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. 

Emails and getting started. Recording notes and reviewing things from a business consulting meeting from yesterday.

Jonathan from Epic Enterprises came over to my house to meet with us. We started out listening to Steve and Eric over the GoToMeeting session. After a little bit, I started to explain some things to Jonathan. We went on mute but had the meeting with Steve and Eric going on in the background. Every once in awhile we would catch something and it would send us off on a tangent and/or direction change. We were waiting for Steve to join us.

Once Steve joined us, we had a good multi-hour meeting with Jonathan, Steve, and myself. Here are some of my notes.

- We talked about analogies between showing a whole mountain vs just an ice berg (how much do you show and/or reveal - it deals with perceptions of how much there is and how much needs to be learned).

-  We talked briefly about the need for the adilas café and a good starting place for our users to come in and be a part of the community. Some of the people come to work, play, learn, buy or sell their own product and services, and participate in the adilas community. We went over some concepts, graphics, and needs in that area.

- I pitched to Jonathan that we have at least 3 businesses that need to be funded, staffed, and managed. We have the main adilas system, the adilas marketplace (others who are buying and selling their services and products to help support the system), and adilas university (education and training).

- We talked about some progress from one server and being able to share logins (one login allowed access to multiple corporations, based off of permissions and assignments). We also talked about how that model still exists but gets tougher as we keep adding other independent servers. Currently, we can share logins on a per server basis. We can't do a single login and allow that user to access multiple servers. The logins are specific to each server right now. As a side note, not everybody needs to be bridged between servers, but certain users work in tons of different systems and on multiple different servers.

- Jonathan recommended a movie called "The Pentagon Wars" - dealing with scope creep. Basically a project that should have been fairly simple turns into 17 years of development and $14 billion to create it. A comical stab at the mismanagement of government spending and scope creep.

- We as humans, are designed to push too far. We tend to go to extremes.

- Making the system more human like... anthropomorphism

- People tend to be either: stable/reliable (45%), warrior/artisans (27%), idealist/humanist (14%), analytical (10%), other (4%) - all rough figures or ish

- Business is a projection of/from psychology.

- Going from order to chaos, order to chaos, and so forth - cycle that has been repeated over and over again in all ages.

- Suggestion - On the invoice homepage and the graphs... maybe add a projection line on the invoice homepage graphs. Show a forecast and/or projection. This could also be done with an average based on number of days. This came up due to the fact that the existing graphs take month over month data and create a graph. Well, if you have just started a new month... you only have a small number of days worth of data vs a whole month worth of data. Sometimes it makes the graph look like it is trending down sharply when in reality, things are actually doing pretty good. Visual helper.

- Talking with Steve and Jonathan - light intro and talking about their respective backgrounds and interests.

- Jonathan wants to help us improve our company.

- Consultants tend to do one of the following actions:  diagnose, analyze, and/or provide feedback. - Sometimes in that order or 3 step process.

- SaaS (software as a service) is a crazy business model.

- Question (dealing with approach) - How do you sneak up on the elephant? Talks about approaches and why's.

- A consultant informs and convinces. A consultant sees from the outside.

- A few things that Jonathan sees right now, without getting super deep: overdiversification, scope creep, scope seep, lack of structure, possible lack of leadership.

- We don't really like to babysit.

- We are trying to work on our to do list or our tick list.

- People have different skills - putting the people in the right place.

- From Steve, sometimes the environment changes how we act and interact with it - it is not just personalities and traits.

- We haven't spent much on selling and marketing.

- We would like to focus on the adilas café approach.

- From Jonathan, book recommendations - "Good To Great", "Rocket Fuel", and "The Go-Giver"

- Building a company is different than running a company.

- By helping our people better focus, that could help us be more productive.

- Steve would like to involve as many good people as possible - He is ok with not knowing everything.

- Steve wants to keep an independent model and/or have multiple cofounders.

- At some point, you will hit the borders of certain things unless you comply with certain principles.

- So many moving pieces - that makes it tough to both see and figure out the roll out and the plan.

- We may need a plan for who will run the business - we like to create it (dreamers and doers).

- Where does one start? Jonathan wants to start with the minds of the owners.

- We just build things... we don't even stop to try to sell them. We love the building process.

