Steve, Jonathan, and I were on a meeting. The meeting topic was the adilas café and some ideas around that subject.

- Where operations and accounting meet

- Launch adilas (aka go to work) - maybe show the top couple corps that they frequent

- Play in a demo site

- Get some training

- Hire a consultant

- Advertise my services

- Advertise my products

- Join our community

- Vote for next features

- See what's in the pipe

- Show stats - personal and over arching (full adilas community)

- Steve would like to keep adilas all lowercase (just for branding)

- The ultimate sophistication is simplicity - DaVinci

- We are looking for a style (the new look and feel)

- Talking about snow owl theme settings, logos, watermarks, and basic styles - talking about customization and even customization with some elements of control (not too much power, but enough). Templates and being able to help people make decisions quickly and keep some virtual rails on the platform.

- Jonathan wants to learn more about the software (web platform) and how our customers are using our product.

- Helping our users and clients interact better - create a single entry environment

- Ratings, communities, money transfers, commerce, skills, and exposing hidden treasures that already exist

- Power users becoming mentors

- Being able to both add and subtract from the visual of what is showing

- MVP (minimum viable product) - the smallest usable piece and then build from there

- Single login, give you access to the adilas café. Maybe show the last corps, top 3 or top 10 corps, etc.

- Maybe bring in the adilas doggie as part of what is available

- Looking for patterns and how people use the product

- Older link to some top level training - https://data0.adilas.biz/training/

- The cart and the shopping cart are the main heart of the application. So many transactions and cause and effect relationships get pumped through there. A vital piece of the puzzle.

There are a number of screenshots attached for some visuals of what we were talking about. Good meeting.

Steve and I were the only ones on the morning meeting. We had fun and talked about a number of topics and had a mini brainstorming session. The main topics were where can we focus and how can we get there. Fun chats and talks. The two main topics were look and feel and server stuff like getting people off the bus and splitting up the database (wold building).

We also spent quite a bit of time talking about the concept of MVP (minimum viable product). We have so much to offer. We are kinda excited to see what pieces we can bundle up and package and then sell those pieces (services). Great session.

On the morning meeting with Dustin, Steve, and Alan. We were touching base on all of the things going on. Steve needed a merge into master for his current code branch. We did that and both Alan and Steve have plans to take some of the pages a little bit further. Most of the meeting was just touching base on different projects and who is doing what.

I spent quite a bit of time working on emails and doing some follow-ups with different people.

One of the follow-ups was with Russell. I called him and we chatted and then jumped online for a 2 hour meeting with both Steve and I. Great meeting. See below for a number of ideas, concepts, direction, and notes from our meeting:

- Need to focus on Snow Owl theme settings (overall look and feel of adilas pages, reports, headers, footers, and data tables).

- On the data tables (fancy tables that allow exports, sub filtering and sub searching, and sorting of columns) - we talked about the need to get a better handle on these data tables, make them more standard, and deal with the possible weaknesses and/or bottle necks with going with these new fancy table structures. By way of a note, we have a number of these data tables throughout the entire system. We need more of them and we also need to refine some of them to make things faster and smoother.

- We talked about what would be involved with the process if we created our own data tables, specific for adilas, and our client's needs. We talked about creating our own custom tags, our own we components, and then using that throughout the whole system.

- We spent a good amount of time talking about how the need to show aggregated data could remove some of the existing load from showing transactional data with the data tables. Those data tables are really good at showing smaller number of records vs tables with thousands and thousands of records. They really work better for things in the hundreds of records vs the thousands of records (and up). Aggregated data would be things like quick counts, totals, sums, averages, maxes, mins, groups, and other overview type data and numbers. That would also be great if we could show that data in charts, graphs, quick numbers, easy to use mini dashboards, and even graphical sub homepages or graphical homepages per section (system main player groups and/or subsets of specific tools and features).

- If we start showing graphical homepage and aggregated data, it would virtually allow us to pull back a level and push the transactional data deeper. It still needs to exist, but it may be a better option if we could get them quick details and data and then allow for drill-downs as needed. Quick, easy, simple, and then more details as needed.

- On the data tables, do we know what people/users are using and wanting? Is it the exporting, the sub searching, filtering, sortable columns, or quick pagination?

- Maybe work on and do some concepting and proof of concept on the adilas data tables. Take it to the fracture level.

- Russell is going to get with Brandon to do some training on the existing and current data tables. We plan on recording the training session. The goal is to start standardizing the implementation of those tools and features (data tables) in the system.

- We (Steve and I) are really trying to focus on better project management, planning, and helping everybody get small victories. Some of this may involve virtually protecting our guys so that they don't get pulled in every direction.

- Lots of talk about MVP's (minimal viable product) and shooting for that type of approach.

- Breaking things (projects and processes) into smaller projects and pieces.

- Asynchronous data loading for big record sets.

- API sockets and loading in bite sized pieces, data, and logic as the application backbone (main source of both raw and formatted data).

- Russell was talking about a need for more developer training, requirements, snippets, CSS and code samples, standards, validation, and other dev tools.

- Steve and I would like Russell to lead the way and lead out on what is new and what is going on. Nothing too huge, but basically, what is the next logical step?

- Having Russell and Chuck work together. More coordination and small teams. Getting involved with all of the other players and pieces. Different talks about teams and collaborating with each other.

- Easy, pretty, simple, and powerful

- White labeling our own product on a per business vertical type model.

- Russell would really like something that he could be involved with and have some kind of stake, claim, and or ownership. We talked about both adilas and adilas fracture type options.

- Steve would like to come up with a new business type model - who owns what, a perpetual trust type entity, open invitations, rules, regulations, standards and options. Reformatting our existing business structure.

- The concept of how "fracture" keeps happening. The deeper we look, the deeper it goes. Everything is sub dividing and splitting into smaller and smaller pieces or subs. Along with that, where are we headed? Ok, then let's build that.

- The whole thing keeps unwinding and new ideas keep coming and falling into place. We just keep taking the next logical step forward.

- We are seeing more and more needs and wants to be mobile ready, responsive, and modern design needs. This could be mobile apps, phone ready options, different screen sizes, multiple screens at the same time, virtual environments, and where are things headed? Keep pushing forward. Skate to where the puck is going to be (proactive approach).

- We are really wanting to jump into some other verticals (business entities and business categories).

- Steve used to look for a single rep or consultant. Not marital status, but size wise (just one person at a time). Now, he is trying harder and harder to find super consultants who want a group of like clients, outsourced compliance, oversite, over viewers, and other vertical specific services. He would love to tie into different CPA firms or groups. The goal there is to turn over the training, setup, oversite, and support to these super consultant groups or white label entities. They run with the needs per business vertical.

- Reoccurring revenue models and how to work with it and mange it along the way. SaaS (software as a service) and what and where is that headed? Good stuff.

- Let's make it happen. We can check off the checkboxes. Let's do it.

- We even want to move our leads over to the correct white label suppliers. We will act as the industry specific point of contact until a suitable entity and/or third party white labeler is in place and/or available.

- Let others focus on each vertical, we will focus on the core and our software package and the offerings.

- Even the core keeps fracturing. That sounds bad, but we are really excited about it. This is the new direction, small, multi pointed, configurable, flexible, software options and packages.

Both Russell and Jonathan were on the meeting. We had a good talk and discussion and it was mostly lead by Russell. In a way, we lightly took over the meeting and Jonathan didn't really get to report on much of what he was working on. Here are some notes from the meeting.

- Talking about a visual appeal

- Function vs form (look and style) - this is always a debate

- We need to find the balance between the number of settings and what can be customized

- Russell really wants things to be... powerful, beautiful, and easy

- We spent some time talking about design concepts and layout options

- Small animations and even icon animations

- Both dark and light themes (general overtones)

- We talked about setting a choice way up high at the top level and altering other sub colors and settings based on the top level choices

- Education mode as a highlight - we may want to focus on this and figure out a way to capitalize on things. From our feedback, this seemed to be a highlight and an interest point.

- Help files and having the little side menu be dynamic and let the users decide to show/hide the help options

- We talked quite a bit about videos

- Jonathan was talking about having the help file side-by-side with the page that it is referencing. Being able to see the real page and the help file (tutorial or image) next to each other.

- Dealing with help files, we talked about all kinds of different types of media, visual, print, courses, etc.

- One of the main goal is... helping people to navigate the system. Some of that means hiding certain things, streamlining the flow and processes, and being able to get our users to navigate through the system.

- The onboarding process - that is a big key

- Russell and Jonathan were talking about user tests and user testing (what can they do by themselves and what do they need help with?).

- Lots of talk about removing the clutter

- Using the quick search and being able to search the systems for key words and then flagging and tagging the other navigation options for key word searching.

- MVP - Minimal Viable Product approach - keep it simple

- Jonathan really wants to get a requirements document setup. That would really help.

- Part of the conversation was dealing with getting both Jonathan and Russell together to get and share ideas

- There are two parts of the system that Russell really wants to help out with. They are the shopping cart and the media/content pieces.

- Light talks about making a single page interface for the cart and other pages and/or processes

- Preferences vs opinions - we are really trying to help educate and help out our clients. It is really hard to please everybody.

- Spending time to develop and explain the "why". That is how we help motivate and influence change.

See attached for a few screenshots from Russell.

Jonathan from Epic Enterprises Consulting came over to my house and we had a meeting. We covered a lot of ground and had a good meeting. See attached for a scan of my notes from the meeting.

- Maximizing vs optimizing - Sometimes we (people) just try to push on the gas and get as much out of things as possible. Very natural - this is called maximizing. The other less common option is doing what is best or getting the optimal results vs the maximum results.

- MVP - We have heard that MVP stands for minimal viable product. Well, it was explained today with a few other variables. What about minimal viable plan, minimal viable service, minimal viable (fill in the blank), etc.? Cool concept.

- We always need improvement

- We were talking about expectations, boundaries, and defining the scope. Without those pieces, you can get run over or overwhelmed pretty easy. Once a scope is defined, you can say yes (if you want to), and then say this is the price for doing that. Tie the two together if possible.

- Definition of a company - a group of people - teamwork at a deeper level

- We spent quite a bit of time talking about the term "Executive" and what does that mean. My current view of an executive is what I see on TV (media) of a boss at the top who commands his employees and somewhat has the final say of things... not something that I really want to be. As we talked, we started to redefine what an executive could be... Here are some of the ideas and concepts: An introspective person who has found themselves at or near the top of a competency hierarchy, who seeks out and wields or aligns themselves with true principles. Respect for other, respect for self, helps and loves others, loves to learn and improve, helps to protect the vision. I liked those ideas and concepts much more. I could do that type of being an executive.

- There are five major roles that need to be fulfilled in a company. Instead of just roles, ideally, you actually have people in place who can carry each of these roles and own it. Otherwise you just have a smaller number wearing multiple hats. The five people are: An organizer, a doer, a creative type, a consultant, and a salesman. The goal is to align talents with tasks.

- What is the definition of success? We don't have to create the same successes that the world has created. We can be our own style.

- Byproducts and harnessing those different avenues.

- People enter the timeline and the story goes from there.

- We talked about lots of our people and what role and talents (attributes) they bring to the table. I listed off 15 to 20 key players that we deal with and have interactions with.

- Jonathan wanted me to read a book, not just read it, but speed read it. He then took ten minutes and showed me how to do this... my definition won't do it justice, but here we go... Totally destroy the structure of the book, browse it, look for single words that are interesting, spoil it if you want to, jump around, create curiosity anchors across the story, make it fun. Then speed read it (glancing over things quickly) and pull out the main points. If something interests you, read deeper, otherwise just try to get the main points.

- Dealing with speed reading, I was thinking that we could help people get interested in adilas that way... sometimes it may look too big or complicated but if people were to browse and find some curiosity anchors and then skim over some of the benefits and features, it may be a better way to consume it then trying to virtually read the whole thing. Just an idea. Make it fun. As a side note, I'm trying to head in that direction by working on the presentation gallery (non linear, visual, outline type format for a presentation or demo).

- Ask yourself, what am I selling? Is it what you are thinking?

- We went over some time management stuff. See my scans for a better version of this... but imagine a small grid with four things down the side. They are: Day to day (fires and being overwhelmed), strategizing, distractions, and time wasters. Then across the top, you have two columns, they are normal and optimal. Pretend that you have an 8 hour day. In the normal column, you have almost all of your day in the day to day (fires and being overwhelmed) column. You only get a few minutes on the strategizing, distractions, and time wasters columns. You are just buried and go from problem to problem (that's what it feels like). On the optimal side, you have about 2 hours of your day doing the day to day (fires and being overwhelmed). You have 5 hours of strategizing (trying to outwit tomorrow's fires), and half an hour each on the distractions and time wasters. These numbers aren't perfect, but represent a better way to do time management.

- Trying to outwit tomorrow's fires - strategizing

- From Jonathan - Books are a form of mind enhancement.

- Life hacking to make something out of what you are given - if you hack it, you make it work how you want it to (at least kinda sorta).

- A knowledge worker - what does that mean? They know something more about something. They need a rhythm or a cadence. They need to have a commitment factor to help them play.

- "10% of what I peddle (sell) is hope." - Quote from Jonathan. I really liked that. I may start using something like that in my pitches. I sell potential, which is a form of hope.

- At some point, every company becomes blind to itself.

- We were talking about disfunctions and trying to reinvent the wheel on different topics. Jonathan was using a word that kept hitting me in the face. It was "rejecting", meaning rejecting or not allowing certain primary functions to take place or do their jobs... We talked about rejecting structure, rejecting responsibility, rejecting proper pricing configuration, rejecting executive time management, and rejecting a coherent form (what, who are we).

- Take the pill of actually solidifying who we are and what we do - scope.

- Dealing with time... It's not too late...

- Positive manipulation - This may sound bad, but we all use this in one form or another. We talked about positive manipulation and how that is both best used and when and why. Lots of variables for it and also lots of reasons to use and employ that kind of a tactic or use that kind of tool.

- Alignment to a core principle - that can get pretty deep.

- Trying to "cheat" the core principles - what cause and effect relationships does that have and mean? This was a conversation about what are we doing and how are we virtually trying to cheat a number of known principles. Not trying to be dishonest, but not doing certain things on purpose. For example, not having an employee type structure, not having proper supply and demand pricing, not having a known form or structure (what does your business do and what products and/or services do you provide).

- Kicking against the pricks - analogy used on animals in agriculture. The prick helped to prod the animal to do certain things. If the animal rebelled, it would kick against the prick and drive it in deeper (causing harm or more pain). We talked about this analogy and how sometimes if you try to avoid or reject certain things, you end up hurting yourself in business.

