my own journey – Page 7 – Michele Christensen

Lessons learned from a bad experience with Ikea

Lessons learned from a bad experience at Ikea

I had a blog post planned for today, but yesterday’s experience just was too full of great lessons to ignore. For those of us in the US, yesterday was a holiday and that means some stores are closed or have shorter holiday hours.

Among other things I had planned yesterday, I decided to brave a trip to Ikea to keep some home improvement projects moving ahead. Since it’s quite a trek to get there, I wanted to make sure they were open into the evening. I started with their website and there was no mention of holiday hours. I then entered into phone menu purgatory which was an endless nested maze of options, none of which was “at any time press zero for an operator.” Those phone menu set ups are a horrible way to treat customers. Does any customer feel valued when that’s what they are greeted with? I think by now most people are used to the phone menu hazing they have to go through to get service, and know that if they do choose to speak to a live person they may have to wait. I was surprised though, at how difficult they made it and that there was no obvious way to get to a live person. I finally did get a live person through one of the many combinations of keys I pressed, and of course he couldn’t answer my question but put me back on hold for 7 minutes until someone picked up. Needless to say, this was extremely frustrating and a big waste of over 20 minutes of my time. It made me, an interested customer, way less interested in buying. In fact, if I didn’t need something I could only get there I wouldn’t have gone at all. It certainly made get in and out as fast as possible and thus they lost any other sales they might have had with me. A company like Ikea can get away with this – the one near me is almost always jam packed with a lines of 20 people at each of a dozen registers. They don’t need to change anything about how they treat their customers, but what about the rest of us? What lesson is there for a solopreneur business in this? I came up with 3 things we can take from this experience.

First –

Don’t make it hard to buy, in fact make it as easy as possible. I suspect Ikea would have lost a lot of people in this situation who were less determined and in need than me.

Second –

Don’t make it hard to contact you. Give clients and customers options for how they contact you and make it easy to find that information.

Third –

Anticipate and reply to obvious questions. Think about what big, obvious questions your clients may have and answer them before your clients ask. Don’t make them work for basic information – most won’t and you’ll lose sales. If you get the same question more than a few times, put the answer in your materials.

What are some of the ways you help customers to buy? Share them in the comments.

Choose your business confidants carefully

In the last issue of my newsletter (sign up here or in the box to the right) I shared a story about a colleague asking how many hits a day I get on my site. When I told him the somewhat modest number, he could barely contain his disdain. I didn’t really understand his reaction – I had just gotten done telling him how pleased I am with my business growth this year so why the reaction to my traffic? It wasn’t until later that I realized that he was asking the wrong question. In his business strategy, big traffic is really important. In mine, it’s not. That led to a post on how it’s important not only to measure your results but to make sure you’re measuring what really matters.

I’d like to add one more thing I learned from this, which is to be very careful in choosing whom you share business ideas and information with. Had I not had a clear vision of how my business model works, I might have been dismayed by his reaction. I might have run home and gotten right on the “bright, shiny object” of getting big traffic. Fortunately, I do have a mentor I’m following and I trust her greatly. I’m following her business plan for growing your business via the internet and it’s working. It’s easy in the early stages to get lost in following whatever advice and opinions you can get, and right there is the problem – opinions and advice are easy to find, but someone who understands your business and can give appropriate advice is much more rare.

We have a natural, almost unavoidable tendency to view the world through our own point of view and to assess new ideas based on our experience to date. This means that not everyone is suitable to give you feedback on your business. Make sure you choose your confidants with intention and high standards. Of course you can have colleagues and friends who don’t meet the requirements to be a confidant, but choose your inner circle carefully. If you’ve gotten advice or feedback from someone you haven’t vetted for the role of confidant, make sure to take their comments with a grain of salt and run it through the filter of what you know is right for you. Their advice might be good, but then again it might not have any value, so be open to that possibility as well. People are very willing to provide feedback, but make sure it’s someone in a position to give valuable feedback before you take their comments as valuable. I would advise listening to your customers though – they always have valuable feedback which, since they are your customers, is right on the mark.

