“The RoseBouquet”

These weeks leading up to Christmas, known to some as the Advent season, can get very busy as we try to maintain our usual work load and then attend a number of special social functions. I have usually avoided or escaped most of that in the past number of years, but this year is different.

At the church I attended on Sunday, and where I think I will settle down now, I was invited by my friend Anna and her son Gary, to come over for lunch. (Her first husband was my mom’s 2nd cousin, making Gary my 3rd cousin). We had a pleasant lunch and visit, but I excused myself about 2 pm as I knew I needed to get my Christmas card and letter designed and written.

That church is having a pot-luck lunch next Sunday, and I’m going to bring a salad.

On Sunday morning I also got an invitation for lunch on the 14th, from another new friend (& distant cousin, we discovered).

Last week I was invited to a Board Christmas Supper with the MHSS for Dec. 1. Yes, last night. The Mennonite Historical Society of Saskatchewan (MHSS) is one of my clients for web design work, and I was urged to attend and to get to know the Board members. So I accepted. It was a pleasant evening.

I can tell though, that I’m not used to spending 3-4 hours in social dining and visiting, because coming home I caught myself thinking, “So what did I accomplish there?”

This is a bit different than counting how many jobs I got done on their website on “their” night. Do you think it’s okay to count these;
1. I met some people whose names I had seen before, but I had no idea who they were.
2. When the president had us play some guessing games I had a chance to tell some family stories.
3. One woman was fascinated when I told of producing some children’s books for my niece’s kids, to help them learn Plaut Dietsch. She told her husband about it later, and they want to come see them.
4. I got to hand out two of my brand new brochures on my Web Business Course coming up in January.
5. I received my most recent paycheck from their Treasurer. (Usually she mails it).

Oh, one more. This supper was held in Osler. That’s half-way to Hague. On the way I feared I would run out of gas before I got back to Saskatoon, so I stopped at their one and only service station, planning to get just $10 worth of gas because in the past I always thought their price was rather high. It turned out their price was 2 cents cheaper than in the city, so I filled up there!

Last week I worked a couple of mornings at designing a brochure to help promote the Four-month Course I’m offering to teach, starting January 5 and going through to April 30th. It will be intensive tutoring in a Business Incubator, to become a Solo Web Business owner. Yesterday I thought it was polished enough to ask Joe downstairs to print me a dozen copies. (He also printed my Christmas cards and photos for me).

In fact, if you would like to read it and tell me if you can spot ways to improve it, or typos to correct, just send me a note, and I’ll send you a PDF of the brochure, or a link to it. (It might be easier to find it online than to receive it by email). But I would like such feedback in the next couple of days as I am now planning to put on a big push to promote and market this, so that by next week I may have potential students coming in for interviews already.

I will only be taking four students at a time. No more. But if they have a “go get ‘em” attitude like mine, and we hit it off, I think the first four months of 2009 will be terrifically exciting in this office! If this doesn’t come off - ie. no students - I believe I’ll close the door to that idea, and just focus on the pace I’ve set myself here since September 1, and just try to do as much as I can with what I have.

However, I can see how, when a few people working together, stimulate bright new ideas, and they can accomplish far more than one person alone. By myself I’ve already had far more ideas than I can shake a stick at! Imagine what will happen when several people start working at this together. I’ll happily give some of my ideas for businesses away, if the right person, with the right interests and abilities gets fired up about them.

I have a younger friend, who works for a web design company that takes on large corporations’ websites, but they turn away those who come asking for a small biz site. She urged me to provide some brochures they can hand out to these potential clients that they turn away.

This week I hope to find several other ways to advertise and promote this course, maybe even some paid ads, eh? Let’s see if this will fly!

If you are curious to know more about what kind of web business my course would teach, I can tell you it is based on, and will use the SiteBuildIt! system. They have many case histories to show how others have used it and succeeded, and there are training videos you can watch in the Action Guide. After a certain point the videos make more sense if you are doing it in the SiteBuildIt! suite of services, but if you are a bright person, there is no reason you can’t watch the videos and learn a lot about the over-all picture, and many principles you can apply to any other system you use to build a web business. I’ve been snitching ideas from these people for years!

Here’s the links to check it all out;
the basic info about SiteBuildIt! What it is and does.
Case studies of SBI-ers whose sites made it into the top 1% of ALL sites in the world.
The Action Guide video series.

(* names are ficticious)

About 9 o’clock I come tromping up the alley to the back door, bundled to the nines, to find one student huddled there, waiting to get in, and another one joining us before I have both the deadbolt and the door nob unlocked. We sound like a herd of elephants as we quickly head up the narrow staircase to my office.

