So, we’ve purchased a new apartment complex in Jacksonville, AR. It’s 46 units and is currently full (no discounts given to facebook-friends). It should be a good deal. I’m 100% confident that we bought it at a great price, the cash flow projections look good, the management is solid, and the occupancy rate is high.

We’re doing a good job at aligning our properties such that they are relatively close, the management is getting better as screening tenants, contractors are more understanding of our terms, and most of the properties have similar goals.

With any organization there is a “culture” that everyone buys into… that includes the owners, contactors, employees, management and even the tenants/customers. If you can’t get everyone to buy into the culture, you either have to change the culture or change the people.

The guys at the top typically define the culture… the guys at the bottom have to buy into the culture… if you’re at the bottom and you want to change the culture, you get repromanded… thats why turnover is so much higher at the bottom…. thats why you hear of so many employees that “just didn’t work out.”

If you want to change culture, the guys at the top have to change… and I mean they have to be replaced. Changing people is too hard to do.

      

I think its funny that you’ll see celebrities reading gossip magazines. Yet they kick and scream about how much they hate paparazii. They feed the frenzy by reading the magazine. I don’t blame them, I just think its ironic.

Facebook is the same way… when the minifeed was released, people were outraged. They yelled that they didn’t want people to know all their business. Yet every day (yes… daily), we log into facebook and skim the minifeed looking for entertainment or gossip.

And if you can’t view someone’s information, you kind of get upset. Is it a laziness/convenient issue??? Is it a “need for gossip/entertainment”? Who knows. The point is, the minifeed is just like the paparazzi… we love to hate it… and although we may hate paparazzi, we love them when they focus on other people.

      

I opened a new bank account last week. I chose Arvest because of all the positive things I’ve heard about it.

When I walked in, they smiled and greeted me… no different than what other banks COULD do.
As I waited for an associate, they offered me free water, coffee, and popcorn… a cheap add-on that other banks COULD offer
They told me about their hours from 7am to 7pm… availability that other banks COULD use.
They gave me free online banking… which other banks usually offer.

The point is… banking is becoming more and more like a commodity. They all offer the same products in a different package. The only thing that is differentiating them from one another is service.

If you have a business that cannot differentiate itself from it’s competitors, you have to focus A LOT of energy on service. And whether you want to admit it or not, you’re selling a commodity.

      

I’ve been a big fan of Google Trends since it was released. Google Trends allows you to view a graph of search terms and compare how often those terms are searched over a time period. I’ve had a good time comparing random things like Jesus Versus Satan (Jesus trumps Satan), Girl versus Boy (girl wins), Jesus Versus Paris Hilton (Paris Hilton usually wins), etc.

I’ve got a new habit now… it’s Google’s Hot Trends. Google’s Hot Trends show the top 100 most popular searches for the day… I’m not real sure how things get on the list but I think its some kind of time calculation.

      

Hundreds of startups are started as widgets (third party item that can be embedded in a web page) on myspace such as photobucket, rockyou, etc.

The new facebook platform will do the same thing except with a smaller audience (about a third of the size of myspace) but a better platform. It will be better integrated with the existing system (news feeds, note posting, etc) when compared to myspace. Myspace simply throws the widget on the page and has no way of tying different parts of the site together (you cannot tag people in photos, tag someone for a note, or view “news feeds”).

Myspace has an unstable infrastructure (we’re all use to the page crashes and unidentified errors), ugly design, and poor integration. IMHO, myspace it the thousand pound gorilla that was created poorly in the beginning. It’s gotten so big, that changing the infrastructure is difficult to do. They can’t implement the things as fast as facebook due to their popularity and due to the fact that they’re tied to a fat, ugly system. It’s like trying to move three thousand people from a raft, to a cruise ship… It just can’t be done. Moving them to dump they’re users in the water (aka it requires you to take a system down for a bit).

Rather than moving them (the users have to be in the water for a little bit), myspace is slowly trying to patch holes in their raft. They’re trying to turn the raft into a cruise ship…Tuff Luck.

Myspace… you’re only hope is this… admit that you don’t have a cruise ship… build one. Take the site down for a little bit and move everyone over to a cruise ship. Quit trying to make the cruise ship out of the raft. If you don’t… you’re going to sink. Or… people are going to dive off of your raft and swim to a cruise ship.

Do you get the point? I expect a response Mr. Murdoch.

      

Its 2:30am and I’m I’m just going to bed. I spent the last 4 hours working on a proposal that we may, or may not, get. And before I received it, someone else worked on it for an hour. As I was about to lay down to go to bed, I realized that I probably need to bring up two points.

Point One
I have three other proposals that are staring me in the face every day. And I need to finish them because proposals bring in money. Not immediately but eventually. The way it works is this: leads turn into meetings turn into proposals turn into sales which turn into money. It’s all a numbers game. So, when you realize that you don’t have anything going or that you’re not making enough money (in sales) it’s probably because you don’t have enough poles in the water (a good sentence since I’m at the lake). Don’t complain because you don’t have money, complain because you haven’t drummed up enough leads, went to enough meetings, or finished enough proposals.

