Day 80: How Can I Do a Better Job?

Day 80:  How can I do a better job?  “But I am doing a great job” you say.  I’m sure you are.  But we can always do better.  If you are new to this business, you probably are doing a great job because you want to learn.  The average person stops wanting to learn at some point in their life.  Not everyone does, but some.  So, I say keep wanting to learn.  Keep looking for new ideas.  We have found that most economic development professionals don’t seem to want to know about new tools or programs that are in the market to help them.  For example to reinforce this fact, we normally have a booth at the International Economic Development Council, IEDC.  Last year I was beside a person that was an engineer and he was new to the economic development world.  He asked me if the trade show area was always this slow.  I said yes it is.  He said, wow, in the industry I was in everyone skipped the sessions and walked around the trade show because they wanted to learn about new products.  We definitely don’t see that at IEDC.  At the time that made me think about all the years we have exhibited at IEDC and how little traffic we see.  Sure we try to generate traffic.  We send out emails in advance, we even had an entertainer at the booth.  But, a very small percentage of the attendees come into the trade show.  So, if you want to do a better job, I would encourage you to seek out new ideas.  These can come from fellow professionals, board members, successful business owners in your communities, and even vendors and consultants (gasp!) Next: Raising money is tough.

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