Budget-bashed?

Go for the GOLD!

You thought “Working Under Pressure” was a power-wash business? (I know, enough jokes; get to the free champagne part; OK, keep reading!) 

     Let’s imagine you’ve got a bashed budget in one hand and are limited to the Northeast. Well, that’s not a strangulation script all by itself, but now add to the mix that you’ve just gotten requests from above (in your other hand) to pull off a spectacular meeting at a spectacular location. Sound familiar?

     So how in the world do you find that top-quality all-inclusive, stunning property with less money than you had last year? Like the elusive butterfly that will land on your shoulder when you stop chasing it, STOP looking! This is a time for greatness. And you came to the right place. The champagne’s on ice, waiting for you. Read on. 

     This is a time to rise above the clutter and clamor, to find the exact right place at the exact right price and book it. It will come to you. Close your eyes… no, wait, don’t close your eyes; you’ll miss getting the answer. Here it comes… are you ready? Here it is:

     Take those meager budget dollars out of your sweaty little fist and count out what’s left. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Okay, good. Now, pick up the nearest phone and dial: 1.800.222.2909 and ask for Kristy, Kevin or Dan. If they’re not in, leave a message with your name and number and best times to call back.

     When you get one (or all) of them, tell he/she/them your sad story. Ask what’s possible… and remember to tell them you got their contact information from Hal’s Blog… they’ll throw in a free champagne toast to start or end your meeting (200 people? No problem!).

     Not only will you get everything your boss ever dreamed of and more in a truly spectacular setting with experienced top professional meeting support, food and room service staffs, plus every amenity imaginable, you can meet in private paradise just a 2-hour drive from Manhattan, 3 from Boston.

     From executive ropes course to golf and racecar-driving school to canoeing and kayaking, spacious clean rooms and top-rated casual dining with fresh EVERYthing, even homemade ketchup! The people you bring to this property will never stop talking about it, and they’ll never forget their meeting experience. What more can you ask?

     You want a taste before you call?

     Go to www.InterlakenInn.com right now. See for yourself why top meeting planners have been booking at Interlaken since the Berkshires had Foothills.        

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar  # # # 

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You still need “Meeting Magic” 

but your budget’s been bashed!

The boss expects you to arrange your next meeting at a 5-star resort with 5-star service in 5-star surroundings at ONE-star prices?? 

     Talk about meeting planners having an impossible job… You’re expected to work miracles without a wand or a prayer… and now, to top it off, your budget’s been bashed. Right? Or am I just imagining things? In the “old days” you could book fancy meetings at fancy locations for fancy prices and get top management compliments left and right. Right? No more.

     In fact, if you’re still on the job, and your organization is still having off-site meetings, you may be what little kids used to call a “lucky duck”! Maybe that’s not a reassuring thought, but what I’m about to tell you can be the most reassuring option you’ve had in years.

     Here it is:I have designed, delivered, and facilitated nearly 2,000 management training sesions, workshops, seminars and meetings nationwide and in Europe and the Caribbean. The sessions I ran took place in some of the world’s finest hotels, conference centers, and campus and cruise facilities.

     I understand the importance of having an experienced, competent, and reliable on-site support team on-call, of not having technical glitches, of having personable engaging staff services from people who know when to provide quiet top level performance behind the scenes and out of the spotlights.

I appreciate the need for knock-out facilities and inspiring surroundings where participants can be both relaxed and challenged.

     I know how good it isto have facility services that are so outstanding that the chef actually visits tables (not while meetings are in session), that someone shows up at your door with a replacement toothbrush five minutes after you call the desk, that nice weather prompts a last-minute request to meet for golf or car-racing or ropes course experiences, or to relocate a session to poolside or lakeside or gardenside and it’s quickly and cheerfully accommodated.

     Yeah, right, you say, at six gazillion dollars per person. Nope. The best-kept-secret location—known for hosting America’s top executive management teams— is available at far less than you paid for your last exotic location booking, and probably far less than you paid for your last boring one-dimensional location booking.

     And odds are, by the way, if the absolute perfect setting and services you seek are likely to be just a couple of hours drive from Manhattan or Boston Commons, transportation expenses will be a whole lot less too!  

     If you’re interestedin knowing more about this no-gimmicks/no-strings-attached opportunity to book the best world-class service facility and location for the least amount of money I’ve ever experienced, return here later this week for the details. If you just can’t wait, email me as noted below.  

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar  # # # 

FREE BLOG SUBSCRIPTION? Click on ”Posts RSS Feed” (Center Column), or now on your AMAZON Kindle for just $1.99 a month after a free trial. BE A CO-AUTHOR: Add your own 7 words to the end of the daily 255 days old growing tale! Click under “7-Word Story” (center column)

VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED!

     Imagine coming here for a business meeting from a small town in another country. You’re just starting to learn English. Your host picks you up at Newark Airport and–intent on getting you to her office in “The Big Apple”–heads for the New Jersey Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel into midtown Manhattan. Great Guggamuggah! Talk about culture shock!

