"Regretting a mistake is like wishing you never learned the lesson." - Justin C. Kwok
This week I experienced something shocking with a client of mine. The incident itself was not the part that was shocking, but more so the nature of the client.
Every form of correspondence in business should be kept professional from email, to phone, and even IM chats. This week I experienced a major case of unprofessional email etiquette from one of the local cities, let’s call them the City of Sandwiches.
OK, story time.
The City of Sandwiches contacted my company about helping them out with some of their marketing. Everything was going well, and I sent the estimate for the job. Earlier this week, after a week of no response to my estimate, I did a friendly email follow up with them after the long weekend. The employee (he must have been an intern) I had been emailing with replied to me within 5 minutes. However, when I read the message I noticed I probably was not the intended recipient.
The message read “Kammy, I thought I’d forward you this just for fun.”
There’s no other way to interpret this message except (1) it’s offensive, (2) it’s sarcastic, (3) it has a tone of mockery towards me and my company.
As it turns out, he meant to forward my email follow up to his superior. Since he made the mistake, I thought I would be courteous and forward his message to his boss for him.
Below is my message to his boss:
Kammy,
This past Friday on May 25th, I had the privilege of giving a workshop/speech at California State University, Los Angeles for the Marketing Club event.
It was a great experience opening the minds of fellow young entrepreneurs. I got a good response from the audience. The ambitious crowd asked me several questions afterwards and one of the professors even asked if I could send him the presentation to use in his class.
It’s a great feeling to give other people encouragement and hope to take risks and take control of their lives. If they asked me to come back and speak again, I would be more than happy to.
Check out the video of the presentation below. Excuse the technical difficulties in the beginning.
I’ve been gone for about a week, and I’ve been getting hundreds of emails asking me to write another post. Hopefully you’ll become a fan of my sarcasm. I’ve come to a realization about education as I approach graduation and get closer to facing the “real world”.
Today I want to talk about careers. I’m going to assume most of my readers (if I have any) are high school or college university students like myself. I’ve come to accept the fact that not everyone is an entrepreneur, even more so, not everyone aspires to be an entrepreneur. Some people just want a stable income, and I can understand that. I figured out early on that I did not want to go that route and climb the corporate ladder my whole career. For those of you who don’t desire being your own boss, I hope you still read my blog because I will discuss many topics that will also relate to your situation.
Even though I do not wish to take this route myself, I am still aware of the facts. The fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the workforce with a bachelor’s degree in the United States. There are even hundreds of thousands of people with MBA’s. Some of which still cannot find a job after college. Let’s be realistic here.You may be a hard worker and have a great personality, hell, you may even be the future CEO of the company down the line, but on paper you’re going to look the same as every other entry level candidate. In today’s job market, an education is simply not enough. The job market for college grads is becoming more competitive and saturated. You need experience. You need a niche. You need to stand out amongst your peers.
One way to accomplish this is to get an internship. Even unpaid internships add value to your resume. Look around your university bulletins for potential internship possibilities. You can also visit the university career center to see if there’s any job listings. You might even make a few calls to companies and ask if they’re hiring or taking on any interns. If not, try telling them that you’re willing to volunteer your time in return for some work experience. Even if companies aren’t looking to hire interns, the gesture of volunteering may trigger something. Bottom line is; you need to gain some experience in the industry before you can get a stable job. Building a career takes time, and may even require some grunt work, but that’s the investment you have to make in exchange for stability.
Everyone that knows me, knows that I’m involved with a lot of things. I’m a full-time student, independent marketing consultant, small business owner, boyfriend, and super hero by night (just kidding) - I’m usually working at night too! I get the occasional question, “How do you manage it all?” There’s no easy answer that I can give you, but there are a few strategies, or more like criterion, that allow me to do it all.
A lot of people will tell you to get more organized or stick to a schedule. When it comes to time management, I don’t believe that those two things will necessarily help. Each individual is different, just like every situation is different. There’s no cookie-cutter solution to anything, which is why certain time management practices don’t work for everyone.
For me, work is recreational, school is an experience, and downtime is a guilty pleasure because I should be working. Everything that I do in life, I see as an opportunity to grow. So my time management strategy is simple - I do what want to do, not what I have to do, however, they are one and the same. In order to accomplish this, you have to change your whole attitude about what you are doing in life. You have to want it! When you love what you do, time doesn’t work against you, it becomes an opportunity to create amazing things.
So find a way to make time work for you, not against you, which should be a reminder that you are the boss of your life. That’s what it comes down to.
I’m young - I’m a student. Don’t be too shocked. Aren’t we all still students regardless of our age? Learn, educate, share, and enable the people around you. That’s my motto.. or at least one of many.
In this post, I would like to share with you a presentation I did for my Business Communications class. It’s a short presentation on some basic steps to starting your own business. I chose to do this because I recently started a business earlier this year and I wanted to share some of the key points of the process I went through.
Note, these are simple steps to starting a business. Some may be rather obvious, and others may not be. I created this presentation for the people, who may not have a business background, who have always wondered how to start a business.
If you had trouble viewing the Power Point Presentation, you can also view it here by clicking “Open”.
I hope this was helpful to some of you. If you would like me to go into further detail about anything discussed in this presentation, please feel free to leave a comment letting me know. You can also email me at richbefore35@gmail.com if you have any questions or just want to chat.
My business card holder, haha.
Thanks for stopping by my blog, Rich Before 35. I’ll just introduce myself briefly, because I don’t want to bore you. My name is Justin and I’m a 20 year old entrepreneur living in Los Angeles, California. I am an independent marketing consultant, copywriter, and business owner. Oh, and in my spare time I like to sit in a classroom and learn about business. I also love Star Wars and enjoy playing video games.
So now that you know a little about me, you can probably get a good idea of where my focus in life is. I’m not gonna preach to you about being selfish, keeping your money-making secrets to yourself, or tell you how to manipulate people. I believe becoming successful is the complete opposite of that. To create a sustainable plan for success, you need to utilize your resources - that is everyone in your network. Don’t be a selfish pack-rat that keeps everything to yourself. Although you should be careful what information you do share, you need to play the game of networking.
Here’s some food for thought. A lot of times we try to find ways to make money fast because most of us don’t have the luxury of time. There’s nothing wrong with that. But realize that fast money doesn’t make the average person rich. In order to become rich, you have to stand behind a purpose and you need to have a strong passion for that purpose. Henry Ford once said “a business that makes nothing but money is a poor business”. You won’t find the desired results trying to accomplish high profit margins when you are in a time crunch. Nine our of ten consumers aren’t going to pay your high prices. Stick to a low price strategy, build an existing clientele and work portfolio, then market yourself and showcase your work. At that point, is when the quality clients will come around and pay you your high profit margin price.
Don’t set out to make a large amount of money. Instead, focus on doing your job with pristine quality and consistency each and every time, and eventually you’ll have a large amount of money. Take it one dollar at a time.
