Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

How to reach the Floyd Community Health Center

The Floyd Community Health Center is open five days a week, 8:30 am to 5 pm and can be reached by calling 540-745-9290.

The Center provides affordable comprehensive primary healthcare to the residents of Floyd and Patrick Counties.

Dr. Lorrie French covers Monday, Tuesday and Friday from 8:30 to 5 and from 8:30  to noon on Wednesday. Nurse Practitioner Beth Hubbard is on duty Thursdays from 8:30 to 5.

There is no after hours coverage at present, but they respond the next business day to messages left on their voicemail.

If you need emergency care at any time, you need to call 911.

I am posting this because they are not in the phone book yet and you cannot find them on Google yet. I have mislaid the brochure I got from them and I rely on Google to look up business addresses and phone numbers.

More and more people use search engines to locate businesses. Is your business visible on the Internet?

Adopting new technology in your business - part 2 of a series

You can adopt new technology in an effort to stay ahead of competition or to distinguish yourself from the competition, but the most compelling reason to adopt new technology is because you have a broken business model.

Of course, by the time you realize that your business model is broken, it may be too late to save your business. Therefore, it is important to keep your eye on technology trends that apply to your business and understand what the implications are.

A broken business model occurs when you have not changed your method of operation, but other companies in the market are doing a better job  of meeting your customers needs.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, you may want to skip the rest of this article and find some light reading like this or this.

Newspapers have a broken business model because readers have found the Internet to be a better source of accurate and non-managed news.

Telephone companies have a broken business model because customers have discovered they can get unlimited long-distance calling through their Internet connection.

Established companies have a natural resistance to adopting new technology because this causes them to discard the investments they made in older technology.

When they pay too much attention to "sunk costs" and refuse to see what is happening right now, they can be creating a broken business model for themselves.

If you are the owner of a business, you can find that your business model no longer works because of external changes in the marketplace. You can sit and complain that customers no longer come to your location or you can change your business model to accommodate their changing needs.

Sometimes this is as simple as providing an email address for customers to send orders to you at all hours of the day.

Sometimes it is a matter of providing a website so prospective customers can find out about you. The Thomas Register and other catalogs are being used by fewer companies every year. If you cannot be found using a search engine, you do not exist for many prospective customers.

One point to consider is that technology should be used to enhance the customer experience, not destroy it. Misuse of technology has created the ubiquitous "phone tree from Hell" which keeps you online forever with little hope for human contact.

There are some simple tests for what new technology is right for your business. I will try to cover these in another article.

On a lighter note...

Happy Mother's Day card inspired by the lolcat universe. Hope you are all celebrating Mother's Day with someone!

Children of the Internet

I wrote this three years ago and I think it is worth revisiting in view of efforts being made by totalitarian regimes to control internet access. I think it will backfire and will actually accelerate the meltdown of any regime that seeks to do this.

The Children of the Internet will introduce change into our society in ways we cannot easily predict because they are bypassing traditional sources of information.

A culture controls change if it can restrict the flow of information. As long as a child only learns skills, attitudes, and fears from its extended family, that child is protected from the corrupting (and civilizing) effect of "outside ideas".

The child of such a culture can be raised to regard all outside the group as inferior or as enemies to be slain or subjugated. By the time the child is old enough to see that these "inferiors" have superior technology and lifestyles, it can be so warped that its only recourse is to destroy that which it cannot emulate.

The internet, with its overwhelming abundance of information, incredible beauty, and skillfully delivered lies, presents a challenge to any culture, even an advanced and open-minded one. The internet, even in its present limited form, presents the ultimate threat to closed cultures. The open flow of information exposes many lies that these cultures use to keep their citizens under control.

The hidden pitfalls of adopting technology - part 1

We all know the bright and shiny face of skillfully crafted consumer technology and for the most part as consumers, we enjoy a relatively painless relationship with a wide range of exotic new technology.

Our cell phones connect us to faraway places while we careen madly about on the highway. We zap our toast or pop tarts and they come up just like we want almost all of the time. We receive music and news from satellites, our cars tell us more about our environment than we can safely absorb, and voices from our dashboards tell us to turn left in 200 feet.

When it comes to automating a business however, technology is a two-edged sword. It takes a high degree of skill to master the technology sufficiently to actually make money using it. It also displaces long-established manual procedures which are part of the DNA of the organization and have never been fully documented because they are understandings, not procedures.

When technology works for me as in the image shown here, life is fine and my days are productive. I am happy and make the people around me happy. When technology eludes my grasp, my days are filled with frustration and suppressed rage, mostly at myself for falling into a self-made trap.

I have been an early adopter for many years, but that was because I was one of the people who were creating and selling technical solutions. I had very little real understanding of the needs of the business owner who has to keep things running for years on end and absolutely HATES upgrades and new models of anything!

Now that I am a business owner myself, I find myself caught on the horns of a dilemma.

As a newcomer to the field of custom picture framing, I was able to embrace the latest computer technology for designing framing solutions and cutting mats because I didn't have anything to unlearn. I could go for whatever solution made the most sense today without having to regret the loss of traditional skills.

On the other hand, I wrote my own software for a simple Point of Sale system that was based on how I was doing business. Since I crafted it to handle my business model exactly, there was nothing extra and nothing that had to be "worked around". It worked fine, but it had a major limitation, a hand-built supplier database.

Now I am trying to upgrade to a one-size-fits-all retail Management System with all sorts of bells and whistles and I am struggling!