Business

I recently learned that one of the habits I’ve gotten into is actually detrimental to my sleep.  If I don’t stay up too late doing something else for work, I often pull out my latest sales or marketing book and read till I fall asleep.  The problem that I started to realize is that I’d often get a new insight from reading, and instead of falling asleep, my brain would start churning about my latest idea, and keep we awake even though I was dreadfully tired.  It’s funny, but looking back it should’ve been obvious.  But like so many things in my journey, nothing is obvious until it’s pointed out to me… sometimes multiple times.

Well, I reading Perry Marshall again, and it finally hit me.  He said to read something light, read some fiction, read something that has nothing to do with business.  The reasoning for this is twofold.  First and most important is that it allows your brain to shut off before bed.  You can focus on something else and allow your subconscious to do the job it’s meant to do…  be creative.  But sometimes when you force work over and over again, your subconscious can’t be creative, it can only focus what you bombard it with.  The second benefit is that when you read something you like, you can actually make yourself a better a copywriter.  Since I’ve figured out that writing is often a big part of the sales job, being the best copywriter possible is very important.  think about it, between emails, websites, sales letters, newsletters, blogging, 2/3’s of my work is writing in one way or another.  So reading a published author can only give you better ideas of how to improve your own writing.  I need to do a lot more reading, but hey, you’re reading this aren’t you?  so can’t be that terrible 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Well, after spending some time digging around I’ve found the trouble with my network.  So I had two systems in the same box, one cloned from the other.  So after running through all the different scenarios, I found that individually, both systems worked fine.  Only when I turned on both systems at the same time did my network problems begin.  I did some hunting on google, and as I often find, my situation is unique…  well, at least unique enough that no one else has posted a solution 🙂

But Virtualbox did give me some clues…  it got me thinking that it might be the network for the virtual system causing the issue.  So I tried changing from a bridged adapter, with no luck.  Then by a stroke of genius, or a stroke of luck, I finally noticed the option to refresh the MAC address.

Magically, everything started working again.  So the morale of the story is if you clone a machine, make sure you change the MAC address, it could make all the difference.

I recently met up with a friend of mine, and he told me about someone I had worked with in the past.  He told how her 13 year old son just died of cancer.  Well, I don’t care who you are, that hits you in the gut.  I can’t even begin to imagine how that feels, and I pray I never have to.  My heart goes out to Trina.

Now for the rest of us, the only good that can come out of this is make sure you don’t take anything for granted.  Give your kids, friends and family an extra hug the next time you see them.  We all know the cliche about how short life is…  well, we need to remember that we don’t really know how short any life might be.  So appreciate what you have every day, and even when things seem tough, remember how much tougher they would be without those family and friends to get you through it.  And never waste an opportunity to tell them how much they mean to you.

thanks for reading,

Well, I’m back in this never ending battle with the network.  I’m trying to run two systems off the same box.  I have plenty of horsepower, but for some reason, when I fire up both machines, the external connection becomes VERY slow.  I’m still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on…  but let’s start with one of my latest revelations when dealing with networking to my virtual machines.

I was originally having a challenge with connecting to my systems.  Often it would take 3 & 4 times to get connected to my SAP systems.  What I found is that within my AT&T network configuration is that to get a consistent connection, I needed to add the SAP port numbers to the static IP address, rather than the machine address that I was originally doing.

Now this works great, until I attempt to run 2 machines at the same time.  So, I’m back on the detective hunt to determine what happened…  if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them 🙂

thanks for reading,

I’ve recently been thinking about the complex nature of connecting with people.  Have you noticed how there are some people that you just instantly connect with, you start talking and feel totally at ease, while other people you struggle to get through pleasantries?  I’ve read multiple books that talk about different personality types, motivations, speaking styles, etc.  But at the end of the day, in my opinion it all comes down to chemistry.  So, can you make that chemistry?  or it just something you either have or you don’t?

Now, I’m no expert, my wife will attest to that.  I’m often a little introverted, a little stand offish, but once I get to know someone, we are typically friends for life.  It doesn’t matter if it’s professional or personal.  So what does it take to make that connection?  Now there is an entire science of personality traits, introvert, extrovert, sensing, judging, etc…  I can’t deny this plays a part, but doesn’t it have more to do with some commonalities?  For those of you in sales, I’m sure you might be laughing  at my naivete right now.  It’s ok, I often laugh at myself too 🙂  But really, no matter who you are, or what you do, there are two things nearly everyone loves to talk about.  Common experiences and themselves.

I’m working hard to improve my own communications skills, and every good book tells you that you need to be a good listener.  Well, listening is harder than it seems, unless you can find genuine interest.  Now for me, there is no faster way to build interest than to find something in common.  It might be sports, music, children, or movies.  But if you don’t find something in common, it will be incredibly difficult to ever build a real connection with anyone.  So, can you find a commonality without playing 20 questions?  I’m struggling with this myself.  How can you get someone to open up about themselves without it sounding like the inquisition?

