What Mike Michelini is up to Now – Nov 21 – 27, 2021
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Thanksgiving week! China doesn’t celebrate, and hard to get a turkey – but may find something. Quick list of what we are up to:
* Onboarding new financial officer / bookkeeper. Budgets, reports, plans for closing 2021 and rocking 2022.
* Indigitus – really that last 5% in the product and our talented engineering team is working as hard as they can. I need to use this as a practice for developing my handling extreme pressure on all sides.
* NowShenzhen – massive update last week and the new and improved site is live! Expecting to promote it more this coming week and make massive updates as those comments come in.
* Courses / Content / Branding – Blimp Method is the code word, but working with various brands. Deciding if we can launch a “black friday / cyber monday” offer flash sale for those who want to be super-early bird on this breakthrough program or wait til end of year to launch.
For those who want to hear the full week plan for Shadstone Limited, Mike’s company (removing sensitive info) – here it is:
Week Plan Nov 21 – 27, 2021 Shadstone Limited
That last week in November often feels like the true transition to “end of the year / starting the new year planning” and that is definitely how it is going here at Shadstone Limited!
We will be introducing a new bookkeeper (we are changing the title to “Financial officer”) this coming week and are excited to have this role spend more time in the company. I’ll let this person be introduced in our Slack later in the week to not spoil the excitement ha. But having a more dedicated financial officer working more closely inside Shadstone, the management believes that we will have better financial controls in place and more clear reporting (as the team member will understand thee role and position of the company more) .
With new addition to the team – it is almost PERFECT timing for year end. And we will try hard to make a BUDGET – for the first time in the history of Shadstone (since 2007!). Let’s make this happen, and having a budget for the year is expected to allow us to better plan – but not just plan – EMPOWER our amazing and growing leadership and management team to take action and make decisions on their own. This has been the transition of 2021 – to empower the leaders to take action – to not make this a “Mike told me to do…” company – but instead a company that can grow and manage with confident and empowered leaders across the departments and projects.
I’ll try my best to hold my attention during budget meetings (I was never into financials – and the older I get, the less … interested… I get.) so that we can GROW. As we made this decision – we want to grow. We have an amazing HR department, and now we are setting up a finance department – and these departments can allow us to SCALE and grow. So while the “comfort zone” for me is stay with a smaller team and involved in all the projects and clients – we decided to make this decision.
Truly believe 2022 will be the year Shadstone scales to have even more leaders and more independent operating projects. If you ae here on the team, you were selected because we felt you can grow as a leader.
We are also discussing more formal ongoing training for digital marketing and other core skills we do in our company- as many whoo are not directing in the digital marketing department do want to learn and get involved – so lets make this happen.
For the projects and clients, here are some highlights from last week and this coming week:
* Indigitus, all of us are anxious to announce the release of it, but still a 5% remainder on the software, security, hardware integration. Hopefully I won’t be forced to go to temple again from this and we can release it as soon as possible.
* NowShenzhen – the new site is ONLINE – months of work, planning, and strategy and we have released not just 1 site, but really at least 5 sites (depending on how you call it) – NAJE-GD is an internal acronym we will use to oversee the content – NAJE-GD meaning – News, apartments, jobs, events – and when needed to be mentioned – guides (epic posts) and directory listings. Just helps us (me at least) organize in my mind all the different sections of this massive local site about Shenzhen that was established in 2001!
* Blimp Method – the site is online at BlimpMethod.com – simply a landing page site as the course and program is a part of Global From Asia VIP. Have a hidden course page and collecting lots of feedback and planning to announce in email next week (but worry we don’t have enough time for it)
* Excalibur Brothers brand – had another weekend marathon session with our partner in the brand Luciano on the brand strategy and outlook. He is super talented and while there isn’t something to show yet – we are defining the avatar and vision/mission to empower people to be who they are meant to be in their lives (hero). This brand will be part of the Blimp Method and also part of the content in the Global From Asia community soon.
* Esatto – still want to launch this, but the containers still at the factory in Thailand and container shipping is “only” $20,000 USD each now. Having a call with our partner this week to discuss strategy and how much longer we can wait.
* This Friday I’ll be doing a workshop for BBG in the afternoon on using content to generate traffic and sales for your ecommerce business (basically what we do!).
* SEO and client work – really proud of what our team is doing and the results being delivered. Also getting more opportunities to create stories, text, videos for clients. Even NFT and Handshake / dweb sites. Do need PPC help on the team.
ClearCafe email – this is a “scary” one for me – as it is a tough transition to move from our current help desk system to one we maintain and host. Just hoping our email deliverability (inbound and outbound) doesn’t get lost / in spam and we dont lose too many emails in the migration. Wondering the best strategy on moving things over and hope to have a call with the project team involved this coming week.
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