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Recently my wife and I took Shadow for his usual morning walk, and we decided to walk around Franklin & Marshall College which is just three blocks away. Rather than going around the college, we decided to actually walk through the campus. We’ve lived here for more than three years and have never done that.
Since it’s June, and it was a Saturday morning, there were no students to be seen. We pretty much had the campus to ourselves and discovered all sorts of things: beautiful grounds, wonderful buildings, and lots of statues and monuments. By reading the cornerstones, signs, and monuments, we learned a lot about this small little academic oasis just up the road from us.
This is the sort of thing we need to do within our own businesses. We might sit in our offices day in and day out, and never really “get out and about”. How often do we walk through the halls and various departments of our organizations? Many of us have built our own “ivory towers”. It becomes a bother to get out of our office, where it’s nice and comfy.
But we need to get out and move around. Spend time with all of our employees; work alongside them.
Spend time engaging your customers and prospects face to face.
Step away from the desk, or whatever it is that keeps us in one place, and move around. Explore. Get to know your business and your people better.
We walk and drive by F&M on a regular basis, with no real knowledge of the campus, other than what we had read or heard. And while we learned a lot, we still haven’t gone in any buildings, used the library, or attended any cultural or sporting events on campus. We still have a lot more we can discover by spending more time there.
Even if you run a small business, I bet there’s a lot more you could discover about it and your employees.
And that road less traveled? Your customers have those as well. Take advantage of that and share the road less traveled with them. If you’re looking for content for Facebook or your blog, take your customers behind the scenes. Share stories, pictures, and videos that help to demystify what it is that goes on behind closed doors. Open your world up to them and invite them in.
Do you ever get out of your office and take the road less traveled? I’m willing to bet you’ll discover something new.
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[...] Discussions going on all over the place, and I wrote about it the other day when I asked you to take the road less traveled. In the comments, Shonali Burke reminded me of her post about being intentional and genuinely [...]