- Steve seems to be the creative type and the organizer type.

- Mixing and blending the persons and personalities - we need all of the players.

- We are trying to create a community.

- Analogy of the bee hive... well, if we have a hive, we may need a queen bee, a tree, and some flowers - we need all of the pieces.

- Steve loves to recruit talent and skills.

- Business philosophy and playing the game.

- Jonathan sees, as far as what we offer: stacked valuable services upon other valuable services.

/////////////////// challenges for Steve and I

1. Use more of Jonathan's time
2. Take a personality test from 16 personalities - Try it in different moods, happy, sad, tired, stressed, etc.
3. Trying to align to business principles
4. Steve and I, discuss some of our known disfunctions - see other notes - search for the key word rejecting

Jonathan came over to my house to meet. Steve joined us over a GoToMeeting session. So did Alan as he was traveling up to the Logan area. Towards the end of the meeting, Alan actually came over and met with Jonathan in person. Here are some of my notes. Also, see the attached text file for additional notes.

- One of the assignments from last meeting was to take a personality test. Basically a way to find out potential strengths and weaknesses.

- Being put in a box - we don't want that. People are not one dimensional (one little box), we do tend to trend towards certain ways over time.

- How can we help our people succeed best - sometimes the personality test helps us understand pros and cons of the different personalities - we on purpose want to bring all the talents to the table.

- We got pretty deep in philosophy and psychology topics. Both Alan and Steve love to talk about some of the things that they have found out and how to apply them. Jonathan was encouraging them to share and help surface different principles.

- Most of the conversation today was dealing with employee/employer (normal business structure) type topics. We talked a lot about motivation, perks, and reasons why we do certain things.

- We made a small list of pros and cons dealing with employees and independents. There really are both sides, pros and cons to both model types.

- If there is a lack of structure, then sometimes people don't know where they fit in. Often people look for ways to move up the ladder or chain. If they can't see a defined structure, they somewhat get lost.

- Some of our people don't want structure. That is good and bad as well.

- Talks about outsourcing and getting people into the right spot.

- Jonathan wants to see if our search for dependables is able to stand the long term test of time.

- Steve wants people to do what they want to do and where their virtues lie. Sometimes that means that certain things fall through the cracks because nobody wants to pick them up (projects and tasks).

- We talked about heroes and heroism... do it all yourself. Dangerous model if you want to really grow.

- Incentives - how do we make or help people to care about the bigger picture vs just their tiny piece. That can get tough. Lack of accountability.

- Once we get someone in the right place, they can really fly.

- Consensus management doesn't work - a leader is someone who plants and cultivates the seeds.

- Random topic, how can we let or use technology be the leader... not sure on this. Just playing with ideas.

See attached for more notes and details.

Jonathan from Epic Enterprises came over and we had a 3 hour meeting between Steve, Jonathan, and Brandon. Lots of talks and discussions about pros and cons of employee model vs independent model. See attached for some of the notes.

- Lots of talk about more freedom and more liberty

- Competency and leadership hierarchy - knowledge workers

- Looking over the long term, how will things line up and match up over time

- Leadership structure and sub structures

- Motivation and pay structures

Jonathan came over and we did a multi-hour consulting visit. Steve was on the whole time. Alan popped in and out, as he was travelling and going in and out of connectivity. Brandon took a bunch of notes and has them on his local file. The file name is called business_consulting_with_epic_enterprises.docx. Here is a small overview:

- Lots of talk about who is doing what

- We talked about friction, confusion, and under performance and how those things become the norm without a governing entity of sorts

- Overcorrecting and how that can hurt the bigger picture

- Lots of talk about a concept called "Heroism" and how it relates to actions and future growth. Not that it is all bad, but it does have its place and time.

- Strategic delegation - huge key

- Lots of talk on scope creep and helping to curve and/or control that where possible.

- Lots of talk about sales and what that means

- Cascading some of our vision and trajectory out a year or two... where does that put us? Are we scalable in the right spots? etc.

- History, were have we been and how did that lead us to where we are? Fun discussions.

- Recruiting the talent and people that we need to make it happen.

- We may need to shed some weight and virtually lop off some branches of the tree. It will help us focus more.

