Back to Business!

My last post was about the importance of vacation. I took my vacation to Bar Harbor, ME where I relaxed by doing some hikes around Acadia National Park, taking a ride on Lulu’s Lobster boat, a whale watch and learning to do some real rock climbing. This vacation was personally well timed but not professionally!

I left the office during the week before we were to host our Customer Service Management Forum for our expansion stage portfolio companies and our prospect companies looking for investors. If you have read some of my older posts on forum setup and execution, you would know that the last week is normally used to tie up any loose ends and finalize all the details with the chosen venue. I was not here to manage the critical last week!

Upon my return from a relaxing vacation, I had to scramble to make sure that everything was in complete order. This including finalizing the attendee list, making a couple of sets of name tags, printing and binding the slide presentations along with our attendee booklet, working with the venue to finalize food & beverage and audio visual, etc. I got back on a Tuesday and the cocktail reception for the forum was on Wednesday… This provided me with a very small window to make things happen. I ran down to the wire and thankfully, everything was well executed.

Professionally speaking, from an operational support point of view, the reason that my vacation was not well timed was because it caused me to feel frantic. When you work frantically, you tend to make mistakes and/or overlook details. As an operational support person, my job is to make sure that all the details — no matter how small — have been taken care of.

I have learned a great lesson from this vacation and immediately following Customer Service Management Forum. I will desperately attempt to never again schedule a vacation so close to a large forum!

Do you have any experiences that did not go so well because of a poorly timed vacation?