Quintified

(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!!

Information release from Kim LeClair of CFCC’s Small Business Center (Wilmington, NC):

————————–

Database Development for Your Small Business

September 10th from 6-8 p.m. / Room L-107

FREE SEMINAR

I am pleased to announce this NEW seminar that will help many businesses run more efficiently. Below is a course outline of what will be covered. Mr. Reid Wilson, from Quintify Database Solutions, will be presenting this seminar.

Course Outline: Are you currently storing all your clients in an Excel spreadsheet? Are you sticking with a legacy system that no longer meets your needs? Many small businesses are using outdated means to store their contacts, do process management, and provide actionable reporting. As part of this seminar, we will show you the 8 key benefits of having a great database:

• Reduce complexity
• All key info is in one place only
• Productivity gains
• You can scale
• Knowledge to make decisions
• Easy customer contact
• Gives the business owner peace of mind
• Immediate ROI plus builds long-term financial value

I am attaching a registration form for those that are interested in attending. If you have any questions, you can reach me directly at 362-7216. Have a wonderful day.

Kim LeClair

SBC, Cape Fear Community College

Here are five “database” mistakes small businesses make. Each of these can significantly limit growth, particularly when a team is involved.

1. Trying to use MS Excel to do things it wasn’t intended to do
2. Using file folders to keep track of their information
3. Using sticky notes and random pieces of paper to keep track of their information
4. Trying to keep everything in one’s head
5. Sticking with a legacy system that no longer meets their needs

These will be fleshed out in future blog posts.

In thinking about what we need in a Customer Education Specialist, and frankly not having time to interview a lot of people one-on-one at the moment, I thought I’d ask candidates to make a phone recording of themselves answering five questions that I’ll be able to easily listen to and share with others on my team for their feedback.

I see this providing me three key benefits in addition to saving me time:

1. Since the position is going to require time on the phone with customers and time making online tutorials with voice recordings and doing webinars, my request to them is not unlike what they’ll be doing with Quintify, and someone who can nail this is (more) likely to be able to nail a screencast or webinar too.
2. The request is complicated enough that it’s going to weed out those who can’t closely follow fairly involved directions.
3. The request is off the wall enough that it’s going to weed out those who really aren’t interested in joining the Quintify team.

Here’s the email I just sent to the candidates. We’ll see how it goes!

—————-

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in our position.

For the next step in our hiring process, we’d like you to answer the following questions by calling (646) 200-0000 and then answer the questions over the phone — your responses will be recorded. (This is a free service called “Cinch” that is provided by BlogTalkRadio.com.)

If you’d like you can answer them all in one phone call or you can answer one question per call, calling back several times. Please take about 1-2 minutes per question answered.

Don’t call from a phone that has caller ID blocked, as your phone number is needed for us to listen to your recordings.

When you do this, please email me the phone number that you called from. We’ll then be able to access your recording by a web address that looks like this:

http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/9105471647

The last part will be your phone number, not mine.

Not to confuse things, but if you’d rather record youself on your computer and then email me the MP3 file, that’s fine too.

——————
The Five Questions
——————

1. In a minute or so, please describe yourself.

2. What is your favorite computer software, and why?

3. Professionally, what is your single biggest “braggable” in the past five years? That is, what’s the coolest thing you’ve done during that time?

4. What background do you have in helping others learn and/or succeed?

5. Based on the job description found at < http://www.quintify.com/customer-education-specialist.html >, why do you think you would be a good match for this position?

Don’t worry if you have some false starts or you feel you have a “dud” answer. Just call back and answer the question again.

Please complete this by 5 PM on Monday, April 6. We will begin face-to-face interviews on Tuesday, April 7.

Thanks!

Reid

Quintify Database Solutions creates custom databases for small- and medium-sized businesses.  Our web databases are used to run entire companies — CRM, marketing and sales, project/task management, order fulfillment, invoicing and payments, HR, time clock, and more. Our clients love having one system for everything instead of having to log into different systems for different functions, systems that don’t “talk to” each other.

In particular, we offer standard turn-key web database products that can then be customized to exactly meet our customers’ needs. In addition to our primary product, Quintify::Complete, we are also developing products for multiple niches, starting with business coaches.

The Value We Offer

Way too many small businesses encounter significant inefficiency and ineffectiveness due to lack of a proper information system. They try to keep things in MS Excel, or sticky notes, or file folders, or simply in their heads, and in so doing information and things-to-do fall through the cracks, and communication with their customers is problematic enough that they just don’t do it. Even those who realize they need a database shrink back from their own ignorance of such things or their fear that a proper database for their company would cost much, much more than they can afford.

Quintify’s primary product provides incredible database functionality to its customers for the cost of $55/month. Then, for those customers desiring customization, for an additional fee we can enhance their system to do whatever they’d like it to do.

For our “mass niche” products, we will provide (for example) business coaches a system that has been “pre-customized” based on best practices from close input from other business coaches. Then, again, these systems can be further customized according to each customer’s desires.

Our databases have already revolutionized organizations, and as we roll out to the masses, I believe we can revolutionize small business itself.

On Being Entrepreneurial

Quintify is committed to creating innovative new products and services to small- and medium-sized businesses in Wilmington and beyond.  By providing a low-cost solution with an incredible amount of functionality built-in, and then allowing customers to request enhancements in whatever ways they can imagine, we can offer phenomenal value at a cost structure that provides us a nice profit as well.

Our databases are web-based and have a sophisticated role-based permissions system built in, which will allow our customers to connect with their vendors, team members, and customers in new ways by allowing their partners to have log-in access to their systems, with them only being able to see what our customer wants them to be able to see and to be able to do only what our customer wants them to do. As the world becomes ever more connected through the power of the internet, our customers’ Quintify databases will be there to enable them to make the most of this.

Our Competitive Advantage

Our “secret sauce” provides us a significant competitive advantage.

Over the past several years I have built a “code generator”, a “program that writes programs”, that we call “wm”. Instead of creating a new database system from scratch, or even starting with something done in the past and having to rework it to meet new specs, we instead describe the database application in a set of config files. For example, a system’s “customer” config file tells what fields are used to describe a customer along with various behaviors for those fields, what other tables are linked to customers, any startup values that are needed, etc. Once all of the config files are ready, wm then uses those config files to build the entire system. Config files are reusable from one project/database instance to another, and many customization requests can be fulfilled by simply modifying the config file and then regenerating the code for that “thing”.

While I started working on code generation years ago to abstract out the repetitive aspects of web development, the main guts of wm were created during a massive project in which I did all of the programming migrating a 25-year-old, multi-million-dollar company off of its complete legacy system to a web-based one. (They subsequently entered their golden age.)  There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in wm in addition to the functionality that allows us to offer fully customizable, feature-rich, inexpensive products that should thrive even more during economic downturns due to the efficiency and effectiveness we increase.

wm has been used to create many different kinds of databases and is an incredibly flexible platform to build on. In a nutshell, Quintify exists to use the power of wm to revolutionize small businesses everywhere.