I unlock the door to my Azaleas Virtual Assistants office suite, and we all chat about the weather, and miscellaneous things while we peel off coats and boots, etc. My four students are eager to get to their computers and some turn on their monitors before they are fully shed of winter outer wear.

I feel a bit harried as I’d hoped to beat them by a few minutes so I could review the days agenda, and be calm and collected, however, I remind them that their first job of the day is to write someone a thank you or encouragement note. This can be by email or in a handwritten card. They know the procedure, and I have just bought myself about ten minutes of quiet in my private office, where I look over my notes from the day before.

When I come into the larger work room again, three have finished their notes, and are checking email and doing a quick browse online. The fourth student is just signing a hand-written note and I relax and chat with them informally while she addresses the envelope.

In the first six weeks we covered all the basics, like looking inside the computers and fixing a few things, they have installed software, and got familiar with what’s on their computers, and they have now begun to take individual assignments.

I go to one eager student and say, “Okay, Al*, you are back on the site you were updating yesterday.” He grins and says, “Yep, I’ve only got about 9 or 12 pages left to go. I may get that done this morning!” I cheer him on.

Then I turn to Barb*, the second student, and say, “You got that mission site listed on quite a few directories, but you should have a few days left on that list yet, right?” She asks a question about one site that seemed to expect payment. We look at it together again, and I make a decision to ignore that one. “Move on to the next one,” I suggest.

Next I go to Calle*. “We’re going to solve that ftp set up problem today. Can you login to that site’s cPanel, and we’ll review that all step by step.”

Meantime, I turn to Dave*. “Let me show you how to go to PayPal to get the Buy Now button codes for those books on that site, and then you can paste those in one after another today. I think once you have gone through the process once, you’ll be able to do all the rest.”

Then I go back to Calle, and we follow the instructions for setting up a sub-domain and the ftp account for it. We do it slowly, and she takes notes all the way through. All of sudden we both lift our heads and shout with victory! It works. Yesterday we had one capital letter where we shouldn’t. The other students grin and congratulate us.

After a while I go back to my small office, and sit down to answer some emails. After a bit one of the students sings out my name. I hurry back to the classroom, and help solve a minor step sequence question. Then I go back to answer another email or two.

At break time we all move into the lunch room (also known as the computer Operating Room) and take a few minutes for coffee and chat and brainstorming. I don’t have to coax them to get back to work though. Two of them don’t even drink coffee. Like me they sip some water, and pick up one of my home-made energy bars, and head back to their desks.

At noon I have to invite one or two of the students individually to leave their computers and come eat lunch. We all brought our own, though some days I come by car, bring my crockpot and plug it in right away at 9. By noon we all have a hot meal to share. In about half an hour we have eaten and are busy brainstorming business ideas, but I’ve said that a walk around the block is good for us, so all but one, who has a cold coming on, bundle up in parkas and boots, and we go striding around the block, hashing over our ideas, and pointing to some business in the next block that looks like it might be up for grabs soon. We have at least two good ideas for what we’d do in that building.

We remind each other of my rule that they can’t start a second business until this four month period is up. But we are allowed to talk about ideas and do some research on them.

Before 1 pm all my students are in place, and waiting for me to guide them through another step in developing their web business idea. Today we are researching keywords and several get very excited when they realize that they’ve found some keywords that are in great demand. This means their website will do really well! I urge them to drill down some more, and now that they understand how to do this, I leave them to it, but am called back from my email work repeated to give my intuitive sense of whether their idea will fly, or how broad or narrow to focus their niche site.

When a glance at the wall clock shows it is after 4 pm already, and we have totally forgotten to take a mid-afternoon break, I remind them that at 4:45 they are to do their computer back up before they leave for the day. Two of the students groan about how much more they want to get done yet before then. One of the students is clutching her head as if she’s just overwhelmed, the other one is frantically scribbling notes on the edge of the too-small computer desk. I make myself a mental note to see if I can’t afford bigger desks yet.

I had planned to hurry home and do some baking over supper, but Al seems oblivious to the time when 5 pm rolls around and keeps bringing up this small detail and then another and yet a different one to discuss with me. At first I cooperate, then I start putting on my boots while we talk, and hinting that it is time to go home. We’ll continue tomorrow. I have to shoo him out so I can lock the door.

I walk home feeling somehow drained and yet exhilarated. I grin wildly to myself, knowing my scarf hides my face from curious eyes that may lurk behind the windows of the houses I pass. I try to pray, but my imagination is all over the place, picturing more of some of the ideas we discussed. So many possibilities! How will we ever do them all?