While 2016 is already in full swing, it is not too late to take stock of last year and make some goals for the coming year. It really doesn’t matter when you do an annual review, the calendar year is simply an easy place to start. So, don’t think that you can only do a review at the beginning or end of the year, just think of the next 12 months and go for it.

Why do we do annual reviews?

In business there normally an annual review period where you take stock of where you are and where you want to be going in the next year. Employee reviews can be a time to consider promotions, raises and bonuses. You can do this for yourself in your own personal life as well. The purpose here is to remind you of your successes in the past year, whatever they are, and learn from your mistakes to make them into successes this year.

The Good

First, think of all the good things that happened this year. No matter how small. You overcame a challenge, an illness, got to spend some time with family, took a great trip with loved ones, or you just had a particularly good day at some point. Everyone should be able to come up with at least 10 things here.

Don’t discount small things, from small and simple things great things come to pass. Your small successes add up to a great amount of good that has happened to you this past year. Don’t overlook it.

The Bad

While I am not normally one to dwell on the bad things of life, here it is good to take stock of some of the things that went badly. Here it is often good to list about 3-5 things. We will be using this list in a minute and we don’t want it to be too long for these purposes. I like to think of it as picking the top 5 worst things that happened to me this year.

Keep it Real

The last thing to do in this exercise is to consider both the good and the bad and decide things like: What was my greatest achievement this year? What was my biggest failure? What was my biggest risk taken? What do I want to do more this year? What do I want to do less? What are my biggest goals for this year? Why do I want to accomplish those things? How am I going to accomplish my goals? Why didn’t I accomplish some of my goals last year? What do I want my average day to look like this year?

All of these are good questions to ask yourself and review from time to time throughout the year. Use your journal, blog posts or old pictures on your phone to help you come up with your answers.

Here’s some Help

I put together a real quick worksheet for you to use to answer all of these questions on paper if you want to. There is some benefit to writing things out and these kinds of goals it could be very good to slow down and really answer them truthfully, it’s only for you, so you are only lying to yourself.

Download Worksheet Here

Hope you have a great year and please share this post with your friends and subscribe here on this page.

And stay positive!

I have been working a lot lately on solving problems. At the beginning of the year there is often a lot of planning and goal-setting and hoping for what will be a great year if all of our plans and goals come to be.

The only thing is there always seems to be problems that get in the way of our goals and plans. Don’t think that you are unique in this, I have seen it at every company I have worked at and every client I have done work for. Everyone has problems. What you need is to find solutions to your problems.

Of course, that is much easier said than done in most cases. Solutions come in many different forms. You may find a software program that does the task that you need done. You may find someone in your organization with a skill that is useful in solving your problem. You may change the way you handle something so that the problem is no longer a problem. Any of these can resolve your problem, if you take a few minutes to go through 3 steps.

Step 1: Describe your worst problem.

Describing the problem seems like it is easy, but I know from experience that is not always the case. Describing a problem in a single phrase or sentence can be very hard to pin down. Ultimately you can do it though. If people aren’t getting the follow-up they expect when they call your company with a concern, your problem is either poor recording and tracking of issues, poor follow-up by customer account reps, or your employees simply don’t know where to send these concerns. Describing the problem as simply as possible will help you find a solution.

Step 2: What is your desired outcome?

Now, in the same single phrase/sentence style, describe what should be the outcome of this problem. This is your goal, what people expect. If you expect your employees to better handle customer complaints and resolve issues in a single phone call, say it. If you want your account reps to know enough about your product or service to answer more questions right away, that’s you goal. This tells you where you are headed.

Step 3: Find more than one possible solution.

Now you need to bring your problem and your outcome together, but don’t stop with the first solution you think of. Come up with several solutions, at least two or three. Then you can look at the solutions and decide which one will fit your need, your budget and ultimately your goal. If you only have resources for a cheap solution, go for it. There is no shame in having to fix something simply. If your organization is larger this become more difficult, but having options will keep you from going for a complex solution when a simple one will do, or from picking a simple solution when a more complex one may be a better fix in the long term.