Point Two
When you look at someone’s hourly rate, think about how much work goes into the work before the work even starts. I know… that’s confusing to think about, but I’ve already invested 4 hours into a proposal that I may get… If I get 25% of the work that I write proposals for, I would get 1 job out of every 4 proposals. If I took 4 hours to develop each proposal, It would take me 16 hours worth of work to get 1 job.

Other things to think about when developing your hourly rate: taxes, vacation, insurance, and other stuff that needs to be paid since you’re employer isn’t paying for you.

      

I have a hard time on small stuff. I know… “don’t sweat the small stuff”… But I can’t help it. One that I ran into last week was trying to determine who should do simple data entry that nobody wanted to do. We had two programmers that were equal, paid equal, and had an equal work load.

The difference between a large company and a small company is that in a small company you have to wear many hats. Sometimes its the “visionary” hat and sometimes its the “trash man” hat. Large companies have a trash man set aside for cleaning, small companies have owners that are sick of seeing trash around the office.

The end of the story is this… I did the simple data entry that nobody wanted to do. And although I hated every second of it, I was reminded that sometimes I have to take off my “I have more important stuff to do” hat and wear my “things have to get done” hat.

      

When many of us use the internet, chances are we may be using a web application without even knowing it. A web application is a type of application that uses the internet or an intranet as its “front-end”. To the normal eye, a web application looks like a web site, but behind the scenes it is a uniformed integration of immense databases and other software applications.

There are several scenarios where web applications make more sense than typical applications. It could be that you already have a piece of software that handles your inventory. You could create a web application that lists all “available” inventory based on an already existing database.

Maybe you have an internal “knowledgebase” where you store all of your customer’s frequently asked questions (FAQs) and you want all of your employees to be able to add, edit, and delete questions. The problem is that half of them use Windows while the others use mac or linux. The web application allows them to work with the same dataset regardless of operating system.

The bottom line is that web applications give users access to data; making it searchable, sortable, and interactive for the user.

Communicates with User
A serious advantage of web applications is that they communicate with the user. That means that the user has the opportunity to customize the application based on their needs. Just think if eBay was just a bunch of static pages that you couldn’t search through, sort, or compare prices. It would be worthless. Web applications communicate with users.

Database Interaction
Additionally, web applications are able to interact with databases. This means, if a website has a dynamic content set with constant changes, the updates to the site will be made almost automatically. Without a web application, the updates would have to be done manually. This means that when you change your eBay price, it’s immediately communicated to your potential buyers.

Interact with Current Applications
As stated in the earlier example, many of our web applications are put into place because they already have an application that they use to take orders but it doesn’t interact with the web, we can easily create a web application that ties into a current system.

      

Are you looking for a few good workers? Finding the right IT and contract workers can be a challenge. In order to find the few people who are truly qualified, you need to wade through piles of resumes. At iProv, we focus on finding people to fill your positions so you don’t need to worry about it. A lot of people have asked me why companies use iProv, and not just do this themselves? We’ll here’s a short list…

Short Term Projects
If your company has a short term project in the works, hiring a skilled worker on contract terms could be an ideal solution. Typically, these projects do not require the enlistment of a permanent employee. Why hire, train, and devote your business’s resources into a short term fix? Let iProv show you the benefits of bringing in a trained worker, specialized in your area of need, whose only goal is a final product up to or exceeding your company’s specifications.

High Growth Companies
Through our employee recruiting and placement program, iProv is also able to help high growth companies increase their relative efficiency. When a business achieves rapid growth, that growth must be met with an adequate base of coverage for all your company’s tasks. Simply adding employees without multiplying net resources can lead to a deduction of your business’s overall production. And as you know, when you are just trying to stay afloat, the last thing you can afford to do is spend precious time searching for qualified candidates.

Help Find Quality Candidates
Our main focus with this placement initiative is finding top of the line, quality candidates for our customers. For every employment opportunity that you advertise, chances are you receive a lot of applications. It takes time to sift through them, interview, verify backgrounds, test, and train the right people for the job. We simplify this process by going through all of those steps for you. We narrow the search down to a select number of candidates that we find adequate for you. We utilize nationwide searches, powerful referrals, and other resources that, honestly, can’t be accessed by the general public.

Not an IT Expert?
If you need IT professionals but you are not an IT expert, the task of hiring can be really frustrating. It is hard for someone who is not part of the IT industry to spot a quality candidate. Since we focus on that kind of work, we know exactly what to look for. This increases the chances that you will find a perfect match for your position.

      

Wait Wait Wait… this should be called “Do Your Job, Tell Your Story, Ask for Money”.

I just met with someone that is in charge of donations for a hospital. The hospital has over 160 beds and they give over millions of dollars a year in free services. They provide the free services by donations given to the hospital’s foundation.

My new friend is in charge of raising money for this organization. And after visiting with him for almost an hour, I realized that he has the same problem most organizations have. He doesn’t have a problem with his internal operations. His problem, like most organizations, is they aren’t good at telling they’re story.

Fundraising is a three step process:

1. Do the work your customers expect and make sure they’re happy
2. Tell the success stories
3. Ask for the money

Like all the other great organizations that aren’t well known, my friend is good at number 1 and number 3, but they haven’t been telling their story. In essence, it’s a marketing problem. Remember, no matter what happens, if you rely on fundraised money, you have to be good at all three of these. If you’re bad at any of them, all three suffer.