About a year ago, my business partner joined an industry peer group: HTG. Both of us had been members of the Young Entrepreneur's Organization. His group disolved and mine defected. He decided to join HTG to get a different peer experience. In YEO, the commonality is business size and geography. Everyone is local but works in a non-competing industry. In HTG, everyone is geographically separated but works in the Computer Network Consulting industry.

Last week was the fourth quarterly meeting of Rob's group, and he wanted me to attend with him. I had a blast! I'm a fairly gregarious person. I like meeting new people and I believe everyone has something to teach me. It's that curiousity about people that makes my job of supporting the Information Technology of many Indianapolis small businesses appealing to me. I get to learn how businesses in different industries operate. But I digress. At the HTG meeting, the owners of 12 IT support services companies spent two days talking to each other about their businesses.

Two things struck me. We are on a par with the companies that are most professional in our industry, and none of us has found the silver bullet or secret sauce that will allow us to revolutionize small business computer outsourcing. Both were reassuring revelations. I appreciate the challenge of running my little Indianapolis Information Technology company. If there were a cookbook, I'd want to treat it like all the other instruction manuals I get.