Lessons on Sales Management
Aug 29 2009

Below is a post written by Laura Benold, ATI’s Marketing Associate about a recent Lunch & Learn we held at Austin Technology Incubator.  It was originally posted on our new ATI blog and called If You Don’t Close Sales, Your Company Won’t Survive.

ATI’s Lunch and Learn panel on sales management on August 12, 2009 began with a question: “Who in here sells?”  A roomful of arms stretched upward. Everyone sells.  Whether on a sales team, to prospective employers, or as the acting “every man” of a start-up business, the act of convincing others escapes no one.

While 40+ ATI member company CEOs and Founders, ATI staff, and TechBA company CEOs and Founders ate lunch in the Alamo Room of the WPRC Building on Braker Lane, the three panelists introduced themselves:

Michael Osborne (left) is the Senior Vice President of Sales for BazaarVoice: a company that makes word of mouth marketing work by enabling services and technology to gather, respond to and amplify content.

Janice (Jan) Ryan (middle) has worked in technology for 28 years and came to Austin to become the founding VP of Sales for Vignette, an early internet enterprise software company.  She is currently the CEO and Founder of Social Dynamix, a new company in the social media space.

Mitch Jacobson (right) has worked just about everywhere the last 29 years in sales from Tandy Corporation to Dell to Tech Data Corporation.  He started at A.B. Dick and says that, “if you can sell with a name like A.B. Dick behind you, you can sell.”  He founded Eyes of Texas, an angel investment firm, and is currently the co-director at the Clean Energy Incubator advising ATI’s clean start-up companies.

Over the course of the Lunch and Learn, panelists spread significant words of wisdom. Here’s what they said:

Jan:

Results-oriented selling.  Remember you’re not selling a product, you’re selling the results that a customer wants to achieve.  Slide to the other side of the table and look at the process from their viewpoint.

Paint a ‘zebra.’ Include all the stripes of an ideal customer in profiling who really needs your product (like  Morphine, not aspirin).  Understand exact needs that would cause him to write a check.  All else is secondary.

Hiring – Hire people who know why they’ve been successful.  They’ll be able to repeat that process in a new situation.  When you hire sales leadership, don’t assume the highest ‘pedigree’ translates to an early stage venture. Their hunger is more important.

Find the maverick.  In early stage sales, there’s always someone who wants to look good in the company.  Find the maverick in your sale that wants a personal win. Study what his win will be, and shape your strategy around it.  Help him succeed, and you will too.

Michael:

Sales should be enjoyable experiences. “Sure, there are contracts and money involved, but it’s an enjoyable experience,” and those have been the greatest sale cycles, he says.

Look for intelligence, passion, and an ability to communicate when you hire. Sales experience previous to the job doesn’t necessarily matter; but intelligent people can answer questions or find answers, passionate people are likeable, and good communicators can drive the deal forward.

All salespeople are motivated differently. There are trailblazers, road builders and truck drivers.  Trailblazers are motivated by ego, for example, and truck drivers by cash. Evolve your hiring process based on the current company needs.

Identify your target customer’s persona to increase sense of urgency. Innovators want to be first.  Those who are behind want to catch up.  Some work internally and think it’s about time for change. Others have a deadline.  Find the pain.

Mitch:

Be persistent. In the early 1980s Mitch sold copiers. One day, while on a pitch, the copier jammed.  “I was taught to say, ‘I’m glad this happened, so I can show you how easy it is to fix’, but it I couldn’t fix it,” Jacobson says.  Ultimately, he made the sale because he came back later that week to follow-up.

Spend a day in the life of your customer. Someone might really need what you’re selling, but they don’t know why and you don’t know why, because you haven’t walked in their shoes.

Although you have little money to spend at the early stage, you have resources to find knowledge.

Keep track of your wins and losses. Repeat what you’ve done well and learn from what hasn’t worked out.  Create and distribute ‘how the deal was done (or rejected)’ documents.

The Group:

Know when to draw the line. If you pick the wrong customer and get mired down in the details, it can kill you.  That’s worse than waiting a few more months to get the right deal. “When a sale becomes a negotiation and you feel like you’re buying a car, it’s a good time to walk away.  A lot of the time, they’ll come back at your price, not theirs,” says Mitch.

