January 2018 Brian Newmark Update
Wow, it has been a long time since I spent time offloading my thoughts. So here is an update of 2017.
Last year was an interesting year. I spent the first half of the year working non-stop on Deaflix Inc. a company I co-founded in 2014. In late 2016 things started to heat up and Deaflix became nearly a full time job. For that reason, I sold the restaurants of Naan Ventures. The experience was fun, I double sales and exited with a profit, but it was time to move on. The first half of 2017 was all Deaflix all the time. Research research research was needed to put together the investor packet. We did a successful seed round and as of today 1/11/18 we are about halfway funded with our A Round and expect to shoot our pilots mid- year.
In the Fall of 2017 I began meeting with a long time business associate about possible collaboration on a redevelopment of his successful Salesforce consulting company. He knows I was an early adoptor of Salesforce with one of my companies going back to March 2006. I built out the entire platform with tremendous automation. I’ve served as the system administrator for the platform ever since even though I’ve sold the company. I helped build the Salesforce platform at Brand.com and consulted on several other companies Salesforce build out. He gave me a challenge to get Certified as a Salesforce Administrator. I took the challenge thinking how hard could it be, I know Salesforce well. Holy cow was I wrong, that was hard. I spend a month studying with every free minute I had taking online classes, testing, trying out what I learned. I am proud to say that I am in possession of a certificate from Salesforce which says Brian Newmark Salesforce Administrator.  Earlier in my career I was a broker and as such had to pass my Series 7, 63 and 65 securities exams to be licenses (since lapsed as I got out of that business), I can honestly say the Salesforce Certification was two to three times harder than the Securities Licenses. So what will happen with this possible business endeavor, not sure, but I am ready if things progress well. Stay tuned.
Personally January through mid-August were fantastic months for me. I felt good physically and emotionally. Late August until Thanksgiving was a pretty rough time for me. I got excited about a business opportunity which came and went within a short period of time, but the carnage it left in my life was pretty devastating. Fortunately, I love the holidays and Thanksgiving came around at just the right time. That was followed by holiday parties and a wonderful Newmark family vacation to California over the Christmas and New Years holiday.
Now things with Deaflix are looking very promising, the Salesforce opportunity is out there and generally life is good.
Stay tuned…
-Brian Newmark 1/11/18
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