We don’t post as much about our Trikkes, because we haven’t been riding them much lately. Which I miss. Until we get the car setup with a roof rack for the luggage, the Trikke’s stay home.

However if the handle bar is long enough, this little mini-scooter may be FUN to get our groove on. You do get a little bit of the carving motion – take a peek at the video below for the Razor Siege Scooter is And we’ll have fun fun fun…

I love this video ! Maybe one of the days on our travels we’ll get to see this cute car in person?

We passed under a Curious banner as we made our way to the waterfront in Charleston. Roller Derby at the Citadel. That sounded like a great way to spend the evening in Charleston. We headed over early and got a chance to meet a few of the ladies and even Mama Q the “Derby Mom”.

We bought VIP tickets for tonight and we hope to get some more interviews and videos for you.

We are qiking now, too. http://qik.com/theroamingentrepreneur so check out the channel to see some nice video from the VIP party and the roller derby bout.

And you can see my roller derby tshirt here !

We have had a great time in Atlanta this week as we participated in the Stompernet SEO Pro event. Toi kept the office stuff handled, while I had opportunities to network AND present at this event.

I was privileged to present on three different topics: SEO 101, iMovie Basics and Building an Organic Referral Network for your SEO Firm. The audience was great! On the first night, I wasn’t sure how things were going … and Dan Thies helped me put it in perspective.  It’s 10:30PM at the end of an OPTIONAL night session and the attendees were all still in their seats at the end. He said, “that’s how you know” if they’re packing up or leaving before the end, then you’ve lost them.

My next presentation was on the basics of iMovie – simple import, add an audio track and upload to YouTube.  I can feel a webinar coming on for this one.

On Saturday I made my primary presentation which was about Building an Organic Referral Network for your SEO Firm, Brad Fallon called it Wholesale SEO, it’s not exactly wholesale – but it drives the point home. 90% of my booked business from the past year has been with referrals. One of the important aspects of building a referral business is credibility – and I offered some tips on local SEO and even showed where I ranked in Google for Jacksonville SEO Expert and Jacksonville SEO Company. I also suggested they start and maintain a blog offering SEO Tips, too.

It was a great event overall, I learned some new SEO Management tricks that will help me provide even better services for my clients, too.

As I write this we’ve stopped for lunch at a little Japanese and Sushi restaurant in Lithonia GA. The Food was tasty and the service was FAST. I barely had time to make a phone call before the drinks, soup and salad were back on the table.  We ordered the lunch portion Bento Box, we should have shared, because it was more than the sushi lunch portions I have in other places.

Next Stop: A couple of days with my Sisters outside Aiken, SC.

I have decided, I really don’t like exercising in the gym, I find it completely boring and mind numbing – unless I am working one on one with a personal trainer. With the impending travel plans – setting up my own personal trainer, just doesn’t make sense. BUT, I know that I have to “move” to continue on my healthier path.

I have decided to make “PLAY TIME” you know like recess when we were back in school – and often I can get Toi to get out with me. The cost so far about $30 for a soccer ball, basketball and a badminton raquet set with birdies.  So now we have grown up play time a few times every week.  Its gets a little more fun when my 4 & 7 year old nephews come over and they run me all over the soccer field – AWESOME.

Even in this Florida heat, I am staying hydrated and having fun. OOPS did I say I was having FUN while “Exercising?” Who knew that could be true, and the good news is that the recess gear fits nicely in the Subaru, so we can take our portable playground and get outdoors just about anywhere we travel.

I have even taken a look at the Jacksonville Kickball League – for more Adult Fun Time. That looks like a really great time, but with the traveling may not be a good fit – but I am going to make it out to watch a game soon.

SO … if its not in the GYM, how do you get out and get your exercise?  Any sports ideas for us to play while were out on the road?   Chime in below – we love hearing from you!

Had a wonderful time this evening celebrating with the latest graduating class for Marketing Matters, a mentorship program of the Jacksonville Women’s Business Center. It is a pleasure to see entrepreneurs dig in their heels to learn more on how to get the most from their marketing efforts.

This was the 4th year that I have had the privilege to present and train for this great group, and its wonderful to hear about their successes and achievements after completing the program.

