My first Eureka Room employee, Chelsea, started last weekend. She picked up on everything quickly and has been doing a great job. She did a couple showings on her own already and the plan is to have her work some shifts this weekend so that I can finally get a break. I don’t have any doubt she’ll do really well. It’s a real relief to have some great help.
Last week was bit of a meltdown week for me. The calendars are about to finish up printing and ship and there’s a lot of things that happen around this time and need to happen in certain detailed ways. It’s really hard to deal with all those issues on top of The Eureka Room. I knew going in it is a terrible idea to run two companies at the same time but my options around that reality were limited. Mackenzie and Charles, who are doing a practice run this year of running the calendar company in hopes of maybe buying it, are doing well but there’s a lot of explaining I have to do which is very distracting. If I had it to do over I might have just let it die and move on. There’s a good chance we are through most of the more stressful and time consuming work, though. Usually once they are printed the mental processes get simplified: sell, sell, sell. There’s nothing else but selling.
So this week I’m giving a talk at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation’s monthly meeting. I’m not really sure my work is a fit for their meeting, but my friend who is involved there has kept asking me to talk, so I finally gave in. I have my doubts on the usefulness of my information in their domain. I guess we’ll see. I’ve put a lot of time in. Probably 6 hours so far to working on the talk. Kevin says they get 6-20 people and signups “have been a little light on this one”. So the ROI on this is questionable.
In related news, I am saying no to everything that is not selling tickets to the eureka room. People want to use the space, partner, talk about this or that. All those are a big no. I need to bring in revenue and unless you are on mission and helping with that, it’s a hard no.
This week I have to work on getting touchdesigner finally set up, finish up some hiring paperwork, do the bookkeeping, figure out the business plan, and start reaching out to more people who “get it” and want to invest or help make it a success in other ways. I’m so glad to be getting out of operations more and doing more future stuff.