It's been just over a week since Derick died; not much really going on there I guess. Death is pretty final, unless you're one of those ignorant religious zealots who insist in life after death. Too bad you're wrong. It was all I could do at the funeral last Sunday to not throw a rock at the preacher and the "amen!" chanters behind me. He's not up in heaven playing his saxophone; he's in a box, buried in the ground. He's dead. Your wonderful god gave him cancer, made him suffer for two years, then ended his life at 28. Give me a fucking break; I don't want to hear your nonsense. My friend of over a decade is dead. It's a lot to deal with.
I'm going to talk about my consulting business. I need to market, but it just costs so much, so I've got a two pronged approach right now. Today I sent out 240 postcard mailers to small businesses (less than 50 employees) within a 20 mile radius of my home office. You can usually expect 2 to 5 per cent response rate on these, so we'll see how it goes. My next step is to actually hire a sales rep, commission only, and have them pick up some business for me. The mailers won't go out for up to ten days, so I've got some time to get my website finalized and uploaded. I've already informed my receptionist in Canada and my accountant in Iowa; I'm excited to see how this works out for me, if at all. I'm expecting no more than a dozen calls at best, but we'll see what leads I get.
The sales person ad will cost about $150 for a week, but would be worth it if I can find someone with a technology background who is personable enough to pick up customers. Honestly, at my rates, a single job would more than pay for the ad and the sales commission. Plus I've got some money coming in for a few jobs I did this week, probably a grand or so. I'll just dump that into the corporate account and reinvest it.
My idea for a coral reef shop somewhat fell through; I had a company in Florida interested in investing in the company, but they want to control it or require that I produce 60% of the startup costs. Uh, yeah, right, forget that. I looked at angel investors as well, but those were a no go as well since you have to pay them back. Kinda misleading terms, huh? But they didn't want any control of the company, so I may discuss this with them at some point.
Otherwise things are pretty stable. My last two PhD courses are going well. I'm enrolled in Management Consulting and also in Advanced Multivariate Analysis (statistics from hell, if I believed in hell). So far I've nailed every single stats problem dead on; at this level, that's saying something, so I'm gonna brag some. The consulting course is mostly just reading some articles and books about how to consult, such as styles and focus. I'm learning quite a bit from Dr. McNaughton, who is a managerial consultant. He certainly knows the ropes, and his PhD says he knows the material as well.
That's it for today. I'm going to relax some this weekend and work on the business. Plus, have some forensics work to do on a hard drive, so later.
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