Today marks the five-year anniversary of Butler Street and you are reading our 260th consecutive Monday Morning blog, each one created with new and original content.
We thank you so much for investing a few minutes of time in us and want you to know that we are tremendously grateful for you and how you've helped us grow!
Five years ago, we had to reinvent ourselves from corporate CEO & COO to owners of a small business start-up. Starting a company from scratch was something we had never done before and required learning so many new things such as the nuances of email marketing, using LinkedIn, Social Selling, Constant Contact, leveraging our website to get our message out, and above all...the consulting/training business.
For the first four months of Butler Street, we had ZERO revenue, yet we remained disciplined to our plan and our focus on the two industries we had the most experience in: staffing & print/digital. And then, three pivotal things happened that changed our company trajectory:
Thanks to our Monday Morning blog, a former executive associate in the Staffing industry reached out to Mary Ann and awarded us our first consulting/training engagement.
Thanks to our Monday Morning blog, a former executive associate in the Print & Digital industry reached out to Mike and awarded us our second consulting/training engagement.
After several reach-outs to share our value proposition, Staffing Industry Analysts offered us the opportunity to speak at the Executive Forum exposing us to well over 100 staffing industry executives.
Time has flown since! We have grown into a consulting company, a training company, a research company and a software company supporting the two industries we set out to focus on. We would like to take this opportunity to share with you how grateful we are for YOU: our clients, our friends, our partners, former associates and Monday Morning blog readers. We LOVE what we do and want to thank you for being a part of it!
Here are some of the reasons we are so grateful:
Having fun is fun. We make each other laugh. We don't take each other too seriously and we make sure that the fun outweighs the stress. Everyone pitches in to make sure of that. (How else can you get five people in a photo booth built for a max of two?)
Being virtual is awesome! We now have a team that is across the nation and having a model that allows us to work in a virtual environment doesn't limit us to the talent we can acquire. We can "balance" our lives just a tiny bit more by having our home be our place of work.
Having Zoom is critical. We collaborate - a lot. We jump on Zoom meetings and turn on our cameras. Those of you who have worked virtual know that if you are not heading to a client, you are probably not "dressed for business". We turn on the camera anyway and connect with each other. It is always good to see each other laugh!
Weekly meetings are a must. And speaking of Zoom. We meet every Monday morning at 7AM CT to discuss strategy, activities and results. It's a format that we've followed consistently and keeps us focused on what matters the most.
Focus is key. We have our own whirlwinds and the way we stay out of them is through discipline and focus. We don't take on opportunities that will drain our resources and not provide us a return of that investment. But we do take on opportunities that help us grow, too because we have clients who trust us and push us.
Team is everything. We have the best team ever. We could never, ever be the company we are today without the team we have assembled. No one is a superstar; everyone is.
Prospecting is a blast! Thanks in large part to LinkedIn. We've reconnected with old friends, we've net so many new people and we've helped others connect. we also learn and share so much from the posts, articles and videos. It's fun and it drives business for us and for others.
Our customers are truly our friends. We've always been focused on advancing
relationship with our clients, but this, well this is different. Every single one of our clients is a friend first in our minds and a customer second.
There is nothing more satisfying than helping companies and their people grow! we get notes and phone calls from those who've we had the honor of working with saying things like, "I'm writing more business than I ever have, thanks to the Butler Street processes" or "my team is more cohesive than ever"..."Our business is finally scalable" "I've got the confidence to negotiate higher prices". That is the reason we are so grateful!
As we look to the future with great optimism, we understand that building a great company is not something we can step back from and admire when complete. It is an ongoing process of building, forming, changing, bonding, refining and tweaking. It is never quite perfect. It is never quite complete. It is always under construction.
On behalf of all of us at Butler Street, we would like to simply say, "thank you" from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you for reading, liking and sharing our blogs. Thank you for implementing our training programs. Thank you for sharing your successes with us. Thank you for entrusting us with your business. And most of all, thank you for helping us to make a dream become a reality! We could not have done it without you!
Cheers!
Mike and Mary Ann