I am getting married on September 20th, my company is constantly undergoing changes, being challenged, and adapting. This is great, but at times it can be overwhelming and the pressure can really build. My fiance, Ann, is freaking out about the wedding and all the crap that goes along with throwing a party for the day of your marriage. This is by no means a pity party, I am thrilled with my life, business, fiance, and realize I am EXTREMELY lucky to have these problems. I wanted to get myself and Ann unplugged from our lives for a few days. I found a cabin in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin about a 3 hour drive from the Twin Cities. The place had no internet, no tv, and was just a tiny log cabin in the middle of the woods!!! This is right up my alley, my plan to destress Ann may have backfired though. I think no TV or internet may have added to her stress Well done Chris(A for effort though).

We got there Saturday and had a little fire with marshmellow roasting and a trivia battle. We love to read Trivial pursuit cards to eachother and keep track of who answers the most right. She almost always kicks the crap out of me

On Sunday i got to do a little fishing. Pretty nice small mouth if i do say so myself.

This is my dog finley, i am obsessed with her, and if I take to writing in this blog about my personal life more, you will undoubtedly hear about her, she rules my existence and every one in the office and my future wife are sick and tired of hearing about Finley and watching me fawn over her…..hahah

In owning my own business there is very little separation between my personal life and my work life. Work is ALWAYS on my mind. There have been times when I am working in one or another every waking hour of my day. This is really not a healthy way to live, for me personally, and at some point my business will suffer as a result. There is some point of diminishing returns and there is a lot to be said for having a healthy balance of personal life and work life. When I strike that balance I find my work is output is of a much higher quality and my personal life is extremely pleasurable. Anyways, unplugging over this past weeekend was great for me and enabled me to come in fresh for the upcoming weeks fires that would inevitability arise and need to be put out.

PAS had a company outing to Vegas last week. There are a few guys who work in the Nashville office who hadnt met some of the guys who work in the St. Paul office, it was a great time meeting everyone. Seeing people away from the office letting their hair down was a nice change of pace.

Dinner at Aureole in Mandalay bay:

Top left to right:

Herb(inthacup), Byron, Chris(morgant), Chad, Ryan(RT)

John(pokeraddict), Arthur, Craig, Chris, Loffi.

It was the second trip organized for my company, and it was a smashing success. We went out to dinner with Karim(raketherake) and for those of you who havent met him, he is quite an amusing chap, thanks for picking up the tab Karim!! We had another meeting which was very promising. I hope to have more to report here about it in several weeks. One of our Russian affiliates, Akim(raketracker.ru), came to stay with us for a few days and it was nice to finally put a face to the name.

I ended up playing PLO at the Wynn quite a bit. My last night found me in a 10/20 PLO game. I sat down with $4k folded one hand and then this happened; I limped 3345 with 5 other limpers. The flop came 3, 9, Q with two hearts. I have the 3,5 of hearts. The BB lead out for pot and i repotted, he went to the tank then pushed and i called. He had top two with a gutter no flush draw. Turn was a Q and i drop 4 dimes before i can blink an eye. This is why I am an affiliate, i shouldnt limp that garbage hand to begin with, and getting my stack in there, while right at the time, is dodgy at best.

I rebuy for $3k and played so weak tight i am sick writing about it. Brad Booth comes to the table drunk as a skunk and entertaining us and most tables near us. I whittled myself down to about $450 which cant even let you see a flop in this game. I had some garbage on the button and decided this was my hand. Myself, Brad and the BB saw the flop and i was allin. Brad kept saying ‘dry side pot’ to the BB, which is total crap in my book. He was telling him to check it down so they could take my chips. The BB didnt listen and bet pot into Brad on the flop. He immediately repotted by throwing in aobut 10 yellow chips, which as about 7 too many! BB promptly folded and Booth offered me a deal; i could get $500 of the pot if i folded. I immediately took it as i was booking a sure ~$50 profit.

Anyways, over the next 3 hours i took that $500 and turned it into 6 dimes!!! God, PLO can be so great……..sometimes.

