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

Well we hope you all had great holidays and are now ready to begin not only a new year, but a new decade.  And it’s going to be a happy and healthy new decade.  We are searching the Internet for the best healthy living and travel tips and items to bring to you and hope that you will share here with us the tips and items that you have found.

Today’s post is focused on travel as many of you have probably just experienced some travel woes especially if you were on the East coast around the holidays.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to travel during that time.

As you may or may not know I am a full-time Road Warrior, traveling for business every week (have been for 14 years).  About a month ago I was challenged to put together the Top 10 Travel Tips for Road Warriors.  At first this task didn’t seem too daunting, however, simplifying all those years of experience into only 10 tips has proven to be very difficult.  I have it down to a Baker’s Dozen+ and each one of those tips has it’s own top 10 or so.

Sorry, we just couldn’t not tell you about so many things to look for, watch out for, avoid and do for a healthier and happy travel experience.  So for the next several posts, the focus will be on one of the Baker’s Dozen+ Top Travel Tips for Road Warrior Success you see below:

If you really are a Road Warrior or you just want to understand what Road Warriors go through, you understand that clients are the lifeblood or your career.  You must take care of them or you don’t last long.  So everything you will find here is predicated on taking care of clients.  And that means you need to be healthy and as stress-free as possible to do that.  Remember, almost no one likes surprises, least of all our clients, so having success strategies is essential where the following subjects are concerned:

The Top Baker’s Dozen+ Subjects for Road Warrior Success:

1.   Taking Care of Clients
2.   Air Travel
3.   Luggage/Packing
4.   Hotels
5.   Rental Vehicles
6.   Sleep
7.   Food & Water
8.   Personal Amenities
9.   Local Amenities
10. Arrival / Departure
11. Directions – GPS Support
12. Health on the Road
13. Tools (Laptops, Cells, Recorders, Headphones, Batteries, etc.)

As I mentioned above, in looking at this subject, the best I could do was a Baker’s Dozen but don’t be freaked out by the 13 subjects.  And to keep this post to a reasonable length, each subject above will be a separate post to give it adequate coverage.  And should you stay with us through the end (basically the next couple of weeks – think of these kind of like the 12 days of Christmas, only the 12 or 13 Subjects for Road Warriors), we’d like you to vote on which of the above subjects was most helpful and which did nothing for you.

So let’s get down to the “only” reason we Road Warriors exist – Our Clients/Customers! And what do they like or not like or will or will not put up with:

•  They don’t like surprises, who does?
•  They like for you to be prepared, confident and energetic
•  They might be distressed but you MUST NOT BE
•  They want you to help them, but remember, they might not like what you tell them, so you have to have some stamina to weather through the storms
•  They do not want to know you are having travel issues that could interfere with the project or cost them additional funds
•  You may be traveling between several sites for your clients, or perhaps overseas. They want to know you are geared for SUCCESS! And know how to handle yourself on the road. They don’t have time to teach you.

OK, we got so excited we started into the first subject.  It’s a long post, so we will end it here for now but let us know what you think so far.  Every effort will be made to stay in order so our next post here at Healthy Living and Travel Tips will be to finish the first subject for Road Warrior Success – Taking Care of Clients.

Thanks,

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

Featured in BizWeb eGazette  

Hello Everyone – Just got word from Jim at JDD Publishing www.bizweb2000.com that this website was being featured in his newsletter about his coaching clients who are completely new to doing business online.  Yes we are newbies when it comes to this website and blogging but we have been receiving great coaching support from him. 

As Jim mentioned in his eGazette, this site was built over the course of about a month using the WordPress Blog Template “Patagonia” and then it was rebuilt in about 5 days for a niche change (we decided to broaden our scope to both Healthy Living and Travel Tips).  Thank goodness for WP because I don’t think we could have pulled off the 2nd rebuild without this template and the techies at Hostgator.  

Has anyone out there gone through this, especially in your first few weeks online?

We have an Opt-in form that is still under construction – Aweber went live yesterday with their new Web Form Generator, so some of that re-build we did this past week, had to be completely re-done again.  So bear with us if things don’t appear quite like you would expect them to be. 

In fact, please leave us a comment below so we can fix anything that looks amiss.  And if you like what you see, tell us that too, so we can include more posts on those subjects.  Our posts here are somewhat long we know but that’s because there’s so much to talk about when it comes to healthy living and you already know that I am a Road Warrior traveling full-time both domestically and internationally.

So with all the stress of this site’s construction, we are taking the weekend off.  We need to return to a Healthy Body and a Healthy Mind(set).  I have been challenged to write about the Top 10 Tips for Road Warriors so we will be doing some thinking while we relax.

Drop us a comment or two on how you are de-stressing this weekend and what’s your best travel tip.

Thanks,

Mel