If you don't know where you're going, any road can take you there.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
What is a guide?
First question I get when I mention the name of this blog and business is almost always "What do you mean by guide?"
True, guide is an ambiguous term, but the gist of each definition is similar at the core.
"Do you mean like TV Guide? Or more like the dotted line on a piece of paper that shows you where to cut with scissors?"
Well, kind of both, but not really either. And, high five if you know what TV Guide was. Think of me more as a mountain guide, only for business and tech projects. Someone who knows their way around, has a satchel full of relevant skills, and offers a degree of enligntenment while helping you get from point A to point B.
"Ahh, I get it now. Cool."
Qualifications
If you've ever been on a guided hike or tour of any kind, you may have noticed that all guides are different. Personality and likeability are both huge contributors to the impression this type of guide leaves behind. Same goes for a business and tech guide.
But, in addition to a congeniality, quality guides all share most (if not all) of the following traits:
- Deep knowledge of and familiarity with the local terrain & conditions. For a mountain guide, this means the mountains. For a technology, startup, and small/medium business guide like me, the terrain is the evolving landscape of these bodies of knowledge.
- Broad set of useful and relevant skills.
- Specialized training.
- Active or recent practitioner in the field of guidance.
- The time, interest, and talent to help others.
- Reliability and trustworthiness. Someone who will warn you about dangers like Avalanches and who will be there to help you out of a jam when you need it.
A valuable guide has the background and resources at hand to help you efficiently traverse your chosen landscape.
What kind of projects?
At the present moment, I'm either presently or highly interested in working on projects that involve:
- Creative problem solving and app dev as problem solving
- Business technology application strategy, design, and production
- Consumer behavior and marketing insight
- New business venture planning, strategy and implementation
- Technology project management
- Providing a bridge between design and tech
- Full-stack dashboarding for data analysis, business statistics and regression models, and financial ratio visualization.
- Qualitative and sentiment collection and analysis (opinion mining) for decision making
Who am I?
My name is Brian Kerr. I'm a business technology specialist with self-motivated entrepreneurial inclinations and informed interests in niche marketing, consumer behavior, and branding.
I started coding websites in pure HTML and CSS back in the stone age because I wanted to code my own websites. I later learned object oriented programming after reading a quote somewhere that said something like "We don't need more programmers. We need more people across disciplines with diverse backgrounds who know how to code."
A business owner, I'm actively working on a business management application designed for organizations that reach consumers with multiple brands to sell both bespoke and standard goods at wholesale and retail. My goal is to automate what should be automated and to enable humans to efficiently do the things that people can still do better than bots and code.
This short (4 minute) video about one part of my custom management app will give you a quick look into what I've been up to lately.
I'm a US citizen living and working in Chicago, Illinois. I've also lived in New Hampshire, Pittsburgh, and Georgia.
Skills, Experience & Qualifications
- 10+ years as a small business owner
- Web app developer actively coding in React and Python with modern HTML/CSS/JS proficiency
- Currently focusing on business web apps that use GatsbyJS on the frontend and Django on the backend, connected with graphql. I'm also experienced with the dev ops skills required to launch and maintain such apps in the cloud.
- Developed, maintained, and retired multiple websites for personal brands and on a contract basis
- Knowledgeable and experienced with common CMS tech: Wordpress (with WooCommerce), Joomla, Drupal, etc.
- Experienced with common accounting software and knowledgeable about financial and managerial accounting principles
- Creator of numerous brands and business plans
- Avid writer
- Knowledge and expertise with most applications in Adobe Creative Cloud
- DIY technology enthusiast and proponent
- Artistically creative and human focused with a self-designed BA with deep studies in Music, Film/Video and Social Sciences from Columbia College Chicago
- Knowledgeable business professional with an MBA from Northeastern Illinois University
- Perpetual udemy student. Always digging for knowledge and exploring concepts for its practical use.
Hire Brian Kerr
I'm actively looking for work. Please find me on LinkedIn or direct chat with me on reddit at u/guideprojects if you have any leads or opportunities.
Thanks for visiting Guide Projects!