My back...

Is killing me. I just moved some new purchases from "woodland" to the house and office. I got a new desk, I'm handing down my other one to Katie who will start on tuesday.

I still haven't gotten the signs up outside the building, but the inside is much cooler today after our new A/C was installed. I cranked it up today and got it nice and chilly for a while. It is much quieter than the other one, which does hurt the privacy part of things, but helps the background noise when you are on the phone etc.

The Red Hills Festival is tomorrow. I need to remember to take some photos and post them on the www.winstoncounty.com site. (just to do some good PR for them)

I'll be really glad when I'm asleep tonight.

Big Bro is smarter than we all thought

Jereme told me today about this. Makes good sense really.
"peope are emotional, and they make their decisions based on emotions and use logic to justify them"

This is the crux of selling. You have to first appeal to their emotions and subconscious.

ProClean & Much much cooler!

Well, last night we had a small renovation party. Prisock was up here working with me on getting our new A/C unit installed. It (the installation) lasted longer than I had hoped but its really nice to have a remote control for how cool you want to be. Now I just need to get a little paint touched up and a big recliner in here... oh and maybe a desk or two.

B2

I don't know if y'all read the mag called "Business 2.0" but it is such a great read for people like me. I stumbled across it at my tech-savy older brothers house 2 years ago. Since then I've received a gift of subscription for my first anniversary and I added 2 years to it for 19 bucks or so. It came in today...

I just got back from spending some time in my "library" as C. calls it. What a great read that thing is, with good ideas for business and product reviews and insight in to internet companies and just cutting edge product marketing.

Busy day for Big River, two new web sites, couple of product interested in buying... and other really cool stuff.

I love this job!

Did I mention I've been busy

Since we've last met. I've been trying to catch up from being gone, and moving in more fully in to the new office. I've been trying to not get too far behind on work, we had a staff meeting today and got our game plan ready on 15 web sites that we are working on.
BRS hired Heath to come work for us. He was with Cellular South and he's joined the Big River team. I can't wait to get him going on some sales calls. We are going to Oxford tomorrow to meet with some property management firms. We've got a game plan to sell about 10 of these systems a month to start with.

Speaking of game plans. I was at someone's house the other night for a party. His first name is Bernard, and well he's most famous for what he didn't know about 11 Billion dollars that disappeared in Clinton. Anyhow if you don't know who in the "world" I'm talking about you probably don't keep up with the news. He was really nice to me and I asked him how he got his start breaking in to the long distance market. He said that they had sales reps that called on businesses and they took it one day at a time gaining market share. I'm trying to do the same. Instead of mass marketing (no offense to you Catholics out there), we are going to hit the pavement first around here, then Jackson, Hattiesburg, Memphis and then move on to Atlanta and college towns across the south.

Ok so there's that. It was pretty interesting to talk to Bernie, but I'd hate to be in his shoes right now. I'm really tired from a long weekend of wedding stuff. C. has been doing that wedding directing stuff and it's about to wear me out. I was a DJ / sound man / official cooler temperature checker at the wedding that she had this weekend. I do have good news, the average temp of the beer in the cooler I checked was "just right" and that was about 14 out of 14 times. (Ok I'm kidding but it was nice and cold). Good for a hot afternoon in Btown.

Well I've been summoned to bed. Ya'll have a good one!

Back on the chain gang.... and some big news.

Well, I'm officially back in town. I've had a full day of work under my belt and it has been great.... Ok I lied, I'm not really that excited about it but the stack of checks today was 300 bucks higher than the stack of bills... Not bad when you've been out of town for a week. The beach was...well the beach... Sand, sun, and of course some suds. I didn't quite get in to a suitcase of beer, but I did have a couple and relaxed a little.

I had a great time using this Seimans wireless PDA with a GPRS / GSM modem in it. It was great for checking email on the go and helped me tons keep up with clients while I was away. I had a massage at the grand hotel, various dinners and on the way home... I got some new clothes. I hate spending tons of money on clothes... It's a frigging waste... C. always seems to be able to help me shop, and she likes spending money so it works out well that if I do need to buy something she can encourage me to spring for the purchase. I did get a pretty good deal, two pairs of jeans, two shorts, three long sleeved dress shirts, one polo shirt.... all for $115 bucks. Oh, the jeans by the way... they were LEVIS. Yep you guessed it I was in a thrift shop... No actually I was in Target. I couldn't belive the good deals they had. I've spent 40 bucks on a pair of jeans before...

Another fun development, C and I have an ongoing "discussion" about purses. She says that she "LOVES" that purse and it would be great with this outfit....yada.....yada.... (no disrespect just trying to be factual). Well we had a purse a month limit set up for a while... but somehow the limit didn't work... we were at one a week for a while... finally on this trip she had a fresh purse, couldn't have been 5 or 6 days old... Anyhow she wants this one that she just things is great.... Well we struck a deal, and she bought that purse, and will not buy ANY purses until September. I need all eyes and ears out there helping me keep up with this. Leave me a comment if you see her at the purse outlet.

