Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Building/moving to a new home - day 9

I have been offline for a few days while I was general contracting in Floyd. Things are really beginning to take shape and enough other people are involved that the project is beginning to take on a life of its own.

The four modules of our new home are being built bon a factory floor in Rocky Mount, VA. They have progressed to the point where electrical wiring is being installed. One of the nicest parts of having our home built in this way is that we are welcome to visit the Southern Heritage Homes factory and see what is happening.

It is slightly disorienting to stand in one room and look through a doorway to the adjacent room which is a separate module ten feet away. After a few minutes this feeling fades in the excitement of seeing our drawings come to life around us.

The house will be ready to load on trailers for the trek to our home site in about four weeks. That puts the pressure on me to have the foundation ready for its arrival.

We have already widened the half-mile-long unpaved road off the main highway so the house modules can be safely hauled to the home site. The garage/workshop is under construction by a separate contractor and the house foundation has been excavated.

The purpose of this trip to Floyd was to get the permits for constructing the house and to make final arrangements with the contractor who will be pouring the foundation next week. At this point all is well and the foundation should be done and sealed in the next two weeks.

A last few trees are being removed to provide more space around the house. I was standing where the living room will be and I noticed that these trees could fall on the house in a storm. After losing a roof to a falling tree in hurricane Isabel, we don't look at trees in the same way as we used to. We enjoy them, but at a safe distance! Our new house is located in a clearing in the woods - a big clearing.

For the next few weeks our clearing in the woods will be alive with activity. We have the permits posted and a porta-potty installed, so it already looks like a first-class operation.

I ordered a modern wood stove by Dutchwest to make use of the abundant hardwood available in this area. It is a free-standing unit with 100% outside air supply and a sealed combustion chamber so it actually heats the home without sucking room air up the chimney. This makes them far more efficient and provides more uniform heating.

Fireplaces and older wood stoves have the unfortunate problem that they create a vacuum as they burn so that cold outside air is drawn in through every door and window. The hotter the fire burns, the more cold air is drawn into the house. The net result is that the family spends their time in front of the fire, because this is the only way to stay warm.

The writer-publisher - part 33

Simpler is better

I write books to express things I want to share. Once I started getting positive feedback from my writing, I realized that I could derive income from this activity as well as incredible satisfaction.

All I had to do was to figure out how to print, promote, sell and distribute my books in a cost-effective manner while keeping up with my other lives.

People have written to say that they would like to self-publish if they had more information about it. Let me say here and now that lack of information on book writing and self-publishing is NOT a problem. In fact, it is more like trying to drink from a fire hose! There is so much information about this area that you can easily drown in data overload.

I believe that success comes when we choose a path that offers information that we can easily evaluate and digest. Too often the advice I see is out of date or is based on hearsay.

Take the matter of fulfillment. Much of the advice I read suggests that book fulfillment is expensive and time-consuming. I say that depends on whether you are trying to play the traditional publishing game of selling to bookstores and distributors instead of selling directly to customers. The short answer is that beginning authors should sell directly to book buyers.

When you sell through the traditional book channels, you get to deal with all of the fun things like discount structures, returns, slow paying customers and low margins. For a beginning author with no connections to major publishers that is sheer nonsense!

When you sell directly to customers using PayPal, you get an email telling you that customer Marge Bookbuyer has paid for a book. You sign the book if you want to make the customer feel special, put it in a padded envelope and send it out by whatever mail service the customer has paid for. This takes five minutes if you have books, labels, media mail stamps and padded envelopes stacked up where you can easily get your hands on them.

PayPal has a simple interface to send the customer an invoice, but you can simply use a copy of your email as an invoice/packing document instead. Write a friendly note on it if you wish.

You get the satisfaction of knowing that someone thinks enough of your writing to pay some of their hard-earned money for your book. You get additional satisfaction knowing that you are shipping the goods promptly. Finally, you get a sizeable portion of the price of each book.

