An Interview With A Shepherd

This week brings an interview with a Book Shepherd.

The definition of a Book Shepherd comes from Dan Poynter who coined the term. A Book Shepherd as someone who can take your manuscript through all the processes to a finished book. Book Shepherding can include preparing you for the best shot at success with branding, positioning, professional promotional materials and advice on getting your book moving through a number of markets.

Before you read the following, you are invited to “leave your ego at the door” as some of your egos might be exclaiming “how can one deal with all of this” or “it’s too much” or “you will never get it all done”.

I am offering this to demonstrate that it can be done as long as one incorporates days for personal time, client time and time for business planning. These days a generated from step one – creating a vision, step two – predetermining personal time, client time and time for business planning in that order and then step three – estimating the income required to realize the income in the client time.

So true to form, this week is also a Buffer Week which means that it is not a Coaching Call Week back to back from Tuesday – Friday.

Monday, Thursday afternoon and Friday are completely clear to invest in the following;

• Sales Management of Limited One On One Coaching Space – Do we add a Coaching Day to Add 7 New Clients or Limit Enrollment?
• A few Client Follow Up E-Mails from Last Week
• November E-Newsletter
• Book Shepherd Interview
• Power Point Review / Prep for speaking presentations for Pro-Seminars on November 19th in London, ON & on November 26 in Vancouver, BC and for The Independent Financial Brokers Summit on November 26th in Vancouver, BC
• Discuss Public Speaking Filming of November 26th Presentations
• Public Speaking Leads Follow Up
• Computer Maintenance. My beloved Gateway Tablet is still experiencing systems problems. It will have to go into the shop to have all the data and programs removed and re-installed.
• Manage Purchase Of Equipment Cabinet and Systems
• Investigate Back Up Power Supply … we had 12 power outages last year and I don’t believe the environment is going to get any better. This includes Investigating A Cell Phone Signal Booster
• Manage Web Site Refinements that Kim Black is working on
• Upgrade Uniform for 2008 ( shirts, suits and ties )
• Continue to Improve Step 6 of our Clients Strategies – Refine your Marketing and Sales Skills
• Update our Speaking Folio
• Asking For and Publishing Speaking Testimonials

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning will be invested in calls with clients and prospects. We are still speaking with prospects in follow up to the four speaking presentations that I did for Advocis, Pro-Seminars and Independent Financial Brokers Summit from Thursday, October 18th Tuesday, October 24th and we will be close to wrapping up the follow up prospect calls this week. A good thing, as I have the three speaking presentations on November 19th and 26th and there will be new prospect calls to follow up from these dates.

We are so looking forward to completing this year and to getting on with our 2008 Plan. Given that we are as good as sold out of One On One Coaching, it is time to introduce a Group Coaching Product. This will create the opportunity to offer a “Gold Program – Group Coaching” and the “Platinum Program – One On One Coaching”.