Personal Blog
“I don’t know why you were so worried. That presentation was amazing!”
Those were the first words I heard after I had finished giving a talk to a technology user group in Seattle, Washington.
Just a few years ago, my stomach would be tied in knots at the thought of something minor such as speaking in a team meeting.
So what changed?
Four walls have never looked so nice.
I don’t typically get the excitement for a new year or its resolutions, but leasing an office for client work and business development may have been one of the happiest decisions I’ve made in a while.
What’s your #1 focus for first few days of 2018?
I just signed a lease agreement for a very small office in a vibrant mixed/used commercial space. 😱
Kind of goes against the work from home in your pajamas idea, right?
After years of working from my home office, I “outgrew” the space. Here’s are my reasons to justify the added expense.
[Read more…] about When does leasing an office make sense for the remote worker?
A few years ago, a friend hired me to help build a data warehouse and a set of company-wide reports from scratch. We knew each other from a previous project but her manager did not.
“You’re the most expensive of the 3 resources so I hope you’re worth it.” I didn’t understand why he chose to start our working relationship with that comment but whatever.
For the better part of a year, the Inventory Stock Quantity and Valuation report was an embarrassment to the IT Director at St. Jude Medical, a global medical devices company in Minneapolis, MN.
The report required a hefty 15-hour downtime of the company’s reporting systems at month-end, yet more often than not it would display a clearly incorrect inventory valuation of $0.00, for a firm that has an annual revenue of $5.6 billion (2014).
How could the IT Director persuade his business counterparts to trust the information from his systems when he could not depend on it for consistent results himself?
[Read more…] about Case Study: How To Save $54,000 In Maintenance Costs With One Diagnostic
I used to get a cold sweat when I spoke to more than one person at a time.
Just the idea of speaking up at team meetings would make my heart race and my stomach uneasy. 🤢
Even something routine as a daily status call would send my nerves into the dreaded fight-or-flight mode. (FYI. I would often rehearse my 1-2 sentence updates before every meeting and hope no one asked a follow-up question.)
Fast-forward a few years and I just delivered my first presentation, live and in-person … and at a national conference, no less! 😬
