As usual another busy week for cavnessHR. But before we get started. I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Be sure to spend this time with your loved ones.

cavnessHR did not make it to the interview round for Seattle TechStars. With so many applications, they don't provide a reason why you are not accepted. We knew it was a long shot. There were many reasons for us not to be accepted. But, regardless of all that, it is still a disappointment.

But as they say when one door closes another one opens. The same day we found out about TechStars. We received an email telling us about Founder University https://www.founder.university/ It is a two day educational experience for founders who have launched their product, but have not raised their Series A. In order to be considered we had to provide them our pitch deck. The two day event is in San Francisco on December 4-5.

Founder University is run by Launch http://www.launch.co/ The managing partner for Launch is Jason Calacanis. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/ Jason is a top Angel Investor and is author of Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups--Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000. Those who get to take part should receive a great learning experience.

If you would like to buy his book the link is below.

http://amzn.to/2zSAyXp

We participated in the Inside Sales Summit https://www.insidesalessummit.com/ which was put on by https://close.io/ This was a series of 50 interviews with various Sales leaders. These interviews were very engaging and informative. We learned lots about various aspects of Sales by listening to these interviews.

We have also been doing lots of sales training this last week. We have been using content provided by https://close.io/ They provide lost of great training for startups who want to learn the craft of sales.

We took part in a PeopleKeep webinar which covered their concept of providing benefits to employees. PeopleKeep is against the traditional group benefits method as is it is too expensive, too complex and too one size fits all for small business.

PeopleKeep has come up with way for small business to provide their employees tax free money to purchase the benefits that fit their personal needs. So instead of the small business telling their employees what benefits will be provided to them. The employees are able to choose their own benefits.

Here is the link to the webinar. https://offers.zanebenefits.com/zane-benefits-is-now-a-part-of-peoplekeep/view cavnessHR is a PeopleKeep partner. So feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about this or if you are interested in signing up for PeopleKeep.

We spent time studying why startups fail and what factors cause them to fail. There are literally hundreds of reasons why startups fail. When I use the term startups, I am not only talking about tech startups. But also every other new business regardless of industry. Starting a new business is not easy and the chances of failing are high.

We wanted to study some of them to see what lessons we could apply in building cavnessHR. The below links are what we used to study startups that don't make it. There are many great lessons in here that are provided by many founders who took the time to document their startup journeys.

http://autopsy.io/

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mortem/

On the positive side, we have a new member of the cavnessHR team. His name is Ian Svasand and he is joining us an intern from Pacific Lutheran University. He will be helping out on the HR side and he will be learning all he can from the rest of the cavnessHR team.

We continue to work with our first customer and provide them great and seamless HR. While we use this experience to learn and to refine our process for providing this great and seamlessHR. We are learning many great lessons from our first customer.

But we realize if we want to continue to build cavnessHR, we have to focus on customer acquisition.
As a way to do this we are going to choose one industry to focus on for our customer acquisition efforts. This was recommended to us by Dave Parker https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveparker/ during Seattle Startup Weekend.

Below is break down of Washington state industries we put together using data from the U.S. Census and other sources. We will use this and other information to help us decide what industry to target for cavnessHR. We will also continue to market to the companies we sent the individualized YouTube videos to earlier.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mGfnowVI6EyvnJ_00yEss-qDmqNGw5yk0g3TlUF6I3Y/edit#gid=294804066

The below video talks about how many of the entrepreneurs that we deem successful today. Actually failed in the past.