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.

New transition today. I popped onto the morning meeting because that is what I normally did. I let the guys know that I wasn't going to be doing that any more. Sean was on the meeting and we chatted for a bit. By way of an update, he is doing great working with the dynamic adilas label builder. He is also willing to do some checking out of what our competitors are doing and providing me some competitive research. Nothing too huge.

John joined the meeting, and we were looking at some mock-ups. We would like to allow our users to interact with options to setup their own space, look and feel, etc. We would also like to do some early prototyping. Get it out and in their hands. Even things like settings for click vs hoover and other simple choices that affect their space (what they do and use - their space, their flow). We already have a bunch that we have paid for and haven't been able to use it yet. We have a ton of R&D stuff that Jonathan Wells did in Adobe XD for fracture, adilas cafe, and a new shopping cart.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Dramatize it, push up XD docs from Chuck on the content server. We have done tons of really good R&D. Let's use that. This is how we are going to get fracture up and going and off the ground.

John and I talked about trying to centralize all of the data and assets. I have a bunch of it. We have pushed up a bunch to the adilas content server. We also still have quite a few assets and raw authoring files with the guys/gals who made them - Jonathan Wells, Chuck, Russell, Marisa, etc.

As part of our discussion, John was showing me some of the projects that he worked on for school. He's got business design docs, pitches, proposals, flow charts, etc. I'd like to tap into some of those planning and system scope documents. Not necessarily for his project, but more for what we could do for our projects. Once again, show them don't tell them. That is huge and reoccurring theme. Show them, don't tell them.

Here are some other notes from our meeting:

- We could make some awesome customizable dashboards

- Realtime data on what is going on (tables, graphs, charts, and quick aggregates), help them see everything without overwhelming them. Full visibility.

- "Show them" and then do it over and over again.

- Talking about dream salaries between John and I. Where would you like to be, salary wise?

- Keep idea farming - that's what we do

- Shari O. joined the meeting. She loves to do some gaming. I'd love for her to come up with some ideas on how to turn adilas and the daily work into a game of sorts (the game of business). Shari O. said that she could do some light research and maybe come up with some ideas. As we were talking, she said that she changes games based on moods. That's good information. We may want to come up with something similar - what mood are you in? Ok, let's play that way. This is just a dream right now. I'd like to see where it goes.

- Keep gathering things together. Eventually, we will make our own world.

- More ideas for the application and/or system - education mode, game mode, nuts and bolts mode (just get it done - speed mode).

- More talks with Shari O. about Facebook groups, other social groups, having meetings, setting up schedules, and giving people power to run what they want to do. Make the whole thing a team effort.

Emails and working on adilas ownership percentages for Wayne and Marisa. Built a small spreadsheet with percentages of ownership to show who has was percentage. Steve and I are helping to spread the load and also the ownership. We are excited about that.

Working on some new verbage to help with a news and update for the Bear 100. Click here to see the final news and update that Cory and Marisa made.

Emails and phone calls. Talking with Steve about Marisa and what our possible plans with her might be. Good stuff. I then sent her an email with some thoughts.

Small little impromptu sales meeting with the guys who were on the morning meeting. Sean, Michael, and Steve talking about gun dealers and firearm sales (current and future clients). Tons of fun discussion and them making some plans to get with our existing clients to see if we could help speed things up, make things better, or add in needed connections and functionality. They are excited to stir the pot and see what they can make of it. Michael has some prior firearm sales experience and he's an experienced adilas user and manager.

The topic switched over and Sean and Marisa were talking with Shari O. and I about the bike shuttle company. They did some training with them yesterday and just doing some follow-up. They will be doing some more training next week.

On the morning meeting with Steve. We touched base on the discount engine that John is working on. I was with John yesterday for over an hour and half looking at the code. There is a lot going on there. Good stuff and making progress.

Steve wanted a demo of where I was at with the bike shuttle company and some of the custom scheduling and booking tools. I showed him the progress, including the bulk add limited flex grid tools. I showed him where I was at on the bulk edit flex grid tie-ins tool and how cool that will be. We also jumped out in ecommerce and talked about the client facing scheduling options that we want to add in. I've got a few more internal tools to work on and finish and then I'll roll outside in ecommerce and work on the client facing scheduling options. Marisa joined us and expressed that when we get to the planning and design portion of that project that she and Chuck would really like to be involved. As a fun side note, this will end up being a precursor to the WanderWays project (campground, cabins, and other scheduling options).

Part of my role is to help share the vision of where we are heading and how to get there. I've got some of the other guys and gals building it out, I just need to keep helping them see where we are heading. As a fun bonus, they catch the vision and then add more to it. That makes it really fun.

Steve and Marisa were going over some Metrc syncing and Metrc training. There are tons of options built-in to the adilas platform. Pretty cool. After that, they got into a training session on how to deal with samples and how to bring them in, sell them, and account for them. Steve was showing Marisa how to treat them similar to normal inventory items. Next, they got into a small internal training session on using update PO's to help with inventory updates and adjustments. That lead to a conversation about how important dates and date sensitivity is when dealing with inventory tracking. There is value in being in a real time inventory management environment.

The last major topic of the morning was dealing with the value and need for education. We have all kinds of tools and some that are light years ahead of the competition. However, if we don't teach our users how to use them and if they don't know about them, then they can use them. There is a real need to train our internal staff as well as getting our clients trained up and using the correct tools. That is a challenge but also an opportunity. There is real value in a power user, someone who knows adilas backwards and forwards. They are needed and in demand. There is real value there.

Steve and Sean talking about other connections (people) and different networking angles. Steve would really like to see if we could find some adilas power users that are looking for some work. Marisa joined and they started talking more sales and marketing. As a side note, both Sean and Marisa are doing a great job with deployment. Steve would like them to circle back around and help make sure that our other clients are being taken care of (reselling or re-pitching our older clients - reengaging them).

They were talking about news and updates and helping to get the word out and about. They were talking about getting some of the new flyers in a standard spot and making those available to any of our guys/gals who need them. Marisa has been revamping some of the flyers recently. The goal is to help our clients stay up to date and also inform new or potential clients of what we are doing and what we offer.

Those who were on the meeting, we touched base on other projects. I was reviewing a number of documents and looking at a website for a possible merchant processing vendor. I have a meeting later today with a guy from USAePay and NMI. The guy also represents a company called Trinity Payments that actually does the merchant processing. The other two companies are called gateways.

Towards the end of the meeting, Eric jumped on and we pushed up some code to the Herbo server. He needed to push up a file for some live testing.

On a training meeting with Drew and Lanette from High Valley Bike Shuttle. We also had Sean and Marisa, from the adilas side on the meeting with us. We were going to be doing some merchant processing stuff and setting up API sockets and API keys, but they didn't have the correct login access. That became a small issue and stopped the progress there. I told Drew that I would check with the vendor/representative from Newtek to make sure that they got the correct login access.

We flipped over to showing them other custom code that had been added since our last meeting. We have made a few tweaks to the bulk flex grid tools as well as some small tweaks to the limited flex grid options. We did some light training and even checked a few things that they had done on their own.

The last thing that we covered was getting them, the bike shuttle company, hooked up with Sean and Marisa to do some inventory management training (PO's, parts, items, categories, invoices, and shopping cart stuff). We also briefly talked about ecommerce and other things that will be needed later on. We had them exchange some contact info.

Both Marisa and Sean joined the morning meeting. They were touching base and checking on vendors and active parent items for certain vendors, for a client. We talked about some of our plans for the High Valley Bike Shuttle and where we are headed. John joined us as well. We then talked a little bit about adilas percentages.  We will just keep pushing things forward. Kinda like making an arrowhead out of flint (rock). You just keep doing a little chip here and a little chip there. That seems to be about as fast as we can go. Just keep going!

Sean and Marisa left and just John and I were left on the meeting. We went over some ideas, and I tried to answer some of his questions dealing with the company restructure and what we are planning. Nice little chat.

Small sales meeting this morning. We started out and Maris was showing us a new ad for a magazine that she is working on. Chuck and I talked with here a little bit about print specific stuff. Basically, print and web are treated differently, from color options to dpi or lpi (dots per inch or lines per inch). Print is, and/or can be, much more technical. You have to be careful.

Marisa and Sean were asking about the High Valley Bike Shuttle and progress there. I requested that Marisa help me reach out and get them all trained up and going. The conversation ended up with a marketing twist and what else we need to do and to help push these things along.

Esperanza (Hope) joined and wanted to do more person-to-person events and network marketing. She was pitching ideas and Steve and Sean were fielding questions back and forth. She seems to have a lot of energy and wants to get out and about more. It seems like she wants to be a promoter type person and help with events, meetings, and social type interactions and marketing. She, Steve, and Sean will get together and talk about ideas, budgets, and expectations. The goal is to get more demos.

Steve and Sean were talking about ecommerce and what is needed to keep systems going. Lots of moving pieces. After that, it switched over to a sales meeting. Steve was asking questions about some dealerships and recent contacts that Sean and Marisa were making. We talked about how much custom code is needed per client or per industry vertical.

We got into a conversation about the client facing scheduler and how cool it will be, but also how much code it will take to make it fully functional. The subject then flipped over to automation, wizards, settings, training, and education needs. As things get more complex, there needs to be ways of letting people know what is needed and what needs to be done. If the education is not there, it actually makes it even harder to figure it out. We talked more about ways of helping to speed up the training and onboarding processes. We need a way for our client to figure things out and/or be educated on what is possible and what is needed. Steve was mentioning that we need a balance between sales and new development.

As a side note, in some of our design prototypes for the fracture project, we were working on a better UI/UX as well as a thing called education mode (toggle on/off for extra help and information). The goal was to make it available but hidden. If it was needed, it was there. If it wasn't needed, it was hidden but still avaiable. Also, a good UI/UX will help eliminate some of the education stuff (not all of it).

The final topic of the morning meeting was dealing with advertising and pushing that forward. We also talked about having the best team we have ever had. Good stuff!

Demo and training session with High Valley Bike Shuttle. They had Drew, Jim, and Lanette on the call. We had Chuck, Sean, Marisa, and me from adilas. Good call. It went about an hour and 45 minutes. Lots of information to cover. We did record most of it, see attached if you are interested in seeing where things are at currently. Lots of other pieces are planned and in the development stages. Once the meeting ended, I wrote down a couple of ideas and pushed up the video. 

Multiple folks checking in this morning. Cory had some questions about payables and a company that reported that one of the payables wasn't showing up in their system. We briefly looked into it. Showed Sean and Marisa some of the progress on the limited flex grid tie-in stuff. Small mini demo for them. Reviewing notes on the adilas trust and ideas for the changes in company structure.

Cory, Wayne, John, and I on the server meeting. John was reporting on the discount engine and his progress there. He has a visual model that he was showing us for the demo. Wayne has been cleaning up some of the database servers and actual databases (data on the servers). Cory and Marisa are trying to make us look good by working on better communication stuff. We also were touching base on other server-based projects. Small meeting.

Steve and Sean were going over tired pricing out in ecommerce and how to set things up. I got to show a small demo of my progress on the limited flex grid stuff. Steve and Sean jumped back on going over some other new things that have come up and/or being developed. Both Sean and Marisa are helping with training and deployment and are doing a great job. As they are out in the field, they keep bringing things back that need a little bit of loving, small tweaks, and other ideas and feedback. Good stuff! That information is super valuable and even critical to our survival and success.

The more we do, the more we are trying to improve our internal connections. Steve and I were talking about ideas for an operating agreement and some sort of option for doing a retirement or special savings account of sorts. I scanned some scratch paper and I was asking him for some ideas and feedback. He recommended that the column for quality could be called position or position level. How critical or important is the role that the person is playing in the mix? We couldn't think of a good name. We were thinking value, quality, rating, or level. I like position level better. Just playing with ideas.

Steve and Sean were talking about custom gram controllers and ways to setup certain settings to make it super flexible. As they were talking, I was thinking, yes, it can do it but we will need to train our people on how to use that. Often with complexity comes the need for more education. They seem to go hand in hand.

I was reviewing notes from a meeting with an unemployment auditor about employees and general employer stuff. We are trying to make some changes in how our business is structured. Good stuff, but also a challenge.

Cory and Steve were going over 3rd party solutions and dealing with them. It is kind of a bitter sweet relationship. They keep popping up all over the place and some of them expect us to virtually carry them. It can be a challenge.

On a different note, we keep circling back around and talking about Stripe and ways to possibly integrate with them. They seem to be a very good and valid merchant solution. Marisa and Sean were going over Metrc invoice syncing and tips and tricks to make things sync up.

After that, Chuck and I worked on media/content files and code review. We tweaked a few files and pushed them up to the adilas content server. Chuck and I started chatting about rules for 1099's and sub-contractors. We reviewed some of my notes from the meeting with the unemployment auditor. Just for fun, Chuck was say, why don't you move where the business is based out of to a more tax friendly state. I never would have thought of that. We don't plan on moving, but it was an interesting angle. Almost a business decision based on tax friendliness - kinda interesting.

Cory, Steve, and I talking about merchant processing with both Elavon and USAePay gateways. Trying to figure out the best approach for those two solutions. We already have active code and implementations with both gateways, we are just trying to figure out which one to sort of lean on and favor (business decisions). Both seem pretty good, just weighing options.

