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As the title suggests, we do our share of having a good time at and away from our desks here at the office. True to form, last month’s annual ski trip to Mammoth Mountain, CA was nothing short of stupendous. From the team-building competitions to bathrobe races through the snow, it pretty much rocked. 

Notice how I said it “pretty much” instead of “totally” rocked? Hate to ruin the jovial mood, but if I’m going to report on the trip in a fair and balanced way, I’ll have tell you about what didn’t rock, too. Turns out that in their never-ending efforts to provide you with the greatest product possible, our CEO, COO and the entire development team locked themselves away in the mountain lodge (The Shining-style) well before the rest of the team for two and a half straight days of planning, developing, and near-psychosis-inducing brainstorming. While not present personally (and thank god for that), I’ve been told there was no shortage of tears, cups of coffee and bins full of crumpled paper. I’m happy to report there was not, however, any red rum reported nor hallways flooded with blood. These were just narrowly avoided.

As they put it, they were locked inside of “Development Hell” for 60 hours straight. 

Okay back into the light (phew that was unpleasant there for a moment). That torturous marathon of desperation did, however, lead to a plethora of breakthroughs in new-feature ideas and designs that are sure to axe down the door sometime this year and scream “Heeeere’s Johnny” (except we’re hoping that they’ll be welcomed with delight rather than crippling terror). As you can see cabin fever does have its rewards – 2012 is gonna be one hell of a year for OfficeAutopilot…and you!

Where was I? Oh yeah, so once the entire team was finally settled into their cabins, the festivities began. Night one consisted of a team battle with contest such as transporting two empty soda cans between two people using only an uncooked spaghetti straw from one side of a room to another…using their mouths. Awards were presented to the winners along with real-life medals. My second place medal is hanging from the dresser in my bedroom as we speak.

Night two was bowling night (pretty self explanatory) which still left plenty of time after the return journey for shenanigans and drawing on co-workers who had turned in early. Writing OfficeAutopilot on someone’s arm in Sharpie is not as easy as you might think but shhh I’ve already said too much. 

On the third night we held an impromptu talent show and gave away an ipad 2 as a prize for winning an ongoing scavenger hunt. The lucky contestant happened to be Morgan Gealta, one of our shining new support staff members and shucks are we jealous of him.

And of course there was snowboarding and skiing during the day. Wouldn’t be a ski trip without at least one of those wouldn’t you agree? Well that and a few rounds of pool.

After a smashing good time bonding and celebrating, our Team arrived back home with satisfied smiles on our faces. A great big thank you goes out to our COO Lena Requist and Office Manager Rachelle Sassi, the architects of our adventure, for a trip not soon forgotten.  We can’t wait to go again next year.

If you wanna see some cool pics of what went down, check ‘em out here.

If you’re like most business owners, you want the new year to be (a ton) more fruitful than the last. Okay let’s be honest, you want it more than your next breath. Maybe you even make some goals for the new year…for revenue, staff growth, profitability, and more. If you’re like me, maybe you also have goals for other areas of your life- like spending time outdoors every day, breaking into acting, and getting hard exercise at least three times per week. But the big quandary for many entrepreneurs (for everyone actually) is how to actually meet those goals. 

Because unless you’ve got a system in place for meeting your goals, they’re likely to exist merely as hopes and wishes. Without a system, all you can ever really do is work more and work harder toward the aim of meeting your goals.  Mmmm…working longer and harder…less than terribly inspiring, no?

Relax, friend…there’s a better way (queue the sigh of relief).

Here’s a simple system for creating goals and having them stay alive for you as real and reachable year round so that you’re far likelier to meet them.

Step one: set the goals. This is the easy part because it’s the part most of us are used to. For example…maybe one goal you have is to generate an additional $100K in sales this year. Sounds delicious, right? Great. Write that down on Dec. 31st as “we’ve earned an additional $100K this year”. 

But here’s the rub though- saying it, writing it exuberantly on your white board, or even chanting it reverently to the statue of Ganesha or Jesus you dutifully keep your altar won’t actually make it happen…no matter how much incense you burn while you do it. But then you probably already knew that from experience, didn’t you?

See, there’s some stuff that has to happen during the year to have your sales be $100K higher by the end of the year. Like, real, tangible things. Shocker, right?

Here’s where step 2 comes in…

Create milestones. Open up your calendar and set up some milestones that must have been reached throughout the year in order for the end-of-year goal to be realized. For instance, it follows that for most businesses, that if they want to have a $100K increase in sales by the end of the year that they must have had to have made $25K more per quarter along the way. Right?