The pipeline is a set of stages. The stages must be easy to understand, such as “meeting scheduled, prospect, opportunity, will close” or “cold, warm, hot, closing”.  Evaluate the stages of a deal daily as an individual and weekly as a team.

A deal isn’t ever really closed. It closes on some level for you when the customer signs or gives you money and for the customer when your product is implemented and they’re paying.  However, good salespeople retain customers, so the cycle never really ends.

Social media creates connections that are not work-related. It allows you to “learn about the prospect and connect via a legitimate connection,” says Michael.

The session ended one and a half hours later with networking and knowledge sharing.  If you’re interested in learning more about Lunch and Learn events, or how you can sponsor one, please contact Aruni Gunasegaram, director of operations.

Lunch and Learn events are an exclusive offering for ATI, ATI member companies and ATI affiliates.  Speakers must be entrepreneurs and business people who can share their valuable experiences with ATI member company Founders and CEOs.

by Laura Benold, ATI Marketing Associate

First Week Of School
Aug 23 2009

School starts next week for most kids here in Austin – public or private.  Many parents are in a flurry getting ready to get their kids back into a routine if they haven’t had one during the summer. For dual working parent families, like ours, who probably had our kids in summer camps it’s probably a shift back to more stricter bed times and potential looming home work days.

For us this is a very special first week of school because our kids will be attending the new Magellan International School (MIS) founded by their dad, Erin Defosse!   It is Austin’s FIRST multi-language (Spanish, English, Mandarin), International Baccalaureate, Primary Years Programme school (pre-K to 2nd) ever and has already set the record for enrollment numbers for a new private school with about 45 students on Day One!  Most private schools start with significantly fewer students.

They will be offering art, music and physical education as part of the standard education and will be teaching using the ‘units of inquiry’ model.  You’ll have to go to the site to learn more about how that model works.  As a person who is rediscovering her passion for singing, offering music is well ‘music to my ears!’

The kids have been involved in getting the school ready from helping to paint, potting plants, running errands, and assembling furniture.  It’s been a great experience for them to see how something that never existed before comes to life.  They might just get the entrepreneurial disease bug.  🙂

As an entrepreneur, it’s amazing to see how much has happened from vision to fruition.  In March 2007, we moved our son to the Austin International School (AIS), a wonderful school whose primary language is French.  Erin grew up in Mexico so he had a strong desire for the kids to be fluent in Spanish.   We really enjoyed the environment and teachers at AIS but given that neither of us knew French, Erin began searching for different alternatives and didn’t find anything suitable so in the Spring of 2008 just before I took the steady, day job, he decided to look into creating one.

Since that time, he along with someone he hired to help him get things off the ground by finding the right Head of School, not only found the perfect Head of School, Marisa Leon, from Colombia but also 3 great teachers – one from Spain, one from Colombia, and one from Chicago.  They all have very sweet personalities and awesome backgrounds.  I’m excited about the kids getting to work with their respective teachers.  It will be interesting to see how they all adapt to living in the United States in a city that’s had over 100 degree temperatures for quite some time now.

So 20 or so months ago, MIS was a vision in Erin’s mind and now it is reality.  I know it will positively effect thousands of kids who will surely go out and make a wonderful difference in this world in not only one language, not even two, but three languages.  As a writer, I have come to appreciate the power of language both written and oral in changing one’s own world and the world at large.  Oh to have such power in more than one language…what a gift to our kids.

So cool! 8)

SXSW 2010 Panel Pimping Time
Aug 18 2009

Last year I submitted a panel for SXSW Interactive on Building A Web Business After Hours that got selected.  It went really well and we got a lot of great feedback.  I really enjoyed pulling it together.  I’ve since learned that for me building a business like Babble Soft after hours is not something I can continue to do given the many things I’m juggling so we are looking for a new home.

This year I proposed a panel called Online/Offline Networking in the Age of Social Media inspired by one of my co-workers, Bart Bohn, Director of our IT/Wireless incubator at the Austin Technology Incubator.  I’m hoping to get some great speakers from key social companies to talk about the importance of leveraging online tools to enhance your offline networking in order to meet your personal and professional goals.

Please vote for the panel at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2851 and if you have any great speaker recommendations, let me know.  You do have to register to vote.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing some of you at SXSW Interactive next year!

