Working During Golden Week

In now by Michael Michelini

What Mike Michelini is up to – Oct 4 – 10, 2020

In the middle of Golden Week here in China. Thursday and Friday last week things were shut down. Hong Kong opens up for business Monday this week, but Mainland China still closed til Thursday. I work online and mainly with the Western world so no changes for me – except kids bouncing off the walls more while I work.

* Trying to transition from “maker mode” to “manager mode”. Working on more community engagement more events.
* The last few months was really 110% focused on the IT systems and team development – need to re-align and spend more time on the community and client side.

for those who want to read more details – here is the letter I write to the team (removing names and sensitive info)

Oct 4 – 10, 2020 Week Plan Shadstone Limited

We are making huge progress as a team – learning new systems, communicating to one another as a team, pro-actively finding new issues and holes to fix – it is really great and let’s keep it up.

Some things from last week. Will write more generally here and then discuss what each person is working on in the following section.

Still really working hard to get email migration and campaigns going. Moved to Mautic but it is a big system and still bugs and things we need to learn that are different from our previous system.

Did the GFA webinar, great work for such short notice (we decided to do the webinar in less than 1 week from when it happened). Was my mistake – just was excited to try to promote the new meeting software while it was on trial. But we did great and all are learning the flow and new systems. Just everything is upgrading and changing so it has been overwhelming for all of us. We did get the flow to work, from signups to attendees to sales. So now it is about the ongoing improvement (improving the promotion, improving the signup flow, improving the attendance rate, improving the conversion rate). And that is what a company is. We have all this content , but we need to use that to build what is called a sales and marketing funnel – that is what we did. Now it is the ongoing improvement of that.

Craziest was the software expired between the two webinars. But we are a great team and we coordinated well with updating the links and the systems.

This is what we are – a team of content creation and marketing integration systems – we need to continue to improve the marketing automation experience and workflow (it was something I wasn’t pushing too hard in the past) and I am really happy with how we are learning and adapting and most importantly – making and updating SOPs. That is the only way we will be able to grow and improve.

Seems the 1 minute videos are really engaging – we have noticed the most from that. I think it is because people are too busy to watch longer v-logs – but also because it is impactful, focused, and has captions and big bold text. Let’s again, keep learning and improving. We need to make reports to analyze it more.

Did sell and get paid for a website I mentioned. Not as much as I was hoping for, but went through the process and looking at more to sell.

Really – I keep saying – “we are almost there” with all the IT and system upgrades. The last couple months we have really pushed it hard – updating our:

Company handbook – what a scary project that was (all our SOPs)
Email marketing system / CRM move – still fixing that a bit.
Moved our biggest sites to static HTML – to avoid the WordPress ongoing hacker attacks.
Keyblogging system for managing all our content and writers instead of people logging in to a ton of google docs or wp-admins
Site-deploy workflow to manage the site workflow and track updates.
Ranking solution system to monitor our progress
(In Jan 2020) we upgraded our whole membership forum
(In progress) a better checkout system for clients on our portal system

Actually probably a lot more was updated that what I am recalling from memory.

I’m also reading a book “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy (recommended during Rolands GFAVIP call) and he said – it is about these small improvements day by day that don’t look like much in the short term, but suddenly, make a huge difference.

In previous week plans I called it the “bamboo forest” effect. For so many months now – since about June, we have made massive upgrades to our entire system. We have invested heavily in the team learning all the systems as well.

We are getting there. I think all of us can see it.

What the team is working on (alphabetical order)

Looking for CrossborderMatchmaker high res logo. Also want to get help with the online event floor plan designs.

consistently delivering and improving our amazing video and audio content.

diving head first into the new online event systems. Also studying other alternatives. Helped with the signup table for a new member during the webinars!

making a priority list of our many sites. Learning Ranking Solution.

overloaded with Mautic campaigns 🙂 working on a master spreadsheet of tags, campaigns, segments.

helping with the inbound email overflow. Thanks for making smooth and clear google docs when we have 100+ website update emails from ahrefs

really going above and beyond writing – learning the systems as well.

helping us with billing / ad account issue on Facebook ads. Coordinating with FB paid webinar funnel

so lucky to have his IT help on Mautic and also hope can help make upgrades to our Shadstone portal.

getting through the All Jewish Links site hope to finish in October

helping with Amazon financial analysis and other ecommerce projects for our joint venture Ecommerce Gladiator investments.

happy birthday again! Really doing great leadership to coordinate with our growing writing and content team.

making serious upgrades to our content and websites, starting to track them in the Ranking Solution system so we can be more strategic about what sites we are updating and when and how it changes the site performance.

Working on getting more projects asap.

helping with the social media. Discussing how to analyze which content is most effective across various properties so we can focus on what works best.

helping with payroll and the portal. Also many of you don’t know but she hears all my crazy and scary ideas sometimes and helps me stop from saying it ha.

digging in on Overseas Property Online

getting podcasts online on time and in the best QC possible (even with my unorganized manner).

overwhelmed as always but keeping the webinar / graphics / marketing flow moving along while also coordinating more as others catches up with it.

Thank you team. We are pushing forward – we will have the team meeting this Friday again 8pm HK time.

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