Out of the Office: Idea Factory

Sometimes the best ideas brew when you're in the car or out of the office. Standing in line, or standing in traffic can be extremely creative as your mind wanders.

Denise and I purposely staged an off-site mind-wander last Tuesday. We rented an office in the Irvine Center for the day and met half-way between our two home offices. Armed with laptops, flip charts and marker pens, we let the thoughts roll out. The Blog Squad gals were sparking some neurons big time.

There was some purpose to our brainstorm. When business is busy, it is easy to get caught up in servicing clients, and just earning your living. As smart and savvy entrepreneurs, we know that we need to stay ahead of the game, to be ready for the next big idea. We can't do that unless we have the day to day things managed - which means optimizing our systems such as newsletters, blogs and shopping cart ecommerce automation.

We decided we needed to change focus for our weekly ezine, Newsletter Nuggets. It was originally created as a showcase for Customized Newsletter Services, my newsletter article and ezine services. It now contains much more, all sorts of biz tips, Conversations with Experts updates, and new product announcements. It is more about savvy biz tips for professionals, than about newsletters.

As the Blog Squad, we also need some consistent branding. And our skills and talents lie beyond just providing blog and newsletter services. We also provide services for professionals who need to set up automated ecommerce solutions.

Several new decisions were made during our day-long brainstorming session. They will be rolled out in the next month.

Here's phase one: You can win an iPod by participating in our online contest starting next week and during the whole month of April. There are 3 ways to win prizes. We will announce that next week!

Be sure you don't miss the announcements. You can stay abreast by subscribing to our blogs...see that subscribe box in the upper right hand corner? Just put in your email address and you'll get notice of blog updates.

Denise and I are solidifying our partnership, and want to include you the reader as part of our team. We will continually ask for your input, your feedback, your critiques. You are an important part of our biz plan; without your contributions and conversation, this wouldn't be half as much fun. And if work isn't fun, then for me, it's not worth it.

Comments

[Heather Jacobson]

Oh I fully believe in this. While my partner don't get together off site (we need to think about this) we do hold every other week Vision calls, as we call them. We think big, we work on those things that got pushed to the side during the week because we were helping our clients' businesses.

I look forward to them. I do try to set aside every Friday for business development, however, sometimes it just doesn't happen!

I'm excited to see what's in store and I'm going to talk to my partner about getting together half way! It's only about a 2 hour drive for us!

Heather