Archive for the ‘Positivity’ Category

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Jobbridge and some very reckless loose tongues

May 30, 2013

I couldn’t believe what I was reading on twitter..

Jobbridge rant

Here was Pat Phelan, a self professed “good guy” (from his own twitter bio: @patphelan: CEO @TRUSTEV, from a long line of Citog’s, friend of Bill and Bob, hates bad coffee #happy #goodguy) having a wild and totally unfounded pop at me/Fuzion trying to create a job opportunity utilising the JobBridge scheme and take another careful step forward with our business.

I was amazed that someone so prolific online could be that careless and loose with his opinions and make such a reckless and damaging accusation – I don’t believe Pat knows the first thing about Fuzion. He certainly has never been through our door and has never had dealings with any of our team.

I took issue with him about what he was tweeting – he clearly has issues and an opinion about Jobbridge but has no right to throw muck at Fuzion.

Fuzion and Jobbridge – for the record:

Jean was the first person that we brought in as a PR intern. She was an extra person on our team and once the period was up we were delighted to give her a full time job. We then added Aisling to our Dublin team and after some initial training and some relevant experience under her belt she was poached by Edelman PR. We replaced her with Niamh who will also be made full time – again she was a raw graduate who has now clocked up valuable experience.

The advert that you saw us tweeting about in the above post is with the intention of trying to extend the team even further, which is risky business in the current climate. Through incredibly hard work and with the help of the Jobbridge scheme we have been able to add new members to our team all the way throughout the recession – we have never reduced anyone’s wages either, which if I say so myself is quite an achievement.

That is 3 new jobs in Fuzion – the Jobbridge scheme has allowed us to accelerate our expansion and create jobs and provide valuable experience for people.

We have also added other members to our team outside of Jobbridge.

Scambridge

I then came across the Scambridge website – their rationale for creating this dedicated website (fair play lads with your effort at #positivity) is stated as follow ” The Scambridge website and campaign was initiated after we received an overwhelming response to the article below by Socialist Party / United Left Alliance MEP Paul Murphy which was published on the Politico.ie website”

I will admit that from my experience someone, somewhere will always take advantage of any initiative, which can wreck it for others – some employers will exploit and take advantage but surely don’t tar everyone with the same brush – this scheme in my view is a win/win.

Even more Twitter abuse

I then found myself taking even more abuse on twitter about our recruitment drive:

I find some guy called Squid (lovely name) @squidlimerick taking a pop at the same advert “@GregCantyFuzion using a scheme that discriminates against people with certain disabilities. #jobbridge“

This gets better …I am not actually trying to create a job but I am apparently discriminating against people with disabilities. Mr Squid, when you get a chance please take a peek at some of the successful work we have done for charities in Ireland.

And then I find another really prolific social media guy on the 28th May telling people to start clicking on the Google Adverts of companies who are taking people on through Jobbridge – thanks Damien..was that a pop at Fuzion?

Damien Mulley rant

Damien Mulley: “I’d never advocate doing this: Googling Cork companies that use JobBridge to avoid paying staff. Then clicking on their ads. Clickity”

Why would you put out such a tweet? 

So Fuzion are exploiting, discriminating and we deserve to be financially punished for our attempts to stay positive, expand our business and use a legitimate scheme in the spirit it was designed.

My head is spinning at such begrudgery, cynical, defamatory and financially damaging attacks – this is some of the stuff I really hate about certain people.

Thankfully not everyone is like this and I for one will hang onto my outlook on life, drive on and try to keep having wins and Yes, create new jobs and give people valuable training and a start they may not have had otherwise.

#Positivity

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion are a Marketing, PR and Design firm with offices in Cork and Dublin

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Posted in Business Planning, Google Adwords, Irish Economy, Positivity, Recruitment, Training | 48 Comments »

If that doesn’t work …get out of there!

May 20, 2013

Escape

That was another incredibly busy week, meeting with clients, attending client events, dealing with stakeholders, meeting prospects, running training programmes and dealing with the every day things associated with running a business.

I meet people from so many different walks of life working in organisations and companies in private, public and non-profit sectors and with my social media activity I interact with many people on a regular basis.

This week in particular, whatever was in the air I seemed to meet a lot of incredibly “frustrated” people.

People who feel no one listens to them, people who feel its impossible to get anything done, people who despair of their organisation because it is choking with politics, people who were bullied out of jobs by colleagues, people blaming colleagues for things that went wrong when in fact they put them under so much pressure they couldn’t perform, people who are insecure so they play games to protect their own positions, people who are hostile to visitors and people who can play a huge part in making significant changes but ….once again feel this is impossible with people busy playing politics who will block all positive initiatives.

Not one of these people were giving out about money – all of them wanted to contribute and enjoy and long for the satisfaction of making something happen.

If that’s you then start making some noise, keep pushing, let your voice be heard, push for the right things to happen, speak up when they are not happening, challenge  the rubbish, encourage working together as a team, talk about making a difference, make the political “players” uncomfortable (they want to make a difference as well) and push them towards doing the right things and at least go home on a Friday with a feeling that you have had a good week.

If that doesn’t work …get out of there!

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion are a Marketing, PR and Graphic Design firm with offices in Cork and Dublin in Ireland

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Posted in Bullying, Ireland, Motivation, Personal development, Positivity, Teamwork | Leave a Comment »

He won’t answer the phone

May 19, 2013

forgive

I asked him how his son was getting on. We were both sitting in his workshop as he opened up to me. I think he needed to.

“I could tell you he is getting on great but I really have no idea. We’re heartbroken” he told me.

“We haven’t spoken to him in over a year. He won’t answer the phone but that doesn’t stop us calling”

The tears flowed from his eyes as he explained to me that it was all down to a simple misunderstanding and since then their son, a normally warm and generous young fella (I can vouch for that) just won’t talk to them.

I’m sure in time that phone will be answered ..

Is there a call you need to make or one you need to answer?

Life is way too short …go on, do t!

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Tags:,
Posted in Family, Personal development, Positivity | 2 Comments »

Snap into it

May 17, 2013
Bueller

Anyone, anyone, anyone?

“Snap out of it” I had to tell myself.

I do a lot of social media training and consultancy both directly for  clients and as part of organised courses for the Enterprise Boards and the Digital Marketing Institute.

I use a suite of materials to deliver this training including some very detailed notes that cover the whole area including blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and some of the other emerging platforms and trends in social media.

In the last few weeks I have found myself delivering a huge volume of training and on this particular day I found myself delivering a module to a client group in the morning and a similar programme in the evening to a group of SME’s as part of training for one of the Enterprise Boards.

Facing into delivering the same material on literally the same day and feeling really tired my motivation level had dropped.

I started to question myself as I drove to the hotel:

Was I getting bored with my own material?  

Would I be able to deliver a good session?

I was wallowing ..

Hold on (big conversation with self!)…you have been crafting your training materials for a few years, you have continuously improved the programme, you not only understand the material intimately but you know how to deliver it in a way that keeps the group engaged and learning – Besides you know you are passionate about this whole area.

This group of SME’s have signed up for the programme, they have given up their evenings to learn about something that could make a big difference for their business and you know you can show them how, in a really practical way.

After giving myself a few virtual slaps in the face and a big kick up the bum I managed to change my gears and open that door – “who wants to tell world about how great their business is?”

We had a great session ..in fact it was the best reaction to a session that I had in the last few weeks and after it I was buzzing.

What you get from any group at a meeting or a presentation is often down to what you bring in the door with you ..your frame of mind, your attitude, your belief, your energy and your enthusiasm.

Snap into it ..

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion with offices in Cork and Dublin offer social media training and consultancy in Ireland

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Posted in Blogging, Facebook, Marketing, Motivation, Personal development, Positivity, Social Media, Training, Twitter | 5 Comments »

The Gardener

May 4, 2013
garden

By the way ..not my garden!

I just knew it ..

When he came in the door with his notebook and pen and carefully took down the details I knew we were in trouble.

