Quintified

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.”

I was a guest on Action Business Coach Reggie Shropshire’s radio program this week, and he has put notes from the show on his blog. We talked about how small businesses can make better use of databases in order to grow AND bring peace of mind. I had never done anything like this before, and it was a lot of fun.

Thanks, Reggie, for the opportunity!

The time has also come to get a real blog design instead of using this WordPress default!!! Matt Hicks to the rescue, soon!