Business – Page 42 – Paper Street Enterprises

Any Questions out there???

From time to time, even the best of us run out of good things to blog about (and for the recommend, when it comes to blogging, I’m far from the best. ha ha ha).

So, this is my request to out to any of you that read this frequently for some ideas. What would you like to know more about?
is there something SM related that you would like me to talk about?
How Variant Config?
ABAP?
BSP?ABAP Web Dynpro???

I can’t promise I have all the answers, but if there’s a topic out there you want to know more about, I’d love to hear about it, and I’ll do my best to pull together some useful info…

Thanks in advance for you help, and I hope I can bring you the info you need…

Business – Keeping Pace with Hardware Demands

Now, with any small business, you understand that budgets are limited. So we can’t afford to have a full server rack, or hundreds of TB’s of storage space. So that means, we have to grow within our means, and still keep things running smoothly. Hardware may be getting cheaper, but it’s still an expense that a small business has to take seriously.

Here’s some tricks you can use to keep your organization running swiftly, but cheaply.

1. I’ve already mentioned this one, but use virtual servers as your computer systems. They are easy to replicate, using oracle’s tool it is free, and best of all, it is easy to backup.

2. Re-use your old machines. In my line of work, being a consultant means having a decent laptop, and you can’t let it get too old. Typically, I can get 2 – 3 years out of a laptop. That means that the old laptop still works. If you need to, add a simple upgrade of additional memory, and you can use it as another machine to run a virtual machine from.

3. External HDD. These are getting cheap enough to get 3 TB for less than $125. For me, the typical SAP system takes 200 – 300 GB. That means in a 3TB drive, I can at least 10 systems and leave some room for growth.

5. Multiple HDD’s. In my previous post, I’ve talked about the importance of backup up your data. This means multiple HDD’s so you have redundancy.

6. The cloud. I know, it’s this mystical catchall that now runs the world… but using simple free tools like dropbox, give you a place to put your data that is off site. I still encourage you keep local copies, but this gives you one more place to keep your data safe. You can also use paid services to give you far more storage space.

7. Good internet. Make sure you either have the fastest wireless plan, or if you’re loaded, you can get a T1 line installed. The point is, you need a fast connection if you do anything online. For me, I’m building web apps, so if i want to demo them, I need a solid connection.

All this being said… don’t grow beyond your means. There’s time… if your idea is as good as you think it is, you can slowly grow it. Hope this gives you some direction.

Conference Takeaways

After spending a week in Vegas at the SAP MFG conference, there were some very valuable takeaways for us. The first thing for us was our booth. We got all the basic pieces, but we found that we were missing some key things.

The first thing you can probably notice from the picture is that we don’t have a good backdrop. We have the plain black curtain, and unless someone is looking down, it’s not obvious who we are. So that is the first piece. Next step is to enhance our banners. We need to add the SAP Partner logo, our own Logo, and the SAP Certified label. We add that, and I think we will be well positioned for our next show.

The next thing, and I mentioned this in an early post is “swag”… despite the fact that we got some solid leads at the conference, Mike and I both came to the conclusion that we still want to get the “list”. If you give away things, people come to your booth. Perhaps they even stay and talk to learn something about what we do. It just seems worth the expense because getting a booth at a conference isn’t cheap, so it’s worth it to build the list.

One big take away was booth location. Mike did an awesome job finding a great spot for us. We learned that staying in the middle, near SAP is a great spot. We also ended up right next to the food tables during the receptions. That ended up being huge for us since we had several people stop by during the reception.

There were several other things we’ll consider in the future… perhaps a monitor to show a running demo. If you have any ideas or feedback of what we could enhance, I’d love to hear them. This is a big learning experience for us, so we’d love to improve on our performance the next time around. Thanks for reading.

Business – Finding your Passion

You know that old cliche about the person that never worked a day in their life, because they loved what they did so much, they never thought of it as work??? Well, that’s what everyone aspires to. What I want to talk about today is using where you are and what you’re doing to find that passion, and more importantly fund it =) Finding your passion needs to be goal number one.

