize, update, and provide clarity to shared work activities]

"So how would I describe Smartsheet? Smartsheet saves people time and provides them a greater sense of control by serving as a central place - in the cloud - for managing work with others (he points to the circles on the napkin). It lets you better track and update your work - lists, tasks, docs, assignments, next steps, decisions - the very things people spend too much time on today."

Hugh didn't accept my on-the-spot offer to join Smartsheet as a sales associate, but I thought the meeting was well worth my time nonetheless.

As you sit at your desk today, grab a piece of paper and pencil a mark each time you open and close one of those 'unnecessary doors'. At the end of the day, answer this question: "Are you sitting in a one-room or five-room kitchen?"

Thanks again for the time Hugh. For those of you who haven't checked out Farecast.com, you should. I pitch it as 'the Smartsheet of Travel Search'. Provides you convenience, confidence, and exceptional control when booking best price travel.

One last thing, if you had to sharpen your pencil a couple times while completing the open and close door counting exercise, use Smartsheet.com.  We can help.