Building Momentum for a Strong 2012
2012 is off to a great start. As you may have read last week, Opportunity Works is officially in business. We provided a team of 10 people for a three day event. I was in a near panic the night before the event. I kept hearing in the back of my mind, my friend Charlie warning me to always overstaff because inevitably someone does not show. I had a hard enough time finding people so close to the holidays on short notice. Sure enough, the night before, I got a call from a sick team member. But, we pulled it off, 10 people showed up each morning.
We spent the mornings surprising commuters with free coffee and donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts for the grand opening event of a new location in the Carrollwood neighborhood of Tampa. My team was made up of many 18 – 22 year old students with learning and/or cognitive disabilities. All of the students that we staffed for the event had what we call here in Florida, special diplomas from high school and are continuing with the public school system in transition programs at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg with Project STINGRAY or at Pepin Academies transition program. We also had some adults with cognitive disabilities that are not enrolled in school programs. Lucky for me, a couple friends also helped out at the last minute to complete the team.
On New Year’s Day, the family drove to Boca Raton. We took a state road instead of the interstate. This gave us an opportunity to show the kids a part of Florida where there are more cows than people. The next day while we got to enjoy our time cooking out with some friends from graduate school (Thanks Alan and Yuki!); I had 2 members of my team back at Dunkin’ Donuts! YAY!! The results from the event last week were so good, we were asked to continue on a smaller scale on Monday, January 2.
Tuesday my day started with a call from a former boss. He had a good lead for me. He gave me a contact in a manufacturing company. I don’t think he knew I was specifically trying to get an in with a manufacturing company but, that’s what he handed to me. It was nice to hear from him, it had been a couple of months, so we got caught up. Then I headed into a sales pow wow/pep talk to get us cranking in 2012. It was nice having that lead in-hand when I went into the meeting.
Today I spent quality time with the accountant. I’ve been getting lots of notices from the Florida Department of Revenue about filings I may or may not be delinquent in submitting. This was concerning me. My accountant, as polite as can be, explained to me the simple error made by whomever had filled out the forms with the state. Clearly this was my error, but I appreciated her refraining from rolling her eyes, sighing in disgust or calling me names just the same. In the I.T. world we used to call these novice types of errors “job security”. Today, we got QuickBooks all set up and entered in all of our transactions and reconciled our bank statements. I feel quite accomplished.
Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to my second Business Network International (BNI) meeting, then following up on the lead from my former boss as well as leads from other friends and family that I’ve gotten for the holidays! All of this and I’m still a little concerned about my momentum. Things are cranking up this week and I expect next week to busier, but I will have distractions.
The Florida Legislative session begins next week. The second week of session, I’ll be in Tallahassee all week with the Parent Teacher Association (PTA). Next week, I’ll be frantically trying to pull together the PTA schedule for the week in Tallahassee. Since Jim’s in Tallahassee I know I will get some good items checked off the list in between legislative meetings, but I am worried about the distractions, just as I feel like things are coming together for Opportunity Works.
For you first time readers of my blog, Opportunity Works, Inc. is the name of the company started in the summer of 2011. We are a staffing services company dedicated to putting people with disabilities to work. Please check out our website, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!
