Brass, Babies, Beer, and Blizzards

It has been a while since I have had the time to sit down and write. It's 7:30 on Saturday and my schedule is all messed up from being in South Carolina this week. Before I talk about that that let's start from the top.

Brass: Last week was my companies fiscal end. In sales this is a big deal because this is when the books close for the year and we report to wall street what we did. Needless to say it's a busy time. On a personal note I had a very good year. I hate to toot my own horn but lately I feel like nobody notices so here goes. As a sales engineer there are not a whole lot of black and white metrics that we are measured by. For sales people it's easy, either you brought in money or you didn't. The 2 metrics they somewhat track us against is number of deals closed and revenue brought to the company. Does this make a great sales engineer? Who is to say, but it's a goal none the less and I was striving to be close to the top. I'm happy to say I hit my goal and I was the number 1 SE in North American for revenue in our small and mid size accounts. I did get some nice recognition if front of the company this week and it felt good. Sales Engineers don't get a lot of recognition period so it was nice. I will say that it's someone else's turn this year. I worked my a$$ off to get there, traveled a lot, late nights, red eye flights, etc. We have some newly hired young guns that are just liking their chops to take the top, time to share the wealth. On a side note Forbes ranked our company the third fastest growing tech company behind Google. This will be an interesting year.

Babies: My best friend Mike Allegri and his wife Kari had their baby last Friday. To everyones surprise it was a baby boy. They named him Robert Allegri, but for now they are calling him Robbie. I had the privilege of spending some time with them in the hospital last Friday night and holding him. He was not even 12 hours old. It was an amazing experience, one which I will remember forever. I can tell Mike is excited and can't wait for him to do things other than eat, sleep, and poop.

Beer: So naturally with all these great things happening there has been some beer drinking. I can't wait for the weekends so there is nothing to celebrate. In the last week there was 1) Year end, 2) year beginning 3) Baby born 4) successful meeting in South Carolina. I'm a little partied out.

Blizzards: Jodi and I have been racking up the air miles lately. This year alone we have seen Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Kalamazoo Michigan, and Charleston South Carolina. I was in Seattle two weeks ago when some light snow shut the whole town down. I had to stay a couple of extra days but Seattle is a blast so it was not a problem. I was in Charleston South Carolina this week, and got back last night at 7:30. Charleston is very cool. Right on the water and very historic. The first shots of the civil war were fired at fort Sumter, which is in Charleston. We had a great meeting and celebrated downtown. First we had a few beers at the Roof Top Bar. Amazing views of the bay and the city. After dinner we had a few beers at this place called Mad River. It's an old church and it turned out to be one heck of a college bar. Click here to see a cool virtual tour.