So for this step you’d need to take last year’s quarterly earnings, and write down that number plus $25K on the final day of each quarter for the upcoming year. These are your quarterly earnings milestones. This way you know that if the last day of a given quarter arrives and you haven’t made at least last year’s earnings plus an additional $25K then you’re off track for reaching your goal. It’s not rocket science but it is a good way to keep you aware throughout the year. 

Okay, we’re closer, but there’s nothing new here, right? You’re still stuck wishing and hoping whilst working longer and harder at this point as you reach desperately and blindly for the quarterly carrots on the calendar, right?  Right.

That’s where step three comes in…

Figure out specifically what there is to do to reach your milestones. Okay, so now you’ve got your goals and your milestones in place on your calendar. Now you need to close your eyes and imagine that it’s the date of the first of your milestones…like, pretend that’s actually the current date. Then, look backwards at the past three months, and consider what actions there are to take in order to be where you are right now. What specific actions must you had to have taken? Be creative and look around and the different areas of your business. 

Doing this will create the opportunity for your imagination to go to work. Maybe you’ll realize that your current sales force is maxed out and that you need to bring on another sales person in order to effectively manage the leads you’re now getting. Maybe you’ll also see where you could put a specific system or two into place in order to save time, increase efficiency and free you up to pursue entirely new opportunities. Maybe you’ve noticed that e-mail is draining your time and productivity and you’ve been meaning for a while to start checking and responding to e-mail only twice daily (if you haven’t been meaning to, maybe you should). 

Great. Now you’ve got some real, actionable things you can write into your calendar and actually do that will move you forward toward reaching that first milestone! 

Do the same thing for each of your milestones for each of your goals, writing down the actionable items in your calender on the date “by when” you’re committing to have done it.

Step 4: Live by your calendar. Arrrrr, matey! Your calendar is the treasure map by which you’ll navigate your business to the riches you seek! Now maybe the riches aren’t an extra hundred grand in sales for you at all…maybe it’s four more hours per week with your family, losing 20 pounds while having more energy, or spending an extra two days per week making a difference in your community. Whatever it is for you, this system can help you reach your goals. 

Step 5: Get accountable. It’s all-too-easy to get spun out in a dozen different directions that may seem perfectly important and worth pursuing. However, if you want to reach your goals then you need to do what you said you were going to do by when you said you were going to do it. But if we have only ourselves to answer to we can easily justify taking a week-long or month-long diversion down some very distracting rabbit holes and potentially get (way) offtrack. Sound familiar? We’re weasels like that. Yes, even you- right there, in that chair of yours. 

If you’re tired of weaseling your way out of what you say you want in life then try being accountable to someone else for a change! This works for the same reason that we’re far likelier to go to the gym if we’ve got a gym buddy we go with..because we don’t want to look bad, of course! Maybe you want to enlist your spouse as your accountability partner, or a a fellow entrepreneur. Share this system with ‘em and see if they’d be up for working on it with you. Hint- this would be a dream-come-true for most biz-owners.

Step six: Write and e-mail a “Create and Complete Report” with your partner each day (or at the very least, each week) and have them. Looking at the milestones on your calendar, take 5-10 minutes at the end of each day, list out what you’re committing to accomplish for the following day, along with what milestone and goal they pertain to. Then on the following day’s Create and Complete report, mark next to each item whether you did it or not, by simply typing “done” or “not done” next to it.

If you didn’t do something don’t write why you didn’t…that’s an excuse or an explanation (not to mention a time-waster). You’re merely reporting to your partner whether you did what you said you were going to do or not. Regarding your word in this way is a powerful habit to get into! The mere fact that you know that you’ve got someone else out in the world who is listening for and expecting you to do what you said you would is enough to seriously invigorate you. You may also find yourself trusting yourself more and more to follow through with what you said you would do in other areas of your life, too! Uh…bonus!

If you’re finding that you’re consistently not doing what you said you would, then there’s an opportunity to look at that. Are you over-committing or just blowing off what you said you would do?  Do you need to recommit yourself to your word, increase your efficiency, or just commit to less? Tweak as needed. 

Good luck, and happy 2012!

I don’t know about you but I like working with new people. It’s a chance to bring aboard fresh perspectives and a great way to inspire the rest of the team. 

In light of that philosophy we’d like to welcome three new globetrotting superstars to our team. I only call them that because they’ve all traversed a good deal of the planet only to end up right here at our office. May we present to you Brian Bargiel, Erin Tillotson, and Sara Tillotson.