- We talked about what makes a mom and pop shop a mom and pop shop? What could they do differently, if they wanted to? Key word, if they wanted to. How could certain principles help them become bigger - once again if they wanted to. People, talent, origination, funding, broader scope, marketing, product line, etc. Interesting conversation. Jonathan wasn't saying we (adilas) are a mom and pop shop, but we are on purpose not implementing all of the options, thus keeping us at a certain level.

- He gave me three things to do: 1. Read the book - "The Go-Giver" - speed reading style, life hack, and non linear format. 2. Commit to a consultant. and 3. Start making incremental improvements (as prescribed). As a side note, I said that we were making incremental improvements and he said that would be good. He then added "as prescribed" and that somewhat changed the direction. Just a side note.

- We have to figure out the people first. Then we can get to the other pieces.

- Jonathan was recommending a board of advisors vs a board of directors. Small changes to focus, direction, and style. Interesting. 

Discussing AdilasWPShop (new e-comm solution) formally known as WooAdilas

MVP - minimal viable product/plan

- Competition and how we help get some of the pieces past the finish line

- Platforms and building on top of them - WordPress, WooCommerce, Adilas, etc.

- Online ordering platforms, showing inventory, full ecommerce, drop shipping, ordering and delivery orders

- In-store pick-up or delivery or shipping options

- Tons of talk about deliver options, scheduling, picking date/times, etc.

- Small talk about integrated systems vs trying to mix and blend tons of independent products and trying to marry them together. There is pain in some of those pieces.

- Plug-ins (plugins) and getting things all tied together

- You have backend apps, frontend apps, customer facing things, options, assets, etc. Lots of mixing and blending.

- Pricing options on parents vs subs (parent/child inventory and pricing tiers).

- Using adilas API sockets to populate WooCommerce stuff using custom plugins.

- Certain pieces are pre-built by other vendors. Other things would be nice. And yet other things are already done by adilas as pre-built or custom options. Where do you build? Where do you spend your time/money/resources.

- Molly needs a gram tracker, custom discounts (discount engine), and better integration options. Currently she has to manage multiple applications and have one do one thing and the other do something else. Sometimes both applications do the same thing and you either need to choose and/or pick one or the other (more integration).

- Versioning and who has the latest cookie and how do you distribute that?

- Multiple ways of dealing with tiered pricing inside of adilas. We need to help standardize things there. As we were talking, there are some know issues with some of the ways that we do it internally (smart group buttons, parent attributes, etc.)

- Shipping zones, different fees for different zip codes, etc. WooCommerce has a ton of different pieces.

- Updates, reports, and getting the needed information quickly. This deals with shipping, queues, sub-queues, reports, and even clear out to element of time or somehow track the shipping, delivery, and/or in-store pick-up. We need to link up the delivery aspects and the customer queue.

- Claiming quantity and on-line orders affecting inventory levels and availability - small talks about quotes, transitional invoices, and normal customer invoices.

- There were also talks about state compliance systems and how in-store pick-up vs delivery orders may need to be handled.

- Messaging and using emails, text, queue specific, or different stages (as things happen) messaging. Notifies  and reminders.

- Acknowledgement and approving payments. We may need a setting where they could fill in some verbiage, and toggle on/off settings to show/hide and require/not require those steps and pieces.

- Coupons, promotional codes, referrals, etc.

- People want something that is integrated, fast, flexible, powerful, and easy. They also want it to look awesome!

- Tying in custom messaging into the customer queue, sub queue, and ecommerce orders. The queues are a great start... we just need to tighten up a few pieces and make it go full circle.

- Being able to automatically add in a delivery fee as a line item on the invoice/quote from ecommerce.

Steve and I were going to be meeting with Kelly, but she ended up getting delayed while traveling and security in the airport. We ended up having our own little meeting. Good stuff. Here are a few of the notes from what we were talking about:

- Businesses need all of the deep functionality, they just want it as hidden as possible. Smooth and pretty just feels better, even if it does do as much.

- What if we keep flipping our model? What we mean here is... as a client or a rep keeps asking for more and more, what if we help direct them in such a way that we can get it done? This could be done by meeting with them, planning out what needs to be changed, offering solutions, listening, and taking down notes. Lots of possible options and then we gain from the source vs being pushed away from the source.

- Steve and I talked about the concepts that we are built on vs the code we are built on. Straight up, the concepts that we have built on are 100 times more valuable than the code that we have built on. Our code set is 1 of 1,000's of possible solutions. However, the main core concepts, those will need to be used every single time that someone does what we are doing. Even though you can touch some of the concepts, there is huge value there.

- We were talking about ways to get funding and the down sides to that. We talked about getting overextended and having huge amounts of debt. That is no fun either. Other talks about possible funding sources such as: grants, selling our services, getting partners, investors, loans, venture capital, donations, and leveraging other assets.

- MVP - minimal viable plan (the p could be plan, product, etc.) - I like the plan option for what we are doing and working on.

- What about the adilas marketplace (adilas world)? Lots of options out there as well.

- Everything that we see is fracturing into smaller and smaller pieces. Development process, permissions, settings, servers, API sockets, single tools vs bulk tools, tracking needs, etc. Fracture is the key word. Kinda like "Legos". We may need some blue ones, red ones, and some yellow ones. It just keeps going and breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.

- Business management and who will take care of what

- Pain and virtual bleeding sometimes help to drive us towards change

- Somewhat of an open source type model

- What is our direction and our pace? Pick a direction and then let it grow. In some ways, it feels like we pick a direction and then plant the seeds, then in a day or so, we dig it up to see how it is doing. I think we need to pick a direction and let it grow a bit.

- Our model has always been slow and steady...

- We are only able to move forward as we get funding - we get funding from...
>> Reoccurring revenue
>> One time services
>> Seed money
>> Donations and other sources

- We are stable currently

- 3 things...
>> Look at what we have - deep, deep
>> We are building daily - progression
>> We help you by bringing value - multiple ways
-->> Low cost for what you want
-->> You are able to move the system in the way that you want it - allow custom

- Maybe make it known what we are spending on new functionality and R&D

- This is who we are... we are who we are and we plan on maintaining that

- We need to take things with a grain of salt

- Our current direction is directing projects over to one main source (Cory) and then diving things out from there - a director of development operations - Steve and I have decided that we will let this play out for awhile before making a major change or shift.

- Walls and helping to sterilizing things - getting some separation

- Like an essay - tell them what you are going to tell them (prep), then tell them (main content), and tell them what you told them (conclusion)

- You can do that? or You can do that! - We love it!

- We have a team that helps and supports us... that is huge

- We, as a company, need to have our clients get in line. Sometimes we give preferences and special treatment. We need to help standardize things.

- As a skill, we have people saying that they are proficient in adilas as a skill set. Pretty cool.

- Constant development and pushing the ball forward. We are building and refining every day. Keep it going!

Steve and I were on the morning meeting together. We did our own stuff and chatted about a couple of ideas and options.

- We have a MVP (minimal viable product) as a full system. That included the 12 main players and 12 basic business functions. Our MVP is a fully connected system.

- Quantity of scale

- Selling this year's model - AKA the 2020 model of adilas

- We also talked quite a bit about the need for training and even specialized training for companies

Steve and I talking about the word custom. Maybe instead of custom, we go more with settings and work on building out the main core pieces.. Make it data driven vs hardcoded.

- The current 2020 model is ready. If you would like get something more, we are open to talking and building.

- Our customers are building their own MVP (minimal viable product) - It all comes back to a foundation of permissions and settings. Very interesting.

Questions... how do we flag our projects for projects that are fundable? Cory asked, how are the projects related? What projects play along with that.

- 3 things - internal shopping cart, look and feel, balance sheet stuff and reporting/exporting

- MVP for the cannabis industry - balance sheet, reporting, sub inventory, mini conversions

- Building new products off of the existing platform as a service (PaaS)

- From Kelly - small group of legacy people to help fund some of the reporting and exporting - certain ones would be grandfathered into older lower rates while others will get increased rates going in the future.

- We did some other forecasting and looking at numbers.

- Grouping projects into like areas

- Lots of talk about smaller packages, modules, and list of features and options per price tag

- Changing our focus to working on client funded projects

- Getting more organized and really staying as focused as possible - working toward a goal

- Everything is trending toward our community funded projects and getting things funded

- Finding the mix and blend between client funded projects and internal funded projects

- Light crowd funding options

- Phases, even with-in our own environment - making it easier and easier to record the data and also to get the data back (reporting) and easy in/out type process.

Talking with Steve about our current business model and the full world tour that we offer. As a side note, we offer so much, some times we get off in la-la land due to the size of the world (solution or platform) that we offer.

- We talked about the train tracks analogy and what that takes. You have to buy the land, lay down the tracks, and buy the train or engine to run on the tracks. Some of the people that we are dealing with want to control and change everything. If that is the case, they would need to do all of the pieces like buying the land, laying down the tracks, and buying the engine. The other option is to use our existing pieces and just buy a train car to be pulled by our trains or engines.

- We talked about babysitting and setting up MVP's (minimal viable products)

- Maintenance and requirements there. There are both knowns and unknowns there.

- A question for us... how gig do we want to be? That question goes pretty deep.

- Talks about commissions, independents, and even internal competition between reps and consultants.

- We have drawn a line in the sand. We are standing by that and trying to defend that position.

- Sometimes we go round and round in the development cycle. Some of that is just part of figuring things out. We are trying to do less and less of this but hard to completely get rid of. Part of building and discovery process.

- We talked about making cuts and getting a fallback plan in place if things get crazy. Interesting times.

- The level of service needs to match the price.

- It is super expensive to switch systems.

- Where to add efforts and work on our existing system.

- Pains of growing and growing and then organizing things into better user experiments and user experiences. Finding that good direction to go and then going for it.

Four of us were on the meeting to go over projects. We had Cory, Eric, Steve, and I, all in together going over plans and options. Lots of discussions about business verticals, MVP (minimal viable products), themes/skins, and bulk back box type options. We also had numerous talks about picking up low hanging fruit, doing gap analysis (we are here and we want to be over there - what is the gap), building the core on rules, assignments, and settings. Lots of good direction.

Marisa, Chuck, Cory, Steve, Sean, and myself were all on a meeting to get back into the WanderWays project. The primary focus was dealing with online scheduling of campsites, trailer/RV sites, cabins and what not. We already have a bunch of work done on the backend WanderWays tool (camp adilas project). We also have a ton of the frontend advertising website done. This next phase is dealing with an ecommerce or customer facing frontend tool. It will combine company websites, online reservations and bookings, ecommerce, and other frontend or front facing web stuff.

Chuck and Marisa were leading out on this project. That is great. Sean was new to this topic, so we did some introductions. Here are some random notes that I took:

- Using iFrames to embed the native sites into outside company web sites

- Chuck has a vision of what he is trying to build and make. We support that vision. Marisa is the inside person who has the knowledge in that area.

- Lots of talk about frontend set-up and customer type settings. We want to make a general tool that could be skinned and/or configured for certain industries. We just mentioned a few... think about auto shops, maintenance things, campgrounds, RV/trailer sites, cabin rentals, ski schools, rafting companies, adventure trips, sport lessons, etc.

- Going back to camping and campgrounds, being able to pick a site vs assigning sites on the fly - different companies like to do it differently - also some like to limit what the customer frontend or front facing app does vs the backend tools. That sounds like settings.

- Lots of talk about being able to shuffle things around. Including invoices, elements of time, locations, payments, and other relationships. Once we have all of the data, we need to be able to shift or shuffle things around.

- Marisa and Chuck are going to make up a number of scenarios and then go through the different options together.

- Dealing with the waiting lists and/or virtual queue type functionality. We need to detail out the waiting list functionality in a deeper way.

- We linked to some of the older notes - click here for details - dealing with rough numbers and budgets.

- Talking about funding sources and making a good and solid product. There was also some talk about making an MVP (minimal viable product) and/or an MVP+ (plus or slightly above a minimal)

- Treating the development and developers and founders as family - setting up good communications and scheduling bi-weekly meetings and demos. Steve talked a lot about breaking things up into smaller pieces to get some smaller chunks and good deliverables.

- The pace (running rate) is going to be increasing on this project. We want to keep it going forward.

- Making the plan and reporting to who is paying the bills (internal, adilas, or outside investors/contributors) - basically, return and report type concept. Let's see where it goes.

Shannon joined at 11 am and we wrapped up the prior meeting. Eventually, only Wayne and Shannon were on the meeting. These are a couple of notes that I got from Wayne. He is hitting walls and boundaries on the servers. He wants to keep pushing them forward and tuning them, but he needs the following three projects done:

1. We have two really big tables that need to be pared down. He wants to consolidate some of the fields into objects of settings. Currently, we have hundreds of settings, all in their own database fields and columns. That is ok, but it makes the tables so big that we can't change the database table engine from MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables. This is all related to different table structures on the MySQL database model. MyISAM tables are an older model and if a lock happens, it locks the entire table. The InnoDB tables are more modern and if a lock happens, it is on a line by line level vs a full table lock. There are also some performance options as well as security pieces that differ between the database table engines. Long story made short, Wayne wants us to prep things in order to convert everything to InnoDB tables.

2. Some of our databases are getting huge... Gigs and Gigs worth of data. That is awesome and means that things are getting used, but because of the structure, we can't split and load balance things very easily. We have to physically pull systems off of one system and put them on their own system to do the load balancing right now. This is a very manual process. We have a project called the datasource project or splitting up the database (bus to motorcycles - world building) project. There have been multiple efforts in this direction, but we keep getting pulled off of things. This would be huge and would allow us to change the size and configuration of the databases. Small companies would only be dealing with their data vs being on a somewhat shared environment and dealing with all of the other bigger businesses traffic. You can't access the other companies data (virtual walls and sandbox type environments), but there is basically other traffic from neighbors who are on the same server. In order to grow, like we would like to, we need to fix this.

3. The way we store files, images, and media/content limits our growth model. We allow systems to store and record information directly back to our boxes. That works great for single servers. However, if you plan on clustering and/or stacking servers, to get more power, that placement of those files and assets needs to be addressed. There are tons of other entries in the developer's notebook about media/content, servers, paths, and storage locations. It works great right now, but it also is somewhat limited in the scalability of those pieces. A single company won't see the limits, but the more companies that you get on there and playing with some of the same resources, that's where you see some of the scalability issues starting to show up. Some of those same limiting factors also prevent the clustering, stacking, and auto load balancing pieces. We need to figure out a way to store the files, images, and media/content assets in a place that is configurable vs hardcoded or built in to the app or software package.

As a side note on the file storage stuff, Wayne has some code that he was working on when we were kicking around the AWS (amazon web services) stuff. We may be able to harness some of that work and effort to make this happen.

