That’s sort of how things are with me now.  I have been an admin for over 14 years and not only am I good at formatting documents, I enjoy it.  As a result, I am aware of poor formatting and inconsistency in forms.  When I pick up forms at businesses or if forms arrive in the mail, I notice the mistakes.  Sometimes I don’t even have to look that hard.  Creating cleanly formatted documents that are easy to use is a challenge I am always willing to accept.  I strive for perfection in my documents and go so far as to align my text boxes in PowerPoint to the pixel.  I know you are thinking it’s because I am OCD and that may be true and I’m not diagnosed, but I like to think the reason is that because unity and balance are essential elements of design and good design is good business.

I blogged previously about the importance of good design in PowerPoint.  People seem to understand the need for it in PowerPoint because it’s a visual form of communication.  Forms are visual, too.  Yet we tend to slap them together, pronounce them “good enough”, and send them out into the world with our business name all over them.  For example, I have been hired by a small agency to be a homemaker for my elderly parents one day a week.  My timecard is an 8.5 x 11 sheet that I have to fill in by hand.  There are no fewer than 3 different fonts on this one-page document.  Click here to see a marked up copy of my timecard.

Less is more, people.  Use no more than two fonts on a form.  A clean, sans serif font should be the body text of your form because they are easier to read.  If you include a second font, it should either be for emphasis or as the title.  A serif font for a heading is okay (and Times New Roman looks kinda nice italicized).  Click here to see my rework of the timecard.

Changes:

• Moved the mailing address and phone numbers to the top and created letterhead
• Centered the document title, removed the underline, and gave it a larger font
• Removed unnecessary column heading
• Adjusted row height for unified spacing
• All margins are .5 inches and tables are centered on the page
• Text aligns to the left or right margin
• Unified fonts

The changes I made to my timecard are subtle.  At first glance they look basically the same, but you can tell they are different when you look at them side-by-side.  If you were to pick up my form first, you wouldn’t really notice the things about it that make it a clean form.  Now you are asking “so what’s the point?”.  Well, it’s like I said in my blog on PowerPoint: you never seem to notice good design.  You can’t say why the form looks good, you just know that it does.  However, you do know why the old form looks bad.  Besides, the true beauty of a properly formatted form lies behind the scenes.  You know that backwards “P” that’s on the ribbon that makes all the dots show between the words?  Most people hate that thing.  It’s actually a paragraph mark and shows all the non-printing symbols in your document.  I’ll discuss that in another blog.

Some of you might be thinking that the original timecard looked okay and wasn’t it good enough?  Let me ask you this: Would you settle for “good enough” on your logo?  Or your letterhead?  Or your business cards, website, signage, etc.?  These are all a part of your brand that your customers see.  They also see your forms.  When it comes to maintaining the integrity of your brand, there is no such thing as “good enough”.

If you have forms you frequently send to customers or forms that customers fill out when they come to your office, you need to look them over carefully.  Insurance agents, real estate agents, accountants, medical professionals – they all have forms.  Got a sign in sheet for people in your waiting room?  Look it over.  Got an info sheet people fill out to get your newsletter?  Look it over.  Those squares of paper people fill out so they can “enter to win”?  Yup, look them over.

For now, let’s close by saying that anything that leaves your desk must be cleanly formatted and easy to read and, if you are mailing electronic documents, they must be easy to use.  Go to the sidebar on the right and sign up for our newsletter and receive a free copy of our ebook with formatting tips and best practices!

It was my storage unit.

I have been renting a 10 x 20 storage unit stuffed to the gills with stuff and junk, gewgaws and gimcracks, knick knacks and kadodies. I would get stuff, put it in a box, put the box in storage, and decide to get to it another day. Well, that day had finally come. Last week I spent the whole week offline so I could empty my storage unit. I went through every single box and pulled out what I wanted, set aside what I was selling, and re-boxed the few items I kept. I had movie posters dating back to my first job in a movie theater in 1988. I had toys and keepsakes from my childhood along with EVERY SINGLE BIRTHDAY CARD I WAS EVER GIVEN. And did I mention the Christmas decorations. Yeah. 17 boxes. Why? How? I have no answers other than I always planned to get to it someday. (I told my friends that if I ever go off the deep end I would probably end up a hoarder and the only reason I am not a hoarder now is because I get sick of it and get rid of it and hoarders don’t.) And somewhere in the storage unit was one box with my good wine opener in it. I had to find it because I missed it and would definitely be using it if only I had it. The wine opener was the impetus for my desire to organize the storage unit. It was long, hard, and dirty work but it sure had to be done. I was exhausted and grimy at the end of the week. Then I held a massive garage sale in my brother’s driveway (he’s a good guy) and what didn’t sell was carted off to charity. And you know what? I feel great. As I boxed up items to sell I would look at them and remember why I bought them. I used them, I enjoyed them, but now I have no room for them and I’m not using them anymore. So why keep them? I guess that’s good advice for anything in our lives.

