April 13. Thursday Night.

Hi Journey.

I think there's maybe a way that I can steer our company into the new market. Remember I talked about a newsletter to send out to the contacts I meet at BizTap? Well Journey, the first one I send out won't just be any old newsletter. It's going to be an invite to an Open House, here at the shop.

We held a small Bloom Team meeting, today, Journey, and that's the idea that came out of it. I know it's Thursday, but there's no way we could have held one on Tuesday, not with Shelly and Viv in the middle of their triage-pitch to the Brentwood sisters. And next week Eddie's coming over to show everybody his first designs for our new website, and I'll need to block off all morning for that.

Note to self: pencil in an extra five minutes for all the ribbing Dana and Viv will give me; they're the only two who haven't met him yet.

But I need to kick around some ideas before the next BizTap meeting. I want to at least have some notion of how to bind myself closer to the contacts I'm meeting. Since we score lowest on our People area of our marketing, it's super-important to have these people to remember what we do--especially early on as we dive into this new market. The newsletter still makes good sense, but the Open House will be a good jumpstart.

Meeting went well, not too much arguing…which is a mixed-bag, because that means the team is getting along but it's also a sure indicator they're so busy with client project they just don't want to take the time to thoroughly engage each other. Might have been a mistake to hold the meeting today. I did cut it short—just twenty minutes. We agreed on one thing about the event—keep the focus to some topic that reflects the way we're trying to position our company in this market as a bridge between home and office.

Don't know how we'll pull it off, but we'll figure it out.

Went for long run tonight, then tried to Skype Casey, but missed her. I'll probably catch up with her over the weekend. Pretty good day overall.

Goodnight, Journey.

PS. Woke just five minutes ago. Invisible strings winched me straight off my back and out of a dream and I was instantly sitting up and Crystal , you are sometimes just so bloody thick . Mom doesn't want to loan you the money to build the business…she wants to loan you the money to buy a house! She wants you to make a down payment on a house. This business loan talk is her way of backing into that. Thick, thick, thick!

Read April 11th entry.

Read April 16th entry.