#483- Manage, Network, Walk

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Trade Shows
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Trade Shows

• Most trade show planners love to include tchotchkes (little logoed promotional products). Don’t put them all out at once. Put more out on the first day of the show rather than the last day though. Take nothing back to the office.
• Get lists of exhibitors and attendees before attending. Set appointments. Great tchotchkes don't sell. Spending a lot vs. a little on handouts is less effective than setting appointments. A busy booth where serious conversations happen is way more enticing than the best squeeze ball. Focus on appointments. 
• If you haven’t been to a particular show before, approach it as a multi-step process. Attend as a consumer, chat with everyone, find out how to add value. Exhibit in a small way the next with that value in mind. Endear yourself to the organizers. Go all in show #3.
• Follow-up is the key to success. It’s hard. You know how frazzled you are after a show? Attendees feel the same. Give them some grace but press on. Time isn’t on your side - people forget and go back to their normal daily grind fast. 

Being Human - It's all about the destination

“You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.” — Zig Ziglar

To grow your business, have a destination in mind. It’s not easy, but it’s important. 

The reason it's not easy is that you're dealing with the unknown. The nature of growth is you haven't been to your new lofty place, so it's hard to know what it looks like. There are some shortcuts. Like maybe hiring people that have been there before and having them share what their destination looked like. But every company's journey is a little different. Different people, different dispositions, different economic environments. 

Remember, it's ok to change the destination once new information comes in. My advice to clients working on a strategy is to pick a timeframe far enough in the future that everyone assumes it may change. 3, 5, 7, 9 years or something like that. Then describe it in as much detail as you can, and get your leadership team to stick to the story. 

The last part, sticking to the story, is the important part. It gives your people guidance for the hundreds of thousands of little decisions they need to make along the way. 

Think about a circus. The showman says he wants something spectacular for his show's finale. "I want five giant bears lined up, balancing on beachballs, roaring at the audience!" he says. With that, the bear trainer that has to train the bears knows where she is ending up. The process in getting there will be long and involves hundreds of little steps, setbacks, re-groupings, and rewards, but once she’s there, the show finale is ready to go. 

Why five bears? Why beachballs? It doesn't matter. The destination is clear. The trainer can do what she needs to do to make it happen. 

When there isn't a clear destination, one gets filled in for us. Your people may hear something in the media, or something from clever marketers that puts a destination in their head. "You know what would be a spectacular finale?" they say. It's confusing.

To make progress easier for everyone, paint a clear picture of where you want to go.

Random Stuff

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Did you know hostas are edible? I learned this from the parent of a trick or treater last year. She saw the dozens of plants around our big front tree and said, "Did you know those hostas are edible?" I looked it up. She's right! (not that I had any reason to doubt a random grown woman in a Bat Girl costume)

When the hosta's shoots are coming up, you can clip them like you would asparagus. They kind of look like asparagus. I'm guessing with olive oil and salt they'd be delicious. 

As you can guess, spring has me spending more time in the yard. It's cleanup and pruning season. Everything seems to be emerging, and I need to get rid of the random ground cover I left in the fall. I used to clean it up before winter, but someone said I should leave it for cover the critters could use. Makes sense. I want them to stay out of my house all winter. All year, really. 

Each evening this week, as I wander around clipping this, pulling that, and cutting branches, I am accompanied by a tree full of turkey vultures. 

They hang out in a tree across the street. There are 60 or more of them and they're huge. When they roost for the night, they make quite a clutter. When I'm concentrating on what to cut, the roosting sounds just like someone sneaking up behind me. Their wingspan is nearly 6 feet. It's a big bird.

Most of my neighbors are old. Or at least, older than me. The neighborhood group chat is full of dark jokes about whom the buzzards are here for, and why there needs to be 60 of them. It must not be for a small person. Unless more than one future piece of carrion is going to be left outside at the same time, I guess. (Consensus is the birds won't go into a house looking for foodstuff.)

Back to the hostas. If you cut the shoots, they regrow. It's a replenishable food source. I'm used to only eating what I grow in the garden, ignoring other bits of nourishment hanging around. Edible plants, small meaty birds, fat bunnies, and maybe even a raccoon could be food in a pinch. I guess. 

Just making notes. . .no particular reason. Just notes.