Greetings Folks,

I had what you might call a bit of a setback in both my personal and professional life a couple of weeks ago. My friend and business partner, Will Hadly, unexpectedly passed away on Father's Day from what the doctors called a heart "anomaly" ( which means they don't know what exactly happened ).

It's taken me quite a while to make up my mind on whether or not I should even post such an announcement on my blog, but I finally reasoned that some of the people in the CRM and/or Small Business community that knew Will may not have heard of his passing. If you are one of those people and would like more information, please contact me off-line.

Needless to say, this event was quite a shock to all of us who knew him and speaking for the majority of those folks, he will be sorely missed. Not a day goes by that I don't think of at least one thing that I need to tell him about some obscure factoid that I just ran across or get his opinion on some wild-ass idea that popped into my head.

Will and I had a rather complicated business relationship. On one level, I was merely one of the consulting bodies he used to fulfill customer engagements. On a higher level, we were developing a combined practice to focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM - and having a blast doing it. Great plans were in the works and we were making excellent headway into the local ( and even national market ) expounding on the benefits and features of CRM 3.0.

Will had been nominated by our buddy Larry Lentz to become a CRM MVP and should he have hung around till July 1st, he would have been given the honor of accepting that assignment. To top even that event, we had been working, studying, and testing and as of the week of his death, had finally achieved Gold Partner status in the Microsoft Partner program.

We pretty much had the world divided into equal parts of optimism and pessimism. Me being the optimist, he being the pessimist. [ this is the part of the program where my friends fall out of their chairs upon reading this - and wondering about my change of state. :) ] This allowed us to cover most bases associated with any problem we ran into and is what made us such a good team. That sounding board and reality check will be sorely missed.

I was watching the Rock Honors on VH1 a couple of weeks ago and they had Paul Rodgers [from Bad Company] fronting Queen as they did a salute to Freddy Mercury with the song: The Show Must Go On. It was very cool and very moving - which is the reason for me selecting that phrase for the title of this entry.

The show must go on. No matter how difficult, sad, disorienting, or painful it may be.

As mentioned, Will and I had great plans and grand ideals about how to transform current and new customers with CRM 3.0 and I don't exactly intend to just throw that all away. Doing so would simply be a waste of time and energy and do no one, living or dead, any good. So, I will indeed endeavor to proceed down the provided path that we had both worked so hard to construct.

Stay tuned as I finish up the pile of CRM-related articles I have on my list as well as some free and commercial CRM add-ons that will be released in the next few months.

Thanks, Mitch