OK, yesterday in our top subjects for road warrior success, we mentioned taking care of Clients/Customers so we want to finish up today.  The best way we know to take care of Clients/Customers is that you need to take care of your self first.

If you are stressed, chances are your client(s) will be stressed.  So here are 3 simple but key things that help make our projects a success, will contribute to keeping you healthy (minimize stress) and will certainly keep clients very happy because these items help us out in the crucial times:

Contacts Sheet(s)

Even if you have joined a project at the last minute and had to make travel arrangements while racing to the airport, spend a few moments in your company’s marketing applications and get the key individuals’ phone #, positions and email addresses associated with this project and by all means, understand who the project’s sponsor is.  You might have to call an administrative resource if marketing applications are not available but get it done!  And continue to collect this information throughout the project because players will change.

At the beginning of every project, we always set up a contact spreadsheet with appropriate contact info (also make sure you also have cell #s or after hours #s) that somehow I end up keeping up-to-date.  Send this list out to project team members on a regular basis – it has saved us many a time so we keep doing it.

And the most crucial thing is not to just have this Contacts Sheet in a notebook or folder somewhere, but to make sure you input these names, phone #’s and email addresses, etc. into your cell or PDA tool.   It takes some time but in an emergency, you will be glad you have this information available in multiple places.  Save yourself some stress and grief and keep track of everyone.

Project Documents

There is almost always a trail of documents that leads up to the actual “Go” for a project and if you are lucky to receive a copy of those documents at the beginning of a project, you can begin to understand some of the history of why this project is taking place and possibly the deliverables required for success.

If your company doesn’t have a central repository for such documents, obtain them from the key sales and marketing resources and read them all before meeting the client face-to-face.  Even if you cannot locate these crucial documents, hopefully your project upline will fill you in on how the project came about and what the real objectives are.  You don’t want to meet the client for the first time and not understand their needs.  This is a major stressor!

Gatekeepers

Having been a gatekeeper early in my career, I can absolutely say, these are the folks who really run the company on many levels.  They know the politics, they know where all the resources (and bodies) are, they know the schedules, the underground leaders and instigators, they know the roadblocks and so on.  Keep yourself as stress-free as possible and figure out who these key resources are on day One or as early on as possible because they will save you when you least expect it.

Summary

In summary, these items will help you organize and minimize the mundane details that can really cause stress during a project.  You are going to be much healthier if you are not stressed.  This list (contacts, project documents and gatekeepers) is not everything we need to keep ourselves as stress-free as possible and our Clients/Customers happy, just the initial ones.

So, our next subject, air travel of which I am going to do more of today, will be focused on what we need to do to help you through air travel disasters and keep our Clients/Customers happy in that arena as well.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Mel

So just how healthy are we going to be this Thanksgiving?  Well, we did go to the special grocery store down the road this morning to pick up a roasted turkey roll that came from a free-range, non-hormoned, not pumped up with solutions bird.  Does that count for healthy?  Oh, and does buying an already cooked roast help classify us as being green as well?

Not really but we’d like to think so.  We are also going to do the pumpkin cheesecake, the candied yams, the sausage-cornbread stuffing with oysters and turkey gravy and that’s all going to have to be heated up somehow.  This may not be a good example of healthy living. But it has to be healthy–we are leaving out the mashed potatoes and all that butter!!!

Well if you aren’t going to have the healthiest of feasts this Thanksgiving, then opt for a great and healthy travel day.

For all of you out there who are traveling this holiday to see family and friends, one of the best travel trips we can suggest is to take some healthy nibble food along because today is one of the worst (longest travel day, mostly late flights and crowded roadways) travel days of the year.  The only day worse might be the Sunday after Thanksgiving because it’s also the start of Hunting Season in many states as well as a major travel day.  Don’t be on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after 12:00pm noon that day if you want to get where you are going.

Now what do we mean by healthy nibble food?  Something we like to do besides take organic fruit is put really raw almonds (not the pasteurized ones), organic raisins and coconut chips, unsalted/raw sunflower seeds – all thrown together to give yourself a great trail mix.  This mix is a good way to curb hunger while flying and driving. 

There are also some great raw cacao bars being made these days (we plan to do a product review soon) that give you so many health benefits (read up on anything by David Wolfe) plus they taste great, impart that wonderful theobromine feeling of being in love and help maintain a high energy level.  Who would have thought there were healthy chocolate bars?  And I just heard about a new product–raw cacao brittle.  Have some of this on order – will let you know how it tastes after Dec. 15th.

And to get you through a long travel day, say your money and remain hydrated.  Checkout our earlier blog on how to have inexpensive and healthy water while in the airport (Click here).  Grab your filtering water bottle, your lemon or grapefruit essential oil and your liquid minerals and off you go.

So healthy flying or healthy driving and enjoy that maybe not so healthy Thanksgiving feast,

Mel

Hello Everyone -

Once again we have worked today on how this website appears to you out there.  We received some helpful comments about the look of the site and hopefully have improved it from what you experienced yesterday. 

What an amazing journey this website construction/re-construction has become.  We are utilizing our healthy living tips to just deal with the stress of making all this come together in a way that loads quickly and makes some sense when you read it.

So we went online this morning and looked for additional tools to handle the stress of constructing your own website so we can remain healthy and keep this site going.  And we found some stress reduction tools that were either free or very reasonable.  So we are going to try out some of these stress reduction tools and let you know in a product review what works for us.  And this now has us working on yet another page or two.

Oh, and we finally got our first article published with ezinearticle.com.  We had no idea it would take us 5 submissions to get just a small article online.  What a learning experience that was and so now we can work on more articles.

Is there anyone out there who has mastered the fine art of publishing travel tips?  As a full-time Road Warrior, I would love to hear about your experiences and check out those tips.

Thanks,

Mel