05/20/2007 Theme parks as an inspiration

Although I have never chanced it, I think I should be able to deduct admission to theme parks on my taxes as business expense. Yesterday I was at Universal Studios in Hollywood and, like at Disneyland, I was struck by the attention to detail. This has resulted in a major change in progress now at SLC.

After my last trip to Disneyland, I spent days upgrading our Introduction to Disability & Culture workshop to add menus, search boxes and fixing all those little annoying bugs like pages that did not resize when you have a small screen, so you need to scroll across. I spent a day re-doing our company Intranet even though it does not look like much at all. Based on suggestions from a user, I added breadcrumbs at the bottom. I started what is going to be a long process of changing the look of our site to be consistent throughout.

During the trip to Universal Studios, I was sitting in a courtyard looking up and I noticed they had a display in the second story window of a building that was supposed to be a French dressmaker's shop, just on the off-chance that someone would look up there. It occurred to me that we need a whole lot more of that sort of attention to detail on our site. So, I came home this weekend and started working on it. Now my desk looks like this. Okay, well the truth is that my desk always looks like that, but now that Jessica is telecommuting from Boston, my desk AND the two desks in the office downstairs that I am using all look like that.

I have a lot of ideas sketched out on paper but it is almost 1 a.m. so I had better get to bed and pick it up again tomorrow night. I think this is one of the most important facts about being successful in a small business. You need to really like what you do. When I was at Universal Studios, I couldn't wait until I got home so I could sit at my desk and start working on some of these new ideas. I would feel like that occasionally at other places I worked, when we got to the really interesting parts of the project, but now I feel like that every day. Everything is going to be in pieces for a while as I work on seven things at once. I have to force myself to be disciplined and not work on the most fun projects rather than those that need to be completed first. Fortunately, my niece, Samantha just came out to California on Friday so we are going to be putting her to work on Monday. That is something about a family business. Anyone in the family who comes anywhere near a desk or a computer gets put to work.

So, stay tuned over the next few weeks as all of this work begins to come to fruition.