Looking back is the easy part. It’s a fact-based review, or at least, it should be. I can identify the facts about my business in this last year:

• Eight active clients (two major), who I love (see my last post)
• Met my goal on billable hours, stayed within my goal for administrative hours.
• Met (barely) my goal for networking/marketing hours for my business
• Delivered more than 120 hours  pro bono work for charitable organizations (not meetings or fun, actually delivering my professional services)
• Saw my work for clients published in journals (medical, research, economics); wrote for local magazines, newspapers & blogs, contributed to an annual report; two articles published in an national online  professional trade journal; regular contributor to four blogs
• Delivered blogs, white papers, speeches, articles, newsletters, executive presentations, social media content for clients
• Organized 30+ events for clients
• Tended my own professional development with a writer’s conference (previous year), a full-day professional seminar, webinars, regular local professional development sessions, lectures (TEDxKC, Linda Hall/UMKC etc), entrepreneurial development meetings, attended paid training programs (video, government contracting, Quickbooks)
• Personal enrichment and service: Hosted a Taiwanese Graduate Study Exchange student and a Russian professional; participated in informal mentoring
• Personal horizon-stretching: travel to Santa Fe, New York (previous year) and Sydney, Australia
• Pushing my comfort level: networking, marketing myself and my business, selling…
• Following my passions: active engagement with non-profit organizations supporting the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts;  SAGA — a support group for siblings of adults with Down Syndrome; NAWBO for women entrepreneurs; IABC for professional communicators; and Rotary, an international service organization
• Survived a computer crash!
• Exercise: Ran (sadly, I report my lowest annual mileage since 1994 — 300 miles) and biked (not enough miles to count) and a bit of yoga, swimming, walking and hiking.

I can count some pleasant successes in this, my second full year in business for myself.

And I can identify some new challenges — the looking ahead part:

• Figure a better way to measure and manage my business pipeline
• Get more effective at networking/marketing my business, or,
• Figure a way to effectively scale my services, and
• Exercise more!

There are many more areas for self-improvement (which should translate to business improvement, since I am my business) … but I will include just a couple more:

• Every day, give my best effort to those who entrust me with their business
• Give thanks, love and laughter every day to the people who are closest to me
• Believe it:  Today is the best day ever

Bring on the new year!

Lately, it’s crept in anyway.

Part of it has come with my sister, who lately has been developing her own anxieties. She now gets anxious when I am not home, as it is difficult for her to keep track of my work schedule, which sometimes allows me to be at home but often requires that I am out. She gets upset and worries, wandering the house and talking to herself, unable to focus. It becomes increasingly difficult for my husband to calm her down.

She also is awakening in the night, filled with uncertainty, but wanting to arise. It becomes a challenge to convince her that it’s still night, and time for sleeping. She gets nervous and frustrated when her things aren’t Just So, exactly positioned where and how she likes them.

These anxieties are taking greater hold of her… and now I find that I’m sharing them too. Not the same ones as her, but anxieties FOR her, because of her.

I am working to banish them — replace them with action. So far, my meager actions haven’t won the day, but I will not nurture fear and anxiety. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.

Instead it’s actions: Research — reading about Alzheimer’s research and practices, medical insights, etc. It’s talking with others (thanks to my friends at Siblings Are Great Advocates). It’s describing all this to others in the family and drawing their support and help. It’s working harder to help her understand and overcome her own anxieties.

Action, I believe, must be the conqueror of anxiety.

I went to turn on my computer, needing to convert a video file, folks waiting for me. Other work lined up in front of me, meetings, deadlines.

But nothing.

It wouldn’t turn on. It wouldn’t work for me. I quickly exhausted all the tricks I knew to get it to work — but nothing. Oh no, that sinking feeling and anxiety rising. I needed help.Rather than dig out my receipts and call the multinational computer

I called a small storefront computer shop nearby. Too late, they were just closing. I explained my problem and a young voice told me he likely could fix it for me. They open at 10 a.m. the next day. I promised to be there.

When I got there, I explained that I had called the night before and summarized the problem. Yeah, I talked with you, the young man said. I think I can take care of it. I’ll let you know.

Within 90 minutes, he’d called back. All done, working fine, I can come get it.

Anxiety banished! End of story? Not really.

When I got there, I asked what it would cost. What should it cost? The young man asked. This prompted some discussion.

His name was Geoff, he’s 20 years old and had just launched himself into business with his brother. It turns out that he and his brother had worked at this little shop for the last five years, and the owner had decided to shut it down and get out of the business.

“I didn’t want to lose my job,” he explained, “so we asked him if we could take it over.” The rest was history. Two young entrepreneurs were born and were now, thrown into business, figuring out their way.

Geoff explained that they were still figuring out what they should be charging for their services. So their solution was to ask customers what the service was worth.

Original, brilliant, entrepreneurial thinking. Align with your customers, let them set a reasonable price and become part of the team. At least, that’s what it felt like to me. I wanted to see this young man and his fledgling business succeed.

