I met a guy at the NWIAG mixer who runs a fashion consulting service for businessmen. There’s some overlap there with classes I’m interested in teaching, so I set up a lunch meeting with him at the Columbia Tower Club. We connected, traded some great ideas, then I headed off to work on my Thirty Day Challenge stuff (we’re already up to #6 on Google and are getting traffic, now the question is if the traffic will buy…). Hanging out in the Tower Club Library, I met a woman who used to work with the Dale Carnegie Institute who wants to chat more about our respective takes on social development (awesome) and another woman who is a business coach and suggested Discover U (the Seattle version of the San Francisco Learning Annex, an adult learning center) as a great way to get started teaching. Another fantastic idea!
Craig then discovered another networking event through Zoodango four blocks away, which we of course headed to. There were only two people there, the CEO of Zoodango and one of his friends. Both of them had been contestants on past seasons of The Apprentice, so we traded reality TV stories and business ideas until it was time to head to…
Volunteer ushering with Alexandra! We saw a great play (The Mojo and the Sayso) at the ACT Theatre, for free of course, because we were volunteer ushers. The nice thing about volunteer ushering is that you can take any open seat, which was how we found ourselves front row and center. I was close enough to blow out the candles onstage.
After the show we headed off to a free dinner at one of Seattle’s finest restaurants. Dinner was delicious, but the chocolate-ginger cake with muscatago (? some kind of sugar cane that only grows in volcanic ash?) ice cream blew my mind. Drool…
Had a very successful weekend at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Music Festival. Got free tickets from Alexandra and once inside proceeded to score free tickets to a comedy club, free movie passes, another $140 of free Bumbershoot tickets, VIP entry to the Bumbershoot shows, discovered an awesome cabaret to attend in the very near future, and fulfilled a fan’s request to sign their bodypart. Oh, and the shows and music were pretty good, too.
Having spent the past year mixing it up with people in bars all over the world, corporate networking events are now a piece of cake. I attended the Northwest Internet Advertising Group’s mixer tonight and had a great time. Highlight of the evening: meeting a guy who started a disposable vibrating cock ring business three years ago in his garage and is now selling 500,000 units a month, partnered with Trojan, and on the shelves at Walmart.
One thing I learned – I think I’m going to get back to my idea of developing a curriculum to bring social training to the business world. I need to develop a curriculum so I can speak on social development and maybe get a gig out of my next networking event.
I tried to find as many people as I could tonight who started their own business. I asked them all how they got their first customer, and everyone said the same thing. Networking.
Ever since I cleaned out my apartment in Berkeley, I’ve had a pile of junk I’d been meaning to sell on eBay. I finally got around to it and have decided next time, I’m just throwing it out. By the time I take photos of my stuff, upload them to my computer, upload them to eBay, write the description, and post it, I’m half an hour in. And I’m still going to have to take a trip to the post office. Unless I’m selling something for $50+, it’s just not worth it.
The other possibility is having multiple items that I sell for weeks on end so I can keep using the same description each time. Barring that, though, I’m eliminating eBay from my list of potential careers.
I lasted about 12 hours in San Francisco before I started feeling homesick for Seattle. This last tour through London, Stockholm, Detroit, and San Francisco was great, but Seattle is the first real home I’ve had in a year and a half. I need some time to soak it up.
