What happens when you realise your path is entrepreneurship rather than employment? Lindsay takes up the challenge and shares an account of her journey as it unfolds…

Hi again – can’t write for long.  Am on a train to Berlin – will be presenting at an Internal Comms conference tomorrow and I’ve got tons of work to do en route.  Everything is getting really hectic!

I can’t remember a more frantic time – I’m really having to get back to the old self-management techniques to moderate myself.

Don’t know where to begin – except that finally, I really know that Mirror Mirror will make it.  Every time I get the opportunity to present to someone with the new messages and business model, they love it!!!

“This is awesome, I can see so many places to use this.”

“Wow this is great – I know a few more people who’d like to see this.”

“Sign me up to the training – I’d love to learn more.”

And I am so pleased to have hit on two essential concept development insights during the whole message development process that will improve the saleability of Mirror Mirror 10 fold:

• We need to appeal to the ‘top down’ budget holder mentality so they can be assured that what we do supports them.
• We can talk about aligning people to the strategy AND with each other (rather than just doing the latter) – because we can and do indeed do that.

They do say that going into a creative process like text and imagery upgrades, leads to more questions and answers!

It has been a scramble to rewrite the ‘final’ key message set to incorporate these developments before everything is etched in our new materials – over the coming week – after months of preparation.

Meantime my graphic designer went off brief and missed my deadline so I fired him and I’m starting again. The reporting tool UAT process is being done rigorously but is taking a long time so I set a deadline of 1^st November to have it ready to use (secondary issues can be sorted out later).

Am having lots of sleepless nights with a lot going around in my brain.  Need to crunch down and move past this.

At the same time and with absolute confidence in MM going forward, here’s what’s going on:

• A pitch to an NGO in Nigeria via a delivery partner– they want a proposal to evidence the need for change – sent.
• A previous client phoning back for another team run in January, then calling again a week later for a different team run under ‘emergency circumstances’ next month – in hand.
• Twelve experts signing up for the training dates I’ve set up within 3 days of the courses going online because of referrals – confirmed.

A hugely exciting potential extension of our offer is a local university who have an organization-wide strategic alignment measurement tool for research purposes.  This would evidence which teams need Mirror Mirror. I’m talking to them about using it for our clients – just WOW.

I am looking at the year ahead and thinking about how to manage growth in a way that is healthy.

I did a P&L forecast for the next 5 years with best guesses of income and expenditure assumptions. It shows that BOY, if all goes well then we are sailing!

I am looking to recruit an Operations Manager on a profit share basis because when we start delivering we need to be READY but I can’t pay a salary now.

I reflect that possibilities to develop only come up when the opportunities to do so present themselves:

• I wouldn’t have looked at moving to the business model where we sell MM as a licence to practitioners if it wasn’t for our new reporting tool being so robust and difficult to copy (previously I felt the process was too easy for someone to walk away with)
• I wouldn’t have considered training up practitioners in every country if it wasn’t for the insight that virtual training and delivery were possible
• I wouldn’t have thought global rollouts were possible if we hadn’t developed the capability to train and deliver virtually
• I wouldn’t have thought we could cover a scope to align people to strategy as well as to eachother if this university tool hadn’t come up to raise the right questions….

Sorry – bit disjointed this time!

Mirror Mirror aligns people to the vision and strategy, and with each other.

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