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Nine Unusual High-Performance Traits

My good friend, mentor and coach, Dr. TC North has been writing columns for ColoradoBiz magazine for the past year. His columns consistently place in the top-five most popular columns and his latest one is the best yet.  TC writes about nine traits that he sees in high performance athletes and business leaders. 

1. Willingness to fail
2. Motivation driven by excitement not by fear
3. Obsessive focus
4. Respect
5. Alignment
6. Positive accountability
7. Shared values
8. No whining, complaining or excuses
9. Meet or exceed

Check out the article to see his take on these nine traits.  You can also subscribe to TC's newsletter where you'll get his weekly EnCourageMent email.  TC coaches elite athletes, top sales people and CEOs. He's been a great help to me and I recommend him highly.

Gold Systems is hiring

With just a couple of days left in 2011, I have to say I think that 2012 is going to be a great year.  At Gold Systems we have a new product, Vonetix 7 Voice, and business is really starting to take off.  We beat our sales goals for Q4 by a wide margin, and we're going into Q1 with a LOT of opportunity.  To say I'm thankful would be an understatement.  2011 was challenging and I'm hugely grateful to everyone who helped us end the year on an upswing.

Now we're looking for some great people to join our engineering group.  We're mainly looking for .NET and IVR people, but check out our job postings at the Gold Systems website and if it looks interesting, shoot us an email.

To all my friends and business associates - have a Happy New Year and I hope to see you in 2012!

Terry

Running a Marathon is NOT like running a business

Many years ago I got the idea that running a business was like running a marathon. Or better yet a series of marathons, with the occasional sprints as needed.  Well, last Sunday I ran my first marathon and I have to say it was EASY compared to running a business.

There are some similarities, and some really big differences and I've learned something about myself, which was the point of running the marathon in the first place.

Here are some of the similarities of running a marathon and running a business.

Both require a certain amount of preparation and planning before starting.  If you don't plan, you have a very high chance of failing to finish, and you'll likely be miserable from the very start.  There are a lot of people who have ran marathons in Boulder, and I talked to quite a few during my training so I didn't have any big surprises while running.  Thanks Herb, Brad, Jim, David and everyone else who encouraged me to do this.

When Jim and I started Gold Systems twenty years ago, I only knew a couple of entrepreneurs, so we made a lot of rookie mistakes that we could have avoided if I had known more entrepreneurs at the beginning.  If you are thinking about running a marathon or starting a business, find others who have done it who are willing to give you the important tips that you won't find or notice in the books. 

It helps to know what to expect.  It was easier to learn about what I was in for with the marathon than it was for the business.  Having people give you advice is great, but it also really helps to hear what it is going to feel like once you are in the race or working in the business.  For instance, I was not prepared to think about my business every waking moment, which I did for many years.  I had no idea it was going to be so consuming.  Had someone told me that it was normal early on, I think it would have been easier.  I've learned to give my brain a break, but the business is still there ready to jump to the forefront of my thoughts anytime day or night, but now I know it is normal. 

Have fun.  One of the best pieces of advice about the marathon was to "enjoy the run."  Whenever I started to feel bad, I reminded myself that this was supposed to be fun, and somehow that helped push the pain away.  Come to think of it, I'm finding that works in business too. In business some entrepreneurs seem to brag about how miserable they are, and how much they sacrifice for the business.   I've been that guy, but If you find you're having a lot more bad times than good times, it means something is probably wrong and an adjustment needs to be made.  I'm a much better leader when I'm having fun, and I'm a much better runner when I'm having fun. 

Pain is temporary.  Until last Sunday, I had never ran more than 20 miles, but I was confident that whatever pain and soreness I would have right after the race would be gone in a few days, and it was.  I've had more painful days while being an entrepreneur than I experienced with the marathon, but I still sometimes forget that the next day, the next week, the next month, it will be better.  I like to say that lessons will be repeated until learned, but hopefully the next time I have a painful day I can remember that I just need to get through it and then things will be better. 

Now for a couple of big differences between running a marathon and running a business.

Focus.  Phylis pointed out to me that to run a marathon, you pretty much just focus on finishing, but in business it can be very, very hard to focus.  In business I've come to terms with the idea that there are more things to do than there are hours in the day.  It's my job to figure out which things I should get done and which should get passed on to others, or simply left undone.  There are always more good ideas and opportunities to consider than time and resources allow, so I think it is much harder to focus in business than it is to just keep putting one foot in front of the other until the marathon finish line is crossed. 

The Finish Line.  Cindy pointed out that in business there is no finish line, or if there is, you don't usually know where it is.  That's an amusing thought to me.  Consider a race where everyone lines up not knowing how long the course is, or whether it will be hot or cold, hilly or flat.  Then somewhere along the way, someone yells, "finish line in 1 mile!" and everyone starts sprinting.  Then the runners hear, "just kidding, keep running."  In business I've seen entrepreneurs quit because they got tired of the race, or they thought that they somehow had entered the wrong race. 

