My Business Diary | Life Lessons From A Baby Seagull

Written by NicolaCairncross on July 8, 2011 - 0 Comments
Categories: Success Thinking

This week has absolutely FLOWN by! With a few fairly major life-lessons thrown in which is a challenge personally and an opportunity to grow in business, combined.

I started with a weekend in Shoreham with my kids where I got to cook for P and two of her friends who were staying over, which I love, both nights. I got to hear about their prom which was the previous week and see more pics of how amazing they all looked. Of course P wasn’t happy with her appearance (I made her French pleat quiff too high apparently and she felt like she looked like a drag queen!). My son N was around Friday but headed off to Henfield on the bus, to stay with a mate on Saturday – he’s getting so independent now he’s 13.5 but while he’s starting to shoot up he still looks like my baby to me!

Sunday, I headed home to Hove and then P came to stay Sunday night so we could watch the first episode of True Blood together, which is becoming a bit of a ritual for us. As they get older, and while they are living with their Dad while they finish their exams and I finalise where I want to live, we are having to keep our bonds strong by finding different activities to do together, which hopefully will lay the ground for our friendship as they grow into adults. I love their company and they seem to enjoy mine, and long may that continue. Harry Potter, this week yay!

Talking of them growing up, we have been talking to P about the need to get a part time job while she’s off for a couple of months, awaiting exam results and college acceptances. She would really rather stay up late, get up late and hang around with her mates down the beach, while her Dad and I are very keen she starts to earn her own money, start to manage it a bit better (she spends her pocketmoney in days while her brother always has a couple of hundred in the bank, stashed away from birthday gifts too!) and get some idea of what the world of work is like.

My theory is that…

…once she’s had a taste of real work – dull work, hard work, minimum wage kind of work – she’ll apply herself a bit harder at college, recognizing it for the lifeline to a more fulfilling career that it is. Unfortunately, she’s not interested in “sitting in front of a computer all day” so she won’t work for me! And I could use some help so I might have to turn to the Northbrook College Apprentice Scheme – did you know that you don’t even have to employ your apprentice yourself, there are third party firms who will take all the pain out of hiring an apprentice, for you?

I’m trying to think of P as a young employee now, as an effort to stop treating her like a child, which winds her up enormously, but I had to exert a bit of leverage this week, to show the pain of potential consequences by a certain timeframe, if a certain type of behaviour wasn’t employed. As this involved her pocket-money and mobile phone I felt a bit mean for it, but after some fairly frank and robust text messages which I managed to ignore and not rise to, she got off her butt eventually and went and delivered 10 or so CV’s in person along Shoreham High St. She’s an engaging girl in person and this strategy resulted in her being offered a job waitressing in one of the restaurants (owned by a mate of one of my poker buddies, who’s a nice guy, so that’s cool). She starts this evening on a trial basis and was so elated, she texted me immediately, all crossness forgotten in her glow of achievement.

My sister Heather’s “push the baby seagull out of the nest” policy seems to be working. This is gleaned from watching the rather outwardly uncaring attitude of the mother seagull that laid her egg on the roof outside Heather’s bedroom window, so we have been able to witness her mothering techniques first hand. The little fluffy chick is growing up fast – it’s having to! There’s no cuddling and sheltering from the sun, wind and rain there, no sir! That mother is all about teaching self-sufficiency!

Tuesday was our always lively “Online Strategy” meeting for the Worthing & Adur Chamber which I really enjoy as Tina and Tracie from the Chamber are energetic, engaged and willing to try things out, Tina’s husband Ian who is the techie whiz, while Clive Spring of XL Design and Mark Lyford from http://Pep4Print.co.uk are both enthusiastic and excellent in their fields and together I think we make a great team. I managed to come out of that meeting with only a few action points – apart from my ongoing work for the Chamber – so I was happy!

The rest of the week passed in a flurry of activity, punctuated by the Jazz Jam on Tuesday, getting things ready for my ex, who is about to start some telesales and telephone follow up for me. I’ve realised that while networking and online marketing are great, most of the local businesses don’t spend all their time online, and I might have to add a more traditional bow to my arsenal of marketing tools. The Telephone. Eeek! An instrument I have a bit of a phobia of, finding it very distracting / disruptive when it just rings and having spent the last 12 years or so coaching via phone.

He’s decided to go freelance on the telesales front, having been one of the best telesales people at CBS Records in his day and having worked for various firms in this capacity for several years now. So if you want someone to gently but persistently follow up your leads, he’s your man (just email me for more details).

I have an ambitious growth plan for The Business Success Factory and want him to be part of that as he’s just the steady, key accounts / managerial type I’ll need, while I concentrate on marketing, sales and strategy for the Local Business Marketing Business I’m steadily creating here.

Which plan is gathering momentum, after getting not just one, but two great write ups in the Worthing Herald business pages last week and attending yet another Chamber networking event at the Ardington on Wednesday evening. I attracted two very strong enquiries at that event and am looking forward to talking to both businesses further.

The more competitor analysis I do, the more sure I am that the lead products and 3 x full service levels we are developing for future customers are great value and will make a real difference to any local business looking to market themselves more effectively. I don’t need a massive amount of clients luckily to build a great business and working with the Chamber is a great start.

We don’t have to just work with Brighton, Shoreham & Worthing businesses but that’s where I’m focusing my activities right now. Although I am also mentoring people in other UK areas who want to follow in the footsteps of someone who is ACTUALLY DOING IT rather than just standing on a stage selling it. If you like the sound of that, just email me at nicola [at] nicolacairncross.com to find out more as the details are not publicly available as I only work with very determined, action orientated people.

I’m just trying to work out how to best use the several local websites that I’ve got to Page One on Google – like EstateAgentsShoreham.com, ShorehamHotel.com, VanHireWorthing.com, JobsShoreham.com, AccountancyBrighton.com and many more including DigitalMarketingBrighton.com which was originally created as part of a blogging duel but which is now dominating for the phrases “internet marketing brighton”, “marketing brighton” and “online marketing brighton” – it’s almost doing better than my main website for those phrases!

And on that note, I’m off to Staples to buy some postcards for a new marketing test…

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