Many people in business have heard the expression that you should work “on your business” and not just “in your business”, but the realities are that running your business requires a lot of energy and sometimes finding that extra time and focus to develop your business can be a real challenge.

Last year, in May 2010 Paula and I spent a week away to combine business and pleasure with a focus on developing the strategic direction and business planning for Abundant Solutions. This really did provide us with the clarity and direction that we needed to move our business forward. It was like running one of our Development Workshops but for each element of our own business.

That was a year ago and since then a lot has happened. We have developed further our consultancy work, driven our 4N Region forward, Helped launch 4N Australia, supported 4N with its training and launched a new business called Link4Growth. We haven’t delivered on everything in our strategic plan, but we certainly have moved the business forward.

So, onto this year, we have decided to focus on getting things done, hence why we have called this trip a Bootcamp.
We have taken a week out of the business and again we are also combining business with pleasure, however this time we are focusing on a different aspect of ‘getting things done’ each day.

Day 1 – Contents for Social Media and Blogging.
Part of our marketing strategy is that we need to do a lot more in developing our on-line presence and in order to assist us with this we want to have a range of online contents.

What we achieved today.

• Identified that we will use the following online tools on a daily basis – twitter, blogs, Facebook and Forums.
• Looked and listened to a variety of Blogs, Podcasts, Video and printed material to identify what we liked and what we don’t like.
• We decided that we will develop online material including Video, Podcasts, PDF’s plus some interactive ‘events’ to engage with people.
• We have identified 6 key topics to develop material around and prioritised those topics.
• Developed a ‘detailed’ plan of the contents for the first topic.
• Researched some material to support this first topic.

After this we took a break and spent 2 hours by the pool – well it had to be done as the water temperature was the same as the air temperature – a rather comfortable 27 degrees.

Looking forward to Day 2………