Arnie Carver

With Amy here helping me with the day to day operations, I’ve decided to continue with my computer education. Since I still don’t have enough time to actually enroll in school per se. I decided to do a study at home course from Quickcert, that way I can learn at my own pace while still working full time. The course that I’m taking is for CEH Certification (Certified Ethical Hacker).

A close friend of mine has his certification and makes around $70k per year. Not bad for something you can learn from home. Not that I’m quite ready to leave the entertainment industry, but It’s something I can use in my day to day life and certainly something good to fall back on. Once I finish this course, I plan on taking more at my leisure. There’s a lot to learn that could really help me solve my own tech problems instead of having to pay someone else to fix them.

So, as I said in my last post, I’ve got family in town. My cousin, Amy is here and probably for good. I’m hiring her as an assistant to help me with my day to day operations. Answering the phone, setting up jobs, giving price quotes, that sort of thing.

Amy is recently divorced and needs a life change. The divorce left her depressed and in a huge amount of debt. Creditors are calling her everyday and the stress is enough to overwhelm anyone . She’s getting her life back together with the help of Debt Counseling and a strong will to go on. With attorney’s fees, and several bills now in collections, she certainly needs help consolidating her debt and she is taking the first steps to a new stress and debt free life. We’re starting with a day trip to Six Flags. I told her the day was on me and to consider it a signing bonus.

I’ve just confirmed that I’ll be in Cincinnati Ohio next week to set up lighting and sound for a new nightclub opening soon. I like to travel, see new places and meet new people. I much rather drive than fly. I like the idea of being able to stop when I want to and not be cramped in an airplane with god knows who. I’m not afraid of flying, I just find it a really big and expensive hassle.

Of course a guy like me can’t have just regular luggage. I need something cool and functional. My luggage is actually BlackHawk Tactical Gear . It’s the same stuff that law enforcement and the military use. I use 2 A.L.E.R.T. bags, one for my luggage and also one for my tools and equipment. It has plenty of space and extra compartments for whatever I feel like stuffing in them. Not to mention the cool factor.

If you’re on the go like I am or just like cool stuff, head on over to Actiongear.com and check them out. They carry a full line of law enforcement and tactical gear.

Owning a small business, it can be difficult to get the word out about your products or services. Unless you have a huge advertising budget (witch I don’t) it can be tough to find cost effective advertising. The phone book and the web are a necessity. I’ve found that radio and television ads can be very expensive for 30 seconds of exposure to people who simply are not interested. The best way that I’ve found is merchandising. The first thing most people thing when I say this is t-shirts, but who’s going to wear a t-shirt advertising a DJ to do anything but cut the grass in on Sunday afternoon? Nobody.

I’ve found that putting my logo on give-away toys and trinkets much more effective. When this idea was first pitched to me, I had a hard time finding a company to make these items for me. That’s because I didn’t know there was a proper name for this stuff to search for. They are called trade show items

Rubber balls, yo-yo’s, key chains, and frisbee’s are all great and inexpensive ways to promote your business. Even if your potential clients don’t use them, they will probably give theese toys to their children who will. Mission accomplished, you have just put your logo and business information in their home and they will see it often. Thus be more likely to remember you.

This method has worked extremely well for me and I suggest anyone else in a similar situation give it a try. Gimmees.com has a huge selection of novelties for all of your marketing needs.

Lats night at work, a worse case scenario happened again. I was setting up my equipment and my external hard drive would not power up. This is very bad because all of my music is stored on it.  It’s not the first time this has happened to me, actually it’s like the third time. The first was about 2 years ago, at work, in the middle of a shift. I lost everything, and it took me a week to reload all of my cd’s onto another drive.

I learned my lesson then, that technology sometimes fails. I now always have 3 external drives with my music library on them and carry 2 with me just in case. Seagate hard drives come with a 5 year warranty and they will replace the hardware but the data is lost. It will take several hours to transfer 400 gigabytes of music over to the new drive but it’s better than copying a few thousand cd’s over again.

To any other digital DJ’s out there, ALWAYS back your music up, you never know when a drive will fail.