Of course, you can fake it, but let’s be honest, we all know when someone is faking it when we’re talking to them, and no real connection ever occurs.  Listening helps, but the book I’m reading makes a great point about this.  You have to listen with real interest, not a “what’s in it for me interest”, or “I have to remember all these details so I can bring them up later when I try to close the sale” interest.  That internal radar we all have, will quickly light up and warn us that we’re just a prospect and there is no real connection  .

So, what’s the solution…  we need to make a real connection.  But what’s the secret?  My good friend Clint is amazing at this skill.  I really believe he can walk up to any random person and find some obscure connection after talking to them for a few minutes.  Sometimes its a hometown, old job, school, sporting event, or vacation.  The key is finding a way to genuinely connect with the person and make yourself someone they can relate to.  This won’t guarantee a sale, but it is pretty much guaranteed to kill any sale if you can’t connect with a prospect.

I guess the point of all of this is that you need to be truly interested in who you are talking to.  Only then can you find that common ground, that magic chemistry.  So make a friend first.  Maybe they won’t be your best friend that you tell your deepest secrets to, but treat them as a friend first, not a prospect.  We all know when someone is trying to sell us.  I believe that connection chemistry can be built…  just find that common ground and build from there.

Thanks for reading.

If you’re a sports fan like I am, Go Pack Go, you might recognize some of the familiar phrases I’ll put out here in terms of dealing with a tough loss, or even an upcoming tough game…

“sometimes a good ass kicking is what it takes to turn things around”
“it was close, they played a great game, but just couldn’t finish”
“if it wasn’t for that bad call, we would’ve won”

Isn’t it funny how we make these excuses for our favorite teams.  Would we make the same excuses for ourselves???  Do you often tell yourself, “I really needed to lose big”?  well, I can tell you, I never tell that to myself. Maybe not, but I’m sure you make similar excuses in your business world.  If you’re a sales person, how often do you justify things.  “They’ll say yes in two weeks”, “they fell on hard times, but they’ll buy when things get better”, “if only someone smarter was making the buying decisions”.  I know that I try to stay positive, but even the best of us justify failure.

Now I know, I make some of these same justifications.  We always hope they are true.  But where do you draw the line between uplifting and fairy tale?  In my world, I don’t often think about this, because I believe so fully in what I’m doing that I don’t allow myself to think otherwise.  But there are moments that I look at my blind allegiance to the Packers, and wonder if I make the same comparisons, true or false, in my own business.

Don’t worry, not giving up anytime soon 🙂  but it is important to keep a healthy perspective on everything.  Be honest with yourself, know when your criticism is valid, know what you want.  None of these are easy…  but it’s good to question.  Be faithful to your team, but be honest to your business….

Thanks for reading,

In my never ending quest to become a better entrepreneur, I started reading a new book.  I got it from one of my neighbors who is in the selling business, and she said it’s her favorite book, so I thought why not.  Well, I’m only 50 pages into it, and it’s already got my head swimming with new ideas.  I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this in future posts, but the first major lesson is in adding or providing value.  Now, this sounds obvious.  Of course you provide value, why else would someone pay you?

The twist on this is just to provide value, for the sake of helping others.  I’m still struggling a bit with this myself, since it’s a lot of work to do blog posts, email newsletters, fancy SAP products and consulting, just to help others.  Despite that, just reading through the chapters started to give me a perspective on ways to build new customers.  Again, this is material I’ve heard before in other ways, but sometimes just hearing it enough helps it to sink (at least for me).

So, the concept is simple.  Provide value for others, and in the end, it will come back to you.  Now, it’s a fine line as to what value truly is.  In my world, it might mean giving away some of my products to small to midsized customers.  It might mean doing some free consulting in my “spare time”.  It might mean recommending competitors products or services because they are more mature.  It will definitely mean continuing to blog and sharing my learning experiences to anyone willing to read my stuff.

so my question today is, how are you providing value to your customers? prospects? anyone in your life for that matter?  And hardest of all, how can you do it without ulterior motives involved 🙂  I’m still battling this, but even so, the idea of providing as much value as possible is clearly important.

Thanks for reading,

Well, you have probably noticed how excited I’ve been lately about my products.  And what this has really reinforced, is that packaging is king.  I’m not talking about bubble wrap or boxes, I’m talking about how you put your ideas together.  I’ve had individual transactions I built, they are very useful, and absolutely would never be purchased.  Why?  well, it’s a single transaction.  If it’s important enough, most companies can find enough resources to build it themselves.  Now this approach isn’t always the best, you could probably buy it cheaper than build it, but depending on your budget, sometimes it’s easier to waste resources then justify an expense.  Let’s not go down the budget rabbit hole…  let’s just focus on when do you start to thinking about buying something.

Now, let’s see what happens when you bundle several things together and put it into a fancy package.  It provides the functionality of that one transaction, plus it puts it in a fancy wrapper, and includes some other nice to have features.  Well, suddenly this becomes easier to justify because it’s bigger, it has the “cool” factor, and would take a LOT of effort to spec out and build in-house.  Suddenly, it’s easier to justify that expense.  You can suddenly get some things you didn’t even know you needed, but wow, it WOULD make life easier.  I don’t pretend to understand the psychological explanation behind this, but now that I recognize it, I can totally see it every where.

