[caption id="attachment_1516" align="alignleft" width="300"] The skiils of an architect and consultant make a perfect marriage of styles and ideas for helping a business grow.[/caption] My youngest son is an architect. We, including my oldest son, are computer and business consultants. Sitting in the living room one night we started talking about what he does and how it compliments what we do. We ask a lot of questions when working with clients. The questions are to help us understand the

Tenacity. What a great word. According to Webster, it means "the quality or state of being tenacious." And Tenacious means, according to Webster, yet again, this: a : not easily pulled apart b : tending to adhere or cling especially to another substance c : persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired Yes, indeed a great word. The first time I heard a varient of this word was when an ex IBM rep told me I was very tenacious. What she really meant was I was a

All of us have favorite tools we use every day to do our jobs. I own a computer consulting business so a lot of what I do centers around technology - but not all. Looking around at my desktop, both real and virtual, I realized I keep turning to the same products and tools. And I thought it might make a good blog article about what I use to keep productive. Here's my top 10 list of tools I use every day. 1. Google - One of these days I am actually going to keep a log of how many times a day I

Once again we are sitting around the business "camp fire" discussing why people think it is not fair when we say we charge for answering questions. We are a consulting firm. That's what we do. The advantage we have over other support numbers is we know the answers quicker so it may take someone 1 hour of waiting on hold for a support person who "may" know the answer when we answer the phone immediately (usually...) and have the answer within 5 to 15 minutes or less. So, they are already ahead of

Recently two of my staff were having a discussion about ways to get people to let us know if a quote was still a go.  One of my people came from an organization that was very aggressive in their sales techniques.  He wasn't really fond of that aggression nor are aggressive tactics our style, but he remembered something that actually worked really well.  You put either ANY NEWS or IS THIS DEAD? in the subject line of an email.  Nothing goes in the body of the email