Wayne wanted to know what are plans are for these 3 projects. I told him that I would email Steve and Cory and see what they say. Without putting anybody under the bus... we've known about some of these projects for years. We push on them here and there, but we haven't really finished up any of them yet. That's where it gets hard. We can't control all of the other variables (time, money, other projects, other demands, etc.). It's a challenge.

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Switching other to what Shannon and I were going over...

Lots of moving pieces and we are getting internal pressure to stabilize and standardize certain pieces. We have had quite a few of our key players state that we've had meetings and meetings and keep rehashing the same pieces with no changes. That gets really frustrating.

Currently, Steve and I's approach has been to keep chipping away at things and wearing multiple hats, all at once. Another analogy is spinning plates on a stick... We spin what we can and hopefully the other plates keep spinning. Sadly, we are dropping some of the plates here and there. There is a disconnect between what is needed (on a management level) and who is playing and what time is available. We are doing the best we can, but we really need some help.

Shannon and I met and talked about maximizing vs optimizing. We tend toward the maximizing side of things. That is pretty natural. We also talked about setting up a MVP (minimal viable plan) dealing with our management structure and business model. Shannon and I are going to be working on a business plan, but that could take weeks and weeks (months) to tighten up and finalize. We may need an MVP type approach for the time being.

As part of that, we are thinking of proposing the adilas jelly fish model as the current plan. Our goal would be to keep firming it up and moving into a more structured environment. We would like to specify lead dependables and cofounders in certain areas. Those would be the adilas team leads for the different areas and/or virtual departments. I think we could establish this type of an MVP plan for our business model pretty quickly.

Shannon and I also talked about a couple of the current hang-ups that we are seeing and facing. There is pain in transitions some times. Nobody wants to take on the full load, if they really know what is going on, due to it's size. Shannon and I chatted about pairing people up and almost doing a buddy type system to help with managing the different areas. We may need to mix and blend to create our teams. Some of those teams already exist, but they are very loose level teams. The goal is to firm that or those pieces up a bit. I think that would help.

Sometime "titles" have become a barrier. For example: nobody wants to be the main boss, the top executive, the full owner, etc. We may need to stick with words and phrases like: founders, cofounders, advisors, mentors, trustees, dependables, etc. Along with this... Shannon said, you guys love to create new terminology, why not do the same thing for what position you hold.

Good ideas coming in from all of the people around us. We need to keep coming up with our own company structure. Along with that, we need to decide and try things. It's ok to change it up later on. Nothing is set in stone. Think phases, pick and choose, and try storming type mentalities.

Shannon and I reviewed this previous element of time (#5295) and the drawings attached (scans and handwritten notes) to get some notes and it helped us go through a great discussion.

Steve and Sean going over sales stuff. They were talking about the Apple Model and how someone greats you when you come in and then you could be helped by someone else by going through some sort of simple queue type process. Danny checked in. After that, we helped Steve with his local environment. Both Dustin and John Maestas checked in. Some small intros were made and what not. John is Dustin's friend. John is just getting going with us on some development projects.

They then started to talk about different versions and generations, for example: generation 3 or generation 4, etc. Dustin has been responsible for some of the new versions out in cultivation land and what not. It is fun to see the progress and the changes over time.

After these guys left, we went into a sub meeting of sorts and worked through some things. Sometimes, our clients, want industry specific processes that are fully built out and completely industry specific (super narrow focus and/or paths to choose). As we were talking, we ended up talking about drawing out the processes, pretending to do simulations and different use cases. We also talked about being proactive vs reactive  and/or passive. We really want to help our users out and then let them help us refine it vs waiting completely on the client's input. Sometimes they don't know what is possible, they tend to stick with what is set in front of them.

Often, our clients don't realize that we can customize it (tweak or refine the processes). That seems really trivial to us, but thinking in custom code (what is possible) is a skill. The deeper we go, the more we are seeing that all of our layouts need to be fully customized or customizable and based on settings. That sounds awesome, but that adds a whole other level of complexity. Small and skinny yet totally data driven.

We need to get back to the limited flex grid pages. Make it slick and skinny. We are already using it for Beaver Mountain, but want to make it good to go for all of our clients. This would be so cool, but it will take some more work. Having said that, we really really want to get back to this. The limited flex grid is a way of setting up custom fields and dynamically populating a really small add/edit form that only shows what they want or need vs all of the possible fields.

As a side note, the flex grid table has over 40+ different fields that we can and do use for different things. Imagine is you could setup a simple form that only had 5-6 of those custom values. It then becomes really simple vs too big or too overwhelming. The goal is user defined simplicity, yet still being fully connected and powerful. If needed, we could always flip over to a full or more extended mode if some other field or value is needed. It is almost like layering the interface and the data. Super simple on the surface, but deeper or more rich as needed (layering).

We got off into communications and dealing with outbound messages, communication options, and getting people connected to the correct sub or special pages (combo of communication and navigation options).

Next, we got talking about building out custom skins (wrappers of the logic and data) and how that plays into the mix. We did some light pitching and talking about different packaging and marketing options. Some of the subjects that we chatted about were things like ski area, gun shooting lanes, classes, and then working with people in those industries to build and test out products and services. Basically, have or get a dream, build it, and then use people who are in that industry to test and give feedback on interface, navigation, user experience, flow, and functionality requirements.

On the marketing and sales side, if we have someone who is using our product in a specific industry, that testimonial does tons for helping others in that industry to be willing to jump on board. We have also found that if we find someone who is in an industry and they are willing to help, provide feedback, beta test, and give ideas... that is like gold and helps the process get smoother and smoother. It is amazing how a little bit of icing makes the cake look that much better.

Expanding into other horizons, we really want to do this. Our conversation circled back around to the dream it up, push on it, and we'll help you wire that up type model. You dream it up, we'll wire it up. Making things simple, powerful, and easy. Awesome words/phrases, harder to do, but possible. We also talked about opening our eyes and minds to what is possible. Being able to see and/or imagine is sometimes harder than you think. Once we can see it, the next phase is letting our users and clients catch that vision. Once you can transfer the vision, others start helping to beat that drum and making it happen. Share the vision!

As we look at the MVP (minimal viable product or minimal viable plan) type approach, we get pulled out of the dream land and back into - what are the next step or steps that need to happen. You can't lose sight of the goal, but you also have to make it work (along the way) vs just the dream at the end of the tunnel. Having said that... one thing that has been very successful for us is... get them hooked on one aspect and then letting them go and start dreaming. They'll start putting the pieces together. You just have to get that process started. Sometimes with an MVP type approach and then let it grow from there.

Here are a couple of other topics that were discussed: saved reports and connecting to them, other future projects (fracture), reviewing topics listed above, automated and predictive logic, aggregates and quick starts, templates, build your own processes (data assembly line and flex bubbles or flex pods), and other topics. Good meeting. Lots of new ideas and also firming up some of the older ones that keep circling around.

Cory, Steve, and I were talking about different projects. We decided to scrap one of them and wait for some other changes to roll into place. I was pitching an MVP (minimal viable product) on some payroll stuff. We chatted about needs there and where it could go. We talked about bulk payroll, special time card aggregates for some of the math, multi-department based timecards, new fields and settings for special programs, and other fields and values that are needed.

As a fun side note, we even talked about mixing payroll functions with special accounts (accrued hours and virtual time based loyalty points for employees and special laws dealing with additional funding and special programs). Special accounts are for things like loyalty point for customers, gift cards, in-store credit, vendor credits, etc. In this situation, we would be using special accounts to accrue or add up additional hours that are earned over time. Then, the employee/users could redeem those extra hours or bonuses, when they wanted. We would have to keep track of values being added to their account, as well as values being paid out or virtually redeemed. This gets into liabilities, and who owes who and the timing that goes along with that. Interesting twist.

Steve and I met up over a GoToMeeting session. The main goal was to touch base and chat about options, ideas, and plans. It ended up being almost a two hour meeting. We started out looking at numbers, financials, and trends. We talked about gaps in our management style and how we could work on filling those gaps. Nobody is perfect and we are well aware of some of our shortcomings.

Lots of talk about R&D (research and development) and how we play that game all the time. We are virtually a huge R&D company. We build, we break, we rebuild, we rebreak. Over and over again. One of the accountants that Steve was talking to was saying that we might qualify for some R&D tax credits, due to what we do everyday. Interesting.

We are really happy with what Cory is doing and how much she brings to the table on the project coordination and project management side of things. We'd like to do the same thing (making improvements and progress) in a couple of other directions. Some of the other things that still need some help are servers, deployment, training, and overall communications.

One of the next major topics was servers and the impact of new systems and new software to that environment. It gets deep quickly and the new layers of complexity make it even more of an unknown. We would like to get ahold of those processes and figure out a true cost per server, with all of the extras, monitors, analytics, watchers, logging, reporting, and rollover options. This is still a tough spot and tough subject for us. We want to be involved but it gets super deep and crazy technical extremely fast. That makes it tough.

We were talking about some of our developers and how to get them all transferred over to paying or funded projects. We tend to do a number of big lifts (improving our own product) but that costs us and taxes us as far as cash flow. Our goal is to make it 3/4 funded projects and 1/4 core updates and maintenance. That would be awesome.

We ended up getting into some planning and talking about ways of getting better communication and better levels of responsibility for what is going on and what is happening. It is constantly a moving target. We talked about billing for everything that we do. Currently, we take a bunch of it right on the chin, that works to a certain level, then it just becomes crushing. We are planning on charging $65/hour for deployment, training, and setup. We will stick with $100/hour for development and custom code work. We also talked about picking up other services that we could offer and/or charge for. There are clients standing in line with money, but we have been too busy to pick up those pieces. We need to make a switch there.

Steve and I made a small 3 month plan and will be making and taking steps to put that plan into action. That is awesome. Our current goal is - Work the plan! Shooting for an MVP (minimal viable product) type approach.

Follow up meeting with a client. Here are some of my notes:

- The current custom page that exists, they will leave it somewhat hidden and not connected. That way only certain people have access to the page.

- They would eventually like it to be fully automated and even hidden if possible. This deals with mapping custom sub attributes to certain phases and processes. Fully custom, just for this client. the automation deals with passing phase dates to sub attribute dates - this would require a small mapping to keep apples to apples.

- MVP solution (minimal viable product) - keep it small and tight. This is just for one client, we don't want to make this standard.

- Steve was pitching some other settings and status values for settings. Instead of just having active or inactive settings (use or don't use). He was proposing view only or admin only settings. Basically, pulling in a level of permissions on the settings themselves. That's nothing new, but sometimes as you build, you don't realize that you have to protect and/or figure out the levels when you first build it. Often, the idea is build it and then forget it. However, if the users have to keep going to the settings, you run the risk of someone who shouldn't be changing global or master settings and they switch something which causes problems. Basically, permissions and status levels within the settings. Interesting how everything eventually breaks into sub levels of control. Think of sub permissions.

- We did some light planning on the next phase of the automation process.

- There were some small look and feel requests. Once everything looks and feels good, they (our clients) are comfortable. If anything is off, even small ish, there is a small tension level. Very interesting.

This will be to ask Bryan's questions, etc for the Paypod integration.

Weekly meeting with Alan to go over projects and code stuff. Both Cory and Sean joined us on our meeting today. We started out with Alan reporting on his current projects and findings. He was working on a page and did a search and found a number of other similar pieces (say 500 ish). He is currently refactoring that part of the application and going to be replacing code so that it runs more efficiently. The code happens to be dealing with custom page settings. We use these custom settings to store both corporation specific settings as well as user defined settings for different pages and sections. We gave him the go ahead to do a little bit of maintenance and refactoring - prepping for the future. Maintenance sometimes isn't that fun, but it plays a key role in the life cycle of a system.

The last half of the meeting was turned over to Sean to show Alan, Cory, and I some of the new stuff that he and Steve have been working on. We logged into a client's site and Sean gave us a great demo and tour of the orders homepage, backorders, fulfilling orders, training amounts requested, remaining, filled, etc. Steve and Sean have been busy. Here are some other notes from the meeting.

- As new features are developed and released, we need to make sure that everybody knows about them - sometimes distributing that information is a big challenge.

- We build special quotes without having real inventory to back them up... Then as the real inventory comes in, we distribute and fill the correct orders. This is a whole new section of the application and Steve and Sean are out there pioneering things.

- The quotes just hold parent items or parent placeholders. Then as the invoices are created, the real parent/child relationships get put in place on the outbound invoices.

- The orders and backorders homepage has three main ways of viewing and sorting the data. It may be vied by quote (order), by item (what orders want what), or by customer (what other things are they still waiting for). Pretty cool!

- Lots of great demos and showing us flow, approval processes, pagination (next page of n), drill-down and filtering options.

- We are gaining some good traction by getting a client who wants something, doing some planning, putting a MVP (minimal viable product) out there, beating it up and refining it - with some hand holding, and then officially releasing it to the public as a new feature. Nice little process.

- Sean also went into some new pages and sections for mini units. This is serialized units that are within the realm of parent/child inventory. The parent is the primary placeholder. The sub inventory or child inventory are the new batches or packages. Then within the new batches or packages, the individual mini unit data is help and recorded. It also shows usage on where it came in, where it went out, etc. (PO's and invoices). The whole process has a tons of great new features.

- Lots of talk about relationships and one-to-one, one-to-many, and one-to-many-to-many. It can get deep, but sometimes that is needed. We play in bulk where possible and then record individual data (and maybe even hide it unless asked for). It makes it look simple, but the whole story is really all there, just nested and/or strategically buried or hidden.

- We spent a bit of time talking about the pains of trying to keep multiple sets of records and juggling multiple systems. We are trying to relieve this burden, but sometimes the transition process is difficult. We have found that clients are so busy, they almost always need a person or small team to help them transition and get the training that they need. Without this, they end up failing on the transitions (switching over).

- Sean did a great job. I was impressed with his demo and knowledge of the system. I can see him doing more and more of that type of thing. He gets in there and spends the time to learn things (tips, tricks, etc.). That makes a difference.

- The value of real live data and real live work flow testing. You have to have a client who will play along, but you gain a ton from that tight of an interaction and/or relationship.

On Friday, June 11th, 2021 we had an internal conference day for just the adilas team. We went from sales to internal code to ideas and plans. All over the place. See attached for my notes. Many great things were discusses. Once again, this was an internal team meeting, but we don't mind sharing what we were talking about. :)

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The attached notes are better formatted, but I wanted to push some of them here for searchability:

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Group Sales Meeting

Marisa, Danny, John, Cory, Sean, Steve, Dustin, Shari O., Dawn, Brendan, Steve (mac), Brandon, Chuck, Alan, Kelly, Bryan

- Kelly was saying that there is some public records per states

- We may try to pull our own list

- Questions... who, what, where, how good, etc.

