Quintified

Quintify has a new client who’s going to use iPads to access their web database, and we’re also moving toward mobile app development including iPads, so we reached the point where it made sense to get an iPad 2 for development and education purposes.

Until today, I had seen the iPad as a media consumption device for watching videos, surfing the web while watching TV, and playing games. My mindset is much more production focused, so I was never that interested in iPads. (And, as an aside, my “media consumption” assumption about the iPad led me to think we’d be much better off getting a 3G iPad, which we did.)

However, now that we’ve had one for four hours, I must say I’m totally amazed at the “production” capability in it. My oldest daughter, the main benefactor of the iPad, had already picked out music composition and drawing apps, which she installed once we got home and has been playing with for the past few hours. I’ll say it again, I’m amazed at what she can already do writing music and creating art on the thing. And I took a sample HD video on a demo while waiting at the AT&T store and was super impressed at the quality.

I watched the Adobe MAX 2011 keynotes recently, and remember how they talked about touch being much more natural than a mouse, and how touch was revolutionizing the digital tools we use. I get it now.

We’re a Kindle family — we have five for the six of us — and now I foresee the day when we’rll be a tablet family too, and a family who uses them for creative production and not just passive consumption.

Mattias MacDowell of Raygun Media has been doing search engine optimization for us, and tonight he texted me to do a search on Google for “custom business software“. I did and was surprised to see Quintify in the #8 slot on the front page! Pretty cool!

Mattias is also doing SEO for two of Quintify’s clients, Monarcares (online caregiver resource) and The Casual Edge (embroidered and screen printed apparel and promotional products. (Hannah — mentioned in my Modern Family Farm post — has also done work for both of these clients, including the video on Monarcares’s “Learn More” page.

If you are in the Wilmington, NC area and need someone to help you with your SEO, I highly recommend Mattias and the Raygun Media team. I’ve known him for many years and have been impressed with his resourcefulness and stick-to-it-ness while watching him start and grow two successful companies, 360Skate.com  (skateboards) and Pacific Medical (medical equipment repair), both also Quintify clients.

In the past, kids would help feed feed the pigs, harvest the corn, gather the eggs, and do whatever else was needed to help on the family farm. Through this they met practical needs but also learned the value of hard work, the satisfaction of a job well done, and “how the world works.”

My family has no farm, but I do have a software development company, and I’m excited at how our kids are becoming more and more involved in the family business.

Hannah, 14, is using Camtasia and Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection to create software overview and tutorial videos, and also do some graphic art work. Her Camtasia work is excellent, with her incorporating logo effects using Adobe After Effects, music, still shots, video captures, and a fine attention to detail when editing.

She’s done paid work for three of Quintify’s clients, and now alas I’m standing in line for her to do a major update and extension of Quintify’s own online tutorials as well as a sales-focused overview screencast.

Danny, 13, does testing for the web databases we create, making sure all is well as part of the development process. He’s also spending a lot of time learning Adobe Flex, which will enable us to offer iphone and Android apps for our database systems in the not-too-far-off future. (This has me excited!) He’s also learning PHP and MySQL, major technologies in Quintify’s arsenal.

Haneen, 10, fills out deposit slips and writes checks that I then sign. I’m also showing her how to enter the payments into Quintify’s database system, and hope to soon have her doing our invoicing. She’s also going to be learning Adobe Premier Pro once we figure out to how to transfer videos from our camcorder to the “Quintify laptop”.

And all three do data entry on behalf of clients’ system from time to time, and we plan for them to soon be doing writing projects that will help with Quintify’s SEO as well as give them something “real” to write about.

Micaiah, just turned 6, is about to be given perhaps Quintify’s most important job — making sure Daddy’s laptop is clean enough to be presentable at meetings with clients.

What enables us to run with this is the fact that we homeschool, so we can block out an hour or two from each kids’ day for “Quintify time”, which, I would argue, is some of the best education they’re getting. The other day Hannah met with a client to do a round of editing on a software overview video. During that time — at which neither Liz nor I were there — she not only used her Camtasia skills (information technology) but also got valuable experience interacting with a client (interpersonal communications), thinking through how to best present information to an audience (marketing), and made some money while at it (business 101). I’ll take that kind of education for my kids any day. (And they love doing this work.)

Like on the farm, there’s always much work to do, and I actually joked to Liz the other day asking if she knows any other smart teenage kids we can adopt into our family and put to work. Since that isn’t really an option, I’m now talking to another homeschooling family about getting their 14-year-old involved in some of the things we’re doing.

Side note: Two things we have found particularly helpful in these endeavors is Lynda.com’s training videos and the fact that Adobe offers it’s Creative Suite Master Collection on a subscription basis. We’re able to cover the subscription fees for both of these products through revenue brought in from Hannah’s work with outside clients, with Hannah still getting paid too.

Hi,

Sorry for the slow response. I’ve been meaning to write you a longer email but at least wanted to reply back to let you know that I received your resume.

In today’s economy, with stiff competition for jobs, I’d like to recommend a couple of articles to read and digest that I think could help give you a mindset that will help with your career success. They are over 10 years old but they are classics. (Tom Peters now has books on the topics if you want to pursue his ideas in more depth.)

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/brandyou.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/24/wowproj.html

As the principles in these articles become engrained in your life, they should flow through too to your resume as well.

Let me know if you have any questions about this. I’d be happy to discuss it further with you.

Reid

Too good to not share… Click the image to see the whole thing.

CNN Money has an article today about how CEOs earn 343 times what the average American worker does. They mention paywatch.org, a website by the AFL-CIO that rants against this ratio. Neither website offered a place for comments so I thought I’d make mine here.

Sorry, but I’m sure I add 343 times more value in the work I do than some American workers do in the work they do. But I’m just as quick to say I’m sure there are others who add 343 times more value in their work than I do in mine.

