In many cases, a personal blog suffers when business needs heat up and this one has been no exception. I think I may try to turn this into a stream of conciousness since it's not commercial and probably the best form it can take is the use for which the term 'blog' was coined... a journal.

Of course, I have been pretty busy having fun. (We're designing a house and hopefully I'll get it built this year.)

Medical Spa MD and Freelance MD (my physician communities) have grown a great deal and I recently (a few months ago) hooked up with some medical school students and launched Uncommon Student MD. All of these are pretty fun and put me in contact with a lot of interesting physicians around the world, some of whom are doing some really interesting things in healtcare.

Additionally, I've been helping some great little companies get bigger as an advisor. (AppleCore is now changing it's strategic direction and becomming more self-controled.) There are some other companies that are also in this category that I'm working with, mostly in the technology/internet space.

I'm in agreement with Kevin Ryan about the best advice he ever got: Article

 "When I was 32, I joined DoubleClick a couple of months after it was started by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman. Before, I had always worked for large companies. After two weeks Kevin came to me and said, 'You need to move faster. The only advantage that a startup has is that it moves faster.'

Whether you're a first year medical student or a practicing physican, there's a good chance you've asked yourself the quesion, "WHY the @#$% DID I GO TO MEDICAL SCHOOL?" Here are a few EXCELLENT reasons... and one bad one.

Just as the blisses of Christmas break was ending for most of us tortured souls who fly the banner of "medical student," and sail these uncertain scholarly seas, Uncommon Student MD got some serious traction with medical students around the world. I believe timing had a large part to do with the explosion in its popularity. Simply put, after christmas break a lot of medical people were thinking, “what am I doing here?!” - A case of mass buyers remorse.

Putting a jaw-dropping, attention grabbing video in your waiting room or lobby is the perfect way to add additional sales and profits to a clinics bottom line.

The benefits are obvious. You're marketing directly to a captive audience that's already in your business with information about your products and services. Your clients will be entertained at the same time that you're educating and informing them of the scope of your services. Special offers? New services? Packages or gift certificates? Video marketing will 'soft-sell' your clients and get conversations started that result in increased sales!

I started this new business as a way to get my wife Shelly involved in some of our online ventures and it's worked out really well since she's a wiz at this stuff having been a long-time advertising director for DSW and then Euro-RSCG.

She's bringing all of her experience with clients like Intel, Iomega, Microsoft and Alphagraphics, as well as her time with our cosmetic practices (Surface) and plugging it into this new venture.

Oie. If only.

Many of my friends who know about my former startup Nimble and are aware of the massive growth of Groupon give me a conciliatory pat on the back when they see me.

Nimble, that I founded in 2004 allowed any local business to sell it's inventory at a discount in real time. And it worked.

(Of course we were tiny compared to Groupon and I made many typical startup mistakes. Mainly, that I didn't have the right team in place.)

Now, Groupon is actually starting to copy Nimble: CNN Article

...a new mobile application that the company hopes will change when and how society chooses to eat, shop and play.

The application, known as Groupon Now, is remarkably and elegantly simple, yet it's a radical departure from Groupon's current deal-a-day business model. When a user opens up the smartphone app, he or she will be presented with just two buttons: "I'm hungry" and "I'm bored."

Clicking either button will open up a list of time-specific daily deals, based on his or her location.

The familiar $10 coupons for $20 worth of food are still there, but they're not one-time offers. Instead, businesses can choose when they want these deals to be available.

Say a restaurant is incredibly busy on Saturdays but could use more business on Wednesdays. With Groupon Now, that business can fill its seats during slow business days using time-specific deals.

That's the beauty of Groupon Now: local businesses have never really had a simple way to manage their perishable inventory, especially labor and food. Why waste those resources during slow periods when you can bring savings-savvy consumers through the doors with a highly targeted Groupon deal?

"For merchants, the daily deal is like teeth whitening, and Groupon Now is like brushing your teeth. It can be an everyday thing to keep your business going," Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason told Bloomberg Businessweek in an extensive interview on the new product.

The daily deals company has been on a tear recently -- in fact it is the fastest growing company in history -- but it faces stiff competition from companies with increasing muscle.

Oh, this kills me.

If only...

Read this post on: Medical Spas & Groupon

My little girl.

Good sales communications can make a brilliant statement about your business.

The Package that Calistoga Ranch is using is a phenomenal example of sales materials that set the stage for immediate followup and move the sales process down the field.

I was impressed when I opened this communications. Not only is the Calistoga Ranch Package beautifully executed sales message, it also delivers just the message that a high end real estate community want's to deliver. A great execution for sales acceleration.

Chia's been shooting actors headshot and has expanded into advertising and lifestyle photography. I had to laugh when Chia told me recently she'd taken the headshot of the actress Gennifer Goodwin who plays the youngest wife 'Margine' in the HBO series Big Love.

About two months I had a conversation with Chia around social media, blogging and the like. Chia alredy had a site, Twitter account and a Twitpic feed. Unfortunately her site was in Flash wich posed some nasty problems around adding or changing content and wasn't filling her SEO needs at all. I finally talked her into letting me put together a headshot blog that could reallys showcase her photography and let actors who might be potential clients to read a few posts and build up a comfort level before picking up the phone and making a call.

On the plus side she's a photographer. That give her ready access to the kind of images that the rest of us can only dream about and have to buy from iStock.

I've been building some training Packages for Sendside's sales automation clients and I have to say, they're some really beautiful communications. Don't you wish your sales and marketing emails looked like this?

Once you get the hang of how the peices fit together and get your noggin around the fact that you can actually send any content using one of the different tab tipes (Text Editor Tabs for HTML that's built in the editor, Web Page Tabs for embedding any URL or web page, and File Tabs for showing document inside a tab) you can do some incredible things that provide real business value.

Not only do they look great, but you can see when they're opened and what content's being read. If you're using a CRM you can track all of that information all the way through to sales. It's no wonder that we have clients whose close rates have jumped by as much as 500% within  three months of implementing Sendside into their sales process. Yowza!

For any sales automation and acceleration clients of Sendside that's using Packages, you'll be recieving the Package above shortly.

Here's a video I produced for my friend Chia. She's a NYC photographer.