This Week In Business: Back To It Edition

Coming back from trip is always interesting, especially realized you have agreed to housesit the week immediately following your return. This makes me glad I invested some time last week making my business more mobile!
Here’s what else I haven’t been up to, you know, besides driving hundreds of miles.
I’ve given myself much more reading to do by joining some LinkedIn groups.
LinkedIn is a professional social networking website but what I’ve heard from most of its users is that its power lies in the groups. Various LinkedIn groups have been set up around geographic location, occupation, or even hobbies.

This Week In Business: The Galavanting Edition

This week was an unusual one for me. I had a friend visiting from London the past five days and yesterday, I flew to Baltimore for my friend’s wedding Saturday. Being on the road a lot allowed me to work on making my business a bit more mobile. Here’s a little of what I did this week besides have fun playing tourist:
I got and set up my new laptop.
After hearing so much about Macs (and the fact that about half my clients are using them), I decided the only way to get proficient with them was to get one and learn with it. My MacBook Pro is quite slick and is allowing me to begin this first draft in the lobby of my hotel while I wait for my ride to show up.

This Week In Business: The Road Trip Edition

I didn't want to be the lame person at the conference taking photos but I allowed myself to be the lame person at the sushi restaurant getting their photo taken. Oh bento!This week, I’ve driven at least 500 miles, 400 of which was to attend a cool conference in the hip city of Portland. Here’s what’s new on the business front:

I went to a social media conference and networked my butt off.
I (and about 200 other people) attended the Social FTW Media Conference in Portland Maine on Wednesday (hence the lack of posts the last couple days). I learned a little and mostly found it was fun to 1) meet people in real life who I’m ‘friends’ with on the internet and 2) feel like I actually understand social media and how and why businesses should use it. I certainly learned some cool stuff to take home but it’s always nice to know you might actually be good at what you do….Also nice to get to Portland and spend time with friends!

For those of you who want to continue the networking (I certainly do!) check out #ftw09 on Twitter and/or check out the Flyte blog. There’s also this article on the event via the NXT and this one via Maine Business.

This Week In Business: Great Idea Edition

Some weeks are more inspired than others, and this one certainly was filled with good ideas and productive conversations. Here’s some of what happened:

I had a great idea and decided I deserved to make money off of it.

I’ve been working with a web developer on a project when she showed me her pet website. I think she has a great product which would be perfect for one of my clients if she repackaged it and came up with a price. I told her about it over Gmail chat. She asked me to make the introduction.

The old, more passive Nicole would have just done so, wondering why my taking the time to help people out never paid off.

The new Nicole tried a new approach.

This Week In Business: Bazillion Conference Calls Edition

I can’t tell you how many conference calls I’ve been in on in the last week. Sometimes it feels like I’m spending a lot more time checking on things than actually doing things. Conference calls are to small business owners, however, what meetings are to employees: necessary evils that are actually, if done right, more productive than participants think initially. Here’s what else happened this week:

I talked with a web design company about subcontracting, and they are going to go for it.
This week, there’s even more evidence that you should do a good job no matter where you work or what you do.

So I work at an inn part time. My internet savy (and much more detail-oriented) friends pointed out to me that the home page of the inn’s website said “Check out our spring packages!” in August. Gulp.

This Week In Business: Tough Love

Ideally, we all want feedback. We just want it to be good most of the time.

Sometimes though, a business has to be able to listen to honest negative feedback and step back from what they are doing to improve. And that is what I learned, or perhaps more accurately re-learned, this week.

Anything worth doing worth doing well? I hope so... because my video still isn't ready!

I got honest feedback about my video, and I’ll have to reshoot portions of it. This is discouraging but good.

I pushed through and mostly finished the video for my site, or so I thought.

Something about it though didn’t seem quite right. So I emailed it to one of my most critical but kind friends. He called me half an hour later.

After some small talk, I asked, “So how was it?”

Pause. “You aren’t going to like this.” he warned, taking in a deep breath.

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