Will Bridges

I joined O'Reilly's Safari Books Online last night. So for $39.95 a month (the cost of one good tech book) I get access to 3600 tech books available online. I can download to pdf up to 5 chapters of books a month. It seems not all books have downloadable chapters but it's still an incredible buy. I was debating buying myself a book last night and instead that's what I settled on. O'Reilly has long been one of the best publishers of tech books ranging across all topics. The flip side is you have to read the books in your browser (except for the chapters you download per month), which really sucks for some people. They have some cool features like you can bookmark areas in a book and add notes to certain parts of a book. You can also save your favorite books as favorites. The search feature will let you search the contents of an entire book as well as all the titles of a book. Any links within a book can be clicked to go offsite. Also, it's a lot easier to copy and paste code from an online book than it is to manually copy by typing up the code from a physical book. All in all I think it's well worth the money.

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Every CEO and/or Business Owner must have these things to be a success.

• Great Organizational Tools - Nothing makes a person more efficient than the proper tools & software. Anything that helps you remember, cuts back on time spent on mundane tasks, or keeps you in touch with the rest of the world is a great thing. Always be on the lookout for better tools and software because these things give you the ability to adapt to changing circumstances quicker. I don't even mean get the latest gadgets. You could end up spending a lot of money getting the next best gadget. My favorite organizational tools are the cork boards and dry erase board as well as my dry erase calendar. When I'm in my office I'm always a head glance away from my company's status. Don't get stuck in using a tool either… be open to investigating new tools, always.
• Excellent Social Skills - Social skills are very important. You are the face of your business and you must present a face that is inviting and happy to be around others. Business is not about money, talent or hard work. It's about people. You may say… "In my business I don't have to deal with people because we produce Widgets and sell them online"… really? Okay, if you have no vendors which you deal with, no contact with customers and no employees then you can have terrible social skills. In just about all businesses you are one conversation from a better deal with a vendor, an undiscovered talent and a group of new customers. If you don't have people skills and you want to be in business then get out now, develop your people skills or find someone willing to partner with you that has these skills. You must not only have the ability but the desire to deal with people. Every person is a branch to your network and thus a path for possible growth, professionally and personally.
• An Attitude That Exudes Assurance & Positivity -  I am almost certain this is what has kept me in business this long. I'm sure like I'm sure that everything is positive and headed in the right direction. Even when I'm not, very few people know. I'm not saying be ignorant to reality. I'm saying don't sulk, don't worry, don't show weakness or disgust. You almost have to be a zealot about your business to succeed. Speak nothing negative and show nothing negative. If you have a problem approach it in a way to look for a practical path away from your undesired result but do your best to not get emotional about problems. It tends to make them worse. You must have zen like dedication and be as flexible as the water around the rocks. Keep moving. Don't let anything get you down. When you lose your ability to adapt you are lost.
• Wise Advisors - Surround yourself with people who have knowledge, like you and are interested in your well being. Wise advisors cost time, energy and at times money. Be willing to sacrifice for these people. Approach it as a friendship and also a business deal. Friendships are mutually benefitial arrangements to share time, knowledge and resources between people which make each individual in the friendship stronger than they would be on their own. I know it sounds cold when put like that but it's the truth. I'm probably the best friend you'll ever know. Do not ever put a friend out of your life completely if you can help it. Do your best to stay in contact, send cards if you can, send emails… do something. Friends are your best natural resources and will many times be more useful than paid advisors. Plus, your next lead, your next thing that makes your business even better could be from a friend of a friend.
• Knowing The Thinnest Line - I'm a very honest and blunt person. However, there are times in business where giving every bit of information to a customer, an employee or a vendor can be a thing that will get you in to more trouble than it's worth. Lying is a terrible thing… avoid it like the plague. However, choose your words carefully. I tend to not speak in absolutes and always remember the instances in which I do speak in absolutes in order to not tell lies. If you are unsure about something be careful about telling people you are sure. Learn to exude confidence without using certainties. There is a very thin line between a lie and the truth. In the end it's really about what you are comfortable saying and doing but lying will get you in more trouble than it's worth and remember that telling someone you are certain about something and having it not be correct due to unforseen circumstances is as bad as lying in most cases. Good politicians know the line pretty well and understand how thin it is. Keep records and notes about all full or semi-business related conversations if at all possible. Deliver the facts you are sure of, show off the positives and don't declare all of what can be percieved as negative, unless asked. One caveat, sometiems drop a small negative without being asked as it may deter getting in to worse negatives, if they exist. Be genuine, be real, be honest but understand politics even if you don't like politics. You can't avoid it completely.

