La Bene Vita

Friday

Keith, my other half, is 40 today. Tomorrow, we celebrate at Butter's Bar. Yes, Robert Waltz , you're invited, if you can handle the Ohio State game playing in the background.

Post at MichelleTuesday.com   at least once per week.
but I'm trying to keep this in front of me. I need to create a weekly schedule that includes bank account reconciliation and blogging, probably on Saturday or Sunday afternoons.

Business priorities for MTMS  :
Brainstorm list of projects for volunteers.
See below.

Holiday customer appreciation event or activity
Delegated to a customer who wanted to volunteer. She came up with the greatest idea: to record a holiday CD of teachers and advanced students performing to mail to all our clients. Then she came up with the second greatest idea, which was to have my photographer take photos of each student with his or her instrument at the recital, and send the photo to the parent along with a holiday/seasonal card. This woman is a genius.

Scheduling and retention databases
Not yesterday, but I have been working on this. Chris, our office manager, started working on her own elaborately linked and conditionally-formatted Excel spreadsheet, because she was tired of waiting on me. That's actually fantastic, because I didn't want to do it anyway it's easier to design a database that's been created in Excel and used for awhile.

Close October books and update projections and break-even
We're working on this. Quickbooks is stupid. Its accrual-based reporting assumes that your revenue is earned when the invoice is created. Granted, in most businesses, you pay for the service after you receive it. But I can't possibly be the only tuition-based advance-payment service out there.

Fill Samplers
We just scheduled our classes for December (6) and January (13). I hope we aren't being overly optimistic. I was thinking holding off on advertising for the month of December (?!?!) beyond our annually-paid campaigns. First, everyone advertises in December, so won't we be lost in the shuffle? Second, we can barely keep up with our growth. Third, I'm interested to see if I'm wasting my money, because a vast majority (probably 90-95%) of our customers drove by and saw the sign or found us online (or both, typically in that order.) As an aside, I find it hysterical that http://www.michelletuesday.com/musicschool has no pagerank to speak of and that its Alexa rank has plummeted from 400k to 740k in the last month or two, and yet I'm getting exponentially more traffic and sales conversions.

Drums and soundproofing.
In progress. I moved the drums to a different room and tried hanging the soundproofing blankets so they reach the floor. It's not done, but I think it may work.

Temporary goal: Plan Keith's 40th birthday party.
As far as I'm concerned, this is done. Although I guess maybe I should bring black balloons or something. And a cake.

Launch one new performance repertoire song per week.
Pending and unlikely.

One load of laundry per day.
NO. But it's Keith's birthday. I should do all the laundry. And do the dishes, too.

Achieve a weight of 150 by 12/31/2010
Weight:
Meals:
5:00am Ask me in a few hours. I'm thinking of going back to bed now.
9:00am 1/3 cup eggnog (2)
10:30am Coffee (1)
11:00am Baby Snickers (2)
1:30pm Sammich (7)  and baby Snickers (2)

TOTAL POINTS: 14 (Goal: 25)