Diane Birch – Meet and Greet
Aug 10 2009

I’m on a winning streak!  Not only did I just win a bunch of I-Spy stuff, but I also got a call this morning from our local radio station Mix 94.7 and they told me I won a special viewing with Diane Birch, a great up and coming singer.  I first saw her at SXSW earlier this year at Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop party.  She really has such an amazing voice which is so mature for someone in her mid-20’s.  She’s been on David Letterman and played with Prince.  Fortunately, I could shift my schedule to make it there for about an hour in the late afternoon before I had to pick up the kids.

Last week I got an email about her visit to Austin, so I went to the site and signed up for a chance to win.  I didn’t really think I’d win so when I got the call I was pretty surprised.

I even got a picture with her and an autographed little poster, that I’m not really sure what I’ll do with.  I’m wondering if I should take these unusual wins as a sign that I’m on the right path in my life journey right now or just chalk it up to mere coincidence?

I have been really interested in learning more about music, getting into the music scene and my kids could certainly use some more brain exercising games so they are both nice coincidences.

Many great things in life and business can only be attributable to luck.  But you have to be open to the opportunity.  There’s a difference between the person who walks by a $5 bill and sees it because she’s looking around and open to opportunities and the one who walks right on by because she’s looking straight ahead absorbed in the incessant thoughts in her head.  I often wonder how many opportunities I’ve missed because I’m too caught up in thinking and worrying too much about things I probably shouldn’t.

It’s Nice to Win Something
Aug 5 2009

Sometimes I get lucky and win something.  Out of the blue I won the following just for being a subscriber to Parent Reviewers.

One (1) Grand Prize winner for the Grand Prize Pack including:
Wii Video Game ‘Ultimate I SPY’
Board Game ‘I SPY Memory Game’
I SPY A to Z: A Book of Picture Riddles
I SPY Treasure Hunt

Grand Prize Pack valued at $85.99

It arrived the other day and I opened the package this evening.  My daughter ran to show her brother the Wii game and he said “Whatever, it’s not Lego Star Wars.”  I told him he had a bad attitude and he said “Sorry” but didn’t really mean it because he has been dreaming about Lego Star Wars for quite some time because one of his best buds has it.   I’m sure he’ll like the I SPY game when he plays it.  Then we played the Board Game and he really enjoyed it and ended up winning by getting the most matches and beating me and his sister.  She’s a good sport because she’s two and a half years younger than he is so she usually doesn’t win unless he lets her win, which he frequently does so she’ll keep playing with him.  However, she often beats him at Bowling and Boxing on the Wii, which I think perplexes him.

He read one of the books and my daughter and I skimmed through the other but we were horrible at trying to find all the things in the complex pictures so we just talked about what we could find.  I think it’s a bit much for a 4 year old but she was excited to see the light houses because she remembered that we went inside one when we went on vacation to South Padre.

Thanks Elina at Parent Reviewers for being so cool and giving away cool prizes!

The random pictures of some lovely fuchsia/hot pink colored roses above are on my desk at work.  I got them this past weekend from Central Market (a grocery store here in Austin).  They opened up so beautifully and this mediocre iPhone picture of a few of them on my desk doesn’t really do them justice, but they are so pretty I thought I’d share.  They were 25 stems for $12.99!  I took some to work as well for some of the other women in the office.

Author: Aruni | Filed under: Just For Fun, random stuff | 4 Comments »

The Dangers of Multitasking
Aug 3 2009

We’ve all heard about the pluses and minuses of multitasking.  We’ve also heard that women tend to be better at multitasking than men.  I think it depends on the person.  I’ve worked with some men who have been excellent at juggling many things, but overall I think women are wired to be better at it because of having children.   Children, especially more than one (I can’t imagine having 3 or more), tend to pull you in 5 directions at once and if you don’t have one eye on a kid, he could fall into a lava pit or a crocodile could eat her.

I’ve always been fairly good at multitasking or should I say serial tasking.  I can jump back and forth from thing to thing and get most things done timely.  It’s probably somewhat of an ADD trait that I’ve heard many entrepreneurs confess to having, but there’s a point when it becomes counter productive (see Dilbert comic below).