Steve, Sean, and I jumped on a small fix it project for the complex labels (QR code and normal barcodes). We got in there and made a number of changes and pushed up some files. As we were talking about labels, we brought up Calvin's dynamic labels and the need to get back in there and work out kinks from his dynamic label builder. Marisa joined and had some label questions. That shot us over to the barcode custom labels and using the complex label generator to store sub packages, fixed quantities, and fixed costs, all tied to a single barcode value. Kind of interesting that the custom labels came up multiple times this morning alone. Pretty crazy!

Cory has been on vacation for a week or so. She got back and a bunch of the folks on the morning meeting wanted to talk to her. She coordinated times to get back with Sean, Marisa, and John. After that we went over projects and progress reports. Lots of touching base on small happenings, projects, and updates. We decided to assign a few tasks to some of the developers who could help take things off of my plate.

We talked about state taxes, state payroll and withholdings. We have two new states that are needed. Sometimes, that takes time, research, and then ongoing maintenance (year after year). We talked about new clients and managing expectations. For our new clients, we need to figure out what they will be needing? We may need to pad the setup and activation fee to help with light customizations. Almost every client needs it, but they don't want to pay for that. We can't do it for free. We may need to add some of that flex coverage to the initial activation fee. Thinking about a fee of $1,500 for a brand new client and a smaller activation fee for existing clients that just need a new corporation or system. Something more like $500 vs $1,500 as we won't know what is really needed with a brand new client.

The last topic of the day was 3rd party solutions and some of the settings that we have and how they play in. Light talk about the API sockets and key connections that outside 3rd parties need to make. 

Marisa and Sean jumped on the meeting. We started out by talking about special driver license scanning options and possible state specific formats and options. Next we switched over and talked about a 3rd party solution and possible security issues. We came up with a couple of suggestions and Sean will relay those ideas back to the 3rd party folks.

Next we went through a number of scenarios on discount engine stuff, custom discounts for employees, and cost plus tax options for owners. We got deep into the discount engine and also using the advanced add/edit to cart feature. Pretty cool.

Tons of dynamic setting and setting up options for barcode quick carts and other speed and ease of use options and settings. Sometimes a new user may feel overwhelmed with too many settings. We can help them run their way without getting overwhelmed via a setup and deployment person on our side who helps guide them through the processes and sets things up for them, based on what they know or have been asked to do. Futuristically, we would love to have a series or wizard type walk-throughs or bigger global user types where we could quickly configure settings on a corporation, business industry level, and even a page level - based on known needs and patterns.

Chuck joined Sean and Marisa on the last little bit of the other meeting. We were going over financials, accounts payable, and accounts receivable. Lots of fun showing numbers and some of their trends. Lots of drawing on the screen.

Both Sean and Marisa had to bail out and so just Chuck and I kept going. We switched gears and talked about the add/edit media/content pages that Chuck is working on (small page level facelift on certain pages). We also briefly talked about maybe using a JS framework (JavaScript) for the next version of adilas. Eventually, we really want to allocate some time, funds, energy, and resources to work on the fracture project. We are hoping that that could be part of our plans going forward. Even if it is a little bit here and there, we would take it and run with it. One of our first main goals is to create a plan and then be able to pitch the pitch. No new code, just mock-ups, requirements, prototypes, and proof of concept stuff. We really want a great plan and then to be able to do and build what we are hoping and dreaming about.

Along those same lines, Chuck was talking about making sure that our application has multiple layers. The database level (dao's - database access objects), the middle layer (business logic, models, and services - object oriented pieces), we then need an interchangeable display or show level (visual wrapper, themes, custom, or even white label options). If we build it out that way, the 2 lower levels could be almost untouched, even if we had to redo the upper or display level. Sometimes that is called the view level. It goes deeper than this, but an older acronym is MVC (model, view, controller). There are more modern versions of that now, but that is all that would come to my mind as I was recording this. Long story made short, keep the data, logic, and display levels as separate pieces and you are heading in a good direction.

Marisa and Sean were on the morning meeting. Marisa wanted to get some information on the PO line item rounding project and how that affected recipe/builds and internal build PO's. We went through a number of scenarios, and I showed her and Sean what the new force to $0 buttons and the line item rounding function does. We talked, drew some flow and training things (online meeting and drawing tools), and spent a good 25 minutes going over all of the ins and outs of that feature.

Next, I asked both Marisa and Sean if they had heard anything about the possible switch to a multi member LLC. Both of them said no, so we went into a good 45-minute crash course. We covered K-1's, 1099's, W-2's, etc. Lots of other ideas and concepts, dealing with our move to a multi member LLC with more owners and splitting up some percentages. I was having fun explaining things and I hope that they were enjoying it as well. We were looking at reports, getting numbers, drawing, linking things together and hopefully making sense. Anyways, good meeting and we went over a lot of ground and territory. When we finished, Chuck had joined us as well.

Tuesday morning sales meeting was going on this morning. The meeting took the whole hour. Lots of different subjects being covered. They went over their email campaigns, possibility of Eric (one of the developers) doing some sales and networking, touching base on the enterprise level systems and their existing functionality. We may want to go back and spend some time doing some small tweaks on some of the functionality and flow. Just some small tweaks and quirky things that need a little bit of loving.

Sean was asking about travel expenses. Steve recommended that gas, mileage, and drive time expenses be passed on to the client. That seems fair, in my mind. Next, they switched over to some corp-specific tables and settings. As a wish list item, they would like to see more wizard type setup processes that walk you through the setup process to help with choices, defaults, and other settings.

Steve helped Marisa with some cannabis level settings for a new client. That lead into looking at options for custom labels and barcode stuff. The need for custom labels is a huge deal and seems to keep growing. We have some pieces in place that help fill the gap, but there is still a huge need for a super powerful, user maintained, custom label and barcoding or QR coding engine. We have some pieces to the barcode and label solution, but they still need some help. We have that on our to do list, but it is not currently the highest priority. Hopefully soon!

Got invited to a Zoom session with Sean, Marisa, and Steve. We looked into a small issue with the enterprise vendors and setting default chart of accounts. The chart of accounts are corp specific and don't transfer when copying over vendors from corp to corp (enterprise level stuff). I helped them fix it and got them going in the right direction. I sent an email off to Alan explaining what we found and some small suggestions.

Calling Newtek about USAePay options. I was on hold for quite a while and wasn't able to leave a message. Called back again and at least left a message. While I was on hold, I read an article that Steve passed me over dealing with guaranteed payments for partners and some of the gotchas in that realm. Lots of tax laws and moving pieces. We will definitely need some help from a CPA and an attorney, when we are ready.

On the morning meeting, Marisa was showing us some sub inventory issues that need to be smoothed out dealing with sub inventory attributes and template settings. I was doing some emails. A question was brought up about New Mexico state payroll and state withholding. We used to have that state, we just need to circle back around and make sure that everything is updated and good to go.

Shari O. and I spent some time going over progress with USAePay and getting information from them. We have both made multiple calls to our contacts at Newtek and haven't really gotten the information that we need yet. Kinda frustrating, we just want info on account types and how to help our clients sign-up for what they need. If we can't the info that we need, we talked about going in a different direction. Both of us will keep trying, for the time being.

Switching subjects, Shari O. and I spent quite a bit of time talking about our transition from full 1099's for all of our guys and gals to the multi member LLC (partners and ownership) options. Eventually, we may need a hybrid type solution that allows for owners, 1099 folks, and even employees and W-2 folks. Still trying to figure things out there. As a note, Shari O. is recommending that we slowdown a bit and make sure that we have watched budgets, gotten documentation, and standard procedures in place before we jump too quickly. I showed her the adilas docs section, inside the adilas site, and she had never been there. If we do build out more internal flow and owner type handbooks, that is where it will go. It will be called our standard operating agreement or something to that nature.

Shari O. and I talked about budgets, watching and tweaking those budgets, and then making some decisions. Lots of talk about timelines and timeframes for some of the upcoming changes. Good stuff. I'm super glad that she cares and is willing to ask hard questions.

Working with Marisa on parts and part category images. She is going to get with Alan later on. Small to do list stuff. Emails and recording notes from this morning. Lots of notes from a meeting between Steve, Chuck, and I earlier today. Back working on the copy chart of accounts project for Cory.

Chuck, Steve, and Sean were on when I joined. They were going over a number of different things. Sean and Steve started going over some of the BioTrack API and small issues. Marisa, Alan, and I started working on the parts categories and the upload for images and photos for ecommerce. Alan was able to find the error and got it fixed. After that, Steve and Alan were going over more of the BioTrack API socket endpoints. Marisa jumped back on and we made one more small fix for her on the part category stuff.

Next, Chuck and I got into some questions on the add/edit media/content pages. He is working on a revamp for that page and section. He was working on the add mode, but his question was actually part of the edit mode. I got him pointed in the right direction.

Helping Marisa with a user login problem. We jumped into to the correct server and had to look around a bit. We pulled some queries, checked some things and eventually had to change some data. We had an old user that was inactive and a new user that was active, but it was defaulting to the older inactive user. We altered some records and got it to work. Checked in with John briefly. We both bailed out and did work on our own.

Marisa, Chuck, John, Sean, Steve, Shari O., and I were on the sales meeting. They were talking about their email campaign and making follow-up calls. Steve wants to get a ballpark figure as to how much that email campaign is costing. We would love to get a rough idea on the client acquisition costs for different industries that we serve. Chuck and Marisa were reporting on how they go in and search for contacts, numbers, emails, and build their own lists. Once we do that for a bit, we'd like to try buying a list of contacts and see which one is more effective. Basically, we are stirring the pot and virtually going on a fishing trip. What is out there?

During the meeting, the question was brought up about current sales rep type persons. Checking in on different names, people, and who is doing what. Sean had some good info on some of the folks.

After the sales meeting, Steve was asking John about some of his projects. Trying to help our guys focus where possible. After that, Steve and Sean were talking about a live system deployment where Sean is going to be going onsite to help with the full setup and deployment. The client has pre-paid for 20 hours of training and will be covering all costs to pay for Sean to be onsite for a couple of days including airfare, lodging, etc. That is awesome! We are really trying to recoup our costs with some of our new clients. On average, it costs us about $2,000 to get a new client on and going on the system.

Steve and Sean were going over ideas on text message marketing and some possible marketing options. We are going to be trying to market more and more of our own professional services such as training, setup, data entry, deployment, maintenance, and consulting. We are really excited about that. One of the missing pieces is who is coordinating things and helping to orchestrate the sale and the deployment.

Switching gears to merchant processing, we really want to figure out a standard procedure there and help get our clients setup with great rates and excellent service. We have tons of options, but we really want to focus in and offer a standard package. Part of our missing link right now is info from the merchant processors as to what kind of accounts and services are available.

Weekly sales meeting for Trailer dealerships and other retail entities. Marisa was taking notes. The guys and gals were reporting on email campaigns and what not.

After that, I helped John with some payroll stuff. He is getting close, just needing a little bit of help to get this project over the finished line. I then logged into Kabbage business funding and made a loan payoff. Other small things from the SBA loan budgeting meeting that were assigned to me. Cleaning up some of the payables and getting things paid down where possible.

The Tuesday morning sales meeting was going on this morning. Marisa and Chuck were both presenting and sharing. They were talking about the scheduling side of adilas and how that would be cool to keep building that out. See this link for some other ideas on both horizontal views and vertical views for scheduling and elements of time. That link also has access to a small 2.5 minute demo video showing elements of time and some custom work that we did for Beaver Mountain (ski area and their snowsports school lessons).

Chuck and Marisa were also reviewing some recent email campaigns for trailer dealerships. They were looking at stats and how many emails had been opened and viewed. They were also talking about other places to advertise and connect with business to business software people and clients. Just looking for ways to advertise what we have to offer.

After the meeting, Steve and I were briefly talking about ecommerce and how it is going to be super important that our clients can sell all of their products and services. This includes normal inventory items, different services, and time (bookings and appointments). They all need to be able to be sold from the same ecommerce interface. You can tell that some of that is really heating up and there is a demand out there for it.

Alan and Dustin joined the meeting and we were going over units of measure and a possible variable casting error. John chimed in and recommended an Adobe ColdFusion update that might fix the problem. They spent some time looking into that.

Steve, Sean, and Marisa were on when I joined this morning. After they finished up, Steve and I were touching base and he had some questions about an error that he was getting. It took a bit, but we figured it out. He was going to make some other changes in some BioTrack files that he was working on to get them up to date with the new code. He and I then went over the PO line item rounding code that I was working on. We looked at some examples and ran some scenarios. Steve had some ideas, and I wrote them down to build them out later today. Lots of testing, talking, drawing, and going other things.

Started out the meeting with Cory asking some questions to Wayne and John. We went over the sales tax aggregate calculations, licenses, SOC2 audit reports, budgets, and starting into making a small performance matrix spreadsheet. See attached, just a quick start, but something to refine and work off of.

We talked quite a bit about Lucee and possibly moving in that direction. The topic then switched over to Docker images and how we could get some gains by flipping over to that type of a scenario. We could even use Docker images to run simulations and trainings for server based tasks, in a safe and secure environment without having to give full live access to all of the guys who would like to learn about server maintenance and tuning. We even talked about getting local Docker instances for Cory and Marisa to test things locally without having to have an actual testing server (paid server that just sits in between testing stuff). There was some talk about manual installs vs automated Docker images and instances and how to help standardize things. Anyways, some great conversations on cost savings and ideas moving forward.

We talked about the importance of good data and good test data. We also talked about going beyond the data and doing tests and simulations on how our clients are using and accessing their data. Trying to help smooth out the processes. Other topics discussed were dealing with configurations between data servers and databases. We also talked briefly about trying to move more and more settings over to DAO's (data or database access objects). Striving to be more and more efficient, where possible.

