After my last announcement about Plum Deluxe Productions, I had a few emails asking if I was going to offer my end-of-year planners like I have in the past. The answer is no, but Leah Goard, Michelle Nikolaisen, and Jamie Tardy all have some excellent resources for you.
I do have an interesting assessment for you to do with yourself and your team. I simply call it What would be easy?
When talking with a lot of my peers about what’s next in the evolution of Plum Deluxe, a lot of the conversations centered around a simple principle: ease.
Forgive me for sounding too meta, but my initial thoughts were that figuring out what is easy would be… too easy? Too simple?
I should have known – in my experience, the simplest plan is the best.
How to Give Your Team an “Easy” Assessment
Here’s what I did. First, I sent out an email to everyone (individually) asking them what parts of their job were the easiest. The stuff that they could do all day long, with ease and enjoyment.
Important: you have to take this too! I almost forgot.
Then I printed out all the ease and put it into a pile, if for no other reason than I liked looking at a pile of ease. It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?
Anyway, I looked for lines, connections, synergies. I compared it with what we spend a lot of our time on, what we make most of our money on, what we asked about the most.
For example, the most popular offering we have is web design – but I never talk about that publicly! What would happen if we did? And our strongest skillset is in content and publishing – why haven’t we been talking to our clients about custom publishing?
I’m looking forward to 2014 and seeing the results of this “easy” assessment going into full affect. My theme for 2014 is ease. Because I’m here to tell you: there isn’t anything better than easy.
(Clarifying note: just because something is easy, doesn’t mean it isn’t hard work. It also doesn’t meant you can’t fail. It just improves your odds for success. YMMV.)