- Core vs custom - code and development

- Business verticals (full on industry specific stuff) vs functions and features (more generic or general)

- For some of our developers, we may need to cut off some of their access to help it flow through certain paths and processes. This is for us internally.

Met with Shannon and went over some brainstorming and some notes from meeting with the business consultant. Mostly just talking about ideas, concepts, and how we are learning from these different scenarios. See this link for more info.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=5524 - business consulting notes

Meeting with Steve and Jonathan from Epic Enterprises (business consulting). We changed gears today and dealt with some very practical things, ideas, and decisions. We went over financials, numbers, and talked about sales.

One of the exercises that Jonathan had us do was called "napkin numbers" - this is where you scribble down some basic numbers (pretend it is on a napkin or something small and throwaway) and then you try to quickly fix or right the problems. Another thing that he had us do was pretend that we had just purchased the company, as if we were the new owners. What would be the next couple of steps that we would want to do or have happen? Fun little exercises.

We talked about times and seasons and being able to control ratios of spending, funding, R & D (research and development), and building for the future. We also talked about priorities and laying out expectations and requirements.

Brandon does have a small napkin budget that they worked on. It won't be uploaded for privacy stuff, but file name has the name napkin in it on his local hard drive. Good meeting and we are making progress. Our next meeting is going to be starting into sales and making a sales plan.

Meeting with Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprises. All of met online, due to the corona virus stuff. Steve, Brandon, and Jonathan were on the meeting the whole time. Shari O. was on for a bit but had too much to do. We took a bunch of notes and sent her a copy. The notes are Brandon's computer in a Word document. See attached for a local (on his computer) reference. Good meeting.

Lots of talks between Brandon and Steve about the business consulting meeting that they had yesterday. Wayne was also on the call showing us reports and a few small questions about the new servers that we are setting up. Some of the topics in the meeting this morning were: sales ideas, recruiting the developers for ideas on sales, servers, world building, breaking up the databases (bus to motorcycles), multi-data sources, project management, internal projects, performance testing, VPS options, and how to help our clients get what they want - even if what they want is a more robust system with roll overs, mirrors, private environments, database redundancy, etc.

Emails, tech support, and recording notes. I also helped out a company with their logo and getting it put outside on their ecommerce site. Reviewing some notes form the business consulting meeting we had on Monday. Some good ideas there.

We had a good meeting with Jonathan Johnson doing some business consulting. Steve and I met with him for the first couple of hours. We then invited Danny and Marisa in to talk about sales and marketing strategy stuff. I took lots of notes and they are on my local hard drive.

- Figure out how to use your consultant well and then do it, use them as a tool. This was a request from Jonathan.

- In decision making, step up to the plate and swing. Let's get to work.

- We really need to keep applying what we are learning and what we know. Knowledge, unapplied, doesn't do much.

- We are looking for help to build a sales and marketing department within the adilas business model and structure.

- Dealing with leadership and decisions, we need goals, focus, direction, and a plan. Take those next steps and get going.

When I joined the morning meeting, there were multiple people on already. Danny, Dustin, Eric, and Steve were on. They finished their business and then each of them ended up leaving except for Eric. He had some questions dealing with custom industry-specific interfaces and the printing of labels. I gathered up some resources for him and sent him a number of links as well as showed him how to access the pieces inside of the system.

Steve and I chatted about some marketing ideas and Danny chimed in that he really enjoyed the business consulting meeting yesterday with Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprises. Good stuff.

The meeting was originally going to be going over a deep look into the automated P&L (profit and loss or income statement) financial documents and reports. We switched it out and ended up with a group meeting on a different topic, set by both Kelly and Sarah. Good meeting. The main topics were: proposal for performance improvements, scalability, revenue increase, legacy and enterprise planning. Here are a few notes and topics covered:

- Upgrades and helping our clients get the service levels that they want. This could be dedicated boxes, clusters, VPS environments, clear out to full on enterprise type solutions. Each upgrade needs to come with a cost. We just can't do this for free as our base level product.

- Charging the correct amount for certain service levels

- What ways do we communicate and how are those channels working? Email, text, phone, GoToMeeting, Zoom, elements of time, pass along from our clients, etc.?

- Kelly and Sarah would like to get a list of who does what and who is in charge of what aspect (task or position).