Tuesday morning sales meeting. Marisa, Steve, Sean, and Chuck were on the meeting. Shari O. joined a little bit later on. They were going over email campaigns and planning some follow-up calls. They are just starting that email campaign for trailer dealers and dealerships. They were going over some planning and logistics. Lots of talk about using the existing adilas tools to help them track touches, contacts, quotes, invoices, and billing for time for deployment and other time-based services. Good stuff.

I saw some great communication between different team members and all being on the same page. They will be doing some internal training on elements of time, billing, and what not to make sure that they are good to go.

The last topic for the sales meeting was Marisa asking Steve, Shari O., and I about the floorplan application. Originally, we built that section of the site back in the Morning Stat Automotive days. We were reviewing some things and giving Marisa and Sean a general overview. They are going to be setting up some other internal training sessions to fully get their heads around it.

After the sales meeting was over, Marisa had some questions for Steve and Sean about custom gram controls and other logistics for a demo later today. We also went over some inventory controls and being able to update inventory counts and inventory management tools (update PO's, delayed scanning, etc.).

Reviewing emails and making plans. Back working on some bug fixes. Checking in on default ecommerce images for Marisa. Testing and making sure that things were looking good. Part way through, I got a call from Cory to look at an error on data 0. We got it fixed (just on that server) and then moved on. No other complaints were made. It took us a while, but all we did was repush up a couple of files. No physical changes were made. Random...

Once that was done, I switched back and did some more work on the ecommerce images and other small tweaks. Made those changes and pushed them up.

Small fixes on a custom report for a client. Merging in some code for Chuck on the view parts page. Small fixes for RFID tags and sub attributes on the view parts page and the sub inventory tab. Started working on a fix for Marisa on ecommerce images and setting up default logic based on actual images, item defaults, and category default images.

Tuesday morning sales meeting. Marisa, Sean, Steve, Chuck, and I on the call. They were reporting on email campaigns and coming up with a deployment check list. They are getting pretty deep on the checklist and Marisa is sort of heading that up. They also brought up the presentation gallery and some of the new dealership themes that Chuck added in. That should really help. If you get to the presentation gallery, you get to the custom themes (custom backgrounds) by clicking the menu in the top right corner.

We got into flyers and wanting to revamp things. That would be really cool. The next subject was dealing with merchant processing. Tons and tons of discussions around that subject. Towards the end of the meeting, they switched over and Steve and Sean were going over Metrc stuff.

Checking on errors, bugs, and possible problems. We launched a bunch of new changes last night and had to do a small clean-up on some of the pages. To complicate things, we also had a Puppet script on the master server that was resetting the main servers (all of the data servers) every 30 minutes. That little script was kicking users out every 30 minutes even if they were actively using the system. We got a hold of Wayne and John was able to fix it.

Marisa and Sean asked me to look into fixing the pagination on the advanced customer search results page. I went in and made a small change, but it still needs more testing and loving. After that, I was helping Sean do some look-ups on histories and logs on data 6 for a client. We were checking clear carts logs, invoice numbers, history homepages, quotes, invoices, etc. We were not able to find anything that looked out of place. Sean was going to report back to the client.

Helping John with some state payroll stuff. He is going to keep working on it over the weekend and will get with me on Monday. Other phone calls and email messages.

Chuck and I jumped on the dev testing server and looked over some of the new code. We are hoping to get sign-off from Cory and Marisa later today and then we will merge in the new code to the master branch. Anything small, we just merge in and push up to the different servers. Anything that is bigger or major changes, we push up to the dev testing server and let the girls go in and kick it around (do some testing).

We spent some time going over questions and mock-ups for the customer queue. That will be one of Chuck's next project, small face lift on that page.

Cory popped into the meeting and we went over a few questions that she had. Chuck was showing her some of the changes up on the dev testing server.

Lastly, we did some code sign-off on the invoice sales and profit report. Merged in the code and pushed it to all servers.

I joined and they were doing a dealership sales meeting. Marisa was leading out. Talking about trailers, dealership stuff, custom paperwork, processes, and getting serialized (stock/units) into the system as part of a dealerships inventory.

After the sales meeting, Steve was doing some new settings and using some include files for a custom gram controller in the view cart top mini area. His goal is to get rid of a bunch of similar custom black box code. That is awesome. Black box code allows us to interject any code on any page to make it custom. However, if you end up making tons and tons of black boxes that are very similar, you can actually create more work and maintenance. Steve is starting to move into a great one-to-many relationship on some of the new code that he is building. That is a huge step.

When a developer starts out, they build a bunch of things that are coded specifically for one client or one purpose. That is easier to wrap your head around and each thing (function or feature) has its own part to play. Lots of simple things that basically stand alone. As their skills improve (developers), they start thinking more globally and start building in functions, methods, special includes, etc. Basically, code it once, use settings and defaults, and let the users configure what they want (make it more dynamic). Then the features become what is called "data based" vs "code based". It allows the application to flex without having to hardcode every option. The settings and defaults determine what it does and then you can reuse it over and over. Instead of copying and pasting code from others, you start building your own code with a purpose in mind. Huge steppingstones. Good stuff!

As a fun side note, As Steve builds this new code and stuff, he is actually able to delete thousands and thousands of lines of code to make it more simple and concise. Sometimes that really boots a developer's sense of being if they can get rid of extra code vs just adding and adding to something that is already huge. Great little mental battles and victories.

Dustin joined us on the meeting and wanted to go over some harvest functionality. He and Steve were talking about keeping up with master on the different code branches. Marisa wanted to see if Dustin could help be on a demo for cultivation stuff. Good little meeting.

Chuck and I going over finances. I went over similar things in an earlier meeting, but Chuck didn't join us on the meeting until we were almost done with the last one. We spent a good 15-20 minutes going over plans and progress and options.

We then got into a small progress report on some of his projects. We would like to do a global or really general news and update stating that we are making changes and numerous pages will be in the process of being updated with a new look and feel. After that, we got into a discussion on testing and what is required per page. It totally depends based on the size of the page, the changes that were made, and how complex the page or functions are.

Another topic that we discussed was our newest delay, waiting for Cory and Marisa to test things on the dev testing server, do a news and update, and then plan the scheduled release. It will most likely help, but it does slow us down a bit.

We talked about adding in a generic dealership theme on the sales and presentation gallery pages. For the record, if you want to change the themes, once on the page, go to the top right menu icon, then click it and look for the gears (settings), once on that pop-up modal choose the theme and click save. It will flip the background images for the presentation gallery. Anyways, we have had some request to add in a dealership-based theme (trucks, trailers, motorsport, boats, RV's, etc.).

At the end of the meeting, we got into talking about making specific assignments and then being able to follow-up with that person. Currently, it is too open and we just put it out there... whoever wants to test it, here you go vs hey so and so, could you test this and let me know. More assignments and specific instructions are needed. Currently, too many assumptions. The last topic was more technical and dealt with options for mixing ColdFusion and JavaScript in code and keying on and off of certain values and dynamics. Fun stuff!

Work session between Chuck and I dealing with new changes and new code updates. We were going over code on his parts update and face lift on the parts and general inventory items pages. We checked out some other changes on the dev testing server and merged in a couple more branches. Today, we went through three new branches and prepped files for going live. We have a total of six branches on the developer testing server that need to be reviewed. Once they have been tested and gone over by Cory and Marisa, we'll do some news and updates and then help those files go live. Normally we don't have to do this whole process, but some of these files are major files and the girls are worried about us just pushing things up without letting anybody know (news and updates).

The pages that have an upgrade and a new face lift are: parts home, advanced parts search, printable parts report, grouped parts and items by category, add/edit parts, view parts, parts history, parts usage, and a couple other changes in the cart and dealing with recipe/builds. Anyways, things are prepped and ready to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working on the bug with sub inventory descriptions and passing hidden form fields with special characters. After I got that one done, I jumped on some research that Cory asked me to do. Originally, we thought that it was a small bug as well, but it ended up being a different interface and UI choice. The problem was the Kush cart was not showing the same amount of fields and data as the classic cart (internal shopping cart). After looking into it, the Kush cart never had those features. The user was flip flopping and wanted both carts to have the exact same layout. They weren't designed that way. The classic cart has tons of data and the Kush cart is a more streamlined version. Anyways, we figured out that it was not a bug, just completely different interfaces. I sent a note to Cory to let her know. I also contacted Marisa and Sean and they did some testing on the other bug fix and gave me feedback that all was well and ok.

This morning, when I joined, Sean and Marisa were on the meeting going over things. They showed me a display problem with products and descriptions with special characters. The descriptions were cutting off the descriptions depending on the special characters. If added by scanning the barcodes or id number, they went in fine. If just generically searched for the items and then added to the cart, there was a display problem. We determined that it was dealing with the special characters and encoding the data to handle the special characters. The primary issue seemed to be with custom sub inventory descriptions that had special characters.

After we determined what was needed, we also looked into some custom emails for invoices and quotes that get sent out of the system. We looked at some code, logged into backend email accounts, and did some testing. We got everything flowing and working. Not sure what the problem was.

John checked in briefly and then bailed out. I spent the rest of the time working on the sub inventory description issue.

As a side note, we are seeing a real need for both maintenance and education/training. Those two things combined are a huge part of what we do and hope to be able to do... The training needs to be for both external customers and internal users and staff. I want to put my vote in for both - maintenance and education.

Wayne, John, Cory, and I on a server meeting. Talking about data back-ups on servers and ratios per server. Trying to get things nailed down and make sure that we have sufficient back-ups per server. Each server is slightly different as far as volume, corporations per server, and what the server's do (usage, traffic, and storage). It gets kinda interesting.

Wayne and John are going to check on all of the database boxes and how many days of rolling back-up we do per box. We have tons of copies of the code, and it changes every day. The actual data is the highest prize and needs to be treated with care. This may not fit here, but we see three main pieces to our application. You have the code, the database structure, and the actual data. If any of those pieces are missing, you only get a fraction of the whole. They are all required to make it work.

Along with back-ups, Wayne was reporting that he is watching the servers for errors and monitoring things. We talked about getting more details from clients who are reporting errors. Ideally, we could get the time of day, the corp id number, the server, and the steps that they were doing when they got the error. If we don't get much detail or feedback, we don't know where to start looking (per say). Those steps to get the errors are super important. Sometimes it could corp-specific code, settings, permissions, or even just page logic flow. Basically, we need the path that the users took to get the errors or certain results. It gets interesting.

Wayne did report that he is working on the corp-wide settings (huge table and breaking it into smaller pieces). That will end up being a pretty big project, by the time we are done with it. Currently, we have close to 400+ settings, attributes, and defaults. It's only going to keep growing.

Switching gears, we did some stuff with Marisa on emails and got her setup as an email admin on the backend. Cory was then asking some sales tax aggregate questions and we were going through different options. Eventually, we will need to walk through all of the steps and branching forks. That lead to some conversations about the value of data and getting the data in the right hands. Some of our developers have really wanted and needed certain data in order to do their projects and customize their stuff. Real data is key.

The last discussion for today's meeting was dealing with hardware, bundles, and making things consistent across the board - where possible. Marisa and John were talking about recommended hardware lists and what should be on there. The main subject was a certain scanner/printer combo. Our current model doesn't really allow us to force any certain decisions. We are very open. As we go forward, we may find a benefit by creating certain bundles and then fully supporting those decisions. It gets kinda tricky! The more we can help the system work as system, and everything plays together, the better. We may need to develop possible bundles of both hardware and software products. The other side of this coin that we looked at was developer costs and maintenance costs for different system and supporting different hardware configuration pieces. That's a somewhat hidden costs, but it is totally real. Anyways, some good hardware discussions.

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.

Ten people on the sales meeting this morning. I was going to present a little bit on our triple play plan and show the sales folks some numbers and costs. I was planning on taking about 15 minutes. I ended up presenting for the full hour and we went over all kinds of things. We bounced between Adilas (the site), spreadsheets, graphics, word documents, and lots of conversation and drawing. Marisa was taking some notes and we had some good participation. I think that it caught a bunch of the guys and gals a little bit off guard. We went over real numbers, revenue, bad debt, expenses, servers, people costs, etc. I felt pretty good about it, but I'm not sure how it was taken or received. I got some good participation from some but some of them were completely quiet. Fun but interesting meeting.

Anyways, the triple play is a current cost increase across the board (step 1). All new sales will be trying to recoup a cost of at least $2,000 as an acquisition cost. This will include a one-time setup fee, a number of hours (between 10 and 20) for training and setup, and any other special fees or 3rd party solution covers. That is step 2, dealing with new sales. The step 3 part of our triple play is a refinement of direction and even some trimming (cutting with a purpose). Anyways, most of the meeting was explaining and getting buy in on the plan. We did lots of drawings, questions, looking at numbers, projections, graphs, etc.

Trying to fix a local error on Chuck's local development environment. We ended up reaching out to both Wayne and Alan to see if we could get help. We also tried playing with it a little bit and doing some testing. It was over our heads.

Chuck and I were talking about some of the hard questions and hard decisions that we need to make as a company. We were talking about creating a nice letter that we could send out to our clients and let them know that we have to raise the prices. Maybe use Marisa or someone who could turn it into a small marketing ploy or add some flower or fluff to it. We also talked about how we need to let the people know that we are still a lower cost solution than the competition. We talked about setup fees, what it really costs, and how long it takes us to recoup that or those costs. There is a client acquisition cost and we need to cover and recoup that cost. Chuck and I were estimating that it costs around $2,000 per client (at a minimum) to get a new client on to the system.

