A day in the life…

Yesterday, Scot Wingo (@scotwingo) cited  Corevist as one of a growing list of Research Triangle Park, NC “Tweener” companies.  Tweeners are defined by Scot as companies that “…are Triangle-based post early-stage (10 people and/or > $1m/yr in sales)”.  Scot goes on to say that we Tweeners are “hard to find and under the radar” in the local community.  Scot knows that that’s because we’re hard at work trying to build our companies rather than spending the time to seek local publicity.

How hard do we work?

Inspired by a recent blog post by Rebecca Sullum who is a Co-Director at Kids4Peace in Jerusalem (I’m on their Board), I’m going to give you a view of a “typical” day in my life at Corevist.

5:00AM –  Since I’m not sleeping anyway, I decide to get up and implement the Excel pricing model that I’ve been designing in my head for the last hour.  One of our clients has asked us to provide him with a proposal to scale up our soon to be launched US SAP Integrated B2B eCommerce website across the rest of his company.  They would like to roll it out to their other subsidiaries in Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain and France and he needs a proposal from us.  I decided that instead of just giving him numbers, we should provide him with a spreadsheet model that he could use to evaluate the various pricing options that we offer, and how they could best serve his interests.  Verizon?  Are you listening?  How about you making your pricing plans decipherable by humans?

6:30AM – I sit down to eat an early breakfast with my wife.  We love starting our day together reading the local paper, complaining about how bad it is, reading bad headlines and the rare interesting story to each other and then me doing the Sudoku after she finishes the Jumbles.

7:30AM –  I take a call from a Managing Director of an M&A firm in India whose client has expressed interest in a strategic relationship with Corevist.  I get at least one of these inquiries every month.  It’s always fun to talk to these folks to get a sense of what’s going on in the market.  In the end, I always hear the same thing.  “Wow, I thought you guys are so much bigger than you are.  Let’s stay in touch until you get into our sweet spot for investments”.   The good news is that we don’t need anyone’s money thank you very much.

8:30AM – I catch up on emails and scan the headlines.  I also review a presentation that our partner BluePay will be using later today in a briefing with one of our clients.  They want to offer SAP Integrated credit card and eCheck capabilities on the SAP Integrated B2B eCommerce website that we’re about to launch for them.  The presentation looks great and I’m really looking forward to the briefing later in the day.

9:15AM – One of the things that I’ve learned since we started Corevist, is that you should always be looking for great people to hire, even when you don’t need them at the moment.  A few weeks back, a colleague of mine from my consulting days, reached out to me  to let me know that she was coming back on the job market after taking a year off to take care of her ailing mom.  I reunited with her a few weeks back and we promised each other we would have our next call as soon as she got back from a family mission trip to Costa Rica.  For the next 45 minutes we wrestled with the pros and cons of coming to work for Corevist.  I could have spoken with her for another hour but…

10:00AM – My Quixotic quest at Corevist is to get SAP to realize that we can provide immense value to their efforts to expand hybris into the Mid-Size Manufacturing space.  A ray of light appeared a couple of weeks back when a Sr. Manager at SAP hybris asked me to be vetted by one of their “goto” hybris implementation partners, a company called Pragiti.  If we passed their inspection, than maybe…just maybe…SAP hybris would consider allowing us to help them in their quest to stop losing deals to faster/better/cheaper solutions (like the combination of Corevist and Magento).  Earlier this week we had our first briefing with the Senior Leadership Team at Pragiti and things went so well that we scheduled today’s call to discuss “next steps”.  I could have spoken with Pragiti’s Lee Reisterer for another hour but…

11:00AM – One of our clients is having trouble getting traction for a custom “Plant Selection” feature that we built with them.  It was designed to be a great feature that empowers the website user to scan across all of our client’s 5 manufacturing plants and distribution centers to determine how best to assemble an order to either minimize delivery times or minimize shipping charges.  It apparently is a little too sophisticated to be used correctly, so we’re investigating a way to provide online “guides” to help them through the learning curve.  We’re thinking that a very interesting tool from a local Raleigh company called pendo that a friend of mine, Todd Olson, founded a couple of years back, may just do the trick.

