I trust that everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend and enjoyed the perfect spring weather, fun family gatherings and a special time to reflect.
On this Easter Sunday, I found myself on the NH beach at sunrise realizing once again that in the environment surrounding me, the only opportunities I can personally impact are those where I can take specific actions to impact specific change. I like to make the complex simple, which is difficult, so I bring it down to my own points of interest where I can personally make a difference.
What I certainly cannot do is to impact the tide coming in or the sun rising. Similarly, I can't impact geopolitics or make any meaningful difference to the general economy, tariffs or political infighting. That being said, what I can do is take immediate action right now to impact revenue growth in my own company! What I know from a lengthy list of unexpected disasters, recessions and global wars over decades of running businesses is that now is the time to take action to grow revenue and not retrench and hunker down.
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Is it just "the older me", or did others of you grow up with the following little poem that is right now rattling through my head this cold and rainy classic Vermont Spring morning?
Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the birdies is.
They say the birdies on the wing, but that’s absurd.
I always thought the wing was on the bird.
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Every week, I shuffle between living on the NH beach, working in Boston, teaching at Tufts and spending weekends in Vermont. Lots of miles on the car, a good time for customer and student calls, and always an opportunity to think about planning ahead. In a month like January when we're kicking off sales meetings and working through the details of territory plans, account plans and commission plans, since I'm a planning kinda guy, I thought I'd have some fun this morning and introduce you to the art and science of what it takes to plan ahead when one heats their house with a woodstove which is what I do in Vermont.
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Just as in all sports, nothing is more measurable than our end of year scorecards for how we did overall in our businesses and especially in our measurements of revenue and bottom line. Everything is on some sort of a scoreboard, and whether it's the Celtics, Bruins and Patriots, or it's in our yearend results to our shareholders and investors, or it's in the semester's grading for my students, there's no sense in playing any game, studying in any course or working in any company without a scorecard! It would be like playing tennis without a net.
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With the Yankees showing up tonight at Fenway at 7:10 to take on the Sox, let me shift away from my last Friday's blog comparing being half way through the baseball season to being half way through the Sales year and focus on the Patriots on this superb summa' morning.
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This afternoon's Finals of the Tufts $100K Business Plan Competition started with 100s of February applications and countless hours of expert advice from hands-on-coaches which then moved to 30 Semi-Finalists three weeks ago and today will come down to the judging of 15 finalists for all of the marbles. Along that path, our distinctive expertise in applying our own brand of "Entrepreneurship for the Rest of Us"is the uniqueness that we provide at The Derby Entrepreneurship Center.
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On a particularly cold, wet and gray Vermont morning as I look out at the remnants of the two feet of snow earlier this week in addition to it being the last selling day of the quarter on Good Friday before Easter Sunday, I've was thinking a lot about "rhythms" on the drive up from Boston last night. Take Easter for example since everyone including me has been commenting on "how early Easter is this year", the simplest way to explain the date of Easter is that it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the spring equinox. Bottom line is that it's more complicated than that, but the simple fact is that there is a definitive rhythm to setting the date of Easter. Next time it will be on March 31st btw will be 2086.
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An extraordinary day last Friday at The Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts watching, listening, reviewing and commenting on the semi-finals for our annual $100K Business Plan Contest. Just as college basketball ramps up for March Madness, so do we accelerate for the biggest event on the Tufts campus for The Finals on April 5th.
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Rhythm
Most everything in business has a definitive rhythm. Every quarter is marked by various events of annual planning, budgeting, sales kickoffs, trade shows, and of course...summa' vacations, which no matter how carefully we plan around them, they always seem to impact our sales forecasts with delays.
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