He and I were going over some rough calculations and projections. Basically, Chuck was kinda coaching me and giving me some good ideas that I could take back to management meetings. Along with those same comments and options about raising our prices, we talked about how quick we could turn things around, including paying our own bills and our own payables. We have a problem there. We end up paying for everything, but if there is a cash crunch, we are slow paying our guys and gals. That is a problem and causes strife and issues as it keeps going.

Going back to the price increases for our clients, we have been eating the extra costs for years. We just can't keep doing that. It is hurting us. We had some really good discussions, good talk, and good advice.

Towards the end of the meeting, Wayne joined us and we tried looking into the local development error that Chuck was getting. Other email stuff as well.

Server meeting with Wayne, John, Cory, Steve, and I. There were a couple of others hanging out, on the meeting as well, but didn't participate. Sometimes they like to hear what is going on. Basically, doing work in the background but just keeping their ear to the ground.

Wayne was reporting on some new application changes that he made in the shop folder this morning. He made sure that certain variables were switched to application-level variables, vs being held in session scope. Small discussion on that process and suggestions going forward. They talked about costs on Fusion Reactor and plans for watching and monitoring but not running up the charges too high.

Marisa had some domain and DNS record questions for Wayne. This is dealing with web addresses and marketing materials. We went over the sales tax aggregate project and the state and status of that project. Eric and Wayne are going back and forth making small changes. It is currently only deployed on the dev testing branch, but we are looking to merge it into master here soon. They, the guys, also talked about optimizing shopping cart functionality and making a skin-deep cart facelift.

Lots of talk about planning out the future and how we are going to deal with end-of-life, plugins, updates, and themes. Before we get too crazy there, we have to help the current system be able to sale more systems. We need to increase the revenue portion of the puzzle. Along with this topic and conversation, we got into talking about triage and what do we need right now and then changing the focus to more proactive or forward-looking plans and strategies. We also need to keep planning and doing reoccurring maintenance and other non-planned system upgrades.

Towards the end, Wayne was showing me the progress that he is making on breaking up the two big tables and how the new system is handling all of the corp-wide settings and defaults. That is and has been a pretty big project. He is making progress and it is looking good. Along with that, we also talked about using the black box services that he has setup to help us maintain and handle custom code and custom pages. We really want to keep the business logic, the database stuff, and the visual elements in different areas and sections. For readability, consistency, and future maintenance.

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.

Talking about the internal shopping carts. We went over some of the pros and cons of the short and sweet cart (still in beta mode). We then switched gears and looked at the progress on the parts section (current facelift project). Light code review with Chuck. We also talked about the lead magnet that he and Marisa are working on. Chuck reported on his training hours and where he is spending his time. I made sure that he had access to the Adobe XD shopping cart stuff that I had from Jonathan Wells. He is working on research and gathering up information about the carts (internal secure and external ecommerce carts). He is also doing some research on some of the competition that is out there.

Great little meeting. The main topic was the adilas shopping carts, both internal and outside eCommerce shopping carts. I took five pages of notes and we got some great ideas and discussion topics written down. We had Cory, Kelly, Marisa, Sean, Chuck, John, and I on the meeting. See attached for meeting notes on the smart cart.

- Lots of talk about modes - eCommerce, internal, user based, customer based, management based, quick and dirty, and more detailed modes.

- Speed is key

- Wants, wishes, and hopes - see attached

- Smart cart logic dealing with discounts and the discount engine - cart as a whole, beyond just the normal add process

- Research and plans

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.

Small email change to add Marisa to the list of custom email persons for the internal emails that we send out of adilas. Pushed up the new changes. Working on catching up on notes and recording things from earlier meetings today.

Meeting with Steve over GoToMeeting. We were going over general updates and new happenings. Things change quickly around here. Talking about funding, plans, and strategies. I showed Steve some quick numbers that I put into a spreadsheet. After that, we looked at his code and made a small tweak to help him get past a small error. He was super close, just needed another pair of eyes on it. We chatted about some other stuff, and we'll hit it again tomorrow. Good stuff.

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

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.

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.

Meeting with Alan on the AWH project. We had our own mini standup meeting and then I showed him what I was working on the PO line item rounding stuff. I was using Alan as a virtual sounding board and we went through a number of good scenarios. His plan is to review a bunch of documents, videos, and notes from elements of time to get a plan together.

Checked my email and got sucked in to over an hour of answering emails and doing some internal tech support stuff. Sometimes, that, email, is a virtual black hole or time sink. Anyways, that is where my afternoon went. On a positive side, I saw some great interactions and coordinating between Sean and Marisa. They were doing a great job (following the email chains) and they had some great info that was being passed back and forth. That made me happy.

I also did some recording of notes and trying to stay caught up on normal day to day tasks.

John and I did a quick check-in. Normally, Cory joins us but she was travelling today. John reported on the discount engine remake project. He is gaining traction and realizes that we have to tone it back a little bit compared to his dream of where he wanted to take it. The current project is just too big of a lift right now. We'll get back to it later on. The other thing that he reported on was some server stuff and John is taking more of a role in the code management and merging area. Especially for the new development environment and testing server. He has been put in charge of that.

Lots of emails. Marisa was chiming in on some marketing ideas. I also got some emails from Audrey and Marisa dealing with other marketing things, questions, budgets, and goals. Good stuff. I sent off a text to Steve to get a confirmation on some of the things that are going on. I want him to be involved with the decisions.

In between times, I was doing more research on the recipe/build process and getting deeper into the differences between build and sell (invoice based recipes) and build and hold (production or internal manufacturing PO's and inventory manipulation stuff). I'm seeing that I may need to add more options to help with sub inventory, multiple decimals, and yield multipliers. When we originally built this section, it was pretty simple. In the meantime, some of the needs are much more diverse and deeper. This whole thing is coming form a project to go back in and check some of the rounding errors for PO line items.

Without being too detailed, no rounding is needed if you have whole numbers times other simple whole numbers or simple decimals. It really gets funky if you have high quantities and costs that are clear out into the 5 decimal land. If you combine the two, the rounding error really starts to be more visible and important. Anyways, looking into what is needed to take those tools to the next level.

Recording notes and getting caught up from the morning meetings. Marisa and Audrey requested some photos from the Bear 100 for some social media. I went through a bunch of pictures and got them a small sample. See attached for some images of a past race. Adilas.biz has been tracking and running the Bear 100 mile race since 2015 (currently 2021).

Back on the recipe/build to elements of time tie-in project for production and scheduling. Looking into PO line item rounding.

Everybody was scrambling this morning, as the servers were down. It appeared to be a routing issue, upstream from us. We had Marisa, Cory, Sean, John, Shari O., and myself on the meeting. We also had Bryan join for a bit. Steve was texting back and forth, and Wayne joined and gave us more information as well.

The whole tech support team was answering emails, text message, and trying to help pass on the information that we had. Great team effort. The sad thing was, we couldn't really control all of the variables. The routing problem was even above the data center or server farm level. We fix code and can tweak a few things, but if the main highway is broken, I don't care how good your vehicle is, it just won't go.

A few small lessons learned... We were trying to send out an email blast, but most of our data was on the primary adilas.biz servers and we couldn't get to it. We did have some older exports of our client list, but it was a few months old. We also updated some files, through FTP, but the caches weren't being updated. Interesting.

As the time progresses, we kept fielding calls, texts, emails, etc. Wayne and John were doing a great job bouncing around and checking all kinds of different maps, up/down internet sites, and even bouncing to different countries to try to access our sites from different IP addresses and access points. Pretty crazy.

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.

Fun meeting with Audrey and Marisa. Kinda like a small interview. Both of these girls help out with our marketing stuff. They were asking questions and I was drawing, showing pictures, and presenting some of the history behind what was happening (then and now). I had a great time. I think that they had a good time as well. Basically, a quick 45 minute tour from here to there - How did adilas get started and some key points along the way.

See attached for an older Microsoft Excel document with some timelines and key versions of the adilas platform.

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.

On a Zoom meeting with Euflora and FlyHi to see a live demo of what they have been working on. I was quite impressed. It was a great demo and they have really done their homework. It gets a big thumbs up from me and the adilas side of things. Here are some of my scribbled notes while I was watching:

- Nice, simple, and pretty opening interface. The backend is fully tied to adilas.biz and is run over backend API sockets. Basically, FlyHi is the customer or patient frontend and adilas is the database backend. All done over API sockets and different connections. I was impressed.

- As an app, it was definitely set to mobile first - nice looking - simple screens - full shopping and delivery app.

- Lots of turn on/off settings and features from the backend side of the app - open/closed, availability of items, filters, etc.

- Full cart, full delivery, full dispatch, and fulfilment through the dispatch process - very mobile friendly for customers, drivers, dispatchers, fulfilment persons, and owners.

- I saw sections for histories, wallet balances, drag and drop assigning orders to drivers, multiple ways to approve or deny progress and service. Easy steps to follow.

- Lots of different apps interacting and quickly loading needed pieces and data connections. Lots of app to adilas interactions (backend API sockets and endpoints).

- Uploading images, documents, building manifests on the fly, back and forth text messages, etc. Great tech and great use of that tech.

- Tons of moving pieces and endpoints being used. From end to end - full circle from start to finish - looked good!

- Fully automated and fully paperless

- As a fun side note, they are using tons of custom parent attributes for their items to run the whole process. Anything special that they need, they are just adding using existing tools and features inside of adilas. Basically, a core product with extendible data points and database fields. Pretty cool!

- As we got into the demo deeper, they are having to do some major hoop jumping and major compliance issues - lots of back and forth. They have done a great job thinking out the process.

- Eventually, they (we) would like to form some strategic partnerships to push this combo product forward. We told them that Steve Berkenkotter from adilas would need to be involved in those decisions.

- They are mixing Metrc (state tracking and compliance), FlyHi, adilas, and their mobile app to do inventory management, ecommerce, online shopping, delivery, dispatch, and compliance stuff. Cool custom mix.

- They said that they have been working on this for 2 years as a development project. It looks great! Nice step-by-step processes and screens.

- For us (adilas) - it would be nice to build a bulk parent attribute updater tool. The other request is a global product catalog to help with normalization of the all the data points and pieces. This includes vendors, photos, descriptions, weights, attributes, categories, units of measure, etc.

- Towards the end of the meeting, I was impressed with how well Cory was doing in coordinating with the client on their requests and next steps. That is awesome! I love it!

- Marisa, from the adilas team was chiming in as well. Good feedback.

- Basically, they are using the huge adilas backend as a big piece of their puzzle - that is awesome! They are building their own app and flow based on API sockets and using a mix of multiple pieces to get the custom interface, functionality, and data storage that they need. I was impressed. In Marisa's words - They are taking the adilas customization options to their own custom levels.

- One of the last topics of the meeting was dealing with how many hoops, loop, and moving pieces. As it keeps going, eventually, who is going to manage what? Lots of pieces to the puzzle.

- As a small side note, I sent Steve a text message after the demo meeting telling him that he needs to see this. Exciting to see what is possible.

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.

Finished up some small tutorial videos on Postman. Light playing around. Spent some time writing an email to introduce Marisa to Audrey (new girl) so that they could work together on some marketing stuff.

Chuck and I started out talking about payables and cash flow stuff. After that we switched over the to the sales and presentation gallery project. Chuck showed me some of the progress that he is working on. One new change is that he has implemented some +'s and -'s (plus signs and minus signs) to help with mini drop-downs for sub or extra verbage. It is looking good and he is making progress. He also reported that he is almost all the way done with the background images and having the different themes stick and play through the entire presentation gallery.

We talked about some new verbage and content for the adilas core concepts. Marisa has been feeding Chuck some new verbage and content. I pointed him to the latest Word document that Shannon and I were working on for new verbage and content for the adilas core concepts. He pulled the document up and we went over some of it briefly. I touched base with him on some of the brainstorming that Shannon and I were doing just yesterday.

Chuck was showing me some training that he is working on and some email campaigns and automation processes that he is researching and playing with. Chuck was talking about using lead magnets (slowly leading the, our clients, to the goal) and using things that we can help them with vs just plain buy our product type marketing. Interesting direction. Also, as you look at marketing, if we can show a need, fill that need, and offer to help ease some kind of trouble or pain, that is very effective. How can we help you? Let us show you how we can!

Along with the email campaigns and automation processes, we talked about controlling splitting paths, following user actions and/or non-actions, and building the automation processes and campaigns based on where the client is in the process.

We then changed directions and talked about bookings and online reservations. We have a client that will need some of these pieces here in the next few months. We talked about some of the new time settings and going over more adilas core concepts and virtual game changers. Both of these pieces are dealing with where we are heading in our world building and digital storytelling processes. I find it interesting that time and elements of time is going to be at the heart of some of these new changes and advancements.

Sent an email to Marisa about the Audrey, the new girl who may be helping with some marketing efforts. Paying bills, scanning receipts, and purchasing some gift cards for the guys and gals (using reward points).

GoToMeeting session to go over a resume for a young lady - looking to join the adilas team. I met with her and we chatted and went over her resume. I'm thinking that she could help out Marisa on the marketing side of things. She doesn't know adilas yet, but she is a quick learner, good with software packages, likes to organize events, seems to work well with a team, and has some experience helping in tech support for a technical college in northern Utah for a couple of years. Hopefully it will be a good fit.

