Adilas Key Contributors:

Steve Berkenkotter - Main owner and business partner - original ideas, concepts, and training - sales, relationships, dreamer, visionary, custom code, coordinator, builder of the first industry specific skin, and the list goes on. Huge player in the adilas story and timeline. One of the original owners in Moring Star Automotive - where the system came from. There are three known Steve's in the system notes. Most of them are this Steve (99 out of 100 times). He won't admit it, but adilas was his brainchild.

David Berkenkotter - Steve's brother and business partner in Morning Star Automotive. David was a system user and helped us create the adilas quick search. He liked using that feature, the quick search, but it only existed on one page originally. He wanted us to put it on every page. That ended up being in the header. He was also one of the original partners in adilas. Power user in the system. Sadly, he passed away due to cancer.

Shari Olin - Commonly known as "Shari O.". She worked in the accounting department back in the Morning Star days. She has been somewhat of a mother hen to help all of us crazy chickens keep going. She helps with customer support, training, payroll, bill collection, and tons of backend office functions. Major power user. Just being silly, but she can have the mouth of a sailor but the heart of an angel. Part of the adilas admin team and a great friend.

Craig Leitner - Also part of the original Morning Star team. Craig was the automotive floorplan and bank guy. He is a power user in the system and does a lot of bank reconciliation and other tasks. He currently works with Steve and asks as the adilas controller (money flow guy).

Cory Warden - Originally an adilas rep and consultant. Cory become part of the team after being a rep for quite some time. She helps with customer care, client support, project management, and keeping the team on track. She also does all of the news and updates and other training material. Cory does tons of oversight type services for our clients. Power user and part of the admin team.

Sean Carlton - Sean was a manager at a Cannabis dispensary in Colorado that used adilas for years and years until they sold. Steve recruited Sean to help with sales, deployment, and training. Sean brings lots of usage experience. Often, he is one of the helpers if we need to send someone onsite to help with a deployment or training session. Power user.

Brandon Moore - I'm one of the guys that writes most of the developer's notebook entries. Originally, I was hired by Morning Star, the automotive dealership, to help with data entry, accounting, and website stuff. I ended up being one of the main adilas developers and architects. I build content, write code, help other developers and team members, and help with training. Helped start the project back in 2001 under the Morning Star name.

Chris Dunsey - One of the first adilas interns (developers). Helped with a number of projects. Ended up being somewhat of a consultant later on.

Shawn Curtis - Kinda a funny story. He was taking a developer's class at Bridgerland. He knew my brother Russell. He asked to join our developer class and became one of the first interns along with Chris Dunsey. Shawn ended up helping with payroll and other projects. Some of the photo galleries in the system came from Shawn's help. He also worked on the media/content (file upload) pieces. Later on, he did more payroll work and acted as a buddy to Brandon and did some consulting work. We worked together for years and years.

Russell Moore - Russell is my younger brother. Originally, he was added to the group because of his graphic skills. He ended up being a great backend developer and project manager. He has also acted as a trainer and mentor for Brandon along the way. Much of the current system came from projects and efforts that Russell was involved with. He has also been Brandon's AI tutor in recent years. Great help to the system. Huge contribution.

Chris Johnnie - He is an entrepreneur who teamed up with Russell to help create a company called "Adilas For Business" or "AFB". Eventually, both Russell and Chris sold their pieces back to adilas. They were honestly the first ones to really try to run as a white label of adilas. This was back in 2015 and 2016. Chris really helped to push the product to the next level along with Russell's help.

Danny Shuford - Longtime friend of Steve's. Danny helped with some website design, sales, and videos for adilas. He even got into creating custom PDF labels for clients. Light development work.

Marisa Shaw - She is Danny's daughter. Danny brought her to an adilas training event in Denver, CO. Marisa was the star student. She ended up helping with some graphics, flyers, marketing material, teaching, instruction, and planning. Power user. Very helpful.

Shannon Scoffield - Shannon is Brandon and Russell's sister. Her maiden name is Shannon Moore. Huge help and virtual assistant to Brandon. She has helped with training, project management, and content creation. Most of the major content sessions were or have been with Brandon and Shannon working together. When they, Brandon and Shannon, were traveling, Shannon was one of the primary adilas instructors. If she was teaching Brandon was taking notes. If Brandon was teaching, Shannon was taking notes. Power user.

Cheryl Moore - Cheryl is my mom. What an asset. She owns a small business and has owed a few different ones. When we were doing training sessions, she came to every one of them. She asked wonderful questions and was a great supporter. Sometime, I would use her as a test subject - can my mom do this? If yes, we are good. If not, we may need to keep tweaking it. Thanks mom!

Wayne Moore - Wayne is my dad. He was my hiking buddy and more than willing to talk about ideas and concepts on our walks and hikes. He helped out with video stuff and was a great coordinator for making other connections. He worked at Bridgerland (technical college) and helped us get setup with classrooms, computer labs, and other great connections. Huge cheerleader! There is another Wayne, Wayne Andersen, he is a backend developer, systems guy, and database guy.

Wayne Andersen - This Wayne lives in Portugal and helps with all of the backend security, server, and code testing. Major skills, writes code, helps push all of us to new technologies, partially retired but loves to play with tech stuff. If you search for Wayne and it deals with concepts and coordination stuff, that's my dad, Wayne Moore. If you search for Wayne and it sounds like a master backend guy, that's Wayne Andersen.

Alan Williams - One of the lead developer's at adilas.biz. Alan joined us in 2015 and quickly came up through the ranks. Trainer, CTO, team lead, master developer, prototyper, and system architect. Alan has helped with many projects and features over the years. He also helped Brandon with some of the prep work for the adilas lite (fracture) plans and project. Sometimes called "Dr. Alan" by the other developers. Example: This might be a project for Dr. Alan.

Bryan Dayton - Bryan has been one of the most versatile guys on our team. Originally, he joined a development class out of curiosity. He and Brandon live in the same town and know each other from church. Bryan has done more custom code or small system projects than almost any other developer. He also joined the team in 2015. He helps with sales, custom projects, pushing on projects that he thinks will yield a return. Lots of work on the adilas lite and fracture project. Very hard working and versatile.

Dustin Siegel - Developer who helped with numerous cannabis and cultivation type projects. He worked directly under Steve to help with that business vertical. Many of the original pages that Steve built were taken over and remade by Dustin.

Eric Tauer - Developer and custom code guy. Originally, Eric knew Steve and lived in Salida, CO. As a note, adilas is Salida spelled backwards. Eric has a background in database work and data warehousing. Eric has done tons of custom systems for clients. Often, Eric would pioneer certain features or logic, as custom code, and then we would bring those features into the main adilas application.

Garrett Kirschbaum - Adilas intern and then full developer back in 2015. Stressful time of building and expansion. He and others helped run the adilas shop with Brandon's help. Garrett was a great developer and helped us standardize a number of tools and features. He was the first developer to work on sub inventory, back in the day. He also did other projects and helped with some developer management stuff.

Charles or "Chuck" Swann - Charles was an instructor at Bridgerland for web development. He builds custom websites, does amazing mock-ups, prototypes, and is a CSS master (styling a website using code). Chuck worked with Russell to help with redesign work, projects, and vision. Chuck worked fulltime for a number of years and now works and coordinates work done by a small hand-picked design and development team. Anything that needs some design loving gets passed over the Chuck and his small team.

Steve McNew - Friend of Steve Berkenkotter's. This Steve helped prep some whitepaper documents to help with getting adilas standardized and some internal audit type stuff. Mostly white papers and putting things down on paper. He ended up getting hired by the local school district and wasn't able to finish the process, but he got it started. He asked some great questions, and we had some good conversations.

Abby Elkins - Abby is Brandon's daughter. Her maiden name was Abby Moore. Abby, when she was little (10-12 years old) helped with some of the original concept artwork for adilas. Later on, she helped with content for the presentation gallery and then the adilas lite plans (fracture). Currently, she is working graphic artwork for different adilas pages. She's now in her mid 20's and has some awesome art and content skills.

Aspen Moore - Aspen is Abby's younger sister and Brandon's daughter. Aspen helped Brandon with some planning and counseling (mental help). Aspen also did some general business consulting with her dad Brandon.

John Maestas - Developer, backend server guys, and designer. John came to us through Dustin. John was uses as a jack of all trades on the backend and frontend. He did numerous projects, documentation, payroll, and page redesign projects. John was also very help to Brandon in working on the notes and comments on the SWOT analysis document. Many other projects as well. Good vision of the future.

Kiva Berkenkotter - Steve's wife. She helped Steve with various projects and planning sessions. At one point, she was in charge of paying commissions and collecting monthly reoccurring payments. Huge supporter to Steve!

Heather Moore - Heather is Brandon's wife. What a trooper. Cheerleader, support, ideas, and consulting. Huge asset to Brandon (me). Thanks Heather!

Jonathan Wells - Designer and mock-up guy. He helped to map out the system and created a number of deep mock-ups for adilas lite (fracture) projects. Great job catching the vision and putting those pieces into a visual representation. We still refer to his work when talking about fracture (future project for adilas).

Jonathan Johnson - Business consultant from Epic Enterprises. Met with Brandon and Steve in end of 2019 into 2020. Really helped us see some needs and opportunities. Later, helped Brandon with some other consulting when trying to define the fracture plan.

Calvin Chipman - Windows software developer. Calvin also did a bunch of web-based work, database stuff, label printing, and API socket stuff. Calvin was the first developer to use the adilas API's to create a native mobile app for a client. He also built a number of special developer tools used by some of our team to speed things up. He's the tool guy!

Cody Apedaile - Bryan Dayton's cousin, Cody helped with a bunch of JavaScript code and changes. He also spent some time working on the UML diagram for the adilas database. We didn't get things finished, but he was working on a new build your own interface (custom to you) for adilas. We ran out of funding. We want to get back to that project at some point.

Dave Forbis - Dave was the official "high tech gofer". He did a bunch of things. Graphics, project management, brainstorming, planning, sales, and helped with managing developers for the adilas shop. He was another great student. He came to a number of training courses and brought so much to the courses. He was also a big support to Brandon during some rough times.

Josh - There are three Josh's. Josh Wheeler, Brandon's friend and developer. Josh Sagert, developer and adilas user (worked tons on the discount engine), and Josh White, Steve's friend from California. Josh White has brought us a number of bigger leads and bigger players, like franchises, and other higher-end clients. Anything recent is Josh White, from California. He helps with networking, sales, and dreaming of new things.

Suzi Distelberg - Sales, training, and deployment. She also worked with some custom projects and doing step-by-step user guides. She has helped with all kinds of projects and even gone onsite for setups and training. Great asset!

Kelly Whyman - Kelly is Dustin's wife. Kelly was single handedly the best independent sales rep that adilas had. She did training, consulting, and sponsored a number of custom projects. Kelly helped Steve and Brandon with reports, functionality, and other things. She got so good at things, state contracts snagged her up to work at state and multi-state level stuff.

Molly Hennessy - Molly was another independent sales rep and consultant. She had numerous clients and got into doing SOP's (standard operating procedures) and other high-end documentation and training. Molly was an entrepreneur and even started creating some of her own product and services. If you search adilas on google, some of the other results are from Molly. Super creative and a great consultant.

Hamid Karbasi - Developer - He has worked with Brandon doing small websites, training, and small tasks. He currently is a manager at a retail store and brings some managerial type skills to the table. Willing to talk about concepts and how they apply to retail and other environments. He is also lightly helping with some planning for fracture.

Gene Spaulding - Friend, entrepreneur, and businessman. Gene is an old college friend. We had a number of friends in common. He has been a small mentor to me over the years. Way back, before adilas, he helped me get my first business loan for a project that I was working on.

Sharik Peck - Friend, entrepreneur, public speaker, physical therapist, and businessman. Good influence and mentor in ways. Sharik and I used to exercise together back in the day. Many of fun walk, run, and weightlifting session. Learning some conference and training skills from him and his wife. They have done really well pushing their product lines and doing some marketing. Trying to get some ideas.

Bridgerland Technical College - Use to be Bridgerland Applied Technology College. Not a person, but a huge help. This is a local technical college in the Logan, UT, area. Brandon's dad, Wayne, worked there. Tons of assets. They provided classrooms, training options, computers, and even an small incubation spot (starter office space) for the adilas shop during the startup phase. Huge asset!

McCorvey's Pro Shop - Also known as Bowling World. Client that had multiple locations. The started out with around 30 and grew up to the 90+ location level, all using adilas. Long time client.

Emerald Fields - They were the first client that wanted their own fully dedicated box and server. They had multiple locations and requested some custom code, reports, and features.

Beaver Mountain Ski School - Client that we helped them track their ski school (snow sport) lessons. Students, instructors, classes, and schedules. Custom interface dealing with elements of time and flex grid.

Bear 100 - This was the first event or annual event client that we did. They used the system for about a week each year. They had 350+ runners and their families that would be on the site for multiple days straight. It was a 100 mile running race with 13 aid stations and a small social portal for the family and friends to watch their runners. This one was special as it had custom input options to upload CSV files to populate the database vs normal HTML form field entries. Records were sent in batches from remote places to adilas for storage and race progress.

High Valley Bike Shuttle - Online ecommerce and scheduling client. They also have a cafe and small retail store. Fun online scheduling and bulk flex grid projects.

Herbo - Mike Roundtree, owner of Herbo, was the first company to do a small white label of adilas. Mike has been a great asset to Steve and the two of them have worked on projects, plans, and dreams. Herbo also has a custom payment solution that they are trying to market and get rolling. Mike has been a great supporter for years. He is also a certified CPA and that credential helps us and him. We would like to get other CPA's on board as well. Thanks Mike!

Nxtlinq AI - AI assistant. These guys really pushed us to get an AI agent inside of adilas. Tons of development took place and lots of prep stuff. We wanted to do a 3-part plan for integrating AI. 1. Teach it how to navigate using the AI quick search (check - done), 2. Teach it all things adilas. and 3. Teach it how to be clear up at the consultant type level. We only got the first phase done. Lots of other plans and such, but we ran out of funding.

Grok AI - Steve loves using Grok. He has built a number of image generation options inside of adilas. He is also working with Grok to feed it data to help with analytics and AI insight. This is not finished yet, but we may end up using Grok as an AI assistant inside of adilas. We have simple and emerging connections available right now but need to really polish things up before going live with the AI assistant options.

ChatGPT AI - We have started using ChatGPT to help with code, explanations, explore resources, planning, and help with training and flow for people and other AI bots. Currently, Brandon, Steve, Bryan, Alan, Josh, Russell, Chuck, and Wayne are using AI in either ChatGPT chat sessions or some other form of AI. We have some using Copilot, Gemini, Claude, etc. AI is actually helping in many ways. ChatGPT is a big one for use. Anyways, they are earning their place in the adilas key contributors list.

There are so many more that I can't list. Developers, users, power users, reps, consultants, trainers, clients, accountants, friends, family, and even critics. They have all helped out the idea farming process and progression. Good stuff! We couldn't have done this alone. It takes a community to do what we are doing.

We had an update meeting to show progress on ship B stuff (adilas lite and fracture). We had 10 people on the meeting. We had Alan, Hamid, Steve, Sean, Danny, Cory, Shari O., Shannon, Bryan, and Brandon (myself).

We did record it. The recording is right about an hour long. The first 20-30 minutes were from Alan going over market research and tech deck decisions for fracture. After that, I introduced a new website to publish some of our work on the adilas lite or fracture project. Here are a couple of links:

Adilas Lite - Project Home - https://data0.adilas.biz/lite/

Adilas Lite - Videos & Research - https://data0.adilas.biz/lite/adilas_lite_videos.cfm

The meeting went well. As a side note, Shari O. recommended that we have a fun, non work, meeting just to catch-up and say hi and what not. She is kinda like our mother hen, for the adilas team. Fun times. See attached for some other videos and assets.

After the meeting, I spent some time uploading things and doing some light clean-up from the day. Busy day. 

Meeting with Alan. Going over some market research that he was doing. I took a few screenshots of what he was showing me. See attached. Here are some rough notes:

- What does Adilas have that is unique - Everything under one roof, operations based accounting, in-depth inventory management, flex grid (custom data relationships), completely customizable, tons of permissions and settings, and ability to track things (inventory, financials, etc.) through time.

- What do others have - Their sites look more modern/nicer, single page applications, eCommerce integration with outside platforms (they don't have their own), mobile app available, nice page showing pricing, they have done lots of advertising/marketing.

See attachments for more details. We also went over possible ways of integrating adilas lite (fracture) with banks to help speed things up. This could be done by integrating with a system called Plaid or other software. We also spent some time talking about outside eCommerce integrations such as Amazon or whatever. We could still offer our own, plus integrate with other bigger key players (as we choose, or our clients make requests and are willing to help fund the development efforts).

Alan is using Adobe XD as a huge whiteboard and then moving things and pieces around as needed. Basically, brainstorming, putting together different elements on the screen, and then moving or organizing them in a big drag-and-drop type interface. He's using it like a giant whiteboard of sorts.

As part of our discussion, we were talking about our approach vs other company's approach. It seems that most other companies, at least right now, are doing some sort of super mashup type system. They have a product, but the big selling points are the integrations with outside parties or other sites or services. That may sound awesome, but there is some pain there as well (trying to marry everything together). Adilas is more along the lines of a single system that is fully integrated and then ties out to outside sites and services, if needed. Here is a link to a hand drawn graphic that shows the difference in approach.

Towards the end of our meeting, Alan was mentioning that we should focus on who is already using our platform and try to get more of those kinds of people onboard. Create some synergy of sorts. I mentioned that, not only could we do that, but we might be able to offer white label options for certain industries and business verticals.

The last thing that we went over was some market research stuff that Danny is working on. See attached for a screenshot of that as well. After the meeting, I spent some time reading the other sub documents and older sales meeting notes. Good meeting.

Reading over some market research that Danny did for online accounting software packages. Good stuff.

Phone call with Sean to go over some custom code for charging a special credit card fee once an invoice goes over a certain amount. Spent time looking around to see if had anything like that. I found some similar stuff but noting exactly like that. Built out the page, did some testing, and pushed it up to the server. This special code is for a trailer dealership that does a lot of trailer rentals. They like to pass on the credit card processing fee to the clients. Anyways, the new code is up and live. Custom black box stuff on data 11 for corp 1501.

