Quintified

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

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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 Many small businesses are using outdated means to store their contacts, do process management, and provide actionable reporting.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!

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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.

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The Five Questions
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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.

I don’t do the normal social scene that well, but here are three evenings I’d LOVE to spend with my business-minded friends.

1. A night of Pecha-Kucha — each person talks through exactly 20 Powerpoint slides of exactly 20 seconds each about their business or some aspect of it. Ideally this would be a Pecha-Kucha throwdown, with bragging rights to the winner. Done right, I can’t think of what would be more fun.
2. A weekly Duct Tape Marketing work group. Not a discussion group in which we talk about how we should be doing John Jantsch’s recommendations, but rather a “here’s what I did, here’s what’s working, here’s what I’m going to do next week” accountability pact.
3. Volleyball at Capt’n Bill’s. I love playing with my friends at Queensboro — we’re actually pretty good! Over the years the “shop talk” between games has helped a lot to bond people from different departments together, and I can see such bonding with business-minded friends having a good networking effect in addition to being a lot of fun.

Now that I think about it, here’s a fourth:

• A bi-weekly Art of Profitability study group, doing one chapter at a time. I’ve listened to the audio book many times and keep telling myself, “Sometime I need to dig into this deep, do all the recommended reading, and most importantly, THINK HARD.”

Like I said, I don’t do the normal social scene that well…

Pecha-Kucha, anyone?

Microsoft sponsored John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame to write a freely available 23-page ebook on social media called  Let’s Talk: Social Media for Business. (For those who don’t know, I’m a big Duct Tape Marketing fan (particularly of the book) and once told Liz that should anything ever happen to me, she should consider becomming a Duct Tape Marketing coach.)

Speaking of the book, Amazon apparently has a “bargain-price” on the hardcover edition for $5.99! I just ordered four to give away — so much for not spending any money in 2009!

I recently heard Dave Ramsey tell a distressed caller something like, “You need to do ten years’ worth of work in the next three months.” That motivated me to contemplate my situation and to wonder, “What would it look like to get ten years worth of work done in three months — what does that mean?”

Fortunately for me, my situation isn’t bleak like Dave’s caller’s, but this “10/3″ challenge motivates me because I see so very much opportunity at the moment with my Vienna — now is the time to march!

But as I sit here, eleven hours into my workday, I find myself wondering if New Hanover High School is playing soccer tonight, and I remember that my son wants me to play a rented Wii game with him before it goes back to Blockbuster in the morning.

I’m not sure I know exactly what 10/3 would look like, but I know what it wouldn’t look like. I need to eliminate everything that’s not important, and work hard when I work, and work a lot, and see where that leads. (And sometimes soccer and Wii with son IS important, and blogging!

As an aside, Paul Graham, another member of Quintify’s virtual board of directors, has an excellent essay on compressing work and the reward that can ensure from that. Most highly recommended.

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!

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…)