JaySmall.com

Last year, longtime pal and former boss Rusty Coats reminded me of the concept that sales success is algorithmic.

Presuming you're selling a product with any demand whatsoever, a certain number of phone calls will lead to a predictable ratio of appointments, then a certain number of appointments will lead to a predictable ratio of contracts. The more activity, the more you close.

My twin teens extraordinaire, Rachel and Tyler, demonstrated this concept over the past week.

R&T turned 16 in November and promptly secured (a) their driver licenses, and (b) access to an old (pre-recall) Toyota to tool around town -- on one condition: Get jobs and help pay for fuel for the hoopty.

In rare quiet moments, Ka and I sometimes talk about how change and upheaval seem to be such constants in our lives. We tell ourselves we'll be glad when things slow down. Then another shoe drops, or absent that, we seem to go out and find some new way to stir things up.

A big shoe dropped this month, and now I can tell you about it:

I will join Cordillera Communications effective Jan. 11 as its president of interactive. Cordillera owns 13 television stations in mid-size markets including Lexington, Ky.; Tucson, Ariz.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; and several cities in Montana.

I am slooooowly recovering from two days of the crud (of a digestive, not congestive, nature ... 'nuff said). On the plus side, this puts me in the perfect mood tonight to upgrade Ka's laptop from the unconditionally awful Windows Vista to the better-be-much-less-awful Windows 7.

Will advise on the outcome.

Pin this on early-Monday-morning syndrome (if you haven't figured this out by now, I often write posts in the margins of my day, then set them to go live a few hours later when I figure folks are awake and paying attention). I meant, in that last post, to explain a key difference between the reasons people wanted my help as a consultant, and the reasons they should have. The distinction should matter to hiring managers in today's economy, and it applies far beyond my little world. So it's worth another post.

Most of the time, people solicited my help (and I served) as a resource. They wanted someone to design, build, and/or operate something for them.

The past several days had a way of reminding me why I wound down the types of part-time consulting I did most often as part of Small Initiatives.

My Scripps job keeps me hopping, now more than ever, as we rethink what it means to be a local news media company from this point forward. That rethinking also makes the job far more interesting, mostly in good ways. I am certainly not being denied the strategic responsibilities I coveted so long.

Meanwhile, consulting tasks people most frequently asked me to do when I ran SI -- and about which I still get questions most every day -- frankly become less interesting by the minute: