Short, provocative,

word-crafted questions

with double meanings

that make you smile

 are what sell best! BUT

they’re not waiting

to jump out

of your closet!

At the risk of looking like one of those idiotic email FWDs written by “anonymous,” here are some inspiring examples of great double-entendre marketing theme line questions. . .

• GETTING ENOUGH? (Delaware Sleep Disorder Centers)

• GOT MILK? (Who doesn’t remember the white moustaches?) 

• WHERE’S THE BEEF? (Years later, we still laugh at that one!) 

• ARE YOU BREATHING? (Stress management exercise for businesspeople and healthcare professionals)

• CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? (Verizon has us still saying this with every static crackle)

• IS IT IN YOU? (Yup, Gatorade) 

• MOUSE GOT YOUR WRIST? (Safe-Zone Stop-wrist-pain brace for computer operators)

Add your own favorites: ____________________________________

Yes, fun stuff, and hopefully inspiring. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these short sweet nothings, these provocative, punchy few words of flair do not fall from the sky.

Neither do they get dreamed up by in-house staff people who write coherent emails, business reports and plans, even news releases, church bulletins, or local fundraising flyers (or well-intentioned poetry-writing relatives with Fine Arts degrees who want to save you money).

Great headlines that slam out great short questions are the product of many years of studying and understanding consumer psychology, consumer behavior, emotional buying triggers, and professional advertising and marketing writing. That kind of expertise costs money.

It’s your call! Not every business owner or entrepreneur wants to sell products or services by identifying them and/or the brand name with a custom-created household expression. But if you do, you can’t cut corners. Top-notch sales messages sell. The exceptional ones can literally bury the competition.

Each of the examples cited above took at least a month (and probably longer) of intensive focus and concentration.

Contrary to auto dealership mentality, words that sell are not seat-of-the-pants, knee-jerk, last-minute compositions. Even with a professional marketing writer, substantial time is required to experience a process of what I call “total immersion.”

A record-sales campaign I once produced for Great Western Wine and Champagne came only after a three-month process of picking grapes, working in the winery, giving tourists tours, cleaning the vats (a time-limit situation to avoid passing out from the fumes!), and learning about processing equipment and the aging process..

I met with the glass bottle manufacturers, the cork people, the wire and foil wrapper makers, the label makers, the glue makers; I worked on the loading dock, in the front office, and out in the field with the sales reps; learning the history of wine and how the master winemakers grafted vines together to create varietals.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you she or he can write you sales-winning words without becoming thoroughly engaged with every level of your business. It doesn’t happen, even for a 2, 3, 4, or 5-word theme question or 7-word branding line.

Award-winning author/journalist Malcolm Gladwell is the epitome of this thinking. To write about John Kennedy, Jr’s piloting death plunge into the ocean at Nantucket, he hired a pilot to fly him to the same spot and dive. When you’re seeking big-time copy, find someone with big-time experience who’s willing and anxious to dive!

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Hal@Businessworks.US

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

As a writer, designer, teacher, 

artist, architect, landscaper,

jewelry-maker, stylist or stage

performer, if you’re not

risking . . . you’re not

being honest!

With special thanks to author Mary DeMuth for the three great words: “Risk being unliked” which were featured in her article, “A Smart Approach to MEMOIR” in the June 2011 issue of The WRITER.

Those of us who create for a living, who own, operate, or manage creative businesses understand immediately what the “Risk being unliked” message is all about. And does it apply to professional selling too? Absolutely.

Whether we create with computers or paint brushes; with crafts supplies, hair, or music; with classrooms or pen and paper, or with the ways we communicate our sales messages, we must –as Ms. DeMuth so aptly puts it– “Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer,” she says, “you have a moral obligation to do this.”

I propose that truth-telling applies to all businesses, even the least creative.

When your focus, your branding, your website, your messages, your employees, and most importantly YOU are all about telling the truth as you understand it, you are setting yourself up to cultivate strengthened long-term high-trust relationships. Those who unlike you for it are not those you want to deal with anyway.