Solopreneurs must create work/personal separation

Solopreneurs must create work and personal separation

When I worked at a job outside the house, it was easy to separate my work and personal life. I got up, got dressed in work clothes (which weren’t the clothes I wore outside of work), went to my job, and came home. As soon as I left, there was no connection to work. I never had a remote login or 24-hour on-call status, so it was easy to say “I’m done.”

Now that I work from home, it’s much harder. It’s tempting to just check in when I’m enjoying a quiet Saturday morning or to go down the rabbit hole of checking email. One way I manage this is by having separate work and personal email addresses. I was surprised to learn at a recent Hubspot webinar on email marketing that 88% of survey respondents did not have separate work and personal email addresses!

This is something I’ve had as long as I’ve been self-employed. When I’m out having fun, the last thing I want is work intruding on my time. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my business and tend to work too much already but I don’t want to think about work when I’m doing something else. If I’m out hiking or visiting family on a weekend, I don’t even want to know about loose ends that need to be taken care of. If I read an email and need to do something about it, I don’t want that hovering in my thoughts while I’m having fun.

As solopreneurs, we ARE the business and it becomes much harder to separate and take a break than for people who have a job with someone else. But you absolutely have to carve out some time to disconnect or you’ll lose a lot of the biggest benefit of being self-employed – freedom. I strongly recommend separate work and personal email addresses for solopreneurs. Try this tiny step and see if you feel more at ease when you’re “off.”

Do you have separate business and personal email addresses? Why or why not?

How relevant are GTD contexts to the Solopreneur?

Sometimes the context for an activity is critical

(If you’re not familiar with GTD, it’s the productivity and time management system outlined in the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.)

When I first read “Getting Things Done,” (“GTD“) I loved it. There were a handful of points that changed my life and the way I manage my time and one of them was contexts. The idea that our tasks occur in a physical setting or context, and that by segregating your to-do list into GTD contexts, you’ll have a ready-made list of tasks that are relevant to the context you are in. This idea helped me tremendously – when I was planning to go out and do errands, I had an errand list. If I was doing messy home repair, I had a home improvement list. If I was at my desk, I had an admin list.

It worked great for a while, but as is almost inevitable my life changed over time. My system no longer worked and I felt more scattered and stressed than I needed to be. When I looked at the problem, I realized that as someone who is self-employed and works from home, contexts aren’t all that important. Most of what I do both personally and professionally occurs at home in casual clothes. I do tag a few to-do items that I need to go out for or have some other noteworthy characteristic in their context, but for the most part, context is not very relevant to me. What is more relevant is blocking my time out for work and personal time, so that’s what I now do.

So the question is, how much do solopreneurs who work from home need GTD contexts? Do you use them or something similar? Is it a useful concept for you life right now? Why or why not?

Product review: Google tasks

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Google products. I use gmail even though my email appears to come from my domain. I use Picasa for photos, Google Calendar, Google keyword tool, Google analytics, Google docs and Google contacts. I love that almost everything they do, aside from being free, works great.

When I switched to an Android phone, I was stymied by what to do with my tasks and projects. I had been using a Blackberry before that, and while the task function wasn’t overly impressive I was able to make it work. If I wanted to stay with Google and make full use of the seamless sync between my desktop and phone it seemed that Google tasks was my only option. The problem was that Google tasks is such a low-feature system that I had to really do some serious work-arounds to get it to even come close to my needs. A lot of people were complaining about it, and it seemed really out of sync with the high level of quality of their other services. I decided to gamble and set myself up on Google tasks with the hope that soon they would upgrade the functionality and it would be as good as all the other products I use and love.

Almost a year later, I decided to switch again because it was just too hard to stay on top of everything I had to do with the system I was using at the time. There hadn’t been any pending upgrades to the task manager announced, and a year was the longest I was willing to wait. Things that are weak on Google tasks include:

There’s no way to put a recurring task in, so you can create a task that occurs every Monday, every 3 days, or 5 days after the last time you did it.
You can create several different lists of tasks, but only one can be viewed at a time, and if you want to view them on your calendar along with your appointments, only the list currently open in the tasks pane shows up. If you don’t think to check all of your task lists, you could be missing things you need to do today.
There is no way to add a tag or a priority to a task. This are pretty basic functions of most task managers, so it seemed like a big sacrifice to not have these functions.
There was no home-screen icon on the Android for tasks from Google like there was out-of-the-box for contacts, Gmail and calendar. It seems to me that a task function is an equally important sibling of these 3 and for some reason Google treats tasks differently.

