personal

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.

It takes a while to move around several years of blog posts and several more of static documents.

I managed to install a bit more of a design on JaySmall.com, notify Google of the changes, get server redirects working to preserve the old Small Initiatives content, get Ka's blog going on its own, and install some Drupal modules that make writing and editing easier.

Perhaps most important, SID made his way here, in a, like, groovy color-halftone form that brings some of my old world (newspapers and print design) to my "now" world (interactive media).

Much more to do, in my own sweet time.

...I am slowly migrating to my new blog. The old Small Initiatives site will suffice until this is ready.