Reading and making comments on some research that Danny was working on. Research on YouTube channels, videos, using blogs, etc. See attached for some screenshots of Danny's research. Watched a small movie from Bryan on his homemade time clock app and project management tool.

Here are a couple of links that I sent to Danny:

- List of over 13,000+ blog entries from the developer's notebook inside of adilas.

- Idea to reuse some of our existing content in a number of different spots or other outside blogs.

Emails and texts back and forth to John about the adilas cafe. Working with a document for Danny and YouTube training videos. I then met with Danny and we went over options for some of the videos and training assets that we both have and/or need. Danny and I were talking about things, and he was saying that he knows a company that doesn't even release the next changes until the training is ready, done, and up for viewing. See attached for a screencap of what we were talking about.

Here a couple of the links that I sent to Danny:

- Entries in the developer's notebook talking about YouTube videos - lots of good resources. Once it comes up, do a browser search for the term "YouTube" to help pinpoint some of the options.

- Entry in the developer's notebook talking about a thing called education mode.

As a side note, on 8/14/23, I added this little link to a video on the education mode.

Went into Logan to meet with Aaron Hill. We went biking (off the clock) and then came back to his office and did a two-hour consulting session. As part of our session, I gave Aaron a small demo on what adilas can do. See attached for some notes.

- Aaron is able to help with the consulting and seeing things from the outside.

- I can't get bogged down in doing the smaller or bigger tasks. My current role is to help get the vision out there and get it all going.

- We'll meet every couple of weeks to report on progress.

- Investors are looking for the full package and lots of potential.

- The (this) education piece is huge.

- We need to keep someone on staff that has their thumb on education and knows what is going on there. It's a vital piece of the puzzle.

- We could start with some of our older stuff. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we could use some of the older training stuff and use that to train the trainers. We have tons of assets, either on our older YouTube channel or Brandon has the raw recordings on some external hard drives that we used when we were doing the original trainings. We just need someone who is willing to get in there and pull out or break out those pieces and/or gems. It's a big project. Not sure on the numbers, but I'll bet that it could be somewhere between $10-20K (ten to twenty thousand dollars). It's worth a lot.

- For me, check to see if Sean or Danny would like to help with this education project and virtually bank some hours (work with the idea of a later payoff).

- Task, find that person. Who will help and run with the education side of this thing?

Great internal training event. John was running the show today. We had Brandon, John, Danny, Eric, Alan, Dustin, and Bryan on the meeting with us. We were going over the adilas docs (online style guide and code snippets), light review, going over conventions, components, and other style guide stuff. John was encouraging the developers to use the docs and play around with things. As a side note, John has also started some adilas server docs (major backend stuff) as well.

Lots of good discussions. Topics ranged from docker stuff, older code, bootstrap versions, and sign-off guides for development and frontend GUI stuff (GUI is for graphical user interfaces or UI/UX user interfaces and user experiences). We had some good practice sessions and John had prepped some code with some flags where he wanted us to work and change things.

It was great for all of the guys to be on the meeting. I did snap a screenshot of some of the webcams (see attached). We talked about using data 0 as the starting point or standard for a number of things. Especially if we wanted to duplicate and/or use the same things over and over again. The conversation then led over to talking about the future and where we are heading. We spent some time talking about the new framework and being able to swap out dependencies and what not.

One of the last things for the normal training session was a discussion about requests for future training and crossover training. Here is the quick list, not in any specific order.

Future Training Session Ideas
- Cfscript
- Javascript/JQuery
- Back End (Models, Services, DAOs)
- API's - Internal API sockets and external API sockets
- Ajax
- Testing
- Custom CSS & Print CSS

After everybody else left, John and I did a small review of the training session. We were chatting about options and feedback. John and I may start with some CSS and theme stuff (planning for the future). See attached for 3 different videos that we did from the training session. Great event.

Steve and Danny were talking when I joined the meeting. Steve had some questions about adding in extras out in ecommerce to append the extra choices to the product description. The other guys gave their updates and reports. John and I then did some work on splits, expense/receipts (E/R's), REI's (reimbursements), and other payables. Light training. Also spent some time catching up on emails.

Danny was pitching some video and training options. Both he and Michael have some video editing talents and skills. That is awesome. As part of our meeting, Steve was expressing that he is getting overwhelmed and stressed. He both said it and you could feel it. We've all been there before (and most likely will be back there). There's lots to do. Anyways, Steve finally left the meeting to work on some stuff.

After that, the guys were talking about marketing and how to best market our product. Danny had a bunch of good ideas. We got into talking about how sometime maintenance and education are better than "new" features. Sometimes that is hard to remember. We talked about some things that we learned from a business consultant a few years ago.

We then did a small review of where we are at. I jumped into adilas and started clicking around and showing the guys. We are succeeding in a number of places. Yes, there are areas where we are falling short, but there is a lot going on and lots of good stuff. I spent a good 20-30 minutes going over things with the guys and gals. It doesn't fix everything, but it does help to lower the overall stress levels. Hopefully it helped.

Morning sales meeting. The guys were going over the new business cards and asking for feedback. We got into a discussion about the user interface and how intuitive or non-intuitive it is. Danny was talking about possible small videos and things to help people get started. We also talked about doing some client feature stories and showcasing real clients and how they use the system. Danny had some fun ideas with small videos and what not.

Michael piped up and said that he has some film and video editing skills. We didn't know that. that is awesome and he and Danny may be working together to get more adilas content up on YouTube and other social media platforms. That's exciting!

All of the guys were giving their updates and what not. Shari O. and Sean were going over buttons and client settings for a small mexican restaurant. They are working on some menu items and how best to display and show things. We talked about a number of ideas and options. Towards the end of the meeting, John and I were looking at some look and feel things. Talking about page layouts and site-wide decisions for style guides.

Danny was reporting on a sales demo from yesterday. The company that he is talking with has some complex shipping and fulfillment requirements. We talked about, if we can catch the data, we can then calculate things and help them out with quotes and shipping costs. The guys were talking about using complex parent attributes and possible tie-ins for outside shipping API sockets and connections.

The guys had some questions about inventory planning pieces. We decided to get Alan to give us a demo of what he is working on for a client. No one really knows what it is other than Cory who is helping to quote things out and point Alan in the right direction. Anyways, he will be giving us a demo on Thursday morning for the morning sales meeting. It should include stuff on scheduling builds, reserving inventory, planning, and doing the actual builds.

Steve was reporting on some of his sales conversations and leads. He has been meeting with a number of different folks and just reporting on each of those contacts. One thing that he kept saying was that some of the potential clients feel like they are growing out of their current solutions. That is great for us.

The last two subject for the morning meeting were talking about 3rd party delivery services and options as well as internal look and feel changes for pages. John is doing a great job and he's been pushing up new files here in the past few days.

Morning meeting with all of the guys. Everyone was reporting in and giving updates. I gave an update about using the snow owl theme headers and close to 40 custom navigation links that are available to the whole user base, per corporation. We talked about an update on gift cards. Eric and I are working on that project and trying to roll things out in waves.

We switched over to talking about ecommerce and gaining more control via settings and options. Steve was commenting to Danny about tiered pricing out in ecommerce land. There are some new options coming and we'll take the existing pieces and just keep making them better. As the discussion progresses, we were talking about our general approach and how diverse our user base is. Because of that, we have a ton of tools that some clients may never want or use. In that same breath, we can also offer things to our clients that they never would have gotten if they had a specific software package that only did one specific thing.

The guys were talking about problem solving and how we excel at that. Steve was talking about a shed analogy and how you can have a ton of different tools in the shed, but you only pull out what you need for a specific project and/or task. That's adilas, in a nutshell. Just for fun, Danny was talking about the TV show MacGyver or MacGyvering - making it work with what I have. We love the challenge of trying to make the glove fit. We have tons of tools and features that we can mix and blend to make it happen. Good stuff.

Fun show and tell with the guys and gals. I showed off the Beaver Mountain special events, how we are building in paperwork and release forms, subs of time, history and usage, and customer logs. Danny, Sean, Michael, Shari O., John, etc. were on the meeting and I was just explaining things and showing the guys where we are headed, drawing, asking questions, good back and forth, and just having fun. I'm not sure if they knew it or not, but they were my audience today.

Quick sales standup meeting. Everybody was reporting in and what they were doing. The focus was on continuing to gather information. Maybe looking into multiple sales channels. Most of our clients could benefit if we could provide services or help them sell their stuff through multiple channels.

For us, we will continue to make calls, doing email campaigns, and online research. The guys were also talking about different angles and circling back around on different companies. Danny was saying that sometimes the easiest person to sell is a salesperson. Lots of groundwork. We even talked about teaming up with others to bring a bigger team or group effort.

They spent a bunch of time talking about SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for internal production. We will be looking deeper into production and manufacturing companies. More gathering info and solving pain points. That's where we shine. Lots of talk about selling support, training, no contracts, and price points. Ideally, we want to help people do well and succeed.

John was reporting in on some new look and feel changes. We will be pushing up some news and updates that talk about a blanket number of changes. It would be too much to cover every change that is coming down the pipeline. The main goal is to help standardize the look and feel. Some of this will be done with page level settings per page - what to show/hide, verbiage, aliases, rules, etc. There is a progression of things! It just keep going!

Danny, Sean, Steve, and Michael were talking about sales and sales leads. They were also talking about other sales related topics like Ag (cows and farming), CPA's (accountants and do they have or see a need), state compliance centers, fees for merchant processing, etc. They were also talking about other point of sale systems and pros and cons of those systems. The conversation went out to Uber Eats and other delivery services.

As it kept going, Steve was encouraging the guys to keep looking for the pain points and then being able to solve and help out to relieve those pain points. Sometimes the users or possible clients see a system and start thinking about the future workload to get a system up and running. That can scare people away. We are looking for solution minded people who are looking for a system.

The guys were talking about asking for other leads and trying to keep it simple. Helping them to basically fill in the gaps where possible.

Steve and Sean were talking about sales stuff and where they are heading and going. Danny jumped in and they were all talking about personalities and outcomes. Fun conversations. Adilas is such a great tool, you can watch everything... we want to keep using that! That's what we want our clients to say. Giving our clients the knowledge to help make the decisions that they need to make.

The guys were talking about maybe hiring a new salesman and doing a 60-day trial period. Just trying to get some ideas. We also talked about education and the big need for structured learning within the system and about the system.

Switched to working with Wayne and John. Got a temp file from Wayne and a dump of his local database. As we were downloading and installing things, I was asking them where we stand and what are their goals? Wayne said - I think that our goal is clustered servers on both the database and code side of things. Small talks about load balancing and not overloading our servers. We also talked about back-ups and storing all external files and images in a different way (maybe the content server or something like that). Basically, getting rid of the local file storage so that the clustering would work better for the different servers and clusters.

Wayne would also like us to switch over to Lucee. That would cut the hosting costs on a monthly basis with a big overall savings year over year. We briefly touched base on the datasource or world building project (getting each corporation on its own database). The other goal that Wayne was talking about was tracking usage based on each corporation's load and data traffic usage (bandwidth and storage). Once we have those pieces in place, be able to bill accordingly.

After that, we switched back over to my local development environment. The way that they have it setup, both Wayne and John, the local environment closely simulates the live or production environments and servers. Trying to make things be more consistent for both test and live environments. Ideally, once we get it a little bit further, some of our automated tests will make sure that things are flowing and behaving consistently. That lead us to a whole other conversation about testing and having a whole test suite. Both unit tests and migration tests.

Lastly, Wayne was helping me install Sublime Text libraries and custom packages. We also went over creating new code snippets to help me code quicker. I had tons of those on my old box, and in my old editor, got to get it all setup again on the new laptop. 

From our meeting this morning - sales technique - is there anything that I haven't shown you that we are missing? Open it up and let them respond.

The guys were going over SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses) options based on batches. Steve is willing to help with some API integration stuff for certain 3rd party solutions. We also talked about the need for flex grid tie-ins and being able to use those as a pass through in the internal cart or shopping cart. We need to be able to pass customer, invoice, time, and part number (items) information through the cart flex grid options. This doesn't exist yet.

Danny was talking about stock/units and using VIN (serial number) look-up tools and outside services to help verify user inputs. John was reporting on some new changes for the bank homepage. Light talk on layout options and using tabs, cards, and responsive web layouts. Small date format bug fix. Talking more about the flex grid pass through in the cart.

The further we go, the more settings play into the mix. We tend to build generic tools and then reuse those tools over and over again. Custom stuff for individual companies may be required, but we will try to use settings and permissions where possible. Try to make everything as data driven as possible.

Sean and Danny were talking about demos and techniques. They are prepping an outline with hyperlinks to help them navigate and show things quickly vs having to navigate the whole system to get to the same pages. Good technique.

Steve joined the meeting, even though it was his day off. We got into talking about new time settings and my meeting yesterday with Beaver Mountain (local ski school). They have been using adilas for close to 7 years now. Most recently, they are looking to use it to help them with registration for their special mountain events and races. It was unintentional, but I ended up giving all of the guys on a meeting a full-on demo of what we are doing and where we are heading.

Steve was kind of challenging me on a few things - why did you do that? What about this or that? Maybe we could do this or that, etc. We talked about it and I took some notes. I still don't fully know what direction to go and what would be best, but I took some notes. Some of it was dealing with multiple systems vs a single system, settings, custom code vs building for the masses, and individual customer records vs quick flex grid to get super simple data into the system quickly. We talked about effort levels, timing, speed, data in/out, exports, and future flow. It was a good discussion, even though I felt like I was being challenged on every front.

As a side note, when we started this project, back in 2015, we didn't have what we have now (7 years later). If we had had what we have now, it would have been a different story. All things are possible and are options, it just depends on timing, resources, budgets, skills, and where the system is at (functionality wise).

As a part of fracture and going forward, we will be trying to turn in as much stuff to settings as we possibly can. We have 4 known levels for settings. They are corp-wide (world level), group-wide (12 main players), page-wide (per page per section), and user-wide (preferences and options per person). Things keep breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces another word for it is "subs". We even were talking about things like subs of corp-wide settings and almost location-wide settings. We don't want to go there yet, but it is starting to surface. Basically, the main goal is to turn everything into settings, where possible.

Along those same lines, if you have tons of settings, you will also need different levels of users - end users (lower levels of knowledge and skill), medium or middle users (knowledge of settings, options, and configurations). You will also need the admin users or backend/systems admin persons (who is making and building the settings for the others to use). It can get deep.

It is ok to re-think the processes or re-think these processes. Permission granted! Often, education leads to new ideas. We see it in our clients all the time. We add something or teach them how to do something and almost immediately they come up with something new, different, or that now seems possible based on the last known level. We call that taking the next logical step. It's huge and big part of what we do.

The last note for this session was this - everything is breaking into subs, sub settings, sub permissions, and sub configuration options. Everything!

Steve and some of the other guys were on a bigger demo this morning. It was just Danny, Sean, John, Michael, and I on the meeting. The guys were talking about demos and what they like to show and what they like to gloss over (speed of the demos and interest levels). Sean then showed some of the cultivation stuff that they are setting up for an upcoming demo.

It turned into a small sales meeting. Michael reported on what he was doing and up to. Sean and Danny were running the meeting. We went back and talked more about different bids, demos, and possible options. John showed us some of the dashboard stuff that he was working on for his school projects. We would love to grab some of that type of code and put some fun stuff into play inside of adilas. This deals with dashboards, quick counts, sums, totals, aggregates, charts, graphs, and other quick eye candy. We talked briefly about our desire to build out graphical homepages for each of the main players and sections. That would be really cool.

As we were talking about graphics, Danny, who is a pilot showed a screenshot of a modern navigation or heads-up panel from an airplane. The old way was tons of different gages, the new way is a real time visual with all of the main important stuff, right at your fingertips. That's what adilas needs, a head-up panel for your business.

Danny then showed us a small video that he was working on. It's just a quick website overview. He is just playing with ideas, timing, and concepts. Anyways, here's the link to the video.

Our next major subject was talking about display and modern design stuff. We went over tabs, horizontal nav systems, vertical nav systems, cards, titles, buttons, sliding drawers, show/hide and toggle options. Lots of visuals. That lead us into a discussion on my cart favorite buttons and how we could keep pushing on those custom buttons and improve their look and feel as well as add additional functionality to them. We talked about smaller cards with other required settings on the individual cards. We also talked about time buttons and how that could really help for scheduling. Great idea going forward for internal scheduling and fracture level controls for custom interfaces.

To expand on the button concept and/or my cart favorites. What if the custom buttons weren't just for the cart? We have similar things on the snow owl theme and the individual payee buttons that can be mapped to different pages, URL's, reports, or sections within the site. What if we took all of those things (cart buttons, quick look-ups, jump or hyperlinks (URL's), navigation, and other options and made the whole interface something that you could setup, on the fly and be specific per user. As a side note, we allow for buttons to be copied right now, if they are set to public vs private. If a public button (aka some sort of nav type button) could be copied, that could be really cool and could allow a lesser user (skill wise) to be able to get awesome functionality without having to know the whole backend processes. Just a thought.

This conversation took us over to the shopping cart, split cart, and different cart types and styles. We talked about all kinds of visual and setting based improvements that we could do over in the shopping cart land. We briefly rolled through the classic cart, the kush cart, and the short and sweet cart (different existing cart styles). John was talking about adding in settings to help with flow controls (step 1 of 3) or crumb trails (you are here - in this process or step), etc. Ways of visually showing our users where they are and what else if still coming and/or needed to complete a certain process or procedure. My biggest takeaway from the entire meeting was - "Show people, don't just tell them!".

Morning meeting. Sean joined and was just checking in. Danny joined and we started chatting about different subjects. Sean had some questions about SG&A costs (selling, general and administrative costs or internal manufacturing and unitizing costs to specific units). We talked about recipes and the potential there to keep track of things and to virtually unitize different costs through the recipe/build process.

We switched gears and started to talk about pitching "potential". We already have tons of that. This is a quote from a business consultant that we were working with at one time. He said - "Part of what I pitch is hope, the potential to be and do better!". I would like to help us keep pitching potential and hope. That is awesome!

We talked about new companies and helping to keep them up to date with new training and getting them started. We talked about how much to bite off at a single time. If you take smaller bites, it works better, but you have to be willing to circle back around. If you give too much, you could overwhelm them or flood them out. Baby steps and smaller bites. It takes longer, but the experience is better over time. Basically, get comfortable and then move on to the next thing.

Lots of discussions and talk about "custom". Most software systems are just as is, they really don't allow for custom solutions over and above their base product. We, on the other hand, love custom and can either do the whole thing or fill in the gaps as needed. This is from Russell Moore, back in 2016, "Adilas is a great companion software package for any business." We can fill in or virtually fill in the gaps wherever there is a need. We got into talking about how you can virtually use any part of the system or any part of the whole. Everything is an option but not required. That really leads us to do more customization of things. We are ok with that. It is part of our model.

One of our biggest benefits is being able to pull things together in one place. We even want to keep expanding on that concept and make other homepages or bring it together type pages or sections. We talked about getting all of the settings together into one page. That conversation caused us to get into the four different types of settings (that we know of right now). We have world or corp-wide settings, group level settings (invoices, customers, products, etc.), page level settings, and user level settings. After talking about that for a bit, we got into talking about world building and where we are headed there. Literally, the deeper you get, one thing will lead right into the next, in a true system or world building experience.

The guys were talking about a client who has a running list of things that they want us to do (once we or they have some funding). That is part of world building and deals with - what do you need, what do you want, and how will we get there?

The next part of the session was me, going off and giving an impromptu history lesson on where we came from and a series of events that lead to where we are now. I was having fun. I hope that the guys liked it. We bounced into adilas, looked at numbers, projects, histories, etc. I showed them a new graphic that I was working on called the progression of things and we chatted about that. I jumped into an old Excel file that had some numbers to show growth, etc. Anyways, I thought it was a fun history or historical session of sort. Good stuff. See attached for some of the files that we were going over.

Going over custom labels and being able to configure those labels through dynamic settings. Steve's next settings page is going to be for the printable invoices. They started to talk about Metrc (state tracking system). Steve was also reporting on what Mike is doing and what he is pitching and throwing. Mike owns Herbo and eXpo, two different companies that are integrated with adilas as 3rd party solutions and even virtual white labels of the adilas platform. He is pitching adilas as a possible option under some different labels and umbrellas.

The guys got into a subject of adilas phones and what we could offer there. This is a phone tree type software package that adilas acquired a few years back. It has kind of just been sitting there, being used by a small number of clients but not really being pushed. They pulled it up and were looking around the adilas phones section and pages. Getting deeper into the phone tree stuff.

Danny was saying, software is only as good as the setup and the usage of that software. I would agree. We also were talking about some of the salespersons and what they could do and offer. There are some great skills out there.

We started talking about a new shopping cart and being able to switch back and forth between a possible new look and feel and the older more stable versions. Talking about adding more cart settings. Ideas about being able to flip over to toggle switches vs checkboxes. This is a more modern look and feel thing. What we would really like is nice interfaces that have the one-pager type feel where you can do all kinds of things from just one page. It still interacts with the server, session (memory stuff), and database queries, but there is a minimum or no full page refreshes. It all happens on one page (one-pager apps). This is a more modern way of doing web code.

Steve is excited to get John helping out with some new look and feel stuff and pages. I too am excited to get John going on some GUI (graphical user interfaces) and UI/UX stuff (user interfaces and user experience). Here we go, just need the funding and the green light.

Danny and Sean popped into the meeting. Nothing major going on but just talking about sales, demos, and how to put our best foot forward. We talked about getting small quick screenshots and samples to help go along with our demos. Currently, we bounce inside of a demo site, show someone around and then bounce somewhere else. I use the word bounce, and we are fine with that, but to a new user, that seems like you have to know a lot, in order to jump or bounce around. They want to know that we have certain things and want to get their hands held for the first little bit.

Because we are so flexible, it sometimes intimidates people and new users. That might be a good thing to remember for fracture (future project). Maybe setup a super simple step 1, 2, 3 process that always work (for example, the normal front door entance) and then show them how they can change that if they want to (side doors, back doors, basement doors, garage doors, etc.). Dustin was calling it handrails. I might be nice to have different training modes or education modes. If you turn it on, meaning education mode, it virtually tells you what to do. If you turn it off, you can bounce wherever you want (like normal). Almost an analogy of training wheels vs freeride or normal bike riding (without training wheels).

As a small side note, my dad (Wayne Moore) was saying the same things yesterday. We were looking at the main adilas.biz website and he was saying, I like the verbage but I want to see it (super tiny clips or screenshots). For example: It says "real time visibility and control with inventory management". Ok, what does that mean and can you quickly show me (a picture is worth a 1,000 words type mentality)? Just some quick screen shots.

As a note, there may be different levels. We may need a quick overview, a quick this is that (demo style), and then a deeper how to or let's really learn and master this. I can totally see a need for different levels of screenshots, examples, tutorials, and step-by-step walk throughs. Good stuff.

Great meeting with the sales crew. There were 8 of us on the call. See attached for the meeting notes.

Stephen Berkenkotter
to Sean, Shari, Hope, Michael, Rueben, Danny

So ......... great meeting.

Everyone on the call is a co-owner of adilas.
Each person has full on authority to complete the sales process and deploy.
Just touch base on pricing until you have this dialed in.

Goal is
Help 1 business succeed.
Focus on just 1.

Tools are
Free Deployment/Training
Competitive Monthly / Activation Pricing
No Contract

Benefits are
Increased hours
10% of the monthly

This is for all salespeople
Danny
Sean
Hope
Michael
Rueben

Open this link on your phone and save to the homescreen.

Sales Presentation Gallery

I was recording notes while the other guys were talking about sales and strategies. Steve, Danny, and Sean were talking about small promo items, selling and pitching our services, and even getting a small account for our guys in the field to really figure things out (a live mini test bed). The more that they get into the whole process, the more they get it what it can do and can't do. That is huge. Lots of talks about that and ideas that were related to that on-the-job training (hand on) approach. Steve was even saying, it may be worth it for us to pay them (the sales reps) to get an account and we cover the setup fees, training costs, and what not to get them up and going. Just an idea.

We are wanting and needing to get ourselves out there more. Nobody knows what we do and what we provide. We need to get the word out there. It would be nice to have a really small starting point. Getting people engaged right away. Some of our guys need some more accountability (daily meetings and/or small touches).

Danny, Sean, Steve, and I on a meeting. Who is our competition? What if we took our sales angle and tried shooting for bigger targets. We can get small accounts, but that takes a lot of work to get them setup. Really big ones have a bunch of red tape and lots of levels of management to get through. It gets tough.

Talking about associations, relationships, and social networking. On the training side of things, we talked about getting the word out and helping people know what we do. Currently, nobody knows all of the pieces of adilas. That is crazy. Just for fun, I rolled back and was looking at an older entry that was talking about what we have and what we offer. See element of time # 5484 for more info.

We then got into talking about private research and transferring knowledge and information. We need to keep working on good documentation and what we really have.

Reviewing code with Bryan. Looking at his new settings and flow for unique events. Going over some scenarios and checking on bugs. Also did a quick fix for Danny for online scheduling, small bug fix.

Small demo for my day (Wayne Moore) and Harry (my dad's friend). They were pitching that we need some training courses. They want to go pitch adilas, but don't feel that they know what it can do. We talked a bunch about LinkedIn training courses. See attached for some of my notes. The first part was for the demo and then we started talking about all kinds of education type options.

- Wayne - training courses - in LinkedIn - people need to see it

- Adilas course that could be as deep as we would like... overview, beginner, intermediate, advanced, deep-dive

- Helping people know what is possible

- Get people where they need to go and then come out with a skill

- YouTube is another option

- We could get a lot of traction if we help train the public on what we have

- Putting the pieces together - where do you start and where can it go (easily) and with some work (more in-depth).

- The crazy things that we are doing - everybody needs.

- Global communities

- Tapping into other resources - including going into LinkedIn - allowing them to get all of the resources (course materials) so that they could do it on their own

- Helping show the adilas world - we have to show what we have

- Just in time learning and training - being able to move from step to step (building out the whole)

- We already have pieces - we need to string it all together - at the professional level - having our own plan of how to navigate the elephant

- Wayne was really pitching the training aspect of what we have and do

- Harry - you get what you pay for - If they pay for it, they become invested and involved - time, money, etc.

- Time - that is the tricky piece - sometimes we feel like we are so busy

- The digital world of learning - certificates, learning, etc.

- Adilas keeps changing... that is part of the game

- Steve was commenting on how we used to do videos - way back - we couldn’t even get things edited before they changed

- Wayne and Steve were talking about setting up new courses on LinkedIn - Wayne will see what it takes to add in new courses

- Steve was showing them some of Danny’s adilas quick tip videos

- Funding - getting enough to get that part of the puzzle going

- Talking about invoice reminders, online payments, etc.

- Steve was showing them the warranty registration stuff - video from Chuck

- Steve was explaining how our model has changed. We used to use outside reps and consultants. Now everything is done internally, using adilas trainers

- Steve was pitching ongoing training courses for our clients.

- Wayne has a degree in curriculum and training

- Steve was showing his older YouTube player - older stuff - but still valid - we need to update it and keep it fresh

- Speed and cadence of what we are going over - full outline and layout

- Just in time online courses

- People are pretty picky - we have to capture their attention pretty quick or maybe even faster

- Keeping up with the constant changes

- From Wayne - make the world our audience! Getting the information in front of the decision makers

- We can schedule more meetings, or we are on every morning at 9:00 am on the GoToMeeting channel

- From Steve - how do we make this go forward? Plans, compensation, ideas (even out of the box).

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

After the meeting, my head was swimming. I came up with a couple of other ideas, just for fun.

- What if for training we gave a new user 3 accounts vs just one account. Here is my thinking - One could be for the start of the lesson (work area), one could be for the finish of the lesson (what is expected or a finished product), and one could be for fun (we keep whatever, their own playground). All of the other systems could be reset to any stage by rolling back a database. Assuming that the training was planned out enough to roll things backwards and forwards as needed. This could all be scripted and rolled around as needed. It would really help with training and keeping things standard.

- What about making things plane Jane type interface or only as much as is needed. Keep it simple. Just a thought.

- Being able to reset the database at any time could be really cool.

- We aren't ready for this yet, but for fracture, it sure would be cool if we could have certain settings and defaults on speed dial. Basically, if someone wants a certain setup or package, the database (aka the backend scripts) could help us flip flop things in a hurry. Currently, we have to setup all of the pieces, settings, permissions, naming conventions, show/hide, sort order, and other aliases in a manual format or fashion. That takes quite a bit of knowledge. If we could get our settings and options dialed in, that would really help and speed things up. We could configure and virtually show/hide certain things in a click of the button vs hours of individual configuration. Lots of options here. It could be size wise (tiny, small, medium, large, extra large, huge) or it could be industry specific (this for that, and this other stuff for some other industry - tons of options). Preconfigure whatever we can. If they want to still tweak things out, it all exists, it just gives them a quicker starting point.

- Not sure where to take this... but I was thinking about books and choose your own adventure type style books. If you want to do this, go to page x or y. If you want to do this other thing go to page z. What if we helped setup our training in the same manner? If you want to put this on account, do this. If you want to pay for this, do this. You get the idea.

- Train the world

- Super easy setup and configuration, you could then tweak it if needed to get super custom

Working with Danny, Sean, and Shari O. on the rafting site (demo site). They, especially Danny, were requesting and wanting some kind of SOP's (standard operating procedures) or some kind of a quick start guide. See attached for our notes. New notes are at the bottom. Mostly the session was just checking in and some light communications for today.

One of my observations is we have things all over the place. We have things inside elements of time, in physical notebooks, in emails, on adilas university, on YouTube, in help files, on different google drives, and the list goes on. We have a ton of resources, but they are not yet linked, cataloged, and organized for use. It's too spread out. That would be an awesome project to get all of that together and available to the public. That could be a future fracture type project. Training and education are huge spokes that we need in our wheel. There is a whole other side to this thing and it's on the education and training level.

Totally random, but a fun side note or thought - Think how cool it would be to go through the different system players (all 12), all of the different system business functions (12 of those as well), and the underlying core concepts. That would be awesome. Beginner, intermediate, advanced, and deep dive or backend levels. Show how things act, cause and effect relationships, where they show up for roll call, how things happened historically, how they effectually show up for roll call, and even how they financially affect inventories, banks, P&L's, balance sheets, and other financial relationships. That would be sooooo cool! I would love to work on that project.

I would love to get into the how, why, and what we are doing. The how and why really seem like fun topics. The "what" is pretty normal but allow us to do the other parts of the puzzle or passing the data along the virtual data assembly line. Getting into 3D world building and all kinds of cool stuff. So many things that we want to do and build. We just need help getting to that next level.

Steve and Sean were on going over new custom label settings that Steve was working on. He is doing tons on the labels and tying in everything to dynamic page settings. He had a few questions about version control (Git stuff). We got him all squared away and headed in a good direction. Next, we chatted about upcoming online scheduling settings and where to go next with those pieces. Bryan and I are making some good progress. I was doing some drawings and showing the guys where we are headed and what some of Bryan's new setting will do for unique calendar events and being able to book those from online or ecommerce.

Steve was talking with a lady and virtually gave her a small demo just by talking to her over the dinner table (concepts and principles). The lady loved the concepts of what we are trying to do and how it could help make things better and smoother. Basically, I think that people do like what we are doing, they just expect it to be done and ready to pull off the shelf (walmart style) where it looks nice, has a set price, and you can just pick it up. We will keep heading in that direction, but the reality is, it takes time and money, tons of settings, permissions, and even custom pieces. We are really going in a great direction. Keep going!

Shari O. and Danny joined the meeting. We did some light sub inventory training with them. Sean was chiming in as well. We've got some great team members. That is awesome. Hopefully we can all keep learning together along the way.

Working with Danny and Shari O. over a Zoom session. We were looking into more new settings and getting the rafting company demo site up and going. We made some plans, showed a few updates, and even had some fun marketing and sales type ideas. See attached for an updated MS Word document. Shari O. recorded the meeting. Once again, mostly a work session, but she recorded it anyways.

After the meeting was over, Shari O. and I stayed on and chatted about business ownership, percentages, goals, and feelings about how things are playing out (pros and cons). It was good for both of us, and we both needed a listening ear. Bouncing some thoughts and ideas off of each other. Good stuff. Crazy how busy life is and gets sometimes.

Meeting with Danny and going over options for embedding YouTube videos into adilas pages. We would like to use media/content, a custom player page, and make the whole things data driven. We went over some samples and even let Danny build a few pages. As a fun side note, Danny has been building out a number of quick tip videos (under 3 minutes) and we are trying to get those out to the public and spread their access links all over our site (where needed).

Just for fun, here is an older embedded video clip showing a demo of a liquor store and how they use adilas.

Danny was on the morning meeting this morning. The topic was videos and marketing. Danny is working on some quick tips and then some deep dives, dealing with different videos. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how best to get the word out. We also talked about themes - do we want to be more serious business or mix and bled and get a more playful theme. We kinda like the more playful theme.

Once the videos are done, we need a way to spread that information and link to those videos from various places within the system or within the site. One of the hardest things with adilas is how quickly things change. It is super hard to keep up and keep our users up to date on what is changing and happening. Often we will build something new and no one knows about it. That same topic "spreading the knowledge or know how" has been and is becoming more of an issue.

Sean and Steve were talking about recipes and production stuff. Sean was trying to figure things out and we finally figured out that one of the categories was missing some sub inventory attributes. We talked about making the error message a better error to help direct the users to what was needed.

We also spent some time talking about look and feel and being consistent. We kinda have a half-painted house right now - switching from classic to snow owl themes (all look and feel stuff). The last topic of the meeting was talking about setting up time with the developers and getting a full rundown on new functionality and doing some of the deep dives or developer level demos.

Steve and Sean were going over gram controllers and all kinds of ratios and scenarios. It sounded like a deeper need for real mini conversions dealing with ratios, sizes, weights, packaging, units of measure, and such. They were kinda going in circles and ended up making some decisions to just fake it a bit. Basically, they (an outside party) was not providing them the correct information, so our guys (Steve and Sean) were just going to make it work and make some assumptions. The communication back and forth has been non-existent between the state compliance service and our company. That makes it really tough. So, we are just going for it.

I was working on coding in some updates for the bike shuttle and auto updating budget counts based on flex grid tie-ins to certain events and elements of time. When Steve and Sean got finished, I ended up giving them a demo on where the online scheduling is going and headed. They enjoyed the demo and saw some good potential.

Steve had to take off and Sean and I looked at a small marketing video that Danny was working on. They are trying to make a number of small adilas tip videos to help with some of the marketing and sales efforts. Anyways, we will give a few of those a try to see what kind of response we get. After that I spent some time paying some bills.

Some of the guys were checking in. Looking at some code for Dustin. Tons of emails. Steve was talking with Danny about labels and options there. After that, Steve and Sean were talking sales and updates back and forth on what is going on. Lots of moving pieces. I pushed up some code for Dusin. Steve and Sean did another small session on talking about new settings, labels, and other updates.

Tuesday morning sales meeting was going on when I joined. There were 8 people on the call. Danny and Chuck were going over leads for dealerships and other verticals. Talking about option and what we have to offer to dealerships. Somewhat of an open format or open forum. Lots of good suggestions and reminders of tools and features that have been developed over the years. Steve was saying a bunch of things that he knows were really important when he was doing that business (new and used vehicles and trailers). Working with dealerships was where we started, back in the day. The first 5-6 years of the system were spent doing a custom write-up for a multi-location used vehicle and new trailer dealership, out of both Colorado and Texas.

If we ever need, we have tons of older data from those older corporations. They were shut down in 2009 and 2010 in order to focus more on adilas. The automotive and trailer dealers were coming off of a huge recession from 2008 and 2009. Our software (web-based platform) was where we were focusing. There is some fun history there, as far as how things developed and why. It could be a really fun origins type story. Countless times of finding a source of pain and then coming up with one or more solutions to combat the pain.