11:02AM – The power goes out in my office and I’m only left with my cellphone which has about 60% of battery life left to it.  Thank goodness that my colleague, Justin Diana, can cover for me because I promised our client that I would give them a rough estimate by tomorrow.  I look at my calendar and I see that I have at least 2 hours of additional meetings booked with two of our clients later today.  In light of my draining battery, I cancel my participation in all non-client related meetings for the rest of the day.

11:30AM – I kickoff the SAP Integrated Credit Card briefing between my colleagues at BluePay (whose presentation I reviewed earlier in the day) and our client.  I pretty much sit back and watch the meeting unfold.  For anyone that knows me, it’s quite out of character for me to sit through an hour long meeting with my lips zippered shut, but the folks at BluePay are consummate professionals.  It was a great meeting and I think everyone agrees that the combination of BluePay and Corevist will be just what the doctor ordered for this client.  We left the meeting with a confirmed strategy as to next steps in the process.

12:30PM – With my next meeting not scheduled until 2PM, and my phone now drained to 40%, and no air conditioning or lights or music or wifi in my office, I decide to treat myself and go out to lunch.  Besides, I can drive around and give my phone a little boost in the process.  The good news is that garage doors, with electric garage door openers, have a manual fail safe to open them in case of power outages :-).

1:45PM – Back to the office…still with no power.

2:00PM – Last week we kicked off a new project in Calhoun, Georgia and today was the first weekly status meeting.  I like attending these meetings if for no other reason to show my support to the project team.  The meeting was run by our project manager, Damian DellaVecchia and was a very efficient and effective meeting.  He had a crisp agenda prepared that was circulated beforehand, we got answers to many questions on the call, and everyone seems to be aligned for our first big milestone which is a Focus Group for internal CSRs and Salespeople next week.  I mostly didn’t say anything :-).

3:00PM – It’s nap time.  I almost always get at least a 30 minute nap in each day.  It’s a bad day when I can’t get my nap in…for both me and those around me.  Today’s nap is deeper and longer than most.  I guess my 5AM start is catching up to me.

4:00PM – I wake up from nap (electricity is back) and my inbox tells me that one of our client’s websites is down.  The good news is that all standard operating procedures are being followed while we work to restore the website.  The client has been notified, we’re in constant contact, and the team is on it.  These are the moments when I feel the most vulnerable because I personally can only do one thing to contribute…stay out of the team’s way…which I’ve learned to do very well.  I trust our folks to get the job done and only escalate to me in case of a real emergency.  So at this point, no news is good news.  I get back to a few emails and start thinking about an onsite briefing that I’m going to be attending in Philadelphia on Monday.  I’m really excited about it because it’s the third prospect that we’re working on with our partners at DSS-Partners, the second that we’re working on with our emerging friends at Oracle Commerce, and the first that was referred to us by the Gartner Group.  For a moment there I had a pang of divorce remorse.  Then I got over it.  Oh, and since the prospect is in the Philadelphia area, I’m going up there tomorrow and spending the weekend with my grandchildren.  I don’t want to be late for my meeting on Monday :-).

5:30PM – Now that power is back, my team wants to reschedule one of those internal meetings that I canceled earlier in the day.  Corevist is hosting a corporate outing (including spouses and partners) for 4 days on Cape Cod in mid-September.  We’ve already rented the mansion in Hyannisport, but the planning committee has some other decisions that need to be made.  We’re pretty much locked and loaded for our whale watching tour out of Provincetown and a day trip to Martha’s Vineyard.  Two of our four evening dinners are planned for.  We just need to figure out whether we want a picnic lunch on Sunday or find a local “lobster shack” to party at.  Decisions, decisions.

6:15PM – I have 15 minutes to decide whether or not I’m going to my Taekwondo (TKD) class tonight.  I’ve had a good week of training so far this week.  I’ve attended two TKD classes including my favorite Black Belt sparring class on Wednesday’s at noon and one Yoga class.  I’m feeling a little tired but I know that I’ll feel much better when I get home.

6:40PM – I’m off to Taekwondo and yes I’m probably the third oldest student in the school.

8:00PM – I knew I’d feel better!  Time to head home and wind down.  A little dinner, a little TV, walk the dog and fall asleep reading.

11:31PM – As my friend Rebecca said in her closing remarks on her blog that inspired this one “Can’t fall asleep because I want to write this blog Just another day at Corevist“

Sam

P.S. – If you made it this far and have enjoyed this blog post, please consider making a donation to Kids4Peace. The kids thank you.