This Is a Great Time to Be Alive and Be in Business

Friday morning I was sitting with Justin McHood (our in-house SEO guy) and Shane Hollenback on a picnic bench outside of Justins friends duplex in downtown Denver.

We had just attended the Mortgage Technology Summit the day before and we were discussing the status of one of our online mortgage technology projects that had suffered a serious setback (key team member had gone permanently AWOL).

The setback caused us to fail to deliver on commitments that we had made to one of our referral partners last week. We were discussing what went wrong and how we could learn from this and get better.

As we brainstormed, we determined that we could learn from the experience and enhance some of our online sales technology tools; but to do so, we needed someone with a very distinct set of skills such as:

• content writing,
• extreme proficiency with WordPress,
• high-level coding/programming experience,
• and a bit of knowledge of the mortgage industry.

We discussed a few names of people that we know and tried to assess their skills, availability and cost. I mentioned that I know a great guy, Mark Bloomfield, who had helped me with a couple of WordPress sites about five years ago. I explained that they were mortgage-related sites and that he had written content for them and was going to build a custom CRM for me. Further, I brought up that he is an expert in Photoshop and best of all hes pretty cool.

There is one thing he lives in South Africa.

No problem, lets see if he is available.

Again, Im sitting at a picnic table, out of town, without my laptop

So, I opened twitter on my phone and shot my South African friend a tweet.

A couple of minutes later he responded and asked me to email him the details. I asked him if he had five minutes to chat instead and he said sure.

This is the cool part.

Shane got out his Evo 4G phone and used it to create a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot.

Then he tethered his iPad to his phone to get Internet access.

Once he had done this, we opened Skype and contacted Mark.

A few seconds later, he popped up on screen and we commenced in a 10 minute conversation that detailed what we needed done.

It was that easy way too easy.

A couple of hours later as Shane and I headed to the airport, we reflected on that experience.

Wasnt that awesome? Sitting on a picnic bench in Denver, we just used a cell phone and iPad to have a face-to-face conversation with a guy in South Africa in order to conduct commerce.

“This is a great time to be alive and be in business!”