A few years ago we changed our office schedule from 8-5, Monday through Friday, to 7:30-5:30 Monday through Thursday and 7:30-11:30 on Friday, often referred to as “summer” hours by many companies. We thought we would give it a try for a few months over the summer and see how it went, expecting that we would eventually switch back to more traditional hours.
Over the past few months I’ve been on a mission to optimize my time and efficiency of task completion. This will not be the last time you read about my pursuit of optimal time utilization – I’ve got a lot to say about the topic. I’m pretty sure I am driving my coworkers crazy, but hopefully they are at least enjoying the ride. After all, our time is so short, we owe it to ourselves to optimize everything we do. Read more
I have written previously about my latest fascination, podcasts, but today I want to talk about Entrepreneur On Fire (EOFire). EOFire was one of the first podcasts I stumbled upon, mostly because it is one of the most popular podcasts on entrepreneurship, with a huge audience. Read more
I’m a board member of a local non-profit called Health Connect of South Dakota. We have about nine board members and in general are very low-tech, as compared to my work at BrightPlanet. Recently we started working on event planning for our annual fundraising event called Health & Safety Festival, which started out as a two column bullet list in a Word document, emailed around to all members. Immediately, I decided we needed a shared project management tool.
Every sales team deserves a great customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage opportunities. It cannot be done with Excel or email or a text file or from memory. At BrightPlanet we have leveraged a good CRM system for over five years but it has been a struggle to get our sales team to use it (and keep using it) regularly.
A few weeks ago I was invited to attend the 2014 Governor’s Invitational Golf Event in Sioux Falls. I have attended similar events in the past and one of the “ambassadors” I was paired with was Bill Byrne. Everyone starts with the standard “what do you do” conversation, and Bill was extremely modest about his past, far more interested in what others do. Bill mentioned that he wrote a book many years ago which became very popular, but really downplayed it as just a milestone in his career. He wasn’t being coy, but rather a great listener and leader, as I would find out later. Read more