Quintified

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.

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.
    

(an email to my wife while she and the kids are spending a month of summer vacation with her parents in Texas)

One of the books I want to use my “reading coupons” for is “Thou Shall Prosper”. It’s by a Jewish Rabbi who discusses why, based on their world view, the Jewish people have historically done well financially.

A main idea in the book is that money made is a natural result of service to others given, in the idea of “I’ll give you my money if you do something for me that makes me better off.” Consequently, someone who isn’t making much money typically isn’t serving others well, in the sense of “value added”.

A metaphor the author uses is, “A dollar in your pocket is a certificate of appreciation that someone has given you for what you have done for them.”

Of course, there are major exceptions, such as missionaries in other parts of the world who are serving God through trying to serve the people there, and there are non-profits here that try to serve poor local populations, and kids’ allowances are given for other reasons, and governmental assistance, but 90% of the time in a free market economy, people make their money through serving others, either directly (e.g. Quintify and other small businesses) or indirectly (e..g. serving your boss while working for a large company that in turn serves a whole lot of people).

So in a sense, saying “I don’t want to make a lot of money” can mean “I don’t want to work harder or smarter and in so doing serve a lot more people.”

For me, for Quintify, this is a very direct thing. Quintify now is serving x people, and it is bringing in y revenue. But if we can get our systems into the hands of 1000x people, who are happily using it and are being blessed by it in a tangible way, Quintify will make 1000y revenue.  There’s no “corporate greed” in that at all — we have a great product, or rather have the potential to soon have a really great product, and we can offer that product at an extremely reasonable price and still make a good profit. If we can do that, money will flow, money which can then be put into use in generous ways or in creating ways to serve even more people.

And Quintify’s product is unique in that it allows its customers to much better serve their own customers, so there’s a multiplying effect.

There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses in this country which are struggling mightily, frustrated men and women who are trying to provide for their families, who are good at some skill or trade, but due to lack of experience and perspective don’t have a good business sense, and their lack of business sense and a business software system is greatly hampering their business, i.e., their ability to serve more people well. A Quintify database can do wonders in such situations, particularly as we develop our library of “how” and “why” to go along with the software and align ourselves with business coaches.

Of course, service to others in the fullest extent needs to have a spiritual component as well, and I need more spiritual ministry as well as increasing Quintify’s “material ministry”.

One small point in all of this: I’m not asking for your help directly with Quintify, but whenever you do work on stuff with me, such as testing Quintify::Business Coach, you are helping me with one of my major ministries, helping me to serve others better, and indirectly helping others serve their clients better.

Another small point in all of this: I have no desire for our kids to “do well in school and get a good job and make a lot of money.” I do though have a strong interest in them being able to serve a lot of people both spiritually and materially, and in them being able to provide for their families well (better than I’ve done for my own so far), and in them having options, e.g. the ability to live wherever they think God wants them to live and to do whatever God wants them to do. Again, it is God who provides as He guides, but He’s put us in a world where by default our financial means is directly correlated to our service to others.

So one of my pressing questions is, how can Quintify serve many more people? How can we get what is now significantly helping a relative few into the hands of the masses?

As a computer programmer, I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow — both the website and the podcast, and I was thrilled when Stack Exchange came out so that anyone can have their own Stack-Overflow-like website on their topic of choice. Today I took the time to set up Quintify’s Stack Exchange website.

Quintify::Answers — found at http://answers.quintify.com — provides a forum for Quintify customers and prospects to ask and answer questions about using their Quintify databases. We anticipate a Quintify user community growing around this over time, and Quintify team members will monitor it to provide regular how-to info for those asking questions.

Right now there is only one question on the site — asked and answered by me — but eventually the site will be a large knowledge base easily accessible by all Quintify database users.

We have some exciting news to share with you!  Quintify recently launched several industry-specific database solutions designed to provide small business owners the tools they need to run and grow their business.  The web-based databases, which are geared towards business coaches, virtual assistants, web developers and small and medium sized businesses, include the following features:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Project / task management
• Quotes, orders and invoicing
• Services and products
• Email marketing
• Time management and time clocks
• Client portal
• Robust reporting
• And much more!