After the sales meeting, I helped merge in some code for Dustin. We also talked about tons of code that is partially built and tested but not deployed. We call that either code on a shelf or half baked (or whatever percentage - 75%, 90%, 99% baked) projects. We've got a ton of that that we would like to harvest and get over the finish line. Tons of options there.

John had some state tax withholding and payroll questions. We looked over some code and got him going in a good direction. Wayne popped in for a server meeting and we chatted before the next meeting began.

Conversation between Steve, Danny, and I on labels and consistency. Many of the past custom labels were setup by specific staff members (from our clients) and then changes happen to either staff (employees of different companies) or changes in processes. We were talking about the need to add in some settings on the custom labels and empowering the users where we can.

Danny is helping with the transition to pass on the job of custom labels. He is willing to help with different pieces but doesn't want to hold all of the weight of the custom labels. Steve has already started working on some new custom label settings.

A bit of history... we used to say that adilas could or can do anything. We just have to code it certain ways. That is true and accurate, but it also means that people have to use our product as it was designed (for example custom labels). We are finding that certain things are failing, not because of bad code, but because the knowledge or dependent pieces are not being done correctly. Everything feeds off of the certain processes and/or assumptions.

After talking about labels, Steve and Sean were talking about sales and getting a guy out on the ground to knock doors and talk to people (network).

Steve and Danny were talking about different verticals and doing sales in the different areas. Lots of options. Then Steve, Sean, and Marisa got on and were doing some demo prep stuff. I ended up bailing out in order to make some phone calls. Recording some notes.

This may or may not fit here, but I was reminded of the importance of both maintenance and education. Sometimes those two key pieces are better than creating something new. Often is is more fun to create something new, but if you have something and keep it updated (maintained) and people get educated on it (the existing piece or feature), you can still have a great product or feature. Anyways, I was reminded of that saying today while on the meeting, going through emails, and just thinking.

Two different phone calls. One with Steve and one with Danny. On the phone with Steve for about 45 minutes. Making plans and talking about possible options. The other call was with Danny for about half an hour. We talked about some of the industries that we deal with and options and personalities of different people that we work with and/or have dealings with. Danny is looking to change things up a bit and doesn't want to work with the cannabis clients. He would also like to turn the custom labels over to John or Steve or Dustin, if possible.

As Danny and I were talking - he mentioned a story about a kid who wanted to be good at a sport but wasn't into doing weights (lifting weights) in the off season. As the guy grew up, he saw the benefit of spending time in the weight room. Anyways, the story goes on to talk about how sometimes we can't see what is going on at the time. Instead of a weight room, he was saying that God puts us in the "wait room" (patience, spending time, and hopefully learning while we wait). Sometimes we can't see the advantage of the "wait room" until later on. I liked the story, good stuff.

Danny and Eric talking about PDF labels. Printing and controlling hardware is tough over the web. Lots of talk about possible settings and allowing users to either interact or manage settings to get the desired outcome. There was also some talks about specifying certain hardware and then fully supporting it. Currently, bigger decisions than we want to make or commit to. In the meantime, we talked about some options and possible hacks (quick solutions) that could help advance the ball and help us know where problems reside.

We already have one, but it needs to be refined and tweaked out a bit, but we need a full dynamic web-based label builder app. Calvin has built us one, but we haven't had the time to get in there and tweak things around like we want them. It works, it just needs a little bit more loving.

Reviewing code with John on some small state payroll updates. John is working on new state withholding calculations for the state of Massachusetts.

Eric and I were going over a customer automation process for a client. Eric is working on a custom (client funded) project for a trailer dealership and their needs. 

Emails. Meeting up with the guys on the morning meeting. Steve was touching base with the guys when I joined. Eric popped in and asked a few questions. We also had Sean, Danny, and John join and ask a few questions.

We were chasing a bug on reoccurring expenses and dealing with random days of the month (some with 31, 30, or 29 days). Added in a small fix and pushed up the new files. Talking with John how state tax and withholding calculations are being handled and done in the payroll portion of the site. He is looking to help me out with the payroll stuff. Big learning curve to get into that section of the application, thousands and thousands of lines of code and lots of branching logic.

Both Sean and Danny joined in on the meeting and were checking in this morning. We spent a little bit of time and went over some of the intro to world building stuff that I sent around yesterday evening. This is the small five-page doc that Shannon and I have been working on for the adilas core concepts - origins doc. Anyways, we had some fun discussions about some of the concepts. My goal is to keep introducing some of these pieces, one piece or step at a time. I think that the full-blown concept of world buiding or business world building is too deep for people to get right off the bat. However, as they learn about it, I really think it helps them envision possibilities and creates the "why" for what we are doing.

Eric joined and we went over some progress on the sales tax aggregate project. We have learned some big lessons on this one. Anyways, I think that he and Wayne have had some great meetings and have a good plan in place. One of the things that was happening was cross merging. We had some hidden first round pages and prototypes in place on the master branch. Then as new development would happen, even on a different branch, we would merge in the master code branch to keep it up to date. The problem was, the true older code was on the master branch and so it kept overwriting the new development. Anyways, I think we got it figured out. Lots of cause and effect things. It also brings into light the need for a manual touch vs just letting the code or applications do everything automatically. All part of the learning curve and what it takes to have a master code branch, a dev testing branch, and keeping everything straight and still up to date. Lots of challenges.

One other topic that Eric wanted to bring up was a communication platform called "Discord" and how it may help us connect and interact better. We currently use GoToMeeting for online meetings. We also have a number of folks who will pop out to Zoom sessions or whatever. Eric is going to look deeper into Discord and then give me a small walk-through to see if we want to switch and check things out there for some of our meetings and communication needs.

After everybody left, John and I were talking and going over some of his skills and how diverse they are (backend, servers, IT, graphics, frontend UI stuff, and modern trends and strategies). He also has done some managing and admin level stuff in the past. A good mix.

Midweek sales meeting going on this morning. There were 10 people on the meeting. Marisa, Steve, Alicia, Audrey, Chuck, Danny, John, Sean, Shari O., and I were attending. Marisa was taking notes and she and Danny were swapping out and running the meeting. They launched a newsletter signup that is tied to news and updates. They were talking about leads and demos that they either have, have had, or are scheduled.

Sean and Marisa are doing great and handling all of the demos. Shari O. chimed in a few times. They are tracking the deployment and training on the new accounts and new corporations. That is awesome.

Once the sales folks left, Steve had some questions for Chuck and John dealing with CSS and page layout. Funny thing, they were trying to fix it and then Chuck went to the adilas docs and pulled some sample code out for Steve to use. What do you know, it fixed the issue. The cool thing was that the answer came straight from the adilas docs. Good job Chuck and John!

Towards the end, Chuck and John were talking about options for imbedding custom videos per page. Good little discussion.

Small mid-week sales meeting was going on when I joined up this morning. I think that the sales team was going to start a small Tuesday meeting and then still do their normal Friday meeting as well. Just touching base quickly and getting more communication going on. While the meeting was going on, I was mostly in the background watching and listening. Danny was running the meeting, Marisa was taking notes and going through the agenda, and others were chiming in. Steve was giving a lot of input with ideas and challenges.

They also talked about some targeted marketing in Colorado. Reaching out to trailer dealers and also possible leads in the campground and reservation industry. Basically, networking, finding people who need our software and tools. Lots of tossing ideas around. Towards the end, it was just Steve, Marisa, John, and I. Marisa sure has been a huge asset on the sales and marketing side of things. We have a really good team.

Going through emails and such. Checking in with Danny on the structure for promissory notes and small business loans and investments. Small stand-up with Alan, Cory, and I on a side project. I got pulled into looking into a possible sub inventory export error dealing with multiple decimals. From everything that I was able to find, our code looked to be doing the correct thing. However, Microsoft Excel was reformatting some of the data and only showing 2 decimals by default. We had to do some manual formatting in Excel to get it right and show all five decimals. All of the data was there (our part of the export), it was just formatted incorrectly on the Excel side. Reported back to Cory about what I had found out.

Wayne had both Alan and I on the meeting. John, Steve, and Cory were also there but mostly on mute in the background. Wayne was doing an explanation and virtual show and tell on what was going on with some of the Application.cfc changes. We talked about all kinds of subjects and topics. Here are some of my notes:

- Our current settings need to keep moving more into models, services, and objects.

- Cfc's, in ColdFusion, are like classes in other languages.

- Lots of time going over onRequest actions and setting global variables. Lots of root path stuff to help with navigation from any folder, any server, and any sub directory (tons of path stuff).

- Talking about includes and possible copy and paste errors.

- We worked on a small bug fix together. Cory brought it up, Wayne coded it, and Alan help do some research and offered guidance.

- We went over a bunch of functions, private, global, and even page level functions. We started out wide on the global defaults and then went deeper into the page level values and defaults.

- Towards the end, Wayne and John were pushing up some of their new changes. I was watching them log into the other servers and do a git deploy and some of the other scripts behind the scenes that I do get to see very often.

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The meeting switched and Eric joined us. We were watching Wayne and Eric talk about some super deep admin SQL (database code) and some custom scripts that they were working on. We got pretty deep into grants, permissions, special functions, triggers, and stored procedures. Alan joined in and all three of the guys were talking about some deep meta data level stuff and options for their functions, tables, and backend routines. Definitely an database admin level discussion. Steve and others were still listening in, but they were mostly lost.

We got into some discussions on checking dependencies and what relies on what (levels and structure). The guys were talking about stored procedures and even comparing code between different branches to make sure that they had the latest and greatest code. Eventually the discussion got into other value-added services and how to monetize some of the tweaks and changes that we are making. Often the developers or server admin guys just try to make things work. We were talking about different ways of structuring stuff so that it could pay for itself by passing on the costs to our customers, for those who want specific features and functions.

The next subject was dealing with corp objects and how does this play into cross corp and cross server updates and changes. They were even talking about options and how to store data, store session values, and application scope values to be able to mix and match users to servers and users to corps. Lots of stuff already exists and we can already do a bunch of this, but it is only getting deeper and deeper. Stuff like sharing session scopes, custom database storage, accessing stored objects, being able do single login and then flipping between corps, servers, domains, and applications. Deeper, almost universe level stuff.

Alan and Wayne were talking about new properties and being able to modify some of the models, services, and objects. They were making some plans and talking through some options. I know a bit of code, but getting Wayne, Alan, and Eric talking about things got pretty deep. My job was pitching the vison and hoping to keep them going on those pieces. They honestly were over my head a bit today.

Towards the end of this meeting, the guys were going over some other Docker and Percona MySQL database issues that they had talked about before. Giving each other some updates and setting up some new tasks and to do lists. I'm really glad that we have a team that can figure some of this stuff out. I know that I couldn't do it alone. I'm super grateful for the other team members and what they bring to the table. One of the end goals is having and using better and better coding practices. We are all trying for that.

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All of the other guys left, and Steve and I stayed on for a few minutes talking about scalability and direction. We have a lot of other things cooking and going on. We also spent some time talking about marketing, sales, and even creating some pricing flyers dealing with the core level to enterprise levels of what we have and what we are building. We will try to get Sean, Marisa, Chuck, and Danny in on putting those pieces together. Here is a quick overview of the different levels.

1. Standard Adilas Core
2. Industry Specific Skins and Features
3. Custom Code, Flow, Data, and Interfaces
4. BI - Business Intelligence Dashboards - Aggregates
5. Enterprise level(s) - Multi Corp or Multi World

John and I had a good work session on year end forms. We started out the meeting going over some XSS (cross site scripting) stuff and how to protect some of our pages and features from the cross site hacks and such. We removed a portion from one of the database updates that was potentially dangerous. The rest of the meeting was used grabbing PDF forms from the IRS website, flattening them, and prepping them for use in the adilas system. By way of a random note, we got clear to the end and realized that we were dealing with forms for 2022 instead of 2021. The current date is 12/30/21 and we needed to get the 2021 forms up and live prior to Jan 31, 2022. Anyways, we tried to find the 2021 forms but couldn't find them on the IRS website. Almost like they skipped 2021 and jumped right to 2022. Anyways, it threw us for a small loop.

I merged in some code for Danny and reached out to Russell for some help with the snow owl theme (CSS and theme stuff).

When I joined this morning, due to the holidays (new year) there was a sales meeting going on. There were 8 people on the meeting. Danny was helping to run it and Marisa was taking notes and going over the agenda. They were talking about a bunch of different things. Good stuff.

After that, Steve and I were chatting about some upcoming meetings that he has. We are pitching some estimates to some guys that Steve has been working with. We talked about the advantages and costs of having a fully developed team and what that brings to the table.

Wayne had launched some new code to help with full text indexing and matching partial values (flexible customer searches). It was working great for basic names and values. It was somewhat failing if we used any special characters. We ended up on a Zoom meeting with Wayne, John, Cory, and I. Eventually, we decided to roll back the new changes and stick with the old way. We may take a different direction and see if we can get the special characters to work better. The full text searches were faster, just not quite as flexible (out of the box). We will check it out and keep poking around.

Cory and Steve touching base on funding and projects. It got into a discussion between Steve and I on our current model and defining things more tightly. Basically, making some of the verbal discussions more official and permanent. This will help all parties involved. Cory and I will work on a plan and get it back to Steve for review. After that, Cory was going over questions and projects that she had on her list.

We really want to get the sales tax aggregate project launched and merged into master. Currently, it is somewhat in a stalemate on a separate branch right now. Cory texted Eric and he joined the meeting for a bit. Small conversations about some plans. The main holdup right now is how to deploy the new code on all servers and also on the developer testing environments? The new code requires some higher database level permissions and access grants. This gets into a conflict between automation and security. We don't want a super enabled database user on the system but we still need to get some things done.

Merged in some new labels for Danny, Cory, and a client. After that, we briefly talked with Steve and Cory about the gift cards and special accounts stuff. We are running into some bottlenecks and how to get around those pieces. Some deals with talent, code, and permissions.

John showed Steve some of the Jira boards and then talking about some of the current sprints and using/allocating the correct resources. As a side note, we are getting pressure from some of our 3rd party solutions to do upgrades and required maintenance. John was also expressing his opinions on some current processes and executive decisions. We talked a lot about extra costs and budgeting.

Wayne and John are really wanting us to move away from Adobe ColdFusion and Hostek (as the hosting company) and move towards Lucee (opensource ColdFusion engine) and AWS for hosting. That is still just talk, but on the radar. Just talking numbers, savings, and possibilities. Eventually it comes down to decisions and then communications to keep all of us on the same page.

When I joined up, there was a sales meeting going on. There were 8 people on the meeting. I was mostly a fly on the wall, but awesome to listen and hear what was going on. Marisa was leading the meeting and had an agenda, notes, follow-ups, etc. Awesome stuff. These were the people on the meeting: Brandon, Marisa, Steve, Audrey, Chuck, Danny, John, and Sean.

At 9:30, the sprint scrum teams joined up and had their daily standup meeting. We had Brandon (me), Bryan, Marisa, Alan, Chuck, Eric, John, Cory, Sean, and Wayne on the second half of the meeting. I took some other meeting notes and recorded them inside of adilas. Towards the end of the meeting, they were going over some light trainings and what not.

Two small meetings with some of the main players within the adilas system. Both sales and developers teams.

Danny, Sean, and Steve were talking sales strategy stuff when I joined. We got a few light updates from some of the guys. We then had a standup meeting for the scrum team. They are just starting their third sprint. They seemed in good spirits and knew where they were going. Alan was leading them. Light bit bucket and git training at the end of the normal standup.

Small side note, they all finished their meeting, made some connections and then hurried off to their other meetings with each other. All of the sudden, it was just me on the meeting, everybody else had left and was starting to go work on their projects. Pretty cool. It kinda shocked me. So quiet.

Eric was checking in on connections to the development server. Pointed him to Wayne and maybe even making a new database user for his special database updates for the sales tax projects.

Danny and I were talking about sales angles. Things keep changing and we need to keep up and keep changing in order to survive. We talked about the book "Who Moved My Cheese". I recommended it to him for a good read. We then talked about small little steps and if people knew what we really do, what would that change? Anyways, moving towards that angle.

Once everybody else left the meeting, it was just John and I. He went ahead and gave me an update on what he was working on. We went over some progress on the redo/facelift for the discount engine. His GUI (graphical user interface) is looking good - modern terms just use the name UI for user interface, but they mean the same thing. We talked about funding and changes that are coming down the pipeline.

John has a diverse skill set. He works on physical computers, networking, web development, secure software, frontend graphics (UI and UX), as well as servers. Great mix.

We also got into a discussion on budgets and the need for doing and keeping a budget. We talked about increased costs on the server and server support side of things. That cost needs to be factored into the mix. We also talked about maybe dropping the adilas phones stuff. There is quite a bit of maintenance that is going to be needed there both now and in the future. The last topic of the day was dealing with year-end documents, forms, and things for payroll for the upcoming year. That too is a never-ending process.

Wow, power packed meeting and tensions were running high this morning. It started out and Steve and Danny were talking sales, models, and different teams and such. No big deal. We then got off into some custom work that one of the developers was doing and it got a little bit wild. We are really striving to bring all of the custom projects under the main adilas roof or umbrella. That is fine and well, but there are still a few older projects out that that are 100% custom and have been run by some of our independent developers. These projects don't seem to be problem, until, the crap hits the fan. Then it's a big deal.

Anyways, one of the custom projects is starting to go over budget and getting some scope creep (wanting new features that weren't originally planned or designed into the project). That makes all of us, on the meeting have to take time and see what we can do to fix things. It also comes down to who is going to fix what and how do we bill for that. We are really trying to cover costs for what we have to do. It was originally all with one developer and now it is spreading (getting other designers and developers involved). We have dealt with this tons over the years. All of our developers are independent. It has only been recently that we've tried to bring things more under the main adilas umbrella or virtual roof. This includes a project manager, quotes, estimates, project id's, proper billing, code sign-off, deployment, etc. Anyways, due to some emails going around, this project kind of blew up and some bottled up emotions and opinions (from multiple sides) kind of hit the virtual fan and created a fairly hot discussion.

We weren't able to come to a specific agreement before some of the different parties had to bail out for other meetings. Reporting on things later on (a couple days after - when I was recording these notes), it got better, but it was a little bit hot and heavy for a while, if you know what I mean.

