I walked in the door a few weeks ago after a day full of meetings and phone calls and flopped on the couch.  I was frustrated because I was actively looking to hire someone to help me with “work stuff” and was having a hard time defining what “work stuff” was and also a person who could do said “stuff”.  All I knew was that I could get all my work done but hadn’t been able to find time to get a haircut since March.
As I looked around from my …

photo credit – from moon to moon
When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after …

We’ve all been there.  You’re at some kind of meeting, event, phone conference and someone says “oh!  We’ve decided to try this new site… xyz.com, what are your thoughts on that?”
And you have no thoughts on that site because you’ve never seen or heard of that site.  You try to remember if you read Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, and Wired this month.  Then you start remembering all of the email  industry news updates that you archived instead of reading.  You suddenly become hyper aware of all of the new sites …

A few weeks ago I attended a happy hour for young professionals.  It was the usual array of business owners, marketing people, and tech folks and I was having some great conversations until one lady asked me what I do.
“Social Media strategy” I answered to which she said “oh.  I KNOW how to update Twitter.”  This happens a lot, and it’s ok, but it does bring up a really good point about social media expertise and who businesses should be hiring to complete it. To me, there’s a really distinct …

Having an event used to involve getting out the stamps and sending invitations but now there are so many online resources that help you manage your guest list (and some even make them look really pretty) that it’s difficult to imagine life without them.  With summer in full swing and events galore I thought it might be helpful to do a quick overview of the tools out there that I have used to coordinate an event (wish I had these when I had an actual events company).  Here’s the cream …

(This is part of a series for Realtors)
I’ve been talking with a lot of Realtors lately which is odd since I’m in no way looking to buy a house or anything… they just sort of suddenly were there in my circle of people.  I met a realtor at a networking event and the next thing I knew I was at a young professional realtor event.   The first thing I noticed about them is that real estate folks, as a group, are DRAMATICALLY better looking than most groups as a …

Let me start this out by saying I am in no position to turn work away. In fact, are small businesses ever in a position to do that? I think a lot of smart, sane people would advise that I should be taking everything. Everything I can to get upright, and to get stable but gluing myself to this desk reworking this proposal for the 90th time just wasn’t sitting well with me.It’s not that I had other things I wanted to do right at that moment, or …

I waited tables for a lot of years starting in high school and ending well after college. I slung pizza, sushi, sandwiches, Osso Bucco, Veal, $3 mugs of beer and $300 bottles of wine. I did high end and low brow. 3 tables in a night and 30. It turned out to be, in my opinion, as educational as my college degree. In fact, I suspect it might have been even more valuable because I draw on lessons I learned in those kitchens every single day of my career. Here …