Just wanted to give a headsup to any raketracker players, PAS affiliates, or people interested in saying hello to the PAS, YPC, and raketracker teams. We will all be in Vegas tomorrow(7/27) until July 3rd. We are all going to be there and love the chance to put faces to online names and catch up with old friends, so send us an email or leave a comment here and we will work something out.

I act on instincts. I can’t read an instruction manual to learn how to build something. I like to splay the pieces out on the floor and put them together where I think they make sense and use the instruction manual as a reference when I get stumped. This has been a fundamental foundation of who I am. My company’s fundamental foundation looks like this: We develop products that provide value to our end user and our vendors and we monetize that relationship through affiliate marketing.

What does that preface have to do with this post? Who I am has ultimately sculpted a large portion of who my company is. My instinctual nature by definition makes me think outside of the box, because I don’t look to even realize that a box exists. My core wants to provide a product with lasting value so that it can be improved, enhanced and capture loyal customers. Most of the advice I see or hear about affiliate marketing involves some variation of “content is king” and “SEO”. I get so tired of seeing those tenants that I felt compelled to write this post.

I am not saying those two things need to be completely ignored, as many people make a terrific living concentrating on those two sayings. But I see far too much one size fits all advice and herd mentality in the poker affiliate industry. I am here to say that content is king and seo being the only way to make a living in affiliate marketing is crap. I have developed multiple websites, including an affiliate network, that, combined, have over 250,000 registered users and 10 employees. I have been one of the top 5 poker affiliate marketers over the past 4 years. This may scare people to know: although I use content to explain what our websites are doing, I didn’t employ one SEO type tactic on my sites until late last year. We made a hire to help with content. However, I still prefer that his role isn’t writing content for SEO friendliness that no one reads. I don’t care that it may help with the SERPs. The idea of doing something that no one will read or use and only exists for a robot to find is preposterous to me.

After saying all that, please reference my statement regarding my company’s fundamental foundation, defining our against the grain focus.

I have a core problem with writing content to beat the search engine at its search functionality. It seems very disingenuous to me. I am here to tell you content is not king and SEO is not nearly as important as you think in Internet marketing.

we have developed into a nice little company here. we started in the basement, moved out to the garage, now we are a family with a white picket fence and 2.5 children. we have two offices, my dog comes to work, and we are really the cliche start up company. i continually label us a startup even though we have been around for almost 5 years, have 9 employees, well established revenue streams, yet i insist on the word startup; it sounds so much cooler.

To top it all off we recently purchased a foosball table for the office. It was the best damned money ive spent for my business in quite some time. Foosball is a terrific game, I am the master of parlor games and declare myself the office champion. Despite all this kidding around and tom foolery, the foosball table has served a purpose I never fathomed. It has provided an environment for us to bond and team build. At the end of the day, my office is a bunch of socially retarded internet geeks(with me being the crown prince). But when we are playing foos, we talk smack, and act like Jersey shore guys on steroids with guinea t’s and tattoos. Today I had a great conversation with a guy who has been working for me for almost three years now. We have chatted in the past, but never had a nice in depth talk until today. We both acknowledged this fact, and it was great for us to connect professionally, share visions, reflect on where we have been and where we hope to be going. I bought the foosball table purely for entertainment, but its turning out to provide our company with a heck of a lot more than that.

i think i am a unique individual, i have terminal uniqueness. not in the way that we all have our own DNA, fingerprints, etc…, but my whole being operates quite a bit differently than most people i encounter in day to day life. in some ways i may be unique, some i may not, but since they have come up with verbiage to classify every style, emotion, feeling, thought, perception, action(must stop there), it seems that entrepreneur does indeed fit me pretty nicely. i shudder to admit this type of square definitional defeat but i can make do for the sake of a blog post.

the writing was on the wall for me at a very young age……..

my mom always joked with my father that i would either be the bank robber or the bank president. well i am sitting at the helm of an 8 figure company in the online gaming industry, mom what does that make of your prediction?

