Welcome to Smuggle Me

It seems like just yesterday that the Super Bowl finished, but people are already talking about the NFL draft. Considering how many games played in the NFL, it is amazing to me how the NFL still gets talked about year round.

Take for example this website that has the 2007 NFL Mock Draft. People are going to be talking for a long time about these picks. Every sports personality out there does something similar. This website is really not worth anything. It’s just one person’s opinions and I don’t think anyone really knows. A team chooses what they want to do on draft day and you never know who will be available. Unless of course you’re the number 1 pick of the draft.

The valuable part of Doc’s mock NFL draft is really in the description of players. I think it’s interesting and fun to know about the various players and why your NFL team would draft that player.

Also, I think Doc’s dead on that Oakland is going to take JaMarcus Russell, QB, LSU at number 1.

This last week at school one of the ladies in my class was making a comment and she said the phrase, “Continuity of Operations Plan.” The professor, who barely speaks English, just listened and nodded when she said it. Everyone in the class just listened and I think they must think she is so intelligent.

Man alive. Can anyone please tell me what a Continuity of Operations plan is? I’ve never heard that term before in my life. I think she was talking about a disaster recovery plan, but she should use the proper terminology when she’s talking. I hate when people make up phrases that no one else understands. It’s pretty ridiculous.

Oh well, it gave me a good laugh in class and good blogging material.

Entrepreneurship and business are two of my latest passions. I’ve recently blogged about venture capitalist extraordinaire Dan Rua. I just really love so many facets of business.

However, the one I think wraps everything else together is strategic planning. Strategic Planning Thoughts is a blog dedicated to the subject of strategic planning. I really like the site because it has some great insights on strategic planning. In one post, Robert Bradford does an analysis of the various types of ways that a business in Ann Arbor obtains customers. Of course word of mouth and Repeat! customers were the highest. However, most of their money was being spent on the least productive customer finding methods, location and advertising. Of course he points out that we should focus more on the other finding methods.

My biggest complaint about the blog post is that he doesn’t really talk about how you generate more word of mouth customers. Sure, it’s a noble idea that you should generate more word of mouth customers, but how do you actually accomplish that goal?

I’ve thought about similar things on one of my websites. We’ve accomplished it by scraping people’s email contact list to gain referrals. Of course we have a refer a friend on the website. These type of tools really help produce what Robert Bradford talks about on his blog.

Here’s a nice tip from his latest post:

Tip Number One - Be Disciplined in Your Strategic Planning

Reminds me of a conversation I had recently about a company being ADHD and changing their direction every other day. I guess that’s the discipline he’s talking about.