A little about me and my methodology.

I fix stuff. My dad fixed stuff.  Since I can remember he was always making things work.  That was his job, that was his #superpower.  We weren’t rich, but we were able to get by because my dad could make stuff work.  This has influenced me more than I ever thought, and while I did not carry on the family auto body business, I see what I do as very similar to what my dad did, make broken [systems | networks | computers | ideas] work.

For the past 20 years I have been working with collaborative technologies, with an emphasis on CRM and fundraising systems.  Starting with ACT! and custom built systems I helped a large decentralized company roll out its sales and marketing system (in essesnce a custom CRM implementation) across 35 offices.  It was not successful to start.  It was broken.  To be honest, many systems like that are doomed to fail because the are designed with an end result in mind.  Usually that is being able to track and report on activity and sales potential.  This is rarely the goal of the people putting in the information. Ultimately I built a custom system to share project information across those offices to supplement the sales system.  The goal of this system was to make all of the information needed to include project history in proposals accessible to all the marketing staff.   This systems usage skyrocketed as I had an intimate knowledge of the pain points the marketing professionals in the organization had, and provided tools to facilitate the things they did on a daily basis.

This has been my approach to everything that I do regularly for my clients : tackling the issues that are getting in the way of people doing their job, solving problems of how to effectively incorporate new technology, and keeping costs in line with the productivity they enable.  I know from my personal experience that systems created with even the best of intentions will not get used if they are not integral to accomplishing a required task.   I have been very successful in distilling those requirements from my clients and delivering just what is needed without overburdening the user with unnecessarily complicated systems.  Unused systems are more than just a waste of money and technology, they also are deleterious to the overall attitude of technology in the organization.  Users asked to use bad systems will be less likely to appreciate good systems no matter the benefit.

In the mid nineties I created a major giving fundraising (yet another custom CRM) system for non-profits who had a membership and direct mail system that didn’t accommodate the unstructured data of phone calls, meetings and letters.  As I rolled this out to clients, I began having to do server, networking, and infrastructure work to be able to implement the solution I created.  This was the beginning of adding tools to my “Swiss army knife.”  Other additions have included becoming a Microsoft Certified Small Business Specialist and becoming certified in Microsoft’s Hyper-V Virtualization, breadth and depth in cloud technology, and social networking technologies and strategies.

My role over the past decade or so has shifted from developer to that of a trusted independent adviser.  I have guided clients to adopt new technologies, not when they are just “cool” but waiting for when they are effective and strategic.  I have also been part of a couple start-ups or at least

One of the most strategic adoptions I am recommending for almost all of my small business clients is adopting software as a service (SaaS) as it has been very thoroughly vetted and is in the “no-brainer” realm.  Platform and infrastructure are making huge strides but require some specialized skills to implement.