Everything changed suddenly. Nobody was prepared for the world to get thrown into uncertainty shadowed by fear and anxiety about what here and now means or what the future holds. So the question arises: “Now what?” In this episode, we are joined by Business Growth Strategist Expert Laurette Longmire to provide sensible answers as to how to navigate through this global business crisis. She also gives some practical advice on how to be innovative in managing resources. Moreover, Laurette invites everyone to the Sustainable Business Growth Summit, which is a great avenue to gather valuable wisdom from other expert colleagues in a variety of business fields to help listeners build a sustainably adaptable and thriving business. We have no way of knowing the unknown but we do not have to fear it. It’s supposed to make our journey exciting, not terrifying. Tune in and get answers that make sense and are applicable!
“Having no plan at all means you’re reacting in your business and in the overall business environment instead of creating a positive, profitable, and planful approach.” -Laurette Longmire
Highlights:
03:34 Now What? -The Best Thing You Can Do NOW
07:11 What Makes Sense- The New Trend In Innovation
12:18 Join The Sustainable Business Growth Summit
19:17 What To Look Forward To
23:15 The Planners and The Pantsters
27:54 Fear Of The Unknown
30:27 What’s Next?
“Now what?” Businesses face a new normal. Tune in as @arlene_gale and @bglexpert provide answers about moving forward with helpful, applicable business growth strategies. #BookWritingBusiness #BusinessBuildingBooks #NOW #innovativetechnology… Click To Tweet
Quotes:
09:21 “Having no plan at all means you’re reacting in your business and in the overall business environment instead of creating a positive, profitable, and planful approach.” -Laurette Longmire
19:34 “If you don’t ever start the business conversation, you’re never going to get to the point of actually having a relationship with someone.” -Laurette Longmire
19:50 “Never ask a question of a client that allows them to say, ‘No’.” -Arlene Gale
28:44 “Get over the fear. It’s only what you’re telling yourself in your head.” -Laurette Longmire
30:33 “Fear seems to be the mindset that keeps everybody from doing what’s next.” -Arlene Gale
Connect with Laurette:
“Business Growth Expert”, Laurette Longmire has been evaluating businesses and recommending growth improvements to those businesses for more than 30 years. She has experience with small businesses, fortune 500 companies, and nonprofits, all benefitting from her innate business sense and her abilities to create informed business recommendations, streamline, redesign, systematize, and improve practices for ongoing business growth. She presents complex or technical topics to our clients in clear, easy to understand language by observing, listening, and asking the right questions to clearly understand operations of a business and solve any problems that may arise.
Transcription:
Arlene Gale: Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of “Mindset Meets Mastery with Arlene Gale.” I’m going to be purposeful today about taking on a tough topic that is mainly, being talked about in a doom and gloom, and “Oh, everybody’s going to die” way. We’re all gonna die eventually, right? So, I don’t want to talk about death, dieing, or fear. I want to talk about hope, and tools, plans and other things that we can put our hands on that will move us in a positive direction.
We all, I think, need something to hold on to that will get us unstuck, because we’re at an unprecedented time right now. This is a time in our history, a crisis that nobody’s ever seen before, and it’s not regional, it’s global. Before when we had a region of the world that would have a situation arise, a natural disaster of some sort or health crisis, the rest of the world would step up to provide food or whatever other help we needed. But right now the whole world is being impacted. All businesses are being impacted in some way. Many businesses are struggling to survive while at the same time they have to worry about their health, and the health of their employees, and their team members. The government is sending out all sorts of protective orders and we’re hearing them everyday, either new orders or they’re being repeated. And that leaves business people asking: Now what? What can I do?
That’s why I have today’s guest on. We’re going to talk about the answers to the “Now What?” questions. Again, we’re not going to talk about rehashing doom and gloom scenarios. We are going to acknowledge that many business people are asking the “Now WHAT?” question.
So today’s episode is about providing some tools and hope. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest expert, Laurette Longmire. Laurette has been evaluating businesses and recommending growth improvements to those businesses for more than 30 years. She has experience with small businesses, fortune 500 companies and nonprofits all have benefited from her innate business sense and her abilities to create, informed business recommendations to streamline, redesign, systematize and improve practices for ongoing business growth. She presents complex or technical topics to our clients in clear, easy to understand language, (Amen, that’s what I need.) She does this by observing, listening, and asking the right questions to clearly understand operations of a business to solve any problems that may arise. Help me welcome my guest expert and friend Laurette Longmire.
