so she posted this instead ....

I am in the middle of a 7 day cleanse. It involves heaping scoops of fiber and a tablespoon of oil poured into a glass of water and drank twice a day (and I know there is something wrong with my grammar here, but since I can blame the cleanse I will just keep typing) - slowly, while holding my nose, while wearing my size 4XL Pat Benatar t-shirt/dress (apparently Pat knows her fans are all older and wider now) and trying not to retch the whole mess up into the sink - hubs gets to watch this entire process twice a day (yes, my sexiness knows no bounds) in case I need medical attention during this process (I tried to get Olive involved but she has spent the week laying on huge piles of random laundry - I'm also cleaning closets - with a very self-satisfied look - I think pretending she just blew up Punky Brewster). I know you are probably not all living the dream like I am here in NJ - please don't hate me for this.

p.s. Back soon to finish that series - in the meantime, here's a little George to get us thinking WEEKEND!

synchronistic strategy for makers part III - this customer belongs to someone else

Now this valuing ourselves part is something we have to think about before we start "standing still" and attracting customers -

without it we will be attracting the wrong customer.

And running a business with the wrong customers will run us right into the ground.

(yes, buried up to our necks with biting ants chewing off our eyelashes - it ain't pretty people)

We cannot please them, we cannot find them, we cannot figure out what they want - because they are not our customer. They belong to someone else.

This valuing ourselves thing often shows up in our pricing, but not always. If we think other people do not value what we do, maybe we are not giving them a reason to. Maybe it's because our makings are not up to snuff or maybe it is because we are not allowing other people to be part of the process.

I used to write about my Polarity Locket - "I simply solder a hook to a car part" - although I have never used a soldering iron in my life and this was never what I did. It seemed the easiest way to explain it in my listings. I had this all backwards. Easy is never going to get us passionate customers, who will find us while we stand still.

(this doesn't mean our process has to be hard; this is about our message - our message can't be easy - this didn't work for us in high school and it won't work now)

When someone printed a story about me on their blog and wrote "Cat simply solders a hook to a car part" I got really annoyed ... with myself. I knew exactly where she had gotten her verbage and exactly what it said about my self-value.

For a while I went crazy, not realizing at first I had just flipped the same self-worth coin to the other side. I started saying "I clean, drill, cut, braze, grind and seal to prevent rust" the car part.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

What a snorefest and I had missed the point entirely.

If customers were going to be passionate partners in my business - if they were going to buy in to my message, which the right people were ready and really wanted to do - I needed to get this right. Eventually I did (but it's a process).

It takes a lot of energy to look for people to serve. The world is like Facebook now - we are all looking at different things. The days when everybody tuned into the same program on Friday night are gone. We can't reach everybody.

We don't want to be running around looking for some way to catch someone's attention because even once we have caught their attention (our attention spans are miniscule these days, most people will never even read this far into this post) and convinced them we are the ones who have what they are looking for we are exhausted (grab a cookie and your snugli)!

So when a customer tells us they are not completely satisfied with our product, policies or pricing we are more than willing to satisfy them. We have gone through so much to get them this far toward  a purchase we are ready to compromise - the truth is, we are too tired to fight. Thinking we will lose the battle to win the war we let the customer win this little skirmish - especially since we know all we went through to get him this far in the first place.

But, if we value ourselves and our business (and have put the proper time and energy into our products, policies and pricing in the first place) we will be more apt to hear that little inner voice, the one that speaks for our instincts, the one that says "whoa girl, slow down, be careful, this one would be more trouble than he's worth - maybe this customer belongs to someone else."

Now this doesn't mean that we write our policies in granite - that we don't change when we need and want to - of course not - the entire point of being small and nimble is well, being small and nimble. We can change on a dime. We just want to be sure that we are not undervaluing ourselves in the process.

Forget competition (think cooperation). Forget "I have to grab this customer before someone else does" (our right customer won't need to be grabbed, she will come to us happily and in fact if we try to grab her - she will probably be someone like me who bruises easily and she will tell 2 friends who will tell 2 friends). Forget "money is money" (if we don't like big corporations - think Monsanto and Bank of America here) doing anything for a buck, we shouldn't be either, change starts with us.

These things don't work anymore. The energy has shifted on our planet - we have moved from the masculine 1 energy of "me" into the masculine/feminine 2 energy of "us". This is why all the old structures are crumbling - there is nothing holding them up anymore. If we build our business on the old paradigm we will be in trouble, too.

Also our businesses are alive (not in a corporations are people kind of way, but in the same way everything is) and just like our own bodies naturally release what is toxic and naturally distribute what is tonic - our businesses will, too, if we keep things instinctual.