So there you have it.  Running a business is a little like running a marathon, but running a business is in my opinion a lot harder and I think even more rewarding.  Stay focused, keep putting one foot in front of the other, be prepared to change when the race changes, and above all, enjoy the race as much as you can.  

 

Update 10-21-2011.  The marathon is done, I'm completely recovered and ready to go again.  I'm getting up early and jumping on the treadmill and I'm looking forward to the weekend for a long run outside.  Thanks to everyone for the comments!  Greg put a link to another post into his comment about running and entrepreneurship, and it is really worth checking out.  Here it is:  http://blog.finette.com/post/11370209405/never-walk-a-talk-about-entrepreneurship-and-running

 

Update 10-28-2011.  Soon after I posted this, I received a very nice email from Miguel Chang who lives in Taiwan and has a website called Sportsnote.com.  Miguel asked if he could translate my blog post into Chinese, and of course I was happy to have him do it.  Here is a link to this post at Sportsnote.com   Thank you Miguel!    

 

Carmin Turco is playing in Boulder Tuesday night

  

Carmin Turco is an entrepreneur, and I met him when TechStars selected him and his partner Sebastian Replanski as one of the very first companies that they brought to Boulder in 2007.  I soon learned that Carmin was also a musician, and a very good one at that, with tours and CDs in his background.  We became good friends and now he's making a quick trip through Boulder this week, and he's got a gig where you can hear him play.

Carmin will be playing at the Rock N Soul Cafe Tuesday August 16th at 7:30 PM.  The Rock N Soul is a nice little venue with lots of live music, located at 5290 Arapahoe in Boulder.

I'll be there, and I hope you can make it too. 

 

Using Microsoft UCMA in the post-PBX world

Continuing to guest blog for Tom Cross on http://crosstalk-techtionary.blogspot.com/, below is my second installment:

IVR Affordable Solutions Using UCMA - Affordable UCMA in the Post-PBX World Part 2

So what is UCMA and why should you care? According to Microsoft , it is "a managed-code platform that developers use to build applications that provide access to and control over Microsoft Enhanced Presence information, instant messaging, telephone and video calls, and audio/video conferencing."

Given that you are reading this newsletter, you might actually know what that means, but I'm going to try to make it just a little more clear for everyone else. UCMA is software, written by Microsoft, that other software developers use to create their own applications that interact with Lync in some way. Most software today is built on other pieces of software, provided by Microsoft or other vendors. We talked about reusable code for years, and now we have it.

UCMA stands for Unified Communications Managed API. It's one of those great acronyms that actually contains another acronym, in this case API, which stands for Application Programming Interface.

Let's say I want to write a simple help desk application. Maybe I have agents in different locations, but they all are using Lync, and I want to know if we ever get into a situation where there are fewer than five agents available to take a call. (Or an email, or IM, it doesn't really matter.) Using the UCMA API, I can write software that tells Lync that I want to know whenever an agent is available. The API is really just a way for my code to talk Microsoft's code. They worry about the mechanics of communicating with Lync, while I code up the business logic. I write code that keeps track of how many agents are available and how I want to notify a supervisor if we run out of agents. Microsoft's code handles everything else behind the scenes.

Just about anything that can be done by a user of Lync, can also be done by software using UCMA. Just as a user can make a phone call or an IM, so can my software application, courtesy of UCMA. Sometimes you'll hear people mention the UCMA SDK. That's just packaging around UCMA that makes it easy for a software engineer to access the API from their development environment.

UCMA isn't just for building simple applications; in fact it can be used to build completely new products. At Gold Systems, we've built the first UC-Enabled IVR that works with both Microsoft Tellme in the cloud as well as on premises with, or without, Microsoft Lync. UCMA includes a speech engine, a text-to-speech engine, as well as all the telephony capabilities we needed to build our product, Vonetix 7 Voice. For us, this means that we can sell a product that is much more capable than the legacy IVR products on the market today, and we can sell it at less than half the price because we do not need to pay expensive speech engine licenses to a third party.

For our customers, that means that they now have an IVR option that was designed to work with their Lync environment. For our customer's customers, it means we can create applications that are more "personable" and that are more satisfying to use than the traditional legacy IVR.

Other ISVs are exploring what can be done with UCMA too, and I believe that this will be what makes Lync successful. Microsoft will continue to build out the core product, and companies like Gold Systems will build around the edges creating new products that just can't be created with the old PBXs that I started my career working on.

Ultimately UCMA is about making Lync even more capable, more affordable and extending it in ways that fit the desires of the customers who buy it. Try calling up your PBX vendor and telling them you don't like the way they designed call routing. And not only that, but you want your own software developer to have access to their code so that you can just get in there and do it right. You can do that with Lync, thanks to UCMA.

 

 
Wow.  Twenty years ago today, Jim Fudge and I received the incorporation papers for Gold Systems.  But that's not quite the beginning of the story . . .

The summer before, Jim and I spent the day together at the Boulder Kinectics Race.  I tell you that because that was actually the day we decided to start the company.  We spent the day in the hot sun, eating junk food, and watching crazy people have fun.  That evening we talked about why we weren't having more fun.  The reason was that we had to go back to work on Monday at a big company, and Jim uttered the words that changed everything - "Let's start a company."

We started getting together after work to talk about it.  For me, I realized it was really going to happen when I told Jim that I had found a used AT&T 3B2 computer for sale on Netnews that we could use as our development machine.  He whipped out his check book, signed a blank check and handed it to me saying, "do it."  I was blown away, and it was the first of many selfless acts by Jim and many, many other people who helped to get Gold Systems to this anniversary.  (We didn't buy that machine, and I still have that blank check . . .)

This anniversary is about Gold Systems, and the people who've helped make it work.  Thank you all, I am truly grateful to have been a small part of this.

 

The original founders, left to right:  David Appell, Terry Gold, Jim Fudge, Kevin Obenchain.  Not pictured, but also there from the early days was Kathy Bishop.  Thank you all for helping us get started!  Update:  Check out David's blog post.  Thank you David!

 

Jim drew up the first business card design.  Note the email address.  The "at sign" had not been invented when we started Gold Systems.  The phone number was my home phone number at the time, which we still have as Gold Systems' main number. 

 

At our open house, Vince Fresquez surprised us by having the company name put on the door.  Thank you Vince!

There are many more stories to tell, and many more people to thank.  Until then, please know that I appreciate everyone who has helped us to get to this day!

Terry

Lync User Summit 2011

Gold Systems will be exhibiting at the 2011 Lync User Summit June 9th and 10th at the Westin Denver in Westminster, Colorado.  This is the second year of the summit and it is the place to be to learn more about Microsoft Lync.

The first summit in 2010 was focused on Office Communications Server and the talk then was all about the upcoming release of the next version of the software.  That software of course was Microsoft Lync and it is changing how we communicate.  Gold Systems has deployed Lync for many customers and our newest product, Vonetix 7 Voice, is one of the first new products to work with Lync by UC enabling IVR applications for both Microsoft Tellme in the cloud and Lync on the premises.

For more information, click here.

Also check out the Lync User Forum at http://lyncuserforum.com

Customer Satisfaction Software

I took a vacation day Friday because after a very busy couple of months at work, I just needed some free time outside to clear my head, think, and to not do the day-to-day stuff.  I went for an easy run in the morning, took my wife out to lunch and then played music, worked on a few projects and just relaxed.  It was a very satisfying day.

The reason I've been so busy lately is that at Gold Systems our newest product, Vonetix 7, is starting to get a LOT of attention, both from customers and partners.  I've been traveling and doing demos, working with sales people on new opportunities, and spending a lot of time at my white-board-wall sketching out how all the pieces fit together.   The product is already deployed at some very, very large enterprises and is continuing to evolve.  It's different from anything in use today, though it is replacing old systems and architectures that have been in place for a long time.  My challenge has been to describe what the product is as simply as possible.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:00 AM, wide awake, with the words "Customer Satisfaction Software" rolling around in my head.   I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I got up and decided to write it down.

My career has been about helping people communicate, and generally it has been about helping large companies or government organizations communicate with their customers.  In the beginning it was people calling companies on the telephone, and I remember when "improving customer service" meant eliminating busy signals and answering calls twenty-four hours a day.  It meant reducing the amount of  time a customer had to spend listing to bad music while being told over and over again how important they were. 

Call Centers became Contact Centers as they started handling emails and then web chats.  TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms)  were everywhere - ACD, IVR, CRM, SEO, PBX, TXT, ICR.  Some of the technology worked together, but most didn't, and what started out as a customer service initiative became an exercise in customer annoyance. 

As I woke up this morning the thought was running through my head that we DON'T need more customer contact software, or worse, customer management software, we need customer SATISFACTION software.  Even that's not quite right, because we are always going to need people in the equation, but it's a start.  Vonetix 7 is customer satisfaction software.  I like it!

Gold Systems Vonetix Interview on Microsoft Channel 9

A few weeks ago I was in Redmond and did an interview with Larry Larsen at Microsoft's Channel 9. It was a lot of fun, and Larry and Kai made it so easy. Larry was interested in how Gold Systems had used Microsoft developer tools and the Microsoft Lync platform to build our new Vonetix 7 Voice product, and he did a great job of capturing the kinds of applications we can build, as well as the tool and platform underneath the applications.

I'm amazed to see that as I write this, the interview has had over 12,000 views and it just went up on four days ago! Wow, thank you Larry, Kai, Albert and everyone else at Microsoft for giving me this opportunity to talk about Gold Systems and our newest product!

For more information on Microsoft Lync, go to http://www.microsoft.com/lync

Gold systems is hiring UC Lync deployment people

The Gold Systems Unified Communications Microsoft Lync Deployment group is very busy!  We are looking to add to the team either full time employees or contractors.  We need people who have Lync or OCS experience, and certifications are a plus. Many of us at Gold Systems are techies who are thinking about doing more than just deploying the software, but we all care about the customer and can speak their language as well as ours.  Gold Systems is a unique company with a great culture and we’re just about to launch some big ideas into the market.  If you have the experience and you want to think about a career change, please email me at tgold@goldsys.com
and I’ll make sure you get considered.