This Week In Business: One Person Edition

Sometimes, all it takes is one person to make a difference. This week, I salute that one person, and the many forms they came in:

My friend Matt and I had one person sign up for our workshop…and hopefully more to come.
We took the plunge and Matt and I went forward with our presentation idea. We reserved the room. We advertised the presentation to our networks. We bought the projector and screen (nothing like the thrill and terror of spending $850 in 5 minutes). I began to panic this week when no one was signing up. Did we charge too much? Was it too early to hope for more enthusiasm? Did we schedule this workshop the wrong time of year?

And just when I was second guessing the whole thing, someone signed up. And paid. Insert sigh of relief here.

Here’s hoping for a few more participants. For more information or to sign up yourself, click here.

I’ll be presenting to the Deer Isle-Stonington Chamber of Commerce, and as part of the Schoodic Arts Festival this summer.
Based on my Ellsworth Chamber presentation, I booked two more speaking gigs for the coming months.

This Week In Business: Oh Wait, There’s More Edition

Remember last week when I had the brilliant idea of offering a workshop with my friend Matt? Well turns out planning events takes, um, planning.

This week, I learned there’s always a little more to something than we expect there to be. Here’s what happened so far this week:

The workshop had multiple details to iron out.
First of all, Matt and I realized that neither of us have a projector. With this realization came more questions: Which projector do we buy? Are there any on CraigsList? What about people we know who might have one? Which one of us should buy it? You can see what I mean.

Then there was the whole “How are we going to accept payments?” issue. Which one of us is talking about what? What if people don’t have laptops? What’s the internet connection like at our venue? Oh, and what are we going to call this workshop anyway?

These Two Weeks In Business: The Great Idea Edition

Do you even have an idea, and wonder “Why haven’t I thought of this before?”

Sometimes inspiration strikes when you least expect it, and then actually works out. Here’s what happened the last two weeks at BEC:

I had an idea for a workshop.
One of the littler known things about me is that I have a teaching certification, and I really do miss helping people learn things.

It was while I was sitting in a talk about websites that I had an idea about how I could combine teaching with what I’m doing now. What if I gave a class to help people set up a blog?

Partnering with my much more tech-oriented friend Matt, he could give the technology portion of the talk (how to install Wordpress on your domain name, basic setup, etc.) and I could do the content part (what to put on the blog/website, how to promote it once it’s set up). We would help registrants of the class buy their domain names and hosting the week before so that the day the class met, we could actually set up the website/blog. Charging $50/person would allow us to pay for our time and the room and give those just starting out a chance to have a website on their own domain in just a few short hours of work.

Matt is down for it and we have a venue…More on the progress of all this next week. In the meantime, let me know if you have any interest in attending.

After the talk, I answered people's questions and even had time for a few clever staged photographs.

I gave a presentation to the Ellsworth Chamber of Commerce.
It turns out that double the amount of people registered for my talk about social media. I was a bit worried about getting through my material and also being able to answer questions so I tightened up my presentation. The other good thing was some of the people who attended gave me an idea of what they’d like to ask me, and the Chamber director was kind enough to send me a list of those who registered.

This Week In Business: The Roll With The Punches Edition

There are some weeks where it seems that you get a lot done but it all seems like small and unrelated things keep coming up for you to deal with? That was this week at Breaking Even Communications. Good news is it was all pretty manageable.

Here are a few things that happened this week:

Forgetting to do something finally made me try Basecamp project management software.

Project management is one of those things you always mean to do, like cleaning your bathtub. All it takes is one metaphorical slip to finally make you get on your hands and knees. Yup, I finally forgot to do something so it was finally time to manage the details of these different projects at BEC.

I’ve tried a few different free or cheap project management software options only to find something missing. I finally decided to try out Basecamp, which is one of if not the most popular project management software online that will end up costing me around $50 a month if I decide I like it.

This Week In Business: The Mess Up Edition

Those on Facebook know that I went to a talk this week where one of the presenters implied that one person companies were less responsive and legit then larger businesses. I like to think I’m fairly responsive, but the death of my dog last week did slow my capacity greatly, so maybe he was a little right. My company limit is, at this point anyway, how hard I can work, but larger companies are also limited by how hard they can legally make their employees work. I think it all comes out in the wash; there are advantages to both large and small.
So it was back to full capacity at Breaking Even Communications this week, but I know I’ll spend the next few weeks catching up completely. Here’s what’s going on:

Marketing Monday: Goop

Editor’s Note: Thank you all for your kind condolences about the death of my dog. I appreciate your compassion, and am happy to report that I am feeling much better this week. Many thanks.
Know an individual or business doing something cool to promote themselves online? Let me know about it and they might be featured as part of Marketing Monday!
Goop's front page. Flash driven and a little vague (bad) but graphic and simple (good).
I’d first of all like to keep this blog a positive one. There are so many people doing so many good things online, to promote their business or otherwise.
Today, I wanted to review Gwyneth Paltrow’s website called Goop. It’s mission is to ‘nurture the inner aspect’ and is supposed to be about things in Gwenyth Paltrow’s life.
Recently, her post about a New Year’s cleanse recieved some media attention at both Nerve and Huffington Post and just this past weekend, the site came up in conversation over lunch with two of my friends in the media.
The only reason this website seems to work is because it belongs to Gwenyth Paltrow. I haven’t found anyone who ‘gets it’.

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