Inflow

It has been a rather interesting week, flow wise. On Tuesday evening we had my Zoom event for Josh, which went very well. 80-odd contributors, good money, 45ish people showed up for the call, and most importantly the guest speakers were super-compelling and energetic and -- because we had taken the time to get them on a Zoom call with Josh and they had studied up on him and gotten a sense of who he was as a person -- they understood who he was and spoke from the heart.

Wednesday I was tired and needed to catch up on work, but I found myself thinking about what I should do next for campaign season: canvas, do literature drops or.... raise $ for Ronnie Chatterjee (NC's Democratic candidate for Treasurer). I had meant to do an event for him in the Spring, and then coronavirus hit. So I got to my desk and was talking to my officemate about something, and my phone rang. It was Ronnie, asking me to help out with his event next Wednesday at 5:30 featuring Beto and David Price (register here). Since I had about 25-30 people in NC I hadn't gotten around to for Josh, I said OK. Need to work on that this weekend.

Meanwhile, I was checking in with clients and prospects. Just in the last couple of days, I've had these conversations:

• A client closed the sale of a house in record time, above asking. Another client (I had introduced) had been broker on both the sale and purchase. Both clients are very happy.
• A client lost a job. I kinda saw it coming. He had been working from home for years, not pushing his career forward, and in the course of so doing had become expensive for his job function. Meanwhile, his employer, the hottest thing in big tech in 2000, no longer was, and had missed the boat on making its video conferencing product the default (Zoom ate its lunch). Got good severance, I will coach him through the period between jobs.
•  A retirement plan client got a bunch of PPP $ and then had business flourish in the virtual environment, so actually didn't need the money, but will likely be able to have it forgivable because they maintained headcount. They want advice on how to minimize taxes on the income (probably will be hard to do, but interesting conversations can be had with CFO types)
• A friend lost his spouse to cancer. Needs counsel re what to do with inherited IRA $, refinancing mortgage, etc. And he really needs to buy some life insurance. If anything, this teaches me that I need to push people harder to buy life insurance, despite how much people hate it and people who tell them to do it. Because I don't get paid to sell it, hopefully he will hear me.
• A friend and longtime prospect is having her business blow up because it got posted on an internal bulletin board at one of the tech giants. She needs to hire and scale, but doesn't have written processes and doesn't know how to scale a business, particularly in an all virtual world (hint: not many people know how to do the latter part). In principle I could help figure this out, but don't really have the time. Will refer her to another client who is a management consultant.  

This is some of the stuff that crossed my desk this week. All told, an interesting week.

* Almost exactly as I hit publish on this post, my Outlook inbox chimed, letting me know my friend who is jumping medical practices and is diving into the details of a partnership buy-in had a next tranche of documents for me to review...