Laurette Longmire: Hi, Arlene. Thank you.
Arlene Gale: You are welcome. Let’s dive right in, you ready?
Laurette Longmire: Sure. Let’s go.
Arlene Gale: So what’s the thing that we need to be doing first or most right now with everything, all the craziness, happening around us. What can you tell us? The number one thing above all else that we need to start with right now, today.
Laurette Longmire: So, it’s the NOW WHAT? How do I get beyond where I am?
Arlene Gale: Exactly.
Laurette Longmire: From a small business owner perspective, you are inundated daily with new stuff, new changes, new requirements, new, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I have to close my business, I can’t reopen, et cetera. So what do I do to be able to get myself out of this? At some point, the landscape, we’ll get back to some level of normalcy, whatever that’s going to look like and I’m not too sure anybody today can predict what that is going to look like. But the best thing you can do NOW is to look back at your business, go back and evaluate where you are. What is your business foundation? Is your mission, is your vision, are your values still the appropriate values for your business or do you have to make some adjustments going forward on those because of this new normal and what things look like? And so setting that basic business foundation is one way to ensure that you have a solid ground to work from on how then you want to evaluate what obstacles you have, and how can you get rid of those obstacles? And how can you make sure that they are going to not become a major issue in your business as the doors re-opened, as businesses get back into doing normal.
Arlene Gale: Normal, norma, normal. I personally hope things don’t go back to normal because I think we’d gotten to a place personally and professionally where people were in such a hurry to get things done or to go from here to there that I think we’d forgotten to appreciate, to look around and count the blessings we have, like these kinds of working relationships, so that’s my vision of the new normal. But I’ve got another question, is it fair to say when you’re talking about evaluate or reevaluate your vision and your values, the purpose of your business, if it wasn’t working before, it’s probably not going to work again. And if it was working, how can you grow it? Are those two fair statements?
Laurette Longmire: They are fair statements, and those are things to be able to take in this time where we are now and evaluate what do you want to do differently? Is there an opportunity for you to change how your business looks? How do you approach the marketplace? How do you interact with a customer base? Maybe you had no way to interact with that customer base pre-disaster, but you have found that it’s an integral part of how you’re able to survive when you can interact with that business and ensure that you have the ability to make the changes you want without any issue, and give new expertise to your team so that they have that ability to be able to interact on your behalf based on how you want to run that business. So in today’s environment, taking that opportunity to evaluate where you are, change what you want to change that isn’t working right, and maybe introduce some new things so that you actually come out of this in a stronger position than when you went in.
Arlene Gale: So that leads me to the use of technology. There were some people in business that were like, hmm, not going to do it, not going to do it. I’m not getting into technology, but really, at least in my opinion, doing things like Zoom calls and using other tech to stay connected may have been what has preserved the sanity of so many people. What do you say about using technology? Is that something that we’re going to continue to have to do?
Laurette Longmire: I think to some level, there will be a use of technology, but that comes back to how do you want to run your business? What makes sense? In looking at innovation, technology is an aspect of innovation, but can you do things manually? You don’t necessarily have to do things automated. And there may be decisions that you make to say in a manual process because it’s simpler, it doesn’t cost you as much. And in today’s environment, people are looking to save money as much as they possibly can. And if you don’t have to go out and buy something today that will actually help you improve your position with your business, but you can do things manually, go for it. Because what that will do is if you’re able to take those manual procedures, those manual processes, you can then take that once you are in a position to actually look at purchasing an automated product. Those manual procedures become what your requirements are or making that selection of what the automation is you want to now bring in house, and you will also find there will be probably a whole lot more bells and whistles that get presented to you with that new product, and do they fit in your business? So having that plan of where you want to go, you’ve done some evaluation, you’ve looked at, does it make sense for me to automate today? I don’t have the cash to do it so I shouldn’t. Can I do it manually? Absolutely. Can I do my bookkeeping, for example. Can I keep track of my receipts by spreadsheet? Sure. You want to do that long term? Probably not. But it’s a way to be able to get around having to make some significant purchases if you don’t have the cash or the credit to be able to do that today.
Arlene Gale: Hmm. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I think also as you’re doing things by hand, you’re going to be up close and personal, and you’re going to improve it, improve it, improve it, improve it. So when you decide you do want to go to technology, you’re going to have a better system. So that would be better than doing nothing at all.
