Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

For the past 10 days, I have been working on getting the June Newsletter out.  Things are super busy with clients going live, new clients coming on board and ourOnline.Company continuing to grow! And then you get this:

Not my normal Message, today I need to ask each every one of you that read this newsletter to help me! Last Year, I joined the Butt Ugly cycle team that raised $50,000 dollars to help end MS.  In less than 2 weeks, the Uglies and myself will be back out on the roads cycling 100 miles (160km) from Grand Bend To London and back to help end MS.  I am challenging everybody that reads this to support the Panda.  Seriously if everybody on this newsletter donated just 2 dollars we would make a noticeable impact. Read about last year’s ride here! Seriously $2.00 makes a difference, Support The Panda!

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

Well, here we are at the end of another month, and you may have noticed that there was no newsletter last month. You maybe asking yourself what happened in April that we missed the newsletter for the first time in over 2 years? Well, it turns out that I thought that I would change things up and try to change the content around and get it done myself, guess what – it didn’t happen. All month I have had a reminder in my phone to get it done, and now today I realized I don’t have anything done for May.

So, time to realize the flaw – ME.  I reached out to my fantastic writer Angela and now the newsletter is setup and ready to go.  Let that be a lesson learned, do what you do well and let others do what they do well. Don’t let yourself get in your way when you know you need to get things done.

Enjoy the read and if your in the way of your organization getting the hosting and maintenance services they need maybe its time to get out of the way and Get Panda Help!

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

April has arrived, did anybody see March?  Another crazy busy month in the books, we have more upgrades on the books, more systems being hosted and a surprising number of maintenance projects going.

I am absolutely amazed at how many organizations feel that they must go it alone to do maintenance and upgrade work.  The time wasted as they read through the endless documents, work through all the kinks, and reapply patches because of mistakes, is truly stunning.  So for example a PeopleSoft Upgrade Maintenance Cycle takes the Panda about 40 hours to implement on average, and I have seen clients take months to implement the same package. When asked why they don’t ask for help – the answer is consultants are expensive.

A couple of years ago, I was at the accountant’s office with all my spreadsheets that I had spent countless hours working on, proud of my accomplishment in my hands.  I handed over my papers, and instantly they found issues. So, they redid my books in a day. Instead of saying I was stupid, my accountant said – you are a computer consultant, we are accountants, going forward you do the consulting and we will do the accounting.  Yes their bill is expensive, but compared to me trying to do it, it’s comically inexpensive.

Are you focused on what you do well?

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

One more month of winter and we should be onto spring! Around here we haven’t seen too much of old man winter, aside from a few storms here and there, it has probably been the mildest winter I have ever seen.  It got me thinking.  All my friends that went out and bought new snow blowers, heavy duty winter jackets, and many other big ticket items, because winter is usually nasty could have spent their money more wisely.  Especially if winters continue to be mild, perhaps spending lots of money on a situation that use to happen isn’t necessarily the best use of money.

Now take the idea of winter, snow blowers, and Canada Goose jackets out of the equation and replace it with your Online business – web hosting, email servers and rack mounted servers.  If the trend is moving towards cloud based service, with better security and reduced overall costs, maybe its something to consider?

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

Welcome to the new year, hopefully everybody is back into the swing of things after the holidays.  As per usual our family took off right after Christmas and went down to visit the Panda’s at the San Diego Zoo. This year we added Los Angeles to the trip and visited the Warner Brothers Studios which is an amazing place. I was quite impressed with the lengths to which they go to take something that seems simple and which should be simple and make it into a masterpiece of complexity and not surprisingly with an impressive price tag. Now if you took the Warner Brothers Studios out of the last sentence you could easily replace that with ERP Systems or Infrastructure or for the matter just about anything. In the case of Warner Brothers their productions create value.  Does your production create value?