- Maybe look at a sample of 10

- We may need a more focuses approach

- What about different industries?

- We need to get the name out there

- Kelly was pitching a social presence

- Do we know anybody who wants to do the social stuff

- Word of mouth

- Testimonials

- Some new video graphics

- To the penny, to the gram, every day

- What about small streaming commercials – focused and pointed

- Kelly recommends that we maybe focus on a slightly larger pool

- Dawn – maybe focus on start-ups or that small to medium range

- Get them at the beginning – maybe even tradeshows

- It is a pain in the but to switch over – pain creates options for change

- Focus on services... deployment, oversight, consulting, training, best practices

- How can we deploy something easily and repeatable?

- It is tough to get some of the people started, but once they get all in, they tend to stay

- Kelly has done this over and over again

- Using the professional resources that are available

- From Kelly – Help get the clients all the way in – full system and platform

- Getting the success on the first implementation and then building from there

- What about focusing on those who are having trouble and/or are struggling

- Dawn loves the support, training, and feel good part of it – duplicate that feeling to others

- How quick can we respond – we jump pretty quickly on custom needs, development, training, and support

- Get more testimonials from our clients

- We have some experience to offer to those who want it

- What about pitching best business practices

- It's ok to be non-traditional

- Being Relevant!

- Focus on helping over sales – from Steve (mac)

- Simple things that bring the relevant pieces

- Social webbing – group effort

- Danny, straight up, I don't want to be the social media guy! We have to find the right person and/or persons (small little team)

- We are not QuickBooks... what does that mean? Be our own style!

- Packaging this platform based on the target audience

- Formulating a plan – ease the lift – maybe a monthly meeting with some planning

- Influencers and YouTube options

- Small info tips...

- New age marketing – we have to play to the current market

- Big Dumb Animal Pictures – super simple

- We have to do a cost analysis to see which one(s) make more sense for us

- John, what if we setup our own little social piece (aka maybe the adilas cafe) – we could allow all of our users and power users to pitch and promote – we may need to approve things, but we have tons of very knowledgeable people and users

- We are looking for engagement – back and forth – a relationship – maybe get an intern to help handle this

- Danny – Switching over to the modal message marketing

- How to save the app to your phone

- Make the email piece better

- Small web tool to help with building special html links to embed promotions, direct add to cart, discounts, campaigns, etc. A simple form to help with the backend tech of those URL's and web links.

- Maybe, we need to upgrade our email platform. It is a small holdover from years gone by.

- What about the delay on the outbound emails?

- Marisa – maybe outsource things as needed

- Steve – would like more input on the bulk tools

- Better filtering and target marketing

- Steve wants to work direct with Dawn and Branden

- Matrix and target marketing – even predictive

- Maybe a little itty bitty (super small) native app on the different phones – iOS, Android, etc.

- Steve wants to get into possible predictive marketing

- Steve – looking for great feedback and even ideas and dreams...

- Archiving, saving for later, dismissing, etc. We have the data, what do we want to do with it? – Wet clay...

- Danny – Going back to past clients

- Version 1 vs Version 2 – type attitude

- What kind of clients do we want? We may not want certain kind of clients.

- We love people who like details and are willing to play

- We love people who take things to the fullest level

- We love people who just need a small little piece – there is a gap in their current model and they need some help. We can then grow from there.

- Do a full comparison of what we offer

- Pitch what we do differently – we help deploy and maintain your ERP

- White glove approach

- Playing with the tools that we have and flipping those into marketing messages

- Chuck – maybe check out some groups on Facebook

- Blog posts, articles, info snippets, quick videos

- Talking with Kelly – how have we helped small businesses become bigger or big business – showing the potential – dreams to reality

- The small goals to achieve – steps to get to the next level

- Small goals lead to bigger goals – getting some small successes along the way

- Clients and expectations – not all money is the same – budgeting and planning – what kind of client do we want

- Reoccurring revenue vs one-time revenue

- A quote is just one of many pieces that needs to be done

- People, skills, and cogs in the wheel

- We all care... where would you and your skills fit in best

- Seeing the bigger picture

- Maybe looking at personalities and figuring out the mixing and blending of our options and resources

- Slowing down and taking the time to see where we are at? Virtual time travel – child, youth, adult – as a company

- What's the difference between a goal and dream? A plan!

- The internal group summary that we did... a great start

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Second session - Servers & Infrastructure - Refining Our Processes - Tech Support & Training - Project Management

Steve wants us to show the online label builder

- We had some good talk about where we want to go

- We pointed to our internal summary report

- Steve McNew – helping with the strategic marketing plan, technology road map, timelines to position, plans for action

- Scale – can we grow and can we shrink

- Conversation between big and small – perspective – big and small (sales, number of team members, lines of code, etc.)

- Molly – Is adilas the big guy or the small guy? Think of code (lines of code). We could be considered a big guy if you were looking at code and functionality.

- We like being small (ish), but what if we are big already

- If we want to grow, that means that we want to get better – grow in a good manner and sustainable manner

- The underlying services that support the whole

- Be your own style!

- Steve McNew – old classmate with Steve Berkenkotter – guest speaker – part of the adilas team to help us get some things more standardized – processes and procedures

- Defense contractor for the military – 28 years

- Testing, software, management, auditor

- He has already called, interviewed, and talked with a number of different team members

- He did a 20 page audit and report on what he was seeing

- Getting into some testing and processes – he would like to see more of this

- Not trying to derail the train – we are trying to polish the Ferrari (spelling – awesome car)

- Whitepapers – catering to a higher audience – going beyond stick figures and into technical docs – not everybody will want to read some of these, but there will be some that require it

- Steve B – if we try to sell our product to those who can't afford it, it doesn't really work. They have to be able to pay for what we do (really do – billing for our time and efforts)

- Fin-tech – financial technology

- Using whitepapers as part of our marketing plan

- John M – unit testing – confidence of the developer team – currently only Wayne and Alan are doing this (unit testing)

- Going to ease into this – refining our testing plan

- Version control and when do we update these systems? The older way was wild west... we may want to figure out some specific micro builds.

- It would be nice to keep track of the versions and options.

- The balance between core and custom development

- The application needs some spring cleaning – what is being used, what isn't, what is going slow, etc. – Refactoring

- Priorities – customer priorities or our internal priorities – what is the mix and blend of these pieces

- We all ware many hats... we may need to define that so that we don't overstretch ourselves

- We all use (and can use) the system in different ways – how do we translate that information to our clients, other developers, and other team members (upstream and downstream)

- 2 minute videos – no more

- Work instructions – even giving it to someone who has never done anything in the system

- Danny – Shoutout to Steve and Brandon – we have done great – what is coming next? Resources?

- Talks about earn and burn ratios

- Prices have to match the services

- We are a growing business

- Kelly – going from 1.5 to 10 (millions) – that is a huge change

- We are competing with companies that are hugely funded... what do we want to do?

- There are some real things in our path – there is tons of potential – what do we want to do with it – also, sometimes there is shelf life on potential or advantages

- We don't want debt – however, there is a time for debt – cost analysis and being smart about it

- Making choices, but also being willing to fail

- Marisa – look at our new website

- Steve – there are some percentages of adilas that are available – not looking for vulture capital (just being silly – vulture vs venture)

- Someone looking to take on some risk but helping us to get to the next level, without taking over the company

- Kelly – pitching our vision and business plan – we have to define the vision – Danny seconded the define the vision before looking for the funding – goals, sales, budgeting, maintenance, and getting a business plan.

- Adilas Trust option – co-founders

- Possible option – Maybe take some of IP (intellectual property) and sell that to a new entity and then restructure those new pieces

- Dustin – thoughts on corporate structure – we are all on our own little islands – Ferrari to a tricycle – frontend compared to backend – splitting up those pieces and functions – he wishes that we could be more collaborated.

- John – teams and buddy projects – small sub teams – full stack (all levels) vs specific skills or somewhat limited skills – this needs to be part of our plan.

- Sean – we already have some small teams that are working on some of these projects – cogs of the wheel – buddy tagging the workflow and processes

- John – the adilas docs project – and being able to go to it and also add to it – working on standardizing the pieces – filling in the gaps

- Danny – Navy Seals – two is one, and one is none – at least two on a project – two-by-two

- Kelly – scale – having a back-up

- Danny – accountability back and forth

- John – confidence levels

- Kelly – what about a succession plan?

- John and Dustin – real life buddies and how they help out each other – seeing a different angle or perspective

- Marisa – tooooooooo much weight gets put on single persons

- Kelly – relieving pressure and helping with scale

- Marisa – Cory, Kelly, and Marisa – wonderful training slides, presentation, and delivery for the conference. Awesome job!

- Alan – modularize things – able to be reused – code concepts can relate to business functions – one to many relationships – translating knowledge into real life and different scenarios

- Chuck – last summer Chuck was on a joint project with he, Russell, and a different John. It worked out awesome – Keep pushing towards that kind of rollout of the project

- Molly – thinking and coming up with ideas. Keep it going!

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Next Session - Deployment & Oversight - Design & Layout - Internal Core Development - Custom Development 

- Deployment – where are we going and how can we make this all work – team effort

- Shari O. – first touch and setup corp, Sean and Shay first hour or so, Sean helping to coordinate the next steps and pieces

- Sean does a great job of reporting back

- Report on things, record the notes, get back with us to help us keep pushing

- Doing great with testing and prototyping

- Kelly – who is on settings, who is on planning, maybe even looking at pre-deployment options

- Before Kelly even does a demo, do some consultation – figure some things out without doing any pitching or selling. This is called listening.

- What are you looking for, wanting, expecting, hoping for?

- Make the demos custom to the pain points or key wants and needs

- The prep work is huge to help them be successful

- This platform is not a turn on and go type system – there may be pre demo, consulting, custom planning and demo, then custom hand holding to get them going down the road

- Picking the point of contact... who is going to own this thing?

- Owners, managers, and users

- Users want the easy button – Steve calls this the tail wagging the dog vs the dog wagging the tail – what is and how can we get buy in?

- Tools are great, but solutions to problems and pain points are even better

- Give to get! If you give too much, it can get you into trouble.

- What is the cost to fixing things... on the other hand, failing does help with major learning – there has to be a balance

- We tend to remember pain – setting people up for success

- Often users are looking for a quick switch. This system takes work. Please sell it that way.

- Not going to custom too quickly – learning the manual way – then automating it

- User buy in – light pain and then helping them learn a better way

- Change proposals and scope of work – setting up boundaries

- Feature creep – setting that scope of work – cause and effect of what they want and what they give – expectations and timelines

- Sometimes I start with NO – interesting

- A saying no - sandwich... Yes, I'd like to, no, I can't. Yes, I would love to help do this... - people think that no is a bad word

- Having a plan to say yes, vs just saying yes

- We like to please people – that is awesome – what does that cost?

- Help make the plan to say yes. Maybe, no (first), however we could do this...

- Making things repeatable

- What are the internal costs to do deployment?

- Say $350 for a setup fee – does that cover it? If yes, great. If no, where does that put us?

- Maybe on the setup, prep, an activation fee (define this – turning on the lights), setup and deployment fee (range), training, custom code, imports, labels, etc.

- We like to cater to everyone – that had bitten us

- Actual prices and then use discounts if needed. You can't really ever raise a price after the fact.

- Back-up our prices

- Use adilas to run adilas!!! This is our communication tool, let's use it.

- We are good at the dreaming and software building part of things, we need some major loving on the service side

- There is demand!

- What pulls at our time - It is time, money, skills, etc.

- Kelly – earn has to be more than burn

- Flipping the demand to sales or services that could be provided

- MVP – minimal viable product, plan, player, etc.

- Intangibles

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Next Session – Show and tell! What are you working on?

Calvin – Advanced file and folder finder, resize images, convert images

Brandon – harvesting assets from element of time

Steve – parent attributes report, items not on a recipe (manufacturing), modal message marketing for customers, log notes for vendors and employees (payee/vendor logs), backorders homepage, mini units, auto add item (quick PO behind the scenes), bulk update on the vendor – master copy paster... :)

- Branch 122 – fun

Bryan – cfqueryparams – stop SQL XSS (database hacks – cross site scripting)  - SQL injection – converting from dynamic queries to secure dynamic queries - Example: Corp_id = #Trim(some form or URL var)# or Corp_id = <cfqueryparam etc, etc,> - this stops the SQL hacks

Bryan is also working on eChecks for eXPO, Hypur checkout in the shopping cart (eComm), new API's for delivery (with documentation and samples)

John – Payroll project to allow holiday date picking, timecard flags, timecard totals (pre summing the math to go faster and lead towards bulk payroll), new timecard reports showing grouped sums and totals.

Page templates and style guide defaults with Chuck – Going from old school tables and links to the newer grid and mobile ready code. Part of the adilas docs project. Build once, use many (effective copy and paste). Basic templates (3 new ones). New information icons and popups (modals). Style guides and usage of those pieces.

Servers with Wayne

Chuck – Huge new web site!!! Awesome Job!!!

Global Design Dashboard, adilas docs, and new presentation gallery (sales tool).

Danny – message marketing, custom labels, sales team meetings – hats off to all of us! Keep listening and keep finding solutions. Open table – follow your highest excitement and be yourself! Be happy!

Alan – enterprise level catalogs, refactoring code (custom page settings), standardizing code for speed and reliability.

Random comments – Cory really liked having access to all of the team members, right here at the conference. Marisa – great to meet everyone – keep floating the boat. Sean – he likes the team. Molly – loved watching and wants to be involved. Chuck – idea of everyone joining slack

Cory, Steve, Sean, and I touching base on a number of different projects. We started out with some questions on connecting to special hardware and what those configurations need to be. At some future time, we may need a hardware expert to join the team to help with setup and configuration between hardware and the web. Sometimes that gets kinda tough. The web doesn't do much there, most of the tweaks and changes come on the device and through small applications loaded on the system or through drivers or something like that (little mini apps and settings).

We started talking about settings and permissions. A client wants to allow a person (user) to go to a certain place (say timeclocks or timecards) and not be able to see certain things. This topic spun us off into a small discussion about permissions, settings, functions, and even sub permissions. Eventually, (we know that is a bad word) we see the permissions being a combo of both settings and permissions. For example: Say the main permission deals with something like timecards or timeclocks. Then, deeper, inside the permission, there may be sub permissions or settings. Eventually, all of the functions of that permission may need to be available for or part of a sub selection. Both settings and permissions may end up being combined and will make some sort of hybrid type system at some point. Just looking down the road a bit. Just for fun, there is another example: Say invoices - within in that, you could have functions like add, edit, void, remove lines, make payments, searches, limits, histories, exports, etc. It can get deep really quickly.

