Well if you have not seen Tropic Thunder, go see it!  It has so many one liners. Even though it is not promoted much, Tom Cruise's role in the movie is awesome.

Well, another month is close to being done. August has been an up month for our little consulting firm here in Seattle.  One of the micro trends we are seeing is longer more complex engagements.  It use to be  that our project work would average around 3 months. This creates churn and presses the sales team to be on the defensive to rebuild and add new business all the time.  It's a tough deal to say the least.  Our sales team has done a good job of building the existing relationships we have. 

The Talent Acquisition Team (aka recruiting) is the best team I have had here over the last 8 years.  Paulette, Renee, Reggie and Ann are delivering on the quality side of the services equation.  Well done team! 

BWC is looking for two rock star Account Executives.  On the surface this sounds like such a simple task.  It has turned into one of the hardest skills to find.  Sure, we get plenty of resumes. Resumes from all industry's and all over the world.  We are going to keep looking until we find them.

On another note, I received one of the best customer letters the other day.  It was from Bill Crutchfield thanking me for being a customer.  It is a masterpiece in brevity, with meaning and thoughtfulness.  It's motivating me to do the same for our clients. 

Have a good weekend all!

Well July is in the books for us and looking ahead, we'll have a good Q3, better than Q2, so I am jazzed about that. Q4 could be great, but its to soon to tell.

School starts next week here comes all the after hours work, meetings, sports, teacher conferences, which means fall in the great northwest is on its way.  Can you say rain? :)

Have a big presentation for a client tomorrow, almost done.  I'll write more later on, been a hectic day.

It's great to see the Olympics. Each event has been thrilling to see. I certainly hope the women's soccer team can repeat, looks like Brazil is playing tough though. 

So there is a lot of news obviously about the economy...we are seeing changes here in Seattle too.  Some of our competition have had it pretty rough.  One thing that is obvious, cash is tight for a lot of firms.  Of course we have had to change and adjust our expenses too.  By making the changes, we'll continue to see monthly improvements for the rest of 2008. 

Still business is steady.  We are seeing a lot of projects extending out into 2009, so the base of the business is longer term in comparison to previous years.

Our next big step is to pick up two more key account executives for the Seattle market.  What is interesting is there is a very high level of talent out on the market place right now. Unfortunately, most lack experience in our industry.  We'll continue looking for that right person.

At the same time, I need to figure out what consulting areas will survive in the long run...just as I say it, its seems almost impossible to determine, even laughable.  In everything we have done over the last 8 years, we have some key services that have defined BluWater. More on this later.

The rest of my day today will be filled with conversations with banks, potential investors, clients and employees.  If anything interesting happens, I'll write it up.

The past week has been challenging personally.  A good friend died tragically.  It was a very sad day for sure. I find comfort in  the fact that he was very sick, but he will be missed tremendously. Hope and prayers are with his family.  The community support has been awesome to see.

Back to business at hand here at BluWater.  The year has been steady. We started out the year with what felt like a hangover from 2007. Mid way through the year the teams here (sales and talent acquisition) are hitting their stride.  Seems like it has taken 8 years to get to this level of operational normalcy. Still looking for that elusive operational excellence...I think that is more of an ideal and less of reality.

More later on...time to take care of some client business.