“There has been a change in plans…”

With that my afternoon was derailed and I accomplished about half what I would have if I had stayed on purpose with my head down plunking away on the computer.

The Most Productive Activity of the Day

So what was the most productive activity of the day?

Two discussions with other entrepreneurs because both were insightful and are resulting in collaborative benefits.

For one, I have a referral that will help both business owners–for the other, we have already collaborated on some livestream events but what I learned was that she has some crazy skill sets I didn’t know about until yesterday.

One of the benefits of real connections and conversations are discoveries of potential referrals or strategic alliances.

Although these things might not pan out right away, they certainly were valuable.

Communication & Clarity

One of the reasons I closed my business was that many of the clients I was working with were small businesses and entrepreneurs who had solid businesses but were not strategic. I had the wrong clients.

This meant that they often had a little bit of information and usually were not comfortable letting go of tasks to leverage their time more effectively.

Many were too focused on the minor details and wanted explanations that took valuable time away from actual implementation.

A good book to read if you want to learn more about this is the E-myth Revisited (Link to my Amazon store)

The other frustrating piece was, that in my role, it was not my job to educate and explain the nuances and complexities of integrated marketing–it was to get the phone to ring and get new customers, clients or patients through the door.

Anyway, my point is that I left context switching a while back so when I suddenly was thrust in the middle of it at a business–it felt chaotic.

You see, every time you make a shift, it drastically declines your productive and forward momentum.

The upside to that meeting? I set specific days of availability and clarified project priorities.

The downside? Being in the environment without my tools, with constant interruptions and multiple redirects reduced productivity greatly.

Of course this is just an observation and not my judgement call for the firm but it illustrated that my decision to not put myself in that environment was a better choice for the fastest and most productive results.

Perhaps I should share a bunch of resources? Let me know if that would be helpful…

Lessons Learned

Because I was up leveling my business relationships over the past three years my business was on a trajectory to success until I began to move from start up to ramp up after the first quarter of 2016.

I’ll talk about the impact of the 90 Day Year a bit more later. (See my first 90 Day Year review here to catch part of the journey and the business growth I experienced.)

What happened in 2016 was that the instability of the new software, the glitches and the extra time spent in mitigation to prevent further issues ended up being a good thing.

Why? Because when I found another group and jumped in to move forward with their software, my experience helped me make the decision to jump out quickly rather than invest and waste more time and money before the end of the first quarter of 2017.

Right now I see that my explorations are giving me additional experiences and better ability to make faster decisions as  I get better at discerning what I might actually invest more time and energy into.

Technology Aids

Although I really don’t want to continue to be a techy, I do have that skill set, and in my quest to find the best options for the local business I pondered how it is like card playing or gambling. (I talk about that in the livestream today jump over using the link at the end of this post.)

Google withholds data so you have to find other options to evaluate results more effectively.

Fortunately, I purchased software a few years ago that meant what would have taken hours and hours of deciphering and analyzing instead reduced the time down to a couple of days worth of research.

Now it is a matter of doing some verification and taking the time to create a hierarchy of terms for the best results.

Because I discovered that the online properties were missing some vital pieces, I anticipate seeing some great results in a short amount of time.

One of the discoveries I made in my research was that the designers failed to activate analytics on the backend–which is a horrible mistake because without the data to evaluate, how would they know what needed to change?

Day 5…

Although I am running a day behind on updates, I did have an early am coffee chat with another entrepreneur, I have a collaborative idea that I think could be mutually beneficial to us. Another follow up and something to test as I outline things.

Stay tuned…comments are open for a day so if you miss out, jump over to Facebook to continue the conversation.