Who Picked Out the Letters?

Honesty in a vanity plate, as seen at the grocery store parking lot entrance.

At first I was impressed with the way they worked their religious bent into their business. After all, we are living in the bible belt. So here is Christian Realty. That name itself should appeal to a lot of the people in these parts.

And they have a clever tag in their domain name as advertised on the back end of the SUV: The ONE way home dot com. Very clever.

But now notice the letters on the license plate: BAD DRVR.

At least they are honest.

Online Management Tools

This morning wanted to talk about switching over to an online version of project management. We’ve been using a database that the company had built about 10 years ago, and we both feel that technology has advanced a lot since then and there are more features and benefits available now. But we all know our current system like the backs of our hands, so I wonder how much resistance there will be from the rest of the staff if we try to change things.

With those thoughts in mind I started surfing for project management companies on the internet and found some that are probably what he has in mind. I really like the information on Atlantic Global’s web site.

How Many Candles?

The problem with being this old is that there’s just too many darn candles burning on top of your birthday cake. I mean, there’s enough to set off the fire alarms in the office conference room already! But some brave soul decided to risk the fire alarm and bought me a birthday cake, which we gathered in the conference room to share this afternoon. That was really cool.

They also gave me a birthday card that someone had passed around the office – behind my back – and had everyone sign it.

A Marketing Career

Years ago I wanted to get into “Sales and Marketing” primarily because I felt that the opportunities to earn what you truly deserve are more prevalent in sales positions than in traditional corporate management positions. Plus, sales is very optimistic, upbeat, forward thinking and you when you make a sale it is reason to celebrate your accomplishment. In corporate management, it is a lot of negativity, screwing people over and self serving. The only real reason a CEO has to celebrate is receipt of a fat bonus check earned off the sweat and sacrifice of all the worker bees.

In the early days when i was exploring the sales and marketing route, I asked a lot of my contemporaries, including other successful sale people and vendors, “What is the difference between “sales” and “marketing”? None of them gave me a good answer. It was only on my own exploration of the sales process and corporate structures that I discovered and embraced marketing. Over the years I’ve mastered quite a bit of the marketing principles and techniques in a variety of corporate settings. Now I am ready to step into the new millenium and learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Obviously I will make use of the internet for a lot of this effort. I have found some good articles about search engine optimization and internet marketing. One interesting aspect of the new marketing is that most of the traditional marketing logic does not apply. You have to shift mental gears into “geek think” instead of what works in the real world, because often they are very different and mistakes on your website can prove very costly and difficult to correct or overcome.