CONGRATULATIONS to the Graduates.  Thank you for allowing me share in the celebration of your success!

Here are a few of the Photos from the Graduation.  I thought it would be rude to upload them during the event, since I was in the presenter row in the front of the room.

We have been Roaming at home lately, so I have been a little “lazy” to post events from Jacksonville – mea culpa.

Last week may have been the week of mediocre food, as I had two experiences where the server could have really saved the day, but they simply were not asking the right questions.

SCENARIO 1: At a business lunch, the server (who was pretty scarce once he delivered the food) never asked how our meal was, and didn’t notice that I had only eaten half of a small portion meal.  At the end of the meal, he had but one question for me:

Are you done?

He didn’t ask how the meal was, or why I had left so much food on my plate, nothing. Since he didn’t ask me how things were, I chose to keep my mouth shut. I know some of our fans will scold me for not opening my mouth – but I was in a business lunch, and didn’t think it was necessary for me to suggest a fix their problems at that time.

SCENARIO 2: Toi and I are having dinner, and really it was only OK, nothing to brag about. At the end of the meal the the server asked the question:

Was everything OK?

OK, yes, it was just OK, was my reply. But she didn’t get the subtlety that it was ONLY OK.

No business is perfect, but we have to work on improving things a little at a time. I know we have times when we don’t ask the right questions, and we continue to learn and grow.

When taking a Cruise Ship vacation years ago, I was continually asked by the staff how things were. However, their gratuity depended on my opinion of the trip, so the did not just say …

How Was It ?   or  Is Everything OK?

If you’ve been on a cruise, I bet you’ve experienced this too, the questions go like this:

Was your dinner EXCELLENT this evening?

Did you find everything in your stateroom to be EXCELLENT?

Was the entertainment EXCELLENT?

Was your excursion Excellent?

There are TWO parts to this idea, though. ONE they want to bump their gratuity – fantastic, and I am all for them training me to believe that I have had an EXCELLENT experience.

BUT here’s the bigger part, if it’s not EXCELLENT – then they know where they can make an improvement, and work to make my experience EXCELLENT.

So what questions do you ask you customers? Do you look for ways to make it an EXCELLENT experience, one they’d like to repeat over and over again?

Just think about the ways you can simply CHANGE  your language, to make it more thoughtful for the customer and more beneficial for you.

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We’ll be posting more from the Jacksonville Roams, and we look forward to seeing you in our travels. We are also beginning to look for sponsors who’d like to be included in future broadcasts as we start putting together more shows.

One of the great things about having a company that sells cases to protect all kinds of technical gadgets, is that from time-to-time we just have to purchase the gadget to set it up for demonstration and examples of how our products work in the case and especially in the water – or under the water.

Last month we visited with local auto body shop and did some preliminary tests with our ipad waterproof case, but we didn’t get a chance to try and “drown” it underwater, and strangely, we just haven’t had anyone volunteer to allow us to try and drown their iPad, either. So today we’re taking funds from the marketing budget and we’re off to the Apple Store – to get our hands on the iPad today.

And we’ve picked a good day, too, after our genius shopping appointment they are hosting an iPad Tour Class -so we’ll leave ready to use the iPad too.

Earlier this week I submitted a post on Ezine Articles on the 5 Ways To Use Our iPad When Traveling.

Having completed our first on the road journey as roaming entrepreneurs, it because obvious that the managing all the electronics that keep the business going, along with the wires to keep them charged became a bit unbearable. I really want to simplify at least part of the process, and I think the iPad will do just the trick. Read the rest of the iPad Article at EzineArticles.com

First, this is not a blog post I ever imagined myself writing, it was not planned … I was inspired by my friend Julie who has the best scrapbooking supplies online and she shares some pretty heartfelt parts of her life with her scrapping customers – she is quite real. Her blog post today was about having a good, authentic life. Which has led me to share my yesterday:

Had a very interesting conversation with my Life Coach in Jacksonville. As we start traveling more I guess we’ll move to phone coaching sessions, I do like the face to face contact, perhaps instead of phone coaching – maybe we’ll do it over Skype Video. But I digress.

The interesting conversation was about the “Big Rocks” … If you are not familiar with Steven Covey and First things First, take a look at the video below.

