Palooza II

Two subjects today.

Podolny Palooza Report

In 1993, I was the unemployed ex-owner of a failed investment banking firm

In 1994, I started as a single person consultant having moved from Maryland to New Mexico

In 1998, I recognized I had a unique methodology for dealing with my clients

In 2000, I decided I needed to really push myself and this business and find out what it could do

In 2003, I suddenly found myself experimenting with expansion in Atlanta, Denver, and Los Angeles

In 2007, I recognized the need to try and create a real organization

In 2009, we met for the second time as a group (7 of us representing New Mexico, Southern California, and Chicago) in what we affectionately call Podolny Palooza to discuss where we were going.

For the first time I was able to make a breakthroughs critical to our becoming a 'real' business. I'd established collaboration tools, a repository for standard documents, and wrote out detailed process descriptions for our critical consulting methodology.

We met for a day and a half. On Wed morning, we did introductions. The various geographic personnel don't know each other that well. Then I conducted the first real class we had on our base consulting methodology. This was all work. I had both breakfast and lunch brought in as we were working in he conference room of my attorney.

In the afternoon we held discussions about the various sub-sets of actual consulting we implement.

On Thursday, we got down to serious discussions of the future and the need to evolve from a single entrepreneur based model to one of multiple committed owners - a big change but one that can take us to new level.

We had lots of follow on work that will need to be done to make this happen.

Pretty cool.