I sent Marisa a copy of her resume and left a voicemail message on Marisa's phone.

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)

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.

Steve and I met and talked about all kinds of stuff. We chatted for almost two hours. Here are some of my notes.

- The process of being willing to dive into the unknown

- Need for project management

- Standalone declarations - How to incorporate those pieces and tie everything in to the financials. The standalone declarations allows (futuristically) a user to move and virtually declare or make a statement one way or another. For example: Say you just needed to declare some revenue, for some reason. It wouldn't have any backing (no supporting docs or history) but it allows you to just add it to certain places within the financials. This would allow you to make any change and/or adjustment that would be needed (revenue, cost of goods, expenses, assets, liabilities, equity, etc.) without having to have a special balance sheet item or entity. Just because it exits (or will be) doesn't mean that you would use it for everything. On purpose, it would stick out like a sore thumb. Ideally, you would only use these adjustments if you did not have another tool to do the job naturally.

- Starting and finishing projects. Our guys seem to love to start things but we are having a problem with getting them all the way across the finish line. That seems to be pretty normal. We don't like it, but we will try hard to help these guys get in there and help them finish things up.

- One small step at a time. It's hard to go faster than that.

- The shelf - We build and develop and then put something on the shelf. That is a big pain to us. We pay and pay and then we can't even use it - right then. The further we go, the deeper the shelf seems to be. It almost has layers and layers within layers. If it gets too old, it gets hard to bring it up to speed with master code branch, just because things happen and change so quickly. Interesting cycles. It's part of the game.

- We would like to use Cory more as the manager for the projects. She already coordinates tons of the pieces, we would love her to be even more involved. Along those same lines, we would like to extend more authority to make calls on flow, direction, speed, and budgets. Good stuff.

- We have to be careful of the mindset of "got to do the whole thing". We do way better if we take smaller bites, do it, finish it, and then cycle back around. If we bite off too much, we tend to get in so deep, the end or end goal becomes blurry and it makes it hard to finish and/or even know where the finish line is located. We keep trying to get the small victories. That seems to help. The really long hauls wear everybody out and sometimes you don't feel very successful, even if you finish.

- One technique that we use and have used is to launch things (pages, features, or projects) and we don't link to them (keep part of it hidden). You have to know that they exists. We then build and test, build and test, and then start showing it to others. As it becomes more stable, we fully build the navigation and path to the door of the virtual area or functionality. We have had great success doing it this way. If we do it this way, we get code merged into master quicker, it is still somewhat hidden, it can get pushed on without breaking anything, and the developer feels like progress is being made. It also has the opportunity to get others involved to help fuel on the project - both financially and mentally. Having a buddy is amazing!

- The conversation turned more towards sales and networking with different people. We would love to get some of our developers out in the filed more, have them open their mouth and just talk to people. We have people who can do the demo, the training, etc. We just need people to talk to. Plus, if a developer is out in the field, they then to fix things that need just a little bit of loving. Rounding off the edges. Good stuff.

- We talked about setting a base $1,000 setup fee. This includes turning on the lights, doing the logo and colors, basic settings, and some one-on-one training. The monthly could then be set on top of that. The monthly could be whatever we deem to be a value for the client. The primary range is between $17 and $987 per month. That could depend on the client and their size and needs.

- We are trying to draw lines and set boundaries. Work in progress.

- Helping our guys get their projects across the finish line. In the meantime, if they are done with their projects, let's get them out and get them talking to people (networking and stirring the pot). We will still pay them their normal rate, we just need people to talk to. Along with that, we log everything in the system. Once a lead shows interest, we can setup a demo with one our people (Sean, Marisa, etc.). Good plan, we just need to work that plan now.

Putting my office back together after the conference and training event. There were a bunch of guys on the meeting. They were reporting in and checking in.

We were talking about info graphics and how those simple images and diagrams can really help our users and clients out. During our conference, we were reminded of a saying "big dumb animal pictures" that was told to us back in 2018. What that means is make the images super simple, it has nothing to do with the mental state of the images, just think children's books or big and simple images. Some of Marisa's presentation slides were great and very easy to understand. We will keep going here and keep making progress.

Talking with Steve about the "BI" (business intel or business intelligence) servers. Basically, Steve and Cory were trying to figure out the name for the top level servers. We have used master server, enterprise level server, aggregate server, the brain, intelligence server, etc. I think that we are going to use "BI" or "Business Intel" server. This is where all of the data normalization and system roll-ups with take place. Steve and I talked about showing some of our clients what we have already automated and pitching a manual type interim to help that get going and do some R&D (research and development) for what the automation needs to look like.

We also talked about the sales presentation gallery and using that for sales and other demos. Basically, a super simple (big dumb animal pictures) set of slides and pages that allow a person to see discussion topics very easily.

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.

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!

Great meeting. We went over a few projects and follow-ups. Then we switched gears and talked about the upcoming training event and conference. Cory was reporting on what plans she, Kelly, and Marisa have been up to. They are doing a knockout job and getting everything prepped and planned out. I'm excited to see how it goes and turns out. My props go out to Cory, Kelly, and Marisa. Also some props to Mrs. Shari O. behind the scenes.

John gave Cory and I a nice update on where he is at with some of his projects. One of his projects has been working with Chuck to create basic code templates and starting places for the developers to incorporate some of the newer design elements and layouts. We also talked about how the support for the classic system needs to remain (older pages and older sections) but some of the new features will only be built going forward - using the snow owl theme (newer look and feel). Eventually, it starts costing more than it is worth to make it compatible on every conceivable level. Decisions have to be made some times.

We are trying to push both users and developers into a more standard and maintainable model. I love to hike, and I can't tell you how many times a trail gets modified and eventually the older trails get forgotten, as long as the newer tails are easier, more manageable, and easier to maintain. It just gets better and better. We are trying to do similar things inside of the adilas system and application platform. Hopefully good and maintainable changes.

John showed Cory where he was at with the payroll and timecard project that he and I are working on. They went over some new look and feel and display options as well as new backend changes. I've been working on this project with John, so I have a pretty good bead on where things are at, but John filled in Cory so that she could follow along.

More education, when wanted and needed. John is really into including the educational pieces, but helping them to be somewhat hidden unless needed. That is awesome.

At the end of the meeting, Cory and I were talking more about training and the upcoming training event and conference. Cory told me that she, Kelly, and Marisa are working on some new curriculum for the upcoming training event and conference. I'm excited to see what that looks like. I love the direction.

Shari O., Marisa, Cory, and I met and talked about the upcoming adilas training conference. We went over some topics like pricing, planning, catering, food, budgets, and scheduling. Lots of good stuff.

Email to Marisa about a new your dream it, we'll wire it up flyer and info graphic. See attached for the new flyer from Marisa.

Super awesome meeting between Shannon, Marisa, and I. We were going over some of the existing concepts for the info graphics, presentation gallery, and digital story telling options. I was on a roll and having a blast trying to convey some of the concepts and what not. I was having fun. The core concepts that adilas is built on are way more valuable than the code that we used to build it. I really want to help promote and protect those core concepts. I feel it my duty and I love it! I had a blast in this meeting.

Just for fun... I will include the chat log from this meeting. Part way through, Marisa's audio (being able to speak and us hear it) went out. So we had to use the chat feature. We were passing along URL's (web addresses) and other good thoughts and ideas. See attached for the copy of the chat logs. Kinda fun!

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!

Big push. Up early changing files and prepping things for the new website going live and the domain and sub domain name changes. We went from www to data0 on the main domain (www.adilas.biz to data0.adilas.biz). Going through pages and pages inside the site. Lots of changes to links, buttons, headers, footers, database values, etc. Met up with Wayne over the GoToMeeting at around 3 am. Marisa and Chuck joined around 5:30 am to 7 am. John joined at 7:30 am ish. Uploaded files, merged in new code, and switched to the data side of the upload and changes (all of the web references stored over the years in the database - non code, but still needed to make the full transition). Long morning.

Checking in with Steve on his item (parts) uploads. Demo of the online label builder. Sean and Marisa has some questions and we ended up doing some quick on the fly custom code for the Prescott Gun Club and searching by the customer tax id (dynamic field - they store the membership number in that field). We ended up making changes on 4 different pages and showing both Marisa and Sean through the code (narrated coding - live). Pushed up the files for the client. Marisa was then going to get with them and show them the new code.

Projects with Cory. Marisa was also on with us on the meeting. Quick overview of the upcoming news releases, dealing with the new website. Cory and I also got into a planning meeting for the upcoming adilas conference and training event.

Wayne and I working on an error with the multi upload page. Going line by line to try to fix things.

Talking with Wayne, Marisa, Chuck, and John about plans and assignments for the upcoming web page switch over. We are switching from www.adilas.biz to data0.adilas.biz (sub domain name switch). This may seem small, but we have almost 20 years worth of data pointing to www vs data0. We are expecting hundreds of thousands of changes to code and data (entries in the database). It will be pretty big. Great team to help and handle all of the pieces. 

Working on some small to do list stuff. I made a small driver license tweak for Marisa in the sell stock/unit section. Other small changes and pushed up some files.

Server meeting with Cory, Steve, Wayne, John, Chuck, Sean, Marisa, and I. See attached for some notes. We were making some plans on the new main adilas.biz website and where certain parts and pieces would be housed and built. Good meeting. We will meet again next week to follow-up on progress.

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.

We had a bunch of guys on the meeting this morning. Sean and Marisa were asking questions about using sub inventory out in ecommerce. There are tons of different settings. Ecommerce was not designed for the customer to be super detailed, like they are inside the main system. Out in ecommerce, they just say something like - I want this and that. Behind the scenes we have to check packages, counts, quantities, and other availability. This makes it kinda interesting... We have to play in simple requests but record things in crazy levels of details.

Steve was helping to guide the discussion. He did a great job and it was fun to watch and participate. We ended up having Alan pop in and go through things. As he was talking, I was scribbling down notes, ideas, and such. There are so many moving parts and pieces. All part of the same game or same puzzle.

We got into some Metrc and state compliance issues and needs. We ended up checking out some data for a client. They had added things, removed things, set things to inactive, voided things, and adjusted quantities using adjustment tools in the system. A complex series of events and timing. Also, different things done by different people. Thank goodness for histories being kept and maintained by the system. We ended up having Sean and Marisa do some fixes and then reach back out to the clients to let them know (passing on the knowledge and info - training).

Putting in another plug for a couple of other things that we still need to build out and/or refine a bit:

- We need to add a history table for sub inventory. The table already exists, but has not yet been wired up. That would really help.

- A quick search tool for RFID tags, media/content (files and links), and sub inventory attributes and packages (batches). The quick search already exists, we just don't have those things listed in the available search options. That would be really cool.

- The story about what is happening is so important. Eventually, it will end at a certain state or status, but what happened to get it there is huge. That's where the history and story comes in.

- We added more to the known issues report and known issues list. This will become part of the master code branch so that we can gather up ideas and such. We are hoping to get this report and tool out soon. Still under construction, but coming. Yeah!

- Steve is doing awesome on JIT (just in time) project management and delegation. Super fun to watch him work today.

- Steve and Kelly were on a meeting earlier today - as part of that meeting, they were using elements of time (calendar objects) to schedule recipe/builds to happen on certain days (production). The elements of time hit the calendar and the individual elements of time had links to fire off or do certain recipes on certain days. Creative use of both tools and mixing them together. As a side note, we are seeing elements of time being used more and more to coordinate and orchestrate different pieces as needed. So powerful!

-  There is a value of group trouble shooting and putting the puzzle pieces together. Not too many, but enough!

- Some of the jobs and tasks require planning and even pre-planning.

- We deal with moving targets all of the time - static (non moving) vs dynamic (constantly moving)

- Out in ecommerce, we have different levels. Inside the system, we help take the users into deep waters, based on permissions. However, out in ecommerce, we need to keep it simple (customer view and customer level), yet eventually we need the deep water info. What do we automate and what do we leave or make as a human type interaction? There is a balance and not situations are the same. Wouldn't it be cool if we could virtually setup the data assembly line with automated tasks and manual entry tasks. We can do that, but we have to be involved every time. Wouldn't it be cool if we could build the tool to help configure things as needed and have it all tied into the big picture software package or system app. Let's keep working towards that!

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.

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.

Marisa had some mass email questions. We talked about how to bulk email out of adilas and what options are available. Mail Chimp is not really working, she was thinking of creating a template and a select to email in bulk. We talked quite a bit about mail servers and how sometimes email application flag emails that have been created via scripting programs.

Towards the end of the call, John checked in and had some questions about an email that was going to be sent out to certain clients to allow them to virtually monitor their dedicated boxes via Nagios and other analytical reports.

Marisa has some questions about EDI (electronic data interchange) and API sockets. We told her that EDI and API's are very similar. EDI was more of a front runner, but most modern apps and systems communicate via API sockets. They are very similar in that it allows computers to talk to one another via electronic communication channels. She and Steve were also talking about other client messaging options besides text and email. Different types of push type notification based on elements of time and/or customer logs that are visible via a valid ecommerce or customer portal login.

Steve, Cory, and I spent the rest of the time going over ideas and brainstorming on aggregate totals, and moving grouped and pre-summed data up the chain. We did a lot of drawing and talked about different ideas. We know that the bottom most level or base of the pyramid is the transactional core or transactional data. We also know, that per world or per corporation, we need to get to the aggregated totals for the P&L (profit and loss statement or income statement) and the balance sheet.

Cory was taking notes... here are some of them that she passed over to me.

- ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) - this is how you work with aggregated data. You extract what you want, change or transform it into what you need, and then re-load or push it into a database in the stored or transformed format. Make it easy to get it back out.

- We have a map (using the existing adilas system from operations into accounting) - we need to follow it backwards. Be able to pull the P&L and balance sheet quickly and pull it in from one single query. Currently, we have to go all over the underlying transactions and data details to pull back the values. It would be so cool if we could aggregate things as needed, based on the current map that exists in the system.

- P&L and BSI reverse mapping? Let's look into it. What if we could start from the top and then work/map going down? Follow the flow of the data. There are many sub pieces that may need to be linked and/or aggregated together before we can pull the hard, fast, numbers - all from one single place.

- As we map things out, we know we need to deliver what they (our clients) want and also try to head in the direction we want to go as well. That can be challenging.

- Different levels of drill-downs. Balance sheet starts at Inventory levels (way up high), not at part categories, vendors, parent items, or sub inventory items (child items). Eventually, we have to be way up high for the P&L and balance sheet info. Then, as the user needs more details and sub information, they will do what is called a drill-down (going deeper into the details).

- Here are the main pieces for a P&L: Revenue, COGS, Gross profit, Expenses, Net profit

- Here are the main pieces for a Balance Sheet: Assets, Liabilities, Equity

- Futuristic goal: run the balance sheet and P&L over time all the way down to the second. Imagine a time lapsed view of your financials. You have to go from transactional data up to fully aggregated totals in order to get those numbers. Let it begin!

- Thinking about data... Am I tied to a corp? Am I tied to a location? What is my date/time stamp? Do I have a main category or grouping? Reports and financials by day are the current goal. Eventually, it could go all the way down to hours, minutes, and seconds. For now, we will focus on a per day basis.

- Think of a pyramid. Top most would be all pieces, all of the sums. Quick sums- held at the top. We want to capture and hold these sums or totals per day. Much less information at the top than at the bottom.

- Value added cores - we had a great discussion about how we want to use a value added core type model to help businesses run on adilas and also ways that we could monetize the different value added cores or levels that get added onto the main transactional core (the adilas system).

- One table with totals for each (top most level): Corp ID, Date, Revenue, COGS, Gross profit, Expenses, Net profit, Balance Sheet, Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Out of balance value (sum). These would be the top most corp or world level aggregation tables. Quick financials and numbers.

- We don't know how deep it goes yet, but imagine one table with totals for each level going down - until you get to the transactional data. Not sure how deep this goes yet? This might take more than one iteration to build and figure things out. For now, just pretend and start back filling as needed.

- We were talking about tracking things up to 4 to 5 levels deep. These are some of the existing pieces (verbage from the system): Destination/main title, main category/main grouping, sub group or sub category, vendors or types. We need to figure out the 4-5 deep path for all major pieces. For example: If recording revenue, it has a certain path. If recording an expense/receipt, it has a certain path. The same thing is true for things like: deposits, user-maintained balance sheet items, system-maintained balance sheet items, basically every piece of the P&L and the balance sheet - they all have specific paths and need to be at that 4-5 levels deep. Even BSI’s are 5 levels deep. Five levels should cover everything (for now).

- Talked about everything being under one database (new aggregated or math sum/count tables). If we feel we have reached capacity, we could always go out to another database (level 4- aggregated sums) or just add more tables. Lots of options. Once again, trying to figure out where the natural lines exists and what could be extra or add-on values.

See attached for some drawings that we were talking about as we were discussing some of these details and ideas.

Seven people on the meeting this morning. Sean and Steve were going over data uploads and combing customer data before doing uploads. We got into stock/units and setting up specific units. Marisa had some questions and wanted to go in and setup a demo site for motorsports (ATV's, motorcycles, side-by-sides, etc.). We got pretty deep into how the stock/units get setup and managed. Fun, light training session.

Towards the end of the meeting, Steve and I switched gears and looked at some of the code logic that Steve is working on.

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

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.

Chuck has finished up a number of smaller projects for the gun/firearm company. He is currently working on two major projects. They are the new sales tool (presentation gallery) and the adilas docs (SOP - standard operating procedures) for adilas developers.  Good stuff and making progress on both fronts. I encouraged him to reach out to Cory and Marisa to get more help with the content for the presentation gallery. I think that both of those young ladies will have some good input and ideas.

Working with Steve on some code for his orders and back orders homepage. We were working with multi-dimensional arrays and complex data structures. Only Steve and I were on the meeting today. As we worked, we also chatted about a bunch of different things. We also looked over a flyer that Marisa worked up as a double-sided mailer or postcard flyer. The new postcard flyer has a bunch of pictures of the blue dog - Adilas - the mascot or avatar for adilas.biz. See attached. We also talked about some sales options and the timing on those efforts. We are excited to help our team go to the next level.

Writing up some notes for Marisa to help her with some questions that she sent around. I did attach a copy of my notes to this element of time. As a side note, these notes were primarily meant for internal consumption (people on the adilas team vs the general public).

Research and looking over documents and questions that Marisa is working on for sales and marketing stuff. She sent out an email with a few questions and some instructions on doing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). She sent me this link to do some research.

www.mindtools.com/rs/SWOT 

**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: 

A bunch of the guys and gals were on the meeting when I joined. Marisa, Sean, John M., Steve, and I were on there. Sean and Steve were talking about needs for the gun dealership. They need a cross between a stock/unit (serialized inventory) and a part or general inventory item (bulk or widget inventory). As they were talking, I jumped in and mentioned that we had a similar request back when we were working with Barry at GPS Autotrackers. He, Barry, wanted to be able to sell things in bulk, but still track things with specific data (say a serial number for each GPS unit). He wanted the invoice to be something simple like: Sold 400 GPS units for a certain amount. Then, somewhat hidden and/or off to the side, here are the 400 serial numbers that go along with that (extra details or extra information or data).

As we talked, we ended up pitching a couple of different ideas of how we could figure that out. Option one was just use normal stock/units (existing serialized inventory stuff). Option two was parent/child inventory with a single parent and tons of subs (existing). The third option was a parent item, a sub item with a certain number (quantity), and then hold any extra info in a special table that is setup to hold the extra details. In technical terms... a one-to-many-to-many or in basic terms a parent item, one or more sub item(s), with one or more extra detail(s) per sub. We did a number of drawings and ran through some verbal use cases and options. The option three stuff seemed to have the most potential.

We talked about an extra sub table that could hold things like: auto id, corp id, part id (parent), sub id (subs), special tracking number (serial number, vin, batch, rfid tag number, etc.). It would also have columns that we could connect it to things like a PO, an outbound invoice or quote, and maybe even a separate tie-in to a customer if needed. As a small side note, we were thinking somewhat of a mini flex grid type table (similar concept but smaller in scope).

We don't know what to call it, but there is already some prior entries and ideas called a mini unit (see other entries).  This is a cross between a stock/unit and an item or a part number.

Wayne joined the meeting and we switched gears into servers, hackers, and how to help protect ourselves. We've had some hackers circling around us this past weekend. All part of the game. Wayne is doing a great job and showed us what he is seeing using some of his tools, logs, and outside monitoring services. Good stuff and we are so grateful for his skills and help. Wayne was showing us things and Steve and I were asking questions. Some of the other guys were just listening in.

Steve, Sean, Cory, and I were on the morning meeting. Lots of different topics.

Here are Steve's top 3
1 - Servers
2 - Cash flow and sales
3 - Look and feel

- Passing those costs on to our clients - as we keep adding new features and options, we need be able to pass on those costs to our clients. Otherwise we get stuck with the bill.

- Get Steve a sales team - Steve, Sean, Marisa, Drea, Danny, etc.

- Wayne wants to help with code sign-off - that really really help. First, we have to get the servers all tweaked out and running smoothly.

- Brandon and Russell - Steve wants us to work on the header based receivables piece - technology to help get the payments from our clients in a timely manner.

- The whole team is helping to fill different roles - really cool

- Tons of cool outside funding on some of the projects - cory and steve and doing a great job billing and asking for help to fund projects, functionality, reports, and other features.

- Another round on the balance sheet, look-ups and drill-downs. lots of crazy deep moving pieces. We are seeing this topic coming up more and more. People really want to see where their stuff (data and values) are and how it plays into the balance sheet. Alan has been meeting with Kelly on some of these topics and needs. That is awesome.

Meeting with Russell over a Zoom meeting. We ended up talking about this morning's group meeting. No special order, but here are some notes that I scribbled as we talked. Mostly, Russell was talking, almost consulting for me personally, and I was scribbling down notes.

- Russell would like to see us use more budgets and really stick by them.

- Russell just got done meeting with Marisa and talking with her about videos and direction. Small report there.

- If you get over extended, the stress level goes way up. Staying within that earning more than you burn ratio. Sometimes that is tough.

- If you choose the enterprise route, you are looking at a team of 50+ (most likely). If you choose the smaller to medium sized route, you are looking at a team of 5-15 people. Which would you rather have?

- Sadly, we may lose people either way we turn (corporate/enterprise or small/med corporations). That's not very fun to think about. Some of our team have completely different goals and direction.

- Eventually, you will need an enterprise level company to take care of enterprise level clients. Or you will need a mom and pop level company to take care of mom and pops (small to medium sized businesses).

- Sell what you have... We currently have a great transactional level core that has been built out pretty darn far...

- We talked about a whole new league. For example: moving from high school ball to college to professional ball. There are completely different leagues.

- Russell did a lot of drawing as we were talking. He drew a Y intersection on the screen. The upper road was enterprise level stuff. The lower road was more mom and pop (small to medium) sized businesses.

- Dealing with the Y intersection diagram... Russell said he thought that most of us will be happier on the lower route.

- Steve's main goal has always been to "feed his people..." - He always is looking out for our team and the relationships that are being built. I'm grateful that he does that.

- If we go down to the lower level, our team will be smaller.

- Living within a budget. It kept coming back up again and again. Currently, we don't have any real budgets, just some known values but no real budgets.

- The other crossroad, besides size of our company and who we choose to server (our client's size of their companies) is which vertical to choose. This has been a long standing debate. Our company is currently being very heavily pulled in the cannabis direction and space. That has been a huge blessing for us. However, we are seeing a polarization starting to happen as some of our team wants to pursue that avenue and others want to break off and into more traditional business verticals (business types).

- If we move away from the cannabis space, we will possibly lose clients, reps, consultants, revenue, and maybe even some of our developers. Having said that, we also lose some of the stress, pressure, and burden of the cannabis space.

- If we choose to stay as a smaller company, regardless of the business vertical, we may lose some clients. Sales could go down. We know that they will go back up, but things will definitely dip before they start raising back up again.

- Talks about life cycles and ecosystems. It is natural to go up and down and have different seasons of growth and decay. That is called life.

- Trying to become more stable.

- We would like to start saving and budgeting.

- Change is coming... we can be proactive or reactive. It is coming, whether or not we want to acknowledge it. I would love to have a choice vs being forced to do certain things.

- Cause and effect - effectual doors - choose your door and then deal with the consequences.

- Back to the Y intersection model - the upper road will require employees.

- The upper road also has more stress

- In order to service an enterprise level business, you will need to become an enterprise level solution.

- Our clients - seem to the ones that don't fit into a standard model and/or need that next step of custom or special functionality.

- Steve wants to help take care of his people. How can we help with that?

- Once we know were we are going, we will need to let other people know where we are going and heading.

- Idea from Russell - what if you sold a copy of the current adilas system and let someone else totally run the cannabis side of things. Basically, allow the company to split. We talked about some other ideas to go along with this, nothing super specific, just rolling ideas around.

- Y intersection analogy - upper road = bosses, stress, rules, employees, and more structure. Everything has to get bigger, more automated, and more structured. lower road = more freedom but also smaller size of team, revenue, etc. There are pros and cons to both. Or maybe a hybrid of sorts... ? Not sure what that would look like.

- Currently, I'm so swamped with meetings and putting out fires, I can't get to any of my goals right now. I sure would love to keep following my own dreams vs being pulled along in super fast moving current (minimal control - at least it feels that way).

- On the Y intersection, where do you want to go? Pick the general destination and then go for it! You have to choose a direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick meeting with Chuck. He has been out doing other things for a while. Just getting back into the swing of things. Touching base on a number of projects. I sent him a copy of the presentation gallery outline. He is mostly working with Russell, Marisa, and small projects for me.

After we finished, I worked on converting the presentation gallery outline into a PDF to put it on the web.

Web link - adilas_presentation_gallery.pdf - presentation gallery outline flyer

We also added a link to the online glossary to help other users.

Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=371&id=4030 - online glossary link

This meeting had two main parts or pieces. The first section was with just Chuck and I going over current projects. He is working on some sign-off documents and helper files for other adilas developers. He is really trying to help standardize things and make things happen on that side of the fence. He also showed me some stuff on his and Russell's Jira boards and where they (their little team) are headed. We talked a little bit about Jira (code specific projects) vs Trello boards (more of a general project management tool). Currently Chuck and Russell are leaning more towards the Jira side of things.

We went over some standards on the naming conventions and what the goals are there. Lots of different flavors out there. We are trying to help create our own style within our small development family. Even that can be challenging at times. Lots of cooks in the kitchen.