We worked through a small quote for a client dealing with some new permissions. Part way through, we had to fix a small error on one of the pages. The new permission was dealing with show/hide options for salary and wages being shown on the timecards and timeclock records. As we got deeper into it, we found that the manager's permission already hides those pieces but the admin timeclock stuff does not. We did the quote and got some options ready for the client.

We switched and talked about some feedback from the  conference. We talked about getting buy in on some of our future plans and pieces by pitching what we've got. After that, Steve and Cory were batting a few things around dealing with other projects and follow-ups. Cory has been amazing and is doing a great job! Huge thumbs up!

Here are some other small things we chatted about: They got into talking about vendor types (small flag for vendors to be either expense vendors or inventory vendors). Reports, exports, and being able to save certain reports. We flipped back and forth between the conference, upcoming plans, and fifty other topics. Just for fun, Cory was saying that she got a bunch of good feedback from the clients who were at the conference. We, as a team, are a pretty crazy machine when people see us in person. That is kinda fun.

We then talked about scalability and how things like alignment, balance, projections, and confidence play into the mix. Cory was saying that she feels like the things that her yoga instructor tells her about herself apply to business and our adilas team. Good stuff.

The final topic of the day was an MVP (minimal viable product, plan, person) on the payroll side of things. A new facelift, revamp the clock in/out section, and make it a standalone mini project (gateway or doorway into the bigger system - the teaser section). We would love to revamp that little project. We then talked about how to fund that and how to move forward. Making plans!

On a Paypod integration meeting with Murray and Aaron from Paypod and Cory, Steve, Bryan, and I from the adilas team. We were talking about the art of selling the possible - potential. Both companies love to play in the realms of possible. We are trying to make a mutual beneficial product and investment. We are both (companies) striving for an MVP type solution. The minimal would be the POS (point of sale) transactions and the admin console.

Steve was having fun talking about the future of AI (artificial intelligence) and where things are going. With Adilas being an end-to-end operations and accounting solution, we could really roll out a good product output.

Steve and Murray were talking about all kinds of use cases and other scenarios. One of the major goals is to use the Paypod unit to eliminate the cash drawer and provide a safer, more secure, self-checkout type option. There are tons of other options, that's just one them that I recorded.

Towards the end, you could tell that both Steve and Murray were pitching their products towards each other and trying to come up with possible ways of doing joint sales and strategies. As a note, the Paypod company already sales tons of other cash and coin based solutions. These are more of an integrated solution with a backend POS system.

Looking at ways of funding development, we could do a possible joint customer solution, and get them to help fund it. They, Paypod, could pitch in. We could pitch in (self-funded) , or we could figure out some sort of sales type agreement based on leads and closures for the Paypod units. Lot of options and talking.

We wrapped up with estimating time for implementation and development on the different sections that are required. There are still some big unknowns, but we will try to transition the project from Brandon over to Bryan and then go from there. Brandon and Cory will then make up some quotes, timelines, and requirement documents. That is our next steps.

After the meeting, Steve, Cory, Bryan, and I stayed on and went over some plans and got some more vision from Steve.

Phone call with Steve. We started out talking about some of our current projects and where things are at. Lots of moving pieces both in business and in life in general. Here are a few of the topics that we talked about. I filled up a couple of post-it notes while we were on the phone.

- We briefly talked about sales and reoccurring invoices (reoccurring revenue steam). Looking at trends and where things are at with the reoccurring invoices. That is our bread and butter. We also do custom code, deployment, training, and other things, but the reoccurring invoices are our primary source of income.

- We talked about the MVP (minimal viable product). To some people and some industries, we are there. To others, we are still not there, even through it's been years and years. As we were talking, we also mentioned, that adilas is so deep and complete, maybe we are just now even getting to an MVP type level. Real digital storytelling and world building requires deep waters.

- Timelines - Sometimes it takes a long time for certain things to happen. That is just true, no mater what. You almost have to adjust to the longer play (for certain things).

- Get out there and rattle the bushes a bit. If we need more custom code or client funded work, get out there and ask people if they need anything done. We could get them a quote and then get a developer on it. All of our guys are busy, but not all of them are on funded projects. That means that we are picking up the bulk of it (the virtual tab), for the new development.

- Pitch things as they are. If needed, we could customize and we can bill for that.

- We need to do some immediate fixes. We have some payables that are stacking up that we need to get out. We also have tons of receivables that we need to collect on. If we had that, we would be fine, but it's hard to get the money out of our clients some times. Always this little game of sorts.

- We talked about some short term funding and cash flow options.

- We are going for the full system or fully integrated system - that's where we want to head. This allows for the ability to record and track things end-to-end, through the entire process.

- We will still allow 3rd party solution but we really want to focus on what we do. There has to be a balance.

- Steve was talking about calling some of our best clients and seeing if they want anything? Development at $100/hour or training at $65/hour. Couldn't hurt to ask. This could be custom development or filling their needs in some other way.

- As Steve and I were talking, it is amazing how functionality and needs for functionality keep bubbling to the surface. We don't even try and it just comes up... Kinda like the ongoing idea farm type mentality... it literally just keeps coming and we end up taking the next step.

- We are a serious solution - those who get it, love it! Those who don't, go elsewhere.

- Harvesting some of our R&D and building out some of the fracture type pieces. We really want to build where we want it to go vs being pulled in certain directions. There needs to be a balance, but right now, we feel like we are just being yanked and pulled in every direction (spreading us thin). It would be great to be able to focus and really go where we feel the bang for the buck would be best for us as a company.

- Dedicate time and resources to those pieces. Work the plan! Carve out some time and push on some of our pieces.

- At some point, you kinda have to keep faking it until you make it. That sounds shallow, but it is true. Fake it till you make it!

John joined the meeting first today. He, Cory, and I went over some of his projects and where he is at. He has pushed up a number of smaller branches in the past few days. One of them had a number of JavaScript changes to the discount engine. He reported on that and then we switched over to servers and system admin stuff. John wants to document things but he is concerned with security keeping the procedures and processes out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them. We talked about some options for distributing and securing those documents.

John also reported on chasing other smaller bugs and putting out small fires. Going back to the key person, systems admin docs, currently, lots of things are hinging on certain key players and their knowledge. We need to capture that knowledge and put it in writing, as best we can. We also need to keep those documents in the high admin's hands vs public knowledge. Anyways, we will start going through things and collecting what we can, while having the security thoughts in front of us. We'll find a good mix.

After John finished, Alan checked in and let us know where he is at with his projects. He is still working on the new sub inventory object model code out in ecommerce land. He still has a few things left with that project. It's been a big lift. Also, he was saying that he currently can't pull that new code inside adilas (out of ecommerce land and into the main secure adilas platform) due to some legacy issues. Not insurmountable, but at least a decent amount of work.

One of the blockades is the number of black boxes and custom code that exist out there. We need to figure out a way to bring in the new code into the legacy system. Alan has a few ideas, but we may end up having modes (new and old) and being able to flip flop between those modes.

Some of the new stuff is more object oriented vs in-line code that runs from page to page but requires a certain step by step process or chain of events. Some of Alan's new stuff deals with objects and inheritance, less hits to the database, and all around more efficient code. It's all part of the process. You have to start somewhere and eventually, things tend to morph and/or mature, in logic and processes. It's all part of the game.

Alan was showing us and talking about some crazy tax calcs and recalcs and how the models and objects handle those changes. One of Alan's goals in this project is to stabilize some of the pieces and isolate the variables. In the new models, he watches and monitors things like quantities, target prices, costs, price per, rounding errors, taxes, etc. Pretty deep.

I thought that it was interesting to hear Alan say that one of the barriers to him finishing the project was the number of black boxes or custom code pieces that are out there. We love doing custom code and it really helps our users, however, there is a cost to that and it tends to hit our developers and how easily they can roll out those new changes. Basically, easier for the users, but potentially harder for our developers. Lots of moving pieces.

Cory and Alan were talking about MVP models for the new sub inventory pieces. We could jump off into super deep waters, but we need to get the project done. We can always circle back around.

After talking about sub inventory for awhile, the topic switched to Metrc (state tracking and compliance system). That 3rd party integration is more than a fulltime job. Anyways, they were talking about importing inventory, comparing inventories between systems, and other required interactions. Lots of moving pieces, plus you have two separate systems that work completely independent and we are trying to keep them synced up together. It can be very challenging. If they change something, we have to follow suite and/or create a bridge to what new requirements are needed. If we make a change, we have to make sure that we aren't breaking anything that already exists.

After Alan was done talking to Cory, he left and just Cory and I were left on the meeting. We started talking about how long certain projects take, how deep they are, and how they tend to morph from what was originally created into something completely new and different. This lead to some discussions on the complexity of being a public or publicly demanded company (our clients have a say in what we do, when, how much, why, etc.). Sometimes I wish that we were just developing our own little software solution and then we could just sell it to the public. Instead, we are building, changing, refining, and trying to please our clients along the way. That is ideal, but it also adds all kinds of pressure and other variables.

Cory and I got talking about real costs and what it takes to please people. We had a client that came up with an idea, it sounded easy, but has turned into a huge 4 month project and has cost us over $30,000. Sure they want it, but did they pay for it? Sadly, no, we are stuck with the bill. We tend to do that a lot. That hurts and especially if you keep doing it. We love to build and can get sucked into that very easily. Having said that, we are getting better at asking for seed monies, billing out the clients, and sharing the load. Sometimes we just need to vent a little bit.

As we were talking, my mind started to think about how hard it would be to fully rewrite the entire application that we are building. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to and I think we could come away with some huge benefits but there is a cost. Some of those costs are real costs with money, resources, talent, time, etc. What about the things that are harder to see like stress, pressure, demands, wear and tear, burnout, changes in physical ability, mental ability, and other unseen costs. What if we just try to build on what we have? That's what we are doing right now. What if we just kept going and didn't try to redo everything? Just keep refining, polishing, and tweaking things as needed. Still a lot of work, but it may be a better solution (at least right now). I was thinking about fracture (future project) and where we want to go with that project and those pieces.

Cory jumped on to the meeting. We were talking about monies being owed to us and from us to others. Maybe even holding projects for payment before starting. Lots of talks about cash flow and getting the development funded that we are doing. We do a lot, we just don't charge for everything. That is both good and bad. We really need to charge for the services that we provide. We tend to do a ton of stuff for free, but that is costing us big time.

We talked about a menu board project and who was going to do what. We have developers who can handle the backend, but they don't have the frontend or design skills to really make it look nice. We have to mix and blend who is doing what. We also talked about breaking the bigger projects into tons of smaller, more manageable mini projects. They, the clients, were requesting a 4th menu board (already have 3), new settings, auto refresh, and tied to quantity on hand.

The concept of an "MVP" (minimal viable product) and how that fits into the bigger or master plan. Either way, you still have to manage these projects from end to end. 

Towards the end, Cory and I spent some time looking into the timeclock issue with the AFB timecards and timeclock app. We ended up checking different versions of the code, working with the backend actions, and looking over code with Cory. I was coding and narrating and she was watching and asking questions.

Steve, Wayne, John, Alan, and Brandon on a meeting to talk about servers, special needs, and how sales tax runs and plays through the mix. Some of these states are really trying to get a tighter grip on the real-time sales tax tracking. They are losing millions. The need is big enough that they, the states, are willing to pay for new software or new development from sales tax revenue.

John was recording some notes. Wayne was asking questions on how deep do they want to go and can we really require some of those things that they are proposing. Wayne was proposing that any POS (point of sale) system could send their transactions to the some entity and we could help them (that entity) control the backend API socket system.

The preferred solution might be to create a separate entity that gets the majority of the load and the traffic. We use adilas and then push to that other entity through an API socket that we create. In computer language, that is called "eating your own dog food" (using and consuming your own API sockets).

Steve was proposing that the state wants to mix what adilas has right now and what eXpo has (a third party solution that does some banking and payment solutions) right now. They are looking for the whole system that works and plays together. Some of the biggest needs are on full inventory tracking, sales tax reports, and other compliance stuff.

Alan was chiming in and giving some ideas. Basically, use any POS system that they want, but you have to play a certain way to handle the state compliance. The state compliance pieces would be virtually mirroring what we are doing inside of adilas and how we do it. Once again, sales tax and inventory tracking are the biggest pains. It comes down to needs, requirements, and scalability (how big/small can you be and how quick).

Small observation - Good mix of ideas and suggestions. Mixing Wayne on backend servers and new tech, Alan on backend development and observations, John on general flow (backside and frontside) and taking notes, Steve stating dreams, sales, and requirements, and Brandon trying to illustrate and help the different people get their point across. Interesting mix.

The cool thing is, adilas already has a ton of these things already built-in. It is exciting to be able to replicate things and then go from there. We don't have to start from scratch... We already have and do a bunch of the things that are needed.

Wayne was proposing a small sample (an MVP - minimal viable product type approach) then see if they like it or don't like it. If they do like it, we could then build it in and deploy it quickly. Basically a foot in the door or experiment type process. As we got deeper into it, there is a whole other side to that to get all of the other supporting pieces that are needed (worlds, corporations, locations, users, permissions, settings, etc.). It is always deeper than you think (cause and effect relationships) once you bring in the supporting pieces and variables.

From Wayne - What is the end report or output that you want? Ok, let's go build that. That gives us a goal and a target. Let's start with that. It could expand from there vs trying to get the whole picture all at once. That's the way that we should be developing software.

From Alan - What if we build them a report from our existing data and system right now? Then, if they like it, we duplicate it and make it scalable.

From Steve and Wayne - What if we show them what we currently have and then ask, what else would you want or need? Pretend that it is the sales tax portion. Basically, give them a good starting point and then let them dream. We could put in some dummy data (or even use real data) and then show them some simulations. We could even show an outside party usage (using API sockets) and how it play into the mix. Let them see what is possible based on existing reports and options (out of the box). That would be pretty cool!

From Steve - Even seeing the possible vision of what we are proposing for scaling for this current project (all of the stuff above) may help us all out, even with our normal adilas stuff. This idea of a separate API socket that sums things up could really be super helpful. Similar to the business intelligence or enterprise level corporation (world or entity) - a common place to hold, store, aggregate, and sum things up (BI - business intelligence stuff). Pretty cool to see where it could go.

Started out with Steve and I chatting for a bit. Then Steve and Sean started talking about some sales, leads, and networking strategy. Things are going good in that avenue. They were also talking about growing organically and what that looks like. We ended up talking about MVP for sales and growth. Sometimes we have our aim set so high, we can never reach the mark. MVP can stand for a lot of different things. Most commonly it is most valuable player (sports), minimal viable product (business), etc. We had a business consultant that was explaining that MVP could also be things like minimal viable person, minimal viable plan, minimal viable player, or whatever. Basically, having enough of something to get the job done. Sufficient for our needs.