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What a wonderful anniversary! To the left is a picture from last night of us at dinner. Yendis and I have been together (as a couple, not married) for 2 years officially. We have a son who is almost one year old and have a pretty great relationship. I think she's strange sometimes but she thinks I'm strange sometimes but I guess everybody does that. We get along well and work out issues easily. We are a very compatible couple. She helps me when I'm down and I help her when I'm down.

Let's get in to last night. We ended up making reservations and Ombi on Elliston Place in Nashville. The restaurant had a great little environment. They had good lighting, interior and it was small but not too small. Yes, the dishes were somewhat expensive. We had two appetizers, then I had a shrimp entree and Yendis had the Swordfish entree. Afterwards we both had Creme Brulee (not sure if my spelling is accurate). The presentation and everything was excellent. We also had a bottle of wine. I'm not much of a wine expert. It was a full-bodied red wine from Spain is all I could tell you. The presentationand everything was top notch. I still have to say I like Acorn a bit better in this class of restaurant but this place is on the level for sure. We spent about $140 for tip and meal together. 

After that we headed down to Broadway and went to the tourist area. We went to this place where they have dueling pianos. I uploaded some photos to flickr. It's a pretty cool place. They do covers from the past 30 years on dueling pianos. But we got them to do Lil John & Usher 'Yeah'… It was pretty fun. The bartender got on the drums to do that song and the other two backed him up on the piano. The one guy said "Nothing says hip hop like two white guys on grand pianos"… pretty funny but actually it was really good. They did all kinds of music. We drank and kept the Shiner Bock's coming. I even drank a Guinness (unusual for me). Yendis was doing cherry bombs. 

I still haven't got my car window fixed from the smash and grab when my laptop go stolen last week so I was a bit cautious when it came to parking. But everything is a okay. These bums were asking for people's parking tickets as they left and then re-selling them to people that parked. What a great little hustle! (-:

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So, as I said in a previous post I got my laptop from Aarons and it got stolen out of my car. It had no insurance on it. And yes, I rent to own cause my credit sucks… oh well. At first Aarons told me there was nothing they could do about it. I was very upset about that. So, I called corporate offices and talked to somebody higher on the food chain. I told them I had been a customer for 2 years (I have various other items from Aarons). He said they would work with me. So, I got a call back yesterday saying they would cut the price in half. I had already made 3 payments because I had the lapop for 3 months. I intended to pay it off this month so I had very little interest. But, the payments are 200 a month for 12 months, so there's no way I was going the whole term to pay that much for a laptop. Basically, they said if I make another 3 payments or pay $600 they will write it off. Well, not quite as good a deductible but it works for me. I got three months use out of it and the total cost will be around $1200. Yes, sad… but hey, business is good I'll get another laptop next month. I think I might just pay up front and get a Mac laptop this time. We'll see.

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I've been thinking about my experience with hosting and I thought I would write about it. We just bought a dedicated server through hostingrails.com. What a beautiful experience it has been. They held my hand through everything and setup every peice of software I needed. Really, I only paid a $99 setup fee and $290 for the first month and I got a full server (specs here, but I got an additional gig of ram). It's an additional $40 a month for the extra gig of ram so that's why my price is $290 a month. Yes, it is a bit steep of a price given I could lease a server for cheaper but you really get what you pay for. They are specialists in Ruby on Rails and have spent way more time helping me get the server just the way I want it than the $99 setup fee I paid. All this and it's a month to month contract! This means I have no obligation to stay. It's been a while since I have been dealt with in such a fashion. I guess I should expect no less from now on.

