Transitions, Transactions, and Testimonials!

Cha, Cha, Cha, Changes…

If you are are like most people, you have had to face CHANGE, head on over the last few years! If you have not, I would love to know your secret! Sitting in a Panera Bread, meeting with a potential client, I asked him… “Three years ago could you have imagined both of us sitting here with computers that we can hold in our hands and log onto the internet for free that has all our most important information synced with our other computers from the cloud?” The iPad was released in April 2010. Now you can walk into any coffee shop or McDonalds and you see more people with tablets than laptops, and 4 years ago the tablet was non-existent. 4 Years is a lifetime in tech today. The Sony Walkman was introduced in 1979. In September 1965, Ford Motor Company introduced factory-installed and dealer-installed eight-track tape players as an option on three of its 1966 models. 14 years between the 8-track and the cassette felt like nothing then, just evolution. Today, Every year (even 6 months in some cases) is compressing 14 years of change in huge leaps. What’s next is already here, but it has to be released more slowly not to overwhelm and saturate the change market!

Change Is Happening Faster than We Can Process

I had someone contact me through LinkedIn and asked to have a coffee. Jan Marino and I hit it off very quickly, and she suggested that we do a BlogTalk Radio show about change. I was taken aback about doing a show with someone I just met but I said “Why Not?”. I hired a professional narrator and used my skills as an audio producer to create a show open and close, and Jan quickly added guests to interview. Three shows into a weekly online radio show, we had Jeff Klingberg as a guest. Jeff’s spin on the interview was to “Bring Sexy Back into Manufacturing.” What he said rocked my world. “Manufacturing was always an assembly line mentality, but now it’s about technology and needing people to manage robot and computers.” He said that while we were shipping jobs overseas, companies were busy upgrading our manufacturing plants with technology. Now there is a continental divide between what kids are learning in schools and the jobs needing to be filled in technology.

Three Ways To Deal With Change

1) Transitions – Change happens and is inevitable. It’s like a river. You have three choices… Avoid it and stay on the shore, jump in and let it take you where it wants with the current, or take kayak lessons and learn to navigate it. Dealing with change inevitably means you will have to learn something new. Embrace your inner student.

2) Transactions – How people contact and spend money with you are way more telling than most people wish to see! Most people communicate the way they like to be communicated to. It’s our job to be in the places where people want to communicate with us. Also, the way we receive money has changed as well. Who would have thought just a few years ago, that we would be swiping credit cards on our phones?

3) Testimonials – People will tell you what motivates them… sometimes you have to ask and sometimes you don’t! The global economy is important to some, but the relational economy is important to everyone. Give good testimonials to others. Pay attention to reviews of you and your business on all platforms (Google+, LinkedIn, Yelp and more). And think about creating polls or surveys of your friends or customers to use their collaborative brain power!

Final Thoughts

All of us have change in our lives. Some of us embrace it, while others try to avoid or even ignore it. If you want to learn how to embrace it, take a class. Learning something new will help you manage transitions, smooth out transactions, and can create glowing testimonials! What have you learned lately?

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