CablesAndKits Blog

Planning & Creating | The Lesser-Known PPE | The Loveable SFP-10G-LR | Rhythms & Sabbaticals | News to Start Your Day

Woohoo! Its Friday! 

(October 23rd is National Boston Cream Pie Day. Go enjoy one (or your favorite dessert). Calories don’t count on holidays.)

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At the beginning of 2019, Craig presented me with a Goal Planner from Cultivate What Matters.  

I’m sorry to say it sat on my desk until almost September of that year. Because I hadn’t been the one who was introduced to it, I didn’t really understand how to use it, and we ended up spending half of our year selling off pieces of another business we owned, buying a house and moving. I bought the author, Lara Casey’s, audiobook (Make it Happen) at some point and really enjoyed what it had to say. Her main message: surrender your fear and live on purpose. 

In 2020 I decided to buy myself the new Goal Planner and actually put in the work on the front end. What did I want this year to look like? One of the exercises in the beginning of the planner leaves a space for a word of the year. I had been praying each time I sat down to work through these exercises, and I knew immediately what my word was for 2020: create. 

I imagined that my year would be spent exploring my creative side: more photography, decorating our new home, exploring painting perhaps. Little did I know that most of my creative energy would be poured into business activities. Last week when Jason wrote the daily email he mentioned that he had a phrase for this past year, and that his phrase took on new meaning during the course of the year. Needless to say, I can totally relate. When I agreed to jump in and help Craig with a few things this spring/summer, I had no idea I would find myself hiring and onboarding a fractional CMO and marketing firm. 

We met the firm we’re working with through Craig’s CEO group. Initially, we reached out to their CEO for advice on building our own marketing team. (Remember that lesson we learned from selling PPE about being more intentional?) We liked what they had to say so much that we decided to hire them! It has been fun work to walk through the discovery exercises with our new CMO and Marketing Manager. (Warning: buzz words coming your way.) We’re exploring customer personas, defining what we want our voice to be in the market, and we’re looking for ways to engage and add value to our customer and potential customer interactions.  

We know you all enjoy a good daily email 😉 What other ways do you like to engage with companies you know? Social media? YouTube? Educational articles? Blog posts? Forums? Perhaps we’ll send a more thorough questionnaire out at some point, but for now I would love to hear from you if you have the time for a quick reply. Help us be a better resource for you! We truly want to add value (to your IT infrastructure and beyond). 

2020 Lessons Learned  | Thermometers Update | Best Rack Mount Kit | Change Your Thoughts | News to Start Your Day

Happy Thursday!

(October 22nd is National Make a Dog’s Day! So go treat your furry, four-legged canine friend to a special treat or buy them a new toy!)

As most businesses probably are this time of year, we are looking forward to 2021 and starting to make plans. What do we want to focus on? Where can we improve? Where do we want to be at the end of 2021? It has been an unusual year for us all, so this year’s planning discussions feel quite a bit different than they have in the past.  

Besides the obvious market disruption that COVID was and is for nearly every business, some things that were different for us this year have been our product mix, marketing methods we’ve tried, and how we communicate with our customers (like this email). When we began selling safety supplies in March, we did it to serve a need, to attempt to be profitable through a yet-to-be defined season, and if I’m being honest maybe a little bit because we were bored. We had no idea adding a new and vastly different product line would change our business so much.  

When Craig and I started selling pre-owned networking equipment out of our garage in the earliest days, it was in an environment where customers were plentiful. The business really thrived in those days because of Craig’s ability to BUY well. The selling part was easy. When the CK webstore took off and we were selling more accessories, customers just came to us. At least a hundred new customers a day placed orders on the site back then. We did not have to hunt them down; they just needed what we had. Then we entered our awkward teenage years as a company, making our way through by pivoting rapidly from opportunity to opportunity. By the time we reached 2018/19 we had somewhat matured and had leaders over most critical areas, Craig had a vision for where he wanted to go, but the how was still a bit fuzzy. 2020 was supposed to be a year of reaping the rewards of hard work that had been put in during 2019 to really define the roadmap of where we wanted to go. Enter COVID.