And I find I can focus in my lovely little loft. I have gotten rid of the millstone around my neck and purged myself of the stuff, junk, crap, garbage, quality used merchandise, pick the adjective of your choice. When I worked in the corporate world I would go through my cube and clean it out every so often. I would change the pictures on my cube walls, I would eliminate paper by scanning important documents, I would reorganize and rearrange my workstation so it felt fresh and new. And it made me feel better to be in a fresh, new environment even though I was still sitting in the same cube. (And having houseplants helped a lot.) I guess the purpose of this blog entry is that sometimes in order to feel productive and free we need to get rid of the chaos we can’t even see. Hiding a lifetime of stuff behind the door of a storage unit doesn’t make it go away. Chaos is chaos and it must be returned to order so that you can focus.

I would also like to clarify that I shared the storage unit with my parents. Now that 90% of my stuff is out, my brother’s stuff is in, his friend’s stuff is in, and my friend’s stuff is in. See what I did there? I made myself feel better by getting rid of tons of stuff I wasn’t using and made it possible for 3 other people to store items. This is good in so many ways. So goooooooooood!

Epilogue: My brother was talking about the stupidity of the saying, “It’s always the last place you look”. His rationale, and it’s a good one, is that if you find what you are looking for you do not keep looking for it and therefore it is always the last place you look. I said that maybe it was more like “It’s always the last place you think to look”. So every single thing came out of the unit and what went back in did so in an orderly fashion. But I still could not find my wine opener and I had been through all of my boxes. At the very front of the storage unit is a big rolling rack with all my Dad’s train sets. I asked my brother if we were 100% sure that all those boxes were trains and he said no. So I pulled those boxes off and looked in them and sure enough, they were trains. On the top shelf of the rack in the corner facing the door of the unit was one last box. I pulled it off and what was in there? My good wine opener. The box was in the front of the unit facing the door and within reach the whole time. I said to my brother that this is what that expression means. It literally was the last place I could look. He asked if I had found it earlier, would I have cleaned out the storage unit? I said no. Now how about that?

We’ve all done it.  You dash off an e-mail on your way into a meeting and send it with a typo.  It’s embarrassing, but it happens.  You simply make mistakes when you rush.  And on national network news, they are reporting events as they happen and some poor guy is sitting in the wings typing his fingers off to get the latest headlines on the ticker.  Sometimes those tickers go by with typos and other boo-boos.  (Like the CNN news ticker that reported that a man suffered cardiac arrrest.  I guess he must have been a pirate.)  It happens.  And it got me thinking about how life in this digital world is so immediate.  When you post something on Facebook and then think twice about it, it’s too late.  It’s already out there.  Even if you delete it, someone may have read it.  We need to slow down and think about what we tweet, post, blog, and e-mail.  You know how they tell you to write your thoughts down, put it away, then pull it out later when you’ve had time to digest it?  That’s good advice and especially important in a world of instant communication.  Or write down your thoughts, send them to someone to proofread, and then post.  That’s where a virtual admin comes in handy.

They say you should blog, tweet, and post regularly.  That’s a lot of stopping what you are doing to type.  If you aren’t already, try typing up your blog entries, Facebook posts, and a few tweets at the start of the week.  Engage a virtual admin and have them make your posts for you throughout the week.  That’s a great way to manage your schedule and you have a second set of eyes reviewing your work!

I realized that “success” and “leadership” go hand-in-hand.

I also noticed that these days we do a lot of following: the lives of celebrities, the news, our favorite TV shows, the ever-changing privacy policies, and the people and organizations we like on Twitter or Facebook.

I know we can succeed if we follow the right things: the good example, our hearts, our dreams, our instincts or that great advice we were given.

But just how does one lead when one spends so much time following?

That’s my question to you.  In your opinion, how does following influence your leadership?

Good design in a PowerPoint is essential and I want to draw some comparisons between a good PowerPoint and a good website.  A website should be interesting to look at with content that is balanced on the page and a layout that makes sense.  Not to mention good use of white space!  These are the same principles you need to consider when designing a PowerPoint presentation.  People tend to cram a PowerPoint slide full of information and use tons of wild colors and pictures and this is bad design!  I want to share 3 important tips for designing a good PowerPoint presentation:

1) White Space.  When every inch of your slide is filled with information, it overwhelms the viewer.  White space is not an empty spot on the page that must be filled.  White space gives the eye a rest, so don’t be afraid of it.  Use 3 0r 4 bullets and leave the bottom of the slide empty.  It’s okay!