Keep it simple. Make the customer pay first and make it simple to order. I use BUY NOW buttons with shipping charges bundled into the book price. I could have made it even simpler by using only two BUY NOW buttons. One would be free shipping in the US by Media Mail. The other would be fast shipping by Global Priority Mail - anywhere on the planet.

Make it very simple at first. Sell from your own website. Use PayPal. Make each buying trasaction so satisfying that your word of mouth advertising spreads. Then find ways to leverage the feedback from your readers to start a conversation with more prospective readers. Treat each transaction as a new moment in time. Each new customer is an opportunity to make a new friend.

We can never have too many friends.

When your sales increase to the point where you can no longer handle fulfillment by yourself, find a way to increase the scale of your operation without losing the personal touch. That is a great problem to have!

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

Building/moving to a new home - day 5

I'm taking advantage of the fact that Gretchen is out of town for a few days to make sweeping changes in the appearance of the house and yard.

To keep myself on track, I have made up two 20" x 30" project boards and covered them with stickies for each of the tasks I need to do or keep track of.

Today, I can cross off two big ones. The back yard has been mowed and cleared of brush and I have taken three loads of books and furniture out of my office.

There is more to do in the office, but the end is in sight. When I am through the only things left in this room will be my desk, a couple of filing cabinets, and a NordicTrack EXP2000 treadmill.

I am slowly returning the house to the spacious condition it was in when we first saw it. It is amazing how much furniture and equipment we have accumulated in three years!

Maybe I will be able to maintain a clean, uncluttered look in the next house, but I am not making any predictions yet. That would require a complete personality change for me, I'm afraid.

On the other hand, maybe I can follow Gretchen's habits more closely. Her office and the parts of the house she controls are remarkably tidy considering who she lives with.

More later...

Building/moving to a new home - day 4

The pace is picking up. My cell phone traffic has increased to the point that my phone is hot to the touch. I also need a better understanding of how to manage call waiting because I keep losing calls.

On the positive side, the various contractors in Floyd are fully engaged and my confidence in them is growing rapidly. They are catching details that I have not fully handled and they propose workable solutions.

On a completely unexpected note, the Floyd County and VDOT (Virginia Dept of Transportation) officials I have dealt with are doing the same! These people have gone out of their way to be hospitable and to provide excellent customer service. I have never experienced this level of service before and I like it.

As an example, we had to get our road widened in order to allow the modular home sections to be trucked to the homesite. This required removal of trees and some excavating and grading along a half mile stretch of road. Since this was not a budgeted item, VDOT worked with us so that they provided the tree removal and we provided the contractor for grading and excavating. They even called me to keep me informed of progress.

At the Lake Monticello end, brush is being cut, new plants are replacing old, and all excess furniture is disappearing into storage. It speeds things up considerably when I can look at a cluttered area and say, "That all goes into storage today!" Books, incomplete projects, and the contents of most every closet are being boxed up and sent to the storage unit.

I am very appreciative of the suggestions you have made about moving. The idea of using local labor in a carefully staged series of smaller moves is a win-win situation. Money is pumped into the local economies at each end of the trip.

There is less chance of injury or damage when smaller quantities of furnishings are being handled because there is time for planning and for acquiring the necessary dollies and moving aids to handle heavy items. Too many times in a large move, I've seen people wrestling furniture through a door or down a stairs with brute strength instead of using labor-saving tools, because of insufficient planning.

Huge moves require lots of planning and lots of manpower. If the move can be broken into a series of smaller actions, as in the case of loading and unloading pods or storage units, each smaller action can be planned as an independent event with the tools and manpower required for that action.

My younger sister and her long-time boyfriend moved themselves from homes in two states to a new home in a third state by making the move as a long coordinated series of smaller moves. Storage units in several states acted as buffers, allowing them to move selected items to a new home while it was still under construction. Since they are both well past retirement age, they used this strategy to keep the effort and the expenses at a manageable level at the cost of a longer move. Gretchen and I intend to do the same.

