Things have slowed down a bit since the last time I updated this blog. The school year is starting to wind down, the weather is finally getting a bit warmer, and yard work is starting to take over my weekends. I’m still ironing out the details on what the girls will be doing this summer, and I’ve been steadily working on projects in the home office, both for myself and for my clients. I realized after I’d finished and posted the last update a couple of weeks ago that there were a couple of things that I had done but hadn’t talked about in the post. There was already a ton of material to cover last time, so it wasn’t such a bad thing that I had neglected to mention what has been happening with projects like the barbecue hut in Cedar Rapids.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I met with the woman Tom hired to manage the day-to-day operations for the barbecue hut. I’m not in the business of managing restaurants, so Tom brought someone else onto the team to worry about that sort of stuff. Her background is not with startups, so she’s not used to the way Tom manages things, with iterations and pivots on a regular basis. I’ve had clients that have changed their minds on projects in the past, so working with Tom has not been any different than other folks I’ve worked with in the past. I could tell that she was determined to get him to change the way he does things, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. There’s a line between creativity and recklessness, and I think that Tom has a great deal of creative energy that he’s looking to harness, which is why this restaurant project is so important to him. If I can help to deflect some of her attention away from Tom, I feel like I’ve done my job.
And deflect, I have done. I guess that because I build Web sites, I am also qualified to set up anything else technological. None of the people I am working with on the barbecue hut, including Tom, are terribly computer savvy. I have spent a great deal of time on the phone over the last few weeks helping them pick out the correct equipment to accompany the Square Register system I recommended to them. I made the trip up to the north side of Cedar Rapids a few weekends ago to setup the Square Register on the iPad they wanted to use for the point-of-sale system along with the cash drawer and the receipt printer. Chalk up a new item for the resume! The manager also wanted a bunch of back-end stuff set up to send the information between the Square system and Quickbooks and to do employee time management – at this point, we have completely left my wheelhouse and drifted out somewhere into the forest. She managed to get Quickbooks tied into the program, but I have yet to have the time to get the rest of the project done. I’m also working on the Web site for the restaurant, which wouldn’t take as long as it is if they had any sort of branding done ahead of time (which I had mentioned a while ago, to no avail) and if I weren’t fielding so many tech support questions. I’m hoping to have this whole project wrapped up before the end of the month.
Also finishing up before the end of the month: all of the leftover Sexy Life video projects and customer discovery interviews that I had yet to enter into our system. In the mad rush to get interviews during the final week of Venture School, I had recorded everything but did not have the time to enter everything into the Big Spreadsheet that the team was using to compile data for the slide deck. Two weeks ago, I finally found a few hours in the evening to work through all of the transcriptions and enter the data into the spreadsheet. After that was done, I got the presentation edited and worked on a slideshow video with more audio that I had collected during the second Sexy Life Social Hour. The audio track ended up being about 15 minutes long, which would have made for a more interesting slideshow if we had taken more pictures along the way – not something that we had the chance to do working as a lean team to get this thing done.
Take a gander at the newest version of our Sexy Life pitch with and without the accompanying Q&A and the slideshow video called “What Does ‘Sexy Life’ Mean To You?”
The end of Venture School does not mean the end of Sexy Life, but it does mean a bit of a hiatus. Chris, the man behind the idea and coder by day, decided that he wants to step back from the project. David and I have decided to carry on with the project. I felt like I was the most adamant about continuing, because this really could turn into something big. However, we don’t have the time to work on it as steadily right now as we did over the last couple of months. So, we’re just pressing the pause button on Sexy Life, to be started again soon.
This past Friday, I got the chance to get up to the Vault in Cedar Rapids for an event they were putting on called “FARKing Friday” with Drew Curtis, the founder of fark.com. I’m not terribly sure about the backstory in getting Drew here to talk about his experiences from running a major Web site to running for governor of Kentucky. Whatever brought him to eastern Iowa, it was great to listen to him discuss his experiences, and I definitely gained some insight that I can use going forward with my freelance business and other entrepreneurial opportunities. I love attending these kinds of events because of the nuggets of information that I can walk away with, along with the opportunity to spend some time with people I enjoy.
In between the two seminars led by Drew, I was able to spend a bit of time working on some projects that needed some deep concentration, without the interruptions of the kids. It’s been a challenge to get that kind of work done recently because the wife has been on an inpatient rotation, which means she’s hard at work at the Big Hospital 80 hours a week. For more, videos are easier to create while I’m with the kids than it is to code Web sites – for whatever reason, I tend to do most of my video editing after the kids go to bed. Perhaps the night is more inspiring for video production than it is for Web site development? Maybe it uses a different part of my brain that I haven’t used all day with the kids.
Either way, I have some Web sites to build this week… so here’s hoping the kids cooperate.