Laurette Longmire: Correct. Correct. And having nothing at all means that you’re reacting instead of having a planful approach to doing, taking an order, for example. Whether you’re a restaurant, or you’re a person who sells, or your business sells products, it’s how you do those things to make sure that you can continue to make sure you are having the outcomes you want. And it’s your outcomes that you’re trying to drive. And do those things happen automatically? They can. Can they hop in automating? They can. Can they happen manually? They can. What makes the most sense in today’s environment based on where you are, but you need to know what your business is. And is it the business model that you want to employ? Or do you have to bring in new things? You referenced earlier, everybody’s moving to Zoom calls, for example. If your business has moved in that direction during this timeframe, is that something that you want to keep evaluated? See, did it make sense for the circumstances that we were faced with. But take it back and look at it, is it an obstacle long term, or is it a benefit? And if it becomes a benefit, then how do you play off it to be able to engage more customers and ensure that you can get more money on the back end.
“Having no plan at all means you're reacting in your business and in the overall business environment instead of creating a positive, profitable, and planful approach.” -Laurette Longmire Click To TweetArlene Gale: So do you work with product oriented businesses and service oriented businesses?
Laurette Longmire: Yes.
Arlene Gale: Is there a difference in the strategy, or the planning, or the approach to moving forward?
Laurette Longmire: There is, there isn’t. It’s the baseline of how you want to run your business. So you start there. What does that vision look like? Where do you want to be a year from now? Two years, five years from now. What is it going to look like? And then how do you set what the products are? Do you have good products? If you’re talking about a product oriented business. Are you having products that are high movers? Are you having products that are low movers? They don’t go every three months to six months. Do you really want to keep that mix? Or do you really want to focus more into the higher end, faster moving product? It may not be a higher end in terms of a price, but it gets you more income because you have a quicker turnaround. So that’s a product view. A service view, if you’re able to take it and how do you present your services into the marketplace. And using technology as a way to do that from what we’re doing here, a Zoom call and sharing information to a website. And in probably most cases, websites are a good thing for either product oriented business or a services oriented business. It makes more sense on how people can find you at two in the morning when they don’t want to actually talk to anybody but they want to do some research.
Arlene Gale: Or we don’t talk to them at 2:00 o’clock, I don’t know about you, I’m not at my best at 2:00 o’clock in the morning.
Laurette Longmire: Me either. Usually sleeping.
Arlene Gale: My website is a much better representation of what I do professionally then I am at 2:00 in the morning. I want to take a quick break, but before we do that, you have an exciting event coming up. What is the name of that event?
Laurette Longmire: The event coming up is called the Sustainable Business Growth Summit. What I saw as this whole environment was unfolding several months ago. It made sense to me to be able to present to business owners, entrepreneurs, anyone who might be thinking about getting into business an opportunity to have information across a business spectrum as opposed to just having a specific topic like marketing, or leadership or things like that.
Arlene Gale: When we come back from the break, I would like for you to tell everybody Sustainable Business Growth Summit, right?
Laurette Longmire: You got it.
Arlene Gale:We’re going to come back and talk about the Sustainable Business Growth Summit, which is the brainchild of Laurette Longmire’s after this quick break. Don’t go anywhere because trust me, you’re going to want to learn more about the who, how, when, why, you need to be a participant in this summit. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back everybody. This is Arlene Gale and this is my friend and business expert, business strategic plan expert Laurette Longmire..
Laurette I want to turn it over to you because my listeners and everybody, I think, needs to be spreading the word to their people too about the Sustainable Business Growth Summit that you’ve got coming up because you have gathered some amazing experts that are going to honor the goals that I’m trying to honor today and providing actual tips, and tools, and learning strategies for the listener. Tell us a little bit more about that please.