I’m dealing with about 5 really big things right now and each has its own complexities.  Way beyond what one person should advisedly handle at one time.   And because I can’t focus fully on one thing, everything seems to be suffering or shall I say I’m not executing 100% or able to play my A game at any of them.   I even published a blog post I didn’t mean to publish and I’ve never done that in the over 2 years I’ve been blogging!   There are constraints (time, money, stamina, fear, etc.) that seem impossible to work around in the near term and ‘impossible’ is a word that I usually smile at.  And in between there are birthday parties to plan and bills to pay.

I remember dealing with so many things when I was founding CEO of my first start-up from customers, suppliers, investors, board members, to employees, etc.  Each area needed special attention and invariably one or more suffers at some time or another.  You had to have your shit together when facing each constituent even if you felt like everything was just a hair away from falling apart.  You have to play the part superbly (no room to mess up your lines) and make sure your customers know you aren’t going to disappear tomorrow.  And you have to make sure your investors and Board haven’t lost faith in you and can see that the customers still have faith in you.  And you have to keep morale up with your employees and assure your suppliers you’ll pay them.  So many entrepreneurs get lost at times like these because it is hard to keep all those balls up in the air while at the same time making sure you take care of yourself (i.e., minimize the fast food and lack of exercise).

So what do we do?  We get up.  We put our pants/skirts on and we show up.  We put a smile on our face because we have to, and we know no one really understands how we sometimes feel like we are free falling with no safety net and no parachute.  Of course, if you aren’t anti-social, you have friends and family to listen to you when you feel like crying or punching the wall, but unless they’ve also walked a mile in your shoes, they can’t fully understand the sensations or lack thereof that you are processing.  And sometimes they let you down because they don’t know how to be there for you like you need and that hurts.  Or they think they are trying to be there for you and instead they inadvertently hurt you.  And most of the time when you feel like punching that wall, you can’t!  So you put your game face on.  You hide and fake it until it eventually turns around.  It does eventually turn around but it feels like a hurricane while you walk through high winds putting one step in front of the other.  As an entrepreneur, you have to be optimistic or at least optimistically pessimistic or is that pessimistically optimistic. 🙂

And if you have kids, they can all of a sudden give you a reason to keep on going as my son did today.  One of my good friend’s father died last week and they are going to miss my son’s upcoming birthday party.  They have a son a year younger who he loves playing with, and I took both kids over to visit them this evening.  I told my son, let’s bring him one of the little Hot Wheel cars that we got for your goody bags since he can’t make your party.  He said, “Let me look for the best one…my favorite one.  I want to give him the best one.”  He knew his friend’s grandfather had died, although he doesn’t really know what death means.  He showed me the car he wanted to give him and it was the special one he had chosen for himself, and I started to cry.  I hugged him and told him how proud I was of him for doing such a nice thing and how special it was to show how much he cared for his friend during this time.  He hugged me back because he saw how happy I was with him.  My daughter asked me why I was crying, because I never cry in front of them (or cry often for that matter) and I told her I was happy that her brother was so thoughtful and she hugged me too.  I thought to myself “I guess I’ve done at least something right to have an almost 7 year old son with such a good heart.”

On the car ride over I told him to play with his friend and make him happy and laugh.  And he said “Just like I do with my sister when she’s upset?  I do this and that to make her laugh.”  They both started laughing in the car and I said “Yes, just like that.  It’s nice to make people smile in hard times.”  Then I cried some more silent tears of sadness and happiness at the two beautiful kids I have been blessed with.

So the moral of this post I guess is Don’t over multitask.  Have kids.  Although kids are a big cause of over multitasking, they help you keep things in perspective and give you the reason to wake up in the morning, put your pants/skirt on, put your smiling game face on, and figure out how to do the impossible! 😀

Posting Mistake on Last Post
Aug 1 2009

I realized just now that the post I was working on about the Difference Between Boys And Girls got published before I finished it.  That’s what happens after a hectic, draining week and you just start hitting buttons in a blurry state of exhaustion and you think it says Save Draft and it says Publish and the neurons in your brain don’t connect to what happened until the email shows up in your in box the next day.  UGH.  Anyway, when I finish it, I’ll re-post with hopefully more clarity on the point I was trying to get across.  I’ve taken it off for now.