Now, let's get to the reason I had to get a new dedicated server. I had a VPS (Virtual Private Server) through eapps.com. They are still running an old version of Apache which doesn't work will with Ruby on Rails and they are using FastCGI for rails sites. Ick. So, I decided, being a decent server admin, that I would install the proper version of Apache and all the things I needed to run Rails properly. Great, that worked okay for about 3 months. Then! All of a sudden my site and all my customer sites are down! Oh no! Come to find out, some of their automated tasks wiped my VPS clean off of their machine. They had no idea how to restore my custom config and they didn't tell me.  So, after a day passed and my customers were yelling at the top of their lungs I said "Okay, give me a new VPS and let me re-install everything". I was able to get a day old database backup from my VPS, which helped a lot. But it took me another day and a half to get the server back to where it was and all of my clients restored. The total cost was almost 5k between my customers loss of business and the time I had to spend restoring everything. Now, let me be clear, eapps is a great host if you are not doing anything Rails oriented. Their support is pretty good and you can reach them by phone most of the time with no wait and their prices are excellent. You can get a VPS for as low as $10 a month! Also, I had a chat with the president of eapps and he has told me about their plan to offer real rails support for hosting in the coming months. I told him the things he will need to do to get it right and offered to help them test anything they come up with. If they listen to my advice I think they will really be an awesome rails hosting company. But, as of now, do not use rails on eapps! Do not do any type of custom config if you are using eapps!

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Just in the past 8 months BluePaw Software has went from a company that brings in 3-4k a month to a company that brings in 15-20k a month. I think by the end of the year we will be to 25-30k a month. This is a lot of growth. I remember I was posting articles before about our foreign worker strategy. We adjusted that strategy because we couldn't find any really good, viable and cheap workers. While we aren't abandoning that strategy completely we are postponing it till we have some more resources to spare. We have decided instead to find local candidates that are good programmers and have an interest in Ruby on Rails. From there we believe we can mold them to the type of programmers we want.

Yes, the market is a flood with Ruby on Rails programmers. But, we have difficulty finding good ones. We've went through a lot of programmers that we though were weak or didn't like their additude. I ended up hiring a friend in Virginia that used to be an ASP programmer. I'm currently training him on Rails. I'm doing it because he helped me when I was in need in the past and seems to have a strong desire to learn. I told him I would be watching him though and want to make sure he is learning at a good pace. We are paying him to learn so in that situation you want to make sure the guy is really learning. He's been learning for about 6 weeks now. I'm about to really put him through a test of what he's learned so that should prove interesting.

I find it funny that everybody thinks rails is so easy and that anybody could do it. Yes, any descent script kitty may be able to learn rails, however to actually produce clean code that is reusable is a different story. You really have to keep up to date, watch the plugins list, watch the blogs and keep informed by discussing rails to be a great rails programmer. We believe that, our style of business and our charisma is our edge and what keeps us moving in an upward direction with profits.

I was pretty concerned at first because I had never managed a business to this degree. Yes, I've been a contractor for about 8 years doing independent work as a programmer and even managed a few people from time to time. But, being a CEO made me nervous and growing so quickly proved to be a serious challenge. At some times, I haven't been sure what my role is or if my role is everything. So, I've started to break apart my roles and look for experts that could satisfy those roles better than me. I still do the things I'm unconfortable with to a certain degree but I take guidance in order to do them from people I'm sure are experts. Things like accounting I've completely given to an accounting firm. It's cheaper for them to use their time to do it then it is for me to use my time to do it. Being a good CEO is about good delegation and focusing on the important details by wading through the confustion.

