I want to let everyone know that I have been a bit out of pocket for the past month. My sister passed away and it has kept me a little off track. We were not as close as some, but it was still a bid deal to me. I just wanted to let you all know that I will be more engaged going forward and to apologize for my consistent absence for the last few weeks. Thanks for your patience. Steady on ahead. Julie

Today is the first day of a series of free classes that we offer for Veterans Day week, it is free and open to all. You don't have to be a veterans. Our programs are designed for veterans and their families but many are just related to a veteran or military people. You can join the classes if interested. They are listed on the calendar or just go to VetBizWeek.com to register.

Yay - you made it! Please introduce yourself- we’re just getting started and I’m hoping this new community proves to be helpful for building new connections and peer learning / sharing. Thanks for joining. We will be adding content daily to provide real-world tools and strategies to help you get started with a new business or to scale and manage an existing business. I encourage you to participate, share you own ideas and insights. This is a community, and varied voices and perspectives are extremely important. I will do my best to keep this group active and worth your time. I hope you enjoy this experience!

I tried a simple strategy in last week and the result shocked me, no ads, no fancy software, no huge budget… yet the store pulled in more traffic in 3 days than the last 3 weeks combined. The crazy part? Most people overlook this because it looks “too basic” to work. I’ll break down exactly what I did… but first I’m curious What do you think the strategy was? Ads? Content? SEO? Something else?

I'm always curious to learn about hobbies and side skills that great business leaders have. Have you ever noticed? Successful people are NOT solely focused just on their business - maybe in the early days to get it going, and I'm not against that fresh sheen of ambition when you're building something. But I'm older now - hopefully a little wiser too - and I find that I want to run the business, but I don't want it to run me. I stopped writing music and books when I started my business. Not consciously, I just got consumed by work and stopped "playing". I'm making a conscious decision not to do that anymore. I'm writing songs again. I'm picking up my old hobbies and some new ones. I'm blocking time in my schedule. We have a rule in our family-run business, we don't take outside meetings on Mondays unless it is an unbelievably huge opportunity. Of course there is an exception - but in general, Mondays are called Shmonday in our business. We ease back in from the weekend (as if we weren't working all weekend!) and Shmonday has become almost sacred in that we reset, reconnect to the parts of the work that we love and we think. We mostly think on Mondays. We sleep in a little later, we sip an extra cup of coffe, we have no hurry or bustle and we're getting pretty good at not letting the external Mondays come in thru the door too. I cherish Shmondays and now that is also the day I work on my hobbies and write songs. What else do you do, outside of your work, for fun, to have a life? Share it!