Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s how to make one yourself.

In the last several weeks, there’ve been two that have been eating up most of my free time: tutoring and honey.

My tutoring company, No Excuses Tutoring, has had an unexpected bump in activity recently. I had several web leads that came in, and as a result I found 3 more students to tutor this semester. Which meant that I had to go out and find/vet/interview tutors for them, and in general become more serious about the company. This of course is great news, and my next challenge is making the website better. Easier to find on Google, easier to navigate and more focused in terms of what the company is and why it exists.

The other project, has been to help a local beekeeper sell honey to new, and hopefully more upscale, markets. The first thing we did is re-label the honey. In order to differentiate honey from all of the other honey options out there, we decided to tell a story of what makes the this honey special. Through the new label of Grampa’s Gourmet we can tell the story of a multi-generational beekeeper based in a unique location (San Luis Valley) – and attract a higher price as a result. I’ve been busy building the website, and looking for partnerships with other companies to sell the honey.

There are many reasons why someone would want to be a vegetarian, and I don’t necessarily want to have that discussion here, but I’ve been thinking about it long enough that it’s time to actually try it.

This is kind of a big deal to me, as I never thought that I would even ever try it. I grew up eating meat everyday (like most people, I think). But my wife is vegetarian, and so are some close friends. And living in Boulder (voted #7, on America’s Best Vegetarian-Friendly Small Cities) for 6 years certainly helped erase some of the stigma.

So, all and all I am pretty excited about it.

Professor Rosling uses data to tell a compelling story about the state of the world today, how we got here and where we’re going. He’s spoken at TED 5 times now, the latest one at TEDIndia in which he graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US.

Links to the Videos:

• Nov 2009 Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when
• Aug 2009 Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset
• May 2009 Hans Rosling on HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals
• Jun 2007 Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty
• Jun 2006 Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen

Professor Rosling made the charts freely available to the public through his company called Gapminder. Google has since bought Gapminder, and made the tool available as part of the graphing capabilities in the Google Spreadsheets.

My interest with SCPNA was driven by a desire to get involved with local issues, and to contribute more directly to the challenges facing this city – to be involved more directly than a being just an observer (or worse, ignore the issues entirely). I started by attending a few the local political meetups (see here, and here), but couldn’t see myself working for those causes (I found the views to be too extreme for my comfort). So I decided to take less partisan approach and get involved with SCPNA.

What I found was a neighborhood that’s changing rapidly, both in terms of commerce (The Bluebird district is booming with new businesses) and demographics (new high rise condos doubling the neighborhood density, new low income housing complex being built). On the neighborhood’s agenda were things like how to accommodate parking for all of the new businesses/residents. How to manage the noise from the concert goers singing into the night, and the constant crime/disturbances from being next to Colfax Ave. It seemed like a great place to get involved in the community.

But after a year of going to the meetings and talking to the association members, I found that the association itself was represented by a very small number of residents who’ve lived here for a long time, and seemed more concerned with old feuds amongst themselves, than the actual business of the neighborhood association. It doesn’t help that the association has essentially no power to do anything – other than take votes on resolutions with no consequences, and write letters to the city officials.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the entire experience was that the vast majority of the people who live in the neighborhood don’t care less about what we were doing – and wanted nothing to do with it. The organization and its work simply didn’t seem to matter to anyone, except to the organization itself.

The best part of volunteering at SCPNA was meeting all of the neighbors, and learning more about the neighborhood -it’s history, it’s struggles, etc. The worst part was the pervasive feeling that all of the hard work of deliberating, writing and communicating was for nothing.

Confusion vs Information

via FlowData, via Indexed Blog.

Excel works well for most quick tasks – but how cool would it be to be able to create interactive, colorful charts that breathe life into rows and rows of data?

And speaking of  FlowingData, they have nice beginner’s guides to get started:

What Visualization Tool/Software Should You Use? – Getting Started

40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data

Simply Honey’s owner and sole employee is Brent Edelen, a third generation bee keeper. He has between 500 and 600 colonies that he moves to New Mexico in the cold months, and brings back to the San Luis Valley in the summer.

Brent let me taste four different types of honey: Clover, Tamarisk, Starthisle and Wildflower. By far the most interesting honey was the Tamarisk. The color of the Tamarisk honey jars is almost black, and it has a very distinct flavor.

I also experienced eating a raw honey comb for the first time in my life. It’s gooey, and the sweetness explodes in your mouth unexpectedly as the hexagonal wax cells all burst when you chew them.

Below are some pictures I took from the excursion.

As it looks like I will be getting more and more involved with helping Brent bring the honey to a new market, I will be writing more about Simply Honey, bee keeping and all matters of honey in general.

Brent of Simply Honey shows how he cuts out the honeycomb.

A frame still full of honey.

The finished product comes in a beautiful case.

Abandoned bee keeping supplies and barrels, once full of honey.

Amazing views of the Sange de Cristo Mountains.

Now that I’ve been with the company for almost 7 months, I thought I’d share the activity dataset. In the graph below, you’ll see the following stats for each day (outbound and inbound activity):

• Email: how many email I wrote,
• Call – No Message: how many calls I made in which no one picked up and I didn’t leave a message,
• Call – Left Message: how messages I left,
• Call – With: how many meaningful conversations I’ve had about whether it’s an opp or not
• Call: All other types of calls (getting to the right person).

You’ll also see that during the course of the last 7 months, I’ve switched strategies in how I approach my job, twice. The first few months, my strategy was to get a hold of someone, no matter how many calls it took. I also didn’t leave any messages, because I thought it would be a waste of time (people almost never call back).

After about two months of relentless calling (and following the advice of my manager), I switched tactics, and started leaving voice messages every time I called someone for the first time. I also tightened my “abandon” criteria – meaning I stopped hounding people until they answered the phone – I would call, leave a message, follow up by email and be done with it.

Tracking daily activity in Sales

By tightening the abandon criteria, I can reach out to a lot more people, and by leaving a message, hope for a better chance that they will notice my outreach.

And the most recent change in strategy (after I got back from vacation) was prompted on my own, with the realization that my goal should be to maximize the number of people I reach out to everyday. With the help of a lot of email templates, I can now send out a lot more email per day, and call to leave a message only to the most promising prospects.

Notice that there is a crucial piece of data missing above. I left out the outcomes data on purpose. The data above is real, and I don’t want to in anyway compromise my current employer’s competitive status by revealing too much information.

What do you think? Have you been able to extract useful strategic information by analyzing daily sales tasks data?

Porche Lovely, the owner of Lovely Confections stepped up to the challenge and was able to spontaneously re-decorate a cake from another bakery in about a hour.

Porche Lovely, baking master.

Thanks Porche!