Danny was on the meeting this morning with some of the other guys. He and I were talking about the little interview session that we had yesterday. I was really happy and on cloud nine yesterday after that little session. Super fun! Anyways, Danny was talking about the question that he gave me about the elevator pitch. I quickly reviewed it and sent them over a link to the basics of the 3 part elevator pitch. Real quick - 1. High-end software as a service model (SaaS). 2. We service and cover needs in operations and accounting. And 3. We have a core system, ready, out of the box that we use and then we customize on top of that as needed. Those are the nuts and bolts of the super quick elevator pitch (at least currently).

John had some questions and was asking about some code samples and style guide (adilas docs) stuff. I gave him a bunch of samples and hopefully pointed him in a good direction. Chuck joined the meeting and John and Chuck were talking about some tweaks and changes to both the style guide and the docs (code snippets). I'm really happy that they are using that. Just by them using it, it brings value to that project.

Chuck and I did a small work session on the view parts page. He is doing a face lift on that page. We went over some things, I helped him with his settings, we added new my cart favorite buttons, we added new flex grid tie-ins, etc. Lots of talking and bouncing ideas off of each other. The current view is very top to bottom linear. We talked about doing two different mock-ups. One that would be linear (top to bottom) like the current page but with new look and feel. We also decided that we could break the page into some horizontal tabs to use the space more efficiently. We could also use those tabs to categorized the different sections. This is not exact yet, but things like main item details, photo gallery, sub/child inventory, recipe/build tie-ins, my cart favorite buttons, flex grid tie-ins, etc. Each tab would hold the respective data below it and thus somewhat hide what is not wanted unless clicked.

After that, I was recording notes, checking emails, and trying to help.

Danny and I had a fun meeting and did a little interview. We did one last week, but they wanted to change the format up a little bit. We had a fun time and even got into some other questions that weren't part of the "script". I think that both Danny and I had a really fun time and hopefully he got some good stuff.

Talking about some marketing and ideas. Danny, Sean, and I were on the meeting to begin with. We were talking about the use of the blue dog avatar and where we are trying to go, marketing wise. Lots of good and open conversations. We talked about a few different ideas and just kicked the ball around. John joined and we asked him a little bit about his experience and questions that he has been asked and/or had to explain. Good conversation.

After Sean and Danny left, John and I went over some stuff for the content server. I showed him some old graphics and drawings of our world building concepts and how we were going to structure data servers, content servers, databases, and corporations within those databases. Click here to see some of the other analogies and explanations for universe level, galaxies or galaxy level, clusters, solar systems, worlds, etc.

Danny was on this morning talking about redoing some of the interviews with Steve and I. He has done the first version but wants to redo it again. Steve was talking with John, Sean, and others. Taking care of business.

I started back into the PO line item rounding project. Working through tons of black box pages and custom code.

Towards the end, John, Steve, and I chatted about some different options. We talked about a raise for John, he is doing a great job. We also talked about some marketing and sales stuff. By way of suggestion, we would still like to use Adi (the blue dog avatar) but we want to make sure that we keep pitching adilas - all data is live and searchable - custom software as a service (SaaS) for all your operations and accounting needs.

We also talked about some other t-shirt and marketing material and how to keep things separated, yet linked in purpose.

Zoom meeting with Danny. It was a small interview type meeting. Danny was asking me questions and I was giving him my answers. He recorded it. Kinda fun.

Danny was checking in and he wants to do an interview with me in the next couple of days. He already did one with Steve. Just some simple questions to put a video up online for some marketing.

Sean had some questions about formatting things in Excel. We went over a few different options. Most of it was dealing with barcode values and Excel auto trimming certain numbers or removing 0's from the front of the numbers.

John has some ideas and questions about the adilas docs and our colors and style guide stuff. I'm really glad that he is digging in there. Chuck has done the docs and John is using them and giving ideas where they need to be updated, modified, and tweaked. That is awesome. Nothing like getting a user in there using something. You get great feedback and can make it better and better.

I jumped back on the project to check on round errors on PO line items. It's pretty deep. With simple numbers, it doesn't matter much, however, if you get out in to costs with 5 decimals and doing thousands and thousands of quantity per line, it really makes a big difference. Anyways, back on that project and doing some research.

Chuck joined the meeting for a bit. He and John were talking about the adilas style guide and the adilas docs. Good stuff. We then worked on Chuck part number homepage rework project. He has a list of to do items, we were working through those issues and questions. I gave him code samples for some of the things that he was going to work on by himself. Making progress.

Danny and Steve were talking sales, leads, and how our website is starting to generate some good leads. One interesting thing from the conversation, some of the new clients had been on the website and basically already decided that they want what we have and then the demos just seal the deal. That is very encouraging. We just need to get the word out.

Lots of other guys touching base and checking in. I told Steve that I had finished the recipe/build look-up for elements of time (production stuff). Towards the end of the meeting, we had some fun and looked over some canyoneering photos from a trip that I (Brandon) went on this past weekend. Just having fun.

Pretty quite today. Steve wasn't able to get on the GoToMeeting session. He sent me some texts and we chatted on the phone briefly. Both John and Danny popped in for a bit. I was working on emails, recording notes, and doing a deposit.

Steve, Danny, Dustin, John, Sean, and I were on the meeting. We merged in some code for Danny. John was checking on the auto deploy from master on the servers. Dustin gave us some code through chat for the servers and how the database handles the group by clauses. Steve and Sean were going over some custom data uploads. Small work session.

Steve, Cory, and I talking about projects including hardware integrations. We spent some time talking about the Paypod project and possible options there. I gave the two of them (Steve and Cory) a small demo on the Bear 100 mobile ready app vs the older Bear 100 runner portal (non mobile ready or older code). I showed them how to compare the two based on the different URL's or web paths.

Steve wanted me to book some more time to work on his projects for a clients. We looked at the calendar and add a few more hours. Danny and John joined and had some questions about the auto deploy from the master code branch and how to monitor that per server.

The deeper we go, we keep seeing more and more need for more modern code and technology such as AJAX, jQuery, JavaScript, and other things that make virtual one-pager type interfaces work. We currently have lots of pages and sections that do a linear progression from page to page, with action pages, and form submittal and validation. That works great, but more and more requests and requirements are going to be needing the smaller more agile code options that are available. We have a number of developers who can do that, but often they are on other projects. There is a growing need to update our developers and keep them learning and playing with new code and tech. Maintenance - the ball keeps moving, this is not a static game. We need to keep moving as well.

Danny and John were on the morning meeting. Much quieter today as compared with yesterday. Nothing major going on. I was doing emails and recording notes from past meetings and entries.

Emails, photos for Marisa (social media stuff), and paying bills. On a GoToMeeting session with Bryan going over pre-authorizations logic and flow for invoices and merchant processing. More emails and tech support stuff. Small code merge and push for Danny on a custom label. Finally back on Steve's projects for elements of time, recipe/builds, and production (manufacturing) type options.

Steve, Danny, Sean, John, and I on the morning meeting. Lots of the guys just touching base. There ended up being a light sales flavor to the meeting. They were talking about some sales, uncovering some new sweet spots with small to medium sized businesses. Steve and Sean were talking about an on-site deployment that they did for a company that does nuts and bolts and other industrial supply stuff.

Steve and Sean spent some time rehashing the system setup and possible angles that we could pursue. They were also talking about merchant processing and how some of that flows. We would like to start referring folks to USAePay for ecommerce and full merchant processing, including EMV chip reader stuff. We have used USAePay for well over a decade and would like to possibly be a reseller and/or a rep for them as a merchant processing.

Steve had us check on a database update for backorders and the backorders homepage. We did that and then started talking about sales tax and some growing needs there.

On the morning meeting. Steve and I finished up from an earlier meeting. Danny, Sean, and John popped on to check in. Mostly a small work session where everybody was on mute working in the background.

Dustin popped in to show Steve some new features on the cultivation and samples pages. Lots of new JavaScript and AJAX type stuff. Nice demo and it is looking good. We asked Dustin to organize a small training class for us on AJAX, jQuery, and JavaScript - mixing those pieces.

Emails and text messages as the other guys were working together.

Danny was on the meeting this morning and asking about a possible mini training session per month. He was calling it a monthly deep dive, where we could pick a topic or section and do some training on that. We could let our clients know, our internal team know, and then go from there. Great idea. He was also talking about an idea for a feedback form and page for monitoring what our users and clients are wanting and needed.

Dustin, Sean, and Kelly were chiming in. Working on emails and other small to do list things. I unpacked a new events banner from Marisa. It looks great. It has a QR code and a web address on it. It also has the adilas logo and some other graphics including Adi (the blue dog avatar) on the banner. It will be used when we help with other events, such as the Bear 100 and other races, events, or whatever.

Merging in some files and custom labels for Danny. Emails and recording notes from the day.

Danny, Sean, Steve, and Shari O. were talking about sales and strategies. Good stuff. While they were doing that I was working on emails and follow-ups.

This is from Steve - He said that his mom had a sign in her kitchen saying "If at first you don't succeed, ask your mother." Kinda funny! He was referring to us, both Steve and I, talking with our wives and getting some great advice and direction.

Steve and Danny were talking about sales and different angles. They were also talking about the Flyhi demo and what a great job they did in building out the full integration and process. I was very impressed as well. Danny was talking about the possibility of showing what they did as one a valid product, and two as an inspiration to others to see what is possible. Great ideas and I love the angle. Click here to view my notes from the actual demo (last week).

Cory joined the meeting and her, Steve, Danny, and I were all talking about ways to harness what the Flyhi guys have done and built. Lots of options. We told Steve that we will try to get him a link to the video recording that they did during the demo. He is excited to see that and also to get on the phone and let others know about it.

John had me push up some new code for the discount engine. Once we pushed it up, we talked about changes and then also expanded the conversation into what are the next steps on the discount engine. Cory and I are leaning towards John going in there and doing some clean-up work. He has been doing great and is the one who has been making the last few changes.

When I wasn't helping others, I was doing emails, checking payables, bouncing between things.

Helping Danny with a merge to push up 30+ files that have built-in or embedded video help file links. We had to fix a small merge conflict and then pushed up the files. Steve and Sean were talking about leads, sales, the game of numbers (touches, demos, etc.), and just plain getting out there and stirring the pot.

One of the biggest problems that we have is keeping our users and clients up to date. We have people who don't even know what we have, and it's been available for years. Steve and Sean were talking about almost having to resell our existing clients on the new upgrades and changes. This in-house, virtual up sale, would be based on who is using what and who hasn't even played with the new features, permissions, or functionality. Sean was recommending that we use the system to see who is using what. We can tell, we just haven't written those pages to check on some of the different usage areas. If we use the system, that would help us figure out usage and compliance from the backend. We could then make a more targeted approach to who needs some follow-up and possibly some handholding. The goal would be to help our clients keep moving forward.

Steve was talking about a simple child's game of red light/green light and playing that with our clients. Red means no, yellow means not all the way, and green means yes or they are using it - meaning features, tools, permissions, and functionality. As a side note, we have to respect and use caution, just because we could check out what our users and clients are doing and using, doesn't mean that we should do that on every aspect. It could flip and go the wrong way and turn into spying. Not that we want it to get there, just saying, you have to be careful and only cross certain lines. This is a small poke, but if you don't define some lines, you may end up like Google and know way too much about your users (just being silly).

Our goal would be deeper customer care and helping our users be more engaged, entrenched, and/or sticky. If we help them get what they want and need, we become more needed and in demand. We want to get them all the way in, so that they love adilas and don't want to leave.

"Use technology to keep pushing our product!" - Wayne Moore, years and years ago, speaking to Steve and I. Small little quote that Steve keeps bringing up from time to time.

At the end of the session, John was showing me his super backend admin site and documentation. We talked about getting things written down and also the security risk of doing that. There are pros and cons. Wayne joined and we got into a small discussion about permissions and roles. 

Danny was one of the first ones on this morning. He and I were going over some the tips and tricks for using Chuck's presentation gallery. We lightly looked around and chatted about the progress. After that, John joined and he and I helped Danny with some links to YouTube videos. Danny and Marisa are making new smaller videos and then posting them around the site, where they are needed and may be referenced easily. These are like embedded help files or help videos on the pages that use those features. This is just a small snippet, compared to the bigger project, but making progress.

I also spent some time this morning paying bills, scanning receipts, and other to do list stuff.

When I got on, Steve had some questions about time templates and making some of them hidden and not allowing users to interact with them. I thought that was interesting, as when we were developing time templates, that there were needs back in 2010 and first part of 2011 where we wanted to build system monitors and system time templates and not let the users interact with them and/or change anything on them. Originally, that was one of the reasons for thinking up some of the templates in the first place. We talked about possible solutions and using the time template status to help control - active, inactive, and hidden templates. The hidden ones would or could end up being the system controlled templates. They would exist, but we could limit them from being edited, updated, and even viewed from time to time. Lots of options.

The other day,  Shannon and I were thinking about permissions and settings and it felt like there was a third piece to that mix. I couldn't put my finger on it. I'm wondering if it has something to do with a mix between the two and dealing with templates, of all kinds, not just time templates. A template is somewhat of possible mix between permissions and settings. Technically, you could have user-defined templates, system templates, time templates, invoice templates, user templates, location templates, corporation templates, etc. The list could go on and on. The templates allows for an interesting mix and also playing more in bulk vs single or standalone permissions and settings. Anyways, just a thought.

Danny, Dustin, and John were on the meeting as well. Each one checked in on what they were doing. Dustin will be out of pocket during the month of September, he was just letting us know (family and travel plans). Also, just wanted to record this - "family first" - super common phrase that comes out of Steve's mouth. Good stuff. In the end, that's what really matters.

Towards the end of the meeting, I was explaining to those on the meeting what Shannon and I are working on and how we are comparing the game changer of the video recorder to what Adilas is doing on the same business recording type level. I gave them some examples and we chatted about some ideas. Tons of potential.

We talked about how the video recorder went through a whole process and series of adaptations to go from big, huge, super expensive, exclusive, and had to have special equipment, budgets, and connections to being handheld, on a phone, in almost every hand (literally) and even cool inventions like the GoPro and how small, mobile, shockproof, waterproof, etc. It has become accepted and readily available. It really is and was a major game changer. Adilas is following a similar path in what we are trying to do and record and make accepted and available our business recordings. It (adilas) is the business recording device, without having to use 6-10 different software packages and then trying to marry things together in a huge mash-up type model.

This, adilas platform and dynamic app, is a fully integrated and fully functioning system - system being the keyword. End to end, the whole digital story. I can't tell you how many times we have said, wouldn't it be cool if we could play the virtual story (movie) backwards or forward and could stop, pause, or replay certain happenings. We don't have the data quite that flowy (aggregated and rolled up summaries and counts) yet but it is getting better and better. Think of the kind of data and business intel (BI - business intelligence) we will be able to get and show as we keep going forward. Once again, end to end, the full digital story! Backwards and forwards! Super cool!

Dustin - How to show an elephant? You show a picture of it and then break it down. We were looking over some research and Adobe XD documents from Jonathan Wells and talking about getting those prototypes, visuals, and mock-up's out to the public. Good stuff. Lots of work there still to do. Show people and the world what is possible. Adilas is a huge, working, fully functional prototype. We would love for people to take the time to really see what we are doing and working on. The trick is how do you do that? Make people slow down and/or take notice of what is going on. Lots to offer!

Cory popped on the morning meeting and had a few requests - things for us to look at. We merged some code for Danny and got it pushed up. Dustin wanted us to check some new code and push it up to a server as well. Steve and Dustin jumped on and talked about some of their processes and how they are somewhat sanitizing things. They are changing some of the names so that they are more generic vs strictly tied to certain industries.

Steve and I chatted about some loan documents and Steve gave me a couple of tasks to do to help with the process.

John had some code to check in as well. We worked together to make some changes to payroll verbage and added some file path changes. There was a new file called payroll summary report. We ended up changing it to pre-payroll summary report and flipped links, verbage, and what not to match. It really is meant for pre-payroll vs actual payroll. Good change.

Sean joined the meeting and reported on what he is working on. He and Cory are working behind the scenes to clean-up a company's records to help them get started with a clean slate. Sort of a manual clean-up process of getting rid of old packages. Danny checked in and had a small question on a query for some labels. After that, Eric joined and had some questions on some new expense types, background logic, and new changes dealing with his sales tax aggregates and mapping them into expense/receipts for paying down the sales tax liabilities. Lastly, Dustin joined the meeting and needed some new code to be checked and merged in. He has been doing a series of updates to the Metrc and cultivation and packaging stuff. Pushed up new files to all servers. Other than those things, I was doing emails and going through things if no one else needed my help for anything.

Steve, Danny, and Sean were talking about sales, directions, and breakthroughs. John checked in and had some files to merge and push up to servers. Just some template changes. Dustin and Steve were talking about production phases and next steps. Eric checked in and had some questions on expenses and special math for the balance sheet for his aggregate sales tax stuff. I'm glad that he is taking that project to the next steps. In the process, he is getting deeper and deeper into some of the financial logic and background processes. That is exciting.

Tons of emails and other small to do list things.

Danny, Sean, and John were on the morning meeting. We checked in and chatted for a bit. Danny and Sean were talking about email templates and using some of the new things that Danny has setup and created. After that, we all went on mute and just started working on our own projects. I went back to finishing up the custom data extraction project for Emerald Fields (a client). The project involves going and flip flopping between different data types to get a complex sub inventory report to pull and be formatted correctly.

Dustin was checking in on the morning meeting. In the background, I was migrating 10K timecard records per click and updating them with new timecard flags and total times per time card. Helped Danny fix an internal email issue. We had to add in a global find and replace line of code to help it interpret the code correctly. After that, I logged into all of the servers and synced up some of the globally shared tables with new web page id's and API settings.

Small note on the things that we need to sync up - the value of using a last date modified field to help only update and sync what is needed. Some of these sync procedures were thousands and thousands of records, when only a couple of hundred may have changes (or less). If we had a last date modified field on some of those tables, the lift would be smaller and I could limit data syncs between servers to just things that had changed, based on a date or date range. The end goal would be to make a lighter light of these global server syncs and procedures.

