A Precarious Balance

Have you gone to a restaurant and left realizing that you've eaten way more than you should? If you were raised to clean your plate and you eat at typical American restaurants that serve huge portions of food, it's easy to do. Over the past year, I've tended to asked the waitress to leave food off my plate (e.g., ...

UPDATE: A few weeks ago, I received a telephone call from Esther, the manager at the American National branch where I have our family bank accounts. As it turns out, somebody at the bank had happened upon this blog post. Esther called to let me know they were looking into other options for international wire transfers, asked about our ...

Over the years, I've always done my own taxes and managed my own books. It's tedious, but why pay somebody else to do it? When I incorporated back in 2005, I decided that I would find an accountant. Choosing to be an optimist about my business' future, it seemed wise to find somebody good and establish a relationship with them while I ...

Many years ago, Julian Bucknall published a book called ''The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures''. He's steeped in algorithms and this particular book has always been in demand. He obtained the rights to his book, improved it, and now self-publishes the book through Lulu. He wrote a very interesting set of articles about his ...

This is old news but I just read about it. Steve Blom introduces a killer tool for seeing how your competitors are arrayed in Google Adwords. Here's a Flash tutorial showing it in operation. --Sean Winstead Tags: Adwords

For the past year and a half, I've been working with a team of guys from Falafel Software to create a back office system for Earthbound Farm. Earthbound Farm is an organic food company based in California. Much of my silence lately on this blog is due to the work required to go live on March 1st. We turned off their old system, converted ...

This is for other ISVs operating in Colorado. Today I realized I hadn't filed a quarterly sales tax statement. Fortunately, none of my corporation's revenue was subject to sales tax. The Colorado Department of Revenue (DOR) website has a Sales Tax Zero File System for such occasions. It's quick and easy. Enter ...

Found via way of the microISV blog, Evan Williams writes Ten Rules for Web Startups. His guidelines resonate with me, especially the one about being narrow and being greedy <g>. --Sean Winstead Tags: ISV, Business

Over the past two months I've read several good articles and blog posts related to finding out what your customers need. At What's Your Brand Mantra, Jennifer Rice writes the following: My personal philosophy on customer involvement is this: Find out what they want. Then figure out how to deliver it. Customers should be involved in ''need ...

I'd venture to say that a slap in the face is rarely a surprise. You can see yourself getting into the situation and maybe you've said something to bring it on. So the slap mentioned in the previous post was really my final capitulation to what I knew all along: I stink at caring for people and being a businessman. What was the final ...