No more Burbs

We've talked about this for a year now but the perfect opportunity presented itself just a week and a half ago.  A friend told me she wanted to sell her house and pay off some debts, but doubted she could find a place to rent that would take 4 dogs and several cats.  She casually asked if we wanted to rent our house to her.  After a brief discussion with her and Mike, we decided to go ahead and started looking at rentals in or near the city of Calgary.  We have two dogs too, so choices were limited for that reason.  After 2 days, we found our condo in the heart of the city, on a leafy green avenue in an older 6 storey building.  It is owned by a young woman is moving to Victoria.  It is completely renovated, laminate wood floors, and painted in modern earth tones.  And a good size: 825 square feet.  We move in Sept. 1.  This will be a big lifestyle change - neither of us have lived so close to the downtown of a city.  The street is a quieter one, but I guess we'll find out how we adjust to a noisier environment.  (The burbs are soooo quiet!) But we are actually going to save money by living there, especially on gas. (But maybe we'll spend more on eating out - so many more tasty places to go!) We still intend to spend some time this winter in Mazatlan too - at least I do.

But how much time remains to be seen.  There is so much going on with the business(es).  We have had an amazing break-through - just yesterday.  Through a series of serendipitous connections, Mike sat down with his egg-head soul-mate for a meeting of minds.  This guy is a serial entrepreneur who has started and sold several software companies in Alberta.  He is working on his Phd in Computer Science.  His interests include Artificial Intelligence.  He knows his way around all of the local government funding programs and the investment community.  He loves our software ideas and is going to write a business plan for free that will get us funding he says - he's done it several times before.  He just raised 2 million for another business that is far less interesting than ours.  After that, he may come onboard as CTO/CEO or be involved in some other way, but for now he'll get the engine started.  Whoo hoo!

Just before this meeting, Mike dropped off an RFP package to an Alberta government agency that is the technology centre of the universe (so to speak) of the Province, in Edmonton.  They want to completely renovate their business processes and information technology systems from the ground up and come into the 21st Century.  This is the bid Mike and an associate put in for.  Whatever this agency does, the whole Alberta government will be watching and adopting.  When Mike walked in, one of the heads of the agency came down from on high to meet him.  This is NEVER done.  He spent a half hour chatting with Mike about Qtility and what we do, our history and experience, since, he said, he had never heard of us before and was intrigued.  Apparently, word that we were submitting an RFP had gotten around.  He actually outlined to Mike the entire big picture of what the agency wanted to do and asked if we could handle it.  This is REALLY never done.  Mike said "YES, with f-ing bells on!"  Well, not literally.  Anyway, I hope we hear back from them next week.

Developments

Mike and I have been very busy lately.  A lot of it is what I call "foundation" building: like for a house.  It never looks like much, never mind looking like a house, but its important.   Can't build a house without it.

Consulting:  Mike continues to work on the contract for Florida Power and Light and will go back on-site in August.  All goes well there - ahead of schedule really.  He was offered another contract the other day but had to turn it down because the client wanted him full-time on-site.  He has been for two interviews recently for 2 more contracts and waiting to hear back, and he has another interview on Tues.!  The one on Tues. is for a company that has interviewed him before, then they went and contracted someone else (cheaper), now that hasn't worked out well for them (duh) they are asking him back.

We took another look at the Alberta government website for Requests for Proposals recently.  Last year, there wasn't anything there we could apply for.  This year - wow!  Must be the Canadian stimulus money at work. (Which was a fraction of the US stimulus money thank god, Canadians will at least be able to pay it back sometime before our great great grandchildren are born.)  So we are busy writing up several of those, which could be huge moola if we get even one.  We will have to hire a couple of people too.

We have actually started the process to bring a guy, Carlos, up from Mexico City to work for us. Incredibly, he has experience and skills that are highly specialized in our field - these are hard to find in Canada and even in the US - and if you can find them north of the border of Mexico, they are expensive.  He found Mike online through LinkedIn (the business Facebook) and offered his services.  We checked him out with some of his previous employers he did contracts with in the US - they raved about him.  Silly man, he wants to come to Calgary to live in winter!

Software:  We have now signed Partnership documents with a firm in Germany (http://www.migration-center.de) who has software/services very similar to Qtility (except they are much more mature than us and have a large client base already).  We are now their only Canadian Partner.  This means we sell and service THEIR software (and they help us by referring their client contacts to us) AND they are taking a look at our software because ours compliments theirs in ways they haven't developed yet so we think that there will be some mergering of the two.  Not only that - their existing client base should also be interested in OneFileEverywhere since they are our target market.  So a cross-selling, revenue-sharing arrangement with the firm in Germany will be ideal. (Could there also be a trip to Germany soon????)  Phone meetings and a demo of Qtility and OFE are in the works.

A development and sales partner in the Middle East (he used to live in Calgary and is still a Canadian citizen and Mike knows him well) is putting together a Request for Proposal for the Saudi government which will include our Qtility software.  He and his team have taken our software and built upon it and translated what they built into arabic.  Potentially this is huge moola too.

OneFileEverywhere did have a working demo last week but it was found that it didn't work when someone went to it through Internet Explorer. (We all use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome mostly - less spam and viruses).  So the techs are back at work fixing it.  In the meantime, our partners in OFE in India have put us in touch with their contacts at a large construction/commercial development firm in India to talk to about trying out OFE.  In their industry, a lot of documents have to be shared and passed around to various sub-contractors for each project.  OFE is perfect for that.

I have been contacting all the various local provincial and city Economic Development programs to see how they might help us grow, since banks and angel investors are giving us the cold shoulder.  We have a face-to-face meeting set up on July 26 with a very key guy in this area to tell him all about ourselves and ask how he can help.  He knows where all the government money lives and how to get to it.

So, whew!  Poor Mike is literally chained to his computer these days, typing furiously.  There is only so much I can do to help.  We did get out into the foothills yesterday with the dogs for a drive and a hike on a closed-off dirt road to nowhere (something we haven't done for a long time).  And, when we got home, a group of the neighbours invited us over for a backyard beer and chat.  So it was a nice break - we'll try to do it more often.

Mike HAS taken up jogging lately, first thing in the morning, early, with the dogs. Me?  No thanks.  I walk them later at a nice sedate pace. ;)