So for me, I have always thought of taking care of myself as “important”, but never as “urgent”. I have tried time and time and time and time and time and time and time again (you get the point) – to work on eating better, getting more exercise, working less, getting more sleep, in general taking better care of myself.

Apparently I am pretty driven – and I honestly have never thought of it that way – I simply thought of it as being responsible and taking care of my family. In the last two years or so I have had to work harder to simply maintain our ever declining market shares in our online ecommerce stores. In addition to the normal workload, I added more consulting clients, wrote a book, helped Toi launch a new local search optimization division and added The Roaming Entrepreneurs as a progressive lifestyle change – all while selling our home, closing our warehouse, reshaping our fulfillment system, reducing staff, learning to shoot and edit video, teaching a 13 week online seminar and taking 2 online classes and moving. Exactly when was I supposed to think about taking care of myself? I know that it’s important – but exactly when could I feel it was also URGENT.

Continued in Knowing is Not Enough Part 2: …my Oprah AHA Moment …

If you haven’t read Knowing is Not Enough Part 1 – click here to go to the beginning of this post.

The beginning on my Oprah AHA Moment …

Last fall I presented a concept called Incremental Marketing on a Micro Budget – and one of the Key Factors is that you have to schedule a priority time EVERY BUSINESS day to work on the marketing for your business. As entrepreneurs we will always find a way to take care of the “fires” that happen: employee’s calling in sick, vendor issues, customer service problems, technical glitches, a sick child at school, flat tires, etc. At some point – our day becomes consumed with firefighting (the small rocks) and not with proactive action in marketing and growing our businesses.

On Monday, as I explained this concept to a friend, it hit me that the same thing is happening in my personal life – and maybe yours. I have been so caught up in providing for my family and in service to others, I haven’t truly made providing for myself an URGENT PRIORITY. I am not talking self-centered it’s all about me, me, me. I mean just in the basics like a hot meal – that isn’t in a wrapper – served at a table – without a computer in my face. In fact a new goal I am working on is to eat my meals without the laptop open. To actually take 15 minutes to stop and chew without working on something.

My coach – who doesn’t let me get away with much – said to me yesterday, as I paraphrase. ‘Not to minimize the progress of your eating a meal without your computer, but really should that be such a major accomplishment?’ OUCH! Not because of what she said, but because it was true. Boy, if allowing myself a reasonable time slot to consume a healthy meal is so hard – what is trying to exercise going to feel like?

It feels like a mountain.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t “tried” to be healthier and look after myself – in fact, I have probably tried 10 or 20 different “things” in the last 10 years, and still I have gotten the same results. I am heavier, more tired, overwhelmed and at times feeling incredibly “under accomplished”. This is no pity party – by any means – it is just a true look in the proverbial mirror. An authentic look.

That mirror is sometimes a hard place to look for me – not the physical mirror – but the mental one. See, KNOWING that something is IMPORTANT, is not the same as setting it as a PRIORITY and behaving like it is important. I consider myself lucky that I learn quickly, but learning is not doing, learning is only knowing, and knowing is not enough.

At what point do I make that shift from important to important and urgent? It’s not until we are so pissed off with where we are that are willing to make that change. The pain of going back has to be greater than the pain of where we’re going. I think that pain is here for me. My coach suggested getting a “big rock” as a physical, visual reminder – and writing my name on it to remind me that I have to put myself and my health as an important priority.

The reason I want to have a mobile lifestyle and be a roaming entrepreneur is because of my Mom. She worked really, really hard her entire life. She worked for the same company for nearly 30 years, she retired at 63, within a few months became quite ill. At 64, Mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer and spent the remaining 2 1/2 years of her life fighting the disease. I respect and admire my Mother for everything she did for me, but I don’t want to Work, Get Sick, Die. I want to work, live, enjoy, live, work, thrive, travel and live to be a healthy, vibrant 115 years old and die in my sleep. Perhaps the magic will be in the authenticity and accountability of sharing this with you.

I have to go find a rock now and write my name on it. I’ll post a picture when I have it.

Meantime, as always we love your comments and feedback. Feel free to post them below – or even share your big rock challenges, too.