Honesty is (still) the best policy!

I’m not suggesting any limitations here. What’s the best way to express this idea to people who earn their keep with their creative talents? Could there be any greater and more meaningful statement than the following six words from Shakespeare?:

To thine own self be true.

When you believe heart and soul that the line, the dimension, the color, the musical note, the arrangement, the word choice, the emphasis is what your gut, your intuitive experience, says it needs to be, go with it and don’t waste time worrying about winning a popularity contest. People will judge your authenticity, not your masks or apologies.

For ALL business pursuits, not fibbing to or misleading customers, employees, associates, partners, referrers, investors, professional advisors,  lenders, and the various communities you serve is just one chapter of your build-a-better-business book. Leadership transparency is another. Honoring commitments is yet a third. 

Delivering exactly what you say you’re going to deliver –and more– exactly when you say you’re going to deliver it is the standard by which others will continuously measure your business performance.

There’s risk involved in all of this, but as with the mark of true entrepreneurship, the risk is always a reasonable one. We’re not talking about harnessing creative spirit here. In fact, if anything, the suggestion is to set it free, and to recognize that the results produced by an honest free spirit outperform those born of smoke and mirrors.

Don’t throw the tending to details, business conduct, and tight-fisted money management out with the baby’s bathwater simply for the sake of being more expressive in the products, services, and ideas you create. But do stop cowering away from being straight-ahead with your work and with all those you come into contact with every day.

Your behavior is of course your choice. Where do you think your reputation comes from?                                            

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

As a national book award-winning author, a national marketing award-winner, and two-time university Professor-of-the-Year award winner, I can deliver the sales you want. 

Don’t believe it!

But if I tell you that I’ve created client programs that have delivered over $1 billion in sales, believe it! (Actually, all of the above is true. But if it’s sales increases you seek, “sales produced” is all that really matters, right?)

I am a writer so (for more than thirty years) I read approximately 1.5 books a week. Fiction. Nonfiction. You name it. I have my favorite books and authors, but I am always trying out new ones.

I rarely if ever choose to do any kinds of “reviews” on this blog, but —and I really should know better by now as I look back at bogus past big-name “Prize” recipients like Carter, Gore, and Obama-– when a Nobel or  Pulitzer Prize winner of any kind comes along, I am still (unfortunately) mainstream-media-conditioned to snap to attention.

Hence, to make a business point at the conclusion of this post, here is my 100% subjective review of Pulitzer Prize-winning book TINKERS by Paul Harding, MFA (who taught writing at Harvard and The University of Iowa):

First of all, considering that the speed of reading this meager (183-page) book could be equated with underwater page-turning, and that the torture of the story offered –which literally tells you how a clock is made when you simply want to know what time it is– Water-Boarding might have been a more fitting title.

If it doesn’t put you to sleep, or drown you in the author’s sweat (which he surely poured forth trying to polish and perfect every overkill shred of every word), it will make you so thoroughly depressed you’ll want to run to the nearest cliff to swan dive into the rocks below.

Even if your genes have been handed down from Socrates, you’ll be bored to tears at this writer’s heart-wrenching effort to draw you into a totally unremarkable story of death and dying.

If, by the way, the subject intrigues you, look up Elizabeth Kübler-Ross for a real education minus all the fluff.

But my advice? Don’t waste your time with TINKERS (or your $14.95/$16.95 in Canada) unless word craftsmanship and belabored descriptions get you excited.

If it’s a great read you’re looking for, you may rather want to go directly to Jed Rubenfeld, Nelson DeMille, Cormac McCarthy, Kent Haruf, or E. Annie Proulx.

Now, why is this like business? What does this have to do with entrepreneuring?

Lots of business service people out there sport big-name awards. But the odds are pretty good you’ll never relate to their missions. And, even if you do, they’re not likely to produce sales for you!

