What Mike is Up To Now – Aug 16 – 22, 2020
Yup, still here in Shenyang, China. Have barely left the 2 block radius of this apartment complex in a couple weeks.
Working online – so fortunate almost all of our work is online (except those events). Making a ton of new tools and systems for the internal team to work better – employee handbook. Analytics, ranking tracking, writer platform.
Still doing content marketing, content creation as a service. Keeping things smooth.
A strategic purchase of expat.com.ph with some writers and a lot of content – excited to integrate that into our team, systems, and content strategy.
Am open to find more writers for the team, making a dedicated system for people to apply to be a writer and we can review applications. It isn’t out of private beta, but if you are interested to write for our team you can doing an early application request here
Wishing everyone a great third week of August.
Here’s the Shadstone company week plan, removing some sensitive company information:
Week Plan Aug 16- 22, 2020 Shadstone Limited
Still building out systems. Taking this global lockdown system and summer month of August to really invest in making a stronger foundation of tools and systems.
Plus we just bought the expat.com.ph site and I am excited as it also comes with a few writers in addition to the 200 articles. See this as an untapped resource and a tool we can use to build our team, test new concepts, and also get stronger relationships in the Philippines market, which is where a lot of our team is based.
Also plan to cross-promote GFA and GFAVIP with the site. Asia business for foreigners is our market, so I see a lot of synergy in it.
The new company handbook is almost ready – the Google sites “Classic” is going away and Google keeps emailing us that we gotta upgrade to the new one – but our handbook site is so big it says it is too big to convert – plus it doesn’t have the features we want. So we found a wordpress solution – and we are big wordpress users here anyway – so you should have gotten a login invite to the handbook (if not please let management know) – inside you’ll see
* Homepage with quicklinks
* Company section – vision, mission, team, principles, org chart (being upgraded), circle of life)
* Teamspace (SOPS) this is a “wiki” section – and HOPEFULLY we can export/import the old google handbook site (it is big, and finally finished exporting – but it is all html and images) else we will have to manually re-create each SOP!
*** So while we make this transition – old SOPs you can still find and the links are still the same (the sites.google.com/a/shadstone.com/ etc) – but do NOT edit any SOPs there – if you need to update an SOP – make a COPY of it and put it in the new handbook.
Really happy to see the team communicating with each other, it has been my dream/goal for a while to “let go” and let the team work with each other, so thank you for making those steps. I know working online makes it harder, and I appreciate it.
I’m a bit behind on reviewing site upgrades, just deep in the handbook, in the expat Philippines migration,
So this week, more of the same:
Handbook upgrade/ migration
Expat Philippines upgrade / migration
Onboarding new writers to Key Blogging
More tools tweaking – Ranking Solutions, Attraction Funnel, etc.
Writing this makes me so excited, but I do have to say I am burning out a little bit – I feel we are really so close to having the major pieces of the puzzle and the team and tools to get us there – thank you for being here for this and all your input is appreciated.