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.

Posted from brad garland’s stream

Got a lot of great responses on Twitter and I thought a short screencast could help us all.  Let me know if there are any others to add to this list, thanks everyone!

Posted from brad garland’s stream

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Listen on posterous

My view

Posted via email from brad garland’s stream

I’m really excited to now talk about a new engagement that I’m beginning for the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA). They are the national association for community banks and I am working with them to help define their online (and potentially offline) strategies. So I wanted to start off the conversation here and allow my audience to help guide them (and me) with what perceptions do you have of banks, more specifically local community banks today and what could they do better for you? What should they offer you or what could ICBA do to educate/support them for you? Please remember we’re doing this in the spirit of transparency and for the sake of education, so no politics here pls. :)

I really think there is a lot of potential good that this organization can do for community banks and ultimately, the customer, and I’m really excited to get started. Please provide some insight as these comments will be take straight to their mgmt team. Thanks so much!

For decades now the wall between the ‘celebrity’ and the common man has been tall and wide. Often only seeing them on television or at the movies or maybe, just maybe, if you could make a special event/concert you got to see them from as close as 100 yards away! Wow, they’re right there (squint)!!!

Now, times are changing. Access is changing. Let me geek out for a second as to why. Example, I watch ‘Meet the Press’ every weekend and really enjoy David Gregory. He’s smart, fair, and encourages good debates on his show. But now he’s on twitter. So I decided to send him a tweet about a guest that should be on his show and within an hour, he responded back. Publicly for all but addressed specifically to me, now how cool is that?!? But it’s already not…cool that is. Why? Because I’m having these all the time now with journalists, politicians, authors, thought leaders, and some of the biggest and brightest minds of our time because of the walls of restricted access are falling down.



Where I’m going with this, however, is this sort of interaction that is novel/cool/kinda geeky today will become standard even tiresome in the future. My daughters will not only have access to but even have conversations with any person on planet they want. Oh, and note, this conversation could take place on the computer but probably won’t. “That’s so 2000s, Dad!”

Doubt me? Welcome the single most powerful woman on the planet to Twitter as of today. Hi @oprah, welcome to the conversation.

This is a vanity private post. Thought about posting up pics publicly of my new car but Jenny convinced me otherwise.

I GOT A NEW CAR! I have been considering getting rid of my 03 Dodge Ram truck for a while now but since it hit the 100K mark I was ready for something new. I knew I wanted something more car like instead of a truck because the functionality of a truck was only getting used maybe two or three times a year really. So I went luxury vehicle and got a 2006 Infiniti M35 from Carmax.

Tangent: The Carmax experience was really pretty good. They gave me $5K for my truck (which was lower than I could’ve sold it for privately but considering the hail damage work I would’ve had to do AND the bad economy we are in, the stress would’ve outweighed the additional money I would’ve gotten. Their ‘no haggle’ concept is great and I went into one knowing what I wanted to look at and we didn’t beat around the bush. The car ended up costing $25,998 and was going to finance through Carmax (at 7.75%) but made a call to Employees Credit Union where I financed my truck and they gave me a %5.5 (gotta love the CUs) so I switched to them. This is a first for me but I also got the ‘gap insurance’ and extended warranty through the CU as well (it was cheaper too) so we’ll see if it is like Dad says, “Those are about as good as the paper they’re written on.” To be continued.

Had it a week now and I really love it. It feels good to ride and really nice interior. Has cool features like bluetooth speakersphone for my iPhone 3G and a 6 disc CD changer which I figured I wouldn’t really use but once I heard the difference between the FM wireless transmitter I have and a CD with that Bose system, I was sold. So the CD player plays MP3 CD and so I’m setting up some CD’s to just stay in the car that will pretty much cover my entire library of songs.

Now, Jenny and I are ready to take it out on the town together since it isn’t a family car (no carseats in it……..yet)

Here’s some pics I took a couple days after I got it.

This shows how geeky I am, I suppose, but I enjoy finding past technological innovations to be able to make analogies to current ones. In communication terms, Twitter (or more likely “short-form communications”) looks to be playing out to be a new form of email. Many people that heard about email a couple decades ago couldn’t see the point. “Why wouldn’t I just call them or leave a message?”, they said. Now email is mission critical in just about every organization. Email didn’t start an upward trend until American Online came out and gave every consumer an email address with their service. And I still remember as a kid being excited about dialing in (2400 baud modem baby!) and hoping to hear those three company defining words, “You’ve got mail!”. YES, somebody emailed me!

So fast forward to 2009 and we have Twitter.

It’s been out for a few years but it really hasn’t taken off until now. One of the key differences that I see between AOL of old and Twitter of today is that AOL’s email was interoperable . AOL emails worked with Prodigy emails or CompuServe emails. What does Twitter work with today? Email was built with a decentralized network in mind but Twitter doesn’t appear to want to play nice. Considering their exponential growth why would they want to though, right? It’s a lot like Facebook in that way I suppose.

Twitter may end up, if not acquired first, to be the new AOL and is definitely put itself on the map for future technology historians.

Anytime I need a place for some inspiration, motivation, or creative thought I find myself over on TED.com. The TED conference is one of those conferences that I would LOVE to attend some day and aspire to be a presenter there (crossing fingers). I came across this presentation by Tim Berners-Lee (father of the Web) talking about what’s next. This presentation came just this past March in 2009. A really wonderful talk and I couldn’t agree with him more on putting your data (or I like to think of it as information) on the Web to be able to unlock other potentials that some of us haven’t even dreamed of before.

Our company just wrapped up our second annual company retreat out in Angelfire, NM. We normally take three days and look at our company introspectively from all facets of the business. It also gives us all a chance to sit back and enjoy each other’s company in a “non-work” environment. One of the things that I found particularly cool this year was how we were able to debate about things in a non-argumentative way. We talked about everything from business models to politics to religion. At first, I was curious what the outcomes would be but the discussions were great and really informative! We have people in our company with a vast array of backgrounds and opinions and the fact that we were able to discuss them without it getting out of hand is really great to see for our team. Everyone went into it with mutual respect for each others opinions and seemed to realize that the goal wasn’t to change others opinions but to have everyone understand their own.

In related news, last week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ex-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was on and talked about how there was many a times where the Court had to learn to disagree agreeably and thought that was a great way to put it.