Reporters & Book Promotion

I arrived at the office this morning about 9. At 9:45 a photographer showed up from the Raleigh News & Observer paper, followed shortly thereafter by a reporter. They were there to do an interview with me for next Wednesday’s paper (www.newsobserver.com). Josh’s hard work with the publicity campaign a few weeks ago finally paid off!

After the interview, I got to work redoing the book information section on www.zeromillion.com and contacting my book update list to ask for help in proofreading.

Within a matter of six hours, I received responses from 73 persons who were willing to proofread Zero to One Million for me. It sure shows what can happen when you ask for help (and use IntelliContact Pro to build and stay in touch with your network)!

I spent this afternoon writing an article on constipation and colon cleansing. I just finished my second ‘colon cleanse’ yesterday. I surely do feel great. If you are ever constipated check out a product called Oxy-Powder (www.oxypowder.com). It does great stuff.

I just finished playing a game of Madden 1996 on my SNES modulator. I beat the computer for the first time, 35-15. Ahh, the lore of pixelated and blocky graphics.

At Broadwick, we’re up to 55 customers now. Things are starting to really take off. We are getting a new customer every day. We’ve recently brought on a recent UNC grad named Kevin to help with the programming.

Anyway, I’ve got to get home and get some sleep. It’s been one of the better days of my life.

Tomorrow is going to be crazy. 75,000 people are going to be on Franklin St., right outside my door. We’ll have a few dozen people up here at the office partying. Let the good times roll.

Five Loud Knocks at the Fire Escape

I just got back from the magistrate’s office in downtown Chapel Hill. An old roommate of Aaron’s knocked loudly on the fire escape about 2:30am. I opened the door as I thought it was Andy, who had just left. The guy came in and was very drunk. He demanded to leave Aaron a message and told me that I better stay away. He then talked to me about the way it used to be with him and Aaron and how Aaron had so many things going on. He said something about wanting a job and Aaron not returning his call. He then proceeded to close the door to the Preation office and told me not to ‘cross that line’ or else, giving me his wallet for some reason. Then he came back out again, asked me to sit down with him, which I did, and talked about Aaron’s companies, while he held my hands. Then he got back up, held a pen up to my neck and told me that there was a lot of lead (?) in it and that would not be good if it went inside my jugular. He told me to stay where I was (in the board room) and closed the door to suite 400 so he could ‘leave a message’ on Aaron’s desk.

At that point I was rather scared as there was a drunk guy who had threatened me in my office doing who knows what. I ran downstairs and to my car and called the cops, who came a couple minutes later. About 5 officers showed up. They went to the top of the stairs and as soon as the guy saw them he took off. He went out the fire escape but then slipped and feel to the lower platform. The cops pepper sprayed and then hand cuffed him. In the mean time, another cop collected the various notes the guy had left. He left two pieces of paper with writing on my desk and a note spelled out one letter at a time on different business cards on Aaron’s desk. I never found out what the notes said.

I was then taken to the Magistrates office to give a report of what had happened. After a guy with multiple DUI’s finished I went in and told the magistrate the story who then decided what to charge the guy with. I was then taken back to the office by the officer.

And this was just 2:30am to 4:30am! This morning at 9am I met with Dodie Boyles at Mary Scroggs Elementary for the first time. I will be teaching the Junior Achievement Program to her 2nd grade class starting next Monday.

Following the meeting, I went back to the office and worked with Josh and got the info sheets sorted for the Entrepreneurship Club’s trip to Chicago. I then worked for my colon cleansing client for a few hours. At 2pm, our new programmer came in and I sat in on a 3 hour training session so I could better learn the technical side of the software. At 5pm I went to a meeting about the Chicago Conference down at the bschool and then went to the Legal Issues forum we were hosting at 6pm with Merrill Mason, which had a turn out of 40.

After the meeting, I came back to the office. I worked on redesigning www.zeromillion.com until those fateful ‘five loud knocks at the fire escape.’

A 21 Hour Day of Colon Cleansing, Interviewing, 411 West, and Running

So I did make it up by 7:45, just 5 hours after I went to bed. I felt great all day, however, with no sleep problems. I took 6 Oxy-Powder pills yesterday as part of a test of a new colon cleansing product I will be doing a web marketing campaign for as a client of Virante, Inc. This sure cleaned me out well. I must have gone to the bathroom 8 times today! I am not sure if it

Been a Long Time

It’s been four weeks since my last entry. I do apologize for the long gap.

I am very happy to announce, however, that my book Zero to One Million (all 273 pages of it!) is finished and has been sent to the publisher. I should have the first copies by November 6 and will start selling them by Nov. 15 through www.zeromillion.com. I worked about 60 hours last week finishing up the book and then editing it. I will be self-publishing it initially through Lightning Source, Inc. I am hoping to sell enough copies to attract a mainstream publisher
a few months down the road.

I have also been working hard building Broadwick. Josh has ended up doing very well and we’ve built another 18 customers in October alone. We’ve also recently added open and click through tracking to the software. We’ve broken even and are now making more money than we are spending.

We are now hiring Josh as a full time employee. His first day starts in about 7.5 hours. Somehow in between now and then I have to leave the office, go home, go to sleep, wake up, have a shower, eat breakfast, and be back at the office. Good times.

- Ryan