I'm finally coming up for a breath of air and a bit of blogging.

August 2006, Hands On Gourmet's business spiked. We hosted 27 events, a company record. And we maintained this momentum through January 2007.

In that time we hired our first 2 employees, increased our daily event capacity from 100 people in a day to 200 + people in a day by purchasing more equipment and finding new chefs, purchased Caterease, an event software, networked our computers with a server, and we cooked our buns off.

Each one of these developments deserves its own entry, but I won't digress. Instead, as Garnett Newcombe of Human Potential Consultants said to me last week, "keep on moving forward".
Fast forward to February 2007, a timely place to begin, as our Cisco IP phone system was installed! I have learned a tremendous amount about phone systems since then. At first we couldn't answer calls, had no idea how to switch from line 1 to line 2, and disconnected people calling to inquire about our services. Now, not only can we transfer calls, the caller hears techno beats while waiting, we each have our own voicemail, and I can make Hands On Gourmet calls from my home (as soon as I receive the extra phone unit)

We helped Cisco discover a glitch with their IP phone system. This is not because we became IP telecom wizards over night. This is because we are their smallest customer to date, with only 4 phones. In brief, if you are using line 1, you can't put that call on hold and switch to line 2. You can hear line 2 ringing, and briefly see a number show up on the screen, but you can't switch to line 2. The good news is, Jose, our phone tech, has the software from Cisco to fix this glitch.

Like my blog? You'll love my website,
www.handsongourmet.com

Great line Diana, hope you don't mind me using it too :)