Change - Part 4

For those of us that lived it, we can never get that sound of AOL starting up as we went to search the internet and check our email out of our heads, you can’t unhear it. The internet and email and high-speed internet access changed countless industries and careers. The change was here, big change, the question was how you would embrace it, harness it, and grow.

Technology change is happening at an incredible pace right now. In fact, the speed at which AI is impacting life is unheard of in our history. So now more than ever we need to ask ourselves how open we will be to change in our lives and how we will embrace it. Will we stay positive, be creative and harness the possibilities or will we mire ourselves into the world of gloom and doom?

It was a long time ago, but I was recently reminded of one of those ground swell moments in my own career and it had to do with embracing the internet and at the time, the start of email marketing.

Our core business was a printing company, and I was aggressively building out our marketing practice to be sure that we would continue to be relevant to our customer base and more importantly help them understand and harness technology in combination with their print and mail spend initiatives to grow their business. I worked closely with innovative technology suppliers as well as companies like Canon as they designed and manufactured the dawn of digital printing technology. So much was changing so incredibly fast.

We embraced the change and again it was frightening and uncomfortable.

My favorite memory was the moment I was going to get to offer the idea of adding email marketing to a print and mail campaign to my largest client at the time. This was brand new, unknown territory in the marketing space. I spent months getting the meeting set up with the key decision maker and at last the opportunity arrived. I remember pacing back and forth in my hotel room reading through my notes on my legal pad the night before and the morning before my lunch meeting. We sat down, I made my pitch, and he said, ‘and who else have you done this for’ and I responded, ‘I haven’t, you would be my first’ and he said ‘ok, let’s do it’ – and with that another new business line was launched.

This current wave of technological changes can pull you under and drown you or you can get on top of it and ride the wave. This is a fantastic opportunity to embrace the power of change.

Signed,

Change (Let’s get it done)