(this week's Flaming Hot Blog It topic)

The idea of goals and objectives sounds really good...in theory. I mean, I've spent lots of time thinking and planning out where and how my business should grow, but these are just thoughts. This year I'm trying something different (as I touched on in earlier blog entries). I'm working out a plan for different markets and ideas I have. It's not so much that I want to increase my sales (can't complain, I've been pretty fortunate really thanks to my wonderful customers). It's more that I want to direct my work a bit into new directions and I think that I will need to develop some different marketing strategies for this new work.

As a rule I take most of December as a down month. I do no shows, list no specials, and seldom list auctions so only when orders come in do I have proscribed torching sessions. I'm using the down time this year to work on things that I guess you could loosely categorize as goals and objectives. I tend to think of them as paths to follow more than destinations to reach but the idea is similar. Right now I'm still in the "mulling it over stage" so nothing has hit print (or type). In fact I haven't decided if writing it all down is the way to go...but as I am typing this I think perhaps that's not a bad idea. If only to help me focus, writing down these new paths and the directions I need to take to follow them seems wise. Yes, yes, definitely, that's what I'm going to do.

First, however, I think I need to clean my work space up.....can't get organized amid chaos, right?