About half way through, we switched over to WanderWays and Marisa joined us on the GoToMeeting session. Marisa had created a small customer facing reservation tick list document and we went over that (see attached). We talked about reservation alerts and notices, date selection and number of day calculations, searching, selecting, confirming, and doing money stuff (checkout and putting down deposits). We also talked about hidden timers for active carts and other show/hide settings.

Lot of talk about mobile friendly layout and web page flow processes. Both Chuck and Marisa make a great team. I'm there as a sounding board and to add some ideas, but it is mostly them and their ideas and skills. Good stuff.

Marisa did a great job on the training. I took another full page of notes. She went through the advanced settings basically one by one. She also recorded it and I'll add that link when I get it.

Special training event put on by Marisa Shaw, from marketing and sales. She did a great job. I wish more people had participated but she did a knock out job and we covered tons of ground dealing with adilas ecommerce. She did record the event, so I'm hopeful to get a copy of the recording.

Here is a light overview:

She started out going into the main adilas system and showing how a good setup inside of adilas reflects and translates to a good ecommerce setup outside of adilas (customer facing ecommerce area). Marisa went through corp-wide settings, customers, invoices, items, locations, settings, permissions, discounts, photos, vendors, bulk tools, special reports, exports, taxes, etc. I really enjoyed it. Very logical approach and showed tons of examples of changes on one side and how that translated to changes on the ecommerce side of the puzzle. Super cool.

There is a follow-up, second training session, tomorrow from 10 am to 12 noon. That should be good. She will be going more into advanced settings and options.

Steve and I were the only ones on the morning meeting this morning. We started out just doing our own things and working on small projects. After a little bit, we ended up talking about some of the challenged of doing custom code verses doing more specific and/or rigid specs. We have a lot of concepts and dreams that play into what we do. That is really hard for certain developers (black and white thinkers) to grasp. We sometimes code to the flexibility and potential of a project vs the exact need or output. We like that, but it does make it difficult at time.

This whole conversation started due to a report that a developer called me yesterday and said that he had decided to take a certain project in a different way than what was planned. Originally we had proposed three options and were leaning towards options number three. Unbeknownst to me and the other developer, Steve and Cory had quoted a few other projects based on the fact that certain prep pieces would be in place from this other project. To us, the other developer and I, we could go any direction that we wanted (we had multiple options in front of us). We didn't know about the other plans. This conversation between Steve and I got us talking about direction and vision and who is managing all of this... it gets pretty deep, pretty quick.

We talked about all of the different phases and how things either need to and should flow through certain processes. We talked about R&D, look and feel, mock-ups, project management, wire-ups, custom code, database design, servers and deployment. It gets pretty deep.

As a side note, one of my new emails was email 4 for the Star Wars - adilas ecommerce email campaign. I have copied in some screenshots from the email. Once again, both Chuck and Marisa are having fun.

Chuck and I had a good meeting. We went over some existing projects and progress reports on each of those. Chuck has been working with Marisa on email campaigns, ecommerce training, and prep for a meeting to show the camping stuff (wanderways website and campground tool).

We went over some font awesome stuff and then rolled into a project that he is working on for Steve. The new project is a custom dashboard for employees and special HR type functions. We did some training on black box stuff and pulling in images and photos to the new custom page.

This is a link to a promotional video that Marisa Shaw did for adilas. It included the avatar dog "adilas". Pretty funny and well done.

https://youtu.be/l0roAYKiWPo - 3 minute video on what adilas does

Trying to catch-up on emails. Over 80+ new emails in my inbox this morning. Steve needed a merge with the master code branch. I spent some time working on that.

As a side note, one of the new emails was email 3 for the Star Wars - adilas ecommerce email campaign. I have copied in some screenshots from the email. Chuck and Marisa are having fun and I think it is fun.

Chuck wasn't feeling well so we had a quick 10 minute meeting and called it good. He is doing some mock-ups for Bill (a client) and working with Russell and Marisa on different projects. Spent the rest of the time working on small little projects and to do list items.

Meeting with Chuck to go over projects. He is currently working on some ecommerce email campaigns with Marisa. The email campaign has a Star Wars flair to it - kinda funny. He is also working with Russell on some of the re-vamp projects. The other thing on his plate is the presentation gallery project and getting that coded and working. He is currently working on menu systems and what not. Good report.

Chuck and I met and had a good little update meeting. I updated him on a few things and he reported in on the projects that he is working on. Good stuff. He reported on his slides for the presentation gallery project, ecommerce training, working with Marisa on marketing stuff, and the internal project for new look and feel on the corp-wide settings page.

We spent some time talking about filling in gaps and checking to see where we are vs where we want to be. The difference is our current goal and ongoing project. Fill in the gaps. We talked about taking care of known needs, coordinating with others, and taking care of our existing clients. Great meeting.

As a side note, we may end up offering some free training courses to help train the trainers and get the curriculum down better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chuck reported on a number of things that he is working on. He is working on setting up an ecommerce class towards the end of April. Working with Marisa on email campaigns, and other training courses. We also talked about direction on the presentation gallery and heading into the slides and page layout options. After that we went over tons of adilas ecommerce settings and internal training.

Marisa has taken over this project

4/2/20: Cory will add info to help pages.

All info that is released for new functionality needs to be in help files and on gears on appropriate pages.

Steve and I were on this morning going over budgets and forecasting stuff.

Chuck joined the meeting around 10 am. The notes below here really show be on the meeting with Chuck. See this URL/web link:

Web link - time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=6052 - meeting with Chuck, Shannon, Marisa, Steve, and Brandon

- Target marketing vs broad or general advertising - industry specific - medical, alternate medical, herbs, homeopathic, preparedness stuff - industries that are helping or assisting other people right now - what about mom and pop little cafes and restaurants that want to do delivery or online orders or curbside pick-ups. 

- Using social media to help sell and advertise things - we haven't spent much effort there - helping to get people more engaged

- Small little places that need ecommerce and delivery options - In the last couple days, we have turned on the existing ecommerce package for multiple clients

- What about lists of different businesses

- Facebook marketing - super targeted and affordable - Facebook has a ton of ways to target certain demographics

- Other methods - radio, email marketing, google ad words (can be expensive but productive - you need a budget and a good ratio per click), flyers and beating the street - most of these were expensive and did really do much

- Email marketing worked good for your current clients because they knew you a little bit - Maybe do our own campaign.

- What if we did some more training, while everybody is at home. Sell it online, do it, present it, and record it. Basically a stuck at home boot camp. We would even harvest our own email list for that. Brandon volunteered to help teach classes if needed. Shannon has also taught in the past.

- Focus and target it in such a way to say - here is how we can help you!

- Maybe run some small experiments on some of these things - meaning make sure that you have a landing plan

- Videos are a huge way to get some training out there and done

- We had Steve, Brandon, Chuck, Maris, and Shannon on the meeting. Good input from all parties.

- Light talks about the existing 2020 model and selling things where we are at

- Steve wants to go full speed ahead on the existing ecommerce solution - this seems to be the current focus and/or target we want to pursue

- Small plan - Email marketing to our existing clients, news and updates, and get some training on how to setup and use ecommerce - we have a number of people who are very good with the ecommerce solution. We can coordinate those trainers and presenters. Prep things in such a way to help the clients. Open to anyone.

- Russell did a great job prepping the existing training on the ecommerce solution.

- We could also offer consulting, training, and even a series of training events to keep pushing the ball forward. Maybe start with the existing things and build from there.

- On training efforts during the next six months - adilas 10% and the other 90% is for Chuck and his team - note added by Brandon

- We have a viable solution and we just need to get our offerings out to the public in order to become more stable.

4/1/20: Spoke with Marisa. She said we could wait on this for now, and perhaps in the future we would go the simple way. Tabling this for now.

Can create auto responders inside the mail client right now. (This is something Drea or Shari could create) Or, if they use our forms (contact support) to send us an email, we could reply back, but that would be code on our side. (3hours)

3/24/2020: I have created an Auto-Reply email template for whenever someone emails either sales or support, an auto-response email will go out letting them know that we will reach out shortly. 

We had a few of the guys on the meeting to start with. We had Alan, Steve, Dustin, Chuck, and myself on the meeting. Chuck and I started out going over some topics from the new promo videos for WanderWays. This is a new video that Marisa created for introducing the product and then pitching it to campgrounds. Fun stuff. Chuck has it under control and will get with Marisa to work on tweaking a few small pieces. Great start.

We then switched gears and talked about some of the bootstrap layouts for the existing adilas site. See the screenshots for more details. Lots of new pages and pushing them towards the current snow owl theme (bootstrap layouts). Currently there are about 5-6 pages that we are reworking.

We then went over some of the other WanderWays stuff. We looked at some new code and layout on the tool side as well as new code on the promotional or marketing side of things. Great progress. Towards the end of the meeting, Alan and I were talking with Chuck about some project management stuff and also getting another developer involved to help with some of the new code changes and wire jobs that are needed. Plans keep unfolding and we are trying to keep moving forward. That is fun.

Met with Chuck over a GoToMeeting session. We covered three main things in our meeting today. The first thing we looked at was the Wander Ways website and the mock-ups for the sales arm of the camp adilas project. See the screenshot for an update. Nice looking site and Chuck will be working with Marisa and Danny on prices, verbiage, photos, and content. Exciting.

We also went over some new mock-ups on the adilas corp-wide settings and corp administrator homepage. We talked about some options and also decided that a nice banner image would really help that page out.

The last thing that we did was go over some code for the camp adilas internal tools and project. This project is in the coding phase and looking good. Chuck is using some of his new JavaScript skills to help wire things up a bit. Still in the transition between code mock-up (CSS and HTML) and backend wiring (making it real and come to life). Great report and making progress.

Meeting between Chuck and Brandon. Steve joined us part way through. We were talking about current tasks and direction.

- Not really learning ColdFusion right now but more on helping to get the snow owl theme to the rest of adilas.

- Pages that Russell and Chuck are working on - classic homepage, payee permission home, add/edit user permissions, mange corp info, corp-wide settings and defaults

- We have purchased the project theme (bootstrap CSS theme). All of those resources are available and online. We were looking at more of the options that come with the preset theme that is already being used.

- The look and feel is so important and really helps to sell the system.

- We may need a way to prompt our users to upgrade to the newer look and feel. This was an idea by Chuck to help us prompt the users to upgrade. If they do upgrade, maybe we could help them by flipping some switches and even changing some of the settings. Make it easy to switch.

- Tying in the new classic homepage design to a user setting. We may need a toggle to switch between the new and old style and also some image controls. Chuck was saying maybe even a picture of the day. We also talked about picture categories and maybe letting them choose.

- Looking at different online resources - get those from Chuck - He had a number of sites that offer free and awesome images and pictures.

- We talked about different levels of control. Do we allow it at a per corp level, then a per user level? Etc. If we bring something forward, we will quickly get requests for more control and more options.

- We are thinking of trying it on a few of our other homepages. We have like 5-10 homepage that this could work on. Talking about a fun changing background image.

- Flipping over to the campground project, we talked about sub dividing it into small pieces and who is going to do what. We may kick some of it over to Marisa to let us know what is the most needed pieces. Trying to shorten the development cycle and get it out to be used quicker.

- For our next meeting - lets get 5 categories of photos (space, mountains, general scenery, ocean, animals), 10 photos per category, figure out the main icons, vertical tabs in the bootstrap theme.

See attached for some screenshots. Some of the screenshots are dealing with possible mock-ups and internal pages and options.

Group meeting dealing with camp adilas project. We had Chuck, Marisa, Danny, Steve, and Brandon on the meeting. We are all really excited to see where things go. Good stuff.

- We talked about confirmation numbers and being able to add and search those.

- Being able to change customers after the fact. This could be the main customer or adding additional sub customers, depending on needs.

- If more options are needed, it will be built on top of the existing adilas backend platform - that opens up a number options.

- Report settings - adding prebuilt reports based off of the settings. Being able to tweak things as needed.

- Permissions and fully removing certain icons from the menu systems based on those permissions or lack of permissions. We decided that fully removing those options would be best for this project.

- Mobile and being able to help solve issues on site - this is huge and could be a great selling point (the mobile version of the app).

- We talked about helping with real traffic flow (actual cars, trucks, vans, SUV's, RV's, campers, trailers, etc.). If we can help alter the bottlenecks, that may be a huge help. The mobile app will open up some options there. Some good discussions around that topic.

- Self check-in options

- Digital signatures and disclaimers - other possible customer portal options

- "I'm here" button and then help them get checked in

- Using other adilas reps and consultants to help do other things and provide other needed services or additional options. This could be design, web work, custom code, training, setup, map stuff, etc. All kinds of options.

- Cart settings for scans and presets. Being able to show preconfigured add-on's and normal barcode scanner POS options.

- Being able to set a default home screen for different users. For example: the check-in desk, the gift shop, the reservations desk, whatever.

- We got the verbal green light to move from graphic concepting to HTML/CSS - clickable web mock-up with dummy data. After that gets finished, we'll actually wire the whole thing up via backend server-side code and database connections.

Awesome meeting. See attached for the video recording of the meeting. There are also a number of still screenshots in the photo gallery.

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

These are some notes that Chuck submitted after the meeting.

Hi everyone,

Here are the notes I took from today's meeting.  Let me know if I missed something.