Each database product is offered for a low monthly fee of $55 per month.  There is no contract to sign, no long-term commitment, and no hidden fees.  Additionally, there are no limits to the number of users who can access the system or the number of records that can be stored. 

To learn more about the products or to sign up for a FREE 30-day trial, please visit the websites below.

Quintify::Complete - an ideal solution for small and medium sized businesses
 
Quintify::Business Coach - perfect for business coaches who need to keep in touch quickly and easily with their clients
 
Quintify::Virtual Assistant - great for virtual assistants who need to keep track of their tasks, perform invoicing or other administrative tasks
 
Quintify::Web Developer - amazing tool for those who design and develop great websites

If you know someone who might benefit from one of our products, please feel free to link to this blog entry!

PS:  Know someone who is looking to start up a business for a very low cost?  Visit http://www.mytowndeals.biz for more information on an excellent home-based business opportunity for budding entrepreneurs!

The vast majority of the paying work we do these days involves building, maintaining, and extending very highly customized systems for “small” multi-million dollar companies. Our code generator spits out “single tenant” systems — each client gets their own programming code base. This enables us to customize anything however the client wants to the extreme, since their system has its own programming code, but it makes it a bit of a pain to “back in” new features that we come up into preexisting systems. (Just a bit though.)

In addition to building these types of very highly customized systems for relatively larger companies, my dream and passion has been to provide the power, functionality, and flexibility of the database systems we offer our larger clients to small businesses everywhere. However, to be able to scale well in offering standardized products, our single-tenant model wasn’t ideal — if you have 10,000 customers using your product, you definitely don’t want to have to manage 10,000 copies of identical code, one for each one!

Tonight brought the “aha” that enabled me to enable multi-tenant in our products, and I tied that in to a “free trial signup” form so that people will be able to sign up and get their free trial without us having to do anything. With this automation we can offer our databases to even the smallest of companies at an very affordable price, and soon we’ll be doing just that. And then, for any company using one of our products that wants substantial customization, we’ll be able to do anything they want with their system by “popping it out” to single-tenant status. (Imagine the response you’d get asking Microsoft to customize one of their products just for you! This customization is our bread-and-butter.)

I’m excited!

I’ve stayed up late tonight reading “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wockman. It’s awesome, and I’m very excited about implementing it in Quintify.

For a while now I’ve wanted us to build in a “business development” module into our Quintify business database software to go along with the CRM, project/task management, order fulfillment, invoicing/AR, marketing, CMS, etc. that we already include. I’m going to build Traction’s model into our own database system, and if it goes as well as I think it will, I’m going to talk to Gino’s company about us having a Traction-branded version of Quintify::Complete. (One nice thing about our code generator is that such stuff can get implemented pretty quickly. I’d also like to create an ActionCOACH-branded version using their business development model.)

I’ve heard the things in Traction before — from Michael Gerber, Reggie Shropshire, and others. But Traction really explains things in an easy-to-understand-and-implement way. Or perhaps I’ve been exposed to the concepts enough that they are finally taking root.

Quintify currently has a job posting for a marketing intern. I think this is an awesome opportunity — if my kids were a bit older I’d encourage them to pursue it. (I wish I had the time to pursue it myself!)

The first two resumes / cover letters we got reminded me of what I often see with such things — the cover letters and resumes are form letters, and mention nothing about the specific opportunity we’re offering, or in this case about Port City Deals (a major subject of our job posting.)

Wouldn’t it be so easy for them to say, “I checked out Port City Deals and love it! I can picture a site like this in every metropolitan area across the country, and I’m excited about having a role in bringing that about! While I haven’t done much with marketing a real product at this (young) point in my life, I’m eager to learn as I go and jump in with both feet.” (Better yet to suggest some first steps toward marketing the business opportunity.)

But instead: Here I am. Here’s my background. I can help you, and I’ll benefit too. I’m going to call you next week to make sure you got my stuff.

But did you read my stuff?!?!?!

Agghhh!!