Mike Bowler

This coming Friday and Saturday is the Metro East IT Trade Show at the new General Motors Centre in Oshawa. They've got a good lineup of speakers and some fun things planned.

I'll be working the show so come on by and check it out.

Starting last December, I've been working on creating a new company with two partners. This company will provide online services for other businesses and consumers. It's time to unveil FreshSand Ventures Inc and our first service under the new company, Easy Branding Tools.

Let's say that you're starting a new company to sell bicycles. You know all about bicycles but want to offload some of the other things that are required to get a business up and running. Before you can start networking, you need business cards and brochures and a website and branded email. This is where we come in. For a low monthly cost, Easy Branding Tools provides the hosted website and email along with business card and brochure templates that you can download and print yourself. Within minutes of signing up, you can have professional looking business cards to hand out at your networking events and a website to promote your product or service.

Every time I go to a networking event, I meet people who are potential customers for this. Every time, I run into people who have a great idea for a company but don't have cards or a website yet. Even if they do have a website, they often have an email address like somebody@rogers.com rather than somebody@mybusiness.com

We think there's a real need for a service like this so here we are. We've had some beta testers giving us feedback over the last week and this afternoon we deployed to the production server.

We'd really appreciate feedback from anyone who gives the site a try. We've already made a number of changes based on feedback that have made the service better.

You can sign up for a trial account and try it out for three days without giving any credit card information. Give it a try and let us know.

My wife and I went to see some of the teachers from The Secret in Toronto yesterday. The event was organized by the Power Within and featured Secret teachers Lisa Nichols, Jack Canfield, John Assaraf, Bob Proctor and Peak Potentials founder Harv Ecker.

Harv is the only one who wasn't actually in the movie The Secret but the material he's been teaching for years is very much in line with what's covered in the movie so he fit right in. Having already been to his Millionaire Mind Intensive, he didn't cover much here that was new for me.

Lisa Nichols was up first and was absolutely fabulous. She is such a dynamic speaker in person and had the crowd with her right from the moment she started. Her focus is helping teens and I can only imagine how powerful her teen events are.

Jack Canfield, creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, was up next. I felt that he started off slow but by the end, he was fabulous. Strangely, my wife didn't think he started off slow at all - she really liked the entire presentation.

John Assaraf gave a really interesting talk along with the most amazing demonstration of how your brain filters out information that I've ever seen. I can't say much about it without spoiling it for others who haven't seen it. This clearly demonstrates that you can be totally oblivious to opportunities right in front of your face.

Bob Proctor was the last speaker of the day. As I look at the successful people who really impress me, it's amazing how many of them credit Bob Proctor as being the mentor who really got them going. People like Loral Langemeir and James Ray and John Assaraf. Knowing this, my expectations on Bob's talk were extremely high and he didn't disappoint.

I came away from this event with lots of notes and action items for my companies and myself. A really good day.

I see that Colorado Software Summit has posted the agenda for this years conference. If you're writing software, this is a must see event.

Since I seem to get more comments here about the Millionaire Mind Intensive (MMI) than I do about anything else, I thought I'd mention that there's a Millionaire Mind Evening on April 18 in Toronto.

The most frequent question I get is whether the MMI is worthwhile. Specifically, I'm being asked if this person should attend. I can't tell you what the right answer is for you. All I can do is give you some information about it and let you decide for yourself.

If you're on the fence and aren't sure if you want to commit a three day weekend to the MMI then I'd highly recommend that you check out the evening. This is a three hour sampling of the material that you'll get in the MMI. It's nowhere near as comprehensive but will give you a taste of a Peak Potentials event and will give you an idea of whether the MMI is right for you.

For myself, the MMI was extremely valuable. I learned some things about myself that I hadn't been consciously aware of and was able to change some limiting beliefs that I'd had. I'm very happy that I attended and I highly recommend it.

If you're not familiar with the MMI then very briefly, it's a three day, extremely intensive, workshop on the psychology of money. If you've seen The Secret or read any material like Think and Grow Rich or others, you'll already realize that the biggest factor that determines your success is what's going on in your head. It has very little to do with the actual knowlege you've accumulated and is almost entirely based on your beliefs and your focus.

The first day of the MMI is mostly theory, explaining how your mind works and how you can work with it to become more successful. During the second day, you go through a whole slew of exercises to break down old limiting beliefs and then on the last day, you build up new empowering beliefs.

This is a really amazing program and I'm glad I went through it. This isn't the ultimate one-stop to fix your mind forever but is a really good course to give you a significant boost in your success. I've been recommending it ever since I took it.

If this sounds intriguing but you're still not sure that you want to commit to the full three days then check out three hours of sampler at the Millionaire Mind Evening.

Here's an excellent example of unusable software. It's clearly complex enough that the nurses on duty couldn't figure out how to use it properly and so they entered data that was inaccurate. This is not the fault of the staff who were using the software, it's the fault of the process that allowed clearly inadequate software to enter production.


Many companies are willing to accept software that is barely usable and highly error prone. In many places, it is more important to have delivered something even if that something doesn't work very well. This is generally due to local optimizations where individual groups are measured based on how they have met smaller objectives and not on how they have helped the organization as a whole.