If I Ever Consider Coming Back to Consulting…
…please shoot me!
This is a quick drive-by post to say that no, I haven’t disappeared from here but on account of several late nights this week having to get some deliverables out of the door and to a client, I am officially exhausted and my eyes are in pain!
Hopefully after a weekend of working on my own business (no rest for the wicked), I’ll be back to blogging speed again…
The 2 Key Reasons Most Businesses Struggle
Those of you running your own business and loving it, can I’m sure imagine the intense dread you might feel if you had to consider going back to to the corporate world and once again becoming a cubicle slave.
As most of you will know, I’m currently re-living my own professional past doing some business consulting for a start-up consulting company here in South Africa. It’s for some friends of ours and is something I’ve committed to for 6 months and will honour that commitment.
It is however, quite a challenge…I can honestly say that having to get up every day, work on and in someone else’s business and working to someone else’s agenda, does not and is not something I would like to continue doing.
Call me a control freak (and many people do) but I am hanging out for the time when I can get back to running my own business, deciding what I get to do on a daily basis and setting my own agenda.
However, it’s not been all bad.
The return to business consulting has reminded me of some valuable tools and approaches which every business should be using. Things that help you:
- Plan and set up a business the right way from the beginning
- Structure an approach to achieving an end goal for a project, including planning required resources, time and effort
- Find, manage and develop the right people in the right roles for your company
The most valuable lesson I’ve re-learned though is this:
Getting the strategic planning of a business right is only one part of the success equation; the second part is getting the implementation right. Unfortunately most businesses fail to do the first and screw up the second.
How Do You Measure The Success Of Your Blog?
If you’re a savvy blogger already then you’ll probably be obsessed by statistics such as the number of unique visitors to your blog, your subscriber numbers, the number of comments generated by each post and the number of track backs & links your posts attract.
If you’re a novice blogger or thinking of starting up a blog, then these are the stats you need to familiarise yourself with because they tell you at a basic level how popular your blog is.
I can tell you now though, that whist I’ve been ever-so-slightly obsessed by subscriber numbers in the past (only when I set a goal to get 1,000 subscribers for the LI blog - which we achieved well within the 6 month timeframe we set for ourselves), I don’t tend to pay too much attention to the blog stats these days.
Whaaaat?
[I can hear the voices of certain stat-obsessed bloggers squealing in my ear right now!!!]
That’s right - whilst I do use our blogs as a marketing tool for our business projects, I don’t pay a huge amount of attention to the blog stats. And here’s why…
Do You Think Marketing Is A Dirty Word Or Are You A Marketing Whore?
[Excuse the crudeness of the title but I really couldn’t think of an equally suitable word that worked]
Read the following questions and tick either A or B for whichever statement best describes you…
