March 9. Thursday Night.

Hi Journey.

Sometimes just the smallest words that I hear from a complete stranger change my life.

Today it was at CoHo, where I was reviewing the notes from the Tuesday Bloom Team meeting and trying to force a marketing idea out of the well. (And yes, I should know well enough by now you can only coax them up, J.)

Her name was Bridgette. And OK, Journey, she's not really a complete stranger. I've seen here there a dozen times or so, but she never stays. She always grabs a Haitian Bleu Voodoo and scoots out the door. We've said hi to each other a couple of times, but that's about it.

Today she sat at the table next to mine. I don't think she was really snooping overmuch, because I was on my cell phone to Dana discussing one of her client's carpet selections (yucky, but we did warn her) and I know I tend to talk louder on the cell.

Anyway, Bridgette allowed she was sorry to interrupt, but she had a home office that she wants re-done. Now Journey, we hardly ever take on home offices; there's just not enough money in it for us. Most of our clients are established in a profession where everybody comes to work in a regular office building. And if the client doesn't work in an office, then it's a sure bet her husband does. I know all the Alvin Toffler wannabes out there keep predicting with internet ubiquity everybody is going to work from home but for some reason it hasn't come to pass yet and I don't see it happening anytime soon. By the time a client can afford to pump any significant fundage into a home office they're aching to add an employee or two and so then they need the additional space that an office building supplies.

But this lady was a bit different. She's a sales rep for a specialty paper company out of Wisconsin . She typically calls on small print and copy shops, so she's either in her car or at her client's 95% of the time. But she's just been bumped upstairs to a position as sales manager for the western U.S. She's just hired a new rep to handle the local accounts. Now she'll either be on an airplane, out in the field with another rep, or shoe-boxed into the corner of her basement where all her paper swatch books are currently jammed into a couple of old, four-drawer steel filing cabinets.

With the new position she'll need to spend significant time at home on the computer and the phone. She wants to wall off that section of the basement and pump up the lighting. She needs to make sure the space is quiet enough that when her teens roll home after school with their friends they don't disturb any of her client calls.

I told her what we did at CD, gave her an idea of what our typical client was like. I pitched her a ballpark price that I knew was at least 20% higher than the work would end up being. Then I gauged her reaction.

Page 2.