Borrowed to Share with Self Employed Entrepreneurs…Lessons from the Top

A,B,C,Ds to Becoming Your Own Best Client
Musings from a 25 year marketing executive on life without clients…
1) Arrive to meetings with yourself on time. When you’re your own best client, you still need to meet… with yourself. You need to carve out time to strategize, do quarterly planning, devise new customer service strategies and even refine your brand. Don’t be late to those meetings and make sure they appear regularly on your schedule.
2) Have a daily agenda. Here you are a seasoned professional used to an office environment with CEO directives, staff meetings, pressure from HR to complete staff performance reviews on time, and suddenly you’re working at home in your pajamas. Oh, the freedom! But you’ll soon realize that even a work day in your pajamas needs structure, an agenda and maybe even an itinerary. I make a point to have two meetings a day and I make a to-do list and a call list that sets the tone for who I want to interact with, hand-picking people from my network that will bring just the right amount of spice and creativity to my day.
3. Form a cabinet. When I was in the corporate world and even when I owned my own agency, I tended to interact with the same people, the same clients, the same staff pretty much everyday. Now that I’m my own best client, I have appointed cabinet members. These are people I hand-pick, but don’t pay, to challenge, inspire and even mess with my head. They don’t all agree with me, none of them think the way I do, but all of them influence my perspective in positive ways. Your cabinet is like a think tank, a muse, an advisory board, Simon Cowell all rolled into one and take their advice — you chose them after all.
4. Work along side people you admire. I mean if you’re going to venture out on your own and have all this control over your time, your creativity, your mood, don’t work with idiots. Don’t work with unreasonable constraints like I want $100,000 worth of your time, creativity and expertise for $20,000 because I need all that strategy and expertise, but I just don’t have the budget.
5. Don’t take out the trash. The carnage of creative ideas left along the roadside of my 25 year marketing career could fill a stadium. Sometimes, I still reflect and mourn all that creative juice that swirled down the drain. When you are the brand, when you are crafting your own marketing strategy, running your own social media programs, email campaigns, closing your own deals and serving your own customers, no great idea is wasted. No trash cans needed.

Written by Bridget Cavanaugh and Wisely Promulgated by Natalia Budilo

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