My back is still tight. I got up a couple times in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it was a slow shuffle to the bathroom. I'm still dropping water weight. Today I weighed in at 186.8 lbs, that down near 16 lbs from a few days ago. Winning.
Today was a must attend work day, Wayne was supposed to be coming by with John the HR guy to talk to Chris and I. Turns out Chris wasn't in and Wayne decided not to come. He did send me an email though. It read:
No figured Monday will work better, will try to forward the draft agreement today.
With such losses at the branch need discuss your comp, think about it over the weekend but to be fair I think we should meet in the middle between past and recent until we can get it profitable. Don't like to back track but really didn't know the looses were so big. I know you won't like it but hope you can understand. Let's discuss further Monday separate from the others.
W.
I had a feeling this was coming. He post dated cheques up until the beginning of October and said he wanted to get the agreement signed before releasing others. It now makes sense, he was planning on this all along. Not that I'm surprised.
It will be very interesting to see what happens on Monday. My strategy is to listen to what he has to say and what he proposes. I'm not going to get my shirt in a knot. I need to know if he's talking a reduction in base pay or base and commissions. I'm also not going to lead the conversation to that I'm needing the flexibility to do my own thing, that could open up some doors I don't want opened.
From my perspective, I'm going to maximize what I can get for as long as I can. I'm going to work hard on his behalf and I'm going to pursue other opportunities on the side. I have two feelings. I think what he's doing is not too honourable, yet I understand why he wants to do it if he's losing money. From my perspective fair's fair. If that's the way he works, then I should have no problem if I want to change the rules down the road and work for him and do something on my own. That's my knee jerk reaction.
My big problem is he wants to reduce my wage yet he's not yet fully committed to the business. If he was committed to the business long-term that's one thing. We discussed that he may get out of the business by May if it's not making money. My question to his is you want to lower my wage and not give me any certainty of my future? What happens to me if you close it down? Worst case is if I accept the reduction I need to get something in return like a longer severance. My biggest thing is to keep cool and not get too emotional during the meeting and not be too agreeable either. I think the longer I drag this on, the better, just like Wayne does when pressed to make a decision.
Talking about future. This morning before getting to work I had an 8:20 am physiotherapist and chiropractic session. As I got worked on for my back the young Chiro started asking me about training. Next thing I know he was hanging on my every word about heart rate training. Here's a guy that spent all sorts of time in school learning about the body and he was taking my expert road-warrior advice. It also got into a bigger discussion regarding fitness with the physiotherapist. That is one reason I think I could own one of those places, I don't feel intimidated.
As the physiotherapist was working on me she asked again how I found her. I told her the Internet and fired up the conversation about Internet Marketing and SEO and how it was by chance going through the online yellow pages and looking for something local that I found her site. I mentioned to her a few things she needs to do and knew it was overwhelming to her. I also told her that I've successfully built and marketed my own sites and then I pulled out the bullshit and told her that I've had some friends ask me to help them out and I did and they were so happy with the result they thought I should start my own business.
She then bit on what I was offering and said she needs someone with my expertise and was I kind of available. I told her I'd look at her site and find out what's going on and get back to her. I'll have poochie do an assessment and get back to me with it's current status and I'll go back to her with a plan and some costs. This could be my first customer if she has some money to spend. I told her I'd get her up to the top in short order, which I'm sure I could do, most of these folks in Burlington do a terrible job with their Internet marketing and SEO.
While waiting for Wayne and all afternoon I worked on my triathlon toons site. It's not that I'm caring about that site specifically, it's just that I'm going to be duplicating it to make a generic Caricature Toons site and I need to get it near perfect before I can duplicate it. After I duplicate it I'm not going to give any effort to marketing it. It's too narrow of a group. However, it more than pays for itself as it sponsors me with pre-tax dollars.
What were are doing is SEO optimizing it right now, that requires copy with selective keywords and phrases. We researched the most used and have wooven them in our copy. Poochies writers did the copy and it's as good as India could do but still needs massaging. It's a good starting point. For me to edit 3 pages it took about an hour a page. The key is to use the keyword and also make it relevant to the reader. I've now got all the copy written and the programmer said he will have all the changes made this weekend. I sure hope so, I'm so anxious to getting some sales in the door on the new site.
The upside is that I'm recording all the steps we are doing and putting it into a format so I can use it for my SEO business. I've got my business mojo back, I can feel it and I know I can do a great job for customers. The downside today was dealing with my Admin VA. I fired Abbey last week and the Team Leader Lorraine has done a terrible job getting the new person trained. I fired off emails to her last night and talked to her today and told her I wasn't happy with her performance and told her to have her boss call me. I really rattled the cage. This is my last rattle before I find another company and I told them that. The boss apologized and told me they feel I'm a very valuable customer and do not want to lose me as a client. I've got to remember that in U.S. dollars I'm probably work about $10,000 per month to them, even though it's only costing me $1000 per month. This is the email I sent to Lorraine:
I just have a concern that they have not been communicating with the artists. It was my understanding that Moin was going to be doing this and working with Sushant and set up existing artists immediately.
I've seen no emails to any clients. As I mentioned on our phone conversation this is URGENT. I can not get sales without artists. Also, had I know they were not doing actual work I would have taken it over myself. I'm not sure what is taking so long, it should have only taken at maximum 2-3 hours for training.
Please give me assurances that this is going to happen tomorrow and Suhant is going to be fully trained or I'll have no choice but to find another VA provider. It's unfortunate because sushant seems very capable and is not getting the training or support required from what I can see.
Thank you.
I didn't eat all day. I had a frozen fruit protein shake this morning and some rye toast. It held me until 4 pm when I left work. I don't like missing lunch, I tend to eat more when I get home. Which is what happened. I still ate healthy, no junk food, just more of it. The only semi-junk food I ate was when Alice, Alyssa and I went to the move The Best Year and I had a medium popcorn. It was my Friday spurge before a heavy training weekend. If I can get two solid weeks of training in with long sessions and speed work sessions I'll be more than ready, especially if I can control my eating to under 1200 calories or thereabouts. It was sure nice seeing that scale back in the 186's.
The real test is going to be my run this weekend and how my calf holds up. It's a little sore from yesterdays run only because I was running with a bad back and using muscles I haven't used often with a good running style. All day today I wore compression socks. I'm also trying to drink as much water as possible to stay hydrated and flush the crap from my body.
Today I sent my brother pictures of his daughters tattoo, he's never seen it and I found it when I downloaded Reid's phone. He was amazed and pissed at his ex-wife for letting her do it. He wasn't angry, more disappointed that she got it done. I also sent him is photo in the chair and told him that it's his casket photo. I tried to give him a subtle shot to push him into fitness. He said he played hockey last night for the second week in a row and scored a goal and got an assist. Before he went last week for the first time he thought he might get a heart attack. He said the guys bugged him because he only uses half the ice, he doesn't back check. He joked that would tire him out too much. The only problem with hockey with the boys is beer and wings with the boys after. Last night they came to his place and didn't leave until after 4:30 am. He plays hockey for an hour and drinks for the next 7 hours. At least he was upfront with me that he was partying last night, he usually tries to hide it. That's a good sign, I tell him about my warts and pimples with booze and talk about how much better I feel since I haven't been drinking, sans the concussion night.
Family wise Reid got his first quazi-report card, he's doing very well. I also got my athletes guide for the ITU Worlds from Team Canada and the list of athletes. It looks like there is 7 other athletes in my age group from Canada and about a 100 on the team all together.
No Training - Recovery.
2786 calories
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