Franklin Taggart's Virtual Coffee Break

Your Own Best Company has featured over 40 interviews since May 2021, and it's time for some reflections and some highlights. Add to that the 90 Virtual Coffee Break shows and you've got a lot to sort through. Join Franklin for some memories, some encouragement, and some gratitude as he looks back on the first year of Your Own Best Company.

Rethinking and repurposing how we package and present our skills for new opportunities is on my mind tonight. Why couldn't a trained journalist bring her interviewing skills into a role where she is interviewing customers of a business for well-articulated testimonials? What if the person who has been waiting tables for ten years repackaged his ability to remember specific people, their requests,...

An important conversation with a friend today who's been giving his business 1000 percent and finds himself needing some steady income. This isn't an uncommon experience for solopreneurs, freelancers, and artistic creatives. Many of us find times in our lives when we need to just line up a steady income to cover our basic needs until our businesses can get to the point where they are doing that fo...

It was a five-client day with a sideways wind-blown trip to the airport and back, and I'm feeling it. I even forgot to bring my coffee to this Coffee Break.  For much of my life, tiredness has been a good reason not to follow through. So has depression. So has sadness. So has every other reason.  My commitment to making one video a day has been mostly to see for myself that I can actuall...

I'm creating a course on starting a blog. No, I'm not twenty years too late. Blogs are enjoying a comeback, and long-form writing is gaining traction in places like Substack, Medium, and some of the old standby collections like Elephant Journal and Huffington Post.  I'm creating the course because I believe blogging is the best way to form and nurture client relationships at a very low cost....

Marilyn Corrado RIP

I used to feel guilty about not being productive all the time. But we're not designed for full-time productivity. There is also a cultural tsk tsk about "wasting time" that I want to challenge. As I've gotten older and faced more physical and energetic challenges, I've realized that my downtime is equally crucial to my creative process: time spent writing, speaking, making music, doing these video...

LeAndra Foster encourages women to take vows of wealth to replace their past habits of scarcity and poverty. It starts with educating themselves about money, then working out the relationships they have with money, and leads to allowing themselves to be wealthy. You'll hear her story of realizing her wealth had surpassed seven figures but still living like the girl from the farm community where sh...

Dear YouTube Subscriber! If you are struggling to find the right words to get people to buy stuff, you're going to want to watch this video! You're about to hear something that will change your world - FOREVER! You'll learn how to breathlessly mesmerize readers step-by-step as they progress toward the one goal - buying stuff! You'll learn these great things: ** How to sound enthusiastic about anyt...

Half or more of the people who contact me for career coaching are nearing retirement and are starting to plan for their next phase of work after they retire. In this Coffee Break, I share some of the most common ideas and directions they come up with and some insight into a few of them.  By far, the most satisfied and successful of my retired clients have been those who found an outlet for th...

How is it I can take a three-ingredient recipe for pound cake and make it so difficult and cumbersome that I spoil the cake and hate the process? Three conversations today happened on the topic of simplicity. Solopreneurs, especially us creative types, have a tendency to make everything much more grandiose and extreme than things really need to be. And it's wearing us out. From the teacher with th...

Four different conversations today centered on the challenge of planning for the ends of things. There's so much we can't know about our futures so we're creating a projecting an imagined future and constructing a plan for that knowing full well that life never goes exactly according to plan. In our businesses, so much energy and effort go into planning for the start of the business, and we get to...

This morning was a low-energy morning as many of my mornings are. I used to be thwarted by these kinds of emotions. Depression and anxiety are a kind of baseline for me. Over the past few years, I've learned some valuable things about the way our psychology and physiology work that have given me some useful tools and techniques to get myself out of the morning lows and into some useful highs. The...

Pretty bowled over by the news of Taylor Hawkins' death today. He is definitely too young, too soon, and yet he's made a lot of people feel better through his work here. I'm grateful for his music, his smile, his kinetic energy, and for the connections I share with my son through our mutual love for the Foo Fighters and their music. If you have a big idea or a big dream you've been sitting on, wai...

After two years in business as a brand strategist, Dre Beltrami became a mom. She tried to operate her business according to her pre-parenthood terms and the latest advice from the business gurus but found herself stretched too thin and needing a long break. Like every other business owner, Dre was challenged by pandemics and quarantines to reevaluate everything about her life and her business. Fa...

Sing to the tune of Daft Punk Is Playing At My House. Yes, everything that worked yesterday is not working today and it's thrown a kink into my works. I'm hoping the tech gods smile upon us and the technician visit tomorrow afternoon will do the trick. This is an expensive service that is costing those of us who depend on it a significant loss of productivity and income. The people have been nice,...

The first question to ask when you're not filling up your programs, selling enough products, or enrolling enough clients - How Many People Know? I have a client trying to get ten people signed up for a class. So far there are only three. We can assume those three found the offer attractive enough to enroll, so lets go back to the first question. How many people know? She emailed her list of 500 pe...

Have you ever had an idea that seemed so amazing and brilliant that you just had to share it with someone, but they didn't get it?  I was listening to The Entrepreneur's Ecosystem podcast this morning and they interviewed the creators of Interact quiz software (you should try it! I'm an affiliate https://interact.grsm.io/jboh69i54xwj ).  In the interview, they talked about their first ye...

Had a great conversation with a client this morning after returning from three days off. We were wondering why there was an emotional scorecard around taking time off. We both commented on having habits of stacking missed work up before or after a trip so that everything will continue to get done, but it seemed to both of us that didn't make much sense and it didn't make taking time away from work...

I just finished reading Small List, Big Results for the second time. Author Robbie Samuels has packed a powerful coaching process into 140 pages that will walk you from beginning to launch of a product or service that your followers will be waiting for. It will be exactly what they're looking for because you will be working with them from idea to launch. For entrepreneurs and businesses who have f...

An inside look at one of the ways I've improved my rest habits. Reading fiction at night instead of work-related non-fiction. Gets me out of my frontal lobe, problem-solving mind, and into my left brain fantasy mind. Makes for a better night's sleep and deeper rest. Calling my work habits into question at this late stage of my career might actually give me a little more time to contribute, but it...

On Your Own Best Company this week I am my own guest. There was a break in the guest schedule so I thought I'd bring up a chair and tell some of my story so that you can understand the history behind this podcast. From a Wyoming childhood to first jobs, discovering passions, learning at every step, and making opportunities from hardships, this story covers a lot of ground. #whatdrivesme #mywhy #wo...

First thing, Happy St. Patrick's Day! Thanks to my friend, Deanna for treating me to corned beef and cabbage at Henry's this afternoon.  I've talked before about the importance of celebrating as a business and marketing practice. Celebrate accomplishments, landmarks, birthdays, holidays, and anything else you can throw a party for, but I'd encourage you to start putting celebrations of every...

Area schools are on Spring Break this week and I, for once, have scheduled three days off in a row. In this Coffee Break, I have a lot to share about how I negotiate with my extrovert family when it comes to how we spend time off. It's not always an easy conversation to have. I also talk about how personality and preferences come into play in our career and business paths. At some point, I started...

In yesterday's Coffee Break, I was spouting off about the idea of becoming an influencer being a goal. I have no problem with someone pursuing that dream, but if that's their only focus, that alone won't be enough to sustain a business. If they hit the jackpot and make big cash for a little while, I'm not going to say anything negative about it. I believe in luck, as much as I do work. The part I...