It’s Memorial Day Weekend—Are We Getting Back to Business?
It’s tough, we know. But the market won’t wait forever. As we sit here facing Memorial Day weekend, which came too quickly this year for certain in some strange way, we are facing that amazing feeling—the start of summer. Particularly in New England, we pray for this window of the year all year long. The sun is at your back, the sky is blue, the grass is green. But what do we do about business? Let’s take some time off over the long weekend, and then lets all jump in, more committed than ever to connecting with our peers. For motivation, go visit your own LinkedIn account—look at your connections. How many of them have made changes? Who is doing something interesting? Who haven’t you spoken to in the past six months?
We are finding some interesting trends in our own team’s distribution activity that we thought were worth sharing:
- Friday is no longer ‘fry day’. In other words, we used to avoid sending distributions and making calls on Friday afternoons. After all, everyone was either on the golf course or otherwise checked out. Despite the loosening of restrictions and some returning to these activities, they aren’t the ‘business’ opportunities they once were for the time being so the numbers are down. As we are all working from home, like it or not, we are sitting ducks as they say. That means that we are looking to do some ‘light’ activity on Friday afternoon and we are looking at our inbox and picking up the phone. Rethink the week and use Friday, not Monday (almost never Monday) as a reach out day.
- The market is now fully engaged in a work from home environment. People have figured it out—their systems are in place and phone connectivity is working. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Three webinars yesterday tell me its definitely not perfect—but its what we’ve got. What we are finding is that not only are people picking up the phone, but they are generally giving us more time, helping us connect to the right people and generally more ‘chatty’ than usual. We love that.
- ‘Please don’t ask me to attend another Zoom meeting’ is a common plea. We are all inundated and overloaded. As one client noted to us this week “you could spend all day on live webinars and all night on the replays”. Not a good idea. Carve out time for your ‘work’ and manage your schedule to work for you. Get on the necessary calls and a few more to learn what is new in the market, but seek to manage your attendance, and more importantly manage your invites to maximize everyone’s time.