Along those lines, we were being silly, but if you could swap out what the "P" stands for in MVP, what if you just changed it completely. For example: MVG or minimal viable growth. Talking about some options and possibilities along those lines. For me, I can see the small things and try to grab what I see. If things are out there too far, I tend to lose focus.

We had a sprint standup meeting. I took a few notes in the main adilas system, on the project. Alan and Wayne were talking about progress and communications. Also, there was some talk about the need for testing and how it gets accumulated over time. Working towards a good continual integration process. Some of the guys are questioning the need for unit testing. They are so used to doing their own, just in time testing, that taking the time to mock-up and fake data and write tests is challenging their minds. I think that most of them are starting to see the value in it and helping them realize that there are other benefits vs just speed on a project.

Work session between Shannon and I going over more changes and content for the adilas core concepts and the intro to world building document that we are working on. Fun work and brainstorming session. We talked more about the MVP model and options to getting things to the "sufficient" level. See an earlier entry from today to see some other comments on MVP models. See the attached document for our progress from today.

Steve and I meeting and going over things. Cory joined us. Going over server costs and other costs. Talking about a number of our guys and gals and what are plans are with them and their projects. Going over ideas on sales and future development.

Here are some rough notes. I have more saved on my computer with the title "budget_meeting_2_10_22.docx".

- On sales – give the guys 10 hours and see what they can come up with. Maybe even a birddog fee if we land something. Their goal is just to get them signed up for a demo. Sean and Marisa will take it from there.

- What if we did some different stuff for custom jobs? Almost a separate bank account for custom stuff so that money doesn't get claimed by other projects. Either play with bank accounts, transfers, or somehow earmarking certain monies. Basically, take out the custom stuff out of the normal reoccurring budgets.

- One of the tricky things is amount per hour that we pay developers. Some are higher than others - pretty normal.

- Cory – she says that it seems like developers like to add things in (their own little agendas and add-on's).

- Cory is really trying to focus on MVP. Sometimes we need to squash the creativity. Maybe we could take those ideas and pass them by the companies to see if we could get them funded. Almost a change order or up sale.

- We have learned some good lessons with some of these guys. We give them a quick one-liner (we need x and y). They then build x, y, z, etc. It keeps going and there are really no set standards. We really need to be more specific on what we need and want.

- Talking about buddies – getting these guys hooked up in order to get things done.

- At times, we have lost track of some of these guys. We don't hear back from them for weeks at a time.

- Certain projects really cost 10, 20, 50K. We've been quoting them at $2K or $5K (whatever) but in reality, it really takes more. We almost need to double, pad, and make sure that we get covered and make some on the projects.

- Steve – we've done a lot of the easy stuff. Some of the rest of it will be a trick and a challenge. We are going to charge $150/hour and start going for it.

- Seeing if we can get some of these developers out hitting the street and helping on the sales side of things.

Cory jumped on the meeting with Steve and I. We went over a bunch of projects and touched base on progress, hang-ups, and things that are still remaining and/or needed. Briefly talked about PO rounding, client scheduling, merchant accounts, John with state payroll, Wayne with settings and servers, and some other projects.

Steve had a few comments about the client scheduling project and we went over a few ideas for new settings, using JSON or page level settings, and making a plan to see what that project would take to get to an MVP level (minimal viable product). Good discussion.

Cory is really trying to help us to be more focuses. We talked about a pattern that she is seeing in all of our developers. We all tend to love new projects but we have a hard time finishing things up. The last little bit of a project is not that fun and can get really tedious. We like the challenge of figuring things out but we somewhat lack in the super detailed finishing realm. Good observation.

Cory and I jumped on and looked over a bunch of projects. John was still on and showed Cory progress on the state choices and new payroll messages. I took some time and showed Cory some of the features of the new copy select chart of accounts tool - copying things between corporations. We also looked at some upcoming projects. I'll be working on some verbage for refund policies, privacy policies, and other terms and conditions. We need to add these pieces to our ecommerce site. After that, my next major project will be planning out an MVP (minimal viable product) for client facing scheduling and booking.

Steve joined and he and Cory were going over a number of custom label and other projects. Steve and Cory were also talking about some merchant processing options. We have some required updates that are coming up and we don't have very many people using that feature. As a business decision, we may need to get with those folks and see if they are willing to transfer over to a different merchant account. The more you have, the more you have to maintain. We are looking to consolidate on some of those options and available features. Finally, we went over next steps for each of us and then bailed out to work on our own projects.

Somewhat of a mix of different things. Reviewing and planning an MVP (minimal viable product) for the client facing scheduling app for ecommerce. Doing some research and reading inside of pass elements of time in the developer's notebook. One of the items was some new time template settings on element of time # 8004. The other was some notes on the bike shuttle scheduling for a client on element of time # 8137.

Sending some emails over to the merchant processing folks to get some approvals on terms and policies for a client. This was required for underwriting for their merchant account.

Jumped on a GoToMeeting with Steve to go over some code for bulk printing custom labels. Steve also reported that he spoke more with Alan on the options for multi member LLC and the adilas trust options for a new corporation and entity structure. Good stuff.

I then jumped back into the research and planning for the client facing scheduling stuff for ecommerce and elements of time.

Checking emails and then on a phone call with Drew from the High Valley Bike Shuttle corporation. We chatted and touched base. We also setup some times to do some training and progress reports. Here is our rough plan.

- Get in there and setup categories, items, images, descriptions, flex grid tie-ins, time templates, and general processes.

- Do some training on the general processes and get them using the system with current tools - somewhat of the manual or non-automated processes. We will record the training and make sure that they are good to go. This will get them going.

- We will keep building on the automation and client facing scheduling portions that are needed. Release things as soon as we are able as an MVP deployment (minimal viable product).

Steve and Sean were on talking about possible advertising in trade magazines and possible budgets and marketing decisions. Sean and Steve were also talking about how Sean had done a lot of marketing previously (back in college and what he was going into - his major). They talked about changes and other possible options. Steve and I touched base on the demo that I did on Friday. We talked about the limited flex grid and upcoming client facing scheduling. Small report on where we are at there.

Eric joined and he and Steve were talking about options for the 2D barcode and digital scans of customer driver licenses. Eric wanted to know which way to head and where we are going. We talked about bigger options and chasing bigger fish but ended up coming back to an MVP (minimal viable product) type approach and direction. That's all that we can afford at this time.

For the first part of the meeting, I was on with Wayne, Cory, and some outside clients on a Google meet meeting to go over an outside data analytics service that was being requested for one of our clients. It was mostly a brainstorming session about possible options and direction. We pitched a proposal for direct data access, showing real data, mirrored over to a new instance, but on an independent accessible database. One of the topics that came up was the data dictionary and the education on the database schema, rows, tables, columns, and relationships (what is what, inside the database). The term that was being flipped around between the parties was the data dictionary (written eduction on the database stuff).

I jumped on the GoToMeeting after we were done. Not much going on there this morning. I was doing emails and texting back and forth with Steve. He was on another meeting with Mike and the state of Mississippi. Steve had some questions about some timecard calculations and wanted to see if we were storing any of the calculated values. I told him that we do store calculated values for employee timeclocks and timecards but do not store calculated values on sub dates and times for elements of time. That may be something that we want to do in the future. It would help save time and speed things up. Steve was saying, when it's time, we'll go for the MVP (minimal viable product) type release. In the meantime, we'll just calculate things on the fly.

Chuck and I met to go over progress on the client facing scheduling. We talked about the date-picker project and how big it is getting. After that, Chuck and I talked about new settings for ecommerce time templates. Chuck had some basic visual mock-ups and we talked about pros and cons of what we are thinking and seeing. Lots of talk about doing an MVP (minimal viable product) and also a bigger granddaddy (full blown product or dreaming the dream) - with more look and feel options, functions, settings, and options.

We talked about doing some other prototypes and scenarios. He is going to build out the bike shuttle stuff and then do some rentals or a booking for something - date/times, just a single date (no time), and a date range (multiple dates). Making progress. See attached for a couple small screenshots.

Meeting with Chuck on the client facing scheduling stuff. We went over ideas for the MVP (minimal viable product). Talking about flow and structure. I took a number of screenshots (see attached). We also talked about how to deal with custom shuttles (unscheduled elements of time). After that, we rolled into what might come after the MVP rollout.

We spent a little bit of time looking into the label builder and Chuck's new layout and prototypes. We got into some JavaScript stuff and looking at custom code to control a JavaScript canvas. We also looked into a mock-up of the custom label homepage that Chuck is working on.

Bryan joined us and we switched back over to the client facing scheduling stuff and gave him a small walkthrough.

Steve and Cory were talking about pages, packages, and sub inventory. Shari O. popped in and we ended up having some light budget talks. The four of us talked briefly about the state of adilas and where we are going. Lots of good things going but we do need to be careful. On a different note, many things are changing all around us - including code changes, settings, clients, needs, expectations, etc. It's a moving target.

Light talk about what is an MVP (minimal viable product) for what we are doing? Even though we have so much functionality, do we have all of the required pieces? There are still some things that we need, even for an MVP - although it be a large MVP.

Cory was asking questions about projects and what not.

Meeting with Cory to go over the quote line items for the adilas label builder. We made a small Word document and added in all kinds of notes, verbage, and estimates on hours for each section. That document was sent to Cory via email and also uploaded inside of adilas for that label builder project. We also did some training on adding media/content to sub inventory items. Lastly, we went through some older notes and tried to make sure that we have/had all of the MVP requirements. Productive meeting and making good progress.

John was giving Steve and I a demo on the discount engine and the new database changes that he and Wayne were working on early this morning. Looking good. John was also pitching the use of diagrams to help with requirements, flow, sequences, and object models. We talked a little bit about MVP - minimal viable product. I like to switch out the ending "P" and do something like minimal viable person, minimal viable plan, etc. It helps me think of what is needed.

Sometimes, we, as a team, tend to wing it. That works great to a certain level. Then you really need to get that extra planning and project management in place. If not, you end up fighting against yourself, in different ways.

As part of our discussion, we were talking about minimal viable plans and how often, they are in one person's head. We talked about getting that MVP plan on to paper or getting it recorded digitally, so that we can preserve it and share it. See this link for more notes on tools that we use.

The last topic of our meeting was John and I talking about small checklists and upcoming projects.

Good conversation between Steve, Sean, Cory, and Brandon. We were going over ideas for sales, eye candy, graphs, charts, and system-wide aggregates. Here are some of our notes:

- We would like to create a MVP - minimal viable plan (product, person, whatever) - focusing on the plan part of it for fracture (future adilas project).

- Brandon pitched the value add-on core model with 5 levels – 1. Internal core (transactions), 2. Industry specific skins and functionality, 3. Custom code, 4. BI – Business Intelligence (aggregates), and 5. Enterprise level (multi corps and multi worlds). Part of our upcomming plan is to work on level 4 - BI or business intelligence (eye candy, graphs, charts, stats, counts, totals, etc.). Make it look good and be quick and easy to get to. Bury the transactional core a couple levels deep, so it is still there, just feeding quick information off of the upper levels (aggregates) vs all of the transactional pieces and records.

- We really want to work on the look and feel of the cart - less is more on the display on the cart

- For graphs and charts, we could use cfchart (code tags) or JSCharts (javascript charts).

- The reports homepage could use some loving

- Surface stuff to help with demos and sales

- Capture the daily, location, and category levels – basically, per day, per location, and per category (on the P&L and BS). As a note, we already have this info... we just need to grab and hold it. Also, we could go backwards on this one... there is already something that exists. We could pull it all in going backwards. There is already a path and a pattern.

- ETL – extract, transform, and load – this is how you get the aggregates = Brandon would be happy to build in this aggregate table or whatever -Steve would like us to talk and work with Eric about the backend triggers and deeper database stuff.

- Lots of talk about database triggers vs smaller microservices - pros, cons, visible, not visible, who has permissions, and best practices.

- We need to remember the API sockets and other ways of getting data both in and out. This needs to be part of our process.

- We tend to get pulled off of a project due to custom code, customer requests, and budgets (time, money, resources).

Sales meeting. Finding pain points and then addressing those pain points. Everybody was touching base and sharing stories. I did a demo on elements to time and how it works with the new pages and new horizontal time view. At one point, only Beaver Mountain Ski School had a horizontal time view page. We revamped some of that custom code and made it more global and available for everyone.

One of the guys had the idea of showing schools and being able to show multiple people at a single time. Dealing with training and education and even demos. Getting more people to see and understand things at once vs the one-on-one game we are playing right now. We spent some time going over MVP's and what is needed. MVP's could be - minimal viable product, plan, person, etc. We all need the continuous win to help us along the way. Little wins and success go a long way.

Prep for a meeting with my dad and his friend Harry. I made a small list on a post-it note for some ideas that I wanted to go over with them. Here are a few of the ideas and notes:

- Go over the elevator pitch for adilas

- Playing the game of add-on as a business model

- Finding pain points and coming up with solutions

- History of where we came from and how things developed over time - it's part of our story

- Demo login and letting them get in and start playing around

- MVP - minimal viable product, plan, person, presentation

- Graphics and world building concepts

- General rules and setup - what's the flow process

- Operations and accounting - horse and the cart - operations has to lead (it's the horse) and accounting follows (the cart)

- Permissions and settings - configuration

- Going over flow and processes

- Systems and relationships

- Simulating reality or simulating the real world - what really happens and why?

- Non-linear system - concept of the data assembly line

- Adilas quick search and standard navigation

- Our current goal - fill in the gaps

- Help files and videos

- Reach out and ask for help - use the whole team

Notes and thoughts about an MVP (minimal viable product or minimal viable plan) for Fracture - future project for adilas:

- Dynamic yet standard CSS - allow for others to change their dynamic CSS (look and feel) - maybe hold some of this in settings and in the database somehow. That way, they could always change it and we could dynamically pull it in on the fly.

- Full API socket access with good documentation. Every feature, every function, super small getters and setters for each section.

- Funding options - real money, time, products, investments, selling percentages or shares, etc. Be open to lots of options. Multi million dollar stone soup type analogy.

- Along with funding the options, I would like to make a page that shows the time value of money based on total gross sales by Adilas, LLC. For example: If someone wanted to buy a percentage or share, they could see the total gross revenue (year over year sales totals) and then see what that value is multiplied by a factor, say 3. The standard is between 1-10 times of the total gross revenue as a general ballpark number. We could show them a price and then let them purchase that percentage or share (somehow contact us). Each day that the page is up, the price would go up daily, based on the total gross revenue. Just for fun, they could roll it backwards (view only), if they wanted to look at things based on past dates. Just playing with numbers. We may have to figure out some other things, just an idea.