A few years back, a good friend of mine, Jason Gylland, opened by eyes to some of the things going on right in front me, that many people never notice. The biggest thing he explained to me is how our money can be printed out of thin air. Initially, this scared me the *#$% out of me. This simple little fact and the way our government just prints money whenever it feels like it, how put our nation on track for a crash that could be far worse than the great depression. Why am I telling you all this on a business and technical website? it’s because this fact helped me realize that what I love and what I”m good at is 2 things. One, I like to prepare for things. My wife always harassed me about the “family that lived in my trunk”. By that she meant, I kept so many things like extra clothes, tools, granola bars, etc. that it seemed like someone must live in there. 🙂 it’s funny how I never really thought about, but I had always been prepping for the “just in case” things in life. So you might ask, why spend all this time on building a business if I think the whole system is going to crash? Simple. No one knows when the crash will happen, just that eventually, it mathematically has to happen. Second, prepping requires cash. There things I want to build, food to build up, etc…

Now the second skill that i have is “digging”. Especially when it comes to problems. I am exceptionally good at going through a problem, or a computer system and finding the information or causes of a problem. That’s what has lead to my success in SAP. I”ve found that both of these skills have lead me to my passion… quite unexpectedly I might add :).

What’s my point to all of this? Find what you love. You might not be lucky enough to do it for your career, but you can keep that passion alive by funding it. No better way to do that than running your own business. Hope this can inspire you the way my revelation of my passion re-inspired me =)

Marketing – Conference Swag, Yes or No?

After spending a week in Vegas at the SAP Manufacturing Conference, I’ve found that there are clearly 2 different ways of handling the vendor booth. Swag or no Swag.

The first is “Swag”. Now if you’re like me, the term Swag is new. It simply means the toys, candy, or random cups that you collect from any vendor. Now, having swag is great for attracting people. Everyone comes around, allows you to scan their badge, and then takes their swag. Scanning their badge gives you their email address and all the contact information.

The alternative is no “Swag”. Now this means that only the people that are interested in what we have to offer will stop by our booth.

Now, the debate that I’ve been having in my head is… do we go for fully qualified leads… or do we go to build the email list, hoping that the continuing emails we will send will ultimately lead to familiarity with our company, and perhaps get forwarded to someone that might actually buy our stuff…

so, with all that said, what’s your take???

Business – Saving for a Rainy Day

Well, I’ve now been blogging for a while, so I’d like to let you in on a little more of what is really important to me, and why. Perhaps you’ll find it’s important to you as well. For those of you that know me, you probably already know how much I hate debt, and I’ve found that I do love what I do, at least the launching of my new business. That’s why I started this crazy path that has connected me to many of you, and has given me more late nights of programming and blogging than I care to admit. While I have yet to be able to fully transition to doing JaveLLin Solutions full time, I know it will happen soon. This does mean that I’ll need a decent cash reserve. Because when I move into my own business I will be working on more a milestone (also knows as feast or famine) mode. =) The only way to weather that is to have a solid cash reserve, preferably 3 – 6 months (minimum).

The second half of this equation is minimizing the amount I need to spend each month. Hence the whole debt thing is REALLY bad. Imagine you have $20,000 saved. If you have monthly expenses of $2,000/month, then you have 10 months of savings. However, if you have $5000 in expenses, you only have 4 months. Needless to say, the math is pretty simple, minimize your expenses. The easiest way to do this is eliminate your debt. Get rid of the credit cards, car loan, mortgage, etc.

While there a lot of good reasons to get out of debt, this is the easiest math to present to you. Given the state of our nation and out of control spending, the best thing everyone could do is live within their means and kill off all debt. But perhaps I’ll go into that more another time…

Network – Changing Internet Providers

Well, I discovered a whole new challenge recently. We changed cable providers, and upgraded our internet. It all seemed so easy. A couple of minor tweaks, and everything would just keep working, right??? not so much. Here’s what I discovered you need to remember when changing internet providers and still keep your SAP system exposed to the outside world…

Even if you don’t change providers, they might change the box for your signal. In my head, that meant nothing. When I went to connect to my SAP systems, it meant everything. Here’s what I found.

1. Changing providers or even changing modems can change your IP address. So, if you’re changing things, make sure you check this right away. My previous post on this stuff talks about some of the steps. www.whatismyip.com is your quick check.

2. Now, a changed IP address unfortunately means that if you are using subdomains (like I am), you need to go to your host provider and change the IP address they are pointing to. I hate this part because it can take up to 24 for the changes to circulate through the internet.

3. Next up, I lost all of my expections. So I needed to go into my router configuration and create/add the firewall expections (80XX & 32XX) for the web and for the gui connections.

4. While you are in there, double check that the static IP addresses are still connected to your machines. If you lost those too, re-add them.

