Way back in 1994 I went to a parking lot on the south side of the Twin Cities to a Humane Society outdoor pet adoption event. I wasn’t intending to get a Cat, just wanted to take a look around. In one of the first cages, a runt of a calico clawed her way to the top of the cage to get to me. I picked her up and she clung to me like glue. I put her back in her cage and she followed me around the cage no matter where I went, never taking her eyes off me.

I think it’s safe to say she picked me.

I brought her home and after watching her stand up on her hind legs and attempt to roar, I named her Bear.

From then on, Bear was a joyful part of my life. I mention her here because of her love of watching me and other people in the various offices over the years work on computers. She was often a part of the work day. I started my first business in a home office, and Bear was there every single day as I got things rolling.

As a kitten, she would stare at the screen and swipe away at imagined enemies moving across the screen. As she got older, she laid on top if the old CRT monitors (remember those?) whenever she wanted to. Without saying a word, Bear had declared that those monitors were officially her personal butt warmer. Any attempt to move said Cat from her personal butt warmer would be met with swift scorn.

It was a tough couple weeks for Bear when we finally ditched the last CRT monitor and got all flat screens. She spent days walking around monitors wondering how in the heck she was supposed to lay on that. Several times she did try to jump on top of them, only to go right over the other side, picker herself up and promptly pretend that never happened.

I could go on about how she was an excellent mouser, how she made fun of my singing, laughed at the inferiority of dogs who ate poop from her litter box, had several freak outs per day (I have to be in the other room- NOW!), was great at taking naps whenever I felt like one and always ate the stinkiest thing on the menu.

She was around for 16 years, so I have a lot of great memories. A few weeks ago she started getting ill, and after several painful and stressful (for her) treatments she only went down hill. Unable to eat or drink for days, she wasn’t moving, wasn’t talking and wasn’t going to get any better.

This morning her pain and suffering thankfully came to an end, but man am I going to miss that little animal. So long Bear – thanks for picking me.

Is this all really necessary? I tried to upgrade my Adobe Photoshop today. I then went to download the software, wondering why I couldn’t download it right after I paid for it. Instead of a “download now” button, I was presented with this Flash presentation on how to download the software, complete with a boat load of unexplained acronyms, bizarre rules, even more bizarre exceptions to the rules and variations on the rules – none of which helped me download what I paid for.

I just want the software I paid for. Does Adobe really want to force me to learn about their dysfunction to get it?

We got new and much faster internet service to the office last Friday and we changed the phone service as well.

We decided not to transfer the old phone number over merely because the old number was being bombarded with SPAM phone calls. The new number is (763) 267-7800. Our 24/7/365 number of (952) 393-4251 will stay the same.

This does make me wonder… with Skype, email, teleconferencing, forums and instant messaging, could we be seeing the beginning of the end of land-line phone service? I’ve already removed the land-line from my house in favor of my iPhone. Could removing the land-line from the office be far behind?

We’ll see. For now, the land-line still provides us with the clearest, glitch and echo free communication option. Plus the phone system we have has an outstanding speaker phone that doesn’t sound at all like you’re on a speaker phone. The same phone system allows for simple transfer of calls.

There’s no doubt the iPhone has gotten better – but it’s not there yet for those three very basic features.

I played guitar for a lot of years, and got pretty damned good at it. But like anyone else, when I started out I sucked. Big time.

One of the best guitar lessons I ever got came from my older brother Jim. It’s a lesson that went way beyond my guitar playing – it has applied to my entire life.

I was in my room one day, door closed, amplifier blaring. I had just bought a couple of new cheap little guitar pedals, convinced I would soon sound like Eddie Van Halen or Ted Nugent. I played the same riff, over and over and over again. I’m sure it was damned annoying, but I didn’t care. I knew that with just the right tweak of the the right knob, I would soon sound awesome…

About an hour into this, and my older brother Jim burst into the room. “Damn it, stop playing that! It’s not the damn gear, it’s in your fingers!

Stunned that he had come in the room to yell instead of tell me how freeking amazing I sounded, I simply said “What”?

“It doesn’t matter if you have that pedal, another pedal, a different guitar or a rack of Marshall amplifiers! How you sound totally comes from how you play – It’s all in your fingers, not the damn gear!”