Brian, the first of our two new project managers in our Professional Services department, graduated from UCSB with a degree in Global Studies. He’s crossed the snowy plains of the Antarctic and soaked up the sun of South America’s beautiful beaches. As a matter of fact, Brian’s been to every continent so far except Africa. Other than being well-traveled, he’s held a variety of different jobs throughout his life from middle school teacher to bicycle repair dude to professional choir singer – he’s the real deal. Now living here in sunny Santa Barbara with his wife and 2 daughters (sorry ladies), you may find yourself hearing his enchanting voice over the phone should you need a marketing system built to run your automated business.

Next up we have Erin who fills our other project manager seat in the Professional services department. A USCB alum in Psychology, Erin’s talents include painting and tending to her 2 cats Yoda and Bella. Why do we love Erin? Because every now and again she gives us amusing and delightful anecdotes about herself…like for instance just the other day she shared that she’s been avoiding the Ocean for a whopping 20 years due to her fear of sharks. And here’s the kicker – she’s lived in beach towns all her life. WOWEE, Erin! Now that’s fodder to harass you with for a good long time! If a Done-for-you affiliate package is what you’re looking for, odds are 50/50 that Erin’s the gal who’ll be reaching out to you.

Sara, our new head of Product Development, happens to be Erin’s younger sister and you would think they are joined at the hip. While you may never speak to her personally (I know it’s a shame), you’re sure to get a kick out of these facts. Sara once raised $6,000 on her own as a child to donate to a leukemia victim she knew. Let me also point out that Sarah and her sister Erin do almost everything together so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she too is a former UCSB student, her degree: communication. When I say that Sara saw the pope on her 3 month extended stay in Italy I mean that Sara and Erin did so. Are you as jealous as I am? 

To say that these 3 have already made an incredible impact for our company and our client experience is a gross understatement – it’s a pleasure to have them aboard.

Prepare yourself for one of the most epic feature releases in OfficeAutopilot history! An event that marks a new epoch in the way we think about lead capturing. This month we are proud to present the all-new form builder 2.0 (dun dun dun!)!

For those of you who’ve longed for a way to place visually magnificent and wildly intelligent forms on your websites but haven’t had the coding and styling know-how to make it happen, your voices have been heard…loud and clear. 

Text spacing, field alignment, image implementation, color selection, and custom submit button creation are all design tools soon to be at your fingertips. Want a form with a checkerboard pattern as a background image and dark purple text in Comic Sans Font above fields with rounded corners that stretch across the page? Who are we to judge…BOOM! Done!

Not only does the new Form Builder offer impressive flexibility in design and styling, but we’ve also invented a sophisticated new “conditions” system which will have you channeling your leads to specific thank you pages based on what they say on the form. Let’s say you’re an insurance broker and your form gives respondents the option to select either home or auto insurance in a drop-down field. Clicking the submit button will be able to channel your prospects to the appropriate Thank You Page depending on which option they selected. Man Alive! I must have died and gone to marketing automation heaven! 

This ground-breaking Conditions feature also allows you to hide or show specific fields on your forms depending on field fill-outs as well. For instance if you’re asking people what kind of pet they have on a form, and they choose “dog” from the drop-down list, you can now easily have the form reveal the “type of dog” field as a result. 

Yesss, this kind of functionality used to require hours of custom work by a qualified web developer (at great personal expense to you); now you can spend that extra cash on something fun for your office. May we suggest Nerf guns for playful discipline..you’ll thank us later.

It doesn’t end there either – each form you create can be automatically hosted. What does that mean, exactly? Remember how, previously, you had to post a SmartForm on an existing web page or a hosted Landing Page in order for it to be usable? Well my dear, soon, your SmartForm will function as its own hosted page- with nothing else for you to do whatsoever- no separate web page required. Sweet, right?

Plus, all the existing features are still represented, including in-form rules…but with a few big improvements that will make you throw your hands to the sky and rejoice…heck, you may even find yourself speaking in tongues. Can you say on-the-fly custom field creation? Umm…yes please!

The new form builder represents a labor of love many (like, many) months in the making. For their extraordinary dedication, we’ve loosened our developer’s chains up a bit and have started feeding them twice a day instead of just the once. 

Stay tuned for more details on the official release.

FORM BUILDER ALPHA TESTING
Be the first to take New Form Builder 2.0 for a whirl before its official release (we dare you). Fifteen willing OfficeAutopilot users will have a chance to play with and test out what may very well become known ever after as the Ferrari of Form Builders (or the Tesla for all you hippies out there).

All we ask for in return is feedback on what we’re doing right and what scratches we may need to buff out. Don’t delay – alpha testing seats are being doled out on a first come first served basis. Don’t worry, Jason Linett, thanks to your incessant jabs at our digital ribs via our facebook page, you’re already in.

To apply for a spot, click here, fill out the form, and wait to hear from us.