Sand dollars, great bad service lessons and the “J-Mac”

Not too long ago while strolling around a trade show, checking out displays and how vendors were presenting themselves I was taught a few business lessons.

Lesson number one. Do not fall asleep in front of your display. Sure it was during a lull in traffic but I saw one guy totally nodding off. To his credit though, his head was still upright.

Lesson number two. Get up! I saw several sales reps constantly in their chairs as potential clients came by. Some would even remain in their chairs when people showed interest or asked questions.

Now, there were plenty of others that were awake, upright and great representatives of their product, but it’s usually the bad one’s that stick out in your memory. That’s why although I don’t like bad service, bad movies or bad food; I usually gain more than I lose from these experiences.

Not much Mac news this week. The new OSX version 10.5 named “Leopard” is apparently due out in early August. Maybe that will herald in the towers. I can only hope.

If anyone has Steve Jobs’ ear (Apple CEO for all you non-Mac fans) let him know this computer idea. Design a portable-tower combo machine that enables you to “dock” a laptop into a tower to combine the tower’s added power (and expandability) with the portable to do cpu heavy applications (Motion, FCP rendering, etc).

When you are only doing simple applications (web, email, text, etc.) you can “un-dock” and do that work anywhere or use it (the portable) to show examples to clients. When you “dock” there is a built-in sync application that updates any new files.

I would jump at buying this machine. You might have to call it a “J-mac” though, as I think Jean came up with most of this idea when I was debating to get a MacBook Pro, wait for a tower or to get both. If you do speak with Steve let him know to give me a deal on the “J-Mac” for the idea.

I’ll leave the “believing in yourself” entry for next week. I’ll need some careful reflection on that. But on a related thought, we were up to the shore this weekend and Jean and I were taking about generating new clients (clients, not projects). I said ten for the year and she said why don’t you be conservative and shoot for two. On the sandbars the tide was way out and we were finding (and rescuing) stranded sand dollar urchins (usually you might one or two on a lucky day). I said, “One sand dollar found equals one new client”. Well I found at least ten. Most without even looking. On my way back into the cottage I found an empty one that now sits in my office as a memento. We shall see what kind of karma this brings.

CM