2) Simple Color Palette.  Keep your color palette limited to 2 or 3 colors.  The color of your text should be black with 1 or 2 other colors to be used as emphasis only.  If you have a corporate color palette, stay within that.

3) Graphics.  Do not put more than one graphic on a slide.  If you have a picture or graph, put them on their own slides so you can make them as big as possible.  This makes it easier for the audience to see the graphic.  Remember, if something is important enough to be depicted with a picture or a graph, it deserves to have its own slide.

If would like more PowerPoint Pointers (PowerPointers?) or would like me to review your presentation, contact me!

“Twitter me this! We send plenty of rapid-fire tweets, but face to face networking is still the best method for promoting your biz.”

My point was simply that, in a digital world of social media, it’s easy to lose the human connection with our clients and peers. Face-to-face interaction is still the best way to market your business, just as it is still the best way to teach. All I wanted to say was that although social media is a highly effective means of promoting your business, don’t forget to actually meet with people in person, or make a phone call if that isn’t possible.

And now I’ve made that point clear.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to sit in on a BNI group that I intend to join.  There were a lot of very nice people in that group and a wide variety of specialties were represented and I am very excited about it!  So the way BNI works is that everyone goes around the room and gives their 60 second “commercial”.  They stand, introduce themselves and their company, talk briefly about what they do and the referrals they are looking for, and then wrap up with their tagline.  Almost every person in the room started sitting down during their tagline.  That’s their close!  This is supposed to be a sample sales pitch and an opportunity to practice their pitch in front of a group of friends and they didn’t stay standing until they were done.  Some people put their heads down as they started to sit and delivered their tagline to the desk.  Obviously, this is something that has gone unnoticed in this group and it’s easy to understand why.  If you haven’t had a lot of public speaking training, you aren’t going to notice these things.  (Pssst!  This is the part where I blow my own horn for a bit!)  I competed in public speaking for many years throughout high school and college and was very successful.  I was the assistant coach of a college speech team and on top of that was trained as an actor and was good enough to get accepted to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts (which I ended up not attending, but the blog on regrets will have to come later).  I know how to perform and how to present.  I’m going to notice these things.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Andrea, you would notice those things because you have been trained to see them”.  Why yes, yes I have.  However, there is a subtle message being sent when you sit before you are done speaking.  It says, “I don’t have confidence in what I’m saying and I want to hurry up and stop talking”.  Your audience is going to sense that.  If you are trying to pitch your business and win new clients, you are going to need to exude confidence whether you really have it or not.  If you don’t feel that what you are saying deserves attention all the way through until you are done speaking, your audience won’t either.  Stay standing until you are done.

Another thing I noticed was hands, hands, hands.  Everybody did something different with their hands.  Some were pretty good and gestured effectively, but most clasped their hands in front of them.  What do you do with the HANDS??  It’s awkward being in front of a group because everyone is staring at you and you know what?  I was nervous when I had to give my sales pitch!  My voice was shaky, my hands were shaky, and I was aware that I wasn’t relaxed and comfortable.  Granted, this is a new business I’m starting, so of course I’m nervous, but it also made me realize how long it’s been since I was in front of a group.  Ha, ha!  I’m going to have to get over that!  My point is, even I wasn’t using my hands effectively.  We must learn to speak and present with purpose.  Gestures need purpose so we don’t look like we’re mindlessly flapping around.  Movement needs purpose so it doesn’t look like we are nervously shuffling from foot to foot.  This is hard to do, very hard.  I love helping people speak and present better.  It’s my true passion zone, probably because I used to be an actor once upon a time.  I love helping people get over their fear of speaking and discovering their voice.  If you would like my help, go to the Contact tab and fill out the form.  Presentation Coaching doesn’t have to be done in person, we can work together via webcam and it will be just as effective.

Hey, I know that speaking in front of a group is nerve wracking and I discovered that even with all my experience, you can still get nervous.  The only thing that conquers nerves is practice.  Getting over the fear is the first step.  When you have confidence, then we start to work on the other things like what to do with your hands.  I can’t tell you how much being a confident, poised speaker has helped me in my career.  When you present with confidence, people listen.

Greetings and welcome to our blog!  The blog is a lengthier forum for our musings and tips.  If you aren’t following us on Twitter or Facebook, I encourage you to find us.  Helpful hints and suggestions on everything from the basics of good design to utilizing Outlook are tweeted and posted.  Our blog will provide more detail on the topics we know best.  It will also give our readers an opportunity to reply and share tips of their own as well as ask questions.  Take advantage of &rea and Associates’ expertise by following our blog and tell your friends and coworkers about us.

- Andrea