If you haven’t already seen the post announcing the change at Keenpath, go check it out and then come back here: Keenpath founder to join FullQuota

It is fun and inspiring to do what you love. Better yet to find what you love and then keep doing that. I have been blessed over the years to have a pretty broad exposure to many areas of business, the good and bad, high and low. My expectations and goals when I set out to be an entrepreneur were pretty high, but I didn’t realize beforehand the great positive impact it would have on me.

It is so true when people say, you can read things in theory, but putting it into practice is what really counts. Book smarts vs. street smarts. Doing vs. not-doing. Action vs. inaction.

Building Keenpath as an inbound marketing agency has been fun. The clients, relationships and networking opportunities I will carry with me forever. Time now to embrace the opportunity and change by joining the great team of seasoned entrepreneurs and business people at FullQuota. Excited to learn from this team, as I do what I can to bring to the table my experience. I am looking forward to collaborating to make big things happen.

My business and entrepreneurial mindset will be with me forever.

The most important lesson I have learned in business? People do business with people.

Are you a thought leader, or a thought spreader? Are you the fertilizer that is spread, or the organic nutrient making rich soil?

Taking time to know who you are working with helps understand how not to work against your objective.Everyone is talking about telling a story, or speaking to your audience, but if you don’t take the time to figure out what and who that audience is then what are you trying to accomplish?

For example if you are running a bakery and decide to blog, who are your customers? Is it the busy, overworked mom that has a part time job, in her middle age with a couple of teenage kids? Or is it the older executive running a fortune company that wants to bring home a hand made artisan bread to surprise his wife?

What about an IT consulting company? Is your primary audience in the public sector or private sector? Think about it for a minute, don’t just look at who has been paying your bills, but look at the ideal and who best matches with what service and product you offer.

Don’t be spread like fertilizer, be a nutrient that will be longer lasting and have residual effect for the long term.

“There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction”  -Winston Churchill

At a time when there is so much focus on Earth Day, there are a few reasons why you shouldn’t go green on this day.

It can be easy at times to make a knee-jerk reaction when a cause, or when a prominent event is coming up. We get extra motivated as the date or event grows nearer to prepare ourselves. The problem with this stems from your motivation. Are you motivated by cause, or by action?

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If you decide to not take something at face value and dig a little deeper to uncover what truly makes it what it is, then you are curious. Are you curious?

It’s no secret that I am driven by curiosity. Those who know me best will tell you as a kid I would always run around energetically working to discover something new. I was a master story teller, often to my demise. One day my curiosity veered to a sharp halt.

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Do you enjoy standing on the edge of a cliff, peering over the edge, pushing your fear aside and jumping? Just when a parachute helps you land safely, even at the last moment, you look up the mountain side and know what must be done.

Entrepreneurship is perpetual cliff jumping. Once you’ve done it the first time, you must do it over and over again. A smart entrepreneur jumps with a parachute, and only pulls the string at the moment its needed, and not a moment too soon.

I am a newly minted perpetual cliff jumper, also known as entrepreneur. I still laugh when I think about the rush it was for me when I took my first cliff jump, landed, and then got frightened at the prospect that I had to do it again, except next time the requirement was to wait a wee bit longer before pulling the ripcord.

How I got to this point

All my life I was raised to “be your own man“. Those are the exact words that were oft slipped to me by my late Grandpa Mac. He was a wise man, a wisecrack to some, and a cliff jumper at heart.

Sitting around the dinner table as a kid with Grandpa Mac meant listening to excited conversations about politics and the economy, with a few risque comments intermingled. It was common for him to challenge others to a healthy debate.

What I learned the most from him was to truly, be my own man. He was well versed in many things, from science and technology to fine art and photo journalism. His background as an early photo journalist in the 1930s and 40s always impressed me, and I lived vicariously as a kid in his history.

By being your own person you learn to be driven. What drives you might be different than what drives me. Being driven by something is key. Key to a life long pursuit of an array of things that may, or may not, bring you ultimate happiness.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it never killed me

I am driven by curiosity. In fact I believe so strongly in it that I put it on one revision of my resume. During an interview process, one of the interviewers, the VP of Marketing for an innovative technology company told me that my statement, driven by curiosity, be your own man, and putting it in my resume caught his attention. While I didn’t get the job, what I learned from that experience is that by being myself, listening to the inner self, it pays dividends, and gets noticed.

Having a curious nature is natural in children and youth. Society squashes this through various means, and I know a few others have captured this well through their writing. By nature I am an optimist. Because of this, I have hope. The hope that society, locally, nationally, and internationally can change this.

A curious society is one that involves some more dreaming, more art making, more productivity. Sitting as a cog and being complacent isn’t an idea of flourishing. Think of a vine plant. In my garden recently some of the pole bean vines began growing together because I neglected to put in a proper channel, simple mesh nets. After putting in the mesh net, I had to pick up the vines and separate them, albeit carefully, to put them back on to the right path and climbing up the mesh net. A week later and they are grasping firm, climbing like crazy, andflourishing.

Where I am headed

In the midst of a great transition, I knew I needed to write this lengthy post. If even not only for me, to look back and remind myself why I am doing, what I am doing.

Leaving full time employment to develop and grow a business that you create, bootstraps and all, isn’t the easyroute. But in my opinion, might just be the best route. From the past two years of moonlighting I’ve learned that anything worth pursuing must at least have your passion behind it. The passion forces you to learn just enough about business and the things that aren’t necessarily your forte, so that it will survive, and flourish.

On goes my journey to full time develop and grow my business, Keenpath, an inbound marketing and social media marketing company. What started out as a blog three years ago has grown into a company. My first clients got some free advice and free work for the taking, only because I was testing the market. Then they began turning in to paying customers. Through this I learned that my skills, having a knack for understanding how the web, technology and tools like social media work to help business do better business and ultimately drives sales, lead me to a critical point. I could continue milling along doing something that is profitable, yet, at least for me, at the time was losing meaning, or I could jump the cliff, and work hard, sweat, bleed and have victories doing something that felt right.

Being driven by curiosity, and being my own man, has gotten me to this point. Where I am headed from here is only a hop skip and jump away, and you better believe I will be working on my hopping skipping and jumping, while jumping those cliffs, sometimes on a daily basis.