I leave this morning to head to Tokyo for the week. I’m meeting with some ecommerce companies there.

This is my first trip to Japan and I’m way excited. I might try to post from the road, or if not, until next week: Sayonara!!

So on August 1, Doba is switching from Blue Cross (who we’ve been with since starting the company in 2002) to IHC. Blue Cross wanted to raise our plan costs up 17%. It’s been about that much each year since we started. By switching to IHC, we get some better covereage in Utah County with hospitals for the majority of our employees, and we only increase our rates from last year 7%.

Do you know of any other part of business where your costs can consistently go up by double-digit rates year over year? It’s actually pretty crazy.

Fresh off of our insurance meeting with IHC and our broker this past Tuesday I came across this article today: U.S. still flunks health care test, report finds

The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation, created a 100-point scorecard using 37 indicators such as health outcomes, quality, access and efficiency. We scored dead last out of 19 industrialized nations. Dead last. If this were the olympics it’d be like we won no medals. There’d be a national outrage. But it’s only heathcare, something that affects every man/woman/child in this country. So most of us will only hear politicians talking about garbage and doing nothing.

We spend more on health care than any of these countries. 7.5% of our total costs in the health care system are administrative costs. Places like Finland spend 1.9% on administration. Yet they beat us badly on over 37 indicators. Think having a baby in the U.S. is a good idea? We have 7 infant deaths out of 1000 compared to 2.8 in Japan and 3.1 in Sweden. Yet again, we spend more on health care proportionate to our population than all these countries.

Hum, we spend more and are dead last in the rankings. Sounds like to me we ought to put some people in the room with a whiteboard and write down all the ways these countries provide/manage health care (all 18 of them that beat us) and ‘borrow’ some ideas from them. Shoot, just plain lift their systems and make the switch.

This is government and buracrecy AND private enterprise all gone wrong and awry and failing the American public.

We’re dead last and Doba and our employees pay 17% more each year. Ridiculous.

After this week, I’ll be gone for the next 2 weeks. Being an eCommerce Hippie.

Maybe I should explain. Back in February, I was looking at the schedule of conferences for the next several months, and noticed that Internet Retailer was in Chicago at McCormick Place June 9-11. I attended this conference last year in San Jose and we were in the midst of making plans for Doba to exhibit for the first time since it’s the worlds largest e-retailing show. I then noticed that eBay Live was just over a week later June 19-21, again at McCormick Place in Chicago, and again, we were making plans for Doba to exhibit–for the 5th time at eBay Live.

That very day, I saw a blog post in my RSS reader where the blogger was talking about how he was looking forward to the fact that tickets for the Bonnaroo Music & Art Festival were going on sale in a couple of weeks. Bonnaroo is a four-day, multi-stage camping festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee. It’s one of the largest music festivals in the country. I knew about Bonnaroo because of a live recording of Warren Haynes from a previous year. My wife and I were both big fans. The dates for 2008 Bonnaroo were June 12-15. Exactly between the two eCommerce conferences. Nashville, TN is just over an hour flight from Chicago.

2+2=5 in this scenario. It was a perfect opportunity for mine and Amy’s trip without kids this year. Plus, she’ll be able to attend the first day of eBay Live and see me do my presentation on Product Sourcing.

Today, I ship 2 packages together weighing about 75 lbs to Tennessee. It’s all our camping gear for Bonnaroo. You see, Bonnaroo is a camping festival. One could say it’s my chance to be a hippie for 4 days.

Two eCommerce conferences over 6 days. One Hippie musical festival over 4 days. I’m out for the next 2 weeks being an eCommerce Hippie. I’ll be posting more when I get back.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss anything that might change your life.

A few weeks back, we found out that I was selected as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Utah region.

Last night was the finalist reception and I was able to meet quite a few of the judges, the sponsors, and the other finalists.

To all the other finalists I say good luck and congratulations! I am very proud to be included with the names/companies included in this year’s 25 finalists. It’s a list of incredibly talented and focused entrepreneurs, many of whom I know very well.

I’m honored to be able to represent Doba in this program. All credit goes to my family, Doba’s employees and their families, our vendors and advisory board members, and our thousands of satisfied customers. The award will be announced at a special black-tie gala event on June 27, 2008, at the Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

Here is the list of the 2008 Utah Region Finalists:

Agel
Glen Jensen
American Name Services
Jill Grammer-Williams
AtTask, Inc.
Scott Johnson
Companion Systems Design & Manufacturing
John Hansen
Al Tiley
Sally Tiley
Dianne Williams
Costume Craze, LLC
Kate Maloney
Discovery Investment Group
Paul Gifford
Doba
Jeremy Hanks
G Code Ventures / Utah Flash
Brandt Andersen
Harmons
Bob Harmon
Randy Harmon
Mindshare Technologies
Richard Hanks
John Sperry
Move Networks, Inc.
John Edwards
Mozy Inc (Berkeley Data Systems)
Josh Coates
Packsize LLC
Hanko Kiessner
ProPay, Inc.
Gary Goodrich
R&O Construction
Orluff Opheikens
Seastone LC
Warren Osborn
SnapLock Industries, Inc.
Jorgen Moller
Skullcandy
Rick Alden
Suh’dutsing Technologies, LLC
Travis Parashonts
Thomas Arts
Dave Thomas
Titanium Solutions, Inc.
Todd Sibley
United First Financial
Jonathan Bonnette
Don Jorgensen
Matthew Lovelady
John Washenko
Skyler Witman
Wescor, Inc.
Wayne Barlow
Xactware Solutions, Inc.
Jim Loveland
Xlear, Inc.
Nathan Jones

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss anything you might regret.

So my travel was supposed to be finished until mid-June, but alas, I find myself this week in San Mateo, CA for 4 days of administrator training for Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a very robust customer relationship management Software as a Service platform. We’ve decided at Doba to move our CRM (marketing, sales, and service) operations onto this hosted platform over time. We’ve been testing it in a limited fashion for the last several weeks.

In the past 5.5 years, we’ve built A LOT of software that originated from our “internal tools” roadmap–software to manage sales processes, billing processes, marketing processes, service processes, etc. Over the next many months, we’re going to work towards fulfilling those internal needs via the Salesforce.com system rather than building our own software. In essence, we’re working to stop building software that isn’t our core business, and leverage other platforms and software that are out there.

Let me say this: I’ve told quite a few people that we’re doing this, and a few of them have said, man, that Salesforce.com is expensive. We can build our own tools better/faster/cheaper. To that I say: no you can’t. Not even close. In my class with me is the Salesforce administrator (yes, at larger companies, they separate out that role) for AMD. Yeah, this AMD. And several other large companies from around the country. Salesforce Professional starts at $65 per user per month. They have a Group edition that’s even less. For that much hard money, not even counting the opportunity cost and distraction factors, you can’t build 1% of what this platform does off the self. And even if you need to customize it (a standard objection to not building things yourself. The whole “customizing it will cost us more than just building it ourselves” argument), it’s still so much more efficient to leverage the base of other software.

So my advice? If you’re a software company, build software that you sell. Build your competitive advantage. Anything else your business needs to operate and function? Buy it. And Salesforce.com is a dang good place to start looking for the whole CRM world. What I’ve seen here at Salesforce.com training is extremely impressive. Totally changing my build vs. buy viewpoint going forward. If you need bookkeeping/accounting, you buy Quickbooks. If you need word processing, you buy MS Word. If you need anything related to full lifecycle (leads to accounts to opportunities to service cases to service solutions) CRM, buy Salesforce.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss anything you might regret.