Pay based on value added is only natural. If you don’t want to pay it, someone else will, as long as I can demonstrate and provide that value-added consistently over time.

You want more income? Figure out how to add more value, how to serve more people. (And that especially applies to myself!)

Lots of work to do and we’re looking for a PHP Programmer to join the team:

http://www.quintify.com/php-programmer.html

Business Coach Reggie Shropshire first introduced me to this video by Tony Robbins, in which he discusses how to keep your New Year’s resolutions.

Good stuff — worth listening to at least annually, if not daily!

The total running time is about 35 minutes.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part Four:

Happy New Year! Here’s to an awesome 2011.

Too many people rely on their memory, file folders, and sticky notes when trying to start up a business, whether that business is a full-time endeavor with teammates or an after-hours side thing for now.

Businesses need to keep track of lots of information — leads and clients and the status of each, things to do, products, orders, appointments,marketing promotions and results, time sheets, inventory, employee records, and on and on. If you don’t have a good system in your business to keep track of everything, important to-dos will fall through the cracks and you won’t learn, and thus grow, as fast as you’d like.

Trying to keep track of everything in your head is the worst. You will forget the details of conversations over time, you won’t remember the details of particular commitments you’ve made, and, as business gets busier, you’ll soon be overwhelmed with all the details, resulting in inefficiency and ineffectiveness, lost money and lost time. Then, when you try to bring on team members, they will at best very slowly get up to speed and will frequently need to ask you questions every time something new or non-routine comes up.

Using sticky notes and random pieces of paper isn’t much better, and they will quickly accumulate into a non-usable mess and they aren’t sharable with team members. Something like a Franklin Day Planner religiously used and indexed can work up to a point as long as you are going to be an army of one, but it’s much nicer to have quick access to your entire history with a particular customer on a single screen, and for anyone on your team who needs to see that info to be able to see it.

File folders fall way short too, though they are better than nothing at the very beginning. But they just don’t scale. I once worked for a company that had tens of thousands of file folders, one per customer, with people who just fetched and returned files all day long. (Talk about a J-O-B.) That company now has zero file folders and is incredibly more efficient, and their new system propelled them into their golden age.

MS Excel is where the majority of small businesses end up, but it is so far from ideal, in particular because it is immediately very burdensome to properly add notes and attach documents regarding your various clients, orders, products, appointments,and so on. Adding notes for every non-trivial conversation you have with a customer is a key small-business best practice — can’t really do that with Excel though.

What you need is a single database system to run all aspects of your business, and to capture and store all information about your business in an easy-to-use format that current and future team members can easily access, whether they are in your main office or spread about wherever they need to work.

In the past, having such a database meant either paying a lot of money or being a technical geek and spending lots of time building one using MS Access of FileMaker Pro. Typically those investments were quite worthwhile even when the resulting database was limited to being used on a single computer or local network, but most small businesses just made do with inadequate tools and stumbled along.

My vision, goal, focus, and burning desire is to provide small businesses everywhere with a powerful, inexpensive database they can use to run and grow their business, and succeed. These databases are web-based and can be securely accessed from anywhere you have an internet connection, they can contain all of your business’s key info, and they can be used by all team members, with each team member having access just to those parts they need to have access to.

I have seen how a good database can help make a great company, several times over. I look forward to seeing that much, much more.

Here are 9 “best practices” for keeping track of your prospects and customers in your company database:

1. Keep customer contact info in one and only one “official” place
   If you have various parts of your customer data in MS Outlook, various spreadsheets, and perhaps a file folder as well, you and your team A) won’t be able to quickly get the information you need, and B) won’t know if the information you are looking at is the most up-to-date info you have on that customer.
    
2. Track the source of each prospect / new customer - source type and source detail
   Know who you got from networking, and who from your website, and who from referrals (as well as who referred them). Over time you’ll be able to see what marketing efforts produce the best results.
    
3. Add notes on every non-trivial customer contact (phone, email, in person, mail)
   Don’t rely on your memory! Write it down. This is of course critical if more than person in your company might have a conversation with the customer.
    
4. Segment your customer into various groups
   This is key, as you’ll be able to see what types of customers are best for you, so you that can focus your marketing efforts on getting (many) more of them.

   Here are some example groups — what makes sense for you will depend on what you do and what market your serve:

   individuals, small companies, large companies, restaurants, print shops, service businesses, consulting businesses, web design companies, clients who first bought from you last year, clients who first bought from you this year, etc.

5. Track lifetime sales per customer (and carry that over to lifetime sales per segment and lifetime sales per source)
   Not every customer is equal. Not every customer segment is going to be equally worthwhile to pursue with your limited resources. The more data you have on customer performance, the better decisions you’ll be able to make. Lifetime sales is one of the most important statistics you can track.
    
6. Have a field for whether a customer is on your email newsletter list, and update that field if they opt out.
   Remember the principle of “keep everything in one place” from #1 above, your marketing contact info and permissions should be stored in your company database.
    
7. Associate client-related documents to their account (contracts, scanned-in forms, etc.)
   Keeping client documents on your hard drive or a company file server is not nearly as easy to use for everyone on your team as keeping the documents you have regarding a client directly linked to their account, where you can download them from the client’s page in your database.
    
8. A “date of next follow up” field lets you know who you need to call.
   Remove the “what should I do today?” when you get into work (for you and your sales team) by tracking the date you need to follow up with each prospect/customer and being able to sort and filter by that date.
    
9. A “date of last contact” field allows you to quickly see who you need to “touch”
   Use this to find those you haven’t had contact with in a while. One of the benefits of a good database is it helps prevent things from falling through the cracks — or in this case, (very important) people.