Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

The impending snow in Colorado has me thinking about preparedness. I'm not. I can't say that preparedness is one of my strong suits unless you count being prepared to improvise.  If the plows get the roads cleared quickly enough I'll be giving an in-person talk at Desk Chair Workspace here in downtown Loveland. My topic is Marketing Lessons We All Learned In Kindergarten. It's a call to get back to simplicity and basics in the ways we bring our businesses and customers together. We feel a lot of pressure to show up everywhere all the time and we rapidly find that it's not a sustainable business model or lifestyle. I think we can learn a lot by remembering how easy it was to start friendships when we were young. The same steps are what we use to build relationships with customers - Attract, Introduce, Share Enthusiasm, Find Things In Common, Make Invitations, Play Together, Create Memories. It doesn't have to be more difficult than that. Let's get out of our

It's been a few years since I've been able to participate in Made In Loveland. I'll be joining the fun this year as a speaker on February 3rd. My topic for the morning will be Marketing Lessons We Learned In Kindergarten: Don't Forget the Basics. Marketing, especially for new businesses can be one of the biggest sources of frustration, confusion, and difficulty. There are so many options - the channels we use, the messages we send, the tools and tactics that fill up our email inboxes - and many times, marketing is the aspect of business that new owners are the least prepared for. They underestimate the time, energy, and money it takes to get their businesses and their customers together. In a mad scramble to cover as many bases as they can, they enlist the help of their high school-aged kids to help with Instagram and TikTok while trying to find time to create and manage an email newsletter that most of their customers never read. And the fees that marketing agencies an