What an exciting day Jimmy and I had during Seth Godin’s presentation on his new Book, The Dip. It was a wonderful presentation that focused on a very unexpected topic–failure. The presentation helped me put into perspective that to be really successful in life, you need to narrow your focus to what you really excel at and go full throttle. In order to do this, you will need to give up a lot of opportunities. To determine what you should give up and what you should pursue, look at the long term effects and determine whether or not this battle will end in added opportunities or a dead-end.  In short, pick your battles and find the battles that can yield the most benefit.

Seth advised Jimmy and I one on one while driving him to the airport (yes, Phil’s Mercedes broke down in Salt Lake, we passed them on the road, picked them up, got lost on I-15, turned around, and finally made it to the airport in time to get Seth onto his flight).  Seth asked if our web development company Apriux was a local business or going national.  We responded that we were currently local but were looking to possibly do work nationally as well.  Seth told us that if we had a really slick and efficient process, then we could go nationally or we could just be hyper-local.  He said that trying to do both was basically suicide.  I was listening to Seth’s lecture, I promise.  I guess I didn’t have time to let it sink in.  Pick your battles, find what you’re good at and do everything in your power to be the best at that.  Jimmy and I had a nice conversation on the way back to Provo about our business strategy.
Those are some of my takes from the conference.  I’m sure I forgot a ton of stuff.  Anyone else have some thoughts?

It’s been about a month since graduating with a Bachelors Degree in Information Systems from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management and things have been going really well. Together with my partner, Jimmy Zimmerman, we’ve started a web consulting business called Apriux LLC. We have a site under construction at www.apriux.com. So far it’s been quite successful and are busy developing a handful of php and ruby applications. Our clients are great and in the next month or so you should begin seeing some of the sites go online.

Our current technologies have been CAKE PHP and Ruby on RAILS.  CAKE is a derivative of the popular RAILS framework and really speeds up the development of php projects.  Our preferred language is Ruby as the RAILS framework was designed specifically for Ruby.

We’re always looking for new projects and if anyone is needing, or knows of anyone needing, web development done, I hope you’ll bring them my way.  We’re also in the process of looking for skilled CAKE PHP and  Ruby on Rails developers to help us complete some of our projects.