YES!! Football season is just about here and I am excited about it. I am a huge Jets fan and Darrelle Revis just signed today, ending his holdout of over 5 weeks. The holdout was over a re-negotiation of his current contract. He believed that he outplayed his contract and was due a salary increase. Additionally, he wanted some of that money guaranteed so that should he succumb to injury, he was not in the position of being cut or released without a right to the original compensation package. Now, whether or not you agree or even care about the holdout or football for that matter, the basic premise here was being compensated for what he had done and being guaranteed that his future was being taken care of. He was making sure that he was secure not only for this season and then some. While many of his teammates were in camp preparing for the season with their bodies, he needed to make sure that he was prepared for the season in a much different way, and in some ways, a way that was more productive in the long term. Of course, he had this luxury because of his athletic prowess.
As a business, you definitely need to be prepared for the upcoming season. Marketing, networking, forming relationships, selling your service or product are all a piece of the process. However, as a business, you can’t necessarily HOLDOUT. Or can you? What are the things that you can “holdout” from in order to get yourself prepared for the long term? What are the things that normally take your focus away that you can “holdout” from in order to narrowly look at your ROI? How can you “holdout” in order to improve your product or service? Who do you need to “holdout” from? Is it a friend, acquaintance, co-worker, client? [...]
Many of us are passionate about our businesses and some would even love to spend all day doing what we love. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you see the glass (half-empty/half full), there is the actual BUSINESS side of things that needs to be paid attention to. So for those trying to learn a bit more about that “business” side, Day 1 of MBDA’s Medweek featured a Mentor-Protege program sponsored by the Small Business Administration. This program is offered under the SBA’s 8a Business Development Program. Part of what that means is that your business needs to be 8a certified or looking towards it in order to effectively participate. However, the concept of mentorship is a necessary one for businesses that are aiming at success. Get more info about this program here:
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What did you catch?
Yes, this networking thing. It’s working. Done right and consistently, that’s what its supposed to do. Although, to be honest, it hasn’t gotten me the big payoff just yet 
. But, I’m sure that will come in one form or another. The hard thing for me sometimes, though, is maintaining and tracking the relationships. I’m finding that you have to be pretty deliberate about noting who you met, where you met them, and why you might need to connect with them again at ANY point in the future. Face to face, this is not always easy and its the ones that are able to mentally do it that are truly amazing. But, here in cyberspace, there are many ways to do this. Some people use contact management software or something as simple as Outlook. Some sort their email into specific folders. I tend to keep a running tab of who, their website, their number and whatever information I have. I also try to contact them periodically just to keep the memory working. It may pan out, or it may not.
Yeah, addictions are hard things to get rid of. Some say you go through withdrawals when trying to quit. So why would I want to deliberately form one? My wife tells me I’m addicted to the computer. Since I do all my work on it, spend a lot of my day on it, do some relaxing on it, work at some of my hobbies on it, that’s a hard notion to defend. I’m not even sure if I want to . But on to my thought for this post.
I think Facebook is a very powerful social networking tool. I love it much more than myspace for a variety of reasons which I won’t get into right now. Some people, including my wife, call Facebook an addiction (even though she uses it more than I do these days). In any case, I put my URL on my Facebook information page today and a friend of mine commented on the status change shortly thereafter. She talked a little about my chosen career path and then sent me a link of people in that same field that were on Twitter. Now, I have seen a lot of articles about Twitter from other e-learning professionals, like Tony Karrer and Christy Tucker, but I have not gotten on the Twitter path just yet. Why? Well, I have an account but I had not used it because I was embarking on a lot of other things at the time. I have been learning a lot of new things, networking, etc. But one of the things I am learning as well is that in order to learn and gain fresh ideas, you have to be in touch with quite a variety of people as well as being somehow able to keep your finger on the pulse of your field. So, maybe I need to give in and jump on this Twitter thing. I really don’t want to have too many things to log-in to or to follow. But at this stage of things, it might really be worth it.
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