Today for my first day of business, I was googling around for calgary-related ruby on rails information, and in the course of my surfing, I ended up on meetup.com. Meetup.com has all these clubs, so I searched for calgary clubs and discovered a small business calgary group. From there, I discovered that there was a meeting happening tonight at 6:30pm.

It ended up going until 9:00pm, and was quite well done. A vice president from a small IT firm, Stuart, ended up giving a pretty impressive presentation on “How to make IT big in small business.” And I ended up taking some notes.

The main thing that I learned from going to this meeting, is that I need to print up some business cards pronto. Business cards are vital for networking among business people. I ended up regretting that I didn’t have any business cards at the meeting because I sure could have used some.

Here are my notes, my favorite ones are in bold:

• Don’t be afraid to make money.
• Work ON the business, not so much IN the business
• Solutions-focused vs price-focused
• Technology doesn’t matter
• Don’t be afraid to value upsale/solution upsale
• Get out to get known, publish articles, volunteer, get referrals
• Don’t be afraid to let people know what you do
• The less you do & the more different you are, the more money you’ll make
• You never know who knows somebody
• Partner with your competitors
• Educational-approach to marketing
• Phone and ask how they are doing with their computers, be amiable about it and you’ll find problems needing solutions that they want solved
• Put what you do on the business card
• A Professionally done business card makes a big difference
• Don’t tell them you’re the owner, your customers are often employees and prefer to deal with other employees
• Advertising: e-mail, txt msging, faxing
• The goal: Sticky. Your name should stick in people’s minds
• Referral business is better than repeat business, repeat business means you didn’t solve their problem fully
• Network, follow up, and stay in touch, invite them for a 30 minute coffee break
• Don’t be afraid to ask for cash up front
• No more billing by hours, focus on package deals.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it! — Goethe

I have decided start my own business. My focus will be on building website backends for other companies. I am specialising in Ruby on Rails, which will enable me to rapidly develop highly interactive websites, or more accurately, web-based applications. My role models are www.37signals.com and www.43things.com.