Eric and Steve were chatting about changes in the little town of Salida, CO. The world in which we live keeps changing. Some good, some bad, some better, some for the worst. Interesting!

Eric was reporting back to Steve and I about the EMV chip reading project for USAePay and possible conflicts with First Data. Our current integration works in most cases, but it fails if First Data doesn't send back the correct response on every transaction. We are expecting a certain format and response, but it doesn't always come back as we hope and planned for. That is causing an issue. We told Eric to keep tracking things down and let's move this project to the next level. We do want a good and solid integration and if we need to, we may have to flip the backend chip reader processor. Anyways, Eric will keep following leads and try to get some meetings setup to help figure out a good business choice.

Switching back to the sales tax aggregates and sales tax aggregate project. We (Eric and I) talked about a small to do list, future plans, data drill-downs, use cases, scenarios, activation process, event scheduling, and removing limits on other corporations. Eric is circling back around on that project and even has scheduled some future meetings to go over next steps and details. I was giving Eric permission to run with the project and be the senior dev or senior lead on it. We also got into talking about new expense types and planning a course of action there as well.

Dustin checked in. Danny check in and had questions about using adilas as a media/content library for email template assets. We talked about using an element of time, and uploading needed media/content (files, images, prep stuff, etc.) for all others to use. We went over a few other ideas and Danny will be running with that or those pieces. Good meeting!

Ended up backing out the code to show the flex grid output both above and below the customer logs for clients with multiple log notes and flex grid tie-ins. The ladies thought that it looked too busy. Good call. The new code was backed out and new files were pushed up to all servers.

Switched gears and ended up back on the massive custom sub inventory data extract for a client. Towards the end of the session, I had to help make a small fix for Danny on his new email templates. Light tweak and then we re-pushed his code up to all boxes.

Working with Danny on code sign-off for 5 new email slots and template holding spots. This allows for customer email messages to be preconfigured and then used to communicate with the clients or vendors using nice, HTML and CSS formatted emails, with dynamic codes to pull in live data (sometimes called a merge field). Anyways, we did the code review and made a few small tweaks and then pushed up the files.

This was a great project for Danny, he researched it, looked it up, planned it out, and then went in and got it done. We only had to help a little bit here and there. That is awesome!

Steve and I doing a little bit of brainstorming. Mapping flex attributes out and how we could apply those flex attributes to specific time templates (or other templates - in general). We thought that maybe we could have a section, very similar to selecting money types for carts, invoices, expense/receipts, and deposits - allow the users to click and point and choose which flex attribute was applied to what template or list of templates. Basically, a flex attribute would be global for that main player group (12 main application players) and then you could limit it to show up and/or play with only certain templates.

Danny was saying "properties" or "characteristics" for flex attributes. The flex attributes are what we ended up calling the in-line database extensions. Flex attributes seemed to stick better (naming and wording).

Danny is adding some new email templates (5 new ones). Steve had me give Danny a small demo on what we were trying to do and get done for elements of time and new time settings. We also tied in how the flex attributes for elements of time would play into these changes as well.

Pretty casual. Lots of guys touching base and what not. Topic moved over to sales. Danny, Sean, Steve, and others talking about customer logs, quotes, and tag teaming on sales and client support.

Helping John with some small questions that he had. Pretty casual today.

Watching some new mini YouTube videos that Danny and Marisa were working on. John was sharing some new client leads from a gun shop. Merged in code for Eric. Merged in code for Dustin and had to fix some merge conflicts. Just busy to do list stuff.

Emails and reviewing some of the outlines that Sean was working on. Watched a number YouTube videos from Marisa and Danny (adilas YouTube channel). Here is the link to the YouTube channel that they are working on. They are hoping to add to it.

Web link - New YouTube Channel - new adilas channel

Web link - Adilas YouTube Videos - older adilas channel (100's of videos)

A bunch of the guys were on the meeting this morning. There was Sean, Danny, John, Dustin, Steve, and myself (Brandon). Steve and I were working on some string manipulation stuff. This is where you take a string (notes or alphanumeric data of any sort), find sequences and then do certain actions based on those findings. After we made some progress we switched gears and got into some sales type talks and discussions. Danny had some great questions and was asking the group for some feedback. Sean presented some sales outlines that he was working on.

I ended up grabbing the screen and pitching some ideas and doing some drawings. We talked about how adilas is a great companion software package for any business, regardless of what else you have. We can fill in the gaps or be the whole solution. We are able to play at all of those levels. I gave my 3 point elevator pitch and explained it a little bit. The 3 points are: 1. Adilas is a high-end software as a service type product (SaaS) - meaning web based software solution. 2. We cover anything dealing with operations and accounting - very broad but still direct enough. and 3. We have a standard package (the software application or site) and then we are able to customize on top of that.

We got into a small discussion on selling what you have, even if it is not fully finished. I showed some of the guys my old LTF (learn to freeride - snowboarding interactive product and multi-media app). I told them that I got the whole thing done and then tried to sell it. A marketing guy had us repackage it, go to some trade shows, and then we ran out of money before we could really push it all the way. I still have some older products and pieces at my house, under my stairs. I related this to selling adilas and even the concept of what we are trying to do. Steve has been great on that and has landed client after client, even if all of the pieces weren't done.

By way of a history, the adilas corporation id is in the 20's and all of the earlier corporation numbers either already existed or wanted in even through things were just barely functional back in 2008. We started in 2001-2002 but didn't officially become adilas until 2008. Prior to that, it was called the Morning Star System and was a custom write up software package for Steve's used car dealerships and trailer dealerships. If you want more info, here is a couple pages of a brief history document (pdf).

It takes all of us. No one person could tackle the adilas monster. It literally takes all of us. Whether it is ideas, coding, tech support, sales, development, maintenance, servers, etc. It takes all of us. Be your own style. You will fit in and be a great part of the adilas team! We love it!

Towards the end, Steve and I were lightly pitching some vision and where we are headed as well. Fun little session for those who were on the meeting. Good stuff.

We had six or seven guys on the morning meeting. Dustin and Steve were touching base on the bulk batch options for the cultivation homepage. Dustin was reporting on some of the changes and asynchronous querying that he is working on. Making progress, just not quite finished yet. They were also talking about new pages, options, and settings for a general nursery (growing different plants and trees) type flow and options. It is amazing how many new settings need to play into each industry and/or vertical. We have some similar things, but even that would need to be tweaked a little bit.

After that, we had Steve checking in with John on servers, me checking in with John on the payroll and timecard project, Danny checking in with Steve and Sean on some sales stuff, Steve asking me about some inventory planning (future supply and demand stuff), and other small meetings. Eventually, we all just ended up working on our own things and projects. 

Meeting with Chuck. We haven't been able to meet the past few weeks due to training conferences, vacations, and crazy summer stuff. Chuck is wanting to get going on some new website status and analytics. I told him to coordinate it with Danny, Marisa, and John. He has the full go ahead other than coordinating with the others on the web site team.

We jumped into the presentation gallery project. Chuck is starting to code more of the pages in web code vs just being mock-ups inside of Adobe XD. We went over some questions that he had regarding certain pages, layouts, and content. It is fun to see it starting to come into real code vs just graphics.

We also talked about that we have a number of Adobe XD files from other R&D projects in the past few years. We are not going to be doing anything with those files right this minute, but we have tons of stuff dealing with fracture, click through mapping, and virtually what is in the closet. Tons of potential there. Brandon has the original XD files.

Chuck would like to get a few new Adi (blue adilas dog) images from the artist. We chatted and Chuck is going to follow-up with the rest of the web team on ideas and choices. The last topic of the day was other projects and reworking existing pages.

Danny, Sean, Steve, and I were on the morning meeting. John popped in later. Steve and guys were talking about finding the sweet spot between clients, needs, custom, standard, training, setup, deployment, and satisfaction rate.

There were some questions posed by Danny about some of the existing ecommerce settings and switches. We were talking about being able to turn ecommerce shops on/off based on rules. You can already do that, we just may have to either revisit it and/or roll some of the newer code that Danny and I did backwards a bit. We got close, but we are slightly off the mark of what is needed. That target keeps moving and changes depending on the clients wants and needs. Eventually, we need some good logic mixed with pretty (look and feel).

There is a trend toward more and more settings. Each person wants to do things completely different with granular control levels.

Lots of talk about the use of ecommerce. It is a client portal, a customer portal, ecommerce, online bill pay, message marking portal, etc. Maybe just call it "portal activity". Sometimes things get pigeonholed into smaller pieces, when the potential is really quite large.

Towards the end of the meeting, the topic returned to networking with business owners. Maybe focus more on production, manufacturing, and cultivation stuff. We are deep enough to handle this and there isn't as much competition in those areas. We currently have a huge head start in some of the those areas.

Danny, Dustin, Sean, and I on the meeting this morning. They were talking about a small mini mobile app for push notifications. Danny was asking Dustin about his experience with mobile apps. After that, Danny and Sean were working together on some other pieces. When I wasn't needed, I was recording some notes from other meetings.

Bryan called in but was on the road and unable to meet.

Danny texted me and we jumped on a GoToMeeting session and worked on some code to help make some of the ecommerce error messages show and look better. It sounded pretty easy, but we got in to it for over an hour. Lots of moving pieces.

Danny, Steve, and Sean were on this morning. Danny and Steve had already been chatting for a couple of hours when I joined. Talking about sales and ideas. As the meeting progresses, Sean and I ended up talking about the process of growing up as a company. Sometimes people don't take us serious because we are not huge or don't charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for our products and/or services. That is so funny how that works. If it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars, it has a certain perceived value. Very interesting.

Adilas is a hidden gem! Nobody knows about it. Part of that was a strategic choice at one point. We are now getting ready to be seen for what we are vs hiding in the shadows. That still scares me, but things are already heading in that direction.

Sean and I were talking about different verticals and how we can help and serve those clients. It takes all kinds of clients to really round things out. We need their problems, our solutions, their people, our people, and then mixing that all together. It creates the flavor that we need. The diversity can be a positive help to that flavor.

Steve and I then got in to some talks on acquisition costs and what it takes to get a new customer/client on the system. We also talked about selling what we have and/or building or refining certain pieces. Steve has done an awesome job selling this package for years and years without it being all the way finished. We had multiple clients using it for free even before we were a company and could legally take any money. They, our clients at the time, had needs and pain and were willing to use a software package that helped relive some of those pain points and/or burdens.

As we focus more on sales, we may need to tweak the balance between development and sales. We may have to throttle back or slow down on development and increase on person to person networking and sales.

Danny and Steve were chatting and checking in on the message marketing options and what the next steps are going to be. We talked about a small little mini app that would be native to the client's phone or device that would ping the correct servers for the correct client id and any possible message marketing options. We talked about making it native for android and iOS (apple). We drew out some ideas and concepts.

Alan had some questions about sub inventory and adding new custom and automated logic out in ecommerce land. We went over all of the different fields and the data that we record and store per item (part number), per parent line item (invoice or quote or PO line item), all sub inventory values, and what options we have there. Alan was lightly proposing a change so that the main time sub inventory tables would just hold the packages (main lot, batch, or package info). We would then build another table to handle and track the sub inventory transactions in a new table. Currently, all of that is done in one table, but it expanding and somewhat bloating the table. Lots of talk about ideas and options and timing.

We are not planning on jumping on this project right this minute as we have some other fires and things that we are working on. When ready, we will circle back around and check things out. I also mentioned to Alan that we need to make these tables easy to get data into, easy to pull reports, totals, sums, and also be able to go (virtually) backwards in time based on dates. We also talked about histories and the need to add histories in for sub or child inventory. Quite a bit of talk about some future plans, including adding some more backward compatibility options and look-ups for the custom data tables (sub string, sub numbers, and sub dates). Currently, we can get the data into these tables pretty easy, but searching them requires lots of joins and virtual jumping around.

Dustin was checking in on his bulk move by batch number project. Sean checked in as well. After checking in, they both bailed out to work on their own projects. I spent the rest of the time reading some new whitepapers from Steve McNew on different subjects. Merged in some custom labels for Danny.

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

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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

Multi-day conference in Salida, CO - birthplace of adilas.biz! If you spell Salida backwards, you get Adilas - All Data Is Live And Searchable

Small Recap:

The adilas team meets almost everyday via GoToMeeting and Zoom meetings (virtual online meetings). Having said that, we have not had an in person conference for almost 3 years. Our last major conference was in September of 2018. The live event was much needed.

The adilas team met up on Monday evening and did a small meet and greet - ice cream social. We then went over to the hotel and conference center. We setup up systems and did some testing. Crazy, but sad, the hotel was having major Internet problems. We setup some mobile hotspots, but it just wasn't enough.

Tuesday morning we started the conference but the Internet was super slow and was dropping the GoToMeeting session, audio, recording, and even basic site browsing was going super slow. We tried using the GoToMeeting options for the first two sessions. After that, we ended up just presenting to those who were on site. There were about 20 individuals there on site. Once we dropped the GoToMeeting piece, the whole attitude of the conference shifted. From my personal opinion, the change was for the better. Much better flavor and things started to flow much better.

We had more folks join us live on day two and day three of the conference. Great stuff. Those who were there were treated good and everybody was learning new things. As a huge shoutout, three ladies spent a ton of time on training content, slides, and presentations (including timing, samples, etc.)

Marisa got a bunch of shirts for adilas with the little blue dog avatar (ADI). The guys and gals looked great in the adilas shirts. As usual, Mrs. Shari O. took great care of us and had snacks and lunches for us each day.

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See attached for some of my notes... I will also put a few of them there below for searchability. My notes that are attached have a lot more details. I just wanted to capture some of the tweaks and user requests that we picked up from the conference. Not all of my notes are just what needs to be updated (for the record), most of my notes were dealing with what the guys and gals were presenting:

- Request - We should not allow new default payments as "show" they should be hidden by default - this is dealing with money types under more options under the corp admin page.

- Request - They wanted Venmo as a payment type

- Request - Remove the Flash option for my cart favorite buttons - under personal profile

- They went through all kinds of setup and settings - being consistent to get things out of the system later on

- Request - Adding in a date picker to the add/edit pages in elements of time. It is currently there, but if you have the HTML enabled SummerNote editor, there is a conflict between the two features. They both use a form of jQuery.

- Small side note on the presentations - Kelly was doing slides on a PowerPoint, Marisa was driving (clicking through adilas), and Danny was presenting - fun combo and good flow.

- Prototyping and then expanding those things

- Request - On the customer log notes, try to add in the date pickers and the SummerNote HTML editors (small conflict)

- Request - On the balance sheet quick search - be able to pull the balance sheet by that date, using the quick search. That would be pretty cool!

- We sure want to get back to a project called "known issues report" - Helping to find things that are known problems or disconnects

- Request - On sub inventory templates, it needs to default to active. Currently it defaults to inactive.

- Kelly and Steve did a great job showing some down the road cause and effect relationships for categories, inventory controls, and other sections in the inventory controls section. Great little session.

- Request - On the advanced part and parent attribute search - They may or may not want some of the inactive parent attributes on that report. In the Farm and Ranch demo site, there were tons of inactive parent attributes that were showing up. Small clean-up.

- Use of the word core - parent cores, child cores, etc.

- Request - On smart group buttons, the description modifier does not currently change the sub description. It only changes the parent description. It should change the sub as well.

- The power of being able to save your own reports

- Save time and money, adilas has a solution built-in (talking about ecommerce, but it could be anything)

- Request - On ecommerce, change some of the verbage on the photo image sizes - make them square (item pictures and item category pictures), if possible. Say something like 750 (_w) x 750 (_h) vs 750 x 553. Square works better on the web, helps make it all line up correctly.

- Request - On ecommerce, the parent attributes on ecommerce show all items with certain tags. We need those counters to filter what was/is really available - For example: Drinks(2) - but when clicked, only 1 (one) showed up. It would be better to show Drinks(1) and then show just that one. That shouldn't be too hard to fix. Maybe just look to see how those item counters and counts are calculated.

- Request - On login into ecommerce, it would be so awesome to have a new setting to say - Where can we take you after a valid login? My details, shop home, make a payment, etc. that would be cool! Basically, let the client/users dictate where to send their customers upon a valid login. Right now, they always just go to a single page and then have to click from there where they really want to go.

- Request - Build a customer marketing link builder page, this would be a page similar to the add/edit my cart favorite buttons (limited), but thte main feature would build a link, add to cart, set a discount, tract a campaign, add a coupon, auto login, etc. Build whatever link you needed, without knowing all of the techy stuff behind the scenes. Make the links so that they may be used in marketing messages, emails, texts, ect. The person who builds it, enters info into a form and the form (backend logic) builds the correct link for the client. Basically a special marketing or link builder tool.

- Request - Add some terms to the glossary such as: Modal, ADI (the blue dog avatar).

- Request - Make the "all help files" more flexible and be able to search the descriptions as well. Currently, it only searches titles for the help files.

- I can't wait until we can show the daily balance sheet over time - multiple day report running over or off of the aggregated totals

- Request - Look into the add new B.S.I. item process - We may need some more flexibility on the account and item groupings. Also, a request was made to allow for setting up the expense types and deposit types right from there as well. Basically, a one-stop shop for balance sheet setups.

- The value of education and being able to help set people and users up for success

- Understanding logic and cause and effects

- Idea - It sure would be cool if due dates could show up on a calendar type view - think of showing all kinds of stuff on a calendar type approach or view

- Request - New settings - Expense/receipts and locations on line items. Also, B.S.I. bump up or down values. More settings.

- Take time and read the page errors and info stuff - We are trying to help - Slow down just a bit

- There is a need for some cash flow and budgeting tools - This would be awesome - Maybe round 2 on the financials

- Request - Ice-down dates and being able to "post" on invoices and PO's - Posts only exist on deposits and expense/receipts

- Data visualization and customized dashboards - We haven't even scratched the surface yet - It's time!

- Request - On the media/content homepage and media/content advanced search pages - It would be nice to output or show the reports in Snow Owl data tables to help with exports and visual displays

- Following your interests and be yourself!

Zoom meeting with Danny, Kelly, Cory, Marisa, Sean, and Shari O. to go the last minute details and logistics for the training conference. Brief overview of the training slides that will be used. The ladies did a great job on prepping the content and training materials. Kelly went over some of the slides and the timing that we are shooting for. Great back and forth with lots of input from the different parties and persons.