- Both Kelly and Sarah were filling the role of business consultants in this meeting. Great questions and trying to keep the subject on target or on task.

- They, both Kelly and Sarah, are somewhat doing an analysis  and seeing where they can help and how best to structure things. I was impressed, they seem like they want to take an active roll and help the whole business become more fluid and efficient.

- Top priorities from Steve - cash flow, servers, customer care, and new UI (user interface).

- Light talks about sales and marketing

- Top priorities from Brandon - servers, current projects, maintenance, R&D, and planning for the future - including new look and feel for the whole system

- Cory is currently doing a great job pushing forward the custom and internal projects - project coordinator

- Charging for storage, processing, and hosting of the software package

- Software is a constant process of refining and building

- What does our team look like?

- What are the future goals? Short term, medium, and long range goals?

- Time management and where we are going

- Concept of adilas.biz as a trust

- Getting business consulting for adilas done by adilas power users

- Cofounders and a small village

Meeting with Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprises - we took tons of sales and marketing notes. Brandon has those notes on his local computer. There is some flex grid on this element that points to the file (somewhat hidden from prying eyes).

Reviewing past lessons from notes in the developer's notebook. I literally was going through a pile or papers on my desk of things that I have printed out. Here are a few of the things that I was reviewing:

- Notes from a business consulting meeting at the end of 2019

- Notes from another business consulting meeting in the first part of 2020

- More business consulting meeting notes - end of January 2020

It was great to go back over some of these pieces. Some of them have completed and come to fruition and some of the other pieces are still flagging in the wind. Keep living and keep learning! We all need this kind of stuff.

Reviewing past notes and business consulting documents. Mostly going over a multiple page outline that we did with Jonathan Johnson back in March of 2020. There is some really good stuff there. I have the paper copy and digital copy at my house.

For internal use... If you want to get to the real document, go to the media/content homepage and do an advanced search for this file name: meeting_with_epic_enterprises.docx

Brainstorming on ideas to help with adilas, our teams, our servers, our costs, our plans, and our strategies.

I read an article on how open-source projects make money. I also looked up how free apps make money. Most of it was from providing hosted solutions, paid support, licensing, training courses, or selling other paid products that support the open-source portion or application. They could also offer advertising, do donations or allow contributions, or some other kind of offering. The other option, that I thought was interesting was a free core and then add-on's on top of the free core. I thought that was kinda interesting. Just for fun, I wanted to see how much would it cost a single client if they wanted to run their own version of adilas. Say it cost them nothing... What would it really cost to get it up and running on a monthly or yearly basis? You would have to get the code, buy a domain name, setup the server with the correct specs, sign a hosting contract of some sort, condition the server settings (super backend level), add the database, populate the database, make sure that they connected (code server and backend database), setup a new account, do initial settings, configure logos, look and feel, and then get a user in and trained on the system. That is for one single person, not even a full team or set of people. You would then need someone to setup other people, train them, and start using the system. I don't know an exact cost, but I would say thousands (plural).

These are just some other things that I was thinking about... No specific order. Some are questions, some are ideas, some are reminders:

- Seek first to understand, then to be understood

- Apply It! We keep learning things... it really takes affect when we start applying what we are learning and have learned.

- What if we created a fundraising pitch deck for investors? On our own? What would that take or cost?

- Playing with the small phrase "start, stop, continue". I heard this statement in a training course one time. It is a way of looking at things and seeing how they or things are going or doing. Imagine something like this: What do we want to start doing (adding something new), what do we want to stop doing (subtracting or taking some things away), and what is working well (continue or keep refining)? Just for fun, you could also say that saying like this: "add, subtract, refine".

- How firm is the foundation? Everything gets built off of that. That is a great question: Do we have a firm foundation? Let's make it super solid, we have a lot riding on it.

- Core and then the add-on's on top of the core... This goes along with our concept that everyone is going to need an adilas core as the base level. This came from an entry back over a year ago. See element of time #6629 for more details. The concept of the value add-on core model - with different rings to denote the other levels of add-on value pieces. We have determined at least 5 levels as of right now. 1. Core, 2. Business vertical or industry specific, 3. Custom level, 4. BI or Business Intelligence level, and 5. Enterprise or multiple corp(s) level. Each of those value rings has to be purchased and serviced. You have to have the transactional data core to get it started, but anything beyond that, is extra or a value add-on piece. Very configurable.

