The weeks seem to fly by so fast. Throughout the week, I’ve had moments where I thought I should stop and post a blog about this or that, but obviously I didn’t stop and so an entire week has passed without any reporting. Not to say that I’ve not been busy. I did accomplish alot, from painting a few watercolors to making sales/marketing calls to getting more paperwork pulled and organized for the bookeeper to checking in with reps and discussing a new program where I can provide a rack/cards for stores. Lots of opportunity out there yet it requires time to follow up, research and implement it all. Which brings me back to the time management piece that I’m trying to focus on. I can see that is critical, when one wears so many hats, to know which hat to wear when!
One of the things Charles and I discussed yesterday was what this blog represented. He feels it is important for anything I do to 1. be branded, as in “words and watercolors” and 2. to be inspirational/motivational since that is the essence of “words and watercolors”. I began this blog about a year ago as I was beginning this journey of developing my greeting cards. At that time, it didn’t make sense to me to name it “words and watercolors” because I was still considering various options for the name of my card line. I wanted to inspire others to follow their dream. With that thought in mind, I tried many variations of inspire/dream/pursue etc… it took a lot of playing with words till I found that “aspire to your dream” was available as a blog title. And so my blog of chronicling my efforts was born. I tried looking around on wordpress to see if I might be able to change the name of the blog. It appears that I would have to begin a new blog, which I don’t want to do because I don’t want to lose this past year’s entries. I’ve made the decision to keep doing what I’m doing. Maybe someday I’ll make it more cohesive but at this point, this is an outlet for me to discuss the process of what I’m doing as I grow. I’ll try to add a component of motivation with my entries as well.
So for the motivational part…I can speak from experience that it has always been my dogged persistence and determination, as I often called it, that led to my success in the Corporate Sales arena (sold Office Furniture and Commercial Carpet for years). Those same qualities of persistence and determination will be the critical factor in my success of my greeting card line as well. This past week, I once again took up the challenge to make 5 sales/marketing calls per day. This was a bit of wisdom I picked up in the book, The Success Principals, authored by Jack Canfield. In it he tells the story of how he and Mark Victor Hansen received well over 130 rejections to their book “Chicken Soup for the Soul”. Once they finally did find a publisher, it was a small one with little to no budget for book tours and promotions. Jack and Mark made it a point to daily contact 5 different organizations to introduce their book. It was that work that paid off, landing them on best seller lists and the incredible launch of an entire franchise of “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. This past week I was surprised and shocked when a person I’d tried to reach last fall answered her own phone (it didn’t go to voice mail!). It took me a second to compose myself (I was prepared to leave another voice mail) and then I was able to question her about greeting cards in their chain of stores. It came down to the fact that I don’t have a rep/rack program and she’s not interested but I hung up the phone with a purpose to figure out a rep/rack program and to win her business over eventually. Dogged persistence and determination. It works every time.