Each of these steps is a very basic overview, solving problems inside organizations can take a while and much more detail, but these same steps are going to be effective.

If you have just a moment, take this quick, one question survey and let me know what your worst problem is right now, everything is anonymous and I hope to use the data for a future post. http://goo.gl/forms/i1dhYkpCrE

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Companies big and small need to keep track of their customers. What products or services are they buying? What is their history with your company? When has someone from your company made contact with them? What kinds of offers have you sent them? All of these things should be tracked, and indeed there are many software companies devoted to tracking all kinds of information to help business owners track their customers. Why then do so many companies seem to have a right hand that doesn’t know what the left hand is doing? The answer is lack of planning.

This morning I read an excellent articles on Forbes.com by Kasia Moreno titled “Why Do Companies Undervalue Customer Loyalty?” She pointed to an experience with a major magazine where they sent her both a renewal offer as an existing customer and an offer as if she had never subscribed. Not only is it poor business for them to not even know who their customers are, but they rubbed it in by offering a better deal to the new customer than the existing one! This seems so backwards by all accounts. When it comes to communicating with customers we should know who our existing customers are and who are future customers.

Communicating with Customers, Old and New

Anyone who has been in business for very long will tell you that it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than go out and find a new one. Keeping customers happy will keep them coming back, which is especially true to service or subscription based business models. You should be offering the best deals to your loyal customers. While you may have introductory offers for new customers, don’t underestimate the value of a longtime, loyal customer.

I am well aware of the problems that arise from not having a software package that can do everything you really want with your customer database. For small to medium sized businesses you must fit into the template of whatever software program you use. For larger businesses there is no reason they cannot develop a system for all their different divisions to use to track customers at all levels. You should not be wasting money sending new offers to existing customers.

While these things are easy to say in a blog post, I know that they can be difficult to actually implement. What processes or tools are out there to help keep track of customers and get rid of these kinds of situations?

For each generation there is a day that really defines it. It is date that everyone who was old enough to know what was happening can remember where they were. For my grandparents’ generation it was December 7, 1941. For my parents’ generation it was probably July 20, 1969. For my generation it is most definitely September 11, 2001.

Everyone has their story, I remember it well and I also have a lot of notes from that day that I took and have kept now for 13 years. It was my Senior year of high school and I had the opportunity to report on it on our school’s daily announcement broadcast, where I was the newsroom reporter. It was a great experience, one of the few pieces of “hard news” that I reported on and it changed the way I looked at life and the world.

Now, 13 years on, I am now a husband and father. I spent two years living abroad and experienced other cultures and ways of life. I have seen how my peers’ lives have been shaped by this event and those things that followed because of it. On this day each year we have a sort of reverence for the day and post messages remembering where we were and those who lost their lives. It is a universal point of reference for Millennial Americans.

When someone says “Nine-Eleven” I know exactly what they are referring to and I like hearing others’ experiences from that day. It is not to say that other generation don’t have the same reaction to it, but for Millennials it is the first, and really the only, date that defines the times that we live in. It has really changed many things, either directly or indirectly.

We are either witnesses of history or participants of it. The wars, the economic recession and everything else that has happened in the last 13 years is called the “post 9-11 world.” That world is more and more being shaped by those who were just coming of age in 2001. Is the world better or worse than it was before? How are we working to make that world better?

Anyone who had turned on a TV this month has probably seen one of the seemingly endless versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” There is everything from “A Diva’s Christmas Carol” to “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” I for one don’t really care for novelty interpretations of Dickens’ work, I prefer the classics, original and Muppet.

The story was written and originally published for the Christmas of 1843. That means that the story was not originally a “period piece” as it is today, but actually set in the modern day at the time. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but the world looks a bit different than it did in 1843, and those differences can change the message that “A Christmas Carol” delivers.

The most misunderstood word in the story is “humbug.” When Scrooge exclaims, “Bah! Humbug!” he is not just making an exasperated exclamation, he is commenting on what he perceives as the motivation behind others’ Christmas spirit.

