Thursday, September 13, 2007

Business breakfast


I had my community business network breakfast this morning - this wasn't the chamber of commerce - that breakfast is the 27th. I live in a very large community and they have their own group.

I was very pleasantly surprised. It was nothing I feared it would be. Everyone was just fantastic. We had nine people show and all of them ran home-based businesses; lady who made wedding and b-day cakes, photographer/videographer, dog walking/sitting service, personal training coach, etc...The highlight was the lady who ran a pole dancing business. That's right, she books a party at your house - girls only - brings a pole and they have a "girl's night out" pole party. Now....that alone was worth it to show up:-)

Basically, everyone shot the shit. We all have kids and we mainly talked about schools, sports and our kids. Very low-key, very relaxed, very fun. Everyone got 5 minutes to talk about their business. I was second to last and after I talked about what I did it was a 30 minute conversation. I now have 4 appointments from the nine who showed up. Not bad. I also booked the photographer since the last family portrait we had done was when my son was 4 - he's 6 now. Oh, and a real estate agent was there an announced that she desperately needed some part-time home-based admin help. So now her and my wife are talking - looks like a done deal. All nine of them told me I should run a seminar at the community center. I'll call today to see how I'd set that up.

Gets better. The chairman of the Piney Orchard (my community) HOA was there and talked about the monthly newsletter for all 2,500 residents and the lack of ads. What ads? We didn't know we could put ads in the newsletter! Yep....a whopping $20 gets an ad in monthly community newsletter. That's a done deal. See...this is the kind of stuff I just would never know about unless I got active. Plus, what else am I doing at 7:30am anyway? I'm up at 6am every day so it's no skin off my nose.

In other news, I got a lovely email today from the HOA of Piney Orchard Millersville - about 15 minutes from me. I put up doorhangers about a month ago and now that's all banned. It most certainly wasn't banned when I put them out and I just got off the phone with them. Everyone's fine and despite what the letter said, no specific complaints were directed at me and I do NOT put flyers on mailboxes! They knew that. However, from now on, as the letter states, no more anything on doors or a nice little fine will occur. Not a problem at all. It's not just me - no pizza menus, Chinese food menus, or anything on the door at all.

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