Home » success
Category Archives: success
The Best Laid Plans
The Best Laid Plans (or Drop Back Ten Yards and Punt)
“Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.” Rene Descartes
“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” Herm Albright
Many business owners have plans. You can have a business plan, you can have action steps, and you can have detailed descriptions for every aspect of your business. Sometimes, of course, things don’t go as planned. I have two examples from different business owners I know that had “glitches” in the past week and how they overcame these.
I’m in a Mastermind group run by Michelle Smith at Z and B Consulting. We meet once a month for this group, and we were scheduled to meet on February 2, 2015. A few days before our scheduled meeting Michelle looked at the weather forecast and, well, the forecast didn’t look real pretty. As you can see from the attached photo (or from the photos many of my friends took out of their window over the weekend), it does look REAL PRETTY – but not very travel friendly.
Michelle, using the information she had available, decided that our monthly “meeting” would be held “virtually” using Fuze. I look forward to seeing and working with this fabulous group of people every month.
Meanwhile, in a completely different corner of the country (where snow is never an issue), another friend was preparing for a client call. This woman works with many of her clients virtually so often all she needs is a quiet place (like her home office) and a good Internet connection.
Of course, if she decides to upgrade her service (to BETTER help her fabulous clients) and there’s a “glitch” with the upgrade, this leaves no Internet connection for her client call (which she records as part of her best practices).
After discovering that the issue was with the upgrade, she managed to negotiate a free cellular Hotspot connection until the upgrade was completed on Tuesday.
We’re all going to run into glitches; let’s hope we all handle them as well as these two business women.
Photo courtesy of Amanda Wu at Amanda Wu, Photography, Copyright 2015
RELATED ARTICLE
Yesterday I met a new person at a coaching event, and glanced at her blog. One of her articles:
Mistakes … Or Are They? Tashony Nalyse at tashonyalyse.com
I guess sometimes we all need a lesson.
How Can I Find You
When I’m looking for help, whether it be a plumber, a graphic artist, or an oral surgeon, I am the type of person to do background research before making a phone call. If I’m going to be spending my hard-earned money with you, I want to know that you are a knowledgeable and trustworthy businessperson.
“Back in the day” if you wanted to know about businesses, you asked neighbors, friends, and coworkers, or you looked in the Yellow Pages. Now if you want to know about a business, you ask neighbors, friends, and coworkers — except you don’t actually “ask” them in person; you can reach all of your friends, neighbors, and coworkers with one Facebook post. (more…)
What Stays The Same
English: Skidmore College Artstor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This morning I was reading the news about a “Gigafactory” that the auto company Tesla will be building by 2020. This is being designed to reduce the costs of the batteries in electric cars. If you’re interested, you can find out more about this in the “Related Articles” section. Earlier this week there was an announcement about the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute in Chicago (on Goose Island).
We see the huge changes happening in technology in our time (I mean seriously, a refrigerator-sized 3D printer – how cool is that?) We’re looking at these changes on spaceship Earth, traveling at 108,000 km/h. It can, at times, make it seem a little hard to keep up.
Today I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the things that don’t change. (more…)
Forming a Social Media Success Plan – Step 1
There are 7 steps to building a successful social media platform. During the next few weeks we will be going over these steps one at a time.
The steps are:
- Create a Vision
- Set Strategic Goals
- Find Your Social Media Voice (Persona)
- Build Your Social Media Platform
- Create a Publishing Plan
- Build Your Tribe (Community)
- Evaluate Your Results
This week we’ll talk about creating your vision. Why do you need a vision? “When there is no vision, the people perish.” – Psalm 29:18. In order to reach your full potential, you need to know where you’re going.
With that in mind, here are a few questions you need to ask yourself: (more…)