Why Your Niche Matters More Than Ever

by Mark Pescatrice on May 15, 2013

You won’t hear this guy complaining about his niche.

You will hear entrepreneurial leaders and other talking heads (Seth Godin, can you hear me?) telling us to find our niche. As I was watching a Twitter feed during lunch on the day of the manhunt for the (alleged) Boston Marathon bomber, it struck me how unimportant nearly all the voices (tweets) were, at least to me. They were all just a bunch of noise.

Why is finding your niche so important? It is easy to look out into the world and easily become overwhelmed by the flood of information. You have a product, a service, or an idea that you want to share with the world, but you will more than likely be drowned out, unless you start with your niche. Take the case of the Twitter posts I mentioned above: nobody cares about your comments unless you have active followers. Finding your niche is the best way to be heard through all the noise.

Don’t worry about being listed on the Amazon best seller’s list or getting a call for an interview by Wired, Inc., or Fast Company. Focus on your niche first. I have learned this lesson over the years. When I started this company, I had grand hopes and dreams for this company to become a large player in the ERP space, providing implementation services across the full spectrum of Oracle E-Business Suite modules. I never put much effort into that bigger plan for a variety of reasons, and frankly I am glad that I did not. Instead, I focused on being really good and getting better at just one area: Human Capital Management (a/k/a HRMS). Although I read this more than a decade ago and can’t remember who said it, this is the age of the specialist.

The reason the niche matters is because people who care about what you sell or say will be the ones listening. It is much easier get the attention of 200 people than 200,000,000 people. If the message is important or interesting enough, those 200 will make sure it spreads to a larger audience. The important thing is to find your niche, decide if there is growth, and then get in and build.

The book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World is next on my reading list, which addresses platform creation. The platform is one of the concepts Seth Godin proposes in his book Linchpin, another book that I consider recommended reading. I will offer my thoughts after I’ve read it.

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As a general rule, I spend no time on Twitter. I will usually visit when I want to see how a big new event trends, especially from people on the ground. Aside from that, I am only there when I post updates to this blog.

Matrice Consulting Launches Incredible Business Library

by Mark Pescatrice on April 18, 2013

I am very excited to announce the launch of the Matrice Consulting’s Incredible Library. I have compiled some of our favorite books in the following categories:

Effectiveness
Entrepreneurship
General Business
Marketing
Leadership
Life Hacking and Lifestyle Design
Motivation
Personal Development

All of the books that we will feature have been hand-selected as our favorite books. These books have been vital to our continued success and we highly recommend them. No fluff, no filler, just good books.

In the library you will find free e-books and audio books for download, as well as books and e-books available for sale through our partner Amazon. The selection of books is incredibly small, but we will add more books in the coming weeks, as well as begin featuring more book reviews here on the blog. Visit our incredible library today by clicking here or the Library tab just above my head.

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Note: All books orders are fulfilled by Amazon.com.

Are Your Passwords Safe?

by Mark Pescatrice on April 11, 2013

An early password manager.

Password security is one of the hottest security issues and one of the most difficult to manage, regardless if you are a Fortune 100 company or an independent consultant, such as myself. Password managers make it a lot easier to manage your side of password security, and if you are not using one, you should. I have used password managers for over ten years, including RoboForm (commercial license), KeePass (open source), ThinkPad Password Manager, and LastPass (commercial license). In my opinion, LastPass is far and above the best password manager/safe, as it is platform agnostic, runs in the cloud, has plugins for all major browsers, and runs on nearly every device. I can sit down at any Internet connected device in the world and access my password vault. [click to continue…]

Moving Day

by Mark Pescatrice on April 11, 2013

It was time to upgrade to something a little faster.

Today was moving day for matricellc.com. We didn’t quite expect to move, but performance with our old site was so bad that we could not wait any longer. We moved our site to bluehost.com, which we also use for hosting other sites and have had excellent performance. I had considering going hardcore and deploying on AWS (Amazon Web Services), but I thought better of it. That would have been the equivalent of swatting a fly with small tactical nuclear device. We needed more power and speed, but not that much.

If you were one of the unfortunate visitors to our site that has suffered through slow page loads, I apologize and thank you for your patience. We may have some intermittent hiccups in the next day or two, but please be patient and I promise we will have it worked out.

I would like to give a nod to the fine folks at Life in the Grid for their outstanding WordPress plugin, Duplicator. This plugin made it possible to migrate our site from one web server to another, on a completely new database, in less than 30 minutes. It was up and running with nary a hitch.

If you are interested in how we did this, let me know and I’ll write a post.

