Day 477 – Wednesday

I had a morning meeting with a coder / web developer I connected with on LinkedIn. He was fun to talk to. He has some interesting projects, we seem to share a lot of the same business values and there may be some opportunities to work together in future. We will stay in touch.

I made pork cochinita pibil which is a slow braised pork shoulder dish rubbed with spices and wrapped in banana leaves for dinner. It turned out wonderfully and it did the usual of making the house smell wonderful after about an hour in the oven. It cooks for 5-6 hours. The smell of banana leaves simmering in pork fat is amazing.

I finally got a chance to go to a networking event this evening. This is the one I went to last summer, a year ago. I tried going since then but their February meting got cancelled due to snow (wimps: something about ice and blizzard conditions as I recall) and June got cancelled due to a restaurant scheduling mixup they encountered.

Anyway, I remember how I felt the first time before I got into
networking in Sacramento.

I walked into a room full of about 25 strangers. I talked to people.
Asked people what they did and asked a lot of questions. Showed
understanding. Eventually people would ask what I did. My pitch was
that I help businesses with their email marketing and copywriting. I
talked about my thrice weekly list. One person asked if I only coach
businesses on email or do I write emails as well as a service and they
were relieved when I said both.

I got verbal commitments to follow up and schedule at least 2 possibly
3 meetings. I’ll be following up with about 6 people for various
reasons.

I basically turned one away who asked if I did social media and I
explained those services get pretty pricy to do it right. Either that
or they were asking about search optimization. The answer is the same
for both. And having a narrow focus is good. Turning away business outside of that focus is good.

I wasn’t nervous (though I was sweating down my back most of the time,
not sure why). At least I projected confidence. I wasn’t needy. I
showed interest in what people are doing.

I was really amazed at the transformation over last year. Got back to
Chris’ and was utterly exhausted. But it was a great evening.