i have so many stories of my ability to make money, or see better ways to bring resources together so that all parties are better off for it. i will stick to my gaming endeavors, and hopefully will come back to this post and dredge up some of my other lemonade stand type maneuvers during my childhood.

i am a poker player and love the game, so you other purists out there please recognize that i was 9 years old and would never consider cheating like i did 20 years ago. brad was my grade school friend who shares the same penchant for making money that i have. having the actual money isn’t what drives the bus, its making it, and finding ways to generate income that make the world go around for a guy like myself and brad. brad is living in chicago now, and doesnt see any reason to head back east to NY. i used to think he was brainwashed, but after moving out here to the midwest, i concur with his sentiments. he could sell shit to a statue and supposedly just setup a 120 gallon fishtank in his home…i need to hear about how its going, since he and i used to bond over fish tanks for most of our childhoods together. So we setup a poker game in my room circa 1986. we found an old set of chips that were probably one of my older brothers. we invited muzzy(true nickname) and brads older brother rick to the game. it became a regular thing. brad and i began using signs to tip eachother off to the strength of our hands. monkey face was one of them, and the thought of how obvious and obnoxious our cheating was makes me laugh right now, but we got over on rick who was two years our senior, so we thought we were the cats pajamas. i think this lasted about a year before laser tag was the new thing and poker got shelfed for a handful of years……….

then in 7th grade on thanksgiving day, one of my brothers brought over a bracket thing. you could pick 4 games for a certain payout, 5 games on up to 10 games. if you got 3 games correct out of 4 you won at a ratio times the value of your bet. THIS WAS IT!!! I was floored by this, and began immediately to research, read, understand all i could about this, spreads, lines, overs/unders….I could care less about the underlying games, i never really cared for watching sports, but i LOVE to play them. Anyways, i make my picks, i think i chose 5 games. Solid logic being, 4 games the payouts were too low, 10 games was utterly impossible to hit, so i want the best chance of hitting money at the highest rate of return. i did some doogie howser mental math in 7th grade that landed me on a 5 game pick. i have no recollection who i chose, but i lost my very first pick on that thanksgiving day. i lost my second pick as well. so my ticket was worthless. i gave my bro the five bucks but kept the ticket with me, playing around with what if i chose this, and that, and there, then what….? whoa that would of been great. to be honest though, i dont like betting on anyting i dont have some say in. a sporting event is 100% out of my hands, so the results have nothing to do with me, to this day i never bet sports, i just plain old dont like it, feels like pissing money down the drain to me.

This post is getting too long so i will have to have a part two. but with the football betting in 7th grade. i decided to play the house. i wrote out a bunch of tickets identical to the one my brother gave me and put in the games for the upcoming week. i also, looked at the lines and adjusted them where i saw fit. no idea why i would have done that, but i did, i thought i could fix the lines in my favor, but didnt realize that the punters could just bet the other side, so much to learn little padawan. i think i had about 8 or so of my friends decided to give it a whack. my one friend Evan hit his damn picks. He broke all the income i had from the other punters and then some. i was devestated, i couldnt win at this thing being the bettor or being the house. i paid evan back who is nowadays a big swinging dick(this is from a book ‘Liars Poker’ fabulous i highly recommend) on wall street. Evan and I share one characteristic, and we always have, we thoroughly enjoy the fruits of our success but its the process of getting there that makes our worlds go around. He was the youngest muni bonds trader on the street when he worked at Lehman Brothers and is now doing some crazy hi finance crap with CitiGroup. We are both heading places, just taking different paths. Its nice when our paths cross and we can shake hands and act like kids, which he needs to do more often!!!!!! i am pretty accomplished at it.

i will follow up with a part two which includes me playing guts instead of caddying and running a blackjack game at my highschool behind the tennis courts!!!!

