Back story
It all begins with an idea. In my case the idea of starting a business percolated in my mind for years (decades actually) before I finally did it. Over those years I toyed with ideas for various business concepts. What finally made me take the leap, was the fat that the company I worked for at the time was moving location to another state, and we did not want to relocate our high school age children. I seriously considered starting my own restaurant franchise. So I did my homework. I took classes on food based businesses at the New School in New York, I frequented restaurants of a similar model and took notes on customer traffic, staff, supplies, basically anything i could observe as a patron. Then I created an Excel workbook and crunched the numbers. My conclusion was it is very difficult to be successful with a restaurant. So I considered asking the CEO of a company I knew about possibly joining them. I had signed my employer up as their first large customer and had seen them grow. My concern was that the most exciting work (in my humble opinion) had largely been done; so figured I’d probably wind up in a role requiring a lot of travel. In my mind, if I’d have to do that much travelling again, then I might as well do it for myself. I decided to start my own consulting firm. As a side note, it is hard to find a name for a consulting firm in my niche that wasn’t already taken. I’ve had to explain to people my whole life, that yes my last name ends with 2 “er”s. Well Double ER sounds too much like a dude ranch, so I named my firm ER Squared. Figured I’d learn more in 6 months of starting and running my own company than I would in 5 years in another corporate environment - so I took the plunge. Well that 6 months turned into 11 successful years, before I accepted a position as a VP at one of my clients. Throughout this time I had numerous ideas about additional business opportunities, but did not have the time and resources to pursue them. Now that I retired from my last job, I have the time to pick some of these ideas up and run with them. Therefore, ER Squared is no longer a consulting firm, but still exists to pursue my other ideas. The first 2 are UltiVideoRec and UltiCashFlow. As this post is already getting a bit long, I’ll share the back stories for each of these in additional posts.
It all begins with an idea, coupled with conditions to make the plunge.
It all begins with an idea. In my case the idea of starting a business percolated in my mind for years (decades actually) before I finally did it. Over those years I toyed with ideas for various business concepts. What finally made me take the leap, was the fact that the company I worked for at the time was moving location to another state, and we did not want to relocate our high school age children. I seriously considered starting my own restaurant franchise. So I did my homework. I took classes on food based businesses at the New School in New York, I frequented restaurants of a similar model and took copious notes on customer traffic, staff, supplies, basically anything i could observe as a patron. Then I created an Excel workbook, researched costs, and crunched the numbers. I concluded it is very difficult to be successful with a restaurant. One option I considered was asking a CEO I knew about possibly joining their company that I had a very favorable opinion of. I had signed my employer up as their first large customer and had seen them grow. My concern was that the most exciting work (in my humble opinion) had largely been done; so figured I’d probably wind up in a role requiring a lot of travel. In my mind, if I’d have to do that much travelling again, then I might as well do it for myself. I decided to start my own consulting firm. As a side note, it is hard to find a name for a consulting firm in my niche that wasn’t already taken. I’ve had to explain to people my whole life, that yes my last name ends with 2 “er”s. Well Double ER sounds too much like a dude ranch, so I named my firm ER Squared. Figured I’d learn more in 6 months of starting and running my own company than I would in 5 years in another corporate environment - so I took the plunge. Well that 6 months turned into 11 successful years, before I accepted a position as a VP at one of my clients. Throughout this time I had numerous ideas about additional business opportunities, but did not have the time and resources to pursue them. Now that I retired from my last job, I have the time to pick some of these ideas up and run with them. Therefore, ER Squared is no longer a consulting firm, but still exists to pursue my other ideas. The first 2 are UltiVideoRec and UltiCashFlow. I’ll share the back stories for each of these in additional posts.
Back Story: UltiVideoRec
It all begins with an idea.
One the things I learned is that there are more opportunities than I’ll ever have the time and resources to pursue. For example, I have ideas about numerous websites that I think have potential. So my plan was to tie them all together under a common umbrella, and hence have assigned the prefix “Ulti” to all of them. The first of these that I did pursue was UltiCareer. The concept for UltiCareer was to have a site where people from all walks of life describe what a day in the life of their job is like, and what they like and dislike about it. The plan was that this would be a fantastic resource for students or anyone considering a career change to explore the vast array of potential jobs and get first hand insights into what it is like to actually do that job. Seemed like everyone I talked to loved the idea as a resource, especially for students, and stated they wished such a tool was available to them when they were starting out. The challenge was that while everyone agreed it was a great concept, very few people were willing to take the time to respond to even a simple questionnaire to share their insights. Struggling to find a way around this, I found that many people liked the idea of being interviewed, so all they had to do was talk in response to questions posed by the interviewer - they also liked the stroke to their egos of being interviewed and recorded. problem is that approach just isn’t scalable. So I explored creating a tool in which questions could be posed and respondents could record their responses themselves on a laptop , tablet, or smart phone. As we started developing this tool, quickly realized that it has numerous potential uses both for businesses and personal use. Which became the pivot to start developing UltiVideoRec, the multiplatform tool for creating a form of questions and collecting video recorded responses.
Business uses include (but are not limited to) collecting customer testimonials, feedback on product or services, collecting user persona insights for distribution to the entire product development team, collecting and sharing congratulatory or best wishes from colleagues for an employee who is retiring or achieved a major event or significant anniversary.
Personal uses include (again not limited to) collecting and sharing birthday wishes from geographically distributed family and friends; congratulatory message for a major anniversary, graduation, wedding, engagement, or any other event; sharing messages of thanks from children’s sports team to their coach; collecting content to share on a blog/vlog; etc.
Basically, uses are only limited by our imagination.
Back Story: UltiCashFlow
It all begins with an idea.
Being a small business owner involved a lot of learning and some experimentation. In my particular situation, my biggest expense was employees which is complicated by today’s environment of distributed remote workers who reside and work in different states with different payroll tax rules. Further complicating matters is that my business involved a lot of proposals and nurturing prospects, which required attributing percentages of success to forecast future revenue. To manage these major complications and the myriad of other expense details, I created an extensive Excel workbook to track revenue and expenses, and better yet to forecast future cash flow. Talking to my accountant, banker, and fellow small business startups it was apparent that many small business owners could greatly benefit from having a similar tool. So went about converting my Excel workbook into a configurable workbook that goes to great lengths to hide complexity and simply the process so anyone can use it without needing any Excel skills.
Why Excel you may ask? Frankly, I already had the beginnings of it from the tool I had developed for my own business; but more importantly I wanted to use a tool that most small businesses would already have and be at least somewhat comfortable using. Additionally, this allows for the workbook to be installed on each owner’s own computer, thus avoiding any security concerns about their data being on the web and potentially exposed to prying eyes. I also wanted to keep the development cost to a minimum so I can offer it at a very attractive cost for small businesses, especially those just getting started.
You can go the the menu item Store to purchase a license and download the workbook to get started.