I've written about similar in the past, but things like this never cease to amaze me:

This is a phone call from two days ago, 7/3

Potential Client: Your price is too high. I've been quoted x for a letter by someone else.

Me: I'm sorry, that's my price. You'll have to use the cheaper writer.

PC: But I want your writing. It's better.

Well, besides Christmas week, the 4th of July is typically the slowest week of the year for many businesses. I say "many" because I'm sure supermarkets do quite well.

But a lot of businesspeople take vacation this week. So a business like mine will see a dropoff in contacts, etc. I mention this because it's very easy to forget this - if I used this week to change something in my advertising, and used, say, Thursday and Friday's contacts to judge the changes, well, that'd be counter-productive. I'm not getting an accurate picture.

Actually, I should've taken vacation this week. But I really don't feel right doing that, as I'm planning two weeks off in early October (and already took a week in April.) Plus, I close between Christmas and New Year's. So enough is enough  - even though it was slow contact-wise, I scheduled plenty to keep me busy this week.

Hope you all had a nice 4th of July week.

Had a big hailstorm here last Friday. Popped up out of nowhere.

Hailstorms are neat, but this one was a little scary, as the hailstones were quite large, and they fell for what seemed like a long time. Lucky, besides a few plants that got whacked, we had no real damage.

Here's my deck:

This is July, mind you - about 90 degrees F outside.

and here's one of the hailstones (next to a quarter - that's a BIG hailstone)

A few weeks ago - actually it seems like ages - I was pretty slow.

Basically, I neglected my website, and also neglected my marketing a little. I tweaked both, and *bam*, business rolls in.

It also means less time to write something here - but that's what happens. I get busy, and I'm reduced to writing an article telling you that I'm too busy to write an article.

Or something like that.

Are you slow? Then change something. Or hire me to do it (I'll squeeze you in somewhere!)

Case in point... I am a gamer. I play computer games, played DnD back in the day, and have an X-Box 360.

One of my favorite xbox games of all time is NFL 2k5 (a football game for the original x-box.) However, the 2k series lost the NFL license, so there hasn't been a 2k football game for a few years.

Until tomorrow. All Pro Football 2k8 will be in stores, and I'll be right there buying one.

Now, this isn't all that profound so far, but get this.... I was just at the message forums for this game over at 2ksports.com  - do you know how many people are reading the message forum for this game at this very moment?

396.

Almost four hundred people are online reading this ONE forum as we speak (err, write.) This isn't the number of people that have been there all day - this is the number that's there reading RIGHT NOW.

Doesn't that boggle your mind? Because chances are, you never even heard of this game.

The point is, there is so much business out there it's almost impossible to wrap your mind around it.