It’s probably a best bet to disregard what business elitists think, and direct your needs to those providers with real-life performance track-records.

If you’re brave enough to ask, I’ll be happy to tell you endless tales about creative groups, ad and PR agencies, marketing firms, management consultants, SEO “experts,” website designers, media moguls, and incompetent but well-intentioned relatives who have won major awards, charged a fortune in fees, and produced nothing!

Generally speaking, the classier and slicker the presentation (or book cover), the more award-conscious (as opposed to sales or productivity-conscious) a given provider tends to be.

As a business owner or manager, this translates to:

• Exercise extreme care when hiring outside consultant or service providers to make sure they are more committed to producing what you need than to serving their own pursuit of awards.

• Be careful about appearances. They are rarely what they seem.

• Ask for samples and examples. Put genuine effort into the screening process.

• Remember that awards of any kind are (like my review above) totally subjective. Sales are real, tangible, and measurable.

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Businesses, like people, get

their faces locked in to 

negative expressions  

You think those who are considering a purchase of your goods or services are not paying attention to how the “package” of your business facade is wrapped? You think it doesn’t matter?

You think” the face of your business” has no power of suggestion? If you’re engaged in professional selling (who isn’t?), do you think no one notices your facial expressions? (You do of course know they’re contagious?)

Try this one.

I’m going to give you a single word that sums up my total customer experience at a business I visited recently. It was something that the receptionist did.

And you will likely do the exact same thing the minute you read this word, which should –all by itself– be a  clear enough demonstration that every business “face” communicates.

My guess is that odds are within one minute, you’ll be hooked.

You will prove to yourself that the power of suggestion is far from imaginary. Are you ready? Okay:

Read the following word and think about it for five seconds. 

Ready?

Here it is: YAWN 

Think about the word now for five seconds.

Well? If you didn’t yawn yourself, did you at least feel that queasy little tremor in the corners of your jaw where upper and lower teeth come together?

No? Well, maybe you just woke up, or just took some amphetamines or someone just put some ice down your back.

How about this word?: SMILE

                                                              

Who is “the face” of YOUR business? 

Does that person pass along smiles or stretch and yawn most of the day? (And, no, this is not intended as a corrective action seminar for air traffic controllers . . . who, by the way, it’s worth noting, get paid $160,000 a year to NOT sleep on the job; it’s stressful and requires special skills? So what! What about truck-driving and mothering!)

Similarly, a health food store clerk or medical clinic is hardly well represented by even the most smiling individual if she or he looks like a walking billboard for some local tattoo and body-piercing parlor. The face of the business is locked in a negative expression.

Credibility registers in the eyes of the beholder in less than ten seconds. There are no second first impressions.

So you get the WHO part of this, what about the WHAT part? What is “the face” of your business? I know of a physician’s office with an absolutely filthy-beyond-belief office front door. You need antiseptic wipes just to touch the handle. One pint of paint and a teaspoon of metal polish would do the job. It’s been that way for many years.

It probably goes without saying that this doctor is not considered the town’s gift to healthcare, and has been struggling financially for probably as long as the door has been hinged. The face of the business is locked in a negative expression.

If you’re in construction or landscaping and pull up to a prospective customer in a disgusting truck full of muck, don’t think your slightly lower estimate will land you work. The truck tells people that you’re a slob. People don’t hire slobs. The face of the business is locked in a negative expression.

Computer techies who can only communicate with their thumbs and say little more on the phone (if they answer it at all) than  “Uh” and “Huh?” OR who rattle out stuff about SEO and Mashables and Tweets to another business owner who doesn’t want to know how to make a clock when she asks what time it is, will not get hired. 

In this case —on the phone or on the screen– the face of the business is locked in a negative expression.

You have the key. It’s in your head. It’s called consciousness. Open minds open doors! 

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

C’mon . . .When was the last

time you ever remember 

in your whole entire life

having a “trillion”

of ANYthing????  

Have you been listening to all the politicians talk about budget-slashing? They must be kidding!