I hope that builds some suspense to see how much more understandable I can make it. 🙂   I apologize for the cliff hanger…

I need to add a category called Oops to the blog.

How Did We Get Here?
Jul 27 2009

Do you ever wonder how people get to where they are?  What are the daily things that happen or don’t happen that contribute to where you are right now?  It’s often hard to piece everything together, but I found myself wondering that recently when thinking about friends, myself, and other entrepreneurs.

An older gentleman came in to pitch his company to the Austin Technology Incubator recently.  He had an interesting concept having to do with wireless technology but it was as if he was living in a different time dimension.  He actually presented using transparencies on an overhead projector that we happened to have because we are part of the University, but I daresay that projector has sat mostly unused for over a decade.  He had over 40 transparencies and we asked him to skip most of them.  When I asked him why he chose to use transparencies instead of a PowerPoint presentation, I don’t think he really understood what I was asking him.  He equated transparencies to being more technical.

His point of view of his situation and why he wasn’t able to raise money for his venture for the past 9 or so years was so far off from our points of view, that it seemed too far a gap to bridge.  He would have to have a spontaneous shift in being and thinking that would probably take someone a lot of time to help him achieve.  A true paradigm shift (business buzzword of the 90’s) would have to occur.

It made me think about how we all view our worlds a certain way and how some people have such far gaps to bridge to see another person’s or group’s reality.  It made me wonder about myself and how my perception might be skewed in certain situations in my life/business and conversely how I could be trying to relate to someone or a group, but they can’t relate because they are living in a transparency world and I’m living in a PowerPoint world.

I’m guessing that this happens in a less obvious way in many start-up companies but many of us entrepreneurs are just too blind to see it or really can’t see it because we don’t know how and don’t have the right glasses to help us see the light.

Maybe I’m just being too philosophical and thinking too much, which is quite possible.

Profiles in Power – Austin Women
Jul 26 2009

This past Friday, I attended the annual Austin Business Journal’s Profiles of Women in Power event.  I attended on behalf of my co-worker and friend, Melissa Rabeaux who I have mentioned on this blog before.  She runs most of the green technology organizations in town including the Clean Energy Venture Summit, CleanTX.org, and Austin Solar Energy Entrepreneur’s Network.  She was nominated for the event in the non-profit category.  She wasn’t able to attend because she is recovering really well from successful surgery!

I sat at the IC2 table.  IC2 is the parent organization to the Austin Technology Incubator (check out our NEW website), where I work by day.  It was probably the best of the Profiles events I had attended and I’ve attended a handful throughout the years.  IC2 sponsors the event every year.  We sat right next to the keynote/award recipient table.

Last year Laura Kilcrease, founding director of ATI, was the 1^st Lifetime Achievement award recipient.  This year it was Betty Sue Flowers (see fuzzy iPhone picture of me with Betty Sue taken by someone who doesn’t know how to take iPhone pics).

I met with Betty Sue several years ago when I was working on a book concept that I have yet to complete.  My friend Randi Shade introduced me to her.  She said she remembered me and that she had seen some of the articles that I’d published.  She also said the offer to write the Foreword of my eventual book was still open even after she moves to New York with her new love, former senator Bill Bradley, who was also at the lunch.  He’s a very tall man!  Now I just have to write that book…whatever it ends up being.

Karen Hughes (former Bush under secretary) was the keynote speaker! She was a fabulous, engaging speaker and even spoke about Bush’s made up words like ‘misunderestimated’ and how they often had to tell them they weren’t real words.  It’s stunning to me that he didn’t know they weren’t real words, but Betty Sue in her acceptance speech said she liked that word and that as a professor of English she thought it should be added to the Oxford dictionary.  She said it should mean something like people underestimate the extent to which they misunderstand something.  Betty Sue is so good with words!  Because it was a woman’s event, Karen spoke about jewelry she bought (and was wearing at the lunch) with Arabic on it when she visited Kuwait and how honored they were that she was wearing it.  They were impressed that a White House official would wear something with Arabic on it.  She said her husband told her it was just an excuse to buy jewelry! 🙂

The winners of the final awards were (ones in bold I know and/or are friends with):