Merging and fixing conflicts for the modal message marketing project for Danny. Both Steve and Danny have been playing tag team on this project and working on different sections and functions for the same project. Kinda fun. Pushed up new code and ran database updates on all servers.

Code review with Danny on the modal messaging (time id 2001) or message marketing project. We did some code sign-off, merging, and pushing code. We weren't able to finished the whole merge. Still kinda only halfway done right now.

Quite a few of the guys were on the morning meeting to check in and what not. John was talking and asking about style guides and decisions on where we are going (design, look and feel, and code wise). Steve was saying that things keep morphing and evolving, hard to perfectly put your finger on it.

Working on message marketing with Danny and adding in some new customer log types.

Danny and I going over his message marketing project. Small code review and going over pages and flow. Light work session. I made a few suggestions and Danny took some notes. We did some planning and worked on the main footer code that pops up the modal message marketing piece.

Danny and some of the crew on the morning meeting this morning. There was a small sales theme going on in the meeting. Danny was commenting about sales and getting good communications between sales and the developers. The developers, me included, build and build, but don't let anybody know. Constant moving platform. Good communication is key. We talked about ways of improving those communication lines.

I ended up showing those on the meetings some of the Adobe XD files that I got from Jonathan Wells, just the other day. It was like Christmas. I was showing them stuff, zooming in, panning out, scrolling, drawing, and pitching some of the ideas and concepts for fracture, new shopping carts, and the adilas café. For the record, Brandon has a whole folder that has tons and tons of Adobe XD files that were done in 2019/2020 by Jonathan Wells. All of it was graphic R&D and research. Very much a little treasure box. Here is the file path (www_adilas/extras/jonathan_wells/xd_from_jonathan)

Marisa  was on the meeting this morning as well. She was getting excited to see some of the prototypes and mock-ups. We want to start harvesting some of those R&D projects. Lots of work and efforts have gone in there and some of the mock-ups look great and make us (and our clients) excited. As a small side note, we somewhat switched gears and talked about outside investors and seeking outside funding sources. I pointed them to a document that we made a couple of weeks/months ago that talked about some of our plans. We called it the questionnaire summary report from an internal questionnaire. Here is a link to the doc (pdf) - questionnaire summary. Light talk about investors and seeking funding. Danny, Marisa, Sean, and Steve were chiming in. Good meeting!

Helping Danny with his message marketing and being able to popup and hide the actual messages and modal message marketing output. It turned into a small training session. I'm not sure if he wanted that or not, but that's what ended up happening. After that, Steve and I worked on some time templates and trying to figure out what settings on elements of time would work best for a specific client need.

I had to push a few more label files and changes for Danny. I then jumped back in and worked on recording notes and info and doing emails.

Shannon and I were in harvesting info graphics. I was cropping images and screenshots and Shannon was doing research and finding other ones to use. See attached for some of her progress.

At the end, I pushed up some files for Danny and a custom label.

A few of the guys checked in and what not. Danny and Steve were working on parent attributes. Helping Dustin with some JavaScript popup windows and such. The rest of the session was a mini work session and recording notes.

Some of the guys were on bouncing ideas off of each other. Steve was working on some report sorting and fixing some filtering options. Danny needed some help with pulling specific files from other branches. Helping Steve with more report sorting tweaks. Working on and reading emails.

John and I jumped on a meeting to work on the payroll and timecard flags and timecard totals project. Danny also joined us for a bit and I was able to get him some code samples to help him on his message marketing project for customer logs out in ecommerce land. After that, John and I did a work session on some new reports and adding a couple of columns to the my hours timecard report. We reworked some logic and added some new flags and such.

When I joined the meeting today, Steve and Danny were going over some plans and talking about things. After that, both Steve and I helped Danny get some info on pulling in customer logs into his ecommerce pages. This will help him out with his message marketing project that he and Steve are working on.

After that, Sean and I looked into some possible math errors on the orders homepage (page for orders, fulfillment, and back orders). We made a couple small tweaks and pushed up new files. Worked on emails and other small to do list stuff.

Monday morning. Merged in some new label changes for Danny and a client on data 17. Looked into some math calcs for the orders and backorders homepage. Made a few changes for Sean and Steve and pushed up files. We did some live debugging and testing. Found a small update statement that was not corporation specific, but should have been. Made the changes and pushed up new files. The update was dealing with a column called sub invoice type (fairly new feature) so it didn't effect that many quotes.

Cory and I jumped on a meeting. Questions on integrating with browsers and different hardware setups. That can get complicated. We talked about adding new settings and going over the pros and cons of those settings. We also covered a couple of other projects and basic questions.

Sean and Steve were chiming in and talking about 3rd party solutions and making sure that we are charging for our time. We tend to get pulled in all kinds of directions by these 3rd party solutions.

Towards the end, Steve and Cory were talking about the message marketing ideas and project. Steve is really pushing hard on that concept. The basic concept is to use customer facing log notes to communicate with the customers/clients through the ecommerce and customer facing portal. They are making great progress. Both Steve and Danny are tag teaming on the different pieces.

Debugging some flow and talking about other ideas.

On the morning meeting, helping Sean with an error. He has been doing some testing of new features for Steve. The error was a cfqueryparam that was set to an integer but needed to be set to a decimal and allow for both numbers and decimals. The error was forcing an updated value to a plain integer vs the more detailed version using the decimals. We made the switch and pushed up the code. Grateful that this is a new feature and nobody else was really using it.

Danny had some questions on his modal message marketing project. He will end up adding a number of new settings that allow for the message marketing to be used (yes/no) and other defaults such as verbage, info, and images on the popup modals. Danny and I also chatted about some custom labels and small tweaks in that area.

John and I went over some custom look and feel colors and being able to swap out custom error message colors.

Merging in some code for Danny and working with Steve on his save report settings for the advanced parent attribute search page and report. We were trying to make the save as code more simple and more reusable to get it setup to pass the correct info.

There were six of us on the morning meeting this morning. Guys and gals checking in. Danny and Steve were talking about their message marketing project. Throwing around ideas and such. We had to reset the WordPress server (new main adilas.biz site). I then helped a couple of guys with their local development environment and getting those into good shape so that the guys could do their development tasks. Sometimes there are some big changes and fixes that have to be implemented.

I spent some time pitching Marisa on some info graphics to see if she wants to help with that project. That was kinda fun!

A few more guys and gals joined the meeting at 9 am. Still working on getting all of the domain name changes populated through the system. Talking with Danny about custom labels. Cory, Shari O., and John and Wayne were on and off the meeting at different times. More database changes to help with the domain name changes. Pretty deep. That was a major change.

Wayne popped back in and we added some things to his auto deploy script to manually flush certain variables. Steve and I then looked into some looping logic on some of his custom pages. Busy morning!

Steve and Danny were brainstorming on some ideas for internal message marketing through the customer portal - out in ecommerce land. Steve keeps saying, the next best thing is taking a step in a good direction. Sometimes we think that the next best thing will be completely different, sometimes it is just the next step in a progression.

We talked about going to the mobile app level with some of our ideas. Lots of guys on the morning meeting, listening, participating, and chiming in. Here are some of my notes:

- Good intro by Steve and sharing some vision

- Use "Adi" (the little blue dog avatar) and make it fun

- Maybe only show the last 3 messages or maybe more

- Allow them to click and say that they have read the message

- Maybe a new drawing of Adi with a newspaper

- How many clicks to get what you want?

- What about saving a message for later use or reference

- We may need other flags - read, save, hide, etc.

- Chuck has some good tech and some great marketing ideas

- Modal or just a modal message saying you have messages?

- Where does the icon send you?

- Based on a valid login into ecommerce

- Single sign-on - and auto login - maybe a real mini mobile app or small bridge app (tiny) - we talked a lot about making this little bridge app

- Make a scannable QR code - or from a small webpage or app on site

- How do we distribute this? Who gets it and who doesn't get it?

- There is already an opt in/out for text messaging and email messaging - harness that

- Message marketing

- Steve was talking about corp level settings and customer settings (what they want) - both sides of the fence (users and consumers/customers)

- What about adding in "ecommerce message" as a new log note type

- The little checkbox on the log note (show on the web) is the main switch right now

- Talking about how much data to store and use... do we want to hold everything or dump things

- Using elements of time - building reports on top of the calendar - we have a table called time_sub_reminders - meant for text messages and email communications and scheduling those interactions.

- Using a simple text message to tell them that they have a message - small mini work around

- One advantage to the log notes is it can handle html and special formatting - kinda like flex grid - for now - some duct tape and bailing twine - temporary solution

- Steve wants to avoid the whole text message thing - too many hawks

- Some of our clients are using only the ecommerce mode - somewhat of a passive message mode - it already exists

- Just take the next step

- Flow - right after a valid login, and before we hit the summary (navigation) page, show the modal popup window with the messages. We may also want to have a link or button from the summary or nav page.

- Marketing - we kinda want to push that info in front of the user - marketing message or fulfillment message - maybe a setting on either push or pull (how we present the data and messages)

- More settings in the future... maybe we build it first with minimal settings and then go from there

- Make the modal conditional based on whether or not a message (one or more) is/are available

- Steve - maybe bring in the loyalty points on the popup modal - get some good marketing info in front of their eyes

Steve and Cory were talking about billing and finances for the first little bit. After that, it turned into a meeting with both Steve, Danny, and I going over some options for doing internal messaging and bypassing text messaging. These would be direct communication messages to a client based on a valid login through the ecommerce or customer portal section of the site. This meeting was mostly lead by Steve and Danny. I was adding in ideas and options, but mainly it was a brainstorming session. Here are a few topics that were discussed.

- Options for internal messaging and message marketing

- Start by making a plan

- Allowing the customer to mark things as read and even being able to somewhat control their own experience on how those messages are presented

- Taking things to the next level

- Helping Danny learn some project management tricks and techniques - he has great vision, he just needs to be willing to jump in and help form up those dreams

- Building and planning for the dream

Towards the end of the meeting, Steve and I worked a little bit on a data import file. The goal is to use a template based system and then be able to speed up data imports. That gets tough as almost every one is slightly different. Trying to get the cogs of the zipper closer together, one cog at a time.

Server meeting with Wayne. John and Steve were on as well. Mostly we were talking about and making plans for the new website. Chuck, Danny, Marisa, and John have been working on the new site for a couple of months. Well, that is getting ready to launch and so Wayne and I are making plans on how to roll things out and get it fully deployed. As a fun side note, the new site is up in beta mode for some of our guys and gals to test and play around with. That is awesome.

Anyways, I pitched a plan and then we came up with a modified version of that plan. Brandon has some notes on his local computer about some of the plans.

Towards the end of the meeting, we switched gears and talked about the usage on the content server. Eventually, we would like the content server to hold all of the files, images, CSV files, PDF's, Word, Excel, and other media/content files. Currently, the system is setup to hold and store certain files locally (per box or per server) and then all of the bigger media/content pieces up on the content server. We would like to get all of the pieces in one general place. That would help with future projects on clustering servers and what not.

We also talked about breaking up and adding more content servers as needed. This gets into world building, universe level stuff, galaxies, clustering, solar systems, and stacking of servers and technology. See this help file for more info on world building.

Wayne is also pushing hard on some test driven design stuff. He is out pioneering some concepts that he wants us to use in our normal development processes. After that, Steve needed some help with some logic and wanted to get a number of sample files for uploading CSV files to the server. He has a new project that he is working on for a client.

There were a bunch of the guys on the meeting. Mostly just checking in here and there and running small things pass Steve and I. Wayne had some database questions, Steve was working on sub inventory with mini units (serialized units within sub inventory), and Danny was working on some new notification settings. After Danny left, Steve and Sean  went over the power of using web based customer logs as direct ecommerce marketing tools to their clients. Steve has a lot of details and vision on that. He is going to have Danny start playing and building along those lines.

Checking in with Danny and Steve. Merged in some new code for Danny, dealing with some new custom labels. Steve had some questions and wanted to show me what he is working on with the mini units (serialized subs). John jumped on and we reviewed his payroll holiday chooser project. After that, Steve and I did a small session and looked over some clean-up logic for a project that he is working on.

Quick merge for Danny and some new custom labels for Highland Vineyard. Steve and I then rolled into some talks about sub inventory and trying to help to speed things up through queries, logic, and database storage values. We would love to rework the po/invoice line items table and the custom dates, custom text, and custom numerics tables. They all could use a few more values to help better connect them. Currently, they are connected, but only through a series of virtual bounces and upward threads. We would like to make it more clear and more easy to get the data back out again. Here is some info that may help with this project: Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=4848

After that discussion, we got into other ways of speeding up the cultivation process. A lot of the ways we can speed things up is dealing with how much data we return and/or try to render out to the user, once they have completed a specific step. Eventually we will need to go clear back to the design and mock-up phase and/or stage. Simple drawings for what we want and then go build the dream. Right now, we just keep coding and fixing, coding and fixing. That helps to figure out the process, but it will definitely need a facelift at some time, in order to make it more efficient.

Danny and Steve were talking about switching labels over to QR codes and even getting rid of our existing simple barcode stuff (on adilas standard labels). Barcodes work great until the barcode gets too big, then it breaks down because the barcode no longer is scannable (long barcode in a tiny space). QR codes have such a bigger range of characters and number of characters that they can show. That is where we want to head. We can already do that (QR codes), we just need to make more of an effort to make that the new default option.

Wayne presented next and we covered his changes that he will be implementing dealing with corp-wide settings. We currently have them all saved in a couple of corporation level tables. The tables are getting really big and are starting to cause problems due to how big they are (number of columns). The new solution will allow the settings to be held in data type specific tables based on the corporation id number, the setting name, and the setting value. Pretty simple. We will have new settings tables for strings, big strings, integers, decimals, and dates. That should cover most of the corp-wide settings.

Alan joined and Wayne was showing Alan and I some of the new code, objects, functions, and logic to deal with these new settings tables. We went over flow, validation, options, setting groups, global settings, etc. Lots of topics around the new changes and upcoming changes for the corp-wide settings. It is looking good (at least in concept).

We got into optimization strategy stuff. Taking the next logical steps and moving forward. We also talked about static vs dynamic and how static (set number of settings) placeholders actually take up more space than dynamic (only what you need) settings. We will provide defaults for each, but only store what is needed. We will end up using the dummy corporation as the default and then only store settings that are different per corp. Much more efficient on the storage side.

Cory and Danny joined the meeting. We were going over some custom labels and pushing them up to the servers.

After Danny left, Cory and I went in and did some research and fixed some paycheck stubs for a client. They had changed some stuff up mid stream and retitled (renamed) certain special fields without worrying about what was already stored in those same fields. The year to date values do simple math and add up whatever was in a certain column. So, it was showing numbers that were off because they changed multiple columns without thinking about past entries and other values that had been added to those same columns over the years. We made the fixes and let the client know.

Here is a more detailed version of what was going on. We allow for 5 special virtual buckets per person to store whatever values they need for payroll and paycheck stubs. For example: say an IRA, dental plan, meal plan, child support, insurance, or whatever. These values could be added to or taken away, before or after taxes (payroll stuff). They get to name the buckets as they see fit and apply any settings that are needed. It is totally up to the users or admin users as to what is used and/or needed. Well, image if you were putting in $200/month into an IRA account (pretend that was in bucket 1 of 5). Then you decided to switch the name of that bucket to Dental and it only had $30/month as its value. The math behind the scenes says - add up bucket 1 and show the year to date total. Basically, bucket 1 had a number of IRA amounts and some dental amounts - all mixed into bucket 1.

To fix it, we had to pull a bunch of data and then reset everything to the correct bucket with the correct name. Not super tough, but kinda a pain and took some time. That is a drawback if making things super dynamic and totally user defined (aka generic). On the up side of things, if you allow the users to only setup what is needed, you don't store extra data and you don't have to think up every possible special account in order to store the data. Instead of having 5 custom buckets to store values in, you would have to have 30-50 buckets with all kinds of hardcoded titles (allowing for all possible solutions - too many). We opted for the user-defined dynamic bucket vs every possible option and then not use even a fraction of them. Choices...

Code review with Danny for a new corp-wide setting. He was commenting that he liked the project management stuff that Cory and I did for his project. It helped him stay on track and was deep enough to guide him through the process without someone to be there to hold his hand. We will keep trying!

After the meeting and pushing up the code, I went back through and was recording notes from other meetings.

A few of the guys jumped on this morning. We were talking about building paths and providing such a good overview of where we are heading, that people want it right now (managing expectations and realistic timelines and budgets). Basically, we build a small foot path, let others start using it, and pretty soon they are expecting a fully built out highway with signs, guardrails, shoulders, etc.

As a funny side note, Danny gave the analogy of a small tractor being able to handle a small parcel of land. Then all of the sudden, the land area is increased and the same small tractor is still expected to run the bigger plot of land. We can all see that major upgrades are needed. In software and web ware, it seems to be a little bit more hidden and either clients think that it will still work just the same or we (adilas) think that it should work just the same, when in reality, there are major changes and major demands being placed on servers, pages, database, queries, logic, functions, tools, and other resources. We had some good talks along those lines.

Danny also showed all of the guys on the morning meeting some new "Adi" (adilas the dog or adilas dog images). Adi is the avatar's name. See attached for some of the new images. They, Danny and his team, are planning on using them as part of the new website that we are building.

Working with Danny on starting a new project #1876. This project is dealing with setting new default corp-wide setting values for parent or subs inventory items. We reviewed a Microsoft Word document (project details and requirements) and he started coding on things. I then went on mute for a bit and was working on other projects and recording notes.

Alan popped in and we touched base on a couple of the projects that he is working on and also doing code review and testing on.

At the end, Danny and I touched base and looked over what he had finished during his work session.

Chuck and I looked over some of the adilas financials and who we owe and who owes us. Trying to keep the guys in the loop. After that, he took over the screen and did a demo of the progress on the new website. We are estimating that it will cost between $5K and $10K for the new website. It is looking good and they (Danny, Marisa, and Chuck) are making great progress. As a fun side note, Chuck is moving beyond design and mock-ups into real code and mobile responsive design and custom code work. Pretty cool!