Hey, it’s definitely no joke the economic mess we’re in. And TRUTH? Truth is -no matter who says what– truth is that we’ve got to live with it all for at least another three years. It’ll take a year and a half or more just for the new White House to undo the reckless spending tangle that the great “Hope and Change” hero created.

Business Owners Beware!

If you own a business and you’re not already working at unseating the socialism plague that’s practically brought you to your knees, you must be part of that crowd that thinks it understands “trillions.” I just read somewhere that a million dollars a day every day since Jesus died wouldn’t even add up to close to a trillion dollars.

The deal is that you must protect your budget without tearing it out by the roots. Oh wait, that’s your hair. Well, the thing is that if your business budget isn’t bare bones yet, you may already be out of hair and roots!

Here’s an example of spending priorities

that smart business owners must consider:

• MARKETING — You should be spending money for a professional marketing or branding writer to create your sales messages, but you should NOT be spending money needlessly to get your messages out.

Maybe that sounds like a “Catch 22”? It’s not. There are plenty of ways to reach your target market effectively for free, but you’d better be saying something worthy of capturing attention, creating interest, stimulating desire, and bringing about action and satisfaction, or get back to your budget board and start all over!

• OVERHEAD — Of course you have to pay the mortgage or the rent, but can you sublet part or all the space to a business that operates when yours doesn’t? Many instructional program businesses operate in evening or weekend hours. Do you have extra space you don’t need that you can separate from your workspace?

A lumberyard office building barters one small corner of space to a moonlighting graphic designer who provides the lumber company with free brochure and flyer designs in exchange for the space, electricity, and computer hookup.

• PAYROLL —Maybe space-sharing’s not practical, but what about sharing people? A centralized reception area and receptionist can save two or three or four businesses money and afford to hire a hard-working quality employee.

There’s much to be said for the old entrepreneurial “incubator” days, where all kinds of services and workspaces were shared. These included common area receptionists, centralized booked-time conference rooms, cleaning supplies and maintenance services, delivery and fuel costs, security systems, office supplies. If you can think it, try it!

• PROFESSIONAL SERVICES — When did you ever meet an accountant or lawyer or consultant or creative service person who wouldn’t be please to offer a discount for two, two, two clients in one? (Oh, that was “mints”? Sorry.)  

This kind of arrangement is especially win-win when common elements or interests prevail. Adjoining physical therapy and occupational therapy offices that both require similar electronic medical forms maintenance for insurance coverage reimbursements. A publisher and designer who both need a copyright lawyer.

Dig out your imagination here. Do the railroad track warning thing: STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN. Look around at what you’re doing from the standpoint of sharing, bartering, co-sponsoring . . . and maybe you too can “slash a trillion” or so!

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Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Communicate. Communicate.

Communicate. Communicate. 

(Four times? Ah, yes, but repetition sells!)

There is no part of good communicating that beats good communicating! Yes, it takes longer. Yes, it’s more work. Yes it can be annoying (if you choose for it to be), but guess what? It is worth pursuing 100% of the time.

There is no part of good communicating

that beats good communicating!

Sure, you know all about the “listening 80% of the time and talking 20% of the time” stuff. And you know that one-way communicating is for radio, TV, and high physical risk situations.

You’re very aware of how important it is to communicate just the right amount of information — not too much or too little– in order to get the job done.

And you also no doubt know (but may have forgotten) that sometimes a W~H~I~S~P~E~R communicates better than a SHOUT! Oh, and of course you always try to offer and ask for examples to better understand or make a point, right? Right, and diagrams. Think of diagrams as little communications accuracy insurance policies.

So how hard do you listen? Human attention spans drift off in peaks and valleys. People often miss the most important points. This is even more pronounced and more frequent in phone conversations than in one-on-one exchanges.

And in case you thought putting it in writing helps, hmmm, look carefully at your last three emails or text messages!