“Humbug” describes a person who is incenser, deceiving or otherwise dishonest in their outward appearance or actions. Scrooge isn’t just an old miser who hates happiness and everything that brings it, he thinks that others are only putting up a face of generosity. He knows that he is stingy, but feels at least he is honest about it.

The real change that Scrooge goes through is that he goes from being cynical about Christmas (and everything for that matter) to realizing that there are those who have want, yet still keep the spirit of Christmas (Bob Cratchet), and those who have no good reason to be kind and giving to someone, yet still are because that is the kind of person they are (Fred, his nephew).

So, this Christmas take a look and see if you really keep Christmas in your heart, or are you just going through the motions. Don’t be a humbug.

If you're not building your business, you're already unemployed.

Yesterday I was reminded of the fact that the job market has not improved much in the past few years. While I was able to get our of unemployment a few times (the most recent case by creating a position for myself) there are those who still struggle, either unemployed or underemployed. Here is a post that I wrote back in 2009 after I was laid-off from a company that isn’t even in business anymore (at least not in the form it was when I worked there).

These days there is a lot of talk about unemployment and there should be. With national unemployment at it’s highest since I was born a lot of people are worried about how secure their job is and what they would do if they were told their services were no longer needed. Now, you are probably asking yourself what this has to do with marketing. Someone told me once, if you own your own business or are responsible for a business, you are unemployed everyday… until you do something that benefits the business.

Business owners wear many hats, from stockboy to CEO. Marketing is often not something they are necessarily good at, at least in my experience. My agency has worked for many small businesses and start-ups and have come across many types. There are people who know (or think they know) all about marketing and what needs to be done for their company, the business owners who know their business really well, but understand they are not marketers and ask for our suggestions and help. Then there are the people who think they know all about marketing but are spinning their wheels trying too hard at things that aren’t effective for their business.

Those who do their own marketing well, or who hire marketers such as myself are not unemployed because they are doing something to grow their business and reach their customers. Those people who think they know all about marketing and are really not doing anything for their business are (marketing-wise) unemployed. Their business is not benefiting from meaningful marketing activities. They might as well be playing games on Facebook. I hope that everyone can see which of these groups that you or your clients fit into. Don’t be unemployed, it sucks.

I bring this subject up because in addition to freelance marketing and advertising consulting and writing for this blog I have spent the last 4 months working full-time for a decent sized national corporation doing corporate communications. Friday morning the VP-Marketing came to my office and informed me that due to budget cutbacks they would be cutting my position. Now I am back to being on my own in business and I find that I have gotten too relaxed. I have not been marketing my own business because I was busy working on some else’s business. There is nothing wrong with working for someone else, but now I am in search of more clients.

Update: Since this was originally posted on FryThoseEggs.com, I have spent time building my agency business and spent some time in corporate marketing as well. I am happy to say that from both sides of the industry I have found some great people to work with and yes, I am always still looking for new challenges and companies to work with.

So, here it is, the first post. When starting a new blog, the first one is usually the hardest, and it will take a few to really get a feel for the blog. This site is really an outlet for what I do that does not fit into any of the other blogs I contribute to or maintain, namely my marketing and advertising work. Check out my links to see the other blogs that I contribute to or support.

I am happy to announce that I am nearing the completion of my first book, Cousin’s American Miscellany. This is a collection of random facts and stories that is a must-have for anyone who enjoys a good piece of trivium. Here is one entry, check back here for more facts and stories from the book as well as the release date, and you’ll be able to order it when it become available..

Dalmatians and Firefighters

The energetic, spotted dog associated with firefighters in the US comes by the job very honestly. Dalmatians originated in an area known as Dalmatia, in modern-day Croatia. Originally they are believed to have been guard dogs and bird dogs, but they really gained their fame as a carriage dog. They would run along a carriage and help direct the horses, especially in crowded cities where there was a lot of traffic. When fire engines were pulled by large horses, the Dalmatian’s job was to lead the horses through the city streets so they could reach the fire as quickly as possible, then they would heard the horses a safe distance from the fire. Even though they are no longer needed to work the horses, firefighters still often keep a Dalmatian as a mascot and a companion.