So, the real key comes down to how to package your product.  I don’t care if it’s software, an e-book, or a cool “as seen on TV” gadget.  The key is how you package it, how you bundle it, and just how functional you can make it.  Buying a hammer, isn’t exciting.  But buying this cool new hammer, nail gun, and drill together that come in a handy easy to store case…  now that’s marketable.  So if you start to get into this mindset, remember to figure out how you can package your idea.  It took me a lot of years to come to this conclusion.  Learn from my revelations 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Well, this past week was a good one for me.  This past week, I finished the first round of development on my latest brainchild.    Then, I was actually a little lost for a couple days, because I didn’t have anything urgent that I had to jump on, so I let my mind start to wander a bit.  I relaxed on Thursday and Friday, and then on Saturday, it hit me again.  I was trying to get my little guy to take nap, when inspiration hit me again.

So, why I am talking about this?  not to brag about my latest ideas (I’ll get to that in a future post 🙂 ).  No, I wanted to emphasize that when you can start to step away from the day to day work, you free your brain up to do the really valuable work.  Perry Marshall calls this the $1000/hr work.  The reality of the situation is that this idea might not have broken out of my subconscious if I had just jumped blindly to the next piece of minutia.  And believe me, in a small business, minutia can quickly rule your life.

What I would love for you to take away from this, is that it’s ok to be a little lost.  It’s ok to take a break from everything.  Give your imagination a chance to break free.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results you end up with 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Well, since I’m still getting back into the swing of blogging consistently again (man, was that a mistake for me to stop.  ha ha ha), I thought I’d give you another update on something I’ve been trying to do.  In an attempt to remove myself from the equation of the person that does everything, I’m trying to delegate more stuff.  Now, this is incredibly difficult as a small business person used to doing everything.  It’s tough because there is no one to delegate things to unless you go out and find them.  It’s also incredibly difficult to let go of doing things I’m good at.

Both of these are excuses, and I know it.  But it doesn’t make it any easier.  Now, my first that I’m willing to start stepping away from is the day to day ABAP coding.  So I’ve gone through several different iterations.  First off, I reached out to some friends to see if they were interested in making some extra money.  Like everyone, they were interested, but what often happens is that life just gets in the way.  I don’t fault them at all.  If I was so damn addicted to my own business and seeing it succeed, I’m certain I’d be doing the same thing.  Now this isn’t to say that I won’t still get the chance to work with my first round of candidates…  but it did mean that I needed to keep hunting.

Lesson 1.  finding people willing to work on a fixed bid basis for programming is incredibly difficult.   There’s good reason behind this, but it doesn’t help my pocketbook :).  With programming, there are often unforeseen issues, poorly written specs, incomplete analysis, or just “weird” data that you thought you understood until you started to extracting it.  Any number of things can cause work load to go from 40 hours to 80 hours.  Most of the programmers doing this for a living and not a hobby (I count myself among the hobbyist) recognize this, and will only do it hourly.  So, I went onto ELance, and put a sample job out there.  It’s impressive how many responses I got to the job.  it was also interesting the rate ranges, and the approaches that I got with each.  I only found one person that gave me enough of a comfort level to try him out.  So far, the experiment has proved to be a success.  But, it did require an hourly rate.  The good news is that my programmer has done the homework upfront, so his estimates have been right on, or even under budget.  This is good on many levels.  First, it’s teaching me to write better specs each time.  Second, it gives me an outsiders perspective on my thoughts.  Finally, once we figure out exactly what’s involved, for the most part, I’m just spending a few minutes a day answer questions, and the rest of the time the code is being written without me.

Lesson 2.  Prioritization is key.  When I realized that I found my first consistent contractor, I had to figure out what was most important to me.  Now this should be easy, but I look at my extensive development list, what specs I currently have written, how attached to my own stuff i’ve become, well, let’s just say this took some effort.  The hardest part was letting go…  I have an idea that I really want to do, but I keep getting pulled away from it.  I even had a pretty solid spec written, and some of the work started.  But, since it’s my latest and greatest idea, I wanted to do it myself.  Well, I had to take a leap of faith and let it go.  I moved my work over to the dev box, and handed the spec over.  Again, it’s good because my idea is only getting better with another set of eyes.  But it was a bit of a challenge.

All and all, the experiment has been successful.  My next addition needs to be someone that can do ABAP Web Dynpro.  Otherwise I will end up doign all of that myself, or paying someone else to learn it.  Neither is the end of the world, but in the idea of delegating, looks like this is the next most logic place to go…  if you know anyone, or you’re interested, please ping me.  I have some simple things to get started on and we can do a trial of each other 🙂  Or, I’ll be happy to let you learn for a fixed bid project. 🙂

Thanks for reading,