And his strategy worked. I said I thought the price should be $40 or $50; he said he was thinking around $35. So let’s put it at $39, he said — giving me a bargain, less than I expected, while he got a little more than he thought. It felt fair to both of us.

Now this might not work for every customer; and he may face some tough conversations ahead of him. But he’ll do fine. This young man is following his heart, doing what he loves to do, and making folks happy at the same time. He’s learning how to make business decisions, but he already understands — intuitively — how to be successful.

Geoff, here’s a toast to you and your brother and your new business. I’m betting on you, and I’m telling everyone about you. Here’s to success!

The series, conducted by Dr. Bill Ashworth, at Linda Hall Library (Kansas City’s hidden treasure) has been delightful.<Update: Maybe not-so-hidden? See November 1  NYTimes article with prominent reference to Linda Hall Library.>

Ashworth is curator of “The Grandeur of Life” exhibit and author of the exhibition catalog. He’s also an associate professor of history at UMKC and consultant for the History of Science at Linda Hall Library. Ashworth brings Darwin to life and is continually telling stories that paint the context of life and the knowledge of the day.

Darwin, I learned, really did not like his schooling — not his prep school time at Dr. Butler’s School in Shrewsbury, or his medical studies at Edinburgh University, or his clergy studies at Cambridge University. His letters talked about how boring his professors were, how dreadful the topics and, like most university guys, he even participated in a drinking club. (The club’s crest included a beer keg, tankards and a water pipe, and in Latin, the phrase “replete with barley and ale.”)

It’s not that he wasn’t curious or interested in learning. Not at all. He just wasn’t suited to the lectures and the classical training that was meted out. It was boring and outdated, and he had other interests — like exploring the estuaries at the Firth of Forth and, later, collecting beetles.

He indulged his passion for collecting things, and that changed the course of science.

It wasn’t always easy. Darwin faced some pretty harsh criticism from his father, who told him he likely wouldn’t amount to anything (I’m paraphrasing, but it wasn’t positive feedback at all). Despite his failures in school, and letting his family down by not following his father’s footsteps in medicine and rejecting a career in the clergy, he managed to follow his interests and that made all the difference.

I learned one other bit that fascinated me: When Darwin returned from his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he realized that he didn’t know what all of his collections of bones and fossils and specimens really were. He admitted that he wasn’t skilled enough to identify them.

So he asked for help.

He gave his collection of creatures’bones to Richard Owen, famous anatomist (known as the English Cuvier), and he gave his collection of 26 Galapagos birds to John Gould, the famous naturalist painter of birds. It was Owen who identified key items in the bones, including the giant sloth; and it was Gould who told him that 13 of the Galapagos birds were finches.

What he learned floored him and led him to ask: why? The rest is history — he kept searching for answers and produced “The Origin of Species” to explain the  questions.

Darwin had asked for help and shared his collections to get it. He’d had a bittersweet experience earlier: At Edinburgh, he’d been thrilled to discover a new type of seaweed but when he told his mentor about it, the professor told him to get off his turf and then took credit for Darwin’s find. So Darwin was seduced by the excitement of uncovering new knowledge, and yet he must have been frustrated by the pettiness and unfairness of the professor who claimed it.

Still, he took a chance again. He was willing to share what he’d found. I have to believe that, even though he didn’t know what he had, his passion for LEARNING overcame the risk of losing “credit” for it.

It was risky then and it’s risky now.

It takes courage to admit what you don’t know. It’s hard to ask for help. Darwin won’t be remembered for this, but he wouldn’t be remembered at all if he hadn’t done this.

There’s a sweetness in this little backstory lesson: take a risk, share information, collaborate. It still makes sense, 150 years later.

The airline attendant announced that it was time for preboarding. We rose to join the line. I was still coaching her, and as we moved to join the line, we cut in front of someone.

I hadn’t seen him.

Or maybe I saw him but didn’t imagine him in a preboarding line.

Nevertheless, I stepped in front of him guiding my sister.

“I don’t mind you going ahead of me,” he said, “but I was in line.”

I felt like crawling under a rock, how stupid of me — why didn’t I see him and register that he was in line? I was preoccupied but my lack of respect was as stunning to me as a blow. How did this happen?

I apologized, but he insisted that my sister go ahead of him. Then with a big smile and gesture full of welcoming grace, he offered to help her get settled on the plane. She happily took his arm and they trotted off.

Suddenly I’m alone there, without a chance to say anything further but call out my thanks as they walk down the jetway.

Later, I replayed the scene in my mind. I had made an assumption that he wasn’t in line, my concern for my sister had propelled me to block out others — and it was exactly the wrong behavior.  I was wrong, acting without seeing and without concern for others.  It was a powerful lesson, and I send my thanks to my unknown teacher for opening my eyes with his personal coaching. It was an uncomfortable moment, but a necessary one.

I thank him because his actions changed me.

I know what it feels like to be invisible to others, to be overlooked. I pride myself on my enlightened respect for others — yet here I was, utterly blind to others in this moment. I was so appalled at myself that I have been consciously training myself to see more — to observe and watch and think and serve others more actively. To really see.

