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My two year old has this expression that she busts out whenever I’ve been away for too long – it’s goes “Daddy I MISS you…”. That’s kind of how I feel, with all of the crazy stuff that has been going on over the past little while it’s been hard to find time to blog… But I’m back baby. The goal is to blog at least three times a week on stuff that you’ll either find interesting, helpful, or both – This post is my “Interwebz I MISS you…!”

And what an interesting few months it has been…

Apart from my wife an I purchasing a house (woohoo!) and beginning renovations (not so woohoo… but still exciting) I have moved from being an employee of someone else’s company to a full time employee of my own (WOOHOO!) and have seen the Tall Poppy Group’s revenue increase by 150% and its subcontractor base by 400%.

Things are really picking up, and we are trying hard to decide what we should be focusing our efforts on… That’s one of the difficulties of when you’ve got something that starts to take off – There comes a point where you need to look and everything and work out what’s actually profitable vs what you are doing merely because you think you SHOULD. More in this later.

Keep an eye out, while this post is short and sweet we are back into the swing of things again, I promise.

The single greatest personal skill in business is the ability to learn.

The second greatest personal skill in business is to be able to adapt and apply that learning into any given situation.

A person who knows stuff, but refuses to learn stuff will not be able to adapt to a changing environment. A person who doesn’t know stuff, but is a skilled learner and possesses the wisdom to apply that learning will adapt, master, and conquer any environment. I’m talking about all areas here – technical skills, people skills, diplomacy skills, sales skills, whatever. He who can adapt, wins.

Here’s a challenge for you. One of the life principles I work off is this:

“You can learn something from every single person you interact with.”

So, try it. Every person you interact with. Tomorrow.

What’s amazing is the things you learn about yourself doing this, your prejudices, your insights (and lack of insight in certain areas), the things that hold you back from progress which are hidden away in the lives of people you have not yet made a decision to glean from.

ONE THING. EACH PERSON.

Let me know how it goes.

It goes very quickly, and it’s a little cheesy, but I like it. Enjoy.

Entrepreneurs can change the world from Pieterjan Vandaele on Vimeo.

I heard a speaker at a business seminar today so something quite simple, but I quite a profound way:

“When the perceived value is an issue, the cost becomes a problem.”

This is basically Sales 101: Establish an understanding of the value of what you are selling to your prospect before you discuss price.

The thing it made me think about though was along a different vein – the decision to become an entrepreneur or a businessman in general.

I love the ride I’m on. I love what I’m learning, I love the success of it, I love the people I’m doing it with, I love the feeling or being a part of building something significant… Except for when its boring. Or I lose. Or the people I’m doing it with just don’t quite “get it”, or there are what seems to be insurmountable roadblocks.

Then what do you do? Enthusiasm, passion and excitement is fantastic, but it is meant to get you though the start, not sustain you in the long run. For the long haul you need a vision, you need a dream. I have a belief system that is pretty big on dreams and life’s purpose – When ever I get the the place where my passion is not carrying me I just go back to why I got into this thing in the first place.

I’ll put it to you – being an Entrepreneur to “be rich” or being in business to “get out from under the man” is not enough. Riches are lovely to have, but at various points in a persons journey there are times when the purpose of all they are building will be challenged, and the size of their bank balance or asset base alone will not be enough to justify the effort they’re expending on their business pursuits.

• What is your dream?
• Do you have one?
• Is it big enough? Here’s a thought – If you have a $5 million dream but are working to build a $50 million business – why would you do that? A $50 million dollar business has exponentially more hassle involved in it than a $5 million one. Could it be that you are dreaming too small?
• Can you whisper your dream in retort to the arguments that challenge your progress?

I know for me, at this juncture of my life and professional development, having my dream on the tip of my tongue will mean the difference between abdication and victory. Time to go grab the journal.

Quick thought… I’m the kind of person who is very quick to start working out contingency plans if a dream, goal, task or venture or mine doesn’t seem to be panning out.