Joyce Batcheller – Seton Family of Hospitals
Marilyn Bostick – Dee’s Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas/Seton Family of Hospitals
Linda Brucker, A Legacy of Giving
Tausha Carlson, Marahton Real Estate
Ewina Carrinton, Reznick Group, P.C.
Deborah Cole, Greater Texas Landscapes
Charlene Crump, Mary Lee Foundation
Nancy Ebe, Ebe & Associates, P.C.
Nora Foster, Campus Advantage
Candice Houston, ThinkStreet
Julie Jumonville, UpSpring Baby
Vickie Lee, VP HR of Tokyo Electron
Marny Lifshen, Marny Lifshen Consulting
Victoria Lynden, Alliance Abroad Group, AIDE, Kohana Coffee, Cissis market & Wine Bar
Sandra martin, founding CEO of Center for Child Protection
Caroline Murphy, St. David’s Healthcare/HCA, Mayor of BeeCave
Rebecca Powers, Impact Austin
Kerri Qunell, Capital Area Food Bank of Texas
Kendra Scott, Kendra Scott Design
Sue Snyder, Jackson Walker LLP
Denis Trauth, President of Texas of Texas State University – San Marcos
Jimmie Ann Vaughn, Jimmie Ann Vaughn Real Estate/Bastrop Downtown Business Alliance
Stuart Vick Smith, Maxwell Lock & Ritter, LLP
Lisa Williamson, UpSpring Baby
Ellen Wood, vcfo
Patricia Young Brown, Travis County Healthcare District

I saw several people I hadn’t seen in a while, and I enjoyed the event immensely.  Maybe one day I’ll be nominated for an award and win  something… 😎

Nothing Much To Write About
Jul 23 2009

Well that’s not entirely true.  There is always many things to write about but it doesn’t always fit the topics of this blog which are business and parenting.  I’m meeting some great people on this path to finding a home for Babble Soft (I so enjoyed the comments from all of you on that post) but nothing I can write about yet.  It’s an interesting process to go through because we haven’t really set a price for the company but of course people want to know what the price is, and I say it depends on the buyer! 🙂  Which it kind of does because we want to make sure it’s the right fit with the right marketing channels that will enable Babble Soft to live on.

I found it interesting that one of the professors at UT Austin did her dissertation/thesis to prove that entrepreneur’s don’t always sell their company to the highest bidder.  I could have told her that without all the research.  We look for the right fit, the right timing, the right exit, and for hopefully the place it will live on the longest and be paid the most attention to.  The hope is that the highest bidder fits all of those criteria!

The kids are doing great and enjoying summer camp.  My daughter has a little end of summer camp performance tomorrow and then she’ll be at the same place my son is at but it won’t really be camp for her like it is for him.  He goes bowling, swimming, skating, to the park, and on field trips constantly it seems like.  At the end of August they will start at their new school:  The Magellan School and soon they will be babbling in Spanish!

So yes, there’s loads to write about but writing about the trivia and minutia of daily life takes too much time and is boring to most and the high tragic/dark comedy drama…well we must leave that to reality TV shows, the movies, and to shows like Grey’s Anatomy.

Susan Hays – Success To Me
Jul 21 2009

I interviewed Susan Hays (pdf) for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, for an article that was published in the March/April 2006 issue.  My writing partner, Pam Losefksy, and I pulled these articles together a while back and you can see them on the Success Profiles page of this blog.  You can see the full article on Susan by clicking HERE (pdf).

Susan is a lawyer with her own practice.  Previuosly she worked with Waters & Kraus, LLP and Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP.  She served as briefing attorney for Texas Supreme Court Justice Rose Spector.  She earned her JD from Georgetown University and was the Dallas County Democratic Party Chair from 2002-2005.  She is also the co-founder of Jane’s Due Process and received Texas Monthly’s Best Lawyers in Texas under 40.

She shares:

Another Biblical adage that I think resonates really well with the notion of success is, “To whom much is given, much is expected.” I absolutely believe that we have a duty to do good with what power and influence we’re given. It really upsets me when I see someone who has achieved a
high office but doesn’t use it for the betterment of the state or country.

She goes on to say:

I don’t think luck, if you define it as 100 percent chance, has much to do with success; success has much more to do with a willingness to seize interesting opportunities. Successful people see opportunities as challenges and not something scary. Wildly successful business people are smart enough to spot a need and gutsy enough to go out on a limb.