As this series progresses, feel free to add your suggestions for do-it-yourself moving tips. If you know of any particularly useful (quick, inexpensive, remarkable) ways to increase curb appeal of a house that is being listed for sale, just pile on in. We are happy to entertain all of your suggestions because, as usual, we are making the rules up as we go along.

Stay tuned.

Building/moving to a new home - day 3

I have moved many times before, but this move has more activity to choreograph than I expected. We kicked this into high gear when we signed papers on the new modular home two days ago on Sept 20.

Since then, excavating has been complete for the house and workshop and work has begun on the workshop. Forms are in place for the workshop foundation, and a panel has been put up for temporary power service.

I has somehow failed to get a permit for a temporary power connection, but was able to handle this over the internet in less than an hour because the Floyd County Administrative Office is internet enabled and uses email and jpeg images.

It is a real pleasure to deal with people who are pleasant to deal with and are customer-oriented as well. Jimmy Whitten is the new Floyd Building Official and Dawn Underwood is the person who explains and issues building permits. Between the two of them, they answered all of my questions and guided me through the necessary actions to allow me to be the general contractor on this series of projects.

By the way, I found the book called, "Learn to be a General Contractor", at Lowes a few weeks ago and it is full of helpful information for the person who wants to build their own dream house. The point this book makes is that the role of a general contractor is an organizer, a manager, not a tradesperson. Your role as a general contractor is to get the job done - by other people. I found my years of program manager experience are a big help in this new house-building game.

We have already started the listing process for our current house. I have rented one large storage unit and have begun moving excess furniture into it. Everything that will not contribute to the sale of the house will go into one or more 10' x 10' storage units two miles down the road. When our first open house occurs in a few days, we want the house to look like a model home.

While Gretchen is out of town visiting her daughter, I have pulled up all of the plants that were less than stellar and have replaced them with mums which are plentiful and are just coming into bloom. Liberal application of weedkiller has turned the scruffy green fringes of the yard into mulch-colored invisibility.

I have someone coming to repaint the deck and front porch this week and have hired the neighbor's kids to do extensive weed-whacking in the back yard. With all of the activity going on, it feels like an extreme makeover home show.

To add to the fun, I have several large pieces to finish for my woodworking customers and more orders coming in as people learn that we are moving away.

This is when my lack of tidyness begins to bite me. I have papers 5 inches deep on all three desks in my downstairs office. If a document gets shoved in the wrong folder, I will have a disaster on my hands.

I still would like a pod moving company, but I may get some needed help from a small local mover. I am planning to use local storage units as a buffer and make the move as a series of smaller moves over a few weeks time. I really want to avoid the issues of coordinating a huge van and crowds of workmen in a week-long orgy of intensive packing and unpacking. I think the smaller moves will be cheaper, cause less damage, and will let us integrate each delivery into the new home without turning the place into a freight depot.

If anyone has experience with smaller staged moves, please give me the benefit of your experience.

Stay tuned.

We are moving to Floyd, VA

After almost a year of preparation, our house-building project has achieved critical mass and everything is beginning to happen at once.

Gretchen and I look forward to joining our blogging and non-blogging friends in Floyd before snow falls. The Ripples Weblog, Affordable Designs in Wood, and Bent Crow Press are moving down to Floyd, VA in less than 60 days if all goes well. 

The rapid transition from planning to moving is a direct result of deciding to build using a modular home. This builder takes about four weeks in the factory to construct a home and then another few weeks on site to finish the home by adding a roof structure, siding, and some interior details.

We were going to build in the Spring of 2006 until we were informed that material prices were becoming unstable due to the after-effects of Katrina. We made the decision yesterday to proceed immediately with the house and the factory in Rocky Mount, VA will begin construction Monday.