When was the last time you were approached by a customer or employee or supplier who had input for you –regardless of how valuable or not you perceived it to be– and you pulled out a pen and pad (you do remember what pens and pads are?), and –as if you were a legitimate journalist (a stretch perhaps)– and actually took notes?

Let me get this down. Can you say that again?

What’s an example I can jot down?

Can you give me a resource to make note of that I can check out later?

Here, can you try to diagram that out for me on this pad so it’s easier for me to remember later?

Here’s what I wrote that I thought you just said; is it correct?

Just imagine being a customer or employee or supplier on the receiving end of a note taking boss who asks these kinds of questions. Do you think you might get more accurate initiatives and responses? Does it mean more work on your part? Of course! Will it take more time? Absolutely! Is it worth having clearer exchanges of information?

You don’t know how to explain the new note-taking you? How’s “I’m trying to improve my listening skills.”? Would that create havoc? Who knows, it might even prompt some increased admiration and respect. Maybe others will start doing the same thing? What have you got to lose? Miscommunication?

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Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

When the odds are

stacked against you

. . . change you!

You may not always be able to do something to change the odds, but you can always do something about changing yourself. Entrepreneurs are best at this.

Many online business entities and retail shopping club organizations (like CostCo and BJ’s) excel at transforming both the ways and the means with which they do business.

Re-inventing yourself may be the greatest of all-time survival tactics– befitting of small business and professional practice owners in tough economic times– and it beats trying to “sidestep” the odds — reality!

In case, you had some fool idea that the economy’s getting better, by the way, HA!

Reports today of findings by The Bureau of Economic Analysis are alarming to say the least.

They translate to the fact that one (1) out of every three (3) adult Americans now exists 100% on some form of government handouts of others’ hard-earned tax-dollars.

1 out of 3! Yikes! Why work?

This whole re-distribution of wealth thing isn’t such a bad idea. Let others work to support me so I can lay around watching TV. I never cared much about achieving my potential anyway.

Besides, America has a whole eleven percent more to go to be as bad off as the pathetic 44% welfare state of the UK. And we’ve even got free healthcare coming down the road. Imagine! Free everything! Ain’t Socialism great?

And we can just keep printing money in Washington and doling it out to all of us who need it so we can get our no-more-work-to-live entitlements, right?

Hey, if you’re visiting this blog, you are surely not among those I speak of. You have drive and ambition and a realistic sense of responsibility. You will do what you have to to stay out of that welfare mentality abyss. But we know the runaway fuel prices will send all other costs, including food, right through the roof.

So survival may mean giving serious consideration to re-inventing yourself. You’re a fine artist and no one is buying expensive art these days? Paint smaller, less-expensive pictures; do your own framing; try commercial design work; cartooning?

You’ve made a living as a management trainer, but companies think training programs today are an unnecessary expense. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, but you won’t win that battle.

Instead, switch gears and offer your skills as a consultant to strengthen and/or negotiate separation of partnerships; serve as a mentor for next-generation family business takeovers; teach adult school courses at the community college; throw in with an existing online training entity; write a guidebook.

You’ve always written stodgy business plans and annual reports. Set yourself free and use those skills to start writing website content and news releases.

I visited a religious items store today that has a packing/shipping business. It used to be a packing/shipping store that had a religious items business. Fuel costs are raising shipping rates and people are doing their own packing. And who doesn’t need religion? 

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If you’re not selling

your creations,

stop whining

about being hungry! 

You got music, art, writing, design, sculpting, dance, painting, acting, photography, and/or craft skills and you’re broke?

How is that? Because the world you’re trying to make money in is not a music, art, writing, design, sculpting, dance, painting, acting, photography, craft skills world, that’s why.

It’s a business world. Period.

If all you seek is to win posthumous awards and recognition, good luck and God speed (and I hope –in addition to your talents– that your billionaire grandmother left you a great deal of money). But, if you’re looking to make your creative talents make money, you’re going to have to step it up (or maybe take yourself down a notch!).

