Adam Dorfman & DMC Atlanta

Everyone's 9/11 experience is burned into their memory. I thought I'd share my unique perspective. Ten years ago today I was stepping onto a plane at DC's National airport to fly home to Atlanta for Jane and Craig's wedding.  I was flying down early - Lara was flying down the next day.  We heard that "a plane hit the Pentagon," and everyone was visually pissed at the inconvenience that was going to be caused by, what we thought was, a private pilot's carelessness. We then started hearing that it was a commercial airliner. Having been in security for an hour, none of us had heard about New York.  The entire airport was evacuated, and we all walked, confused, across the bridge to Pentagon City, scrambling for cabs. Sprint's towers on top of the WTC had been destroyed knocking out much of the Northeast's cell service- and all lines were busy on what towers were active. I finally got into the back of a cab driven by a crying, confused gentl...

Parker on "PLACE" Working with my dog, Parker, over the last few weeks has reminded me that, sometimes, the more important we feel, and the more pride we take in our work, the happier we are. As my daughter has become more mobile and capable, Parker has been acting out (namely, peeing all over the basement)-- frustrating the family. It took me a few weeks to realize that I was the problem, not him!   I was so caught up in trying to balance my roles: husband, father, coach, business owner --  that I forgot to encourage my dog to do what he was DESIGNED to do -- WORK! Without constant challenge, he was getting bored and feeling useless -- leading to destructive behavior. Now that we are challenging his mind and teaching him new commands, he is feeling renewed, and the destructive behavior has stopped.   No surprise -- it got me thinking about my work. It reminded me that, as a coach who cares about his players, it is important for their own well-being to hold the tea...

I suck at lullabies.  Not really something I'm ashamed of or upset about, just kind of a fact. I have many other fine skills. Lullabies just don't happen to be one of them. I'm fun, outgoing, personable, and, overall, a reasonably good dude. HOWEVER - Anyone who knows me and my personality knows that, by nature, I'm not exactly what one would call "low-key."  In other words - my effect on the people around me is less than soothing. Even when I try to sing them to my one year old, the outcome is less than desirable.  She wants to get up and play. She climbs to her mom. She jumps up and down.  She does algebra.  You get the picture.  The one thing she absolutely does not want to do is, as Samuel L. Jackson or Adam Mansbach might say, Go the F to Sleep . Deb Talan ( www.theweepies.com ) does not suck at lullabies.  In fact, whether she means to be or not, she is, in my opinion, the world champion of them. I've been listening to Steve and D...

Thanks to my friend John’s decision to get married (or, rather, his fiancée’s acceptance), I had the opportunity to spend the past weekend with a group of 10 guys on Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast.   The trip was dubbed the “old guy bachelor party” and, at one point, “the lamest bachelor party of all time – in a really good way.” Most of us are married and, in terms of things one would regularly be excited to do at a bachelor party, have been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, and returned it because it just didn’t fit quite right. Rather than conversations about strippers and conquests, rather than tall tales about what we were going to do, we talked about our wives, kids, futures and even exchanged recipes for cocktails and guacamole. Thanks to hours of semi-lucid conversations with friends – good friends – friends who want to see each other be better men – I made an extremely uncharacteristic decision that I am fairly certain made a real difference in my life. I went surfing ...

2011 marks our third year as a sponsor for Songs for Kids Foundation's annual "500 Songs for Kids" event, and it couldn't have gone better! We had over 40 people from our team show up for the event on Saturday, April 30th! At DMC, we embrace the "Work Hard, Play Hard" philosophy and have a strong focus on giving back to the community.  "500 Songs" is always a major high point in our year.  As a former professional musician, it's a cause that is close to my heart.  Music really does have an incredible power to bring people together and to heal.  In addition to myself and my sister, Stef Dorfman, two of our other team members - Randall Crane and Jeremy Stegall also participated by performing at the event. Please take some time to learn a little bit about Songs for Kids, a non profit that arranges for musicians to visit terminally ill children in hospitals throughout Atlanta. www.songsforkidsfoundation.org . Jeremy's Band - "Oper...

In the spirit of the season, we're moving some of our eggs to a new basket. One of my mentors told me, repeatedly, that "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten."  I guess she had to repeat it because my skull is 99% concrete, about 3 inches thick, and houses a tiny little brain that, by design, doesn't particularly care for change. I'll start by saying that I'm extremely happy with what we've always gotten, but I want more. Lots more. Well, for the last (almost) nine years, I have run a company that does B2B Marketing & Sales on an outsourced basis for large Office Supply and Telecommunications companies.  We've even managed to get pretty darn good at it - acquiring over 75000 new accounts and expanding to have offices all over the US. Because of our track record, we've been approached over the years to take on new clients.  We have succeeded with some, failed with other, an...

So I’m going to begin my blog by stating that I never thought I’d have a blog.   I’m not sure why, maybe it’s that the word itself –BLOG—sounds either like a euphemism for pooping or some kind of tree-dwelling slug.   Or perhaps it is based on my initial notion that a blog is nothing more than an online diary, a place for the artsy-for-artsy’s-sake to express their distrust for the “establishment,” “corporations,” “the man,” or any other in a bevy of often-airquoted words that are misused by people who have an unfounded distaste or distrust for anyone who has achieved more than they have. I was wrong. In the last several months, I’ve learned more from BLOGS than from newspapers, online articles from reputable sources, and books combined. The ability to update in real-time, to face today’s issues head-on, and to voice an opinion, realization, or brilliant idea as soon as it occurs is a true miracle of science. Plus, I get to use my English degree....