Quintified

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.” My friend Matt MacDowell of 360Skate and Pacific Medical and I have talked about that quote for a number of years, but the problem for me has been settling on a “Vienna” to take, as there are just too many great (fun!) opportunities out there. As a result I’ve lacked a singular focus.

Today I was at a GrowthCLUB 90-day planning session with ActionCoach Reggie Shropshire (highly recommended!) which wrapped up thinking I’ve been doing the past several weeks.

I now have my Vienna.

I left GrowthCLUB with 6 goals for the quarter but they all feed one main goal — the one thing I am going to focus on regarding business this quarter, this year, and on into the future. Everything I do professionally will be in light of that one thing and will be evaluated by its effect on and contribution to the realization of that one thing.

After years of entrepreneurial thinking and endeavor among a myriad of pursuits, I’m pumped to have just one thing!

Last Wednesday I was working at the Connection Cafe when my laptop froze up and didn’t come back up when I tried to reboot it. Instead it ran Windows’ version of “check disk” and found and supposedly fixed some errors, but the laptop wouldn’t come back up. Major hard drive crash. Argghhhh!

I was there to meet with Kent Milholland and asked him if he recommended anyone for laptop repair, and he referred me to Your Computer Friends. I dropped off my laptop that afternoon. Long story short, Your Computer Friends had to restore Windows Vista, meaning I had to reinstall all of my programs, but they were able to restore my data to a “Restored Files” directory, meaning not only did I not lose any data, but I didn’t have to restore from Carbonite, which would have taken a good while.

If you are not using an online backup system like Carbonite or something similar, start today. Hmmm. I just realized I need to set Carbonite up on my restored PC!

Thanks, Your Computer Friends! I hope I don’t have to see you anytime soon though!!

I realized sometime on Thursday that someone I had had lunch with the previous week probably fixed laptops too, so I’ll give a shout out to Craig Fortenbury and CMIT Solutions.  They “can completely offload the burden of troubleshooting, securing, and maintaining your computer network for a very affordable monthly rate.”

I read somewhere once a recommendation to have a “virtual board of directors”– a hypothetical one, not just a literal one like I found references to online while trying to find the source of this idea. This virtual board of directors is composed of business/thought leaders whom you know and respect well enough that they can both ask you good, hard questions about your company and answer questions you have for them, with you holding all the conversations in your head.

For example, Tom Peters in on my imaginative board of directors. I’m quite familiar with his many books and thinking, and I have a good feel for the “hard” questions he’d ask me if he were at a real Quintify BOD meeting. And if I stopped and asked myself “What would Tom Peters say to me if I had a one-on-one with him and he knew my situation?”, if I sat and thought about it for a bit I’d be able to answer that fairly accurately.

I want to “flesh out” this vBOD more, but here’s my preliminary list, with a key theme or two for each (of many themes most provide).

• Tom Peters — WOW work done by WOW teams (PSFs) comprised of WOW people. (”And why is your vBOD made up entirely of non-young white men???”)
• Seth Godin — Forget “mass” anything regarding advertising or probably even product development
• Paul Graham — work hard and add incredible value quickly, taking the harder path whenever two options present themselves
• David Thomas — author of The Pragmatic Programmer — his discussion of code generators in that book lead to much of what drives Quintify
• Dave Ramsey — pay it out of cash flow after your emergency fund is built!!!

About time for a board meeting!

Two questions for you:

Anyone else you’d recommend me to add to my virtual board of directors?

Who would be on yours?

Reid

One area that excites me a lot is taking the mundane out of work. “Automate the automate-able”. This frees up workers to do higher-value-added work, “inspired human work”, which is both more rewarding and more fun. That kind of empowerment is one aspect of mass prosperity. (And for those comfortable with their mundane tasks and not wanting to change, well, the future is going to overwhelm you with or without Quintify making its mark…)