Week In Review

It's been a busy week with a ton of balls in the air so I apologize for not writing too much. Here's a quick recap and then I'm going outside for a ride in this first beautiful weekend in the Northwest (hallaluhia summer may have actually arrived!)

I've been getting a few calls this week from people who are interested in working with the direct mail group I worked with for my spring direct mail piece asking me what I thought of the group/results/etc. It made me go take a look at the ROI and I realized that we're at about a 75% ROI for the campaign which is really pretty good. We don't have the sales figures I thought we would (there's still another week left on the promotion) but I keep remembering that at it's base I wanted this to be more of a brand awareness campaign first and a sales campaign second in the hopes that when people see our ads & second campaign this fall and then see us at the trade shows it will spark them to come over and check out the product offerings (and place orders - big orders!)

The new website is underway and I'm ecstatic. After much searching I finally found someone - well really two people - who I think are going to do a bang-up job on the new site and really help us bring the site up to the brand image of the company as a whole. We're also going to have some great new componants for retailers so that they can quickly and easily get all the wholesale information they always need and place orders directly on the site. I'm very very very excited.

Our house is in the midst of being torn apart to have the wood floors on the first floor redone. That means we've been moving everything out of the first floor of the house which includes the dining room table/my office. We're actually moving out to a friends house for a few days so we're also trying to pack up what we'll need for a week, etc etc etc. In short, it's chaotic around here right now so next week is definitely going to be a shortened work week. I'm bringing my accounting to-dos with me to the friends house and if I get that taken care of and nothing else I'll be really happy since I also have to be at the house part of next week playing constructon foreman and then spend a day cleaning the house post floors/pre moving everything back in and then off to a race on Friday in the eastern part of the state. Phew!

I also submitted my application to join the Board of a local nonprofit that is connected to my industry and, obviously, in line with something I believe in and love. I'm excited to meet with the Board in a few weeks to talk more about the position/responsibilities/and goals of the organization to see if it will be a good fit.

Many in my industry are at a big tradeshow this weekend on the east coast and while I'm not there - obviously - I'm interested to hear from friends in the industry how it went. It's in a new venue so people were a little skeptical of it not to mention the slowing economy so I'm glad I didn't go but am anxious to hear how things panned out.

Lastly, I did have the first round interview with "Big Company" which I don't think actually went too well since I haven't interviewed in over two years so am a bit out of practice. It's still an interesting position and if I get a callback I'll probably continue the interview process to learn more but am leaning towards sticking it out fulltime with my company rather than hiring someone to run it for me for a few years. But who knows...we'll have to see how this all plays out.

I was talking to a good friend the other day and after doing the quick "what's happening in your life" rundown he said it sounded like I had my hand in a lot of pots. I don't disagree with him for a second and while things are going really well I'm definitely reaching my limit on what more I can take onto my plate and think I may need to start taking some stuff off/delegating some stuff off.