Now, if you’re lucky, everything will be back to normal in a day. For me, it took 2, because I didn’t catch that the IP address changed until a day later. Short story, be sure to test right away from outside of your network to make sure everything is still working. Good luck, and try not to change your internet provider if you can avoid. ha ha ha

Preparing for the First Real Tradeshow

Since yesterday was our day of prep for our first real trade show, I thought I’d talk about some of the hard work that goes into getting ready for your first one. First off, I really need to thank my parnter, Mike Golden. He took care of so much of this, so I could keep rolling on our never ending development list.

So first lets talk about the obvious stuff, the table… if you’ve ever been to a trade show, you know that they normally have a fancy table covering with their logo, or slogan or something like that. Now it sounds easy, but it still requires the design and getting the logo into the correct format and getting it all ordered a few weeks in advance.

Next, to up the level of our professionalism, we wanted a couple of banners to advertise for our “heavy hitting” products. Renovation for all our service management stuff, and proximity for all our production execution stuff. Now, this needed all the same stuff and then some marketing content. Let me tell you, coming up with marketing content is no walk in the park for a couple of engineers 🙂 Now, not only did I need to come up with some good descriptive stuff, but it needs to fit in a confined space. Up till now, I’ve been working with a web page that has limitless space. On the up side the marketing blueprint class I did helped a lot, but it still takes time.

And all this work was just to get the table and a couple of banners to sit on the table… Next up we needed some takeaways for people who visit the conference. The first, and probably easiest was the pens. Mike got some pens with the JaveLLin Solutions logo made up, so we can give those away at the table. But a pen alone is unlikely to have anyone remember us… This leads me to the biggest chunk of work, the brochure.

Again, my hat is off to Mike. He took the lead on this, learned MS publisher and put together a great layout. Then came the hard part again. Content. Only this time we needed written text, AND a demo. So that meant for all our products we needed to put together a decent demo highlighting enough features of our products to get people attention without overwhelming or boring them with details. Not as easy as it sounds for me. Simply because I designed all this stuff, and I want to show off all the bells and whistles. For me, it came down to writing a script and giving myself a deadline. So I aimed for a 5 minute demo, and recorded over and over again until it finally worked =) Check them out if you get a chance. Each of the product pages now has a full demo for it. Mike then took the video and even gave it a QR code and slapped it on our brochure.

Last but not least, I’ve been working to have systems up and running so that we can give live demo’s to anyone “really” interested after watching the 5 min demo’s we put together.

Amazing how much work this first tradeshow has been, but I trust all this up front work will pay off and get us multiple leads, and make life MUCH easier the next show we present at. Wish us luck, or if you happen to be in Vegas, come find us at the Mirage. =)

SAP Manufacturing Conference 2013

Well, it’s finally here. Our first big conference. We actually sprung for a vendor booth (545 if you happen to be in Vegas next week 🙂 ). It’s really exciting. I’ve wanted to be a vendor at one of these big conferences for over a year now, and it’s finally going to happen.

I’m hoping some of you might be going to conference next week, and if you are, I hope you come check out our booth and say hi. I’d love to meet you.

Going to keep this one short, since there is still a lot of work to be done. Can’t wait to tell you all about it in the coming weeks.

Development – Staying Focused

This topic is especially relevant to me as I type this. I’ve just spent the better part of 3 weeks focused on learning a new client’s business process for service management. While things like this can be tedious, they are also tremendous opportunities for new ideas and new products. That’s exactly where I am right now. I’m in the middle of 2 rather large development projects, but I’ve just been struck with several ideas that people are asking for!!!

So, how do you balance that. I’m struggling right now. I just want to pull up one of my original products and begin adding some new features to it… I want to start developing a brand new application that I see is a perfect fit for several customers I’ve recently talked to… But, I’m in the 75% complete for one our brand new production offerings. And I’m a third of the way done in converting my first product from BSP to ABAP Web Dynpro. Both of these are already more than I should be trying to handle at one time… but I need to shift gears from time to time to help avoid burnout.

So, here’s what I’m doing… I’m taking really good notes and adding items to my to-do list. I’m trying to get my head back in the game on what I need to finish first. Why you might ask? you have a request from a customer? an actual need!!! true. But we also have a business plan… and my partner and I agreed to it. We believe this new production product can be huge. And while the Service Management side of our offerings is starting to gain traction, we will never get the same traction on the Production Execution side if we don’t finish the offering. Plus, several half finished products equal ZERO revenue =)

So just remember, you started with a plan… stick with it unless there is reason to deviate. And even then, work with your team. It’s easy to get excited about “potential”, but until someone signs on the bottom of your contract, it doesn’t mean anything. it’s just something that someone asked for, but might never be willing to pay for. There will be time later to reset priorities… and that’s exactly what I plan to do after the SAP MFG conference =)

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