This sets off a chain of events which I will blog, because we are planning to work outside the box in several areas and I want to capture the lessons learned. I also want your advice and suggestions because we have a lot to accomplish in the next 60 days.

I hope to find a mover that offers moving pod service. Barring that, I hope to find a mover that will cause the least damage. Any current recommendations for movers in the south central Virginia area will be most appreciated.

We will be listing our current home this week and I have work to do to give the place more curb appeal. I will provide a link to the listing for those of you who have friends who are looking for a less stressful lifestyle.

Gretchen and I moved to Virginia from San Jose, CA in 2002, hoping to find acreage and high-speed internet connection. We found you could get either, but not both, so we settled on the wooded lakeside environment at Lake Monticello, VA. It offered the comforts of a gated community and a peaceful lifestyle where we could operate businesses from our home.

As time passed, this formerly rustic resort community has mutated into a clone of typical northern VA developments. It is still a charming place to live, but it is more like a manicured golf course community than an example of laid-back country living.

As a result, it is becoming an attractive bedroom community for people who commute to Charlottesville or Richmond and want gracious living at an extremely attractive price.

For home-based businesses, on the other hand, there is increasing pressure to minimize any visible evidence of business activity. Thus business expansion almost mandates a move to the countryside where land-buying pressure has driven prices sky high.

Our alternative was to find a community where land prices would allow us to achieve our earlier goal of enough acreage to put up a house and a workshop while allowing us to have high-speed internet access. Floyd County still offers that opportunity at a price we can afford.

Stay tuned for the rest of the saga.

An engineer's viewpoint on global warming

The world has gotten slightly warmer since 1850 and people have had something to do with that increase. Big deal.

Measurements taken since thermometers were invented show that global temperatures have increased 0.8C in the last 150 years. About one third of that increase is due to increased Carbon Dioxide which can be attributed to mankind.

Before anyone whips themselves into a frenzy screaming, "I told you so!" they should be aware that a significant part of this temperature increase is a result of solar activity which they can't blame on any political entity I know of. :)

To further confuse things, A Little Ice Age existed in the 900 years before 1850 when mountain glaciers advanced in most parts of the world.

During the big Ice Age of 650,000 years ago, the ice advanced deep into the Midwest and deep into Germany. So much ice collected in these two major regions and several lesser ones that the sea level dropped by some 400 feet and the overall global temperature was lowered by around 5°C (about 9°F)

You should read the excellent Calspace Distance Learning Courses and get a full understanding of the discoveries and the limitations of past and current research. 

I found this excerpt interesting:

...only climate history, that is, long-term experience, can tell us whether we are witnessing highly unusual conditions or not.

As an example:

Habitation of Greenland was possible in the early Middle Ages because the climate was unusually warm. By 1000 A.D., Greenland was inhabited by an estimated 1,000 Scandinavians. The settlement only lasted until about 1480 A.D., when the onset of nasty winters brought the inhabitants to death by starvation. This sudden climatic cold spell, known as the “Little Ice Age,” is an example of the power that climate change can have on human society.

We should not look at 0.8 degree Centigrade change in 150 years and panic while ignoring huge changes in temperature that took place before recording thermometers existed.

The forces that created the earlier ice ages still exist. For a reality check read, Lessons from the Ice Ages?

If we don't understand the underlying mechanisms, we don't have a chance of preventing or ameliorating the next big temperature swing.

The experts at Calspace wisely mention in their conclusions that they need to improve their computer models. I agree. I think we need a lot more research before we try to assign blame or try  "fixing" the perceived problem.

Read Climate Change 2: Past and Future. This will give you a background from which to develop your own conclusions.

Thanks to Fred First for introducing me to this excellent resource.

UPDATE: Andy at the Charlotte Capitalist has posted more to suggest that our climate changes are driven by the sun rather than by industrialization of this planet.