After nearly a year of making due with a task manager that just wasn’t up to the job of managing my life, both personal and business, I finally gave in and decided to look for another option. This process will be the topic of a series of posts for which this post is first. I just love peeking into other people’s time management systems, so if you want a peek into mine, look out for the next post.

What task management system do you use and why? Do you sync it with your smartphone?

Are you an introvert?

If so, come out of hiding and treat yourself right!

I read this article this morning on how to care for an introvert, and in addition to giving tips on how to care for an introvert, there’s great information introverts can use to care for themselves. Have a read and come back to the rest of the post.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/2696/

First of all, let me say that I am an introvert. If you know me in real life, that may be shocking because I’m social, have friends, love to talk and even love public speaking. But as pointed out in the article, there’s a lot of incorrect ideas about what an introvert is. I’m not shy, housebound or miserable. I am exactly like the introvert described in the article. When I do social things, I need lots of time by myself to recover. There’s a limit to how many social events I can do in a day or a weekend.

You can tie this into your business by making sure your business aligns with your natural, comfortable personality type. I love working one-on-one with people, but only have so much energy for that. I realized late last year that I was spending too much time working one-on-one with people, and now I’m leading group programs and working on information products as well as working with just a few one-on-one clients.

Does your current business work for your personality? If you are an introvert, are you draining yourself by spending too much time with people? If you are an extrovert, are you feeling like you’re missing out because you spend too much time working alone at home? Have you adjusted your business to a better mix for you? If so, tell me about it in the comments.

If you recognize yourself here and want to adjust your business accordingly, let’s talk! Click here to schedule a free strategy session.

Find an hour or more per week easily

Ok, here’s a quick tip that’s not strictly business.

I’ve known about home grocery delivery for years, but never tried it until today. I saved at least an hour and a half and a lot of energy. What could you do with an extra hour and a half and some extra energy every week?

Here’s the highlights:

It was only $6.95 for the delivery, and the driver wouldn’t even take a tip.
I was able to find a lot of the foods we eat, which is surprising because we keep a vegan household and don’t use many packaged foods. A partial list of what we got: almond milk, tofu, grapes, fresh tomatoes, cashews and canned beans.
The driver puts the bagged groceries on your kitchen table. No lugging bag after bag from the car!
The process was smooth and included options where you could specify your rules for substitutions. You could also make a request to the person picking your order.
They did miss two items, but one quick call and my credit card was credited.

So, back to business. What could you do with an hour and a half per week that would make this pay for itself? Considering taxes and overhead, you’d need to gross something like $14 for example to make this worthwhile. Leave a note in the comments and tell me if you’ve ever used this service or plan to, and more importantly what you did with the time and energy you gained. If you’re a business owner who doesn’t have a way to make at least $14 in a newly-found hour and a half, let’s talk! Click the link below to schedule your free strategy session today!

Yes, I want a free strategy session!

Welcome!

Hi and welcome to my site!

I wanted to start my blog by explaining why I love solopreneur businesses. I spent the first few years of my career working for corporate America, and by the time I escaped I was so miserable I never wanted anything to do with business again. I took a few months off to travel the USA, and then some temp work led to a small consulting practice. By then I was in LA, where there were loads of creative types needing business help.

I still hadn’t quite gotten the right mix of services in my practice though, and closed the practice to spend a few years working in a non-profit serving the clients of the facility. I began getting interested in blogging, social media and web 2.0 stuff in early 2008, and in January of 2009 I launched my own solopreneur business as a professional organizer. Over time, I niched down further and further until I was just providing time management and productivity consulting for entrepreneurs.

From that specialized practice came my current business combining business experience, strategic thinking and productivity. I did a lot of masterminding with trusted colleagues, past clients and people who would be ideal clients. What came out of it is that my mission is to help solopreneurs with the business side of their work so they can focus on bringing their unique gifts to the world. I believe that solopreneur businesses are going to be a powerful force in the post-recession economy, and I see the amazing, positive change they bring to the world. I want to be part of that, to help you create a solid business foundation so you can do your work in the world.