Taking Care of #1

All through July I blogged every day; haven’t posted anything since August. All summer I was wildly active on FB; now I have 140 FB messages waiting for my attention (sorry Friends!). Between April and May I added 1,000 twitter followers and now they’re leaving my nest for lack of my sociability. And nobody’s seen my newsletter since July.

What’s happening? I remember business in the 20th century, before results were supposed to be instantly produced & measured after a perfectly crafted 14-day campaign for a product that magically blossomed over a weekend.

In the last century, I had a job (actually, a great job for a wonderful corporation). I was a mid-level manager with a team of 3 and a very large revenue responsibility. I worked for a great boss, just 2 levels away from the CEO. And everything took time to gel: meetings, reviews, concepts, beta tests, trials, parallel systems; they all were part of a process to reduce the risk of a flop with any initiative, either internally or with customers (and no manager wanted to give birth to that and lose future budgetary dollars or a job).

Now, I don’t want to go back to corporate life, no matter how benevolent the organization was. But I think there’s something to be said for the old ‘look before you leap’ concept. It acknowledged there was significant cost and risk associated with any significant change. As a result, ensuring success, in advance, was the norm.

I’m slowing down – development, production, campaign, list growth. I’m focusing on internal development of my own shifting priorities. After all – it’s my business and it exists because I believed business ownership would serve my goals better than a job, no matter how great the employer. Now, I don’t mean to say my business  can withdraw from serving clients or my team or partners to focus on me alone but frankly, if it doesn’t provide me with my goals and honor my values, what’s the point? Fortunately, my sense of work/life integration tells me my business serves me well because it’s been designed to provide real value for all, resulting in a great life for me. This is the best of symbiosis.

However, right now, things are a bit more balanced towards my side, I’m tweaking my target audience and new programs are afoot. Will I let my ‘fingers do the talking’ and get back to my sociable self online? Well, here’s the first sign: I’ve got a new site (still tweaking) and a new blog post.

Your thoughts? How often do you take time away from the all-consuming external focus of marketing the right message to the right audience and check in with yourself? How often do you look at the business you’ve built to ensure it’s still taking care of #1? And believe me, I know that when #1 is happy, the whole business and its constituents hum; so – are you happy?