This will be an interesting week. It's a week where I take my business on the road. My wife is a choir teacher and one of the benefits of that is being able to go on a “long” tour once every year. This year, we are taking a seven day road trip to the a bunch of different places – Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, DC, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana – ALL IN 7 DAYS!
Needless to say, it will be pretty intense. To make the task even more interesting, we will be supervising a group of 104 High School students. Some of you guys out there are teachers, so you know what kind of a logistical nightmare that can be.
The great thing about it is that I'm on a bus now in Ohio with my laptop and wireless card, so that I can be connected to you and to my business. It's one of the great aspects of running an Online business. It will be business as usual. I have great assistants that will help my business to continue to run smoothly. To be perfectly honest, it runs better now that they are on board than when I was doing it myself.
I have decided that I will try my best to get one lesson that can be applied to my business every day from a different state. I HAVE TO find something in each city that correlates to my business – even if it is something really simple.
The Lesson for today – If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
I have a serious problem. I LOVE traveling. I do it quite often. However, I HATE packing. For some strange reason, before every trip, I convince myself to put off packing until the last minute – yes, I'm a last minute packer.
Now, if you are a last minute packer like myself, you have probably had those times where you forgot to pack something significant – something that will have a significant impact on your entire experience, usually in a negative way. For me, that thing is my Video Camera.
One aspect of this trip I have been anticipating is putting together a semi-professional video of the various experiences so that the kids would have something to remember it by. However, that will now be a little more difficult than anticipated.
In the same way, we all have big dreams (hopefully) of things that we can do to enhance our experiences, whether it be making a substantial amount of money, going on a nice long vacation, or simply spending a significant amount of quality time with our families. For me, all of the above are part of my goals. However, without significant planning an preparations, mistakes are bound to be made – mistakes that can affect you (and I) negatively.
However, there is a bright side to the story. You see, regardless of what happens (whether their was a plan or not), there is always a way to make lemonade when life hands you lemons. For me, this meant calling a friend and having them break into my house, find my video camera and overnight it to a friend in Maryland who will then bring it to me. Sounds like a lot, but it will be worth it in the end, and I will have it in hand by Tuesday.
The same goes for Affiliate marketing or any method of making money online – when things don't work out exactly the way we planned (or when we fail to plan), it makes no sense to cry when the milk is already spilt. Figure out some way to squeeze as much lemon juice out of those lemons, add some sugar and water and you are good to go.
Take your failures, and analyze when, where and how you went wrong, decide on a course of action and then make it happen. So, those are the lessons I learned from the Ohio part of my trip, stay tuned next time for . . . . . The West Virginia Lesson 🙂