He knew I wasn’t learning a thing. He knew I wasn’t practicing. He knew I was looking for the short cut to something that only comes from hard work and perseverance. My guess is he listened to me for hours, trying to think of a nice way to tell me I sucked, but the annoyance finally got to him and he yelled at me instead.

I read an article sometime after that where Ted Nugent was all excited about trying out Eddie Van Halen’s guitar rig. No question about it, Eddie’s sound was huge and everyone wanted to figure it out. He asked Eddie if he could try it at a sound check and Eddie was happy to oblige. Ted plugged in to the most coveted guitar rig in all of rock-n-roll – and low and behold, he sounded just exactly like Ted Nugent!

It wasn’t until several years later when I had put in all the time and energy to really learn how to play that I realized how right my brother was. I was in a studio working on getting “the sound” when I got tired of it and grabbed my trusty old $100 pawn shop Music Man amplifier and just recorded the track. It actually took me getting rid of all the fancy toys to hear what I actually sounded like – and it sounded awesome. All that sound just came out of my fingers, my beat to hell Jackson guitar, a single cord and cheap amp. I never gave a crap about gear after that again, and it was so liberating.

It still applies to my life in developing websites and software. The latest plugin, framework, development environment, coding tool, book, computer, printer, monitor, conference… they don’t matter. Yes, some of those things can be nice to have and make your work a little bit easier – but unless you’ve mastered what your doing with your fingers on any keyboard you touch – none of it matters.

So don’t let what you don’t have hold you back. Once you do the hard work and it’s all in your fingers – you own it. You control it, and you can do with it as you choose!

My thanks the authors of Rework for reminding me about this!

I’ve learned a great deal about running a business from my clients. These are sharp people who in many cases have already “been there” and “done that”. One of the most valuable concepts imparted upon me by our client, and my friend, Dave Larsen was “The Value of Distraction“.

Simply stated, what’s it worth to you to pursue a particular opportunity? What’s it worth to you to be distracted from your own goals to help others achieve theirs?

A short time ago, I ran into a situation where I learned exactly what it’s worth to us – and what it’s not.

Podomani was recently approached to help out on a very large marketing/design/development and Ecommerce project. I was pitched that it would mean lots of work to us, and lots and lots of money with a super-mega-potential client. They said we’d get big exposure, and even though their budget on this deal was limited, there was big potential  for more lucrative work down the road.

It took me all of 24 hours to dive into the details, think about it, weigh the potential outcomes, and then promptly turn it down.

What? Turn down a potential huge job? You bet. And we couldn’t be happier about it.

First of all, it was easy to see the client had unreasonable expectations. What they wanted was the internet equivalent of us buying and developing a square block of down town Manhattan – for the price of about four fully decked-out Hummers. They also demanded that a large part of the site be built to integrate with some third party software that was yet to be developed – at no additional cost. Frankly, the project looked to be a fantastic train wreck just waiting to happen.

But more distracting for us was this project was to utilize a whole slew of dead, or dying technologies. So for a year or more, we would be focusing our skills on tools we would never choose to use again. And no where in the project would we be helping a client “make the cultural shift to a world of instantaneous, on-demand information” which we’ve set out to do.

Even if we put an outrageously high bid on it and the accepted – the value of the distraction would have been too steep of a price to pay.

Then there is the matter of the 24 hours I spent on the project to turn it down. That’s three full business days I could have spent in many other ways… but I chose to pay the price of this distraction. While I mourn the loss of the time, I’m comfortable knowing it could have been much worse.

John G. Miller, has a new book hitting the store shelves this month! Outstanding! 47 Ways to Make Your Organization Exceptional. The book is inspirational as well as a guide-book that individuals and organizations can use to set your organization apart from the pack, making customers and stakeholders get more involved and wanting to “stick” with the organization.

From my last post, you may recognize John as the winner of Sarah Palin’s jacket she wore for the photo of her best-selling book “Going Rogue”. All the proceeds went to benefit two organizations that support our U.S. troops, and the jacket made it home to John’s house. John’s lovely and gracious wife Karen modeled it briefly.

We’re just impressed that John was this generous in helping the people that are out there laying their lives on the line for all of us.