Susan has done a lot of great things for her community and to help young people, especially pregnant teens via Jane’s Due Process.  So many of us have been given so much and we don’t always put our resources, skills, and talents making the biggest difference we can.  It does take hard work, wrestling with your definition of yourself and society, as well as facing your fears to make the biggest impact we can.  Seize those opportunities when they come your way!

Country Music and Broken Hearts
Jul 14 2009

When I was in high school in Lubbock, Texas, I took a part time job at Mr. Gatti’s Pizza because one of my friend’s worked there and I wanted to earn some extra money.  I even worked there on my 18th birthday and served my very first beer.  I remember the thrill of pulling the tap and angling the plastic, chilled mug to get the right amount of beer and foam top.

I also remember a few other things from that time and one was one of my co-worker’s statements about country music.  I can’t remember his name, but I remember how he looked when we had the conversation.  He was short to medium height, average looking, with curly light brown hair and was wearing the Mr. Gatti’s uniform (tan pants, white buttoned shirt, and apron).  I think he was in his early 20’s.  We were standing in the front area by the register.  At the time, I couldn’t stand country music.  I told him how lame, annoying, and stupid it was.  He looked at me and said something like “You obviously haven’t had your heart broken.  Come talk to me about country music after you have had your heart broken.”  I looked at him and thought to myself “Well, I better not let anyone break my heart then.”

Well for me Happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my Rear View Mirror (Mac Davis) and I have no interest in being buried there in my jeans. 🙂

As I grew older and had my heart broken, I did come to appreciate country music.  I’m still not an avid fan of the entire genre (broken trucks, everyone leaves, the dog dies, somebody kills themselves, etc.) but artists like George Strait, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, John Denver, Dixie Chicks, Shania Twain really know how to sing to a broken heart.

Broken hearts come in many forms but the kind involving personal relationships hurts the most.  I’ve had my heart broken a few times in my career, two of which have partially happened while I’ve been blogging (2 years now) and you, my readers, have been along for the ride.  Once when I learned about my first company’s/baby’s death and wrote a post called The Entrepreneurial Ledge.   My heart broke when I left the company back in 2001 and it broke some more when I found out it was gone in late 2008.  The other is of course having to find a home for Babble Soft, but I’m still optimistic that there will be a good outcome and it will live on in some form or fashion.

So if you want to shed some tears, relieve some tension, and appreciate the learning/yearning from some of your broken hearts check out some of these country songs on You Tube:

You Look So Good In Love – George Strait

Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue – Crystal Gayle (quasi-country)

Ring of Fire – Johnny Cash

Walk the Line – Johnny Cash

Landslide – Dixie Chicks (via Fleetwood Mac)

Always On My Mind – Willie Nelson

Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain – Shania Twain and Willie Nelson

As they say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”  My heart will hopefully be stronger (with some duct tape, stitches, and super glue) on the other side.

Some Interesting Quotes
Jul 12 2009

I’ve seen a few interesting quotes recently and thought I’d share.  On another note, on Friday I was talking about wanting a sno-cone and yesterday (Saturday) I took the kids to one of my son’s friend’s birthday parties and they had a sno-cone machine!  I chalked up the fortuitous coincidence to the Law of Attraction (wikipedia).  One of my online friends, Edward Mills, blogs and coaches on the Law of Attraction.  I’m not sure he would agree that having a desired sno-cone show up in my life is the best example, but still.

Now for some quotes:

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out.  It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” – Albert Schweitzer.  From a Deepak Chopra Center for Wellbeing newsletter I get occasionally.

“At the age of 20, we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at 30, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at 40, we discover that it wasn’t thinking of us at all.” – unknown.  From a birthday party evite from a friend who is turning 40.  I’m looking forward to 40 only for that reason.

The following quotes are from a guy named Jeffrey Fry who I honestly can’t remember how I know.  He sends out a daily quote/tidbit email and since I find many of them interesting, I have stayed subscribed to his list.

“You often love someone not for what they are, but for what you are when you are with them.” – Jeffrey Fry

“Change only happens when the status quo becomes unbearable.” – Michael Drapkin. I recently heard a speaker on the topic of understanding people and he had another twist on this quote that goes something like this “Nothing changes until the pain of remaining the same is worse than the pain of changing.”