More emails and tech support stuff, once Chuck left the meeting.

Merging and pushing up code for custom labels for Danny.

A bunch of the guys checked in this morning. We did a quick merge for Danny and some custom PDF labels. After that, we had fun doing a quick trip down memory lane and talking about some of the old reps and adilas consultants. Some of them were pretty awesome. It would be cool to see where they are and what they are doing now.

Some of the other guys left to work on their own projects. I showed John what I have been working on as far as security upgrades and new validation stuff. We also talked about query params and how those work.

Chuck joined the meeting and gave me a report on where he is at with the new website project. It is looking good. He and Marisa are building out content, designing templates, and even looking into mobile type options. I'm happy with where things are going. Some of it, I'm going to leave up to Danny, Marisa, and Chuck to figure out (their little team). It's got a good flavor already. I'm excited to see what they come up with.

After Chuck left, I did some emails, tech support, and watching a video recording from this morning's meeting.

Touching base with Danny on things. John and Dustin joined the meeting and we went over some of the new tables that they are wanting to add for the cultivation project. Going over scenarios and use cases.

Steve, Danny, and John were on the meeting going over projects. Some of the other guys checked in, we merged some code, pushed up some labels, and talked about servers. John and Steve were going over some server monitoring and ways to allow our clients to see what was going on. John and Wayne are setting up Nagios (server monitoring software) for our clients, with limited views to their dedicated boxes.

Steve then had some questions about sending out customer emails and prepping pages and code to help with that process.

Towards the end of the meeting, if was just Steve, John, and I still on. Steve wanted to know what he could do to help with some of the upcoming projects. We talked about it and basically gave him full permission to be creative and use his "style". Basically, a version of "be your own style" for specifically for Steve. He has been in this game with us since the get go, in reality, it was Steve's ideas that got this thing started. We were trying to empower him to keep going and keep inventing, pushing, proposing, and building. That's the Steve style. Good stuff.

As a side note, I (or we) tend to get bogged down and eventually don't know where to go or what to do. That happens to almost everybody. Sometime all we need is some one to help us see that we can still move and then all of the sudden, we get ourselves out of the mess, mix, or whatever. Once you feel like you can move, or someone enables you to be able to move, you have room and can get going again. Interesting. Also, super fun to encourage people to take that initiative and go for it. There is plenty of room and there will still be time to fix some of the other looming piece out there. Keep going!

Working with Shannon on vision statements and general goals for the next 1 year, 5 years, upto 10 years. See attached for our progress. Here is a list of some of our semi-short term goals that we will be adding to our business plan and vision plan:

Without going into too many details here are some elements that will be included in our plan:

- Keep tweaking on the transactional core

- Move client services more internal to Adilas 

- Expand into other verticals

- Allow for custom code where needed

- Get into aggregated and/or business intelligence (BI) type levels

- Grow the platform into an enterprise level app/system

- Along the way there are plans to do a full re-write under the code name “Fracture”

- Revamp the look and feel - improve user experience 

- Create and facilitate the Adilas Café and community

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

We also talked about using the key word "core" for different starting spots or base level options. This could be core transactional systems, core database columns or fields, core or main pieces. An example may be something like: Using the word or phase core values vs parent attributes, sub attributes, flex attributes, etc. Hopefully that makes sense.

Prepping things and doing some pioneering. All part of the game.

At the end of the meeting, I ended up pushing up some code for Danny and his custom labels.

A few of the guys were checking in and touching based from the weekend. I helped Sean and Danny on some custom label mappings and some document management stuff. Both of those guys are trying to help with the label stuff. After that, Steve needed an overview on how we integrate some of our code with automated emails (outbound emails based on user actions). We went over the process and did tons of drawing and talking about what happens. Steve will be working with Chuck and I on this project. This is for the gun/firearm registration and RMA (returns) processes.

Back in the office after a couple days off and a day for a funeral. Busy times. There were 6 or so guys and gals on the morning meeting today. I helped merge in some code for Danny and some custom labels. John and I did a little bit of work on 1099's. Other small questions and touching base.

General observation - Lots of the guys and gals are very interested in helping out our clients and making them happy. That is great and awesome to see. It hasn't always been that way and back in the day, it felt like we didn't have enough people to go around and support those client wants and needs. Good stuff.

This meeting was setup by Danny and Marisa. It was scheduled earlier in the week, but we had some crazy Flash conversion stuff hitting us at that time. Here are my meeting notes. Also, see attached for a number of screen shots from Marisa's presentation.

SEO meeting

- Danny, Marisa, Steve, Chuck, John, Brandon, and Cory were on the meeting

- They were talking about different phases, tools, progress

- We are looking to make our site more organic, actionable, and able to help with solving pain points

- Some pain points for others are: Missing the all in one (system thinking and system options), missing functionality, legal compliance stuff (oversight)

- We want to generate more good web traffic

- Taking courses and trying to stay up to date - Danny, Marisa, Chuck, and John are all taking some new courses to keep learning what they need to know and do. That is awesome!

- Gearing the design to help share and show what we have

- More internal linking

- Resources and support - Marisa really feels like this is a big need and wants to focus here - helping out our clients with what they need.

- Mobile friendly - 1st criteria - everything needs to be mobile ready

- One SEO, the score changes and gets degraded based on errors and missing pieces

- Changing targets - we know that we are chasing a moving and changing target

- We know who we are... be our own style - this is our plan

- Pirate ships, pirates, and boot strapping

- Pros and cons of technology choices

- From steve - keep things as small as possible, service our customers, and optimized our revenue

Tech support and helping with check printing, new PDF labels, and pushing up code changes for Danny.

Quite a few on the meeting this morning. Mostly just checking in. Some of the guys were prepping some demo sites and doing some internal training. Steve was talking about some new angles for possible white labeling. He has a meeting later today with a current clients that wanted to pitch some ideas.

I sent Danny a list of domain names that we current own and also some that we have let go. I want him to help take a look at those and see if he and Marisa want to do anything with them.

As part of my clean-up process, I ended up doing tons of FTP (file transfer protocol - aka uploading and downloading files from a server) to back-up an older server that we are going to be letting go. The server is one of our original servers and was used clear back in the day when it was called the Morning Star System. As I pulled some of the files down, it was a blast from the past. Lots of fun memories. That's where it all began, back in the day (2001-2008). Adilas did come along until mid 2008. Just for fun, I am going to attach a history doc that talks about the process.

Towards the end of the time slot, John was the only other developer on the meeting. I went through and showed him around on some of the old files and website stuff. We sure have learned a ton over the years.

Steve texted me and said that he was on a demo and would join when he could. Danny popped in for a bit and we talked about harvesting some of the existing video training that we already have and what that could look like, if we were to put some scripts to it (SEO stuff). Recording notes and other odds and ends.

Eventually, we'd like to go back through all of these videos and catalog them and find little gems of content and/or training - https://www.youtube.com/user/adilasbiz/videos

50 million videos... on YouTube... close to a year and a half of training that we recorded. I'll bet over 100 hours of training that was recorded. We haven't categorized it yet, but here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/user/adilasbiz/videos

Danny, Steve, and John were talking about SEO (search engine optimization), training, and getting the word out there. We have tons of stuff, but no one knows where it is and how to get it. We are looking to change that up as we go forward.

Sean was talking with Steve about reaching out to our clients and getting them all on board and updated to the newest levels. We are really excited to get in there and start taking care of our clients better and better from the inside vs the older outside independent model. Really good stuff. We are trying to mature and develop as a company and as a family unit.

There were 5 of us on the meeting. We had Wayne, Alan, Steve, John M, and myself. Wayne started out and we moved through a bunch of topics dealing with serves and where we are headed and what is needed. Great meeting. Here are some of my notes.

- Most of the servers have been moved over to Hostek.

- The servers are being more stable.

- We are still having problems with 3rd party solutions.

- Our internal API socket connections have slowed down - we ended up pushing some of that back on the outside clients.

- We have moved the WordPress stuff on to its own server.

- Data 0 is working much better and being more stable.

- Wayne and the guys (John and Danny) are working on some database projects.

- We are getting close to being able to cluster those servers. Currently, we are somewhat of a 1-1 server/database setup. We would like to get into clustering of those servers.

- We are getting good read and good data back on servers and database usage using Fusion Reactor.

- The bigger clients will get what they want and our smaller servers will be able to be consolidated.

- Data 2 (new data 20) seems really busy on the database queries and requests. There are also some other servers that get hit really hard.

- From Wayne, reward points seem to be a bigger lift. We have to look up so many records.

- Cloud Flare has a hard 100 second page load limit. We still have a few pages that are big pigs. We are looking into some long running report handoffs and finishing the process behind the scenes and then either emailing it or making a new link available. Dealing with Cloud Flare, we have been happy with a ton of bad traffic that is being blocked.

- Maybe getting into threads (Alan and Wayne looking into things)

- Wayne was showing us some server stats. Lots of traffic and requests.

- We have been renaming servers and changing their domain names.

- Stats on servers, requests, browsers, pages, operating systems, device types, etc. Great stats.

- Wayne was even reporting on hack attempts and measures that we are taking to either monitor and/or eliminate those attempts. It is great to have Wayne on the servers, watching and helping to smooth things out.

- Talks about databases and having unique datasources on the same servers. This is a future project.

- Talking about internal coding practices, testing, and stomping out bugs.

- Wayne, John, and Danny are working on some big database tables and consolidating those queries and data. Along those lines, they, that team, is going to do some automated testing on the new changes. The goal is to eventually get lots of automated testing in place and ready to go. Wayne was talking about processes that were looking at automated tests, and auto deployment options, if things pass all the tests.

- Introducing bugs by making a change and then that bugs shows up on some other page (what pages affect other pages).

- Talking about bugs... how do we track those, who fixes those, and how we get those bugs assigned to the correct developers? Currently, lots of the bugs are being passed over to Wayne and that's not really fair. What are our options? We need to pick somebody to start and track that process. We are thinking Cory, right now.

- Maybe using bug tracking stuff that already exists on bit bucket (Jira) or we could write our own bug tracking pieces. There are pros and cons to both scenarios.

- We may need a full-time bug person. We have ways of seeing some of those bugs even before they get really crazy. The biggest problem is who had the time and who's job is it to address those issues? That is a missing piece right now. Some of these bugs relate to our development process and lots of copying and pasting. We are seeing many of the errors show up in logs and such, but no one is actively watching or trying to take care of that.

- We tend to use junior devs (developers) and send them into a page, have them make some changes, and then go from there. It would be awesome to help them know and learn the why.

- We would like to make a standard operating procedure (SOP) for how to deal with bugs. Also, it could be training, operator errors, settings, processes, procedures, etc. We will start getting into this. We had some discussions on some of internal issues that we have. Who will fix it, what data was passed in, how can we duplicate those errors, etc.

- Two possible roles - one who collect and logs the errors. The other is a developer who can get in and get things fixed. Along with bugs, we need to also set priorities for those bugs and those bug fixes. We may need more than just one bug guys. We may need to pick and choose based on the bugs.

- Getting Wayne a mini me helper - how to jump on the servers, interact with Hostek, rebooting servers, resetting services, stopping the auto deploys, etc. We will be starting out with John Maestas as a mini me helper for Wayne.

- Data normalization rules and redoing some of the database tables. On this first round, we will do the minimum levels to get it ready to do clustering. We will normalize where possible.

- On the server side, the database are the weakest link. We would like to get these clustered and backed up even better than they currently are. Wayne and John may be looking into this as we go forward. Currently, both Hostek and Newtek are doing daily back-ups of the data, but sometimes a lot of data passes in just one day. We may need to get a smaller increment for our back-ups.

- Light talks on server caching and calls to the database. Trying to be more efficient. Limiting the number of requests per page.

When I joined at 9 am, the guys were talking about industry specific marketing and research. Mixing Danny, Sean, John M, and Steve together has been fun to see. Each has some unique attributes that mix well together (small project team). I'm excited to see what they come up with.

On a different note, Steve is going to work with John to get him going on a round 2 version of the icon menus and more options. Russell launched a new version on the new classic homepage. Steve wants John to do similar stuff on a number of pages. Instead of using screenshots for the icons (current visual) they will be using newer more modern icons such as fontawesome icons and other web specific icons. It makes it feel more modern. John will be working with Dustin and Chuck to coordinate the icon list and what each one does and/or represents. There could be tons and tons of new icons added to the mix.

Looking over some code with Steve on one of his projects. Alan popped in and gave us a small update on some of his projects.

A bunch of the guys checked in and then jumped off to work on their own projects. We had Sean, Danny, and John all check in. John was pretty excited, he is working on a project that tweaks some charts and graphs. Good stuff.

On a side note, Danny asked about Russell and what kind of involvement he may want to play. Russell has been a major contributor as far as current look and feel (snow owl theme) as well as the one who designed the current main adilas.biz web site. We would love his help, he is just busy with school right now.

Danny, Sean, Steve, John, Dustin, and I were on the meeting this morning. Steve, John, and Danny were going over SEO (search engine optimization) stuff when I joined. We are going to put Danny in charge of that and let him run with it. I helped Steve with a small code fix. We then pushed up code to all servers (database update and spelling change).

Steve and Sean were talking about the accounting side of the equation and how cool of a piece that is... once someone catches the vision, they can really go and start seeing the whole picture and seeing the vision come full circle. That is exciting. As a side note, Steve and I are getting better at delegating tasks and responsibilities.

Steve and I were talking about seeing people catch that vision and then being willing to help push the ball forward. It is very fun to watch that process happen. We also talked about using internal teams to help these clients get onboard. along with that, we are more willing to spend monies to get clients onboard and going. Once they are going, we can take good care of them (internally) and service their needs.

Emails, paying bills, and recording notes.

Quote from Julie Thayne (friend) from the other day - "If you can't do what you do... do what you can." On a funny note, she said that Bon Jovi (rock singer) had a song about that. I just liked the saying. I did go and listen to the song and liked the lyrics - we bend but don't break, we do what we can. The whole song is about how we, as a people, are dealing with viruses, pandemics, change, etc.

**Total for everyone 12/3/20 to 4/14/21: $13,837.34

3/18/21: 4.92
2/23/21: 2.83

12/21/2020: JM hours as of today: 10.31
11/25/2020: 

Danny and Sean checked in. They were talking about some SEO (search engine optimization) stuff, a new adilas web site (coming next year), and a plan for what they want to pitch and show to the world. John M joined the meeting and he showed me what he is learning about SEO.

I got an email with a bug report in the email. I went to check it out and got sucked in. For almost 2 hours, John and I were fixing some functions and making sure that local function variables were properly declared. I was coding and John was watching. It ended up being a small training session of sorts. We talked as we fixed things and finally got it all wrapped up. We pushed up new code and let people know via email.

At the end, I did some other email stuff and recorded some bills before going to lunch.

When I joined, Danny and Steve were on talking about team dynamics. Danny is a drummer in a band for his church and worship team. He was making an analogy about members of a band... The ones that work out best are those who love to play together. You can have tons of talent but if you don't play well with other, it just doesn't work (over time). This is just a prediction, not sure where it is going, but I can see Danny playing more and more of a role as we go forward. He is very fun to be around and has loads of talents.

I spent some time cascading API socket settings and documentation between servers. Sent out some email about servers and observations from bouncing from server to server to Wayne. Just a couple clean-up items.

Going over option for inserting meta data in key pages. Danny was heading up a discussion about SEO (search engine optimization) with John M and myself. I was taking notes and the other guys were commenting and providing ideas and info. We started out with intellectual property and went from there. Here are the basic notes.

- IP - intellectual property - natural flood - you can't copyright or trademark or paten things that already exists... if we flood the area with prior art, that effectively prevents others from claiming things as their own intellectual property. Fun discussion about where we are headed. We are sharing to protect ourselves.

- SEO - buzz word - science and art of making things show up for searches and on search engines

- Seen and unseen - matching SEO content with real natural content - light talks about the history (good and bad) of SEO

- Marketing and getting a new website for adilas - we really want to get a good plan in place and then follow that plan - up until now, it has been a very natural progression that just sort of happens. We want to be more specific and deliberate on our efforts, messages, and marketing. It is time.

- We have a bunch of different levels - main website, secured content (SEO not needed - due to login and permissions), shop (ecommerce - a little bit more tricky), web/API sockets, and other pages and documentation.

- Web content - they virtually and really score your site based on responsive design (mobile ready), same domain name (traffic and visits), amount of time on that domain (frequency and length of time on certain sites), reciprocal links (who links to who), matching content (good natural content), etc. Going over the basics.

- Meta data - key words, buzz words, include photos and videos with built-in meta data

- Sometimes it is the little itty bitty things that help - small things but a lot of small things really start adding up - almost like a virtual score sheet

- We don't want to do anything that is sketchy... off canvas text, hidden things, tags and random content, etc. Play well and be honest.

- We want a main landing page and home base that deals with what adilas is and does (as a whole). This is not industry specific, but who and what are we.

- Animated story lines and time lines

- Some other links - see chat - elevator sales pitch, presentation gallery, outline, chuck's new sales tools, etc.

Web link - adilas_formula.pdf - adilas formula

Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=7089 - elevator pitch

Web link - adilas_presentation_gallery.pdf - presentation gallery outline

Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=6914 - internal questionnaire summaries (sill working on this - progress)

- Put Danny in charge of the team - pick a team, get a plan in place, set a budget, and help to roll things out.

- What do we want to sell and pitch? Up to this point, we have been pretty off the hip... we need a strategic plan as we go forward. It is time.

Monday morning. Steve, Danny, Sean, and I were on the meeting. I was somewhat in the background listening to the other guys talk. Steve was going through the different levels of data and how things are coming together. It is fun to watch the progression of how things move and needs that arise. Towards the bottom of the pile, you have the underlying data or transactional data (day to day stuff and the underlying pieces of the story as they play out). You then go up to aggregated data (sums, averages, counts, totals, and other stat type data). After that, you go up to data warehousing and storing big data sets and other big data type stuff. As you progress, there may be a point where you need to archive the data if it gets too big or bulky. It was fun to be in the background listening to Steve talk with the other guys about the transition between transactional data and other bigger or more big data type methodologies. Kinda fun to see the transfer of knowledge.