Notes from meeting with Brandon, Steve, Marisa, Danny and Charles on the design sign off
 
Tweaks that need to be done to final product
 
- Reservation # added to invoice (under Invoice in the upper left corner of the invoice) and possibly use a bar code or QR scan for the invoice to pull up the invoice.
- We can use a setting for a seed to generate the reservation number for example use a date and site number for the seed or something similar
- We need to have the ability to change or split the invoice for different customers.  This can be placed in the settings icon on the invoice
- Have a go to admin that would place the customer back into the Adilas back end if they needed to adjust advanced settings
- Add a vacant filter quick button to the sites page
- Ability to add quick buttons to the menu list.  The customer would be able to add favorite searches or functions to the menu list by choosing an icon and setting up a tool tip.  Setting would be found under the setting icon for each section
- When we get to doing the front end we should look at having a self check-in option that can either be a full self check-in or an I'm here button to notify the user that a customer is there and ready to check in
- Need to look at icons and standardize some of the icons.  Replace the cog with filter at any area that a filter is being used instead of settings.
- Be able to set which cart/invoice section is default (cart, invoice, or scan)
- Make a user that only has access to the pos system and can just sit and scan
- Changed the calendar to have green vacant and red filed on the sites overview
- On the calendar ad function so you can click a day and it will take you to the sites page for that day
- Add a date range either through search or above calendar to change the background of the calendar pages.  When one of those dates is selected it will take you to the sites page with that date range pre-loaded

Meeting with Chuck, Steve, and I. We went over some of the new screenshots and I took a number of new screen clips. We talked about the videos that Chuck had created. He will re-render them later, once he gets a full version of the software studio that he is using for capture. Steve suggested that Chuck look at some of his brighter colors and help soften and/or tone them down a bit. Just a suggestion. We also talked about more settings and getting a sign-off from Marisa on the flow and functionality. That is our next major stepping stone. We will keep refining things until we get that sign-off. From there, we will start moving to actual code.

If you want to see the mock-up videos for the camp adilas project, click here.

We also spent some time talking about the upcoming Bridgerland demo and what we wanted to do there. I proposed a few ideas, we drew some loose sketches, and setup a new time to work on the project. Leaning towards a configurable presentation gallery vs a perfectly straight in-line presentation. Lots of fun ideas and concepts.

See attached for a number of new screenshots.

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

Notes from Chuck - sent via email on 11/13/19. I thought that they would go good here.

I had a meeting with Marisa and Danny today at 11-12.

Here are my notes from the meeting.

Overall they are very impressed and happy with the new colors and setup of the current layout
 
Updates that I need to do:
- Marisa is going to think on a better verbiage for the split sites setting.
- Need to add a setting for a waitlist for those who have already created a reservation but want a different site if it comes available.  For example if they are currently in a site with only electricity but would also like one with water and sewer hookups if it comes available
- A way to merge duplicate records (in case there was as misspelling on a record) - this isn't an essential launch feature but would be nice to have
- Add (FT) behind RV icons on sites to be more specific
- When the check in or out button on sites is clicked it will launch an invoice so the user can see if the customer has a balance and needs to pay in which case it will go to a payment option, or if the customer is paid in full the user can look over the invoice and then email or print an final invoice for the customer.
- I want to redo the layout for the user setting as it's confusing
 
At the end of the meeting Marisa was asking a time table for completion as she is excited to sell it!  I told her "maybe spring, and that I really didn't know".  - hope I wasn't overstepping on that :)  she is really excited to get it out.

Met up with Chuck to go over some camp adilas stuff. He is making great progress on the interface layout. Good stuff. Here are some of the notes from the day. Also see attached for some screenshots and some notes from another follow-up meeting with Marisa - campground rep.

- Alan, Steve, Chuck, and I were on the meeting. We introduced Chuck and Alan.

- We talked a lot about going mobile. We talked about native mobile apps and responsive web apps. We are leaning more towards responsive web. There were some talks about using phone gap to convert from web to native mobile (Adobe product). We know that some of the camp host staff may be mobile from time to time (going around their campsites and such).

- Light talks about some design elements such as titles, slide outs vs modals, buttons, colors, preset color themes, etc.

- The next round is deeper prototyping in Adobe XD and making it more clickable like a virtual sales demo.

- Steve brought up a point about deleting inside of adilas. We often show/hide and make things active or inactive to accomplish the same thing as deleting, but we really never delete the data. It just gets hidden. That way we don't create any holes in the data.

- KISS - Keep it simple silly - trying to keep things in that simple model.

See attached for some screenshots.

By way of a note, Newtek, the server farm was proposing a full reinstall of a software package. We finally got Wayne, one of our guys on it, and he was able to find the problem and get it fixed without doing a full reinstall. That was pretty awesome. After that, we looked through some of the other logs and tried to make sure that everything was tight and good. Wayne is the man.

After all of the server stuff got settled down, Steve and I had some talks and discussion about direction and how to help standardize things. We also talked about the "sellable" comment that Marisa was making in out last meeting. Good stuff.

We would like to become more organized in - design, projects, and code. Those are some of our focuses right now.

We had a meeting with Chuck and he was showing some new progress with the campground stuff. We are code naming it camp-adilas just for fun. That was Marisa's idea. We had Danny Shuford, Marisa Shaw, Chuck, Steve, Alan, and myself on the meeting. Steve and I were lightly distracted, due to a server issue. We had two servers down and we were part in the meeting and part trying to make sure that things were being taken care of. Interesting.

Anyways, here are some notes from our meeting.

- Visual services and access to add-on services when selling and booking a campground site

- Color coded helpers to help with states, statuses, and color coding helpers

- Be able to show available, occupied, and services available to each site

- Marisa was talking about a synced reservation and a non-synced reservation. This deals with who is booking the site. Is it grandma and grandpa who put their card down to reserve 4 different sites for their family (synced or all together) or is it just a single family booking a site (non-synced or self pay). She was saying that we need to be able to do both and allow those groups to expand, contract, and break apart if needed. All of this deals with billing and reservations.

- It is really important to be able to show just the open sites for a specific date range.

- The sites themselves need different status levels. For example: pending, confirmed, checked in, checked out, reserved, etc.

- They talked about a "do not move" lock on certain site. This deals with a state or status that keeps the person locked in for some reason. It could be VIP treatment, special needs, special group considerations, or some other circumstance.

- We need to be able to add notes to any site and/or reservation.

- Block a site through a date range. Also being able to block the same site with a possible extension date range (not for sure, but a maybe or possible extended stay).

- Lots of needs for discounts and campaign tracking. This is already built in, but we wanted to note it anyways.

- Waiting lists would be nice. Able to sort and move people around on the waiting list as needed. They even talked about different queue type options.

- Lots of color coding and legends

- Being able to move reservations from the waiting list to some other available site

- Lots of talk about treating the waiting list like a queue of sort sort. The queue would be, by default, first come first server, but it would also have ways of tweaking it based off of needs, special circumstances, and/or add-on services (being able to manually move things around if needed).

- Currently, the campgrounds are doing tons of little hand-written notes and post-it notes to keep track of things. That gets crazy as things get busier.

- Danny was talking about using the priority fields on the elements of time to help sort certain reservations and/or waiting list persons. Just an idea.

- My biggest take away from the meeting was Marisa's comment - "I can sell this!" - Chuck is making the system sellable due to the ideas of the intuitive graphical user interface and what the possibilities could be. That was my favorite comment. Good stuff. We need to make this thing sellable.

- Sent an email to both Chuck and Russell to have them look into some of the stuff that we have been doing with Jonathan Wells, the designer from Rexburg, ID area. Here is the link: Web link - developers notebook - q=meeting%20with%20jonathan

1/10/24 Bryan Dayton sent an email to Marisa Shaw, who was originally working on this project. He was asking if she would be willing to switch over to using adilas as her RV/Campground park management tool. As a note, we were working on this project from 2019 into first part of 2020. The project got paused due to budgets and timing. This email was sent in January of 2024. Marisa emailed the following evaluation of needs for Adilas. Her response was brutally honest, but is loaded with tons of great information. See below.

To be honest, no, we would not be ready to move over. Adilas has quite a ways to go to be ready for the hospitality industry, especially for campgrounds/parks of our size. I would say if you wanted to look at your biggest competitor it would be RezExpert. That is the only software that we seriously thought about switching to but ultimately decided to stick with what we have due to price. Our only cost at this time using Campground Master is $100/year for any upgrades and customer service. 

Graphical User Interface for Campground owners.  

Link to xd share https://xd.adobe.com/view/5c903c5b-0451-4fca-5613-5ed795812d1e-2aa1/ 

We have had a number of meetings on this project, here are some other resources and meeting notes. Many of the different notes have screenshots to show the development of the project and where it is at and/or going. See below for more details.

Meeting on 10/10/19 - click to see meeting notes and screenshots - research and ideas

Meeting on 10/15/19 - click for notes and screenshots - concept art and mock-ups

Meeting on 10/29/19 - click for notes and screenshots - more mock-ups

Meeting on 10/31/19 - click for notes and screenshots - mock-ups of the revenue and expenses sections

Meeting on 11/7/19 - click for notes and screenshots - first full mock-up - multiple pages and topics

Meeting on 11/12/19 - click for notes and screenshots - full mock-up plus some mobile screenshots

Meeting on 11/19/19 - click for notes and screenshots - mock-ups for mobile

Meeting on 11/21/19 - click for notes and screenshots - more mock-ups for mobile

Meeting on 11/26/19 - click for notes and screenshots and a video of the meeting (virtual tour of the app to date) - full mock-ups and mobile mock-ups

Meeting on 12/3/19 - click for a couple of screenshots - moving from graphic concept into first round of coding.

Meeting on 12/5/19 - click for notes and screenshots - mock-ups from graphics to code

Meeting on 12/10/19 - click for notes and screenshots - more mock-ups from graphics to code

Meeting on 12/12/19 - click for notes and screenshots - code mock-ups - playing with different backgrounds

Meeting on 12/17/19 - click for notes and screenshots - code mock-ups

Meeting on 12/19/19 - click for notes and screenshots - code mock-ups and browser testing

Meeting on 1/23/20 - click for notes and screenshots - starting into the customer side - new website mock-up for WanderWays

Demo video 1/28/20 - click to view demo (youtube) - 3 minute video to showcase the product to date - marketing efforts

Meeting on 2/12/20 - click for notes and screenshots - new website almost done and interactions between designer and backend code writers

Meeting on 2/19/20 - click for notes and screenshots - new color pickers and settings for look and feel

Promo video provided by Marisa on 2/26/20 - youtube video - 3 minute promo

Meeting on 2/26/20 - click for notes and screenshots - working through settings and starting into project management

Meeting on 3/21/20 - click for notes and screenshots - Working on settings, color pickers, site admin, roles & permissions

There was a small break in the project and we had to set it by the side, dealing with funding, and availability. There were a few small meetings and progress, but nothing major to report.

Meeting on 7/22/20 - click for notes - Meeting to get the project back on track and moving forward.

Meeting on 9/2/20 - click for notes and screenshots and a new mock-up - Reporting on the customer frontend pages and application.

Wayne and Steve were talking about servers and some of the new updates that are going on. Wayne is helping to fine tune and monitor the servers. He wants to be in charge of that portion of the puzzle. He is very good at it and knows what he is doing. Steve and I are trying to encourage him to keep going in that direction. Some of the discussion items were dealing with servers, up-time, redundancy, database table locks, response time, active vs passive monitoring, and empowering our users and clients to view stats (maybe limited views) on the server. There was quite a bit of talk about new news and updates talking about the server monitoring and even possible mirror and/or redundancy back-up and/or mirror server options (insurance and roll-over technologies).

Wayne was asking some great questions about the current model and where we want to go with things. Steve was responding and answering the questions. We left off with a charge on Wayne to get in there, dig around, and come back with a plan. We may end up rolling some of the new changes out over a series of months. Good stuff.

We touched base with some of the other developers on the meeting and then broke out into our own work sessions. I was working on the sales tax branch and trying to cascade new sales tax changes through the black box pages. As a fun side note, there are around 400 (ish) black box pages that are part of the master code branch. That doesn't even include ones that are created and uploaded without being merged into the master branch. What that tells me is, that our clients like custom options and that section, black box or custom code, is a huge part of our model. It can be a pain in the rear some times, especially if we are trying to update things, but it also fills a need and our clients seem to like the options of being able to customize things. That is awesome.

Once everybody left the meeting, we all just worked on our own little projects. I was doing tech support and follow-up on some sales calls. Towards the end of the session, Steve and I chatted briefly about the client who may want to do some tracking on their assisted living facilities. We talked about maybe setting up a play site for the assisted living and running things with locations, elements of time, etc. Lots of good ideas.

We also talked about the adilas label builder that Calvin is working on. We are getting close on this round of the project. We would like to see where all of that goes and what comes out of it. We are looking to close out phase one and then start using it to see what else may be needed (round two or phase two).

Steve - we are a solution for solution minded persons. We are really seeing that the clients that like customization, they tend to be some of our greatest clients. Very interesting. We are also seeing that some of the reps are a great resource and are throwing some ideas and monies at things (pieces of the puzzle) that they need and/or want. Some of them are getting funding from their clients to help push things forward.

Random idea... what about opening up the door to our customers to get their own developers and let the custom side of things grow a little bit deeper. Maybe use the adilas market and let some of the independent developers run with things a little bit.

Training - we were talking about ideas and timing. Things are a little bit crazy right now, but we don't want it to get out too far before we circle back around and setup some more training. We were also talking about costs and paying for that. On a different note, we have tons of hidden benefits like hooking up Marisa and Drea on training. We also have Calvin who was at the last training and got tons of great info and feedback about his labels and Gmexting (group mass texting). Lots of hidden benefits and getting people trained and more involved.