Attention Acumatica customers. We would love to hear your story.
If you would like to tell your story, please contact me (click here).
I would love to record an Acumatica Customer Interview with you as an episode of AUGForums.com Real Talk (click here), an Acumatica Podcast.
How It Works
We schedule 1 hour to talk. I’ll send you a meeting link so I can record the conversation.
We get on the phone call and chat for 5-10 minutes to say hi and get “warmed up”.
I press record, say a little intro, turn it over to you to introduce yourself, and we’re off and running.
There are seven core questions that I hope to ask you during the interview:
1. What is your personal career background prior to getting involved with Acumatica?
2. What does your business do (share ballpark annual revenue and # of employees if possible)?
3. What is your role at the company?
4. What system did you run prior to Acumatica?
5. What advice you would give to someone in the middle of implementing Acumatica?
6. What are some creative ways that your company uses Acumatica, outside tools that you use, Acumatica customizations that you’ve done, etc.?
7. What future Acumatica project plans does your company have? Implementing additional modules? Implementing ISV products? Customizing Acumatica to further fit the needs of the business?
But don’t worry about answering all of those seven questions like a machine. It’s my job as the interviewer to guide us through those questions. And if we don’t get to all seven questions, that’s totally fine.
Tangents are encouraged. We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. An AUGForums.com Real Talk episode is real, somewhat “raw”, and genuine.
The Rules
There are two rules for an AUGForums.com Real Talk Episode:
1. No Editing.
2. Publish Immediately.
Regarding “No Editing”, at first the reason for this rule was purely about time. I didn’t want to take the time or spend the money for editing. But I now realize that there is another benefit of “no editing” in that it does something to achieve a sense of being real which an edited show can’t do. For more on that, Google “reality tv contracts” to see how fake “edited reality” really is.
Regarding “Publish Immediately”, this is because we’re all busy and we have short attention spans. After we’re done recording our phone call, I will turn off the recording and we’ll decide how we think the interview went. If either one of us doesn’t think it should be published, then I won’t publish. But if we both give it a thumbs up, then I’ll go ahead and publish right away. Done. Nothing more to do.
An unwritten rule with this format is that there is no prep, other than you reading this blog post. Our “prep” is when we first get on the phone call. We both invest one hour of our time and we’re done. This format allows me to interview as many Acumatica customers as possible.
The Networking Effect
One benefit of participating in an Acumatica Customer Interview is that it can expand your network.
When other Acumatica customers hear your interview, they might want to reach out to you.
There might be other Acumatica customers out there struggling with the same things that you are struggling with. Maybe you can compare notes?
Your personal network is important. Why not expand your personal Acumatica network?
Here are two examples of Acumatica Customer Interviews that have already been done:
1. Acumatica Customer Interview with Dan Wilkins (click here)
2. Acumatica Customer Interview with Ryan Brown (click here)
Does anything in those interviews resonate with you? You can use the links in the posts above to contact the Acumatica customer being interviewed and expand your network.
Stories
From a technical perspective, it’s just a phone call conversation, but from a human perspective, it’s your story.
Above all, I’m looking for your story. Stories are powerful.
The interview in the video below helped me to appreciate stories more. I watched this after watching the American Factory documentary which was recommended to me by Stephen Hennelly. At the time, Stephen was a consultant at JAMS which built the Acumatica Manufacturing Edition that eventually got acquired by Acumatica. Here’s the line that stands out to me from the interview:
We want to give voice to the people who don’t appear on-screen. Working people, their stories, their struggles, their hopes equally compelling to superheroes.
– Steven Bognar
If you think about the Obamas in that video, they have a lot of options. They are powerful people. Yet they are choosing to invest in stories. That’s pretty interesting.
I’m investing in stories too. The personal career stories of people who use Acumatica.
Please contact me if you’d like to participate:
