What Mike Michelini is up to Now – Jan 31- Feb 6, 2021
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January is this half “end of year” (with Chinese new year coming) and half “new year” (for the western world).
Honestly, always look forward to getting through this “halfway” mix of Western (Solar) new year and Chinese (Lunar New year) which is Feb 14.
So basically it is “new year” until about early March, 2021. Just part of the cross-border trade world – specially between China and the rest of the world.
Some highlights of this week:
- Working on OKR and KPI for the departments. This year I’m working on building the leadership team and the next step is then having the departments and team aligned with the projects from the leaders too.
- GFAVIP Mastermind week (2 slots for members, 7pm HK time Tuesday and 10am HK time Wed) will be on ecommerce, B2B trade, and second time slot is on influencer marketing.
- Deep into Handshake (HNS) and building up the Handshake ecosystem with a forum (Handshake.mercenary) and a mastermind (Handshake.mastermind)
- Saturday Feb 6, 9am HK time doing a webinar with Janette from DigitalFilipino.com on “Reigniting your Cross Border Ecommerce business” and will also introduce updates to Global From Asia and business stuff here.
For those who want to hear the full week plan for Shadstone Limited, Mike’s company (removing sensitive info) – here it is:
Week Plan Jan 31 – Feb 6, 2021 – Shadstone Limited
January is always a crazy weird transition month for many. Depending on the industry the company is in (was reminded supplements and health does well in January as people want to “start fresh with their health”), there are some industries that slow down and some that pick up.
For us, we are getting overwhelmed with requests for content marketing and SEO services. I think it is mainly the Chinese factories that want to improve their business as Chinese New Year is starting. Some of them are giving us deadlines for some projects by February 3, for example. Because Chinese New Year is starting in the middle of February, many are doing their “new year’s resolution now”.
It is great we have our leadership team in place now, and the next phase is setting up department goals and effectively delegating projects to various team members in respective departments for these projects.
Reading a management book “Measure What Matters” which is focused on what the author, John Doerr, calls it OKR – which is 2 parts (1) OBJECTIVES, which are goals, and (2) KEY RESULTS, which we can call KPI / or the output. I’m brainstorming how we can all have OKRs by department and individuals and more clearly, all know who is doing what and what the goals are for the company.
Basically, there are more and more projects coming for the team and this week, we are working on delegating those.
We are restructuring the GFAVIP mastermind format as well, as it seems hard to expect people to attend all of them. We have a new system / program in mind but want to wait until it is ready to publicly show it.
Attended a few different online events and a 2-day Namescon (Thurs/Fri) last week which was overwhelming with amazing people, while also trying to do our project work. But we have some great potential collaborations coming.
Team updates
:
She is starting as our bookkeeper this week! We need to better track our financials and please help me in welcoming her.
Our SMM team member is keeping up with the overwhelming amount of social media work, discussing the role and looking to have her help more on our sales and client services as that is a spot we desperately need.
Design and IT leaders are making a new GFA header/footer to re-organize the site and show our authority. It should go online this weekend and it will start to inter-connect all our services with the media company. Many of you know the site is just a bit unorganized and many friends and visitors say they cannot find what they need when visiting it.
Client / Project specific
A VIP client wants to do this every online event every 3 months. So, we have to make clear “setup” SOPs and processes as it involves a lot of our team members.
We have quite a few new clients:
- a BlogJV partnership (50/50 ownership and shared costs). The owner is a really nice person in Florida and is easy going and trusting us. There is a recent hack (wordpress) and our team is still fixing that. Well, one team member for now!
- Amazon seller for SEO and content creation
- Content creation – for Amazon review pages
- Chinese factory wants Amazon listing optimization, hope to confirm that .
- Chinese factory wants SEO
- Building a lot on Handshake (internal projects) – handshake.mercenary, handshake.wiki, and more.
So much to do!
And, we are working on giving more projects and opportunities to our team. Working on making more OKR, KPI and SOP and processes.
This is our year, 2021. Time to come out of the “new normal” bigger and better than ever.
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