I can’t begin to tell you how challenging 2016 was for me at many levels. Seemed like everything we wanted to do at Incedo got stalled, delayed and took much, much longer to complete than we planned. It was frustrating to me and everyone on the team. While the team communicated often with each other with weekly meetings and email updates, having a meeting that started with ‘nothing has changed’ or ‘we have a new problem’ became depressing.

I am happy to announce though that we have come through the worst of what challenged us, the website. Our original plan was to have a new website up by the beginning of Q2 2016. Then it became clear that I wasn’t going to have time to write the  new copy so we hired a copy writer. While we thought we communicated effectively with him, there were nuances he didn’t get and we had to rework part of his copy. After much discussion, we decided to hire someone to help us with SEO. It was a good decision, except it cost us months of delay as they optimized some pages and we had to learn about SEO at a level no one knew. The technical part of moving the site was a disaster. Turns out that my original website designer did some funky things and made it difficult to move or even back up the old site. So much for planning.

Our new website is now up…yippee! I encourage you to take a look. Download one of our gifts, sign up for our newsletter, read and comment on our blogs. Check it out here.

In the spirit of open communication and sharing, here’s what’s coming up over the next several months.

1. New sections of the website. More on speaking engagements, more content on various sections and more blogs.
2. A couple of new products and programs are on the horizon. If you are in professional services you’ll want to check back in a few months as we are creating a number of new programs just for you.
3. Narrower focus. Yes, I’ll still be doing leadership coaching and workshops and speaking, and I decided to get away from doing things I don’t enjoy. Rather than share what those are, if you have a question just contact me.
4. Finally, we are going to be communicating with you more often in a variety of ways. Watch for videos on the site and YouTube, we’ll be blogging several times a week, we are likely to start a podcast, our newsletter will be delivered twice a month with a mix of articles, something newsworthy, videos and more. I don’t want you to get bored. 🙂

While this article’s purpose is to introduce you to the new website and what’s happening at Incedo, I want to share a couple of lessons I learned as good reminders from this process.

1. Planning is important and there are situations you can’t plan for. Learning to roll with what you can’t change or control helps with your sanity.
2. A reminder that you always have to plan for things to take longer than you expect. If you think it will take three months, plan on five and be ecstatic if it takes less.
3. We never know what we don’t know until we learn it. And what we don’t know can delay our plans or cause us to change our plans.
4. Don’t think you can do it yourself. For example, at one point I thought I would rewriter all the content for the website myself. It was foolish of me to think I could find the time for that.
5. Decide where your time is best spent and is the highest use of your skills. It clearly didn’t make sense for me to spend time writing content instead of focusing on business development or product creation or writing a book. Where can you put your skills to use that best serve the business?
6. When you are making a huge investment, make sure you rally all the resources you need to help you. Ask people who are smarter than you in areas you don’t have expertise in for their insights and help.
7. It costs money to do anything, consider it an investment. The cheapest solution can often turn into the most costly one. For example, the company we hired to help us with SEO was not the least expensive option by far. However, they discovered things about our current site that were not only huge problems for us, but had we not fixed them would have carried over to our new site and cost us traffic and more.
8. Delegate, delegate, and delegate. I’m a bit of a control freak so while I’m fine delegating, I have this need to know what’s going on. Delegate and build in a way to keep up with the status of the project so you can step away and do other things.
9. Listen to others. People that work for you or whom you hire as contractors often know more than you, which is why you hired them.
10. When you get frustrated, and you will, just breathe. I can tell you from experience that getting frustrated is normal, but doesn’t solve anything.

I’m hoping you will take the ride with me this year and stay connected via our blog RSS feed, social media, continue to read our newsletter, and more. Please don’t hesitate to let me know what you want more of, or even less of. I’m listening.

Looking for someone who can be your trusted advisor and knows about building and running a business? Schedule a thirty-minute complimentary call with Linda today to learn how we can help.