Tag: Global Warming

BlogAds logo redesign - revisited

What must be really frustrating for the two or three people who took issue with Henry Copeland's fast-track methodology is that they were voicing valid concerns!

A logo design that will not scale without serious degradation or does not suit some particular medium is a big problem! What they seemed to have overlooked is that Henry got 30 finalists in a matter of weeks! If he had gone the traditional route, they would still be in the middle of hammering out an agenda for the first meeting.

Here is the shortlist of logos that Henry and the BlogAds staff feels will work for them.

Take a look and see if you agree or disagree. Remember, this company has become a success in spite of a logo that violates all conventional rules of brand identity except one: The logo is truly the "maker's mark" and there is five thousand years of agreement that the mark must let the customer know who stands behind the product.

Here is the basic issue as I see it:

All Henry and crew need to do is make sure that the new logo does not create any confusion in customer's minds.

Whether it goes on a T-shirt or hot-air balloon is a secondary issue. I am sure that the BlogAds team and the winning designer will handle these issues with a minimum of histrionics.

"Needs more cowbell?  Sure!"

This online collaboration in front of the entire blogosphere is one hell of a way to shake down a design. Issues get immediate visibility, but it works best when you have someone who is confident enough to shut off discussion when he has heard enough to make a decision.

Check out the shortlist and see if they have a logo candidate that communicates BlogAds for you.

This exercise bears a lot of study for someone who is going into business for themselves. You will have to work out for yourself if brand identity is as important as the development and maintenance of the brand itself.

Tag:branding

Blogads logo redesign has some "experts" in an uproar

Henry Copeland does not follow conventional rules. He built a multi-million dollar enterprise on the notion that advertisers might want to advertise on blogs. He felt they might want  to engage 500,000 opinion makers, instead of pestering 100,000,000 nobodies.

The secret? Smart Blogads join a community's conversation rather than shouting over it. As a result, Blogads have become an increasingly important part of the blogosphere.

Henry achieved three years of success while defying conventional wisdom and using a scrawny scribble of a corporate logo that was a mistake.

This year, he decided to create a new logo. Blogging friends in the ad industry said "do an RFP, hire a pro, draft a creative brief, hammer out a brand identity... do it right!" Demotivated by that feedback and with lots of other projects bubbling, he put the idea on the backburner.

Recently, he turned the task of designing the new logo over to the internet with this notice:

Blogads.com needs a new logo. I hope you can help. We'll pay $1000 to the creator of our new logo and $300 to the blogger whose post refers or inspires her/him.

You can read the story of the logo collaboration here. It makes fascinating reading.

Henry decided that Blogads needed a new logo and he went about it in his non-traditional style and a few "experts" have gotten their knickers all bunched up as a result.

There are more than 365 entries from a lot of talented people who understand the blogosphere, but a few of yesterdays experts are sputtering about the way it was done.

I had to put in my opinion, of course, when I read this "expert's" advice:

My advice to you is to hire (or persuade) a professional designer to pick the 10-15 logos that will go on your shortlist. You could then make your decision from that pool.

In all honesty, if you pick the logo yourself, or if you allow the people who are leaving comments to have a hand in the decision, you are going to waste 1300 dollars on a badly designed logo. From your previous post, and based on some of the completely ludicrous comments left on the entries... I suspect that you're not going to make the right choice.
Posted by: Brian Ford on Sep 14, 05 | 9:45 am

I wrote:

Henry, consider the purpose for this logo redesign and who your target customers are.

If your target customers are blog-savvy businesses that want to advertise effectively in the blogosphere, a good logo is one that punches up the informal, but effective conversational style of blogosphere communications

If your target customers are from the Proctor and Gamble school of marketing. then Brian Ford's suggestion might make sense, because you will attract ad agency flacks who respect and honor logos that grace the pages of Communication Arts.

Your call, of course, but simpler and real are better in my opinion.

Which elicited this response:

I disagree pretty much 100% with what David St. Lawrence says in his comment.