- Dealing with the core add-on or add-on core - I would really like to make some graphics of what that would look like and even put some prices to that model. That would be fun!

- Random side note - I've got so many things started or half baked... it sure would be nice to finish up some of those things. So many things, I get pulled in multiple directions and even lose momentum or focus. Part of the territory of what we are doing. Lots of moving pieces.

- Do a quick napkin style fix job - quick and dirty. Pretend that you are solving the problem on a single napkin, after you ate lunch. What is a quick fix? Get that going and then dive in deeper as needed.

- How desperate for help are we? How desperate am I? Is Steve? Are others? - I'm not saying that I'm there right now, but I've been there. Literally clawing for any traction or firm ground. It's a scary place and you feel totally vulnerable and fragile. You feel like things are out of control and you'll do anything, pay anything, give anything, to get back in control or onto stable ground. Searching frantically for any shred of hope or positive traction. It really feels like that sometimes. Just being honest.

- I think it would be good if we could define our roles, responsibilities, and expectations - within our own small teams. Put real numbers, attach values, priorities, and get rid of any assumptions. This may help with our expectations of who is doing what and even what our jobs (perceived or actual) really are. A little bit more structure there.

- Build on what we have

- Reaching for firm ground and what does that fear drive us to do? I could say lots here. I've been there. I'll most likely be back there again. Who knows, I may even be there now (again). It won't be the last time. It has happened over and over again. It seems to be a pattern of sorts.

- Along with that feeling of desperation, are we desperate enough that any help or progress is allowed, tolerated, and even welcomed? Be honest!

- Are we making decisions off of logic or emotions?

- It may be good to review some of the business consulting that we started doing back in late 2019 and into the first part of 2020. Here are some link: EoT # 5295 (1st meeting), EoT # 5296 (2nd meeting), #5354 (3rd meeting), there are also some uploads in the media/content section (in the shop) called meeting_with_epic_enterprises.docx with tons of other notes.

- From Kelly - We need to spend time managing our own company. Who is helping to manage adilas.biz?

- Focus on one thing at a time

- Saying "no" 101 - a no sandwich - Yes, I'd like to do such and such. No, I can't. Yes, I'd like to do this and that. Basically, yes, no, yes.

- By not talking about certain things - what are we avoiding and/or denying?

- Fall down 7 times, get up 8 times!

- How firm a foundation - We get lost out on the limbs and branches. Maybe bring the focus back in a bit.

- Getting rid of assumptions - who is going to do what? List it out and define it.

- Setup a time or a person to help manage adilas

- The costs of transitioning (switching between things, projects, tasks, focuses, etc.) - it is a real cost that is hard to nail down. There is also a mental side to transitioning without finishing things. That wears on a person's confidence and psyche.

- Maybe cut down on dedicated hours

- Dealing with funding options, we could divide some of my percentages (ownership) - just an option.

- Who is going to manage things - single person, small team, some kind of board or council, nobody, or hire it out?

- What about the adilas Jellyfish model - good, bad, change, tweak, refine, kill it, what?

- Who are we and what size are we comfortable with? Small, medium, large, extra-large, massive? Just being silly. I really like the small to medium sizes personally.

- Reread the internal adilas questionnaire summary that Shannon and I put together from the different key players and adilas dependables.

- Timeline to make and implement these decisions - how are we doing?

- So much - We get pulled on every day - how do we get away from all of the distractions? Focus!

- Just for fun, what does it take to go public? Meaning publicly traded or a way to raise capital and investments.

- Could we sell some of our shares? What would that look like?

- What about freeware, shareware, or full open-source options? Do we even want to go there, or do we stay with our current model and just keep tweaking it? Just ideas.

- Our internal rates - What we charge for what we do - We are held captive due to available monies and funding. As an independent developer, I was charging $50/hour back in early 2000's. Where are we at now and is there any room for progression? There is a disconnect to what we are making vs what we have to deal with and try to coordinate. The stress alone is way bigger.

- What if we created our own investment pitch deck? We could do all kinds of levels - loans, investments, equity, shares, other supporting companies, etc. Might be interesting.

