The most disastrous start to the year?

I have to say though that this has probably been the worst start to a year ever! In the midst of the Christmas Facebook contest we ran (12 Days of Christmas), my partner Steve got sick. Blue light ambulance, heart in my mouth, lead in my stomach, tubes everywhere, doctors discussing putting him on a ventilator sick…

I would say it was worse for Steve but luckily he was off his head on morphine for the pain so missed most of that! 

We can joke about it now but roll on three months later the daily home visits from nurses are now over and he’s only just gone back to work.

And of course all of this happened at a time when we’re supposed to be setting up in business together… (keep an eye out for our new Creative Flow website coming soon!)

It’s incredibly frightening when somebody you love gets critically ill. We are so wonderfully blessed that we anticipate that Steve will make a full recovery. Not everybody is so lucky.

So what have I learnt from this situation? Quite a lot, the most important of which is how much I love Steve and I missed him dreadfully when he wasn’t around…

Also, even though I don’t ‘do stress’, in the end I had to admit that it was actually very stressful and once I did I felt much better!

From a business point of view I believe there’s several things you may benefit from thinking about.

• Don’t let your natural optimism prevent you from assessing risk and having the resources to back you up just in case things go wrong. If you or your partner/business colleagues couldn’t work what impact would that have and how would you be able to deal with that? Please understand that my working hours were drastically reduced too even though it was Steve that was sick.

• Build your team before you need them. Luckily because of working with some other freelance team members last year we already had the working relationships to be able to call on some – much needed – support to get the most important things done.

• Have a business plan because then you can quickly tell what needs to be dropped and/or changed in a crisis situation. That made it so much easier to focus on the priorities such as coaching client delivery and providing prize winners with their promised prizes.

Have you had any situations like this? What did you do and what did you learn for the future? Please comment below…

PS I apologise for the long gap in business development videos, Steve is getting his camera chops back this weekend on a filmmaking event while I’m rehearsing for my next theatre production opening Easter Monday (see details for theatre lovers in the North West UK). We’ll be back up and running soon.

PPS We’ll be running another video blogging workshop in June (in fact we’ve already taken a booking from a client who’s been chomping at the bit!) and we’ll have a video trailer, video testimonial and details available soon.

In the meantime if you’d like a free 20-min “Get Clear on Video” session just give me a quick call on 07766 917890. In previous sessions I’ve already told people that it’s not right for them at this point in their business and helped them identify what they need to get in place first. Video can get amazing results… when it is approached properly.