Quintified

Quintify has an outdoor (sand) volleyball team that plays Friday nights at Capt’n Bill’s — it’s a lot of fun. This was our first season, although the core of our team played on Queensboro’s team for many years. The team is composed of former Queensboro teammates, clients, friends, spouses, and myself — with several players falling into several of these categories.

Last night we ended the regular season beating Queensboro, putting us at 12-2 and in first place for the season. We’ll get a trophy for this, and will hopefully win another trophy at our end-of-season tournament in two weeks.

Outdoor volleyball is so much fun that one of my hopes for my kids is that they’ll be playing this sport competitively when they are my age. As much as they hang out at Capt’n Bill’s with us, they should be pretty good by then!

On Thursday (11/12) UNCW will be hosting the Wilmington Area Professionals IT Breakfast in the Madeleine Suite from 7:30 AM - 9:15 AM. The topic will be the “Impact/Future of Cloud Computing.”

I’m going to be one of the speakers, and will spend the majority of my time discussing things we and others are doing with Amazon’s Web Services for cloud computing. This is a fascinating topic for me and I’m particularly excited about Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).

I’ve often said that I’d be Quintify’s biggest fan - even if I wasn’t working for the company. There are so many ways that a custom database can streamline your business and make it much more efficient. One of those ways is being able to do everything you need to do from one location. So many people I talk to are using excel to store their contacts, then are uploading them to an email sending service to be able to communicate to those clients. And then any time they add to that contact list, they’ve got to re-upload their files, taking more time out of their busy day.

With a Quintify database - you can do all of this from one place. Your client records are updated in real time and you can easily add them to specific segments when setting up the client. When you’re ready to send an email blast - you’re working with up-to-date client segments and you don’t have to re-upload your data. Super easy!

Today I recorded a tutorial on the basics of sending an email blast using a Quintify database. People send all types of emails with our databases - from newsletters and announcements to sales and promotional emails. You can click on the tutorial below to get a 7-minute overview of how to send emails to your clients. Creating, testing and scheduling!

In the very near future, I’m going to create a tutorial on how to uitilize our WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor so you can make amazing emails to send out to your clients. For now, here’s the basic overview. Enjoy!

How to Send Emails to Your Clients: http://www.quintify.com/tutorials/emailbasic/emailbasic.html

We’ve added a new tutorial, this one focusing on how to add a client in your Quintify database.  You can view the video below.  We’ll be adding tutorials frequently - let us know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see!  You can view the entire tutorial library at http://www.quintify.com/tutorials.html. 

Now onto the tutorial!

Quintify Database Solutions is hosting a free seminar - “Database Success for Your Small Business”.  Learn how local businesses are using databases to achieve their goals, increase their revenue and become more efficient. 

Speakers will cover topics including email marketing and other CRM, project management, order fulfillment/operations, and accounting.

The seminar is being held Wednesday, October 14th, at the New Hanover County Library in Wilmington, North Carolina.  For more information or to sign up - visit http://www.quintify.com/seminar.html.

UNCW is having “Business Week” this week. Each year the Business School cancels classes for two days so their students can attend various sessions held by members of the business community.

I’ll be one of many speakers. My session is called “Every Small Business Needs a Great Database (and What To Do With It).” It’s at 9 AM on Wednesday in CH231.

Thanks to Dr. Doug Kline for the invite!

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?

Got good work done, and some exercise. Made a family memory and ate right. Didn’t spend any money.

364 more of these and it’s going to be a great year!

Want a blog for your business or personal life but don’t know how to get one started? Live in the Wilmington, NC area?

I want to announce a new service: blog setup and orientation. We’ll go to where you are and help you set up your Blogger or Wordpress blog, point it to a domain name of your choice if you want, help you pick and install a template, and show you how to make posts, all for a flat fee of $25. (You’ll need to pay for any domain name you get or paid hosting service, but it’s possible to do this without any additional cost as long as you don’t mind something like myblog.wordpress.com.)

When we’re done you’ll have full confidence on how to use your blog, and you’ll be able to start promoting your blog immediately.

As separate services we can get you up and running on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter, including some initial orientation.

It’s actually going to be my daughter Hannah Wilson doing this, but as she can’t drive yet I’ll be there too and will provide any advanced assistance needed and make sure that everything goes smoothly. You can contact Hannah at hannah@majanit.com or call her at 910-763-0609 (our home number).

Please help us spread the word!

Last Wednesday I was working at the Connection Cafe when my laptop froze up and didn’t come back up when I tried to reboot it. Instead it ran Windows’ version of “check disk” and found and supposedly fixed some errors, but the laptop wouldn’t come back up. Major hard drive crash. Argghhhh!

I was there to meet with Kent Milholland and asked him if he recommended anyone for laptop repair, and he referred me to Your Computer Friends. I dropped off my laptop that afternoon. Long story short, Your Computer Friends had to restore Windows Vista, meaning I had to reinstall all of my programs, but they were able to restore my data to a “Restored Files” directory, meaning not only did I not lose any data, but I didn’t have to restore from Carbonite, which would have taken a good while.

If you are not using an online backup system like Carbonite or something similar, start today. Hmmm. I just realized I need to set Carbonite up on my restored PC!

Thanks, Your Computer Friends! I hope I don’t have to see you anytime soon though!!

I realized sometime on Thursday that someone I had had lunch with the previous week probably fixed laptops too, so I’ll give a shout out to Craig Fortenbury and CMIT Solutions.  They “can completely offload the burden of troubleshooting, securing, and maintaining your computer network for a very affordable monthly rate.”