GEEKNOTE: A Busy Week

GEEKNOTE:  The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind.  The week after Business Development Week is frequently like this, generally because I spend enough time during BDW learning and networking that I let my "to do" list at the store grow a bit.  This year was no exception.

Word spread that I am following through on my long standing plan to take a break from city government at the end of my current term on council, which expires in two months.  Growing my business, spoiling my grandkids, and spending more time with my wife are all top priorities for 2013.  Getting back into my cycling routine and burning off some of the pounds I've collected sitting in meetings instead of riding my bike is also high on my post-council agenda. 

I've had the opportunity to sit down with a couple of folks thinking about running for office.  The folks I've been serving with on council are great, as are the city staff members I've gotten to know.  I'm confident that the city will be in good hands after I'm out of office. 

At work, we've been taking a hard look at our marketing, trying to figure out what has worked and what hasn't worked.  We are making adjustments, with more adjustments to come.  

We renewed our yellow page advertising.  Yellow pages have been in decline for several years for most businesses, because more and more people are using the web to find what they need.  Yellow page advertising works for us for the simple reason that folks with dead computers generally can't go online to find help.

Before this year's BDW, we hadn't done a trade expo in several years.  After the BDW expo, we are going to completely revise how we approach expos.  April (our account manager) and I learned quite a bit by visiting the other booths.  I definitely need to get out more.

We have updated our marketing materials and we are now looking at how we go about spreading the word to more members of our target markets.   This will be somewhat easier now that we've actually identified our target markets.  I suspect a fair amount of my time is going to be spent coaching our sales and marketing staff members during the next year.

I am the guest speaker at two separate luncheons this coming week, so I'll get an opportunity to hone my presentation skills.   It will also give me an opportunity to see how the new marketing materials go over.

Technology continues to change and I spent several hours this week working my way through the latest and greatest stuff now on the market.  I got my hands on the first of a new generation of motherboards and I'm looking forward to building a quad core system using the new hardware later this week.  The only question in my mind is whether to install a conventional drive or an SSD.

In addition to everything else at work, I wear the "CFO" hat.  One bright note for the week was that I managed to get everything put together for the accountants for the last fiscal year. 

Another project I worked on this past week is tweaking our service call scheduling.  As we've added staff, this has become more important.  None of us have quite mastered that whole "being in two places at once" thing, so this aspect of our business is becoming more and more important.  Ideally, the office will know at all times exactly who is where doing what.

My partner Tim has been tackling the time tracking issue, with the goal of being able to enter project details in one place and have it show up everywhere (scheduling, logs, ticketing, time sheets, billing, and reports) without further effort.  We aren't quite there yet, but we're a lot closer than we were.

I've been blessed to be able to work with some absolutely wonderful folks at our company.  Now that the economy is taking off, I see great opportunities for the next year.  The key will be for us to stay focused on where we want the company to be at year end.

As always, feel free to drop me a note or give me a call if you have any questions about your computer or the Internet.

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek, Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.
http://www.gulfcoastnetworking.com

(Rob also serves as deputy mayor of the City of New Port Richey. Opinions expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the position of the city.)