Rollercoaster

If I was to equate my overarching experience of business ownership, specifically running a start up, to any other of life's experiences it must be that of riding a large and very fast rollercoaster.

It is a constant thrill but the ups are very up and the downs very down. It seems to me that if your in that safe little bit in the middle your doing nothing. 

The analogy continues in that like a rollercoaster, there is so much of the experience that you can not control. Once you've paid your money, strapped yourself in and set off you are completely at the mercy of the ride for the next moments. Sure that ride will end and you can choose whether or not to get back on or find another ride to go on but for the duration of that particular cycle you are committed, good or bad.

I told you in the last blog that we had a couple of important meetings lined up. The first was really hard work. We presented ProAct and particularly the features around allowing parents to populate pupil data (medical authority, photography approval, trip approvals, principle and secondary contact numbers etc etc ) directly to the database via secure log-on through a web-browser. We know this is a real and consistent issue having spoken to lots of Schools up and down the country. We demonstrated how the changes were made, from the parents and schools perspective and we demonstrated how through a simple report, the changes could be applied back into Capita's SIMS product. "Are you a Capita Technical Partner"; "No" and the shutters came down.

For the second meeting where we talked about how the product could be used to work with local businesses to capture and match requirements around real estate and waste, exactly the same process in effect, two remote parties sharing and maintaining common data, we were pushing at an open door.

Perhaps we got our message wrong in the first meeting, we are certainly looking at the integration with Capita and have already got a quote for what the licencing will cost us. The irony is that we probably already know what the API looks like as we can already generate the CTF file structures from the products. The missing link is therefore Capita authority to let us write the file content directly into the SIMS database rather than upload through a report. One button press to replace two?

BUT, if this is what we need to do to get us back on the rollercoaster for the next ride, we may as well buy the ticket and hold on.

Darren Gent