Tag Archives: Business

Lindsay’s In Business: PART 37: Doing things differently in 2018 

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positive

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…

They say that if you keep doing what you always did, you get what you always got.

Here are four things I’m going to do differently in 2018 so that I get different results from the ones I got in 2017:

  • I’m going to target those who I think want to buy Mirror Mirror the most
  • I’m going to articulate the problem and the solution in ways that people can better relate to
  • I’m going to focus on building the relationship rather than transacting a sale
  • I’m going to relax my expectations and take each step at a time.

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Lindsay’s In Business: PART 36: Understanding things

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Jake – Adventure Time

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…

It’s December. We can’t help ourselves look back and review the year past.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

  • If you can identify the question, no matter how obvious it seems, write it down. Have faith, an answer will come up.
    • I wanted to firm up my ‘target’ market – find the people who would be most susceptible to the Mirror Mirror offer. Once I knew that was what I was looking for, ‘agile’ came up: companies transiting to agile would need help to align its people.

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Lindsay’s In Business: Mirror Mirror

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Femflection is excited to run its first interview with blogger and businesswoman, Lindsay Uittenbogaard.  Lindsay has been writing the story of her transition from employment to entrepreneur with Mirror Mirror in Femflection for several weeks.  Now, we get to hear more about where she’s got to, how her business concept is taking shape, and how she is handling these developments.

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So, you’ve been blogging in Femflection about setting up your own business.  Tell us, where are you with that right now?

It took several weeks to land the idea I’m working on right now.  It felt like quite an unusual position to be in actually – to know that you want to run a business but not have an idea in mind.

Once I’d investigated various concepts – from an art promotion business, to a one-stop home maintenance service – I have landed on something that is fundamentally about communications for the corporate market, which is my area of expertise. It also covers HR, learning, leadership and business improvement.

So here we are… it’s called Mirror Mirror – it’s a structured team situation assessment tool that helps team leaders with engagement, teamwork and performance.  It’s also a perfect team leader onboarding tool.  We’ve finished the design and are currently testing and refining it. Continue reading →

Lindsay’s In Business, Part 9. Awaiting responses

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by Lindsay Uittenbogaard (you can find previous parts of Lindsay’s story here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8)

So, Miss X and I had decided to circulate the blueprint I had written up to 10 – 15 experts in the field as our “Alpha Testers”. They were each asked to review the document and respond with their thoughts on these aspects:

  • if they thought it made sense,
  • if they had heard of anything like this before,
  • and if they could suggest considerations or improvements.

From Hong Kong to Pakistan, England to Australia, that pack – with an NDA precursor – went out to the most accomplished and well-respected OE, HR, Comms, Learning and Leadership experts I had ever met. Continue reading →

Situation 29: ROMANCE

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Betsy gets romantically involved with someone at work. Billy advises her to handle the situation in a highly professional manner.

(Click on the pictures to see them in full size)  Continue reading →

Lindsay’s In Business, Part 8. Unjumbling

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by Lindsay Uittenbogaard (you can find previous parts of Lindsay’s story here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

The confidence and clarity I had in my business idea had plummeted whilst on holiday in Scotland and I got back feeling just awful.

RIGHT. This mess needed sorting out.  I wanted to get back to the basic concept and start afresh. I’m sitting at desk.  The house is empty. OK.

  • The emphasis had always centred on creating a better understanding of ‘context’ so that Managers can better engage with their teams.
  • It was about capturing perspectives to get that understanding – listening to what the sponsor, team leader and team members find as important and why, what they think could be done differently, how positive and motivated they feel about things – and most importantly – WHY.
  • It was about better understanding the style of the team leader, and the values of the team members.
  • It was about real dialogue: teams and their leaders talking together, co-creating a shared understanding of the issues, possibilities, ideas and means – where they are aligned and where they could be more aligned and why
  • Then it was about achieving real outcomes – what the team could do differently to move forward together, be that in learning, communication, collaboration, relationships, changes to processes etc.

I was waking up in the mornings, visualising the way this ‘offering’ would work.  A brand name popped up. Continue reading →

Lindsay’s In Business, Part 7. The big stone in Scotland

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by Lindsay Uittenbogaard (you can find previous parts of Lindsay’s story here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

My ex-colleague, James had introduced me to a guy called Jeremy, who runs a Leadership Development consultancy in London. I went over to meet him and outlined the basic concept:

We want to find out what team members think is important and why, so that Team Leaders have a better handle on how people understand about their context. With that, the Team Leader can organise more effective engagement and teamwork. 

He was keen.  “Context, yes.  That could be the missing piece.  Sounds good. Let me know when you’re further down the track.”

Good. We have interest from a potential partner.

And now it’s August. Continue reading →

Lindsay’s In Business, Part 6. Shaping, Goodwill And The Network

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by Lindsay Uittenbogaard (you can find previous parts of Lindsay’s story here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)

I’d have to start earning again in about 4 months and was desperate to get something moving. I’d put my CV out with some interim agencies – just in case (all my own work fell apart – I had to simply ignore that possibility) but I just couldn’t envisage getting enthusiastic about ANOTHER project with the same old challenges, the same old inefficiencies, and the same old difficult leaders. This had to work.  Plus now I’m even blogging about it (is that wise?) so it HAS to be a success story! Continue reading →

Lindsay’s In Business: The Big Professor

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by Lindsay Uittenbogaard

OK –  so now just two business concepts await examination under the microscope. Having started with seven concepts a few weeks back, one by one they had fallen down. Each time I had been grateful: who wants to spend months and thousands in pursuit of a business idea only to discover a fatal flaw later on.  Letting each idea go was tough – especially if it was a hot favourite.

This week, the hot favourite definitely wasn’t idea 1: a one-stop home repair and improvement service.  Interesting but not INNOVATIVE. It was idea 2: a solution to address that repeated Middle Manager engagement issue. Now there’s a market. Continue reading →

Lindsay’s In Business: Falling in love and whittling down

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by Lindsay Uittenbogaard

The high you can get off letting on your own ideas flow is like champagne… I fell completely in love with an art-based concept.  It seemed to take on a life of its own by the hour!

It started with a thought: wouldn’t it be interesting to see feelings (like anger or serenity) be represented in a painting. Surely a series of these by one artist would get attention. There was something there.

What about if set titles were created and artists were asked to paint to those? Each title could start with the phrase “How it feels when….” and end with a description of situations that everyone can identify with, like “… you come home to a clean and tidy house”. The titles could also be about global issues: “… you hear that 50 people have been murdered in a New Orleans nightclub”, for example.  What would the different interpretations look like? Continue reading →