Sandra Yancey Speaks at Savannah eWomenNetwork Event

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Sandra Yancey the CEO and Founder of eWomenNetwork came to Savannah this week to speak at the local eWomenNetwork chapter’s monthly Accelerated Networking Event.

Her talk was fabulous and I’ve got to say that Sandra Yancey is a tremendously good public speaker. She had the whole room captivated for the entire time she spoke and the audience was silent for the entire time. Getting a room full of 80 women to be quiet for a few minutes can be an accomplishment but Sandra spoke for nearly an hour and a half! The time had passed so quickly while she spoke that it felt like less than half that time to me.

Starting a New Business

Sandra spoke about some of the struggles it takes to get a business off the ground and running profitably. She shared how close to failure she’d been at the beginning of her business and how she was able to acquire the skills and knowledge she needed adapt her business turn it into a successfully growing venture.

As Sandra Yancey spoke she filled her talk with stories and anecdotes ranging from her own personal experiences to relating the classic children’s story of The Little Engine That Could.

Most Valuable Asset

Sandra shared what she thought was the single most valuable asset in her business career, and it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t capital reserves, marketing savvy, or the ability to come up with earth shaking new ideas. Read more

Gorgeous on TV

Gorgeous and I were up early this morning. I set the alarm for 4 AM because we had to be down at one of our local TV stations by 6 so that Gorgeous could be interviewed about her upcoming eWomenNetwork event.

The event Wednesday will be a big deal because eWomenNetwork founder and CEO Sandra Yancey will be here in Savannah as this month’s speaker. With over 113 eWN chapters in the US and Canada you can imagine that Sandra can only attend a very small percentage of the events in any given month.

We’re fortunate here in Savannah that Sandra will be paying us a visit and sharing her insights into how to network with folks who can help entrepreneurs and business women expand their business vision and attract new customers and referrals. It promises to be another top notch event. Read more

Advice to Yahoo Employees - Start Looking Now

It’s not big news that Yahoo is facing some significant challenges. Even if everything was roses for the search engine company the very fact that another company like Microsoft is looking to buy them out is going to make for some tough going for the good folks who work for Yahoo.

Been There, Done That

Event though I use Google products and services way more than those of Yahoo, I feel for the good people at Yahoo. I’ve been down that “the company I’m working for is being bought out road” my self. It isn’t very much fun. I was in the maritime industry, not the tech field at the time.

9-11 hit the transportation sector pretty hard. The company I was working for was on a shaky financial footing anyway and the couple lean years after that day was simply too much to for the company to endure.

Rough times have a very Darwinistic way of weeding out inefficient companies. Read more

Think Before You Call It Spam

Those of us who make our living working primarily online know full well how pervasive the scourge of spam has become. Whether you are an online publisher like me, or just dealing with the hoards of junk emails that come your way everyday you know the problem is real.

But did you know marking that email newsletter as spam is probably not the best way to keep it out of your in box?

In fact you could even be causing problems for other folks by doing that.

Unwanted Newsletters

From a marketing perspective the email newsletter is a wonderful way to reach out to potential clients and keep a recurring contact with past customers. Because the costs per message are incredibly low this is a marketing tool of choice for just about everyone from the solo entrepreneur to the major corporation.

Trouble is, it is usually pretty easy to add email addresses to the mailing list. Because of that it’s easy to get on to mailing lists that we really don’t want to be a part of, whether we unwittingly “agreed” to be on the list at one point or not.

Being bombarded with unwanted email can be frustrating. And the temptation is to just “make it go away” by hitting the “mark as spam” or “junk” button. But you might want to think before you do that and here’s why. Read more

Analog Networking Morning

Just as Social Media can be a useful avenue to raise the visibility of your business face to face networking is also an important element to promoting your business and the service or product you offer.

I call that my analog networking time. And today will be full of that.

I’m heading to the eWomenNetwork event at the Savannah Southern Women’s Show. And while that may sound like it could be a bit of an estrogen filled morning, I find eWomenNetwork to be one of the most productive of the networking events I attend locally.

And I don’t say that just because Gorgeous is the founding Executive Managing Director of the Savannah chapter either. Though I will admit that probably adds just a little bias to my opinion.

Truth is women make or heavily influence something like 80% of all buying decisions in our culture these days. Couple that with the fact that this particular group is focused on intentionally making business connections and it adds up to a winner for my business.

The similarities between seeing results with analog face to face networking and with digital social media networking are striking. And when you get right down to it, your results are usually tied directly to how much effort you are willing to put into building those relationships.

So for now I’m off for a breakfast event.

Creative Marketing from an Accountant

OK. One of the points of marketing is to help folks remember your brand, right?

What if your product or service isn’t exactly flashy or naturally attention getting? How can you stand out from the crowd?

Say your business is accounting. Good accounting is a critical piece of any successful business. But let’s face it. Not only is accounting a little on the, um, unexciting side for most folks but accountants themselves generally tend to be very conservative unflashy folks.

So how can you make sure you’re noticed and people remember your brand?

Well a local Accounting firm here in Savannah just made sure I’ll not forget them soon.

My Kind of Marketing

As regular readers here may know I have two flavor passions. Coffee & Chocolate. The argument could be made my consumption levels of these two wonderful substances is remarkably unhealthy. I’m OK with that.

Knowing that you can imagine how I stood up and paid attention when Gorgeous brought the chocolate bar pictured below home from her BNI meeting yesterday.

Now that’s just plain creative. Since it’s tax season a nudge in the IRS direction is a good attention getter.

How much more effective do you think handing someone that instead of a plain old business card would be?