- If we did seek some outside funding, we could put up 20-30% of adilas (shares or percentage for co-ownership). We could also open up options for funding as a loan or to lend or loan Adilas, LLC monies. That money could be put on the balance sheet with promissory notes plus interest.

- Just as a rough number, shooting for $10 million in funding for projects and future development. It very well could go beyond that. We could start on projects once we get a portion of that (seed monies). Technically, we could start with anything. Shooting for a smaller $2 million for a seed money level start. If further budgets were needed, they could contain things like marketing, sales material, training, education, documentation, look and feel, interface changes (UI/UX and GUI updates), new features, bulk tools, upgrades, maintenance, servers, team members, admin/management, developers, support staff, internal training, different roles and responsibilities, hourly wages/compensation, salaries, perks, plans, project management, R&D, AI (artificial intelligence), "Any" scheduler, design work, API sockets, consulting, white labeling, settings, permissions, templates, marketing, advertising, promotions, sales, certifications, merchant processing, external marketplace stuff, 3rd party solutions, and other areas. Just putting a number out there for a general goal.

- Another thing that we want to keep doing is creating content - written, verbal, visual, video, etc. Good, clean, data, and content.

- Make an MVP plan for where we are going - we already have lots of research and planning for fracture and other projects - just need to pull it all together. Pitch the pitch and review other notes. See the developer's notebook for other topics as needed. Most of the notes are stored there or are referenced there. Great resource.

Great phone call with Steve. We were talking about direction, options, and how to push the ball to the next level. We talked sales, staff, developers, projects, MVP, plans, adilas jellyfish model, value add-on core model, adilas cafe, adilas marketplace, and adilas university. Tons of different topics. We talked about raising prices, raising funds, selling percentage shares of adilas, and how to help make things smoother and smoother. Who is going to manage what and how to best define certain roles, jobs, and tasks. Great conversation and making progress.

Here are some other random notes:

- Client acquisition costs - Where are they at? Do we fully know or does it change from client to client?

- Increasing development or decreasing development?

- MVP's - minimal viable products and minimal viable plans and minimal viable persons

- Possibly selling up to 51% of adilas percentages and then reinvesting strategically in projects and pieces that we want and/or really need. Plan it all out and then push on what we want.

- As a side note, we went in a number of circles - ok, let's do this... ok, maybe we should do this..., no, let's do this... - next thing you know, you are back where you started. We did this over and over again. The funny thing is, we didn't come up with the same exact plans every time. That means that there is more than one option out there.

- Trying to work the long plan and long play

One huge advantage of our system is the visibility and transparency of who does what inside the system. If we don't have it, we could easily add it. We currently have tons of histories, log notes, historical data, and data broken into tons of small transactions, all being monitored and recorded in the background. That is awesome.

The sales guys are gearing up to help sell gift cards. Sean and Michael have been pitching some of our existing clients to see if they could help them get started, for some practice runs (doing gift cards and gift card setup).

As part of the sales meeting, Steve asked me if I had any sales ideas. We started getting into a small pitch of where I think things need to go. Basically, a pitch of our pitch (parts of the adilas master plan). Nothing is in stone, but I had been thinking about some ideas and options over the weekend. I pitched the idea of maybe selling some percentages of adilas in order to raise some money. We are shooting for 2 million and basing a budget off of that. As we were talking, Steve was liking what he was hearing, but he also had some hard or tough questions. I wrote a number of these questions down in a Word Doc that I have been working on, but some of them dealt with things like client acquisition costs, life expectancy for clients, what do our clients really like and need (MVP stuff), and how can we roll things out in packages or make the process smoother? How do we get paid back? What are the timelines? What is the ROI (return on investment)? And other great questions. Good discussion.

Eventually, Steve had to bail out and jump on another call/meeting. He wanted to stay but had to go. He told us to keep planning things out. Sean, Michael, and I kept going, talking and laying out the basic pieces of the plan and/or pitch. It's not ready yet, but we want to build and make our own pitch deck (files, assets, and a presentation) for potential investors and co-owners.

As we were talking and drawing things out, Sean said that he heard this from one of our clients - "You (meaning adilas) are sitting on a gold mine." - Renee Grossman - "You just need to finish it!" - Meaning we have a great thing going and being developed. It just needs to be taken to the next level and fully get the i's dotted and the t's crossed. This comment of "You've just got to finish it" inspired some more discussion on helping people catch and believe the vision of what we have and where we are going.

I was giving the analogy of the Death Star from Star Wars and how it was mostly a work in progress but it finished enough to give you the vision of what it could be. I realize that not everybody likes Star Wars, but I liked the analogy. We went through a number of drawings, light sketches and talking about options. I had a fun time, and the guys were chiming in and having fun as well. Basically, I was trying to pitch them on the adilas master plan and recruit their help in building it out further.

Just for fun... I added a small Star Wars graphic that I modified on 3/13/23 to this element of time, just for fun. See attached.

Bryan and I met up again after lunch. Going over progress on his date range date-picker page. He is trying to build out an MVP product for booking a cabin rental. He is mixing it with some of the existing stuff that we did for the bike shuttle and the ski resort for reoccurring and unique events. I see where he is going. We are just trying to make sure we build on what we have but don't get too locked in. The events are a one-to-many where more than one person is participating on an existing event that is already in the calendar. The cabin reservations have to make their own reservation and make a brand new entry or one-to-one relationship with the calendar (new element of time). Anyways, making progress.

We went over the progress, talked about the next steps, cause and effects, and how to get all of the pieces collected together to really make it happen. Hopefully, I wasn't bursting his bubble. They (the scheduling subjects) are close and somewhat related but different animals (a preset trip or event vs claiming a new event on a blank calendar). Trying to drive that point home. Good meeting and making progress.

Talking with Sean about making a tighter game plan for credit card payments and which merchant account types we will allow and support. Currently, we are super open which is nice, but it also introduces too many variables. We have done integrations with a number of different companies and vendors, but not all. It gets really tricky when new hardware is introduced and chip or EMV requirements are needed. Anyways, we'll work on refining our options and how we approach custom solutions.

Eric joined the meeting and had a few questions. He let me know that there was a problem with the Herbo server (most likely a test branch of code). We also chatted briefly about some other MVP special account options that we would like to get to. We talked about in-store credit, round two on gift cards, coupons, and promotion codes. We also mentioned that we may need to do a full review of what we call our standard merchant processing setup and credit card payment options.

Emails, reviewing some videos on a time formatting bug/complaint on employee timecards. We used to leave it very open and allowed users to enter times as they see fit (for example: 5 pm, 5:30 pm, or 5:30:00 pm). The new time pickers require a certain format and some of our clients have been complaining about the requirements. We had time-pickers for hours and minutes, as well as one that required hours, minutes, and seconds. Basically, they want it back open where they can just quickly slam in a time vs having to comply with specific formats.

Sean, Shari O., Michael, John, and I were on the morning meeting. We all checked in and said what we were working on. After that, we all either left or went on mute and worked in the background. Shari O. had to take a tech support call and Sean was waiting to chat with her once she was finished. John had some flex grid tie-in questions. I was doing some research on MVP's and past data that we had recorded for what we wanted in some of our MVP (minimal viable product) stuff.

Here is a short MVP list that I'm thinking about - for the record, we already have some of this, we just need to refine it and make it watertight:

- Special accounts and in-store credit - We already have loyalty points, and round 1 for gift cards. Eventually, we would like to do in-store credit, vendor credits, punch cards, and other ones. The next biggest need is for the in-store credit stuff (in my opinion).

- Round 2 on gift cards - We've been gathering ideas and wants and needs

- Coupons and promotion codes - clear out and through ecommerce and internal shopping carts

- Take Calvin's adilas label builder to the next level - we've already done some planning and prep work there

- Standardize the merchant processing options - We have like 9 different integrations. Here's my next goal, pick one, make sure it flows from start to finish and is super simple. I want to do normal sales, pre-auths, captures, tips, refunds, voids, and reoccurring payments, etc. We have to be able to do manual key (like ecommerce mode), swipe, chip/EMV, and tap to pay hardware integrations. I want to do and offer all of the merchant processing functions. I was thinking that we could do a big push and try to get all hooked up with Datacap and then let them handle all of the different hardware pieces and different merchant gateways. That's my thoughts right now.

- Revamp the internal shopping cart, my cart favorite buttons, and general look and feel. I would love to head towards the fracture project - we have a bunch of R&D on where we want to go with that.

There are tons of other things on my list, but that is my quick MVP list for right now.

Sean was the only one who checked in this morning. We briefly went over a list of things that we want to get done as an MVP level product. These things came from a list that I made yesterday. We went over some of those ideas and concepts. It's like we are close but still not able to break over the crest of the hill.

Spent the rest of the time doing emails and recording notes. Added in a new tooltip option on elements of time on the time homepage where the entries span between timeslots. Also upped the auto page refresh value from 2 minutes to 30 minutes for the time homepage.

Met with Aspen to look over her world building presentation. We ended up getting into this little Q and A session and small virtual interview. It was kind of fun. Aspen took a bunch of notes on a Google doc. I won't share all of the info that we covered but I may pull out a few key pieces.

- Settings and speaking the client's language is a huge part of it - where it starts or where they (the client) gets some buy-in. Once you speak their language, they feel more comfortable.

- System configuration - I like this, I don't like that, can I hide this, can I make this show up here or there, etc.

- Using world building concepts in trainings and demos. Once the clients figure it out and catch the vision, they use world building terminology in describing what they are wanting or what they are hoping to achieve. Basically, if you can get the client to start thinking about the bigger picture, it really gets the juices flowing and the ideas rolling in. Virtually get the wheels spinning.

- Keep building what we know and then deal with other ideas and requests as they come. Custom code vs settings and toggle on/off features. A growing blossoming idea farm.

- We have outgrown a number of different models. For example: We started out with 5 different roles for permissions. Things like sales, mangers, accounting, admin, and backend/web. Now we have over 170 individual permissions that may be applied in any configuration vs the five simple roles that we started with. Also, our first round of corp-wide settings was to build out six corp-wide settings. We had to flip the model when we got up to the 400 ish level. We ran out of room. We ended up building vertically (variable/value pairs) and using custom setting objects (JSON objects and linking similar settings). Tons of ways that things have exploded, changed, and evolved over time. It's been a process. The other big challenge is adding in or taking away new stuff without affecting those who are already in there working (existing clients). You almost have to make the system a chameleon that can change its shape and color on the fly.

- Aspen and I talked about the potential of doing a white label approach. Kind of like the Intel chip inside of a computer. It could be branded however, but the chip is what the whole thing rides on. For example: You could have an HP, Dell, or some other brand of laptop but all of them use the Intel chip as the underlying microchip processor. We would like to do something similar. Whatever brand, powered by adilas.biz on the inside. We don't have to be the main company like HP or Dell or whatever. We could easily just help power those brands using our tech and underlying engine.

- Along the lines of a white label - It would take a potential competitor years and years and millions and millions of dollars to do what we can do right now. If they saw the value of a white label option, they would be smart to go in that direction (saving time and money). Just reskin it and start selling it vs building it from the ground up. There is already a market for what we do (based on our current clients and 20 years in the business and millions and millions in revenue - even though we aren't done yet).

- Aspen asked me about a couple of features that we are using right now and how they relate to world building. I mentioned elements of time and the flex grid tie-ins. Both are hugely customizable and fill gaps and needs, out the door. We talked about selling in bulk but tracking individual items, tracking processes of change (dealing with sub locations, sub phases, or steps of a process). One-to-many relationships, custom fields, preset settings, configuration, and being able to limit what is shown (even though behind the scenes it could be very complex). Tons of samples, examples, prototypes, and working models. We have nuts and bolts companies, bike shuttles, ski schools, and tons of other companies that use these pieces. This is just two pieces of the much bigger puzzle.

- Most of our progress is somewhat limited by outside funding, not ideas or needs. We have huge dreams; it just depends on where the funding for that comes from. This whole thing has been build on a garage type budget. We have ideas and projects that sometimes sit for weeks, months, and years before we can get to them. Our list for an MVP (minimal viable product) keeps revolving and growing. If there is funding, it moves to the top of the list. If not, we chip away at it little by little.

- Lots of analogies between our system (the adilas.biz system) and the body. Often, we start out talking about things like arms, legs, feet, etc. As we get deeper, we get into layers, joints, muscles, system, and clear down to the cellular or molecular levels. People keep wanting to be able to control and/or see the next layer, the next layer, etc. We haven't found the end or bottom yet.

- Aspen was asking what is the difference between world building and fracture? I tried to explain that the fracture project is more of list of lessons learned, ways to speed things up, ways of standardizing things, allowing for customized things, show/hide things, toggle on/off certain settings, full control over flow and display, and controlling things at a smaller detailed level. World building is what we are trying to do and/or accomplish (think bigger picture). We use fracture (aka the next generation of the system or application platform) to get to the bigger world building pieces. We talked about Legos and building blocks of different size, shape, and functionality. Sometimes you need to play in bulk (bigger or preset pieces), medium pieces, and super small pieces.

- We got into talking about the iceberg analogy (or ice berg analogy - different spelling) and how if we could have the whole mountain but only show the iceberg, it would sell better than something seeing the whole big mountain. It makes it look too intimidating (showing the whole mountain). The iceberg looks so much more approachable (be able to configure just what you want to see and use). That's where fracture and some of those ideas come in. You could still have the whole mountain (under the surface) but only have to show what is needed or wanted. Put the rest of the engine under the covers (under water) like the Intel chip inside of a computer. It's all perception and expectations.

- Ideas that don't get exposed (out to the public) can sometimes die in a hole. We talked about if a bigger company was pushing some of the world building concepts or data assembly line concepts, they would sell like hotcakes.

- Towards the end of the meeting, we were getting into costs, growth, and projections - numbers, costs, financials, etc. Fun stuff!

Anyways, a great meeting. Aspen has more notes in her Google doc where she was recording things from the small interview. I enjoyed the chat and the learning session. Sometimes you don't know what you have until you start trying to verbalize it. Good stuff!

Bryan and I going over progress on the online scheduling for rentals. We talked about being able to setup a default template. We went over pros and cons of either a manual path or full automation. I sent him a small list of things that will help get us across the finish line. Our goal right now is just to create an MVP and then circle back around and expand the options, settings, and functionality.

Phone call with Steve to go over hours and commitment for adilas (ship A stuff). I wanted to chat with him and ask permission to have a team meeting to discuss direction, options, and next steps. I've got a bunch of other notes... not sure if they were before the phone call with Steve, during, or after. I'm recording these notes on 6/24/23 from post-it notes that I made on 6/1/23. Anyways, here are some of my notes.