We’ve also been fascinated by the level of angst or joy that the mere mention of Sarah Palin generates. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one person garner so much of a positive response – or raise the level of hatred towards an individual so high in the negative responses.

But whatever your take on Mrs. Palin is, it was nice of her to donate the jacket, and even cooler that they made sure the profits went to support two important groups like Wounded Warrior Project and the Fisher House.

Politics must end when we are talking about the care of wounded soldiers. And for that, John, Sarah and all those involved at the very least deserve a thank you.

One of our favorite clients just won an online auction for Sarah Palin’s jacket she wore for the cover over her best selling book “Going Rogue”. The winning bid was $57,000 and all the proceeds go to support the Wounded Warrior Project and the Fisher House. Both are organizations to help our veterans and their families.

The winner of the auction was John G. Miller, best selling author of the books QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, Flipping the Switch and the new OUTSTANDING! 47 Ways to Make Your Organization Exceptional!.

We here at Podomani are very proud to have been helping John with his websites (qbq.com and outstandingorganizations.com) for the last year.

John was only mildly interested in Sarah’s jacket, but he was very very interested in supporting the troops, since his family has personal experience with veterans issues. We just thought this was a great gesture on John’s part, as well as Sarah Palin’s and Laura Ingraham’s.

John’s donation should go a long way to making this Christmas season better for our vets and their familes!

We don’t have any sales people here. Zero, Zip, Nada. When you call or email, your connected to a person who can discuss what you need for your website. I know to many this may sound like a strange way to run a business, but it works.

For several years I worked in an business environment that believed it must grow a sales force in order to grow. This is common for a growing business. It’s the path the vast majority take and I’m sure it does work when selling commodity items.

With every sales person we hired, we ran into the same problem: Since they had never worked in design, development marketing or hosting of a website, they could not discuss anything with a client without saying a phrase I came to dread: “I’ll get back to you on that.”

Translation? “I have no clue. I will have to take the information you gave me, talk to someone smarter than me, then bring it back to you, and hopefully, I will not screw it up in between. Please be patient with me while I totally waste your valuable time.”

The result was often a phone call from a customer I had spent years developing a relationship with who would say “please don’t make me talk to that person again.”

So that former business environment just kept right on firing and hiring sales people, beating their heads against a wall, and hoping for a different outcome.

When I started Podomani, one of the ideas I wanted to try was not having any sales people. It’s working better than I could have ever imagined. We’ve cut tons of time off of lead times and sales processes, lowering costs. When you call Podomani, you get a live voice that can help you now. That has lead to better long term relationships with our clients, and faster turn-arounds on projects.

Do you know of other companies that practice the “no-saleperson” philosophy? If so, I would love to hear about it.

You may have noticed a new look on the Podomani.com website. Today we launched a new version of the site and I first of all wanted to say thanks to J.D. Hendrickson and Brandon Johnson for all the help on getting it done and looking fantastic!

This is about the fourth version of the website since Podomani got started. I also think it’s the best looking of the sites we’ve done for ourselves so far. Working on this also gave us some sneaky ideas on what to do for the next version.

Building a website for yourself after spending a day working on them for others can be difficult at times. Much the same as I imagine it is for a butcher to go out for a steak dinner after a long day at work – but this one was different. We had a good time with it.

I hope it shows.

I confess I just started tweeting recently. I had been watching Twitter out of curiosity for a long time before I decided to jump in.

The more I looked at it the more I found it to be … well, random bragging about your unexceptional life. As best described in this SuperNews cartoon.

Slowly but surely I find myself replacing my daily blog reading habits with Twitter. I have a bunch of RSS feeds and a long list of bookmarked blogs. But I find myself just checking in on my Twitter page. Almost everyone I am following on Twitter is someone who has a blog I was checking almost daily.

Some of the blogs I followed are done be exceptionally good writers and story tellers. I would much rather read a full blog posting or story from these people than just a Tweet – and many of these people have already effectively figured out how to Tweet and get my attention – and then I’m off to their blog to read the full story.

For the other blogs I check out… Twitter helps me avoid wasting time scanning through their blogs. Twitter forces them to get to the point – thank God.

So has Twitter killed blogging? Not yet. But with our ever shorter attention spans … it’s got a shot.