Kelowna a Success!

Last week Matt and I took the trip out west to train a bunch of young professionals on building an efficient and successful team. The challenge was called 'Assembling Success'. Now, we've done this exercise all over the world to over 150 people and this one had them all beat!

Without giving away all our trade secrets, the objective is loosely around trying to make as many products in the allotted amount of time. Typically we see anywhere from 1-10. I think the count on this team... over 30 (before the stealing rampage began that is).

I'm not sure why this team was more effective, but they sure assembled a successful team! Good work!












PS. Check out our new website - www.igniteyoursmallbiz.ca.

The Birdhouse Challenge in Jasper Indiana

Matt and I presented a full day of workshops in July in Jasper Indiana. Over 50 people were at the conference. One of the sessions was the Birdhouse Challenge where teams are paired off to live the life of an entrepreneur from start to finish, concluding with promoting their product. In the 70 or so times we have done this session, we have never had a team actually make a commercial...until now. So here it is.

YeeHaw! We're in Calgary

Stop number 3 on the world tour! We arrived Tuesday in Calgary to a balmy 5 degrees and light flurries - much different then the 25 degrees and smog advisory in Kingston.

Tomorrow we're doing the Day in the Life of an Entrepreneur training session at the JCI Canada National Convention. There are over 125 dynamic young leaders registered from across Canada. Wonder what they'll think when they see the costumes they have to wear - not your typical conference training session!

Check back in a few days for some pics and stories about our trip.

Over planning can be Overkill

We always talk about (and even write about in Trucker Management) that planning, from business planning to contingency planning, is key to small business success - and it is. At the same time however, there comes a time when enough is enough and it's time to stop planning and start doing.

A Junior Chamber chapter this year experienced how over planning can be overkill. JCI provides tools and templates for the individual chapter to complete a yearly business plan. The challenge is that the organization has a pretty diverse mission and a vague target market (only defined by age). In one city, the JC's may look like a business networking association, in another a community club and in another a social group. The other challenge is that the Board of Directors completely changes over every year, so the plan starts from scratch every year. Every chapter struggles with trying to be everything to everyone. So, this chapter we're talking about, spent many months planning who they were, who their target market was and what programming would occur. Then when the President had to leave half way through the year, the new board had to go back into planning mode before the first plan was complete. For 7 months the chapter was planning what it would be doing for the year, even though the year was almost over.

In September, the chapter realized enough is enough and that the planning phase had actually deterred members from attending and joining. So in September they DID something, not just talked about it. The talk on the town the last few weeks had much and improved.

A good quote to sum this up is:

Ready. Fire. Aim.
is better than
Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim. Aim...