Back tomorrow with part IV - "so what is this standing still part again, my feet hurt"

synchronistic strategy for makers part 2 (adding value by valuing ourselves ... and providing free coffee)

“A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

 Now, before you start thinking this standing still thing is all about me being "spring-lazy" and expecting good stuff to just start falling in my lap


(I am and I do)

it is really about knowing that expanding one thing, expands everything 

and knowing (well, knowing is the wrong word here, but again I'm a little too spring-lazy to think up a better one) that like attracts like - that the law of attraction (please don't confuse this with The Secret) is always working.

When I managed a bank (many years ago and actually it was a savings and loan and not a bank) I organized Money Mondays at the local commuter train station.

We would set up a table and give out free coffee and a newsletter containing financial news and information. It included a networking component where we provided free space for local business people to post weekly announcements to promote their businesses.

The guidelines for these businesses were pretty simple.

Write the announcement as they wanted it to appear, use proper grammar and punctuation, make it under 2 paragraphs and have it to us by the Thursday - also we didn't allow repeats - a business could be involved week after week but the announcement had to be new.

I wanted to keep everything fresh and everyone physically and mentally involved in the process.

For the first few weeks/months, my memory is bad here, everything worked great. But there came a time when the announcements were arriving late with typos and poor grammar, businesses were changing a word here and there instead of offering up fresh information, sometimes people would just phone us with a few words and ask us to 'come up with something' for them. Commuters were just shoving them into their brief cases to get the free coffee.

I was ready to just bag the whole program. We had a team meeting and realized that our real frustration was coming from the impression that the local businesses, in their carelessness, were just not appreciating us. Now, I know that how we view others is really a reflection of our own behavior, so I knew that what was really going on was that we were not valuing our service.

Our early labor of love had become a chore and when we started taking our own efforts for granted everyone else did, too.

The minute we got real about what was going on - we decided instead of bagging the program we would make it freaking awesome. We bought new software and a camera, gave team members the time they needed to do a good job, we got more people involved - instead of expecting one person to throw it all together after the lobby closed on a Friday.

We made one small change to our guidelines for the businesses - we limited the number of announcements a business could run in any month to 2 and we limited the number we would print in any edition to 15.

We announced the new guidelines after we ran our first 'freaking awesome' edition and magically overnight we began attracting exactly the kind of announcements we wanted. Commuters began reading them again on their Monday train rides.

When we started valuing ourselves everyone else did, too.

So part 1 of our "spring stand still" is an assignment - think about where in our maker business we might be taking ourselves or our makings for granted. Where are other people not appreciating us? What did we enjoy doing in the past that now feels like a chore? What parts of our business are feeling tight and oppressive (a sure sign we have already outgrown them)?

Also think about any health issues we might be having, in particular with the right sides of our bodies, this might all fit in, too.

back tomorrow with part II (xo all)

using a little strategic synchronicity to grow our business

Whenever I say the words "grow our business" I get a little itchy.

Not itchy in a "I can't stand still, I am busting out of these duds and need to be moving" kind of way, but itchy in a "this isn't about bigger, better, faster, we can rebuild him, we have the technology and I don't want anyone thinking I mean that" kind of way.

This isn't about growing until we explode, or can't fit through the door, but all of life is expanding all the time.

It's what we're here for.

With a maker business, this growth is sometimes about the business externally in the world but often it's more of an internal shift - some decision by us that creates expansion in our life.

As makers, choosing to live an expanded life creates growth for our business.

(not the "more now" kind of expansion - that totally didn't work for Veruca Salt and won't work for us either, but the expansion that creates the space for us to show up for life in a bigger way)

I once thought of the internet as some kind of trap, the very word web had such a  negative vibe to me (and obviously it can be a negative place if we become addicted to it or use it in hurtful ways) - about the time I started to see this web as more of a connecting 'net', the safety net that is dissolving in so many other areas of our life as it expands here, I was able to connect with it in a much bigger way.

(if we don't love the internet, warts and all, there is only perfection in imperfection really, we probably shouldn't bother trying to make money here because how is that ever going to work for us)

As we evolve toward truth and openness, we have opened up space – cyberspace – for the purpose of helping us to express ourselves openly (this is why real stuff works best here).

So where the hell am I going with this and what does this have to do with the kind of strategy that creates the kind of synchronicity that expands our life and grows our business - well, you will have to check back tomorrow to see where all this is going but I will offer up a little hint:

Back in the days of traditional marketing, we would target customers (think ducks in a shooting gallery here) by putting them (think marketing models and computer generated spending data) into neat little boxes because, well honestly because we needed to know who we wanted to hit and they were easier to hit when they were ... standing still. 

Now that the internet (and evolution) has taken the entire idea of marketing and flipped it on its head - we are attracting customers and not targeting them anymore - going after them doesn't work the same way, they have to be looking for us - maybe we need to be the ones standing still. 

Back tomorrow with Strategic Synchronicity Part 1