Shared Answers 2007: Part 1, The Problem

Laura Spencer at Writing Thoughts and Yvonne Russell at Grow Your Writing Business are jointly hosting an unusual group writing project. Shared Answers 2007 requires two posts: one describing a problem or a challenge the blogger has faced and the second describing the solution or approach taken by the blogger.

I’m going back a number of years to select a problem I faced when I owned an interior landscape business. As a service business with about fifteen employees and 300 clients, mornings were always chaotic.

Since I’ve never been a morning person, getting to work at 8:00 AM was enough of a challenge. Then the phone began ringing – an employee was sick and wouldn’t be in to work, a client had a dying plant, another client was having an important meeting on the scheduled maintenance day and wanted the plant maintenance technician to come a day early, a second employee had a flat tire and would be late, another client wanted to be sure the technician had been there the day before because the receptionist had been out … and on and on.

My two managers were in and out of my office asking my advice on the schedule changes they had to make, a client insisted on talking to me personally rather than to any of my staff …

Within an hour or two, we would have the technicians re-routed and service calls re-scheduled to cover all the employee and client emergencies. But I would be stressed out, with none of my plans for the day accomplished.

The solution I came up with was counter-intuitive, but it did more than solve the problem of my chaotic mornings. I believe it actually saved my business a few years later when I had a stroke and couldn’t work for an extended period of time.

[tags]Shared Answers 2007, meme, group writing project[/tags]