We Have A - LMS

Sometimes the unexpected things happen in business.  For my benefit of my students I have been recording all the classes that we offer.  But there was nothing in the market that I could find where I could distribute my videos of my classes.  Our videos are sometimes 4 hours long and you could forget about You Tube.  Even if they allowed such long videos there was no way to keep it secure and give out access to students easily.

So I spend a crazy amount of money and working with JAVA developers to develop my own Learning Management System (LMS).  I do not have a fancy name for it yet, but we will come up with a name.

I have a simple and elegant system in which I can access to any of my classes that we offer within minutes to any student from around the world.  It can keep track of when they are watching our videos, how long they have been watching our videos and a host of other features that we have installed.

I was chatting with a friend that owns a similar company and he wanted to know if he could buy our LMS.  So I sold it to him for $3000.  This was a fraction of what I spend to develop it, but I never dreamed of selling it for any money so I figured, every dollar that comes in is profit.

Then I thought about it.  If someone wants to buy it, maybe there is a market for something like this.  So we have decided to hire a bunch of JAVA developers and make it even more robust and add a lot more features and start selling our LMS to other small companies or individuals.  You never know how people will use the product until you start showing the market place.

I just thought that it was interesting that I developed a product that I needed so that my kids could benefit from watching my videos again and again and this has become a product.  Sometimes life takes you in interesting directions.

By the way, all my friends made fun of me and did not even believe that someone would offer to buy it, but the very next day one of them came to me and asked if he could have it also, and since he was a friend, he said he knew that I would give it to him for free and would not charge him.

Hummmm!  Interesting!!!

Anyway, thanks kids, only by my trying to improve the experience for you at our training center would this product have even come into existence.  I will now put a team together and work on it and see if we can start selling it. 

Like I said, you never know where a product or idea comes about.  Mine was inspired by my students.

Guest House Remodeling

I went to the guest office a few days back and there were a whole bunch of small things wrong that I found immediately that no one told me about.  I had not visited the Guest House since we had bought it.  Then I got to the kitchen and found that the dishwasher was unplugged.  So I asked in the office and they told me that it kept breaking and they simply unplugged it, since it was costing so much to fix it each time.  They even blamed the kids and told me that they were messing it up and did not know how to use a dishwasher.  There is no way College Graduates with masters degree do not know how to use a dishwasher as to make it breakdown.  The likely scenario is that the dishwasher was old or the drain was clogged and hence the leaky dishwasher.  But to tell me that my kids do not know how to use a dishwasher is ridiculous.

I called in Lance my handyman and since the appliances were old, I am remodeling the entire kitchen.  So why am I spending $10,000 to redo the entire kitchen?  The answer if very simply.  If I was staying in the guest house, would I be happy with something.  There is no way I could stay somewhere where there was no dishwasher, especially with 6 people staying together.  I could make do with the old stove that was there, but I figured, now that I started, might as well fix up everything.  So here we are, with a big huge repair bill to fix every small little thing that is wrong in the guest house.

No kids, I am spending a lot of money on fixing up and upgrading everything, please treat the property with respect.  After you leave other students need to stay there and it is important that they have a good experience also. 

I want my kids to be happy when they are with me and this is something that simply had to be done, so yes I really did spend $10,000 to fix up the guest house.

Office Front Doors

I paid a great deal of money to install magnetic locks in our office.  You can only enter with a card key.  My friends always complain that my office doors are locked.  You have to view it from my point of view.  I have at least 10-20 students at any one time studying with me, and each one has their own time period that they study. Some study at night and some study during the day. 

I mainly put the locks in place so that the students that are girls will feel safe when they are studying in our office.

I dream a lot and I get ideas and now that I have money I simply implement the ideas.  I am sure in the consulting business my office would be the most high-tech office anyone has ever seen.  I have the best Electronic White Boards (Promethean), the best 1080P Projectors, and the best Speaker Phones (Polycom).

I had a few students complain that they could not hear in the back of the room, so I bought a wireless mic with speakers so that it will not be an issue.

I am sure that I bug the hell out of my partners in the business when I spend crazy amounts of money on getting the best of everything.  I know I have a problem, I care way too much about quality than about money.  I will continue to spend massive amounts of money on getting my students the best.  Weather it is spending $5000 to install Magnetic Locks on our Front Door or flying in a teacher from another city, I can guarantee you that I will get my students the best of everything.

And, yes I really did spend $5000 on installing locks for our front doors.  I wanted my female students to feel safe and comfortable in our office.