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]