I’m in the middle of a company crisis and have decided to do a series of blog posts about how I’m solving the situation. Don’t worry - my company is actually thriving. The crisis is…more complicated, and I’m probably not yet ready to talk about it at this time.

One small component of the crisis has led me to re-evaluate my business relationship with my current bank and to suck it up and leave this bank for another one. This move has been long overdue and has only been held back by my own personal (and unfounded) fears.

The bank I’m currently with has been a nightmare from Day 1. The problems started with the new bank employee who set up our company account in January 2005 and made a slew of errors including mispelling our names multiple times which continued to haunt us over time. I ended up with a 5-page, single spaced typed document outlining every egregious error that the bank made (almost every one of them that they admitted to doing) that cost us time, money and sanity. To this day, I still have not had my call returned when I left a customer service voicemail - per their instructions - asking for a supervisor to call me back to address my complaints. That was 2 plus years ago.

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As a writer and pro-blogger, I’m always in need of ideas for articles, columns and blog posts on a near daily basis. Unfortunately, even a writer who does this for a living can run dry. It isn’t that I don’t have any ideas. It is just that the ideas I have right now aren’t inspiring me. Call it a bad mood, call it writers block, call it what you like. But whatever you call it, I’m still sitting here with my morning blending into midday blending into afternoon and still no blog post.

So I will do what every professional writer must do at one time or another. Write about ways to overcome writers block or ways to find your next cool idea. I hope this list will inspire you and help some of you get out of that idea-free rut you find yourself in on occasion, whether you’re looking for topics to write about or ideas for any aspect of your company. Read the rest of this entry »

As a freelance writer and blogger, I get bombarded daily by PR folks and business people pitching me to write about them, their clients, their companies, fill-in-the-blank. I have hundreds of unread emails in my InBox, sorry to say, but am having my new personal assistant go through them and sort them based on urgency, topic and relevance to what I do.

Freelancers are juggling a million things and are always on deadline. For example, I compose at least 8 blog posts, release several podcasts, and write at least several articles EVERY WEEK.

For the record, I write specifically about:

1. Women business owners - This actually does mean women and not men (for those who pitch me male business owners all the time).

2. Women’s business issues - This means topics, themes, issues about business that have a female slant. Some examples? Women who have a baby while running their business. Women who hire their husband or boyfriend to work for their business. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m working on a series of articles about mentoring for women business owners for a client of mine, and it got me reminiscing about my own mentors when I had my Internet company back in the 1990s. While my articles will be filled with tips for finding a mentor (or finding a mentee), I have to admit that my own path to my three key mentors was much more serendipitous.

At the time, I was the first woman to start a full-service Internet company in Manhattan that focused exclusively on creating content and community for women on the Web. All of our sites (Cybergrrl.com, Webgrrls.com and Femina.com) focused on a female audience and all of our clients focused on the women’s markets. But at that time, there were no women at the helm of new media companies, particularly none bigger than my own company from whom I could “learn the ropes.” Finding a mentor in my industry was a major challenge.

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I’ve just arrived at BlogHer in San Francisco. For those of you who don’t yet know, BlogHer is a conference for women bloggers and women interested in blogging. I think this is their 4th annual conference. I was unable to attend the first because I had just moved to Alaska a few days before it was held and could not convince my husband that I should fly back down to the Lower 48 to attend. The 2nd one was immediately after I had a baby and could barely walk.

I did attend the 3rd in Chicago - last year - and it was my first extended time away from baby. This year, I just returned from a few days in Seattle for BizJam Seattle last week, so am on a roll in terms of travel for business. When I mentioned to my 2-year-old that I was taking a plane today and would be back in a few days, she proceeded to purse her lips and emit her “fake cry” to express her displeasure.

But back to BlogHer and more specifically, how to get more out of attending conferences like BlogHer.

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A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “working in the clouds” for the first time. The phrase refers to the way many people are starting to use online-based applications for their work processes and tasks rather than computer-based solutions. Even without thinking very much about it, I’ve been “working in the clouds” more and more often in the last six months. But after my big computer crash and near-loss of all 10-months worth of data, I’ve been thinking a lot more about “cloud computing” ever since.

There are definitely major pros but also major cons to cloud computing, and weighing them out is often too much for my overloaded brain to handle. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic and then hear from you as well so we can share best practices on this revolutionary way of work.
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A client of mine teased me the other day when she saw me pull out my calendar book to write down an entry.

“I thought you were so tech, and here you are with a paper calendar,” she said by way of explanation.

“But I have a 30Boxes calendar as well!” I retorted. “And it sends me text message reminders to my cellphone!”

I don’t know why I felt that I needed to prove my tech savvy by rattling off how wired I really am and that the paper calendar is just my first line of defense against my progressively bad memory.

I just like the tangible feeling of a paper calendar. I like the feeling of pen on paper. I like seeing what I write on a page. Our words are so digitized these days with reading and writing emails, reading our news on Web sites, connecting with others through online social networks - that for me, writing things down on paper really grounds me.
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I’m scheduled to travel on business to either speak at or attend a number of conferences this year and am just trying to get my groove back. In my single days, I was out on the road as often as possible with an out-of-town speaking gig nearly every week and an out-of-the-country appearance nearly once a month. Then I left Manhattan for the high plains of Wyoming and a new life away from the hustle and bustle of the circuit and road warrior weariness. Then I got married, moved to Alaska, had a baby and fell off the face of the earth as far as industry appearances were concerned.

Now I’m back and trying to find that delicate balance between being a wife, a mommy to a 2-year-old, and a business owner who loves travel and is itching to be totally immersed in my industry once again. But the barriers to entry into road warrior-dom are many, and some of them have really surprised me.
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This is a topic that isn’t exactly a business one but I am finding that it is without a doubt an essential thing for both my work and personal life. I have to learn how to be.

If you are a Type A, over-achieving type (so many entrepreneurs are), then you probably are like me - more used to being productive and being on top of things and being innovative and being active than just being. I have a hard time just…doing nothing. I struggle with dialing things down. I can’t seem to stop multi-tasking. Then I get into a dangerous loop of information frenzy and work frenzy and trying to keep the home life from being part of that frenzy, that I end up a mess.

Where the heck is my reset button? Read the rest of this entry »

I am still reeling from a complete and total computer crash (MacBook) that happened mid-day yesterday, and I’m not sure when it will really sink in or when I will recover emotionally from the ordeal.

Before you read on, I want to know this: When was the last time you backed up your computer?

If you had asked me a few days ago, my answer would have been “Oh, I haven’t backed up since I bought my new computer last year,” and then I’d add “I’ve been using Macs for nearly 15 years and have never had a problem.”

Well, folks, yesterday I had a problem. And it was a doozy.

I ended up crying in the middle of the new Mac store in town. My tears were not for the hundreds of work-related documents. My tears were for the thousands of photos and hundreds of videos of my baby girl who turned 2 last week.
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