Ryan and I usually dont need to speak to eachother. We can go through a series of grunts and half read email exchanges to understand what one another is working on, where there are problems, and where we are headed. This works when the two individuals that started a company understand how one another works after four years of building something from scratch. It doesnt work when the business starts growing and new people join our team. Other people cant read my mind!!! Preposterous I know.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the ideal project management software. We have an office in Nashville, an office here in the Twin Cities, and an employee in California. Ideally the PM software would have some type of calendar syncing feature and a platform for the eight of us to collaborate, share, and manage our own ever growing task lists. This is my third time *seriously* looking into project management software. I really wanted a Microsoft product since it could sync our outlooks and the office products most of us use between the desktops, laptops, and windows mobile phones we all use. Getting information on the servers, the software, and the interactivity of the two from the microsoft website was atrocious. Talking to someone on the phone from microsoft was worse. The cost of project server was prohibitive, and getting a clear answer from microsoft on what or wasnt available or appropriate for our situation was a torturous process. Ryan and I can be perfectionistic. We want the optimal solution and spend valuable time pondering the merits of something, playing it forward in every way imaginable. If the solution isnt perfect we dont like it. This is a good thing(to strive for excellence), but it also stunts the growth of our businesses. Byron is here to help us recognize this and to just plain old GET SHIT DONE! So with his help and decisiveness we settled on basecamp. Better to spend time actually using a product to see if it fits, rather than hypothesizing what will happen when and if we use it……Action, action, action!

At the end of the day Basecamp is really not cutting the mustard for us and i am using it less and less as the time ticks by. I am sitting here with 854234141 ideas, tasks, goals, thoughts….etc…to manage, prioritize, delegate, and execute. I am back to the drawing board to find project management solution that will alleviate keeping all those responsibilities tucked away in my head, on post it notes stuck to my computer, in my 17 notebooks, or from being on the almighty MUST GET DONE LIST(which gets written on my hand) . If anyone has any suggestions of a solution that you think could help out our company we would be much obliged.

There was a recent issue at PAS. This problem was caused by many factors. It was not one or two individuals fault, but rather a symptomatic result of doing too much with too little and a dash of Murphy’s Law. We have seen these shortcomings and have increased our staff by almost 50% in the last 6 months, with several more hires on the near horizon. New people means training, understanding how each other works, establishing goals, and holding people accountable. In short, MANAGEMENT.

The jury is still out on my management abilities, but I am confident in my ability to problem solve, develop profitable business ideas, and inspire those around me. I have identified my management deficiencies and am fortunate enough to have the money to hire someone to take that task over for me. A key for my success is identifying my talents and exploiting them while identifying my weaknesses and finding people who can complement my skill set.

That being said, I still want to improve on my management skills. And since I am now a cool blogger, what better place than here? Hopefully I can objectively relay what just happened and see if anyone (if we have readers yet?!?!) has any feedback.

Our emails and helpdesk tickets are a good system check for us. If something is wrong with our software systems, our users generally find it instantly. We have a protocol we run through when a player states he is not tracked. Often the player signed up incorrectly and there is little or nothing we can do. But when several emails come in regarding the same issue, red flags go up. We look at the issue and solve it. Then get back to our forward looking projects until another fire comes up.

When a recent flurry of emails came in, I knew something was wrong on our technical stats importing side. I contacted the people who know that aspect of our business and asked if they were aware of stats issues. We have been working on a new set of importers that may have caused the glitches. I, or so I thought, relayed this issue and took for granted that they could troubleshoot the problem by importing the stats that were missing.

I don’t care who, how, or why it happened. There was a problem with our importers which caused a problem with out stats reporting. I just wanted it fixed so business could continue.

I am analyzing how I dealt with this issue. I would like it, and we are big enough now, so that an issue like this doesn’t need to find its way to me. However, it did. I am unsure if I reacted to it aggressively or assertively.

So my question is: When there is a problem that shouldn’t have found its way to the top, but did, and needs immediate fixing, is it inappropriate to say, “Fix this problem immediately. I’m not interested in excuses or explanations, nor am I assessing blame. I just need it fixed – now.”

The interesting thing is, as I read what I have written, I now know that I reacted to it appropriately. I like blogging.

GO GIANTS