     You’ve struggled with deciphering the difference between driving on the parkway and parking in the driveway. You read signs: “CASH” and “NO CASH.” You get cash at this little booth? No, it must mean you give cash. Then why go to “CASH” and pay if you can go to “NO CASH” and act broke and get by for free?

     “EXIT” or “NO EXIT” or “EXIT ONLY” present intriguing options. Then, just to screw up your brain, is “LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL” (so why not take it to avoid having to choose between “CASH” and “NO CASH”?). Aah, then there’s the whole question about whether “U TURN” or “NO U TURN” that’s just past the “CASH” ”NO CASH.” 

     I mean, why would U turn and have to pay again and why would U not be allowed to turn (especially if U needed to re-turn to the little booth to use the bathroom or something)? And wouldn’t your curiosity be aroused in 90-degree July weather about “BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROADWAY”?

     This doesn’t even compare to the questions the signs raise about your head.

     Uh, “CURVES AHEAD” and “STOP AHEAD” are puzzling, but you start to wonder about what kinds of animalistic creatures would urge you to “BRAKE AHEAD.” Then you see “JUGHANDLE AHEAD”…whew! And the radio blames traffic on “RUBBERNECKERS”???

     Standing still next to the “KEEP MOVING” sign in the middle of the tunnel, your host tells you how many hundred feet you are under the Hudson River and then notes how old the tunnel is and that it periodically springs a leak or two but that you’d probably only have to be there awhile. YUGZOWIE!

     So you finally get to the office. The 35th floor reception room with 4-inch thick buzzer entry glass doors next to the elevator has 6 plastic potted palms complete with strategically located yellowing leaves, a plastic-looking gum-chewing receptionist with spike heels, a 6-inch skirt and a plastic tube and a half’s worth of lipstick plastered between her nose and her chin.

     The coffee table sports three ragged copies of PEOPLE magazine from 1997, a National Geographic with the cover missing, and a few odd pages (aren’t they all?) of last week’s New York Times. The carpet has a large stain that resembles a Law & Order murder scene without chalk lines.

     There are dozens of moving black things breeding in the overhead fluorescents. Something piped out of ceiling speakers that resembles music is playing under the static. The coffee maker in the corner looks and smells like it’s been cooking for two days.

     Are you ready for your return flight yet?

     The business road to reception is filled with stuff we all take for granted. We’re used to rushing through this crummy airport route filled with confusion and traffic congestion. We’re used to rushing into office buildings and through disgusting and completely inhospitable reception areas every day without ever stopping to take inventory of what it must look like to a first time visitor.

     We KNOW there are no second first impressions, but we get ourselves in the mindset of thinking no one notices or cares about these things. They do and they do!

     When you take a customer, client, patient, prospect, associate, vendor, employee, friend or relative into your community and work environment , be sensitive to what that person is experiencing (especially someone from out of town!) and take the trouble to clean up the act before that individual’s arrival. Please note the word “before.” Thank you.   

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

A toy truck, a stroller, 

and pub coasters

strung with dental floss…

     A few years ago, our second or third trip to Ireland, Kathy and I –romanticized by the classic Bing Crosby Christmas song, “Christmas In Kilarney”– spent Christmas (our first away from home) at Kilarney Country Club. 

     Up a rocky, grass-between-the-tires dirt road from downtown Kilarney, jockeying “the wrong side” car controls to bounce cheerfully along between the seemingly endless stone walls that separated cows from sheep, we drove under a brick archway and pulled into a historic-looking brick complex that seemed to sport about three dozen two-story townhouses. 

     There was one other car at the far end.  We parked, found a smiling, green-eyed, freckled face and bubbling thick Irish accent at the office counter.  We registered and unpacked.  We had a spacious two-bedroom upstairs arrangement with living room and kitchen downstairs.  Our windows overlooked the property’s main courtyard and pathway to the Country Club Pub. 

     It seems when I think back that after the first day of being rebuked by a rude non-English speaking tourist family of six that literally comandeered the odd 3ft-deep indoor pool, we were actually the only guests there for the rest of the (Christmas) week. 

     We made the trek into town everyday, a beautiful, historic, bustling hub filled with happy holiday shopping locals, who seemed to visit a shop or two, then stop in a pub, then visit a shop or two, then stop in a pub . . . you get the idea.  And we drove hundreds of miles of picturesque unspoiled (and unlittered) countryside during the week, meeting only pleasant, accommodating-to-a-fault natives all along the way. 

     Night driving seemed a bit perilous, so we opted for evening visits to the Country Club Pub (the alternative was staying in our unit with three tv stations, two of which were German!).  The only Christmas tree we could find ($45 American) made Charlie Brown’s look like Rockefeller Plaza.  I think it was about 30 inches tall and had about 16 (or maybe it was 14?) scrawny branches. 