When bumps in the road come, my mind spawns a whole range of Plan B‘s, way that I can change tack and either recover what I am doing by going down a different route, or finding an alternative that involves abandoning what I was doing altogether and trying to find a way to recapitalize on the effort and expense I’ve already put into Plan A.

Here’s the thing I’ve realized over the past few days in particular… When you allow yourself to focus on Plan B you:

- distract your attention from Plan A, (and remember that Plan A was what you really wanted in the first place wasn’t it…)

- divert resource from Plan A,

- create a ton stress in your your thinking, because all of a sudden you’ve move from the front foot of conquest and new things to the back foot of defense and repair,

- and if you’re anything like me, because Plan B was conceived in a stressed-out defensive frame of mind, you’ll probably start wondering what to do if Plan B starts to go wonky as well and before you know it you’ve got 50 Plan B’s, 500 Plan C’s, et al…

Here’s the most important thing though. When you start to focus on contingencies and the ever comforting Plan B, BY DEFAULT you lose faith in Plan A. It’s impossible not to… The focus of your faith turns from making this really great exciting thing that you’ve decided to do work to recover from a worst-case scenario… It this really what you want?

It’s hard to really pray for what you originally wanted when your faith has shifted towards a lesser thing.

I hope this has made sense. Cutting off Plan B has actually been quite liberating…

Matthew 17: 24 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”
25 “Yes, he does,” he replied. When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own sons or from others?”
26 “From others,” Peter answered. “Then the sons are exempt,” Jesus said to him.
27 “But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

God is really bugging me with this verse at the moment… I feel it relates so powerfully to how life should look as a Christian who believes in the provision of God.

Couple of things…
1. Jesus knew Peter’s concern about paying the tax before Peter had said a word about it… (v25 – “Jesus was the first to speak”) – How nice is it to know that the same thing applies to us today?

2. Peter was a fisherman by trade… Fisherman normally make their money by selling their catch, and the return is in proportion to the effort they put in and how successful they’ve been. In this instance though, Jesus alerted Peter to an opportunity to multiply his return out of proportion of the effort Peter had put in.

3. The outcome of the story isn’t actually written down, but one can assume that Peter was obedient to pursue the opportunity that Jesus put in front of him.

4. Jesus didn’t say to Peter “go and dig for gold“, or “go and play the stock market“, or “go fill this high paying role for a day”, or even “go ask this rich guy for the money”… He got Peter to take the skills he already had, and multiplied their value for a specific purpose.

5. The money Peter got from the mouth of the fish was enough to pay for both Jesus’ needs and his. (v27 – “for my tax and yours”)

I am still working through the full story of what God is trying to say to me personally through this passage, but my encouragement I’ve taken from it so far is this: God’s provision is not something we need to rack our brains for, to strive and stress and struggle to find “that one good idea” that will set us up for life and provide provision for the Kingdom.

I thoroughly believe that God’s agenda in all things is to draw His kids into deeper relationship with Him. If I just set the sail of my heart towards God’s purpose, walk with Him, listen, and obey, He will provide the rest.

And what He provides will be enough for both of us.

This is a repost from http://www.strategyeye.com/articles/digitalmedia/id/24649416.

Interesting to watch this progress – the take-up of anti-monopoly solutions like Skype since the Global Financial Crisis has been incredible (until, of course, Skype becomes a monopoly itself and people move on to the next thing).

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service Skype has cemented its position as the biggest carrier of international calls, finishing 2009 with a 12% share of all international call minutes – a huge 50% increase on 2008 figures. The results come from a report by TeleGeography, which says Skype handled more than 54bn minutes of calls last year, an increase of 64% on 2008.

Skype’s growth is accelerating despite a slowdown in the market overall. International call volume has grown at an annual rate of 15% over the past 25 years, but in the last two years it has slowed to just 8%, growing from 376bn minutes in 2009 to 406bn a year later.

“Demand for international voice has been remarkably robust, but it’s clearly not recession-proof,” says TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert. “However the volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous. Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far.”

Skype has experienced record growth in the past year, hitting more than 520m users in October. It is expected to have reached an even bigger user total when owner eBay reports its Q4 earnings later this week. The service also recently broke its record for the most concurrent users logged on when almost 22.3m people signed into Skype at the same time.

