Many of us set out each day, especially each Monday, with a spring in our step and the greatest of intentions to do many of the business tasks that we have been putting off for far too long.  History has shown, however, that as business owners or managers when we walk through the door to the office our best laid plans are going to be sidetracked.

Mondays seem to frequently start for me as mentioned above and then quickly spiral out of control; all of a sudden it is 6:30 or 7 pm and while I have been frantically busy all day, I have not checked one item off of my best laid Monday plan.  Unlike Office Space, as a CEO, this is what I call our Case of the Mondays.  While I will take our Mondays over the cubicle nation Mondays depicted in the movie any day, I still feel less than fulfilled after a day like this of heavy firefighting.

I recently read a great article by Peter Bregman for Harvard Business Review with tangible steps to managing your day.  As today is a Monday and we still have four more days left this week, I thought this might be particularly applicable to making the most out of not just tomorrow but the rest of the week.

[Below is an excerpt from Harvard Business Review]

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better.

Read more…

Ethan Allen added a style quiz to its website recently.  While there is nothing scientific about it, it is a great example of a website encouraging visitors to not just browse but to actually interact.  Once you take the quiz and are assigned your “look” (my results said that my look is “glamour”), there is a link to explore products which takes you to the Ethan Allen products that best fit that look.

While I am not Ethan Allen’s target audience, I did appreciate that they are encouraging interaction and inciting individuality by assigning quiz results.  Instead of just selecting a sofa from a page, you are shown the pre-selected pieces that fit your individualized style.  That’s just good marketing.

From a coding perspective, this quiz probably cost Ethan Allen very little but they will see great ROI due to increased word of mouth (I found out about the style quiz via Twitter and retweeted accordingly) and by converting quiz takers to customers through meeting their stylized preferences.

Take the quiz yourself.  It’s fun.

SmartBlog on Social Media posted a great article last week about the importance of your subject line when sending emails to your lists.  They list a few tangible suggestions to greatly increase the value that you bring to your community as well as the increase that you can get in your open rates.

(article below)

After Stephanie Miller’s recent guest post about optimizing the deliverability of e-mail marketing messages, we received several requests for more information about e-mail marketing best practices. With 10 years of e-mail marketing experience under our belt, we’ve learned a few things. Now it’s time for us to share with you.

The golden rule: Do unto others …

My No. 1 tip for e-mail marketing success is actually what not to do: Do not send too many e-mails to your list. The value of your list decreases the more you send e-mails that recipients don’t want/need.

Read more at SmartBlog on Social Media…

Time Inc., the publisher of Southern Accents, announced on Thursday that the September/October issue would be the last issue for the 32-year-old publication.  According to Publishers Information Bureau, Southern Accents’ ad pages declined 37%, to 176 pages, in the first six months of this year.

Southern Accents is the latest shelter magazine to face the guillotine.  Earlier this year, Conde Nast closed Domino; others to face the ax in the last two years were House and Garden, O at Home, Blueprint, InStyle Home, Cottage Living, and Country Home.

While the economy is much at fault for the lack of advertisers for our beloved shelter mags, could it also be that the emergence of social media is too taking its toll?  With advertisers opportunities to stretch their dollars farther by utilizing online tools and the online ability to microtarget, could it be that shelter magazines’ only possibility for survival is to also move more substantial efforts online?

We will miss Southern Accents.  As someone who has spent a great deal of her life in the South, it appears to be one of the only luxury design magazines that exemplifies and embraces the beautiful design, ease, and elegance of southern living.

Recently, our interior design firm received an RFP (Request for Proposal) to perform purchasing for a hotel renovation in the DC Metro area.  I must say that, as a small business, I am not fond of RFPs.

1. They take a significant amount of time to complete.
2. The typical conversion rate is low.  Many companies who issue RFPs already know who they want to use but are fulfilling a requirement by issuing them.
3. RFPs are formal.  As a small business, I cringe about formal interactions and would much rather develop a relationship, work with the potential client to assess needs, and then provide a proposal.  This is naturally how small businesses work best.

That being said, there are cases when responding to an RFP are necessary evils and are opportunities that should not be passed.  The best resource that I found for how to respond to RFPs and dealing with larger companies in general is Tom Searcy.  His company, Hunt Big Sales, provides consulting for small to mid-sized companies that wish to hunt larger “whales” for larger sales.  I used a lot of information from Tom’s book, Whale Hunting, as well as an e-book that is now going to be published called RFPs Suck!  How to Master the RFP System Once and For All to Win Big Business.  Here are some valuable lessons that I learned when preparing this RFP:

1. Be extremely picky.  Ensure that you should actually respond to the RFP and submit a proposal.  In most cases, you probably should not.  If you are not 110% qualified for the work that they request, you are wasting your time.  As Tom argues in his book Whale Hunting, the Inuit did not try to hunt every whale, realizing that they needed to focus in order to win.
2. Once you decide to respond to the RFP, get as much information from the issuing company as possible.  Try to meet with the people; if you have someone on the “inside” you are in a much better position.  If you don’t, your proposal is going to be a long shot because chances are, one of the other companies submitting a proposal does have an insider.
3. Be sure to answer each question posed in the RFP, preferably in the order and format that the questions are asked.
4. Deliver everything neatly and on-time.  I was fortunate enough to hand deliver and thus be able to spend time meeting with the decision-maker.  We were the only company to do that.

Most importantly, if you are completing an RFP for a big company, you, as a creative genius, will actually need to play down the creativity side.  Big companies want you to answer the question of how you are going to save them time, how you are going to save them money, and how working with you is going to be low risk.  While we each want to tout our innovation and creativity in approaching problems, these are actually scary words to a big company issuing an RFP.  Think inside the box…this might be the only time I issue those words.

If you ever have to respond to RFPs or ever want to respond to RFPs I would highly recommend Tom Searcy’s two books.