Andy's Idea Factory

UPDATED!!  I should have posted this sooner - but it took me a while to really commit to these planners on a daily basis for the full 90 days!!  My latest review for the 90x Planner by Alon David: I have been using the 90x planners for a couple of years now but hadn't ordered the Action Planner until now and LOVE the compactness of it! I struggled to fill the pages of the bigger planner some days (although when I did I found the intentional activity powerful!) and I also travel a lot for work, so It's nice to have the Action Planner with me always to stay focused on the goals at hand!  I also have used a LOT of planners, I tried the Panda planner, Erin Condren, Brendan Burchard's, Franklin Covey, and others (see below)... but nothing hones me in on my goals, bringing me back to focus on them weekly, staying on task with them monthly, and ticking down the 90 days like champ more than the 90x planner does! THANKS Alon!! This book has been a game changer for me!  If I c...

The online tools I teach to small business owners are the ones that are most inexpensive (or free!), stable, reliable and most importantly, always improving.  I look for applications that have the same priorities - making online marketing and communication easy for business owners. Today's blast from MailChimp is a perfect example. The headline: Every 4 weeks we launch new features.  An online tool can't get more up to date than that.  I have half a dozen clients using this program, and knowing they all got that email today too made me giggle.  What a proactive little monkey! It takes me weeks, sometimes months, to share the plethora of online gifts that I love with my clients, but in brief, here are some of the wonderful tools (in order of  why I appreciate them) that I use for my own businesses, which to me, speaks volumes when I learn from the my own online gurus. In this fast and vast technological age, we are all students just keeping up with the p...

Most of my peers have this subject nailed down.... but occasionally I run across someone who I think has it all figured out, all this social media hoopla, and yet they are missing one key element about the system (yes it is a system!) that would make their life online so much simpler. So today's Idea Factory is about all the social media tools I use on a daily or weekly basis. This list will likely change in 6 months, so it will likely require a followup. I know 6 months ago I wasn't using half these tools yet... technology is already light-years ahead of us! I also knew this would be a good post today when I counted my sites up and realized I regularly post to, gasp, over 30 different profiles. No wonder I need automation technology to keep myself from going crazy, AND to be able to do some work in a day! Daily I post to: (# of profiles) Facebook (3), Twitter (3), LinkedIn (1), Flickr (1) Weekly I post to: Blogger (4), You Tube (1), Ning (6), The Wheel Life (1), Aweber (1),...

This was one topic I struggled with for sure... table cloths and color accents? Window decor with light catchers? Hanging lamps or additional lighting? Chair covers? Flowers on the table, tall or short? Placecard colors and font? OMG! It was overwhelming once we'd decided on our location because the options were limitless and we didn't have a wedding planner to help make those decisions. Personally, I'm more of a simple person, and our budget wasn't limitless (as most people's aren't) so I struggled between wanting to make it beautiful and frankly not giving a damn. :) So I met myself somewhere in between, and I think so should you... GENERAL DECOR First, go back to your colors. What are your bridesmaids wearing, what colors did you choose for flowers, or what are your favorite colors in general? Typically those snappy wedding experts say to stick with only 2-3 colors, unless you want it to look like a circus, and marry (excuse the pun) those colors with you...

Last week we started a Wedding Season 101 series of helpful hints for brides-to-be. We got married in 2006 and spent an entire year preparing. These tips are just my helpful hints that we discovered along the way for those of you who aren't enlisting the help of a wedding planner. This week I've got two more ideas for you for the wedding-day party favors. We'd been to over twenty weddings before we got married ourselves, five or six just in the 18 months between our engagement and the I-Dos, so we gathered a good deal of ideas to sort through before we came up with our own. We'd seen rice sachets, seed packets, music cds, and beer cozies, and wanted to give something that people would definitely use but would still remember our wedding by without necessarily being reminded of it with the cheesy text "Andy and Craig's wedding day" on it. We wound up compromising. 1. First was my mother's great idea from her knitting closet. She wanted to give the ...

As wedding season approaches and my wedding industry friends begin to hustle and bustle, I thought to share some of the Idea Factory lightbulbs from our own wedding in 2006. This will be a multi-part series of four topics: Prep, Gifts, Decor, and Honeymoon. Today's topic, PREP, is to help you get organized. Wedding planning is a long process with many facets, and doing it all on your own is daunting, so enlisting a good team and organizing your process is vital. We didn't enlist a wedding planner, but these tips can help you help your wedding planner too if you get one. Aside from the heavy duty first decisions like size, venue, band, and dress, you're going to have some smaller decisions that are just as important. There aren't many tricks to buckling down and making these decisions, so helping get the little ones sorted first will ease your mind. Here are three ideas to start... 1. Once you decide a location, you should send out your Save-The-Dates. We struggled ...