I had a little fun playing with Adobe Fireworks today, I am no expert but I was able to create this little gem.

Enjoy.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t been posting to this blog on a regular basis. This is not because I don’t have things to say, or time to write, it’s simply because my energy has been focused elsewhere. So, until further notice, I am going to put this site on hold while I work on the other projects in my life.

For all of those interested in where I’ve been spending my time, I’ve written up  this little summary,

Netgen – Rocking business development and sales. I help companies looking to showcase their company’s culture and engage visitors.

Simple Story Videos (a division of Netgen) - I am working almost exclusively with start ups and tech companies, helping them communicate their magnificently complex solutions in short, 60 – 90 second, animated videos. See some examples here.

Last but not least,

Be Mobile – The newest addition to the Netgen family, Be Mobile is a quick and easy solution for companies looking to optimize their content on mobile devices.

Aside from work I’ve trying to take the weekends off to relax with friends and live life a little. If you are interesting in following these shenanigans you’re welcome to do so through social media, more social media, or if I’m not there you can find me here on, some more social media.

And for those of you concerned that I’ll never blog again, you’ll be happy to hear that this cease fire is not permanent. This post is just a heads up for my “massive following” that my next post does not have a due date in the foreseeable future. That being said, when I do get back to updating this site, you’ll know…

This post is dedicated to Brennan Loh, who, in my absence, will continue to inspire young entrepreneurs through his blog at, throughintheclutch.com. Enjoy.

I learned a valuable lesson this week while reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Make Friends and Influence People”, that is, there is never a good reason to criticize anyone. Not to say that constructive criticism is a bad thing but to straight up talk down to someone about their actions is never justified.

No matter how bad someone messes up, or how right you think you are, you can never truly understand everything the person was going through. That being said, people usually know when they screw up which means that they are less likely to make the same mistake again. I believe that the best time to put your trust in someone is right after they have made a mistake, this show that you have faith in them and it will encourage them to keep at it.

My goal this week, don’t criticize anyone, although I am hoping to keep this up for more than a week.

- 80 percent of people will delay making a decision until they can get a friend’s stamp of approval.

- 80 percent of the benefits come from 20% of the effort

- 80 percent of mobile video is viewed on Apple devices

- 80 percent of Canadians watched some part of last year’s gold medal mens hockey game at the Olympics.

- 80 percent of Canadians are happy with the health care system

The other day I was looking at our sales strategy to try and discover different ways we could drum up more business so I started writing down all the reasons why people should buy from Netgen. As I started to write this list I soon realized that we don’t need any gimmicks or slogans to sell to our clients and we don’t have the time or money to develop huge advertising campaigns. But what we do have to offer are the core competencies that make us who we are and it will be these assets that will allow us to succeed as a company.

Here is what I wrote down,

Why companies would choose to work with Netgen

• We are young, driven and have the time and availability to go the extra mile for our clients.
• We are small and lean and will fight tooth and nail for all of our contracts and clients.
• We have not gotten comfortable with our clients and/or our designs and are therefore always striving to be the most forward thinking and innovative with everything we produce; we don’t know the meaning of a template.
• We don’t have a lot of overhead or cushy corporate incentive packages, this allows us to give our clients the lowest total cost of production.
• We are a young company and therefore we live and die by our portfolio and referrals from our clients; we don’t have the luxury to say that’s good enough with any of our projects.
• Our office has no steady 5-9, no limit of a 5 day work week and no backup plan which makes us throw everything we have into our projects to guarantee success for everyone of our clients.

What does this mean?

At Netgen we don’t try to be a one-stop shop miracle solution nor do we to pretend that we are Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. One day we may get there but until then we will continue to stay lean and strive to create the best with what we have to offer. At Netgen we don’t know the meaning of quit because if we did there wouldn’t be a Netgen.

If this sounds like a company you would like to work with contact us today.

I was recently awarded the Canadian Association of Business Students Lifetime Achievement award at this year’s national conference called Roundtable. Along with this, my business partner Kyle Braatz was nice enough to write up a little post for me. Here is the full article, It has only just begun

Check out Netgen’s new website at http://netgen.ca. There you will find out more about me and be able to follow my most recent blog posts in the Netgen blog.

A follow up to the post A Day With Doug Smith and the quote,

It’s fun to focus on aspects of the business that you are good at, but you have to focus on all of the aspects in order to be successful.

It’s easy to focus on the things that you are good at, but you can’t ignore the other side of things.

Click here to read the full article,
Don’t Forget about the Other Side of Your Business

Here is my most recent Netgen blog about the day I spent with Ex-NHL Superstar and medical miracle Doug Smith,

http://netgen.ca/blog/post/a-day-with-doug-smith

Today I began to play around with my new WordPress blog and I’m started to understand the hype about it. Before WordPress, I posted all of my blogs on a Posterous account, but my options were limited. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great tool for getting content on the web, but when you really want to get serious about blogging you’ll find it’s very basic.

One thing that I really like about WordPress is the amount of theme options that are available. I’m not a programmer so I’m taking advantage of all of the free template out there. That was until my lastest purchase of the Thesis theme, which is an awesome template. It’s very point and click, and is optimized for SEO which makes my job a lot easier.

Along with the cool themes WordPress offers, there are also the widgets and plugins to improve the look and feel fo the site. From Twitter feed, to Archives, these widgets make a simple bloggers site look more professional without know the difference between HTML and FML. I’ve only begun to discover the amount of widgets available and so far I’m quite impressed.

To sum it up, I know that I’m not the first, last, or most original person to comment on how cool WordPress is. Nevertheless, I thought I would share my thoughts and give praise to a piece of technology that has made it possible for a mediocre writer like myself to flood the web with my own fanfare.

- CBeau