It’s a business world. Period. 

Will you have to prostitute your skills? Perhaps. Depends on your definition of “prostitute” (as a verb), but if you do feel like commercialization is a process of selling your soul, you might want to re-think the value structure you’ve saddled yourself with, and accept that payment for services is not always about the giving up of one’s spirit.

It is only within your realm of definition of the word, “prostitution” that you choose to accept for an act or creative product or service of yours to be what it is.

Be reminded, in other words, that

you choose your behavior.

When you can accept that truth, you will be able to stop torturing your self. You will free yourself to give up all the self-destructive attitudes you may harbor about having to trade off your creative talents for some project retainer or ongoing fee that you’ve considered unethical or unappreciative of your instinctive abilities.

Or, someone once told me she didn’t feel the stars were aligned for her to feel okay about getting paid for applying the purity of the innermost resources of her mind to a brand name.

She was not independently wealthy.

Instead of using her God-given talents to earn a living, I presume she’s now contributing to our nation’s misguided, deficit-draining, socialist agenda, collecting welfare and food stamps!  

Do you have to market and sell and publicize yourself and the work you produce? Yes. Or hire someone you trust who has those skills and is sensitive enough to your neurotic state to be your agent or rep and stand in the publicity spotlight for you. Easy to do? No. Not if you are truly gifted and struggling to acknowledge the need.

Keep in mind that successful marketing of creative talents and creative products takes great amounts of tenacity and networking and skill-sets that include public relations (events and news release coverage), branding (both you and your creativity), and business applications to Internet and social media avenues.

Don’t feel that you’re lowering your standards. Choose instead to see you are raising your odds for success.

The more you sell, the more you can command the integrity levels of work you deserve, but right now, it may be time to start affording to bring home more than junkfood, and get some nutrition on the table to feed that creative furnace.       

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

To and from work, are you

wide-eyed and bushy-tailed

… or in a trance-like state?

DOES IT MATTER? Well, does your job attitude matter? Your family attitude? What goes on with you in that little Twilight Zone commuting-to-and-fro time window? Are you looking and acting like you just stepped out of (or into) some weird, skin-crawling Steven King story? How does your daily commute impact your business? Career? Family?

Or, hey, maybe you’re hop-skip-jumping along in time to your happy whistling? (Hmmm, hard to remember the last time I heard someone whistle. Once it was commonplace, but now suggests serial-killer symptoms.) Or, no, I was, well, I was  going to substitute “humming” but that’s come to signal readiness for being committed, y’think?

I’m asking all these questions because I have been, alternatively: a tiger, a puppy-dog, and a zombie commuting to, from, and through a wide variety of career pursuits.

I’ve run the proverbial gamut of commuter vehicle experiences from choppers to car pools, and here’s some of what I found . . .

Years of Fortune 500 corporate client travels and commuter trains so jam-packed and smoke-filled, I often gave up a seat to stand, freezing, between the deafening, open-air train car connection spaces (an hour each way on those rare occasions when schedules were actually met), hanging on for dear life. And I won’t even mention the rain.

Ah, yes, and there was always at least one time when briefcase snaps failed or a coffee lid wasn’t secured!

Those enlightening death-defying train rides definitely fed appreciation like no other for the plastic suburbs and phony weekend-warrior neighbors.

I mean imagine racing home from the railroad station to screaming kids, barking dogs, complaints about dinner being cold and a mountain of bills. 

But, alas, those late arrival, go-getter young executives –after working long past punch-out time, in efforts to excel and earn more– often found that state of pandemonium a welcome greeting!

                                                       

In fact, it was almost a treat compared to straddling the clanking, jerking, bucklings that connected the stinking (slippery when wet) rail-cars after a stressful workday.

Then there were years of driving (and standing still on “expressways”) and tolls, bridges, bus fumes, and broken windshield wipers. I wonder how many hours wasted away waiting in lines and at traffic lights and in (cough!cough!cough!) claustrophobic tunnels. No, never mind, I really don’t want to know. It would make me crazier than I am.

