Balance
It poured rain last Saturday, but that didn’t stop me from getting out there, cutting the grass and stooping over hundreds of times digging out the weeds which are sprouting everywhere-just like, ah, weeds. Remember this is the state where eating dandelions (appropriately disguised as “fiddleheads”) is considered to be a delicacy. After a week on the road and way too many miles in the car tripping from NH to Rochester and back again, it was good to be up to my Wellies deep in Vermont dirt both literally and figuratively.
Early May, and we Vermonters are deep into the season of trying to find balance between the last vestiges of this year’s wicked long winta’ and the hope of what promises to be an equally long hot enjoyable summer. Perhaps that’s what I was doing on Saturday trying to balance my self-induced mania of wanting to get things done by being out in the pouring rain with a vision of me sitting on the deck in July soaking in the sun. Of course, I further confused this opportunity to create balance since on one hand, I was forcing the old Toro which was groaning under the impossible job of cutting wet grass, while at the same time, I finished the morning by planting even more seed.
Also, I’m out there on Saturday with my chain saw and every other imaginable noise-hammering tool that I own loaded onto my ear-shattering ATV and its clanking metal cart, while I’m envisioning being able to sit in the gazebo sometime in June listening to the quiet of the woods and gazing out at my perfectly manicured lawn, which on Saturday, of course, was just short of flood stage.
Not sure that trying to create balance with imbalance works, but the same goes for the birds and the bears that hang around the house in the spring. With a couple of year bird feeders located on the edge of the woods, we like to feed the hawks and the doves, but we also know that birdseed in the spring brings out the neighboring bears up on the ridge. Already this season, we’ve lost one solid steel pole and one door to the garden room which used to store the spare bird seed, but we keep plugging away trying to create the perfect balance between the birds and the bears. The locals think that we’re nuts and can’t understand why we would waste perfectly good seed on the birds in the spring when everything’s sprouting again.
Finally, when I thought that just perhaps I had successfully, but artificially, forced some sense of balance back into my little world in the hills of Vermont, I jumped in the car late Saturday afternoon to join my wife at our house on the NH beach. All during the three hour drive I realized that we would consistently try to balance our time all this summer making decisions between the dirt and the sand most probably working out some mystical equation balancing the forecasted weekend weather with our love of both the hills and the beach.
So when I was writing this post last Sunday morning looking out over the beach with the temperatures only in the high 30’s, I had already checked the Vermont weatha’ to discover that it was actually snowing that morning on my newly sown grass seed back in Vermont. My continuing quest is to create balance out of imbalance, which I can pretty much do anytime in my business life, but in Vermont, Mother Nature does get in the way sometimes which means that I need to work doubly hard right now before the summer begins and Q2 comes to an end.
Just like digging in the dirt and planting are critical in Vermont at this time of year, so too I find that Q2 is the most important time of the year. It sets the pulse for the next six months plus it’s early enough in the rhythm of the year to tweak solid sales plans that are working and make wholesale changes in other plans that have fallen apart and in people who are just not showing any promise to bloom during the summer and the fall. To that end, the next column has three points that you might find helpful to think through at your staff meeting next Monday monday. .
Hopefully see some of you at in Vermont at Stratton for one of its many summer events or maybe on the beach in New Hampshire this summer.
In the meantime, Good Selling for the balance of this quarter, but I do have just one more request this morning.
It’s that time of year again, and I’m looking for a new group of four companies for my Tufts juniors and seniors in the Fall. I’m a professor of Marketing in entrepreneurial studies at Tufts, and a tactic that we’ve developed very successfully is to embed team of 5-6 bright students to solve complex marketing opportunities at companies over the period of the 13 week semester. If you feel that you might have a need, just send me an email, and I’ll give you a call to outline the process.
Jack