Laurette Longmire: This Sustainable Business Growth Summit is the result of listening to all the news that happened back in February. And having had a business, my background is starting in a corporate environment and having worked for manufacturing companies, or having led a nonprofit organization. Learning from all the changes that they were going through decades ago in terms of improving their supply chains and moving into markets where they had cheaper labor. What I could see coming out of all the news that was being reported was the businesses were going to take a very big hit because of looking for the best places for labor and markets in terms of getting new products, raw materials, things like that. And most of the summits that have been presented have been presented on a single topic that business owners are interested in. Looking at leadership, looking at communication, looking at marketing and given all the variety of issues that were being created. It made sense to me to look across the entire business spectrum and to offer this summit with leaders as you referenced in leadership, in marketing, in book writing, in the ability to communicate about wellness technology, and for rounding out the mix accounting and finance. Those are all interconnected parts and pieces. And with the manner of planning that’s gone on for years, nothing wrong with it because plans have been put in place to deal with business continuity to make sure that if a disaster occurred on your block, if your block got burned out, for example, you didn’t cause the fire but your business is affected by it. So what do you do with that? Then you get into regional disasters that occur. I’m in California, so there’s earthquakes here, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, all those natural disasters that occur, but then you get into some that are material shortages. Businesses can’t get supplies in because of a strike that’s going on in another part of the country. But technology breaches also are one that come into play because they are problems that major corporations have or not so major corporations have. How do you protect yourself from a continuity planning perspective? And in a lot of the plans that went on, they have been very much focused on their local disaster. Well, we’re in a situation where we have a global pandemic and a global disaster, so how do I plan for that? And it changes your mindset to have to look at what makes sense. With today’s environment, you have a great opportunity as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, to really evaluate where you are in the market. Are you offering products that people want? Are you offering the mix of products that people want? Or do you have some clearance that you need to do and make sure that you can clear houses on those that don’t move as quickly? Or do you need to adjust your services where you’ve always been in a make a presentation before a live audience mode? That isn’t allowed today and it probably won’t be allowed for some time in the future when you’re talking to audiences that could be as big as five, 10,000 people. How do you do things differently? And that’s what this business summit is looking to share, those tips and those tricks if you want to call it that. But those things to be engaged in planful, mindful thought on how your business can operate going forward.
Arlene Gale: For example, I think there is a business strategy that was implemented years ago, maybe 10 years ago, the just-in-time-inventory strategy that was saving money and doing well, but all of a sudden in today’s working conditions, the businesses are now looking up and saying, well, we got people, we got assembly lines, we don’t got parts. That’s going to create a mindset shift and the direction that some of these businesses are going to have to deal with. These big corporations are doing that now, so there’s lessons that us, little guys like me, solo-preneurs who have a few helpers along the way, should be learning those lessons. And some of the people who are speakers, are the kind of people that are aware of those kinds of shifts, and can help share the wisdom of those messages that we might be missing.
Laurette Longmire: Very true. And one of the biggest parts of that is, how do you communicate? And have talked with an expert, Glen Michael Milliett, and he will be sharing on the business summit how you stay engaged in a conversation, and how you’re able to get people to listen to you better to ensure that they’re understanding. If you don’t ever start the conversation, you’re never going to get to the point of actually having a relationship with someone.
“If you don't ever start the business conversation, you're never going to get to the point of actually having a relationship with someone.” -Laurette Longmire Click To TweetArlene Gale: Yes. And Glen is great. One of his big things that I love that you guys have got to listen to figure out how to do this is never ask a question of a client that allows them to say, No. Glen is an expert at that. So who else do you have?
“Never ask a question of a client that allows them to say, ‘No’.” -Arlene Gale Click To TweetLaurette Longmire: I have leadership expert, Norm Hall, who is coming on board to be able to share his wisdom on, what’s this new future gonna look like? And how do you have to work through that? Have marketing expert, Debbie Allen, who can share her wisdom on how do you approach the market even if it’s changed, how do you still approach that market? And things to look at and consider as you move forward. Just had a conversation with Marcy Maslov who is an accounting expert who speaks accounting in English, she is not getting into the debit and credits. She is a wonderful person to be able to understand your business because that’s where she starts from. Learn the business and now apply accounting to it to be able to have you become a better person running your business because you now what your numbers mean instead of waiting till the end of the year to do all your processing of receipts and coming up with numbers and let your tax accountant do it, you’ve missed some great opportunities to be able to shift and adjust your business going forward. So who else is in this group? You are.
Arlene Gale: Hmm? Who else? I am very honored to have been invited to participate with this amazing group of people that you and I get to hang around with. Knowledgeable, inspirational, funny, kind, giving people who are experts in their field. And I’m a book writing business coach and people always complain that they don’t have time to write the book. Well, now people are complaining, what am I going to do with all this free time? So I can answer that question. The other part of it though is as a writing and marketing expert, there are things that I can talk to you about, we were talking about the 2:00 o’clock in the morning client who wants to get to know you, your website, how long has it been since you’ve updated your website? And your social media content, and a video plan, and there’s so much that has to do with the written word that your business can be doing now, it’s about laying that plan, what moves forward? How is your client base going to change? How is the market changing? And that’s what I’m going to talk to you guys about. And I’m really excited about because there’s lots of, I think, and my clients would tell you there’s lots of great wisdom there. Got to own your expertise, right? Isn’t that what we tell people?