I am learning, and while I have a long way to go, I will get better at this as I practice it more.

The one thing a business must have is customers.  And today’s customer is a lot like today’s citizen journalist.  Your customer:

• Cares. The Customer cared enough to give you money for your service or product.
• Has a voice.  The Customer can spread stories about the great or poor experience.
• Can amplify the story. Here’s where Social Media changes the traditional interaction between buyer and sell — and the outcome. Customers have always had a voice, but now Customers can easily form spontaneous organizations with others anywhere. Instead of just talking to a neighbor or coworkers, your Customer today can Twitter, launch a blog, publish ratings and build a Facebook community about the experience, etc.

So what?

Here’s a great example from November: The Motrin ad.

It ticked off some blogging moms who wrote about it — here’s the original post.  Next a Twitter army spontaneously formed and quickly spiraled into a movement, including a campaign on Facebook to boycott Motrin.  It spawned parodies and hit mainstream media and generated lots of angry customers for Motrin.  Motrin responded but even a big company with all its resources and smarts didn’t get it exactly right.

Need more examples? How about SciFi — er, SyFy? Or Tropicana’s new labeling?

Being a Customer today is a participatory experience — another example of mass collaboration. As a business, you can listen and engage, even empower your customers and employees to speak for you. After all, they are already.

Why not participate?

Sure, for a business, it’s a change and it can be disruptive — but probably more disruptive if you don’t.

To be successful, you’ll also have to balance top-down hierarchy with participatory technology, and maybe rethink your perspectives on control vs. freedom.  You’ll want to relinquish any belief that you know where the good ideas come from or that you know all the good ideas, and replace that with a willingness to listen, learn and respect the individuals who care enough to engage with you.  Sure, it can be messy (remember Motrin?) — but also authentic and powerful and rewarding to the business.

There are other, more tangible and practical things you’ll want to do too.

• Do an audit — what’s the marketplace really saying about you right now? What’s happening with your competitors here, too? (Although, again, this one  starts with the soft skill of listening.)
• Define your strategy. Know what you want to accomplish.
• You might need policies on the changes and on managing risk. (Like email, you have some ownership in tracking, auditing, defining what’s unacceptable, storage, privacy, etc.) Don’t lose sight of the collaborative nature of social media, use the culture to help with self-policing and honest engagement.
• Engage slowly.  Don’t lose sight of the need for authenticity — don’t let corporate-speak take over.  Be real.
• Over time, engage in full.  Your employees speak for you, so do your customers. You initiate conversations, invite feedback and give something back to those individuals who care enough to engage with you.  Build relationships.
• Over time, build this process into your standards and culture.

It’s your community, and it’s already there. It’s up to you to join in.

UPDATE:  Here’s a nice summary from the LA Times, incorporating some other incidents (Amazon, CNN, Dominos) and describing the need for rapid response.

We’re in San Francisco, on business, but simply HAVE to stop at all of our favorite spots.   So it is that Saturday evening, we decide to stop by the Marines’Memorial Club for a drink. It’s on the 11th floor of a Union Square-area building with a lovely view of the bay and the city.

The club is sold out for dinner, but it’s still quiet. A piano man is playing and singing and we take a small table nearby.  We notice a woman who comes in and sits alone at the bar. She has white-grey hair, carefully coiffed; she’s wearing a once-fashionable suit, carrying an umbrella and the red rose that the doorman or host has given to her.  She is obviously comfortable at the bar, nodding to the bartender who knows to mix her a gin and tonic on the rocks.  And so she sits, ignoring the television, the piano man, the surroundings.

We move over to join her — it’s a chance to talk with someone. We buy her a refill and introduce ourselves; it’s easy for us to babble a bit about ourselves to let her relax. She is slow to let her guard down — she engages cautiously in our conversation.  Is she a regular here? Yes. A member of the club? No.

We explain that we are members and just in town visiting; we have a fondness for the club as it has introduced us to people all over the world in reciprocal clubs — in London, Edinburgh, New York City, Wellington, NZ.  At that, she perks up: it turns out she is Ellen, a native of New Zealand, and she is delighted when we tell her our impressions of that perfect and beautiful land. She asks if we visited the club in New Zealand, and when she learns we did, she tells us a little about herself.

When she was young, perhaps still in her teen years, she had met a US Marine there. And she thought she loved him, she thought he loved her, too. But her parents said she was too young, and she wasn’t allowed to see him again. Not long after, she moved to Australia and years later, to the United States. But she never forgot that Marine and was still wondering what might have happened…

We had a parallel story: our dear friend Gordon Smreker was a Marine at Wellington with the 2nd Marine Division in WWII. He loved it there, and he met a woman he loved. But he had to ship out and never was able to return. He later married and lived a full and generous life. But he had a certain look when he talked about New Zealand, always. I believe he also wondered … what if…

We hugged and kissed Ellen when we left the bar. She thanked us and told us we’d probably never understand how much it mean to her to talk this Valentine’s Day eve.  All I can do is take her lesson to heart, and know that even not taking a risk IS taking a risk.

Here’s to trusting your instincts.