Week 10 - Interviews

This week I have learned about time management.

I know it has nothing to do with the reading or the videos but that's what I've really learned about.

The videos and readings were good as normal but the interview was what took up most of my time. Here are my takeaways from it at the end.

My first takeaway was that you need to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. LaMar recognized that he was good at some things and not so good at others. He was very interested in some aspects and not at all interested in other. I think the key is to really take the time to understand which is which and how you can fix that. For some it may be just learning different skills, for others it may be having those tasks given to someone else, which brings me to my second takeaway which is more of a personal insight.

The insight I got is that I hate pricing things. It becomes too personal to me. I feel very attached to what I choose as my pricing and if I’m directly involved with it, I find that I have a poor response. If someone doesn’t want to pay me what I think I’m worth, it again becomes a personal insult almost. Moving forward, I’m having my wife talk to people, and negotiate my prices so I don’t have to worry about it. I can just do the part I’m good at, interact with people and take pictures. I’m also very good at process improvement. I can take something, tear it down to something simple and assemble it back together in a functional, efficient and understandable process.

My second insight is that no matter how good your product is, if you can’t sell it and people don’t know about it, you can’t be wildly successful. Success in business comes when there is a perfect storm or balance of all the characteristics… maybe even the 4 p’s that we learned about in this last chapter of another class.

Until next week.