In other news....
We had a OB appointment yesterday.... The wait is finally over. We now know the gender of the baby. (as far as they can tell anyhow) It's a girl. We are calling her Kate Taylor for now... And later too. It really makes her feel more real knowing that we have a real little girl in there in the fish tank swimming around. She's a person, with a soul, and fingernails and toes and eyes and all of that. I guess the thing that really made this kind of hit me in the last 45 minutes is that we got our first "real" baby gift. A little PINK outfit. Wow, I can't belive I'm going to have a little girl who will wear this stuff.... It doesn't feel like I should be that lucky. I guess I'm a little sappy right now, but it's an amazing thing that I had no idea I could even care this much about. The thing that has caused so much sickness and discomfort to my wife... Is a little girl called Kate. Kate, we can't wait, get here soon.

Oh, yeah, I want to thank the jerk who reminded me yesterday... "That's great, you just got nominated to pay for a wedding!" Man, I think I need to go back to the office for a while. Maybe get a couple more billable hours in.

Not home yet...

I've been enjoying the beach. With the exception of a couple of spots that got missed in the sun screen routine I'm doing pretty well. I have a couple of third degree burns on my body from the sun... But nothing too bad. We had yet another service nightmare last night at the bay side grill... I tried to email a post in with my PDA that i'm testing. I think the post was so long that my web mail connection timed out. I'll get that on here before too long. You really do need to read this. I'm not looking forward to getting back to work at all. I've done a little work here and there... But I'm mostly letting the office handle stuff while I'm out. My employees have been great while I'm gone. For all I know anyway. I haven't gotten any calls about them... at least thats good. I've got 3 new sites to work on... All sold while I was on the beach... Maybe I need to move down here. I might get more done.

Can't wait.

We are leaving in the morning to go here!
They have great rates and I can't wait. It sleeps 10, and at 780 for four days its only 19.50 a person / day.

It comes with a Pack 'N Play and some other stuff that I don't need, but the coolest thing I think is a Golf Cart. How cool is it to have your own Golf Cart. Granted I'm not a real golfer, but I love being able to tool around in one and not have to walk every where.

I'm missing my sisters graduation to go on this trip. I'll be gone till next week but we have a house sitter taking care of the dogs etc. We haven't been on a trip in a long time (C. loves to remind me.) The only problem is that she's got a cold coming on. I hope she can beat it with some good R & R... Too bad she can't drink. Robert is meeting us down there later, so he'll help pick up the slack I'm sure.

BEACH -- HERE WE COME!

So you can see what I've been working on. Yes we are making progress... On and get this, DSL turned on today. I'm hoping to be working out of there tomorrow. We'll start moving after the election returns tonight. Robert's uncle is running for Alderman...
*UPDATE* Dickie won the primary. Congrats!

After the party he'll be helping me get some stuff moved over so Mandy can start her day over there. I can't WAIT!

Fundraisers

Earlier tonight, a girl from our church called me wanting to know if I wanted to buy some stuff for a fundraiser for the cheerleaders. How do you tell a 16 year old that you don't want to donate AGAIN to their school project???
Well after donating to the silent auction, the BETA club, the math club, the general fundraisers and teaching out there for 2 years making half of what I'm "worth" an hour.... I finally said "no."
I wish there was a way for them to raise money doing something that is really valuable to people. I don't want cheesecake or cookie dough, I don't want wrapping paper and pop corn, I'm not done drinking the 4 cases of cokes that my wife caved in and bought last semester.
I've thought about a web fundraiser. Something where they could sell ads, on a web site that they updated, that had local news that was well written, and that they got some free advertising with the paper and radio from... They could get a lot of local traffic, and would get a chance to learn some cool stuff... But they would have a valuable thing to offer to people. I'd pay 20 bucks a month to get more business. If they did 10 --- simply 10 businesses, and had a real site that people would go to and that they updated... They would be able to raise $2400 bucks pretty quickly. Well if they had another ten, that had a smaller ad for 100 bucks, that would bring them up to $3400... I'd donate the site for the price of having the most prominent ad.

But the question is... What would you want to see on a site like that? Links to good MS and national news? Sort-of a "local-Drudge" site? Local scoop on stuff? I bet they could find some really good stuff. Maybe write some opinon articles, stuff about the local mayoral races etc... There is some liability in this of course. But you could monitor it via the board and make sure that everything was cool on the site.
If this works here, who's to say that we couldn't do it in really big towns like Atlanta, and sell ads for $75 a month, and get 100 people on there. Splitting that 50 / 50 would make it worth my while. Having the traffic make the site work... What do you think would be news worthy that would generate traffic?