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Many people are chasing what they consider to be the American Dream. They work long hours and put up with lots of shit from their bosses and co-workers only to be told that the road is getting shorter to their dreams. In most cases they are paving the road to the biggest let down. I just can't see being an employee of a company and working massive overtime and putting all your energy and thought in to a company that you have no stock in. If you have no stock then you are dispensable. You not only can be replaced but most likely will be replaced in today's market. I've heard a lot of people say "Do your job well, give it all and you won't get laid off." But that actually doesn't hold up to reality in most cases. If you have a lot of domain knowledge specific to the company that nobody else has then the company may have a difficult time replacing you and thus you may hold more leverage. But, being employed at a company where you have no stock and no leverage is only a pay check and a job. You take a major risk by staying in a position like that. To give a job like that your overtime hours and stress over every detail may pay off eventually in due course but it probably won't.

As a CEO, I'm big on profit sharing, stock options and making the company feel owned by it's employees. To me it seems that a company only exists to benefit each individual in the company and should be treated like a family of sorts. Many companies are run on what seems like finanical slavery. This is where only the top most of the company makes the majority of the wealth and reaps the majority of the benefits. The middle and bottom get the scraps that are left over from the top. This is generally a recipe for failure in my opinion. The reason I say this is the top eventually becomes more and more disconnected with the people doing the real work and with the actual customers. This means at some point the company topples because the top is heavy and low on knowledge and the middle and bottom are weak, under tremendous stress and feeling unappriciated. 

As a company you can either move together as one strong unit, in which all are greatly motivated and benefited or you can whip the believers in to submission and get them to turn out more widgets while the top becomes strong and the middle and bottom become weak. See which one works better.

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About 2 months ago I got a new laptop. A pretty nice one at that. The first thing I did was uninstall Windows Vista and install Ubuntu Linux. I was happy about this because I haven't had such a nice laptop in some time.

Sadly, last week my laptop was stolen out of my car. Someone broke my passenger side window and took the case with laptop inside out of my car and left. You're going to say "Damn Will, why'd you leave the laptop in your car?". Well, I was only 4 rows from the door of circuit city, it was broad day light, I was only gone for 15 minutes and I had the laptop bag on the floor board. I didn't think anyone would notice it. But, someone must have been watching for that. Oh, a special thanks to the Rivergate Circuit City, who has no cameras outside but has 20,000 inside the store. Another special thanks to the Nashville Police Department, who had me waiting for them for 3 and 1/2 hours in one of the hottest Augusts in Nashville's history so I could file a police report. 

So, I actually got the laptop on rent to own through Aarons. I like Aarons… since I have terrible credit. But, also they have really nice things and they don't jack up the price really high. They also charge no interest for the first 90 days. So, if you pay off your stuff in 90 days you don't pay any interest. Great place. But, like I was saying… I was renting to own the laptop from there. They don't have or offer insurance on theft. Great… So, now I will probably have to pay like $1,200 to Aarons for a laptop that someone else has. Though, I did call Aarons corporate office and they said they may be able to lower the cost for me due to the cicumstances. More on that later. If anyone sees someone with a nice, new HP laptop with a 17 inch screen and it's running Ubuntu… punch them in the face and then email me.  

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I'm back. The company just bought a dedicated server and now I have all kinds of space and power for the things I want to do. So, one of the first things I decided to do was to get my blog back online and update the look of it. I'm also going to be putting up a company blog to just blog about company stuff and ruby on rails stuff. Yes, so now I will be blogging as much as I can. Hopefully I'm going to make it part of my daily morning routine. Right after breakfast or right before. I haven't decided. A lot of positive things have happened over the past 4 months and a lot of things are happening now. So, I'll have tons to write about. I know all of you Invisiwill fans out there just couldn't wait to see my blog back up. Yes, yes… I know. So, I'm going to attempt to spread out all the posts in to a few days because if I got started today and just started blogging about everything over the past 4 months and everything that's going on now I'd be blogging till the wee hours of the morning. Anyways, so welcome me back. Talk to you later.

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