I promise I’ll be talking about Karp, Ronning & Tindol far more since they helped feed my addiction than I ever would have otherwise.

What can you do to help get more conversation rolling about your business?

2008 Will be Dramatically Different at SuccessCREEations

It’s funny how we measure time by the calendar. I mean January first will dawn just like any other day. Here in Savannah odds are pretty good it will be a bit foggy, just like this morning. It’s that time of year.

However 1 January will be a vastly different time for me here at SuccessCREEations. A big part of that change involves me leaving my day job.

Yep. You heard right.

As of the new year I will no longer be employed full time in my old position in the maritime industry. I’m leaving that job to focus on growing SuccessCREEations, Inc.

It is a big step, no doubt. and that is one that Gorgeous and I have been working towards for quite some time.

There have been a myriad of things to get in place, things like health insurance, a car to replace the company car I’m giving up, and a new laptop - again to replace the company one I’m forfeiting.

What it Means

In the next few weeks y’all will see some big changes around here. For starters we will be overhauling the entire site.

SuccessCREEations will transform from a pure blog to a hybrid site that will be our company site with a blog on it. We’ve thought long and hard about the pros and cons to changing the site. Based on the direction we are moving a change is in order.

Gorgeous will be starting her own much anticipated blog here after the first of the year. I’m excited about her joining the blogging community in a more formal way after all her involvement with SOBCon.

I will be writing much more often and in a few new places. I’ll be firing up my personal blog here again shortly after a 6 months or more of neglect and joining in on a couple new projects.

All in all 2008 promises to be dramatically different around here. I’m looking forward to it.

Learning with Lynn Lilly and the Ladies

You may or may not know that Gorgeous is the Managing Director of the local Savannah chapter of a business women’s networking group called eWomenNetwork.

I’m proud of what she’s accomplished in growing that group from nothing a little over a year ago. But pretty much it has been her thing. I’ve kept my distance for the most part. Besides I’ve been kept pretty busy with all the ships.

Things are changing however as we grow my own baby, SuccessCREEations.

Networking

One of the concerns of any business or organization has to be growing the contact base. Without a growing contact base there is no potential customer pool and the whole thing may very well wither on the vine.

There are tons of ways to expand your organizations contacts. For example blogging can be a great way to expand your reach online.

Likewise, if you are interested in building a local customer base, one of the best ways is to get out into the community and meet people, network face to face. And from what I’ve seen here in Savannah there is no better place to do that than amongst the ladies at the local eWomenNetwork events.

Granted I might be a little biased. But I’m sure nobody’s fool either.

So I decided it was time to start participating, step in there, meet some folks, and offer my help to whoever might need it. I’m glad I did.

eWomenNetwork is obviously oriented towards women. However there were a handful of smart men who attended last night’s event as well. These guys understand that over 80% of the buying decisions are made by women and not us men. It makes great business sense to get to know some of these ladies who are controlling so much spending power.

I met some new folks. And last night’s speaker shared something that resonated with me as well.

Lynn Lilly

Lynn Lilly is a lady with more than 20 years experience in the marketing business. She did a great job sharing with us last night. One point really struck home with me.

Creativity is the great UN-Equalizer

Never really thought about it before but she’s right.

We all have the ability to creatively come up with ways to give ourselves an edge up on the competition. The trick is to stimulate our minds to get those creative juices flowing.

Lynn was kind enough to leave us all with a little tool to help get the ball rolling. You can see from the picture that she put together a stack of idea cards to stimulate the synapses.

All in all it was a good night.

And it sure didn’t hurt to be spending time with all those lovely ladies.

Anonymity Credit Card Style

Identity theft is a big issue. If you talk to anyone who has been a victim of that particular crime you can get a feel for how incredibly disruptive it can be to your life.

What if a credit card company came along and changed things up to help protect consumers? What are some of the things they would have to do to keep their cardholder’s identity safe?

For starters they would have to remove information like card holder names and account number from the card, right?

Sound crazy, doesn’t it?

Well there is a new credit card company that is doing that very thing.

Revolution Card is a new credit card that leaves the account number and card holder name off of the card.

I think they may very well be on to something. Sounds a little like the PayPal of credit cards.

For those of you unfamiliar with PayPal, it is a system that makes money transactions via email. The person you send or get money from only sees your email address. Your financial information is theoretically much more protected because you can change the email address associated with your account.

In the same way the Revolution Card uses a pin number for each transaction. And they even allow you to create temporary pin numbers. That can be a useful feature for one time purchases, dealing with unfamiliar merchants, and when working online.

I suspect we will be seeing much more of Revolution Card in the future.

Thanks to Valeria Maltoni who shared about this in Fast Company.

Clarify Your Win and Be More Effective

Effectiveness is often a good measure of success. When we are effective we are producing the results we striving to achieve.

Trouble comes when the results we see are different from what we expected. What then? How do we become more effective?

One sure way to be more effective is to Clarify Your Win.

We All Want to Win

Everyone likes to win. People love the excitement when their team is getting ahead. It’s the reason sports are a multi-billion dollar industry around the globe. We are hard wired to crave winning and being associated with winners.

This is also why a team that’s in the middle of a big loosing streak has trouble filling a stadium. No one wants to associate with “losers”.

With sports it’s easy to see who the winner is. One quick look at the scoreboard, or maybe the clock is all it takes. Winning in most sports can be reduced to numbers and guys often memorize an amazing amount of data from their favorite sports teams all with the the goal of figuring out who’s got the best chances to win.

Or sometimes they use their stats to explain why this team won and that team lost. Read more

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