A "good" logo is one that is designed well; regardless of who the target audience happens to be. There are plenty of logos in the list that follow the guidelines set forth in the entry form, but that doesn't mean that they are automatically "well designed" logos. In fact, I would say the opposite happens to be true in this case... This isn't about target audiences. It's about getting advice from someone who -knows- design. (my emphasis)
Posted by: Brian Ford on Sep 14, 05 | 10:28 am

and another:

I'm going to inject my honest opinion here. Many of the logos submitted are absolutely useless for branding. Many of them are not vector....  It will be nearly impossible to pick a logo you can brand with the rigid guidelines you set. ...For $1000 I would have thought you'd want to make sure you were getting something you could actually use.

Posted by: William Chastain on Sep 14, 05 | 4:32 pm

These "experts" are confusing design with branding. Blogads has overcome the limitations of a "butt ugly" logo by delivering on the promise of expected service. If Henry can find a new logo that aligns with customer expectations, I think he will be just fine.

What do you think?

Tag: Blogads

The writer-publisher - part 32

Date coincidence - a handy tool for the self-published author

You have at least two choices when you self-publish:

1. You can spend years reading all of the books written on self-publishing and you can go to seminars, classes and so forth in order to gain the knowledge that will allow you to self-publish successfully.

2. You can skim through a few good books and decide to make the rest up as you go along.

The only problem with approach number one is that the self-publishing game is evolving almost faster than you can read about it. Seminars and classes can be helpful if you select carefully, but you will have to know what is actually going on in order to decide. You learn what is going on by experiencing it yourself.

Approach number two is what I have done in almost any field I have entered, and it has worked well in areas as diverse as computer design, product marketing, and consulting. Naturally, I chose this path when attempting to write and to self-publish. I have written most of this down in the earlier posts in this series, but I failed to mention the underlying element that allows you to be successful when you charge out on your own.

If you are creating a new activity, you may not know everything necessary to be successful at first, but you can adjust your efforts and course of action to achieve success by keeping an eye on date coincidence of actions and results.

This is not the beginning of a long treatise on managing your life, but it is an observable fact that bad and good results don't just happen, they are caused. If you look carefully at any change in statistics, you will find that some change occurred previously which caused the change. By date coincidence, I mean that an earlier act caused a later result. The communication lag is between the cause and the result tends to remain constant for any given communication medium, so once you determine the lag you can monitor results and track back to whatever caused the change.

Here are some examples of how this can work:

Recently, I revised a blogad by adding quotes that made the ad more interesting. The traffic to my book site increased within 24 hours. This was obviously a good thing, so I let the change stand.

Encouraged, I "improved" the text on the book site to make it more interesting and the order rate dropped.

Looking over the site, I found the text to be more readable and more interesting, at least to me, but I realized I was no longer "asking for the order". This is a classic error. My attention was on capturing the customer's interest, but the copy did not call for action. I corrected the copy and the order rate increased that day.

In a dead tree medium, this process might have taken weeks or months, because of the time it takes to get something into print and then distributed. On the internet, this took only one day. On a really high traffic site, this might have taken less than an hour because the results of a change show up immediately.

This works as well in almost any field. Date coincidence is a handy tool for the self-published author, but it is vital for the entrepreneur. Here is a suggestion on applying it.

Instead of having to know "everything" before you start a new venture, learn enough so that you can make some intelligent choices and can recognize good indicators vs bad indicators.

There is little chance that you can learn all of the causes of good and bad results, so concentrate on producing the best quality product or service you can manage and take notice of changes in your vital statistics like sales, money collected, and customer complaints. Track down the source of these changes by date coincidence and reinforce the good actions and eliminate the bad.

If you are alert enough, and quick to respond, you will find yourself in a better condition as time goes by. You will also learn what really makes your business results improve and this will give you much needed certainty in a challenging world.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing