Quintified

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…)

The time has come to build the company and build the team.

Fun!!!

(In the meanwhile I sure am working a lot!)

I wrote this back in 2005 but it still stirs and drives me today.

– The ubiquity of the web (connecting everyone to each other and to every thing)

– The power of the database (store, access, and process info)

– The cost structure of today’s technology (e.g., the LAMP platform (i.e., none of this has to cost that much))

to provide individuals and organizations WOW tools that

– allow them to do new things that enhance the quality of their lives

– allow them to automate the mundane in order to have more time for more worthwhile things

– connect them to others in new, novel ways

– allow them to capture, organize, search, and share their info and keep it as long as they want it

– quite simply: significantly enhance their lives

Tomorrow I’m going to be the guest on The Business Coach Radio Show with Reggie Shropshire (Wednesday, Sept. 17 on WAAV 980 AM). We’re going to talk about “How a Great Database Can Add Incredible Value to Your Small Business”. I’m looking forward to it!

When offered to do this, I picked the last possible date on the list, knowing that this would be a great time to finally get a website but that I’d need some time to work it in. But with everything else going on, tonight has been “get the website ready enough for the show.”

So, after  building so many websites and databases for so many, I now have my very own. It’ll hopefully get tweaked to death over the next couple of weeks, but with all the standard caveats, here’s the link:

www.quintify.com

Oh — in case you haven’t heard I’m going to no longer use Majan IT. Nobody knows how to pronounce it, and nobody can remember it (even those who have been my client for years), and it sounds (and is) foreign. So now the company name is Quintify Database Solutions. “Quintify” is a made-up word just waiting to be filled with our brand.

Next on the “working ON the business” list — a design for this blog!