Life’s been pretty, er, robust, here at Epiphanies, Inc. and at the Voivod Ranch.

Finessing the balance of married life, parenting, childcare, and school vacation with accelerated business growth, deepening client relationships, a boost in high-quality networking gigs, and a steady stream of dynamic meetings with extraordinary business leaders throughout New Hampshire is a fascinating high wire act and daily thrill ride, to say the least.

(Thank goodness we have Tivo to catch the final episodes of American Idol, The Biggest Loser, and Jack Bauer’s 24!)

Amidst all the hullabaloo, we’ve been remiss at sharing one gigantic bit of news that’s going to completely change the course of our lives and business as we know it:

We have been accepted as charter members (fewer than 50 around the globe!)

of the Mentor With Mari Social Marketing Protege Program!!!

This six-month learning and mastermind intensive will earn us the designation of being Certified Social Marketing Specialists from Mari Smith, the woman Fast Company calls “The Pied Piper of the online world,” and one of Twitter’s most respected and influential superstars.

Mari has designed a radical, ultra-progressive program that’s pulled out all the stops. If you’ve ever been on her blog, follow her on Twitter, visited her Facebook Page, seen any of her tutorials and videos, listened to her on teleclasses, or seen her on stage at one of her many high-profile speaking engagements, you know she’s a benevolent, whip-smart walking encyclopedia of social media knowledge and application.

We met Mari in person for the first time at Ali Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop event in November 2008, where she wowed the audience with her presentation and a bold statement: “Ask me anything about Facebook. I know the answers.” Facebook goes so deep, it was amazing to hear someone so wildly confident - and we know she was telling the truth.

What we love most about Mari is she truly practices what she preaches as Relationship Marketing Specialist. She GIVES, GIVES, GIVES information, insight, and good vibes all around, while staying in touch with the molten-hot center of the social media universe so she can help businesses tap into the power of these vital tools and communication channels.

Our first 2-hour immersion pow-wow happens today at 1pm ET, and we’re about to mainline coffee and gingko biloba like nobody’s business. Stay tuned, as we report from inside the trenches here and on Twitter.

Follow us: @AllenVoivod and @LaniVoivod, and follow the whole group’s adventure by way of the #MWM hashtag.

Posted in Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Social Marketing | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 9:36 am and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

If you’re an entrepreneur who comes from a corporate background, and you want to improve your business, or if you’re planning to take the leap and want to start out on the right foot, here’s your chance to learn from the experiences (and mistakes!) of others just like you. It’s the Corporate Entrepreneurs Unplugged TeleSummit, taking place Tuesdays and Thursdays, February 10 - March 19, 10 am PST/1 pm EST.

It’s being thrown by Sherri Garrity and Marcia Hoeck, and they’ve got a fabulous roster lined up, including: Pamela Slim, Michael Gerber, Naomi Dunford, Michael Port, Marie Forleo, James Roche, Gina & Stephen Bell, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, Melanie Benson Strick and Alicia Forest.

I joined the preview call they held earlier today, and what follows are my notes from the call!

Sherri and Marcia met at Ali Brown’s OSBW, and had an instant connection. They have similar businesses - corporate communications and marketing. Complementary specialties - change management, team building.

They say there’s a difference between lifelong entrepreneurs and peeps who escape corporate for the entrepreneurial lifestyle…and a complete mindshift that needs to happen in that latter set. Especially when it can seem like you escape the corporate world just to create another “job” for yourself. And coming straight out of academia to entrepreneurship creates its own set of issues.

The series is designed to provide positive role models of people who have left corporate and succeeded, and/or serve corporate escapees and do so with a business that doesn’t also work them to death.

Top three reasons why people leave their corporate positions:

• Control - because you have little or no control in a corporate position…
• Security - corporate provides a false sense of security…
• Money - there’s a cap on what you make in a corporate position, and none on your own business!

And here, the main focus of the preview call, are the seven biggest mistakes corporate people make when starting/working their own businesses.

1. Thinking that being good at what you do is the basis for a business. You have to have a market, and people looking for what you have to offer - who can pay for it! - before you can make a go of it. “Starving customers,” as James Roche put it once.

2. Thinking that you can do it all by yourself. You come out of corporate and think you want to ditch everyone, keep it simple, go it alone. And what happens is you plateua in your energy, your lifestyle, and your income, because you can’t leverage your specific abilities. You can have employees, a virtual team, contract for services…there’s more than one way to compound the math of the productivity.

3.Thinking that you can keep yourself on track. You’re so used to the structure of your organization that it feels like you’re throwing off the shackles. And while it can be thrilling to be free of that, it can also be difficult to know what to focus on, and support yourself when you’re the boss and have no pre-ordained structure to rely upon. Mastermind groups help here, too!

4. Thinking that you need to get people’s approval. Nothing is further from the truth. As an entrepreneur, nobody’s there to push you, to tell you what’s right or wrong. It can be very liberating or very lonely, or both at different times! Sometimes there’s an adjustment period to getting stuff OUT THERE without five levels of approval, and the stakes are higher when you represent yourself instead of someone else’s company. Also, even with a team, no one cares as passionately about it as you do. And friends and family aren’t the people to rely upon for advice necessarily, so you have to learn to trust yourself and put a good support system in place.

5. Not continuing to learn. In corporate, all you have to do is your job. If you need education for your job, the company sets it up, and you just show up. When you’re on your own, it’s easy to get caught up working in your business and not on it. You don’t break out of their routines to learn something new, and that’s true of successful AND not-so-successful businesses. And then you find yourself falling behind. Instead, you need to work on your business and yourself - and not just in your field. It’s also learning about marketing, leadership, self-improvement, you name it! In a survey of 200 Chief Marketing Officers, 6 of the top 10 things they’re looking for in new hires relates to knowledge of Web 2.0 and community-building strategies.

6. Not knowing what you really want. Especially if you do in your business what you did in your corporate career. If you don’t, you end up doing things that work well for other industries, or other business models, and it’s not on a path that YOU want to be on. The guests of this series saw their success take off when they tapped in to what they really wanted, found something that aligned with what their market wanted, and found a way to leverage it beyond working 1-on-1. Eight of the 10 interviewees in this unplugged series are women with kids at home, and four of them have kids under five years old.

7. Thinking it has to be “perfect.” Get out and try it, even if it isn’t “perfect” yet. You’ve got to move quickly and get things started, and that’s a better way anyway. The longer you wait, the more you worry, the more you second-guess, the more you let fear in and let fear breed even more fear. “It’s easier to direct the troops once they start moving.” –General Norman Schwartzkopf. The Zigzag Principle: Success never takes a straight line. - -James Roche. Jack Canfield gives the example of driving at night - you can only see a couple hundred yards ahead of you at any time with your headlights, but you can drive all the way across the country that way.

Please consider checking out this great event - it looks like it’ll be incredible, and Sherri and Marcia are donating a portion of the proceeds to Kiva.org, the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Their work, though international, is similar in mission to a group we’re members of, MicroCredit-NH. So we can totally get behind it. We’ve already signed up for the Telesummit, and hope you will, too!

Posted in Call in the Coach, Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Microenterprises R Us | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Dances With Gurus, Entrepreneur Diaries, Microenterprises R Us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I just left a comment over at the Small Biz Bee’s blog, where they said the only piece of advice a business owner may ever need is this:

“Keep doing what you’ve always done and you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.”

In the interest of multitasking my time and content, I’m sharing my comment here:

Thanks for the post. You know, I was just talking to my good friend Lisa Steadman (an amazing author, relationship coach, and solo-preneur in her own right), and we were talking about the comfort zone thing. Lisa and I realized we both “suffer” from a split personality issue that many entrepreneurs likely share. It’s a battle between our BOLD, FEARLESS selves and that squeamish, sulking, other self.

Seems like whenever the cranky, complacent one looks the other way, the BOLD, FEARLESS personality makes all these plans, promises, and proclaimations. They’re all super ambitious, scary, and completely unreasonable to a normal person.

Then that comparatively lazy, ambivilant personality realizes what the other has done, and is forced to step up and fulfill the plans and promises, despite a raging resistence to the whole darn matter.

It’s a constant inner battle between these two personalities — the one who’d be fine doing what she’s always done, and the one who absolutely hails the message you write in your blog post.

The ultimate battle cry from that incorrigible BOLD, FEARLESS persona:

“REACH! GROW! LEAP! TAKE CHANCES! FAIL, FAIL, AND TRY AGAIN! EXPERIMENT! And most importantly…GET OUT OF THAT DANG COMFORT ZONE!!!”

Sometimes she’s exausting, but for the most part, Lisa and I agreed we’re VERY lucky to have her on our team, or we’d never get anywhere.

May you, too, be *blessed* with a similar split personality disorder that shoves you out of your comfort zone and into a fuller, richer, more inspired life.

Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries, Microenterprises R Us | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries, Microenterprises R Us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Allen and I are in the midst of an extended “Spurt.”

What’s a SPURT?

Well, according to, um, me (and some maniacal-looking scribbles in a few notebooks), a Spurt is a distinct chunk of time in the life of an entrepreneur, creative professional, artist, and/or forward-thinking business person. It’s a magical time of focused creativity, heightened productivity, and determined and dogged propulsion.

This propulsion part is an interesting mix. Some of it is self-rocketed, sure. But a big part of it is of the “Manifest Destiny” realm. As hokey as it sounds, there’s some sort of spiritual inevitability component, a cosmic coasting, if you will. When you’re in the midst of a Spurt, things get done. Momentum flows. Issues that may have held you up for months — and sometimes years! – are handled swiftly and confidently with one bold decision after another.

From a two-bit, overly simplified (and probably misinterpreted) quantum physics standpoint, a Spurt is a creative wormhole wherein the Unmanifested becomes the Manifested. Ideas that have been swirling around in God-knows what dimension find their exit strategies, and take their cues. You do the plucking and pulling, and they fall into place accordingly.

As the mere human who’s been given the gift of facilitating the transition of an idea into its physical reality, you may feel more like an observer than a participant. That’s OK. They key to effective Spurting is to accept your marching orders, take the ACTIONS necessary to transform metaphysical IDEAS into their physical counterparts, and TRUST THE PROCESS.

Sometimes, you may feel like you’re dreaming. You may feel like you’re in a daze, you can’t even remember how you got from point A to point B, and you’re shocked at what you’ve managed to create, produce, devise, concoct, and MANIFEST in such a short period of time.

If you watch the TV show Heroes, you’ll understand it best with this example. A Spurt is when your superpowers kick ON, and you’re not even really aware of it. You know how, on the show, artists who paint the future have freaky, pupil-less, all-white eyes when they go in the zone to “see” what’s going to happen next?

That’s a Spurt.

For Allen and I, our Spurt is taking shape through a 3-part Teleseminar Series on “How to Recession-proof Your Business” that we just finished up. The materials we’ve created, the energy we’ve channeled, and the information we’ve shared have all come tumbling out of us so quickly, with such purpose and power, we are having trouble taking ownership of it all.

Quite frankly, we’re stunned. And proud. What’s more, our actions have opened up a bunch of other possibilities and opportunities, and they’re all playing into a bigger plan — one that’s unfolding before our eyes. It’s exciting, a little intimidating, and it’s often frustrating because we can’t necessarily see the whole picture all at once…YET.

Still, we acknowledge that SOMETHING is happening here. SOMETHING is upon us. We’re in the midst of SOMETHING very special, even extraordinary.

And that SOMETHING is a Spurt. I’m sure of it.

What does YOUR spurt look like?

Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries, Insight + Action | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries, Insight + Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I came across this in an email newsletter:

“You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
-Zig Ziglar

Makes me feel good about the teleseminar series we’re offering. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

After yesterday’s post, which ended in a frustrated Catch-22, my lovely wife and business partner Lani gave me a challenge.

(Side note: She was at the 6th Annual MicroCredit-NH Artist Exchange yesterday, connecting with artisans and checking out presentations by Nancy Clark of Glen Group, Jim Horne of Beacon Business Advantage, and Linda Faranas of Millenium Advertising.)

Here’s the refresher: If you don’t have the budget for marketing, and you don’t want to learn marketing because A) it’s not your specialty and B) you know as a business owner you should leave marketing to someone who knows how to do it, then you’re stuck.

So Lani challenged me to answer the question: How do you get unstuck?

Whether you go the Michael Gerber, E-Myth Revisited, employee-based model for your business, or you go the Timothy Ferriss, 4-Hour Workweek, totally-outsourced model, the answer is the same.

You have to start by doing it yourself. Period.

That means you have to do your own learning, purchase educational material, hire a coach/consultant, join a mastermind group, or some combination of these. You have to commit to this.

One of our mentors, Adam Urbanski, says (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) that if you’re a solo professional who sells a product, then, stop saying “You’re in the [product] business,” because it’s not that simple. The reality is that you’re in the business of marketing your product.

Gerber’s business planning acknowledges that, when you’re starting out, you’re doing everything. So he advises you create complete job descriptions and manuals for an employee’s duties. That means you have to know your own marketing cold, so when you get big enough to hire in-house marketing help, you can hand off the duties and know the person will be successful. Why? Because you already did it, and you know it works, and you documented it.

Ferriss lays out the process for building the outsourced model, but you have to do the research to find the product, you have to do the testing to make sure it’s viable, and you have to be able to give the proper direction and guidance to outsourcing firms or freelancers you hire to do the work down the road.

Bottom line: If you are a one-person shop, whether you’re selling a product or service, you have to learn how to market and sell your product or service. YOU. No one else.

And if that means you have to pay to learn, or pay to get coached, then get a budget together, set your expectations, put your money where your passion is, and take the leap. Because you’re not really “paying” - you’re investing with an expectation of return on your investment.

Take advertising as an analogy. Are you spending $100 on an ad, or are you investing $100 with the expectation of getting $500 in new business? That’s the only smart way to look at any marketing expenditure.

Sure, there aren’t any guarantees with marketing. There aren’t any guarantees with business, or with life. What is there, then? Numbers that can be tracked, and campaigns tested and tweaked, until you get the results you’re looking for.

Again: It’s you, and ONLY you.

Take the leap.

Posted in Call in the Coach, Entrepreneur Diaries, Lessons Learned | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Call in the Coach, Entrepreneur Diaries, Lessons Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’m a little surprised at how hard I’m taking this.

I talked with a micro-biz owner today who reached out to us after being referred by a networking contact. (Goooooo Networking!) He started off with a phrase we’ve heard quite often over the past couple of years…

“I need help with my marketing…”

Which is great, because that’s right up my alley. But because marketing means so many different things to people, and because people often include sales in their definition of marketing, I dug deeper to find out what he meant.

In this case, it was a mix of both marketing and sales - outright commission-paying sales help, plus building top of mind awareness with centers of influence in his field, plus creating marketing collateral.

Now for the Catch 22…

On the one hand, he’s good at what he’s good at, which is creating his product. He’s not interested in learning how to market his business. He knows that ultimately, as he grows his business, someone else should be doing the marketing for him, so he can focus on what he does best.

A fair point, indeed.

On the other hand, when it comes to resources, he has his time. As for money, there’s no budget established for marketing spending. Which means that, by default, he’s the only one who can do anything marketing-related for his business.

Which means he’s stuck. And I can’t help him.

Sure, I can throw a few ideas his way as part of a free consultation, but if he can’t get the help he needs to strategize and plan out the action steps, then it gets him nowhere, no matter how good the ideas may be.

He’s said that he needs to see a decent return within a year or he’s going to drop the business. But until and unless something changes, he intends to keep plugging away the way’s he’s been doing it, even though it’s not delivering him the results he wants.

Next time - if there is a next time - the consult will be billable. But without a budget, chances are he won’t ask for another consult. And besides, another consult just means that, even if he gets the strategy and the action steps and even the calendar to know when to take those steps, ultimately he’ll have to take those steps.

But he wants someone else to do it.

But there’s no budget for it.

But he can’t/won’t change the way he markets his business by improving his own skills.

Catch-22.

I sincerely hope the conversation we had sparks some action on his part that works wonders for him. But right now, I’m sitting here blogging about the conversation, and there’s no reason I should be so upset about this.

But I am. It’s been hours since we talked, and I still can’t let go of this absolutely unreasonable sadness.

I think I need to get outside for a while….

Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries, Lessons Learned, Storytelling | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries, Lessons Learned, Storytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
- Walter Bagehot

I agree.

What say you?

Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 7:12 am and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

For the past three years, we’ve taken off at the end of the summer to Kokatosi, on the shores of Crescent Lake in Raymond, ME. This year, we weren’t sure if we were going - family health issues for one, and for another, we’ve been a three-person family in a 10×10 tent - where do you fit a fourth, and all the gear that comes with him, in there?!

Well, we worked it out at the last minute, and I’m writing to you in the middle of our two-night stay. Lani’s parents even snagged a reservation at the last minute, so they’re here with us as well.

They have free Wi-Fi near the camp offices, so I’m sitting in the game room as I complete marketing updates for our clients, and put the finishing touches on a couple of press releases. It’s working fine for the most part…except for the fact that I can’t seem to upload photos onto the blog.

After we get back, I’ll post a photo of our campsite, and of me in my temporary “workspace.” Until then, it’s time to post, shut down, and go jump in the lake with my kids!

Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’d love to write a great blog post here, but I’m already running behind. Allen and Kevin are hosting a webinar on “Top 10 Opportunities for Social Media Engagement” in 59 minutes, and I’m supposed to head down there 10 minutes ago.

However, I’m NEVER alone in our beautiful office these days. As Allen and I hoped and dreamed and planned could happen, I’ve got kid duty. This is a wonderful thing…except I miss work.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE being with our two amazing boys, and I’m involved in our business on a daily basis. Allen calls me from the office and we talk client stuff. When he calls, I’m either:

Stacking or unstacking the dishwasher; in the car; at the town beach; hosting a play date; going to or from the gym; grocery shopping; vacuuming (our yellow lab is shedding like CRAZY this summer, and we’ve got a crawling child!); fixing someone’s breakfast/lunch/dinner; elbow-deep in a bathtub; changing a diaper; or in the midst of and/or on the way to some other glamorous act or locale.

When I talk to Allen, I’m in awe of all the things he’s handling on a daily basis. On any given day, he’s smack in the middle of:

Helping to launch a pet loss care franchise; serving as marketing manager and content strategist for a multi-million dollar communications company; writing email campaigns for the world’s most popular 11-inch glam girl; blogging great tips and advice for job seekers and C-level executives; and meeting with any or all of the fine folks at Acorn Creative about one project or another.

As if that all isn’t enough, he’s also the guy handling the thrilling tasks of meeting with our accountant to manage our finances, showing up to countless meetings via phone and in person, blogging for us, and talking to me on the phone about all life issues — re: furnaces, SUV transmissions, disciplining our almost-six-year-old, scheduling doctors appointments for our little guy, coordinating child care and the “date night” that never actually happens…

So yeah. It’s a lot. For both of us. For all of us — you, the reader of this blog post, and us, the “Content Lovers” who manage to blog here and there, in the midst of it all.

And if we can’t find the time to blog, we Tweet. On Twitter.

I Tweet here, and Allen Tweets there.

Because really, that’s more conducive to this crazy, fully-loaded life, ain’t it? 140 characters to say something, anything, just to try to capture a moment of your day, before the moment is lost, and before the day never got recorded in any way whatsoever.

Is it worth it? Does it all add up someday? Does any of it matter?

I guess that’s what I’m going to find out in 21 minutes, during the aforementioned Social Media webinar, hosted by Kevin and Al.

But before I go down to the Acorn Creative offices, I’m going to do a quick Tweet about how much I love and appreciate my dear, sweet, hard working, multi-talented husband. Just in case I forget to tell him when we’re lost in the chaos of all that other stuff that too often gets in the way of the more important things of life.

I may not have hours and days and weeks to thank Allen for everything he does for me and our family and our business and our clients, but I definitely have enough time and focused energy for 140 measly characters.

Ahhhh, it’s a modern-day love story, through and through.

Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.