“Kindness is the oil that takes the friction out of life.” – Dustin Hosterler

“I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert

Love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All. – Rabindranath Tagore. Interestingly, I have a cousin named after Rabindranath

Documents And Other Such Things
Jul 4 2009

In between doing some laundry, making beds, painting my daughter’s fingernails, and making grilled ham & cheese sandwiches for the kids, I spent much of today getting things and documents together that people who might be interested in taking in Babble Soft will want to look at.  I just finished up the typical “one pager” that entrepreneurs use to gain interest from a potential investor or acquirer. I got some great feedback from a couple of my co-workers at the Austin Technology Incubator that I think enhanced it quite a bit.  That’s one of the pluses of having a day job where the Directors review such docs for other technology start-ups.

The one pager can be different depending on who you are sending it to.  It’s much harder to write a one pager than a novel sometimes because you have to really figure out the best words to put down in a limited amount of space.  It’s a cross between a product sales sheet and a company highlights document.  A ‘teaser’ document that will hopefully get someone to call you to discuss your company further.

Since tweeting about us finding a home for Babble Soft, I already have more leads than I expected.  That is the power of a strong social network…so many people reaching out to help others.  I’ve started following up on those leads and they are interestingly quite different.  I also sent messages to some of my LinkedIn contacts to see if they might have connections to appropriate partners.

I’m not as organized as I should be about this process as I’m pulling together information in real time.  I guess I’m following a “fire, ready, aim” route instead of the proper one but it’s the best I can do at this moment in life so may the winds of favor smile on us. 🙂   Thank goodness for smiley emoticons.

On an unrelated note, in the background today I’ve been playing music.  For all of my life, I’ve loved music but I haven’t been able to have it playing in the background when I work.  I usually have to have almost complete silence when I read, study, type, etc.  But for some odd reason that wasn’t the case today.  I found myself listening to Jim Croce, James Taylor, ABBA, Simon & Garfunkel (Feelin’ Groovy), Michael Jackson, and of course Backyardigan’s while working at my computer.  Not sure if that bodes well or not to the final product, but it’s an interesting new experience for me.  I guess I’ve just enhanced my multi-tasking abilities or maybe I’ve killed those brain cells that tell me I can’t listen to music and concentrate at the same time.

Just finished listening to I Am A Rock – by Simon & Garfunkel “And a rock feels no pain and an island never cries”

My husband is just getting back from taking the kids grocery shopping, and now we’re off to take the kids to see Ice Age – Dawn of the Dinosaurs at the theater.

Playing With Fire – Happy 4th of July 2009
Jul 4 2009

The thing I enjoy most about 4th of July is the fireworks.  I remember my dad taking us to parks to watch fireworks when we were kids and letting us light fireworks at his house or other friend’s houses.

I have a great friend who has a house on the lake and every year, they throw a 4th of July party.  This is the same friend who got me the purple peacock hat for my birthday.  You get a perfect view of the fireworks right from the back yard of her house and there’s nothing like watching fireworks in an uncrowded place while sitting on chairs.

Needless to say I got my pyro-fix for the time being with a few firey delights which shall remain nameless.  I’ve always been fascinated with fire.  My mom used to get really upset with us for melting candle wax on the fireplace ledge and making things out of the wax when she wasn’t there.  Rightly, she was worried that we were going to burn the house down.  Fortunately, that never happened.

I did accidentally burn my sister’s fingers when we were kids.  I got in huge trouble with my grandfather who rarely got upset with us.  He sent me to a corner and I was devastated.  I think I was about 9 years old and in my mind I was conducting an experiment with medical tape wrapped around my sister’s finger and lighting one end of the tape with fire.  I have no idea what I thought would happen, and I had no idea how quickly it would burn.  I guess I just thought it would just stay at the end like a candle wick, but I was wrong and after my sister screamed, I knew I would get in trouble!

With little kids around, we don’t burn that many candles in the house these days but when I do see fire, I find myself mesmerized by it for a while.  It’s sort of calming in a weird way.

I wonder if other entrepreneur’s have a fascination with fire because really what we do is play with fire with some of the risks we take…