Things I Carry

by Mark Pescatrice on April 8, 2013

Philips Voice Tracer Digital Voice Recorder

‘Big Idea’ Catcher

In the spirit of the LinkedIn series, Things I Carry, I have created my list of the things that I carry. I am a frequent traveler and have well over 1 million miles of air, car, train, and bus travel over the past 10 years, and I’ve learned to travel as lean as possible. These are the things I carry:

Family
Assistant
ThinkPad
Voice recorder
Ebook Reader

Family

I will wax sentimental here and tell you that I carry my family in my heart, and this is the most important thing that I carry. I could not do what I do as effectively as I could without the unwavering support and love from my wife and children. Because of this support, I am more balanced, driven, focused, and grounded than I ever was as a free agent. This is sincere, honest, and true.

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The Best Month Ever

by Mark Pescatrice on April 4, 2013

March had 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays, and 5 Sundays. How could it not have been the best month ever?

For the independent consultant, marketing does not come naturally for us, unless perhaps you are a marketing consultant. This is because we are technicians by nature, using the definition of technician as described in The E-Myth Revisited, the brilliant book by Michael Gerber. Our websites and blogs are one of the most visible ways in which we can market ourselves and showcase our knowledge. Running a website and blog is one thing; getting traffic to our sites is another.

When we relaunched this site in August 2012, we began experimenting with different methods to increase traffic to this site. March…it was the best month ever. Really! Why was March the best month ever? Three things: [click to continue…]

Using Your Power For Good, Not Evil

by Mark Pescatrice on April 3, 2013

As some of you may know, I am a regular reader and fan of the web-comic xkcd. As of this writing, xkcd.com has Alexa rankings of 2,100 globally and 765 in the US. For the uninitiated, this means that xkcd.com, a web-comic, is the 765th most popular website in the US, which is pretty good for a site that only updates content four times per week (3 comics, 1 ‘What If?). That means it generates a lot of visitors. By way of comparison, this website is ranked 11,700,869 globally.

When you generate that much traffic, you have a regular audience, and when you have a regular audience, you have power. You can present any number of things, good, evil, or indifferent. On April Fools Day, Randall Munroe decided to do something good with his power. First, his web comic was updating periodically throughout the day with dynamically changing text on the same illustration. This was no doubt his clever April Fools joke on his readers.

There are always two punchlines, one in the comment and one in the mouseover text (‘title’ for those who read and speak HTML). The mouseover text on the image of the dog read: “The dog gains a pound for every $10 donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via this link. Currently at $xxxxx.xx”

Clicking the image takes you to the Wikimedia Foundation’s donation site, where you can donate to the non-profit to keep their wonderful projects, such as Wikipedia, up and running. As of early this morning when I took this screenshot, $41,457.11 had been raised.

This is powerful and this is good. There was no overt plea for money, and it was subtle enough to be missed by casual observers. Mr. Monroe knows his audience and it great to see how so many people stepped forward to contribute.

The lesson here is that we all have some power, some influence to effect change, to do good. So go do some good.

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Matrice Consulting is proud to support Wikimedia. To donate, click the picture in the middle of the post.

How to Get Questionnaire Data from an Appraisal in Oracle SSHR

by Mark Pescatrice on March 28, 2013

Where in the world are my questionnaire answers?

The appraisal function in Oracle E-Business Suite Self-Service HR, like many other parts of EBS, is very good at capturing lots of data, but not very good at letting it go. The questionnaire, which is an optional component of the appraisal function within SSHR, can be used to collect data using standard HTML form functions, but retrieving the data can appear to be impossible, if you do not know where to look. It’s kind of like finding Carmen Sandiego. The actual design of questionnaires is outside of the scope of this article, but I will reference some of the HTML used.

This article applies to both 11i and R12.

Data is collected on the questionnaire using standard HTML form controls, such as short text, long text, radio buttons, and lists. This is an example of an HTML <select> tag that is used for a list:

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Evernote Email Fail

by Mark Pescatrice on March 5, 2013

The elephant is sad.

If you know me or have read any incarnation of this blog, you will know that I am a huge fan of Evernote, going way back to the beta days. If you are an Evernote user, you are probably aware of the security breach they experienced. I knew it was big when it appeared on my BBC RSS feed over the weekend. Although no passwords were compromised, they quickly instituted a plan to communicate the breach and rollout application updates to mitigate any issues.

Although the response was timely, there was a minor fail that I identified: All of the links in the email were to a site that were not evernote.com, but rather a sub-domain of another site.

Example (link abbreviated): [click to continue…]

Where Mark Zuckerberg Got it Right

by Mark Pescatrice on March 3, 2013

I finally watched The Social Network last week and was very impressed with this film. I take it for what it is and nothing more: just a film based on a book based on true events. For me, there is one major takeaway from this movie that was probably lost to most in the ensuing drama.

I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg, despite the fact that we share a first name and his accomplishments are very impressive. I do not know him personally or enough about him to form an opinion one way or the other. When I meet him, then I’ll let you know. What I can say is that Mark Z. got it right, and by it, I mean the core concept behind all entrepreneurial effort. The creation and propagation of Facebook into a world-wide phenomenon is the result of one word: Action.

Consider the sequence of events: