When something has to give, what strategic priorities will you give up?
When it is crunch time, what will emerge as your real strategic priorities? And are the priorities you pick the same strategic priorities you said you'd emphasize when it was time earlier in the year for strategic thinking?
Those questions are front and center for me.
Nearing last year’s close, I thought we knew specific changes in the make-up of The Brainzooming Group. Looking ahead, I planned to shift my activities toward organizing our content (and increasing its value) and to streamline our internal processes to boost capacity.
Then things changed.
A key person planning to join The Brainzooming Group delayed the decision. Marianne Carr took another role. In a complete surprise, Barb Murphy returned as part of the team. A speculative business opportunity occupying a good portion of my time went away. A new referral client materialized, leading to multiple opportunities. All the while, demand for Brainzooming workshops on innovation, strategic thinking, and content marketing increased.
It would have been easy to decide the best thing to do was sticking with what we've been doing. That would suggest pushing off changes we'd been considering until some future date.
The best option, however, was ramping up marketing and business development activities, building out our own content marketing strategy to work harder, and migrating more of the doing to core and extended team members of Brainzooming.
That's what we've done, with both successes and sacrifices.
Unfortunately, the sacrifices involve important personal priorities for me - prayer and spiritual time, being with family, fitness, and time to explore new creative ideas. Sleep has also been a victim during this change.
That's not a sustainable combination.
And even more recently, I actually blew up over a business situation; that’s something that hasn't happened for a LOOOOOOOOOONG time.
Suffice it to say, it feels like crunch time.
Another victim during this crunch time is regularly publishing this blog.
I've been a proponent for regular, if not daily, blogging as vital for successful content marketing. We’re off our schedule, however. While I'm creating a tremendous amount of new content (workshops and presentations, eBooks, and client deliverables), it's not transferring to blog content as readily as it has in the past. As a result, my strategic priority of maintaining an aggressive publishing schedule isn't happening. When you finish working on that day’s workshop at 1:30 in the morning, sleep wins out over staying up another hour to write a blog post to publish at 4:50 the next morning. That’s especially true when you know the alarm is set for 5 a. m., no matter WHEN you go to bed. The night after that, however, I did stay up until 3 a.m. to get a second blog post published that week. It was not easy rolling out of bed at 5:25 a.m., however, to make it to mass before diving in again to get ready for multiple trips that week.
All in all, for those that notice when there isn't a Brainzooming blog published each day, I wanted to let you know what is happening.
I'm still here.
I'm still trying to create valuable content for you.
But it's crunch time, and right now, that's getting in the way. - Mike Brown
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