So, take a taxi! Yeah, right! Talk about crazy. Besides that drivers must have to pass a taxi test that proves they can’t speak English, they all have their little trade secrets about longer routes to take passengers who are in a hurry, more dangerous routes to take passengers who look nervous, etc. Taxi? No thanks! 

____________________

Besides, I ditched all that nonsense years ago when I took the big leap off of payrolls and benefit plans and came crashing to Earth as (Ta-ta-ta-ta-tah-tah!) . . . poorer than a ragged beggar, more headstrong than the bull in front of the Stock Exchange, able to leap onto prospective clients in a single bound . . . Look! . . . Up in the air! . . . It’s . . . It’s a corporate mogul . . . it’s a pocket-padding politician . . . NO! IT’S ENTREPRENEURMAN!

Yup, that’s me! Shucks! You’d never recognize that frazzled commuter anymore. Now I just run up and down the stairs to my basement office, bathrobe aflutter, with an armful of pantry snacks, writing fool that I am, remembering the good old commuter days, and being soooo thankful to be struggling in small business with big happiness!

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 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Bitten Off More Than

You Could Chew, Eh?

We all do it now and then, but some make a steady diet of taking on too many projects. The end result is never pleasant or rewarding, yet most of us fail to learn the first or second or third or . . . time around.

We tend to either be in situations where we have overwhelmed ourselves or chosen for others to overwhelm us, or somehow put ourselves into overwhelming situations.

Some might argue that they have fallen victim to overwhelming situations.

But you know what?

If we trace the root cause of any over-whelming situation, it will inevitably come back to a conscious or unconscious choice we’ve made somewhere down the road.

So what? Well, we can’t always avoid making bad choices or choices with bad outcomes –and sometimes we might even intentionally elect to put ourselves in the middle of bad choice/bad outcome circumstances– but when we can accept choices as the driving force, we increase the odds of survival and success.

How is that possible?

When we acknowledge and own up to our behavioral choices, we stop making excuses.

We stop sulking.

We stop blaming others, We stop kicking ourselves (because that, of course, is also a choice!).

We stop having tantrums. 

And these actions and awareness’s lead us closer to resolution.

Accepting responsibility for our actions, and for leading ourselves into high pressure situations helps us get on with life quicker than we are able to by wallowing in misery.

I once accepted an offer to write a commissioned memoir about a very prominent, admirable, and likable elderly person in failing health who had led what I thought was a fascinating life. The challenge was hearty. The compensation was fair. The 3-month project turned into 14 months and the degree of engagement multiplied exponentially with each new life path discovery.

For me, research time exceeded writing time by many moons. The project commandeered time away from management and marketing consulting clients, community programs I was developing, and family engagements and contact with friends. Stress arrived at my doorstep dressed in many costumes. But I did it to myself.

 Realizing that I had set myself up for the time crunch didn’t untangle the commitments, but it helped me deal with them more realistically, and all the while (I think!) keep my sanity . 

A friend of mine has a growing family with young children and aging parents. He owns and operates four different, rapidly growing businesses — each with over a hundred employees, sits on three charitable boards of trustees, travels extensively and regularly participates in a variety of favorite outdoor activities. He admits he’s bitten off more than he can chew.

But instead of blaming others or banging his head against a wall, he has engaged his family’s help in consolidating the businesses and finding replacements for the trustee seats he holds from among his employee ranks. He now brings parents and children and spouse along individually and as available on his business trips. They now join him with his outdoor pursuits  . . . and he joins them with theirs! 

The transition is taking time, but PACMAN has stopped eating away at his life. He has turned the corner and found renewed energy. 

You can too! It truly is a matter of choice.

Need a little fresh “Overwhelm-Deactivation” guidance?

Call or email me.     

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302.933.0116     Hal@BusinessWorks.US

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!”   [Thomas Jefferson]

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