Laurette Longmire: Absolutely. And I’m looking forward to talking to you. We haven’t had that opportunity yet, but it’s going to be fun.
Arlene Gale: Yeah. We usually just get together in person and goof around. Anyway, so what are you talking about? What is your topic?
Laurette Longmire: Well, my topic is going to be a little bit of what I’ve shared here today, how do you do that plan? How do you set that plan in place based on what your foundation is? And where do you want your business to go? And ensuring that you have the right steps put in place to be able to look across your business and then plan for where you want to grow, helps up that action plan. So you identify what your strategies are, set the action plan for how you achieve those strategies, and be with or without technology.
Arlene Gale: Perfect. I know because so many people don’t want to use technology, and so many people don’t want to exist without it. I have a question for you. In the writing world, we have two types of people. We have the people who do an outline and create a plan. And then we have the people we call “pansters” who fly by the seat of their pants. So how does that apply to the people that you work with, or that you run into out and about, in the business world. Are you finding there’s more “pansters” or there’s more “planners?”
Laurette Longmire: Both. I’m not too sure that it’s, I don’t know that it’s equal. I think in a small business environment or an entrepreneur, it’s probably more of the pansters because they don’t go through and take the time to write something down. If you don’t get it written, you don’t have an ability to go back and review it, but you also don’t have an ability to share what that initial thought process, what that initial vision was with your team, and your team is very important to your success. One of the experts we’re going to have on this summit is going to be a wellness expert and she’s going to share information from a holistic perspective. So if you can gain, as a business owner, better appreciation for how you feel from a stress perspective, but also how your staff is feeling. Everybody’s been impacted by this environment, so how to be able to help everyone grow through. This is also part of that process. And communication with Glen, he’s also talking in matter. If you’re the business owner or somebody looking to get a new J-O-B, you can still apply all of his same techniques and information. So lots of opportunity for people to learn, lots of those panters to take an opportunity to write things down and be able to share them because you want your team to be able to be with you on this journey going forward. They’re going to want to participate because like everybody else, you said it, we’re getting tired of looking at each other just through the computer. We want to be out.
Arlene Gale: Then you meet somebody who you know through Facebook and you say, “Oh, yeah, I can see that little one by one inch square. Yeah, you look just like your Facebook profile.”
I think a lot of people aren’t getting very punchy. So this will be a good purposeful thing for them to plan to attend. So can you give us, first tell us how the listeners can connect with you, Laurette Longmire, and your business if they want to know more about you and your business and what you do.
Laurette Longmire: To learn more about me, I’m the business growth expert and I have a website you can go to: businessgrowthleadership.com and you can learn more about the services and offerings I provide. You will be able to find out more about the Sustainable Business Growth Summit. The event is all recorded interviews. Once I get clarity on those Sustainable Business Growth Summit dates, I will post all of that on the website.
There will also be an opportunity to connect back with you, for example, Arlene, and share with your listeners and each of the experts will have that same opportunity so you’ll be able to learn more about me, my business through businessgrowthleadership.com, but you can also learn more about the summit.
Arlene Gale: The Sustainable Business Growth Summit, the best place for them to get updates would be your website?
Laurette Longmire: Yes, it is the website. You will also be able to find a link specifically to a URL, SustainableBusinessGrowthSummit.com to be able to register and learn more about what the summit is and what the experts are bringing to the table.
Arlene Gale: That’s awesome. So do not hesitate. Keep checking and keep getting information updates as they become available, SustainableBusinessGrowthSummit.com, did I get the right?
Laurette Longmire: You got it right.
Arlene Gale: Yay. Okay. So before we go, I do this with all my guests. I put you on the hot seat because the name of the podcast is Mindset Meets Mastery. So it’s all about those stories we tell ourselves are the mindsets that we have that keep us from gaining the mastery, the success mastery that we want in our businesses. So here’s my first hot seat question. If you can remember back before you were so successful, I mean, that was a long time ago because I’ve known you a long time and you’ve been very successful. So what was one of those negative mindsets or those stories you told yourself that could have held you back if you had listened to that, that voice or if you had honored that mindset instead of going towards mastery, what was one thing that held you back?
Laurette Longmire: Fear of the unknown.
Arlene Gale: Ooh, isn’t that great for today? It’s a great topic.
