Last 3 weeks have felt like they zoomed by. It’s been very nice to be back home. Yesterday was a write off, but today was great. I’m focused on sleep since I have been short of it – so last night got 10hours in. Felt great.
So, interesting looking back, in how important sleep is in being be function at 100%. For next time, I will take things q bit easier. If I need to do EU I will do EU on it’s own, then jump continents after getting back for a week. Basically, it may FEEL like lots gets done, but the fact that fatigue creeps in, means that this style is actually ineffective.
So, key to productivity and optimized zone thinking is rest. I thought I new better, but still made this mistake.
As I stipulated before, this coming week should be a good week. It pretty much will be. I spend today planning out next week, and balancing it towards focusing on my top 3 priorities. So, plan for next week to meet with C…. to go over RedStores valuation (booked already for Friday lunch), work on 2010/2011 plan, and financial side.
Few cool things. Found a whole new segment of business performance management tools – sites like kpilist.com where you can find people from various industries posting their KPI for their businesses. One of my goals, and dreams, has been to link performance of people in the company to companies financial performance. The trick was that without consolidated statements, without monthly P&L that was impossible to achieve. Well, it is my hope that shortly I will be able to link everyone KPA to a line item on an P&L. Yes, lofty goal, but with a financial reporting system in place, with the right KPIs, there is no reason why everyone in the company should not be able to be linked to a P&L. Talk about accountability, visibility of ones effort, the empowerment that would give to the team!
Speaking of team, I have been working on getting the right people on the bus. I have two wholes at the moment – CIO and Marketing VP. With those spots filled, I will then empower myself to be able to leadership and growth. So, by weird chance, last night got a new status change for one of the guys that used to work for me, G…. I had felt, and actually know, that I had seriously screwed up years ago when I lost G… I tried to bring G… Back 2 years ago, but he was in a great job. Well, as luck would have it (for me and him, he may not feel thus way yet) the company he was working for lost the contract and G… lost his job. So, when a linked notification showed up, I emailed him right away to see what was up. Bottom line, we are getting together over the weekend, to see what what opportunities we could create for each other. Basically, if I could have G… back, not only would I be lucky enough to be able to ‘take back’ my mistake but also to gain an A player – that would not only fill my CIO gap but also the marketing gap. So, nothing settled yet – but I’m thrilled to be in this spot.
On a tangent topic, from HK GLC conference I had met a guy that used to work for a company that would take brick-and-mortar online. Planning to Skype him on Thursday. Hoping to get a baseline of what their business model looked like, how they priced things. The interesting point from talking with him, was that the issue they had was that they had trouble getting ‘sales’ – sales in their business model defined as taking a brick-and-mortar and taking them online. The thing for me with RedStores is that I infancy have at least 5 ‘sales’ that I ignored because of not only Genie, but also because my business model wasn’t setup for that kind of operation. So, hoping for two fold experience sharing – the pricing model and also a rough baseline of what it would it would cost project like Genie to go online using a US based firm. Since I have pretty much relegated to the fact that Genie will not br fast tracked, to move Genie forward, i will have to apply a whole different model to it if I’m to take it. So, knowing a model that someone used before would be of huge help. So, HK, despite low value to me based on the conference it self, may actually turn out to be of high value just by meeting with S….
And one more scaling thought – it would seem that a common thread among entrepreneurs has been that at some point many of them (if not all) either went out of business or got close to it. For quite a long time, I did not quite understand how it was that these guys that went bankrupt, like Donald Trump, could get up again. Well, I think i got a bit of enlightenment. What I see is this. The first time you start a business, it is hard, very hard. But what you gain is experience and knowledge, and assuming that you don’t repeat ALL of your past mistakes, next time round you are likely to get up stronger, smarter and more able. Sure, not all the guys will be able to get up again, but those that do will actually likely to be successful. This in a way relates to me, since for quite a while I have known, that getting PearlsOnly up was a huge challenge. Huge. But, I also know that if I had to do it again, I would be able to do it in half the time and twice as big. So, applying this to RedStores which in a way is a whole new business, it seems easier – and it makes sense. For the same reason why the guys that fail can get up and kick but (their experience) – is the same reason I’m able to move so much better with RedStores than I could with PearlsOnly. The nice thing i have that PearlsOnly didn’t fail, and it’s doing good – but nevertheless – lots of lessons from that had empowered me to launch new things so so much easier.
So, bottom line, it’s really about experience – weather that experience ended up Ina failure or success – it is still experience – and its that experience that makes it possible to go out and do new things regardless of the previous outcomes. So, I can now completely see how Donald Trumps bankruptcy empowered him to rise to a whole new level. And why guys that lost the game before, get up to bat again and are that much more likely to hit it out of the park during their next round. So, here is to experience – no matter how it is gained.