“Skype remains the sole VoIP juggernaut, and it has clearly hit a tipping point,” says Beckert. “I know because my grandmother has started using it.”

eBay must be kicking themselves after selling Skype last year for $1.9 billion after buying it September 2005 for $2.6 billion. That’s a $700 million write-down, and it may be that they pulled stumps at exactly the wrong time.

And as an aisde, my Grandma user Facebook AND Skype… Go Grammy!

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I’ve had a few funny responses from people I know personally to my Goals for 2010 post along the lines of: “Great goals – I had no idea you were a smoker though…”

I started smoking when I was about 14 years old, as so many smokers do, with my mates from High School. The habit has carried through into my adult life, ebbing and flowing depending on what was going on in my world (I was a “stress smoker”, if stuff got hectic I’d hit the smokes).

I’ve wanted to and made numerous attempts to quit over the years (one of my favorite quotes on this comes from Mark Twain – “Quitting smoking is easy, I’ve done it a thousand times.”) because of health reasons and, quite honestly, I grew to dislike the image that being a smoker lumped me with. This stigma has been the main reason why I kept the fact that I was a smoker from most of my non smoking friends, along with my sheer embarrassment at the fact that I couldn’t seem to kick the habit for good.

So I tried a stack of things to stop, Zyban (which made me go a bit cuckoo), gum (which I hate), and just plain will power. Most of these attempts were successful to a point, but then when things got hectic or stressful at work of home I’d get straight back on them. Then my daughter was born and the ante was officially upped… I didn’t want to be one of those unfit dad’s who couldn’t keep up with their kids, and I certainly didn’t want to miss out on seeing my little girl get married and all those things a parent looks forward to by dying prematurely.

I am happy to say that at present I’ve been smoke free for almost a year.

The tool I’ve used to get me here is Nicotine Replacement Therapy using the patch. Normally a course of patches goes for 8 weeks or so, but I’ve been using the patch now for that entire time (since early March 09). The good thing about it is that I no longer smoke, am no longer damaging my health, and when the patch runs low I crave a new patch instead of a cigarette.

Ultimately I don’t want to have a chemical dependence on ANYTHING, but the logic has been that servicing my nicotine dependency with something that doesn’t destroy my health is the lesser of the two available evils. The goal for this year is to wean off the patch and nicotine completely. I’m happy to say that on January 5th I bumped myself down to the lower level patch and things are going well.

That’s my story, and what has worked for me. Ciggies are a stone pain in the butt to get off once you are hooked to them, and it seems that everyone’s story of quitting is different, but this is what has worked for me so far. I’ll keep you posted.

I’d love to hear any feedback on what has worked for you quitting smoking, or if you have a story that relates to some of the things I’ve said here.

I only ever set 5 goals as a New Years thing… More than that and I get distracted. These goals ultimately spawn a list of tasks and sub-goals, but they are the “big rocks” – the themes I’d like to keep in mind as I journey through 2010.

Here they are as of 3am on the 31st of December 2009:

1. Romance my wife and daughter.
2. Fall back in love with the Bible.
3. Make a noticeable improvement to my physical fitness.
4. Unhinge myself from caffeine and nicotine.
5. Get out of the rat race.

Some are ambitious, some are simple and clear. This blog will be, in part, a story of the progress of these goals through 2010.

Happy New Years to all!

…or better put, so begins the blog that accompanies the adventure.

Truth be told, the adventure has already been going on for quite some time now.

Life is about learning and building. Our company provides a platform and a brand. The vision is to innovate and grow into many different fields, provide many different people many different types of opportunity to pursue what they love and do best, and in it all hopefully leave the world better off than it was when we started.

Small goals. I hope you find the pursuit of them interesting, and have something to say when you feel like you want to contribute. The Tall Poppy Group is just that, a group of innovators who know they stand out, who want to stand out, and who seek to continue standing out.

If that is you, you are a Tall Poppy too, and you are more than welcome here.