Laurette Longmire: Fear of the unknown. For those of you that don’t know, I was a competitive athlete, I was competitive synchronized–
Arlene Gale: Awesome.
Laurette Longmire: I had an opportunity to take that talentI created that I’d developed over the years. And I was approached by a university to be able to go and join their team on the other side of the country from where I grew up. Very, very challenging from my personal perspective, being very tight with family and having to move across the country. How do you get over that? Well, you either do it and say, yes, show up on the doorstep of the pool with the new coach or you turn it down. Well, I accepted it so you can work through that. Get over the fear. It’s only what you’re telling you in your head. What are the big problems that really are out there that’s causing that fear? Are they insurmountable? Maybe not.
“Get over the fear. It's only what you're telling yourself in your head.” -Laurette Longmire Click To TweetArlene Gale: So facing that fear of the unknown, what was it for you that helped you push past that fear and go across the country? What was it for you that made you change that mindset so that you could move on to the next step of your success? Can you explain that to us? So maybe somebody else who’s facing whatever fear they’re facing today might be able to process that for themselves.
Laurette Longmire: Yeah. The thing that I learned was to talk, to talk to people about it. Get some viewpoint. You have an opinion in your head that’s maybe slowing you down or having you not take any action, whatsoever. Talk about it with people. Get some feedback on where people see what the benefits are, what it is your stumbling with. And I’ve been able to use that going forward in my career many times. The sport that I was involved in was a performance sport and we were always ready for the next competition. Well, if I clammed up prior to getting into the pool to perform, I wouldn’t have a good performance. But if I talk to my teammates, if we just got silly, it helped. So having that conversation, having the discussion with someone, you can be serious, it can be lighthearted. It doesn’t matter as long as you talk about it because they may help you reset your mindset that it isn’t as fearful as you think it is. Somebody is always available at the end of a phone or a Zoom call.
Arlene Gale: Zoom call? What an excellent idea. You trendsetter.
Laurette Longmire: I know.
Arlene Gale: I think that’s great wisdom because fear seems to be the mindset that keeps everybody from doing what’s next. What’s next? One of the games I play with myself about fear is, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I spend myself up all the way to the point where it’s like, yeah, and then I come back down. I was like, okay, what’s the absolute worst thing that can happen if I don’t do the dishes, or don’t do the laundry, or don’t put gas up my car, or don’t pick up the phone and make that client call. The worst thing that can happen is I’m going to die and end up in hell. It’s like, really? No, that’s not going to happen. So get over it, girl, move on, do something about it.
“Fear seems to be the mindset that keeps everybody from doing what's next.” -Arlene Gale Click To TweetLaurette Longmire: Very true. And you talk yourself out of it.
Arlene Gale: You talk yourself out of it. Because yeah, I’m a good person and I live right. I’m not going to end up in hell for the rest of eternity. That’s ridiculous. So if that’s ridiculous, maybe the fear is ridiculous too. So what’s the next best step I can take? So this conversation kind of morphed, but that’s okay. I think it was important because a lot of people are dealing with a lot of fear right now. And that fear of the unknown is so timely because we don’t know personally or professionally what’s next, or we don’t necessarily know what’s now. We don’t have a perfect answer, but we still have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, right?
Laurette Longmire: That’s very true. And if you’re looking for someone to talk to, reach out to people that know you, reach out to people who maybe don’t know you but maybe able to help you with any kind of business questions that you may have. It only makes sense to get into a research mode, help train yourself more, learn new things that can help get you out of that, I don’t know what I’m doing or I don’t, I don’t know how to do it mode. Lifelong learning is a great thing.
Arlene Gale: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Laurette, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you for your time today because I know that you’ve got so many other things going on preparing for this sustainable Business Growth Summit because sustainable is really almost the biggest, most important word, right?
Laurette Longmire: Exactly.
Arlene Gale: sustainablebusinessgrowthsummit.com with my friend and business expert Laurette Longmire. Get in touch with her and thank you again for your time, I really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to the summit.
Laurette Longmire: I’m looking forward to it too, and thank you for the opportunity to be able to share wisdom with all of your listeners.
Arlene Gale: Well, you are very, very welcome. So as usual, I’m going to leave my listeners with this thought. “Do not let the world dictate your story or the story you tell yourself. Do not let the world decide what’s possible or impossible for you. You get to decide that, so take that power back and hold onto it. And remember, you’re the one that gets to decide to live and to write your story everyday.”