There were 5 people on the call when I got in. Each of them asked some questions and then eventually bailed out to work on their own projects. Here are some things that I pulled out of there discussions.

- What is the real purpose there? Thinking on a per page level. If that is known, that can really set the tone for the project - aka a focus. Basically, being more clear on the objectives and then sticking to it. That really helps. Idea was presented by both Russell and Danny.

- Some marketing ideas from Danny about free software and then charge for other pieces and/or services. He was talking about a product out there for music lovers and how the sound mixing software was free but they had to pay for specific hardware. Lots of options.

- Eric was talking about being able to build business processes. I would love to take that to the next level. Think how cool it would be if we could setup an area where people could build a business process, name it, setup defaults, determine layouts, requirements, and flow. Then, once those pieces are set and in place (saved), we then could show and use those real settings. Imagine being able to setup your own data assembly line and then the system helps you keep and maintain those business processes. If you need to alter something, you could go back and just tweak some of the setup pieces. That would be so cool.

- Talking about auto printing from the web and using a queue of sorts and then doing the print jobs based off of a service that monitors that queue.

- Talking about custom code jobs. How are jobs coming in and being completed? We have lots of independents and what is the plan for the adilas shop (dev shop) and the projects being passed through? Along those lines, we need to take care of the house. The house being adilas. Often, some of the independents do the work, they get paid, they move on, but they suck tons of resources from adilas without paying for any of those usages. Time, talent, and money are all resources... we need to make sure we are managing and taking care of those pieces.

- Eric was talking about rough estimates and how he likes to bid a project. If needed, he sets up an estimate and then says he bills by the hour regardless. If things get deeper, he then lets the client know that it will be different then the original estimate. It flips it back on the clients and they get to say yea or nay. It's a way to somewhat protect yourself.

Steve and I worked through some questions that he had on some code. After that, we started talking about marketing ideas and small pieces of the sales plan (up and coming plans).

Proposal for all that want to sell adilas

- Old whole message - how do we sell the model that we have right now?
- So many people say - we can't sell it, it needs to be fixed
- What are we focusing on...

- Some salespersons need the wagon loaded for them - almost after the fact sales vs up front sales

- Side note, we are gaining control on the custom code stuff. We want to do the same thing for sales.

- If people want to play, game on. If not, we'll get the next one.

- It is what is... (meaning the system). We can build it out to your specs but that is by quote - pitch some of the other services.

- What do we tell to the salespeople that is available (our current offering)? Sell what we have. It has value.

- A good problem to have is - how many new clients we need to setup.

- McCorvey's is one of our poster child type accounts
- A stud who takes care of the whole thing
- Mel and Tish were the salespersons, but they didn't do any of the real setup

- Salespersons don't need to know too much... enough to play the game

- No contract - minimal risk

- $1,000 simple start-up - that could cover, setup, some light training, 1st month, and some custom code and/or data import

- Selling is telling - get the word out. Not everybody likes strawberry ice cream, but some people do.

- We have people wanting to help with setup, but they don't like to do cold sales.
- We keep trying to force these setup and consulting people to be salesperson but they aren't that person.

- We would like to get a full sales force... we could sell the opportunity to sell adilas to other salespersons... It is all about potential and realizing that potential.

- Sell the vision

- Pricing - we need a basic model with enough to cover the salesperson and the house

- What is produced on a sale... that we could share with those who are helping the process
- Bird dog fees - one time deal
- Monthly reoccurring - able to share that with the salesperson
- Commissions based on participation
- just talking about this... hourly vs commissions - hero to zero or zero to hero - leaning towards strictly commission based

- On sales and a sales force - full commission based doesn't cost us anything

- In real estate, they have to pay a broker fee to play the game (where are you hanging your hat) - basically, charging for the opportunity (taking care of the house) - We, adilas, have time and energy in this as well. - We almost want the persons to either fly and thrive or weed themselves out and move on.

- Pitch the opportunity to make reoccurring revenue - Sell it once and then reap and reap (harvest that effort).

- Bonuses, games, and other stuff

- We've got to have salespeople on our team but we can't force non salespersons to be that salesperson.
 
- There is an old sales opportunity flyer... Maybe look at that and revamp it and/or pull some pieces from there

Great little work session meeting. We started out and Shannon and I went over some of the new updates and happenings. It is amazing how quick things change in our world. After the update and chatting about new changes, we spent the rest of the time brainstorming on business intelligence (BI) and how that plays in. See attached for our brainstorming (you may have scroll way down the page).

- Shannon and I were talking and drawing small models of the power packed core (transactional data core - main part of the adilas.biz system) and then how we could add value add-on's going around it. Think of a small target with a couple different rings. The inter ring is the adilas core or the transactional data core. Then the rings around that would be the other add-on value rings.

- Here are some possible value add-on rings that could play into our model... once again, just brainstorming...
1. The adilas core and transactional data core
2. Industry specific skins, white label, or add-on's
3. Custom code, skins, API sockets, or 3rd party integrations
4. Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard and stats, graphs, and special reports
5. Enterprise level - unlimited options to interconnect multiple corporations - consolidated system

- See a need, fill a need - movie "Robots"

- Our landscape keeps unfolding right before us and even right underneath us - keep adapting

- Harvesting tons of prior work and efforts (some of our new brainstorming efforts - good stuff)

- Value add-on like a car, you need the basics (say the core) and then you may do other value add on's beyond that.

- Custom code and other interfaces are a part of the value added layers (core model with target like rings around the core)

- Industry specific layering, may be multiple levels deep, if needed.

Project stuff between Cory, Steve, and Brandon. New quotes, updates on current projects, and assigning developers to new and upcoming projects. As a note, Cory is doing awesome. She is filling the wagon, doing follow-up, communication stuff, news and updates, and also saying "no" when needed. Even to Steve and I. We need that.

Eric joined our meeting and had a couple of deeper server based questions. We talked about request timeouts, server side loops, API socket calls and checking status codes, multiple treads and threading, dishing off things to a task queue or sub queue of sorts, 3rd party error logs, and syncing data between servers. Pretty deep stuff.

After Eric left, Steve and I chatted briefly about some more marketing ideas. I pitched the core model with value added rings. Super light but a good start. Without all of the details, here are the quick levels:

1. Core
2. Industry Specific
3. Custom
4. BI - Business Intelligence Dashboars
5. Enterprise level(s)

We also briefly talked about how the corp size, number of transactions (invoices, users, and locations), data storage and usage (database size, photos, scans, uploaded files, and media/content), and even API socket transactions (3rd party stuff or other API socket usages) may all need to be part of the pricing and billing. We are thinking of setting up levels and then using that to help us to provide pricing options. Making progress.

Finished up a couple of small projects that have been hanging around. I got some new JavaScript code from Jon Hudson for a slight change on the build sales deposit page. The new code checks to see if the existing pieces are in place before just using them. This helps if any of the payments have been sub filtered before being added into the deposit.

Kelly sent me an email about a date issue on ecommerce quotes and invoices. I went in and fixed the dates to look-up and use the timezone offset. That helps stamp the history date/times according to the user that is setup to do the outside web traffic or ecommerce actions. Great catch by Kelly.

All new files have been uploaded to all servers.

Finished up by recoding some notes from the day. See earlier entries.