I sent Sean an email with a link to some business consulting that was done back in 2019/2020 by Jonathan Johnson from Epic Enterprise. I also sent his a 9 page document that had even more notes, ideas, and brainstorming for our company and where we are heading. Good stuff.

Met with my sister and my mom. Both have small little shops and want to sell things online and use things like Venmo and PayPal to get paid. Super simple ecommerce needs. Another thing that they really needed was someone to help them. They can both text, email, shoot pictures, and do other phone and computer stuff. They don't know how to make business cards, crop graphics, and/or setup merchant processing with store fronts.

Anyways, I thought that it was a great meeting and really helped me see the need for helping some of the small independent vendors and mom and pop shops sell their stuff. We could easily handle what they want... it's just a mater of making it easy and simple to do.

Futuristically, this may be a great little thing for the adilas marketplace. I would love to see a spot where a user/vendor could add their items, list them, we help them track things, and then we do all of the ecommerce stuff and get them paid out (with a small fee to make it all happen). We could easily do that.

Went into town to meet with Aaron Hill for a lunch meeting. Tons of great ideas and basically a full on business consulting session. Aaron did a great job. See attached for my hand scribbled notes.

Here are a few takeaways:

- Aaron was talking about a book called "The 6 Types of Working Genius" and where each person fits in. We spent some time on that and even talking about our own strengths and weaknesses.

- I'm in the way - how can I get out of the way and let my guys/gals run with things? We spent quite a bit of time talking about this. Along these lines, I'm the guy who has to help them catch the vision of where we are wanting to go. I may be doing less of the actual coding or tasks, but I've got to get them the vision and make sure that we are all on the same page. Help make it (the plan and/or vision) more clear.

- I have a great team already. We just need to define the roles and give them authority and then let them run with it.

- My personality tends to be kinda nitpicky. It has its place, but we need to focus more on the "what" (outcome) vs the "how" (or how I would do it). If they are doing it, let them do it how they want. We are more worried about the final outcome vs the processes to get there. Aaron was telling me that I may have to suppress the nitpicky tendencies (super detail oriented). That may be hard for me.

- One of my jobs is making and gathering up the ideas and spinning the vision.

- Embrace the mess - not perfect but getting there - it's a process

- Respecting others and their skills, genius, creativity, and style

- Be careful how quickly you jump ahead... You may be seeing multiple steps ahead of where you are at. That is awesome, but don't expect everyone to be right there with you. Help lead and guide them, from where they are at.

- Everything tends to go in cycles. If needed, wait your turn and it will come back around. Be patient, the timing is very important for feedback, directives, and brainstorming. Aaron had a cool acronym - B.F.D. - brainstorming, feedback, and directives (actual instructions). I may have messed that up a bit but it was something like that. Sometimes we have to help people know what level we are talking about - For example: You may have to say, just brainstorming here but what about... or This is some feedback, what if we did such and such. You get the idea. Sometimes, it is really clear in our heads but others don't know where a certain thing or topic may be categorized. Clear communication.

- There are lots of decisions that need to be made. Let my guys/gals make those decisions. It just all needs to come together and be compatible. If needed, keep circling back around.

- Shift from task oriented to vision oriented - If needed, have a funeral for your tasks.

See the attached notes for more ideas and details. Great meeting. As a side note, after the meeting, we went and looked at Aaron's shop. We talked about byproducts, business consulting, and potential for other byproduct type businesses from what we are doing. Good stuff.

I joined the meeting late, but Alan and Steve were going over SG&A costs when I got there. They have a client that is wanting to virtually plug the SG&A numbers. Steve was talking about how that is playing with fire and not good accounting. After that, Alan gave a small demo of his production and advanced recipe/build process for sub inventory. It looked great and had lots of heavy client-side JavaScript stuff going on.

We covered a bunch of topics. Here are some small notes that I picked up from the discussion. No specific order.

- Steve and Alan were discussing settings and adding more settings for production and manufacturing.

- Steve was asking for input on direction, on the sales side of things.

- Alan was proposing some industry specific skins to help with sales.