- Look for it - Seek and ye shall find - What are you looking for? Often, you find what you are looking for (good, bad, ill, faults, goodness, blessings, etc.).

- Ask for it - Knock and it shall be opened unto you.

- Bring what you can and throw it in the pot - We're making stone soup.

- Following a dream - The next phase or step of the journey

- Plans for adilas percentages - 20% of my percentages to go to help both teams A and B (normal adilas - ship A and fracture or ship B). 5% for getting the plan prepped and ready. 5% getting the funding. 5% for releasing an MVP (minimal viable product), and then 5% for ROI (return on investment). The ROI part was right from Steve during our conversation. I remember that much. That was brilliant.

- All of us would like to be able to fully turn all modules on/off at any time. That would be huge.

- I will give adilas (ship A) 10 hours a week. The rest of the time I will be working on ship B (fracture stuff).

- My biggest job is helping and dealing with people - the code and projects and products come later.

Group intro meeting for Ship A and Ship B - current adilas (ship A) and where we want to take adilas to create the next level (fracture or adilas lite - aka Ship B). We had 10 people on the call/meeting. I took a bunch of notes, Aspen took some notes, and we recorded it. See attached. After the main meeting, a few of us hung around expressing other ideas and then after everyone else left, Aspen and I had a small chat.

Notes from Aspen and Brandon talking after everyone had left:

- Start emphasizing what we are doing

- Fixing the scary things (rounding off corners and refining things)

- She (Aspen) would like to try to pitch it a bit (build it up and be able to help pitch it)

- Help Steve with a viable product and plan (MVP's) that he can sell. Help him to see that he can sell anything, including things that are poorly planned out. Imagine what he could do if we gave him something to work with (MVP's - minimal viable product, plan, person, etc.).

Paying bills, emails, and sending out instructions on how to log time in the adilas shop. Recording notes.

A few quick notes and ideas...

- On a hike yesterday morning, I was thinking about the adilas cafe. Imagine a person sitting down looking at a menu or a person looking at a digital menu board. What do you want? What do you want to do? Our menus may not be food items, but it could be what would you like to see? Do? etc.

- What if we offered our business functions such as CRM (customer relationship management) or POS (point of sale) options vs customers, invoices, PO's, items, etc. Basically, we have 12 business functions that we offer. We also have 12 business application players that help us get the business functions that we want. Maybe just some different ways to pitch or let our users choose what they want to do or see.

- I'd like to setup some rules for participating in the new build out (ship B). This is part of the bigger community effort. I'd like each person to be able to make their own timecards (already available, just need a small instruction doc to line it out). All actual hours will be held in sub dates and times (subs of the main element of time). I'd like to tie it out to an expense/receipt so that it goes into the accounts payable (A/P's). We could then clean out those payables weekly, monthly, etc. as needed. If something sits in the payables for over six months, we ask the person if they want to roll that over to the balance sheet as a form of investment. If yes, it would then start accruing interest and be held similar to a loan or investment. We could pay simple interest of 5% annually (just guessing at that number right now).

- If that model works well for our internal team, when we are ready, and if we want to, we could do something similar to potential approved outside parties. This needs more thought, but I wanted to put it out there. This would be an even deeper community effort of sorts. We would still setup rules, control things, but I have no problem with others who want to help and/or help build it out. Along those same lines, we would make sure that the rules and who they reported to (and any other rules or specs) would be assigned and set forth.

- Flipping over to ship A (existing adilas platform or application). What about an MVP for ship A? Getting that fully done could pay some major dividends. It could also help smooth things out and create harmony and unity. I would really like that. Here is a quick link to a possible MVP plan for the current adilas system.

- Only run as fast as you are able.

- I was thinking about the SBA loan. I would love to get it paid off or at least help pay it down. It's not huge, but it would help with the stress load.

Meeting with Aspen to go over parts of the plan. She ended up doing some research on fracture and I was recording notes and such.

Notes from Aspen - see below

Adilas Lite Weekly Objectives

6/12/2023–6/17/2023

1. Smooth over the relationship with Ship A

1.1. Propose prototype testing for Ship B components on Ship A

1.2. Win-win for all parties–helpful features that Ship A won't have to pay for directly, Ship B gets the assurance that their components work, Team harmony improves

2. Get Ship B Organized

2.1. Variety of Meetings, prepare documents for a more technical meeting with Wayne on the 14th

2.2. Project Management Document Summary, start on strategies

3.Complete Personal Hours, Etc.

4. Classification of Projects Under MVP and Non-MVP Categories

4.1. Helps focus efforts

4.2. Both need to be clear

4.3. MVP needs to be built with potential Non-MVP build-ins in mind

Meeting with both Alan and Aspen. I took some notes and Aspen took some notes. After the meeting, I did some more note recording and note digitizing for 6/15/23 and for 6/16/23.

Alan was on with us for the first hour. Here are some of my notes. See attached for all of them.

- Let's build out the MVP for the plan - general fracture or adilas lite planning session - what documents does that mean and/or require?

- Two of the first main things we want to do is define the jelly fish model (business structure) and the value add-on core model. Those two are some known needs of where we are heading.

- We spent quite a bit of time talking about how to break functionality and features up. We want to keep those separate as far as options.

- I showed Alan the presentation gallery and the outline of the business functions. There is quite a bit of work that has already been done there. Great resources.

- Small packages and/or starting points - We could call it whatever - recipes, packages, templates, industry specific skins, presets, etc.

- Alan wanted us to think about tiers and scaling - both vertical and horizontal. I was thinking, what about the Z scale or the depth/layering axis. Just for fun 3D scaling and 3D world building. It might be fun to explore this.

- We talked a little bit about pricing and tier levels. We would like to set breakpoints, ranges, and fees for going over.

- We asked Alan about his vision for adilas lite and fracture - He is really excited about creating a solution that is light weight and very efficient. In his words, he said, How can I get the most power with the least amount of drag? We went on to talk about hiding things that they don't need and getting them to the meat of the operation as quickly as possible. We will do future planning sessions where we look at each section and slim it down to the minimum or minimal requirements.

- This is a side note, but as I have been thinking about minimal pieces, I keep coming back to a concept that we were looking into called standalone declarations (full entries without any other connections and/or supporting documentation). They exist by themselves but they also may be mapped and pointed to the right place. We could sum them up, count them, map them, and keep it super simple. Originally it was going to be something that could be made for financial documents (P&L and the balance sheet)  but technically we could use them in any way. Simple standalone pieces.

- Spend the time and do some market research on what business verticals we could hit and take care of.

- Lots of talk about automation and even automating the setup of new systems. Let people try things out as a free or limited version. We would setup thresholds, limits, ranges, or whatever. We want people to try it out and like it.

- We talked about ice bergs and mountains (perception of how big it is). We also switched and talked about the depth of the water... pretend levels of swimming - Imagine that you are at the beach - you could get your feet wet, do some wading, swimming, snorkeling, or scuba diving. All at the same place, just how deep and serious are you or what are you looking for?

- Once we have a list of things that need to be done and/or worked on, we get to prioritize that list. What do we want to build out and when?

- Alan had the idea of putting our outline information into a database. That way we could just query things (just in time) as needed. That way we could make the lists super small and then allow for it to be expanded at will. Great idea. Simple displays with drill-downs. Almost the presentation gallery for sales, marketing, pricing, features, and education.

- We also want to highlight future plans and what is up and coming. We change things all the time. Make that part of the plan and the part of the presentation. Put it in a database and let our users pull back what information they want and/or need. Self-building templates, feature lists, tiers, and other levels.

Lunch meeting with Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprises. Jonathan is a business consultant here locally in the Cache Valley, Utah area. Great little meeting and he was asking some great questions and feelers to check out parts and pieces of my plan for ship B, fracture, or adilas lite. We talked about pieces of the business plan and how to plan things out and proceed.

- One of the main topics was dealing with talent and getting excellent talent to help run the business.

- Went over our rough plan and talked through steps of the plan. See elements of time # 10179 for more details.

1. Company Structure - Adilas Jelly Fish Model
2. Product Development - Adilas Value Add-On Core Model
3. Education & Training - Internal and External - Adilas University
4. Community & Outside 3rd Party Solutions - Adilas Marketplace
5. Social & Efficiency Options - Adilas Cafe & Community
6. Deeper Product Development - Adilas Lite - Fracture Project
7. Budgets, Finances, Marketing, & Sales - Other Business Plans

- Lots of talk about division, departments, and managing the entity and the projects. Defining those roles and what is needed. Once that is finished, we will put or assign/invite the who (people and talent) to the what.

- We talked a lot about inviting and enticing the talent. Not all of the talent will be hourly or employee level people. Some of the talent or high-end knowledge workers contribute in different ways. That was a small paradigm shift for me, thinking wise. More of projects and contributions vs hours and physical output.

- What needs to be done for the product development pieces - plans, marketing, sales, and roll outs.

- Talking about building out a pitch deck to help pitch the project and product (the whole package).

- 5 main personality types - There are five major roles that need to be fulfilled in a company. Instead of just roles, ideally, you actually have people in place who can carry each of these roles and own it. Otherwise, you just have a smaller number wearing multiple hats. The five people are: An organizer, a doer, a creative type, a consultant, and a salesman. The goal is to align talents with tasks. I grabbed this bullet point from entry # 5295 - another meeting with Jonathan Johnson (early on, back in 2019).

- Talking about the root words in authority (author or create), accountability (count or manage), and responsibility (respond or react). Who does what and how that all plays into the mix.

- See attached for a napkin with some notes on it - Here is what Jonathan wanted me to do - 4 steps he wants me to work on... 1. Define the division and structure of the company, 2. Invite the talent to fill the roles defined, 3. Product development MVP, and 4. Build the pitch deck. All of these need to be at least good enough. Shooting for an MVP level on all of them.

Zoom session with Cory and Steve. Showing them the progress on the mini scan cart. We did some demoing, playing, and even some drawing of where things are headed. Good meeting. They want me to get it pushed up as a beta cart, even if it is not fully finished. They basically want to play with it and even start showing it before it is fully finished. I'm going to make a few more tweaks and then push up an MVP type beta product. Good stuff.

Good work session with Shannon. We spent a bunch of time working on the SWOT analysis and recording notes in the opportunities section. There really are so many great opportunities. We also spent some time going over MVP (minimal viable product, plan, person, etc.) as well as MVT (minimal viable team). Lots of prep work on the plan and how everything needs to come together. We often want to just start on the new code because it is shinny... however, we have to get in some of the other key pieces and projects if we really want it to go somewhere. See attached for where we are working.

Meeting with both Steve and Alan. Originally we were going to be discussing some ideas on company structure and where things are headed. We got a little bit sidetracked and ended up covering a number of other topics. These are some of the notes.

- We spent some time doing a general catch-up. It's been awhile since we have met as a group.

- Steve was talking about some of his friends that are teachers and have been forced to do online school (prison camp for the teachers). They, the teachers are being watched super closely. They, the teachers, almost feel like it's a prison camp type atmosphere (too tight).

- Advances in software

- Age of our kids, they are growing up

- Business, everyday wondering what you will do today and tomorrow

- Kelly has been pushing hard on us

- Master/slave relationship

- The squeeze - by clients, internal owners/users, and in general. We are feeling it!

- Analogy of a bug vs windshield - which one are we?

- How do we find our way forward? Plan and vision

- Super loose structure - our current plan is very loose

- Wild west thing - our current mode of operation - minimal rules, laws, expectations, or structure

- Getting spread thin

- Alan was talking about teams for projects but no one takes ownership

- Still dealing with teams, they didn't want to be left out but didn't want to really participate

- So much to do but the turnaround is so slow (how quick we can get the projects across the finish line)

- Frustrating/mental health

- Building and not finishing things

- MVP (minimal viable product) - Leaving stuff that is still flapping in the wind

- Whirlwind (bouncing all over)

- Discussions on funding and a centralized office

- Drift & culture

- Deadlines and nobody caring about it

- Why don't you care?

- Managers of Steve's stores - back in the Morning Start Automotive, Inc. days - They really kept things rocking and rolling

- Not taking any crap and rolling some heads if needed

- In the replacement business (people) - When you deal with employees, you tend to be in the replacement business (from past expierence)

- Reviewing peoples work and making sure that people are on task

- How big can you get before it implodes on itself? Experimenting...

- Managers and assistant managers

- Employees and workman's comp

- Payments, lawsuits, HR stuff, discrimination - more employee/employer stuff

- Filling in the gaps

- Start with a manager

- Manual of what your duties are - put it in writing

- Defining roles

- Part-time or variable working schedules

- Part-timer's may end up costing you money

- Scheduling and who is working when

- Missing the employee/manager piece

- Independent contractors and putting requirements on them

- We are all part owners but what does that mean?

- Alan had some questions like - Co-owners and having to pay to be paid? How does that work. Basically, we had to pay money to become a co-owner and then we get paid by the company for doing work. Just trying to figure things out.

- How does joint ownership work?

- Defining responsibilities

- Who wants that management position?

- We (humans) know right from wrong

- Too much oversight or pampering

- Learning curve

- Moving on

- You could always get someone better - or not - That's a variable

- We can't hire people that need help all the time

- Avoiding things

- We have all been trying really hard

- Good guy/bad guy and letting people go

- Fitting virtues to the jobs that they can do

- Efficiency

- 1 person can manage 5 or less people

- Are our people remote or local

- Going over some possible structure options

- Getting the managers setup

- Being able to crisscross over departments (some flexibility)

- Each department does their own R&D

- Able to switch things up (bring new life)

- We have so much stuff that our clients could use but we don't do the client retention stuff (letting them know about stuff like gift cards, loyalty points, new carts, etc.)

- Each department could use a programmer

- On purpose, rotate people around

- Bare bones - What do we need, right this minute?

Planning a restaurant MVP with Bryan. I went over to Bryan's house as he already had some whiteboard drawings and other notes that we worked on last time. We had a good review, brainstorming, and planning session. We are seeing three main projects for our current needs. They are: 1. Tweak out the mini scan cart interface and settings. 2. Build out the line item grouping stuff for carts, quotes, and invoices. And 3. Build out the restaurant specific pieces as a separate project and use the tweaked out cart and the line item groupings to make it all happen. Sort of a 1, 2, 3 - different but related projects.

Maybe use my cart favorite buttons (or something like that) to group customers for a restaurant type interface (tables and areas). We also talked about building out a 3-level deep grouping and sorting option for carts, quotes, and invoices. Along with that, we may make a new table to hold the grouping data. Not everybody needs it.