I had an employee come to me today and ask for more work to do. Ha. That could be the first time that someone has done this. Employees generally try to do as little as they can because they want to be in their car, out of the parking lot at 5:02 in the afternoon. So, this person tells me. “I want to feel needed, involved and helpful.” I was like,,,, wow.

In the course of finding this person some other job (s) that would help the company and be fulfilling, I discovered how easy it is to lose focus on the main things. Our main thing is selling hotels and to do that, you need a very articulate and professional internet presence and that presence needs to look perfect. I went to our website the way a new client would and, well,,,, ours needs a lot of help as I discovered today. A good manager (unlike me) would have been doing this already but clearly, I am not as detailed as I should be.

We all spend our time, writing offering books, updating numbers, doing pitches and basically selling. Using a common analogy, we don’t often look at the front of house because we are so busy working in the back yard. What I learned today was you need to look at the front of the house (what the market sees) more than you need to trim the weeds (what we mostly do) in the back yard.

So, what am I saying? If this employee had not come to me today asking for more work, I would not have put the time into finding more work. In short, I would not have looked at what the market sees when they look at us online. I would have kept trimming the weeds in the back yard. Every now and then something happens (like this employee) that causes you to look at things differently. In this case today, it was what I needed. KT