Jeff's Blahg

Travis and I have spent the last 3 days here in beautiful, rainy, Orlando Florida. The occasion was the ADT Sales & Marketing Convention. There were many ADT Dealers here – including many of our customers. It was a great opportunity for us to do some networking… and it is already paying dividends. We have been ribbed extensively about our apparent lack of interest in marketing our product, SecuityTrax, so we gained some points for actually reaching out for once .

Last night ADT bought out the House of Blues. We had all the food we could eat and the local Blues Brothers performed, followed by 38 Special. I knew a couple of 38 Special’s songs, and they did a good job. My favorite part was the drummers solo. I mean this guy went NUTS for like 10 minutes straight!!! I have never seen anyone go so fast on the drums, and with such sweet rhythm. It was awesome.

Good trip, but ready to be home. Speaking of which, my flight is about to leave. Out.

Ok, about 6 months about Sandie and I decided that we need a web conferencing solution. Due to some extraneous circumstances we didn’t have much time (like 1 day) to decide who to go with. Due to some referrals we checked out webex. They had the product we needed so we talked to a sales representative and told him were were a small business and that we would be doing maybe 1 or 2 webinars a month… and that we were looking for the best deal for that scenario. So, we get ‘hooked up’ at 375/month. We thought it was pretty steep, but honestly, we didn’t have time to find another solution.

Well, the other day I call up webex to cancel out my contract… my 6 month contract. I tell them that I am being charged too much for my usage, etc, etc, etc. The webex salesman says, “I can get you the exact same service for $75 per month”. WHAT!!@#(%(! He said that we had ’5 hosted accounts and it was obvious that we only needed one’. Wow, the blood is starting to boil – I have WASTED $1200 dollars! I was up-sold like CRAZY. The salesman admits that I have been up-sold as well… there is no question about it. So, the next obvious question is how many free months of service am I going to get for this injustice – well 1200 / 75 = 16 months right?! Think again. They pretended to care – but not enough to do anything about it … at all.

Ah… how does it feel? No job, nobody telling me WHAT to do, WHY to do it or WHEN. Wow, if you haven’t had this opportunity you should give it some serious consideration… not that it can be achieved overnight by any means.

I started my first business in January 2001. Kristie and I were just married and I had started doing some web development things for fun. I had created BYUTrack.com as my first site. Now, I say that loosely, because what you see there now was probably about the third makeover it went through. The last go round I actually hired a designer to come up w/ the the look and feel of it – because I then, and still do – consider myself to be weak in that area. I wanted to make it look very polished. Anyway, not too long after I did that site the BYU Gymnastics coach approached me because he had heard about this cool site I had done for the track team. You see, the official site, BYUCougars.com was very weak on media. And, even more frustrating to the coaches, they had almost NO control over what was there. So, they wanted what I had created, a very powerful, flexible site that they could update and manage without having to ask permission every time they needed something. So, another site was created, BYUGymnastics.com. It amazes me that these sites have not been messed w/ at all since I did them. I would have guessed that they would have had major work needed by now. So, lesson 1 is take the time to do things right the first time, and don’t expect the world for it – or anything for that matter.

So, back to the business. I had this bright idea (so I thought). I had been paid for the above two sites, although it was insignificant amounts… but I could see where the value was being created and respected. I wanted to basically take over the BYUCougars.com site and redo the whole thing – add a ton of media and other cool things and provide what was being so loved by the track and gymnastics teams to all sports. Long story short is that we got all the key players in a meeting and presented the idea. It was shot down. So, I lost on that deal, but I gained some good experience from it – like 2) don’t expect people to even respect your ideas. Some people don’t, so either get thick skin or get out of the game.

Well, I still thought the *idea* behind the scenes was a good idea. Hence I began working on a new project. It was called SportTrax (notice the ‘trax’ portion, it will become a popular theme). The idea was this – create a site that allows a school to create / manage all their sports teams and their activities through it. Create rosters, schedules, add pictures, results and more – all easily on their own. When I started doing this schools around here didn’t have sites at all – requesting a schedule from the local high school required them mailing me (USPS) a photo copy. So, I did all the work on this, and oh ya, here was the real kicker: I was going to have the site easily MAKE money for them. I provided forms that would be taken to their existing (or new) sponsors that would allow them to choose a level of sponsorship, and their logo would show up on the top banner at appropriate interval based on sponsorship. Oh, wow, what a brilliant plan!!! I took it to the local high school and asked if we could test it out on them, at no charge. Of course they were all for that. We got them all setup and trained them how to use it, etc. I walked out of the place and nothing else ever happened to it. Anything besides the minimum is too much to ask it appears… so, outside the job description and outside the possibility of getting done. I met with a few other schools and came to the same conclusion… and left with a bitter taste in my mouth for athletic directors that claimed to care, but in the end were more concerned about doing as little as possible than anything else. Lesson 3, no matter how great you think your ideas are, don’t put all your eggs in one basket… ever! Always be thinking about what will be next. Oh, and 4, take some time to do some market research .

So, all those attempts pretty much went down the drain. But, I learned some valuable lessons along the way. In one of my next posts I will continue the story and eventually get caught up to where I am today… hope you can stay away that long.

To answer the question from the previous post….

Today is the first time in adulthood that I have woke up and not been employed by anyone but myself . Byaaaahhh!

Benched 375 Monday. It was h*a*r*d.

Golfed last Friday and got 4 pars in a row – a record for me! I am definitely getting better overall, but it is very streaky. I went today and pretty much stunk up the course… but still had a good time.

I have another big first coming soon. It will be the first time I’ve [insert your guess here]. Stay tuned.