A few weeks ago we had the 2008 Infusion User’s Conference held in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was AWESOME! This is the third year we have held the conference and it was great to reconnect with old friends/customers and meet so many new members of the Infusion family.  Small business and entrepreneur uber-guru Michael Gerber was the keynote speaker on the second day. It was great to be inspired by Michael again. He was a keynote speaker last year too. I have also had the great personal benefit and pleasure of having attended an In the Dreaming Room session with Michael early last year held in Napa Valley, California. Listening to Michael again at the conference reminded me of many of the things I learned in the Dreaming Room.

The experience literally changed my life.

I attended the Dreaming Room with Scott Martineau, the founder of Infusion and our Vice President of Product Management and David William Lee, our Vice President of Marketing.  Michael introduced us to the concept of “intentional dreaming” and he startled me out of my state of relative sleep to see things completely diferently.  I actually “woke up” from my day-to-day state of “waking sleep” to really, intentionally dream and discover the meaning of what I am doing personally, and what we are doing at Infusion.

digital marketing phoenix, az

Michael’s Dreaming Room changed Infusion also.  Scott, Dave and I came back from the Dreaming Room with our minds blown.  We felt like we were in a different universe with regard to thinking bigger and with more meaning than we ever had before.  We returned to the office with a new sense of purpose.  A few months after the three of us went to the Dreaming Room, our President Clate Mask and Sam Blackham our Director of Finance attended an In the Dreaming Room session with Michael.  Same result!

As the leaders of Infusion we all put our heads together and re-tooled our company, particurally with regard to the meaning of why were building Infusion to serve small businesses.  Clate later created our Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission as follows:

Dream:
Revolutionize the way small businesses drive and manage their growth.

Vision:
Infusion will be THE sales and marketing software program small businesses use to grow their companies quickly and profitably.

Purpose:
Liberate and empower small businesses and their employees so they can enjoy doing business, wow their customers and better serve their families and communities

Mission:
To create the leading sales and marketing software program for small business that is easy to use and powerful enough to turn small businesses into big businesses.

It is not hard to see our focus and commitment to small business. We sometimes say that we are “stubbornly small business.” Michael taught us how to intentionally dream and it has made a tremendous difference, both for me personally and for Infusion. I can’t recommend the Dreaming Room highly enough.  Thanks, Michael.

Consider the following concept: feature suggestions, defects and change requests are really just like sales leads.

Right now I’m sitting-in on the inaugural Infusion ICC (Infusion Certified Consultant) training course. It is the charter class for ICCs and every seat is full (over 50 in all)! It is a 5 day course and it is going great! Tons of great CRM and contact manager information being exchanged by the group.  After all, almost everyone doing the ICC course is a CRM or contact manager expert.

Anyway, as the ICC course is proceeding everyone is encouraged to put feature suggestions and change requests on post-it notes.  We put them into a basket and we later enter them into our ticketing system.  We are getting some FANTASTIC suggestions listed on the post-it notes that we put in the basket!

Well, during one of the breaks a few of the course attendees and I were chatting and I was asked if I was cringing at all the post-it notes in the basket.  To their surprise, I answered ABSOULTLY NOT!  Fact is I LOVE all the suggestions on how to make the software better.  I explained that all the post-it notes are just like sales leads to me.  I consider all of the suggestions to be written on gold!  Make no mistake, I’m very proud of our product and all the functionality it offers our customers.’ Nevertheless, we have a great opportunity to get feedback from all the ICCs to make us even better and stronger.  I’m going to take every “lead” and chase it down and close it.

A few months ago our VP of Marketing David William Lee suggested the concept of bugs = leads, and I thank him for the idea. We are working every day here at Infusion to make the product better and I want to thank all the ICCs for giving me such great “leads” to work with.

The development team is growing! This last quarter we expanded our office space and the development department moved into our new development room. The team is loving it! To give you an example of what we were up against before, we worked in a back office that had little air-conditioning with a constant beeping noises from the alarm system. Our only window looked into the server room here at our office. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great view of our servers, but the new room has many large windows to the outside. Also, our team shared multiple offices and some cubicles so we were all spread out.

Our new room is awesome! It is one large open room with an extra office that we use as a conference room. We bought new furniture and decided not to use cubicles. Why, you may ask? Because we’re a team delivering an awesome product, so we wanted to make sure communication and team atmosphere screamed from our office. The team was excited to finally get all together in the office. In addition, the QA and Systems teams now join with the Software Engineers to allow for a quicker process for getting things done. Instead of just sending emails, we yell out at other to get things done. Talk about line-of-sight reporting. :)
Not only is the atmosphere great, it looks great. We purchased some couches for the presentation area, a HD projector and drop-down screen and some other chairs for team training. We have whiteboards everywhere to facilitate innovation, creativity and communication.

When others in the company walk into our room they don’t want to leave. In fact, we’re considering charging for people hanging out in our department. As we bring others in our new office space, like business partners, recruiting candidates and our customers visiting our office they all remark what a great development room we have.

We love our office and take pride in it! It is already clear that with this new space the efforts between the several teams within my department are more synchronized. Our team is stronger and our moral is great.

Infusion Software rocks and it is the best place to work. We look forward to telling more about the dev room adventures.