What is Mike Michelini Up to – Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2020
* Preparing for the new Amazon brand to launch in Jan. 2021 – preparing all the product details, bank account, seller central account
* GFAVIP Mastermind Session 1 this Tuesday Dec. 1 at 7pm – working on fostering leaders.
* Scaling up more SEO and content marketing clients in Shadstone
* Investing in upgrading our HR management tools and systems for year end.
And, for the full report I post to the Shadstone team (removing sensitive info and names), see below:
Shadstone Limited Week Plan Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2020
What a week! The end of year and holiday season is always one to reflect and prepare for the new year. Seriously, I cannot wait to have 2020 behind us. But let’s be appreciative of what we have – our health and our families.
The team is doing great. It is funny / ironic because I am looking for things to “fix”, to “build” and some may say it is micromanaging or looking for problems. So I am adjusting to things working (used to “fighting fires”) so thank you for all your hard work. We have done great.
But I can’t help myself, still trying to make things even smoother and better, so there are some adjustments:
1) Work diary – many feel that they are redundant so we’re making them more optional for certain roles that may not have much “different” things to report on a daily basis. If you feel that your role/ you don’t require a work diary, let us know. Some we have already agreed to drop the work diary daily requirement.
2) Regarding Work HR – we know it is a bit buggy and it only allows single day clock in / clock out. We are going to upgrade the software to their newest version hopefully this week. But the clock in / clock out multiple times per day is a pretty fundamental change that would not allow us to upgrade their software anymore and may break a lot of the other code, so we most likely will not customize that.
SOP – here we are testing a multi clock in / clock out function on the handbook. It is in testing phase now (if you’d like to test it, let us know in your work diary). We’re talking to the developer about some bugs/questions on it.
SOP (work in progress) and video here.
And this will replace regarding work clock in / clock out
This is in response to everyone’s requirement to work 100% remote, 100% flexible. It seems most HR tools are not built for that.
3) Otira.com company culture bot on slack. I have a friend who made that startup and we are one of the first customers. It is also new/buggy (it didn’t turn on until I asked 2x) but the idea is to help collect feedback from team members and ensure people are happy and satisfied with their work. I’m not sure exactly what it is supposed to do but the idea is a culture bot that you can talk to, that helps with engagement. Please let us know what you think. I have seen it asking question in slack random channel, but no one is replying. If you can reply and see how it works, let’s see what we think.
Ok, so those are all in effort to HELP US. I hope that is how it is seen. I was maybe pushing too hard on work diaries. Honestly I like work diaries, but I finally let the team’s voice be heard and am letting them go in most cases.
I live off feedback, and we try to do the company monthly feedback survey which can be 100% anonymous as well. We take it seriously because we want to improve.
Other announcements :
She is taking a much needed holiday. It is paid leave and all of December! She hasn’t taken a holiday. Heck, I don’t think she has taken a single day off (as you see she responds to our messages on Saturdays and Sundays) in the 6+ years she has worked with Shadstone. So it is something that is supported. 2 others will be the 2 main contacts for tasks you have had for her in the past. She will be on leave in December.
He is joining the team this week. He was referred to the company by a team member (thanks!) to help with our much needed citations and link building efforts for our clients and our own investment projects. Please help welcome him once he is onboarded early this coming week.
Now to the projects and things that have been happening:
We are taking on more content creation and SEO projects, sending out proposals and also confirming new ones. It is our core strength. We have a team of content creators, web designers, builders, and outreach (have had outreach department in the past but re-building now with Regi)
Preparing all the new product descriptions and design we need to make for our Bavdan brand. 15+ products (some are variations of color or size) that we hope to have ready by early Jan 2021. Hope we can organize a clear content schedule for that to split it up week by week as it is quite a bit of products all at one time.
Adding more courses and memberships to our client. Thanks for your hard work and patience on that project.
GFA partner Mercury is being onboarded and is happy with the GFA review and introduction in the community. Plus I think their service is perfect for many of the GFA blog readers looking for US banking help. So it is a great win win win for all.
The GFA live streaming seems to be getting smoother. I KNEW it would be chaotic when we did so many at the beginning. But it was something I felt necessary as we had to get a few done upfront so that the future ones would be more clear for all of us and the community. Seems now the team and the community understand the system and hopefully it will be smoother going forward.
GFAVIP members have the first mastermind this Tuesday evening at 7pm HK time. Working on having leaders in the community running various mastermind tables /sessions and sharing the “stage” more so it is more about the members as a true community should be.
We had the Webinar last week, for the Scale By Outsourcing. It was the first one we did with Gilbert coaching me/us and we need Edwin’s help on FB ads for sure! Plus, I need to improve my sales offer pitching skills and delivery (this is why I knew I needed Gilbert’s help)
Been deep in the Handshake domain work, getting Twitter “love” from others in the community for our developing skyinclude.com service. Essentially, it is using our amazing web team to deploy sites to static (JAMstack).
I know I haven’t explained handshake to the team yet too much, so one more clear example is we have www.dotbartender.com (we own the domain extension .bartender) and we can sell a domain now for someone to have mike.bartender . Only thing is, it is on the blockchain now and typing it in to chrome browser will say page not found. The idea is once Chrome / Firefox and other browsers add this Handshake HNS (blockchain DNS) to their settings then it will go mainstream. But for now you need to install chrome extension / settings to make it work. But just like the original .com domains in the mid 1990s, people didn’t buy domains then but those who did were early adopters and now look really smart!
Duosea, the auto-translate “beyond border” chat app, is still being developed, some of you (thanks Angelica) have tested it out and written down bugs. Hope to clean up all the bugs and things but it keeps getting extended week by week as it is a huge project to make an Android, iOS, and web app!
I do hope these week plans help. I remember they started in 2015 or so when Sheryl said she was working on the tasks but didn’t understand the bigger picture of what the company was doing.
I know it is a lot of stuff. I honestly probably forget a bunch of stuff but it is what I love to do – CCC – content, community, consulting. In the web, we’re creating businesses that drive traffic from search and inbound marketing for ecommerce and cross-border trade.
I drew this up last week as I am trying to make it more clear visually
(image removed)
It does seem to be 2 main different businesses
1) GFA – media / content / community
2) Shadstone – consulting / services
3) Venture seed – more “investments” , but also can fall under (1) and (2) above as these investments came from the community.
But they do feed back and forth to each other.