Here is some of what he spoke about:

Combining action, behavior and decisions produce results.

Joe surprised us with his answer to the question, “why do most businesses fail?” We guessed money, competition and changing consumer behavior but the answer is actually, simply, “burnout.” Those who fail are apparently spending too much time and energy doing things that don’t work. He went on to tell us some of the things that do work!

One can’t change their behavior without changing one or more of the following: skills, beliefs, values or identity.

The way you are being * what you are doing = what you have.

It’s crucial to eliminate chaos:

Read: “Getting to Yes” — book on how to negotiate with suppliers

Read: e-myth revisited – Michael Gerber

Track time (yours is valuable!), expenses and inventory

Outsource jobs that are lower value. (your time is valuable, suggest you value it at $100/hour, spend your time doing what is most valuable, outsource what you can)

Read: Eat the Frog – Brian Tracy

Question based selling, keep following up until they get tired of saying no and hire you.

Measure every step of the selling process.

Have written goals, helps your sub conscious work on them

98% of the worlds wealth is contained by people who have written goals (attribution?)

Unique selling proposition, guarantee. Make a guarantee you can live with — example of general contractor guaranteeing framing for 10 years (which is required by law!).

Track conversions to know what marketing method is working.

Leads x conversion rate = # clients, revenue = #clients x #transactions x $/sale

revenue x margin = profits

Call every client you have ever had to generate new business. What else can you do for them? Who do they know who could benefit from your services?

Endless referrals by bob berg, incentive program/ system that works, call people back asking for referrals, and testimonials

Survey people who don’t buy. Give a prize, credit, item, etc. Could be a gift card, a service for free, etc.

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If you want to learn more, Joe can be reached at: 408.699.6737 and you can read more about him and see his recommended book list and services at: http://actioncoach.com/joesiecinski

I’m excited to share my new website which has launched today! Celebrate with me by saving 25% on all packages booked by the end of February! This is a great opportunity to book your wedding photography, portrait, headshot or other special occasion!

Here’s the kind review I received from the father of the bride:

In August of this year, Rudi Halbright and his assistants did the photography for my daughter’s wedding in Half Moon Bay, CA. They were not only exceptional at taking the traditional “must have” photos, but were also innovative with staging extremely interesting and unique situation poses. During the reception, Rudi and his assistant blended into the party while capturing moments that were truly emotional and genuine; the essence of the event….people being themselves. Rudi Halbright demonstrated to be a consummate professional, and is truly a honest person who is pleasant to be around. Meet the man in person and you will know this is true….you won’t go wrong with Rudi. – John M.

You can see this and other reviews posted on my WeddingWire Page.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the day:

Mavericks Half Moon Bay

Thanks to the whole crew who made the day great!

Event Coordinator: Jaime McFaden

DJ: Rob Goldberg

Minister: Eric Selm

Videographer: Adam Clark

Mai Trieu, a popular Thai Massage Therapist in San Francisco decided to venture out on her own and needed some photos for her new website. She has created a really nice space and it was a pleasure to work with her and capture it! You can see more of the photos and more about her massage on her website at MaiThaiSF.

Over a month ago my biggest Drobo nightmare began. My array failed completely. It kept rebooting never running long enough to allow me to copy my data onto another drive — assuming course I had another 4TB drive handy — which I didn’t. Finally I got help from Drobo who generously replaced the external powersupply, blaming it for my data corruption and shipped it to me at no cost. Customer service led me through some steps as follows:

1. Remove drive 2 and place it into another drive enclosure or computer.

2. Download Data Rescue 3 and use it to clone the drive to an exact replica drive (fortunately, Data Rescue 3, a really terrific utility, offers this functionality for free)

3. Install new drive into Drive Bay 2.

4. Restart Drobo in Read Only Mode (requires special key sequence

5. Try to get it to rebuild for several days only to find out that R/O mode isn’t just from a user perspective, it prevents the Drobo from rebuilding even though it looks like it is making progress — it isn’t.

6. Restart Drobo in Read/Write mode.

7. Find out that Drobo still is read only. Several days later accept that this isn’t rectifiable without reformatting.

8. Copy Drobo data over to newly purchased 3TB drive (copy remaining data to older drives)

9. Reformat

10. Reload Data onto Drobo

11. Discover Drive 4 is failing.

12. Replace Drive 4 and let array rebuild.

Drobo with over 300 hours to go on Data Protection

13. Wait a day to see how much progress is being made and

At this rate, my data will be protected in a little less then two weeks of “Data Protection” activity. In this period of time, if anything happens to disturb the process there will likely be data loss. The data is more vulnerable than in a single drive solution as a failure of any of the four drives would create data loss. Finally, while this process is running, the Drobo is much slower to respond.

Ultimately, did I lose data? Yes. While all of my client data is backed up onto other drives and onto blu-ray disks that are stored offsite, I had some personal content that was lost and which will cost me $1,000 to replace as it involves having 8mm movies re-scanned into digital format. While this loss is my fault for only having one backup, it underlines the simple fact that Drobo is not a reliable data storage platform.

Some will say that RAID isn’t a backup and that a separate backup needs to be kept. I agree but RAID is really designed to assure high availability of data and to do so fairly quickly as having a drive array should produce faster read speeds without question and sometimes faster write speeds as well. Drobo is quite slow (I haven’t tried the thunderbolt or sata versions so this is for the firewire 800 versions) and after weeks upon weeks of my array being unavailable and with countless hours wasted, any money I saved on choosing Drobo over a more robust solution was “penny wise, and pound foolish.”