Mitch's Blog

Today is my 18th year in business. Considering that most statistics say 95% of small businesses shut down within 3-5 years, I consider myself lucky. It hasn’t always been easy, and the last two years have been extremely tough since I’m the primary caregiver for my mother, who lives with me and has dementia. Yet I’m still around and still pushing forward; that has to count for something. 🙂

Over the course of the last 9 years, I’ve written a special anniversary post 8 times. The year I missed, my 11th anniversary, I wrote an article about hitting 1,000 articles on this blog, which felt more important. As I’m writing this one I’m sitting just 2 away from 1,400 articles. So, not only in business for 18 years, but writing something for most of these years as well.
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Sometimes I create products, just like I’ve written books. Titles aren’t my strong suit, but I can get the job done. In this case I’d like to bring attention to a product I created many years ago that I only tried marketing once, back in 2006. It can be a very valuable tool for those in a position to hire or evaluate new managers, as well as set the criteria for evaluating employees.

It’s called the Mitchell Manager Evaluation Module; catchy title, right? I created and tested this tool in 2003, with the intention of not only evaluating and hiring managers and employees but being able to rank the criteria so that the type of people hired are what’s believed is needed for the job.
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The weather in the Syracuse area has been beautiful for a few days now. Instead of staying in the house walking, which I have to do all winter, or driving to the mall for a different scene, I enjoy going out and walking in the fresh air. Sometimes I go to Onondaga Lake Park, and sometimes I walk the neighborhood.

A couple of days ago, I decided to walk around the neighborhood by myself. Depending on which walk I decide upon, it takes me either 20 minutes or 30 minutes. It was getting late, and I had to be home before I got the call saying the bus was bringing my mother home, but I could still take a casual walk as I wanted to see the rhododendrons before they started to die out.

There were other people walking, some in pairs, some with dogs, some by themselves like I was. It’s a pretty quiet neighborhood while also being scenic. It wasn’t too hot or too cold; it was close to perfect.
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Some years ago I gave two presentations in the same week. On the Wednesday I presented to my medical billing group, more specifically about the relationship between CPT-4 codes and revenue codes. It was a fairly short presentation, about an hour, but it was well received.

I can hold babies!

It was also planned. I say that because when I got home later in the afternoon, while catching up on my email, I learned that a speaker I’d scheduled to speak to my consultant’s group on Friday had to cancel because her father had been rushed to a hospital out of town. The president of the organization had gotten the news since I hadn’t been home, and sent out an email saying we had to scramble for a speaker for Friday morning. 
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Some years ago, in a meeting, I learned that something was going awry as it pertained to a process that was being followed by a group of people I’d only met a week before. When I got back to my office, I decided to talk to the people who, I figured, would have noticed the error. As I was talking to them and asking about the error, I fully expected someone to be as incredulous as I was. Then one of them said “We don’t know anything about that sort of thing”, and the others agreed.

Daniela_oliiver via Pixabay

I was stunned, but only for a quick moment. I had fallen into a trap, something that I try to tell others to guard against, and proved that even someone who teaches certain principles might get caught off guard. I had assumed that just because people were following a process for a very long time that they had knowledge that it turned out they didn’t have, or wouldn’t have, because they never had a reason to learn it.
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