This update will be longer than usual since we did not do one last week.

We would like to welcome a new member to the cavnessHR team. His name is Josh Kotoff https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-kotoff-0a452736/ Josh is going to do the Marketing for cavnessHR. Welcome to cavnessHR, Josh.

We had a meeting with Bruce Bjorklund https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-t-bjorklund-68732336/ He is a fellow Veteran entrepreneur who is also a member of Bunker Labs https://bunkerlabs.org/seattle/ His startup Hyux, http://www.hyxus.com/ was just acquired. He gave me some great advice on how to move forward with cavnessHR and some of his lessons learned while building his company.

Bruce introduced us to the great people at Sirrus7 https://www.sirrus7.com/ We also had a great meeting with them. We talked about the background for cavnessHR and our vision for moving forward. Our CTO should be coming to the Seattle area next week and we are going to schedule a follow up conversation with Sirrus7 when he is in the area.

cavnessHR has signed up for the e-verify program. This program allows you to verify with the government that someone is authorized to work in the U.S. We will use this as an additional layer to ensure the people we onboard for our customers are authorized to work in the U.S. Of course right now this is useless as the site is not working because of the government shut down.

We completed the 12th and final course of the HelloSign Digital Transformation Course. This one was "Not just Silicon Valley: Digital Transformation for the Real World". We learned so much during the past year from this course. The course will help us to secure our customers data.

We have been prepping for tax season and everything involved with that. We received a notice from the state of Delaware that our taxes would be $45,000. Needless to say we went into a shock and immediately called our lawyer, Joe Wallin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/wallin/ He told us to relax and that the taxes would be more like $400. So that was a great relief. 

Here is a blog Joe wrote about how Delaware scares the ^%&* out of you. http://www.startuplawblog.com/2013/02/28/delaware-franchise-tax-frights/ 

We met with Matt Burns, for our monthly meeting. Matt is one of the Board of Advisors for cavnessHR. As always, he provided great insights and asked great questions to help make sure we are focused on the right areas.

We had our quarterly cavnessHR Board of Advisors meeting. Me and the CTO spent some time prepping for that and making sure we had a good agenda and slide deck for the meeting. The Board asked some great questions. At the end of the meeting, we asked each board member to provide one item they would like us to work on over the next 3 months.

We did a demo with HelloWorks https://www.hellosign.com/products/helloworks HelloWorks is part of HelloSign https://www.hellosign.com/ We use HelloSign for our digital signature platform. HelloWorks is their platform to automate all paperwork processes. This would take care of all of our onboarding for our customers. We would need to create all the documents. But after that, it would be a piece of cake to implement. The monthly price is steep. So the cavnessHR CTO is looking at doing this ourselves. But we will look at all options for this.

We redid the editing setup for the cavnessHR podcast. This should help us to save time during the editing process. For the podcast we are going to do something different moving forward. Instead of doing the talk over zoom. We are going to do a livestream of the talk. The livestream will go to our YouTube, FB, Twitch and Twitter. We are doing this in an attempt to have more engagement. We will then use the audio recording to build the podcast out.

We redid our Social Media process as well and we will continue to tweak this throughout the year.

We signed up for the Hire Vets Medallion program. https://www.hirevets.gov/ It is a program that recognizes you if you meet certain criteria in hiring Veterans.  

We had a great meeting with Daniel Nadel https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcnadel/ of BlackRock  https://www.blackrock.com/ He is also a Veteran and we talked about challenges Veterans face when they transition. His own transition from the Army to Blackrock and how building cavnessHR is going for me.