     We had no ornaments, but confiscated a wide range of carboard pub coasters in our travels, and strung them up with pieces of dental floss, a homemade alluminum foil star on top.  We stuffed two ”Season’s Greetings”-scrawled plastic shopping bags with small sofa pillows and hung them in our windows. 

     We grocery-shopped for the all-time elaborate brunch of Irish rasher (bacon), eggs, cheese, jam, butter, toast, fruit, crackers, cavier, coffee, tea, and a bottle of asti that (being entrenched deep in beer and ale country, cost 11 trillion dollars American) tasted a lot better than it was. 

     We exchanged gifts we bought walking down opposite sides of the downtown, waving in between shops, a book for me, a piece of Irish crystal and a little stuffed Irish Christmas Bear for her, plus some other goodies.  It was great! 

     Every minute there was great, even when 15 native Kilarney guys had us singing with them (at the Country Club Pub where they’d hiked to by flashlight from their nearby farms) until 3am which led us to the discovery that no one there had ever even heard of the Crosby song, “Christmas In Kilarney”!!! 

     With the rows of “y’got ta finish dem” topped-off pints of beer and ale lined up from one end of the bar to the other, planted there when 11:15pm closing time came, it ultimately mattered not that anyone heard of any song as long as you sang.  And sing we did!

     So much for that, but we had a wonderful experience there.  Just one thing was missing.  Family.  We spent half the afternoon trying to phone home, with circuit connections going from where we were on Ireland’s West Coast, to Northern Ireland, to Boston, to Florida, to New York, to the clan in New Jersey who sounded like they were in a tunnel. 

     It made us realize that all the happiness of the week there was momentarily lost to being lonesome for family.  We managed to bounce back after that when the resort manager and his wife (who we suspect might have been listening in to our phone connection efforts) invited us to their home to see the doll baby stroller Santa brought for their daughter.  (Last Christmas, Santa brought the doll!).  I think their son got a toy truck.  One single present each and those children were in heaven! 

     That certainly gave us cause for pause.  We in America are blessed with so much, and family is, well, what Christmas is all about now, isn’t it? 

     I truly hope for you that you enjoy what you have today, and not take any of it for granted. 

     Oh, one last thing: Please remember to God Bless Our Troops for their eternal vigilence that grants us the freedom we have to celebrate this joyous day and season!  Enjoy!

Peace be to you.           

The original of this Christmas story appeared on 12/25/08 on this blog site.

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Hal@TheWriterWorks.com

“Like driving in

the middle of the ocean!”

     What a great place to live – DELMARVA Peninsula.  Unless you count the whole State of Florida as a peninsula, DELMARVA is the biggest peninsula in the U.S., and one of the largest in the world! 

     I just found out a couple of years back that the name DELMARVA is because three states share the one peninsulated space . . . hence, the name: DEL for Delaware; MAR for Maryland; VA for Virginia. 

• It’s easily a five-hour drive from the Delaware Memorial Bridge between New Jersey and Wilmington, Delaware, to the Peninsula’s southernmost tip in Cape Charles, Virginia. 
• The Cape May-Lewes Ferry from New Jersey’s southernmost tip to Cape Henlopen (rapidly pronounced K-Pen-Low-Pen), Delaware, home of Lewes (pronounced Lewis), Delaware, the “First Town” in the “First State” in the United States takes 70-90 minutes to cross Delaware Bay at the mouth of the Atlantic. 
• The Bay Bridge across Chesapeake Bay to and from Annapolis?  Well, that sometimes hair-raising ride can be (almost literally) a breeze, or take close to forever.  

     Delmarva history swirls around Nanticoke and Lenape and “Delaware” Indians, rich and abundant farmland and produce —especially corn, soy, wheat, chickens— and of course, crabs. 

     Recent years will find much ado about the nearly one-mile distance that manmade non-motorized catapults hurl pumpkins in the Annual World Championship Punkin Chu-nkin Contest! 

     And there’s much to explore, from worldclass arts and handcraft shows, golf courses, major horse and car racing events, to minor league baseball and national championship softball, fishing, swimming, boating, boardwalks, and wild pony herds in ocean dunes . . . plus, it seems, every religious affiliation opportunity imaginable.   

     When someone refers to “the Eastern Shore” you need to know where that person is standing.  The Eastern Shore in Delaware is the Atlantic Coast line from Lewes, Delaware south to Fenwick Island.  (And some, I’m told, consider the Delaware Bay coast from Lewes, north to Wilmington The Eastern Shore!) 

     The Eastern Shore in the southern Virginia tip of Delmarva is the Atlantic Coast line from Chincoteague south to the southernmost tip of Cape Charles at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.  If you’re in mainland Maryland or Virginia, The Eastern Shore is the stretch of Chesapeake Bay coastline and islands galore from Wilmington south to Cape Charles.

     Enough!  It’s a great place with great people.  Visit sometime!  It’ll make you happy!       halalpiar   

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