Clear Simple Business

Am I creative? No, I’m not creative. I’m not artsy so therefore I can’t be creative... Like Heather ( An Overachiever's Guide To Breaking The Rules: How To Let Go Of Perfect and Live Your Truth ), because I'm not artsy, I believed that I did not have a creative bone in my body.  But also, like Heather, I have somewhat recently discovered that I am in fact creative. I’ve learned and acknowledged that being artsy isn’t the only path to creativity.  I’m not really sure why we were both conditioned to think that creativity can only be found in the arts. Guess it’s another one of those subtle societal conditioning things. Oh the joys of societal conditioning! No matter where it came from, it’s time for it to die. Because everyone is creative.  With Heather’s help I rediscovered (and accepted) my creative side.  I looked for the evidence that points away from creativity and points towards creativity. And as you will see below, my list is quite lopsided! Not creative -...

Every business owner has a ‘ Business Junk Drawer ’. There is no use denying it! It’s full of all that stuff that you'll, “get to tomorrow”. All that stuff that you are secretly hoping will magically fix itself! The most common ‘item’ that is found in a ‘Business Junk Drawer” is the task of updating a process. A ‘Business Junk Drawer’ is full of processes that supported your company early on in the company life cycle; however, can no longer support your current business. Your employees DREAD working on them, and no matter how many times these processes are put back in your “business junk drawer” they will not fix themselves.   When a process gets put into that “business junk drawer” for too long, that's when problems can start to develop and snowball. That is when things start to get out of control. Not a pretty picture, is it? Have you reached the ‘out of control’ point or are you quickly approaching it? What if things could be different? What if I told you that there is a we...

I don’t think it’s any secret that I LOVE Excel.  With all the love I have for Excel, I’m still greatly perplexed as to why more people don’t utilize this amazing software more.  Why most people only use it to put together a basic spreadsheet to add up a column or two of numbers.   Come on people! Don’t you realize that excel can make your life sooooo much easier? Trust me on this one. Excel has been my main system for improving the lives of my clients! I shared some of my tips for streamlining excel in a previous blog post – 5 Easy Tips to Streamline Your Excel Experience. I don’t want to rehash these tips, rather I want to share with you some real-life examples of how I’ve improved my clients’ lives using only excel.  Here are some examples: Weekly Report There was once a weekly report that took all day on Monday to create. Data had to be pulled from multiple sources of truth, reformatted, manipulated, and put into graphs/tables so that it would make sense to ...