brad garland

I had lunch yesterday with a business partner (we’ll call him Scott) and we got to discussing our businesses and how they are doing and all that ‘entrepreneurial type’ discussion. He owns a small 6-person audit firm and works mainly in the Texas region. So, in our discussion, I asked him how much he is looking into growing his business this year and he said he’s not. “Huh?!”, I said. He said actually over the past two years he’s been letting clients go. At one point, he had close to 50 clients his firm worked with but realized a couple of things:

1. He wasn’t happy that he was never home.


2. He was not seeing his 3 girls enough.

So, very simply, he decided to just stop growing and get back to a number (around 35 clients) where he could satisfy both those criteria. In the circles I’m in, you often hear and become excited to hear stories of meteoric rises, VC funded companies, and entrepreneurs building a company from nothing to IPO but, to me, this guy is just as much a superstar. It’s the lifestyle entrepreneurs that don’t get enough credit for building businesses just perfectly sized for them. I really respect that mentality. I’m still working on my business plan for my next business but I don’t know, maybe something small and big enough just for me is a good fit.

Sometimes transparency just stinks and although I’m definitely making my blog suck by writing this…I need to do it.

Gastric bypass is not a fix-all solution. They tell you that the first day you do it. You still need to work to maintain a healthy lifestyle or the surgery can be overcome. I’m starting to overcome it. At my lowest, I was at 189 but probably was a little too lean for my liking, I’d prefer to be in the 195 range. Today, I weighed in at 214. (ugh) Since the surgery, every pound I gain is like gaining 50 pounds in my head. I beat myself up, I play games and feel like a failure.

Now the good news…twenty pounds isn’t that far away! I know my issue is more of a food thing than an exercise thing so I feel like I can control that more easily and revert back. And lastly, I got my FitBit in the mail today. I’m going to go back to tracking my calories, activity, and now sleep with FitBit in hopes to meet my 1st goal of 199 pounds!

Jenny and I made a list of dealbreakers yesterday while driving the 12 hours back from Angelfire, here they are:

• Exercise at minimum 3x per week (soccer can be included in that)


• Track my food, exercise, sleep everyday!


• No Starbucks except for 1x per week (I have been on an everyday kick for a while)


• No eating after 8pm (I’m a notorious late night snacker)


• Only allowed to eat out 2x per week (Jenny was big on this one)

I’ve always struggled with the ability to capture a moment, a college class, a presentation, a meeting. There is often no pattern, reasoning, or order behind note-taking abilities. Mind mapping, bullet points, verbatim, argh! Anyway, point being, I have always had a hard time trying to find just the right way to take notes. By paper, iPhone, or Laptop.

Paper was always tops for flexibility but not very searchable or sharable. So I conformed to the computer and the closest thing I could find was Evernote. Unstructured text documents and it required the keyboard be used despite my need for more of a ‘mind mapping’ process. But recently, I think I may have found the holy grail (at least for me). It’s called the Pulse SmartPen made by Livescribe. It’s part pen/microphone/camera/storage device that allows it all to come together for me. Watch my demo/review of what I’m talking about but all I can say for now is so far, so good.



Oh, and for those interested in the church sermon and sketchnotes I did today, see below.

Recently, I joined an organization called EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) to be able to connect and relate with entrepreneurs with similar business and personal issues. It’s a great group and they pride themselves, especially the Dallas chapter, on providing the best experience and value for all their events and last night was no exception. The event was held at the Dallas Museum of Arts and the speaker was Ben Zander, who is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. I wished I could have taken pictures but my battery died before I thought about it. His message was so great and I took a lot of way from it. He spoke about ridding ourselves of the ‘downward spiral’ or negativity and staying within the ‘the art of possibility’. I wanted you all to at least experience some of Ben Zander’s greatness and so I’m embedding a video from a recent TED conference. Enjoy!

Had a few people ask how to do a good online demonstration when showing your product off. I’m not talking presentation skills but more the technical details to have it feel and look clean. I told them I’d put together a quick little screencast showing my setup, in a Mac world, on how to do it. So here’s what I do, nothing super complicated but small steps add up to alot!

Also posting @bradgarland on Twitter.

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