- Alan was also saying that we should circle back around and build out more reports or even dashboard level pages to show all of quick data, counts, and totals. He was saying, we should stick to our name - Adilas - All data is live and searchable - stay true to that slogan. Along with that, we were talking about some places that still need some help and a little bit of loving. Sub inventory was a big topic along with other histories.

- Steve mentioned that he is working on some job costing options and reports. Tying in expenses, invoices, deposits, PO's, and time cards to elements of time (the job or projects).

- Small observation - both SG&A costs and job costing are dealing with deeper tracking of sub pieces and components that make up a bigger thing or item. Kinda interesting. That's some deep terrain and more than just simple inventory tracking. It's a mix of operations being tied into accounting.

- There have been more requests for more charts, graphs, and eye candy type stuff. At one point, we really wanted to do some graphical homepages to show and highlight some of that data. We have all of the data. It just isn't presented in an eye candy and easy format to see and look at.

- Alan is thinking that people (our clients and users) are going to be looking for more and more efficient ways of doing things and tracking things. There seems to be a draw or trend towards efficiency.

- We spent some time talking about AI stuff (artificial intelligence). That is a big buzz word right now. What if we redid some of our homepages (made them more graphical) and helped to show trends and month over month, year over year tends and patters. That could be really cool!

- We talked about the history homepage and how it shows a great overview of what was done or worked on throughout the day. That is some great information and a great daily summary of what happened in the system. Steve was showing that piece to a perspective client and they were super impressed.

- Back to AI stuff. We may use some verbiage like, we do such and such, similar to how AI works, without actually saying that we are using true AI. We already do a lot of that type of stuff. We feed data in, we then train the system to do certain things with it. As we go along, we can see areas that we could work on and turn our interface into a more AI oriented type product. We're not that far off, even right now.

- More talk about comparing patterns, comparing trends, and showing business intelligence (BI) level stuff.

- Mike, would like us to work more on the backend accounting pieces to help round out the system. Mike is a CPA that Steve has been working with for years.

- We could gain a lot, even on the virtual AI level, if we started to build out reports that show the known issues. We have a whole page that lists places and scenarios where things can get off the tracks or in the ditch (virtually). Date problems, number mismatches, disconnects, cart before the horse stuff, etc. That would be super cool to get those pieces built into the system.

- We circled back to sub inventory and possible ways of fixing things up there. We would love to add part id's, part category id's, and other key attribute id's to help the retrieval be faster and smoother. We can get the data in, it's the getting it back out that makes it a little bit harder (current database relationship structure). Anyways, some talks about ways to sure things up and fix some of the underlying pillars in the system.

- Quite a bit of discussion about Biotrack and Metrc (state compliance systems). We spend a lot of time and money trying to keep these connections up to date and working correctly. It's a moving target. We also want to pass on some of the costs to our clients and users.

- Our clients have some great ideas and tend to tell us what they are wanting and/or needing. That is awesome! We just need to figure out how to charge them for those upgrades. Basically, who is going to pay for the changes? Sometimes that can get tricky - either way, it's still part of the game we play.

- Most of our clients want real-time data going back and forth (live - not batched or staged).

- Alan and Steve were talking about ways to simplify the current API connections.

- Light talks about what some of the other developers were working on.

- We would love to be able to bill for real usage and what features our clients are using.

- We keep seeing costs increase. This is costs to us, costs to our clients, and even costs that 3rd parties are pushing and/or passing on. Everything seems to be in a state of upward flux. Along with this conversation, there were talks about some of the 3rd parties limiting throughput and/or limiting the number of API socket requests without a price increase.

- We talked about changing some of the file names. Some of the pages started out as a cannabis related page. We are now making those things more general so that we can use them (the pages and features) for our other clients.

- Going where the money is (based on client requests).

- Steve wants us to quote/estimate some new code for a client. Alan was recommending that we break things into phases and stages. Good discussion on this topic.

- Steve is doing some high-end business consulting for some of our clients. Helping them make decisions and plan for the future.

- The last topic of the day was thinking and finding ways to harvest the services (service byproducts) that our clients want or need (adilas marketplace stuff). If we help our current clients, that is an avenue of funding that comes from inside vs having to get new clients. Basically, help them get what they want. Steve put it this way - make your choice and then build up that choice (meaning software choice and pushing that software further along).