The garden was in a state, the grass was up to your kneecaps and it had been totally neglected since the end of last summer. I reckoned our poor Flymo wasn’t up to the job, so the idea was that we would try to find someone who could come in, give the whole place a once over and leave it in a way that we could look after it ourselves for the rest of the year.

Bear in mind that we have a nice 4 bedroom detached house in a housing estate with very average sized gardens both front and back.

After he left us we saw him pacing the front garden – It looked like he was measuring the area. Not good I thought.

The following day his quote arrived by email – €1,560 !!

Oh my god – I thought it must have been a quote for the whole year but when I read it carefully I realised it was for just the initial tidy up!

If there was ever a moment to spur me into action, this was it ..the next half dry evening the Flymo came out and together we attacked the grass – it took two more evenings and a few hours on the bank holiday Saturday but we cracked it!

We bought weed killer, moss peat, some flowers, a yard brush and spent pretty much the rest of the Saturday at it.

I totally despise gardening and this for me was a real punishment day (and evenings) and there is still plenty more to do.

I don’t care enough about the garden to have it perfect and I’m sure our expensive friend would definitely have had it spick and span but to me this was not worth it.

I guess at times we are like the “gardener”.

We do take careful notes, we spend time gathering as much information as we can, we try to fully understand the prospective client’s needs and issues and the challenges they face in their sector.

Armed with this information we go away, we do our own research and we write a Marketing and PR plan for them that will hopefully achieve their objectives. We then prepare a budget to execute the plan as economically as possible.

At times this is fine and everything proceeds but there are times when it is just too much for the prospective client and they must pass – sometimes they decide to cut their own grass!

Their garden will more than likely end up being like mine but sometimes with budgets being so tight that will just have to do.

The important thing is that we all do our best to drive forward and while that can be difficult with limited resources at least ..keep driving forward.

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion are a Marketing & PR firm with offices in Dublin and Cork

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Posted in Gardening, Marketing, Positivity | 12 Comments »

Turning the screw

April 28, 2013

Cork in the sun !

This blog post has been written and re-written so many times. I have deliberated about publishing it as it is quite a negative one.

Every journey has number of bumps and mine is no different – this is one of my big bumps!

Let’s hit that button!!

Publish

The sun was splitting the stones as I walked through Cork city on a gorgeous Saturday ten years ago with Dee and my kids, Brendan and Ellen.

It was a perfect day but my head was about to burst … I was far from perfect.

The torturing turning of the screw was full on and one of the owners wanted this pushy, challenging, drive forward, energetic, self minded General Manager out of their company.

Because of an underlying dispute between the joint owners of the company a big attempt was made a few years before by one of the parties to force me out and I managed, probably out of pure stubbornness to stick in there, putting up with the horrible atmosphere, beating every target and meeting every challenge that they put before me.

Company performance had never been better, we were making good profits and earlier, devious attempts to turn my management team against me had failed with the opposite now happening.

In a tough, competitive environment we were thriving.

The final straw was me taking on someone new on a commission arrangement with the Chairman’s permission – one of the owners felt this was reckless behaviour and coupled with a few other concocted incidents it was deemed that I was not to be trusted any more.

Walk the PlankAfter a visit by the new managing director of this global business it was decided that this boy would have to provide a detailed list of his movements for each week in advance, mornings and afternoons.

If the relevant powers decided this schedule was not appropriate it could be altered. His words were that “I was manager in name only and had to run all of my actions through someone else“.

Excellent!

I had better things to do with my life than put up with this stupidity and being constantly caught in the owners crossfire and on that sunny Saturday I decided I was done. I went home and wrote my letter informing them that my position was untenable and that I would leave in the near future.

A few weeks later I left to work on my own projects.

People ask me was it difficult (my folks thought I had lost my marbles!) to move from a good, secure, extremely well paid  job into self employment – in truth when that decision came it was not a difficult one.

Despite my considerable financial commitments (just like everyone) I had arrived at a point in my life where it was the only decision left to be made. Easy!

This turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made but I didn’t appreciate the heavy hands on my back.

Many felt I should take a legal route with my ex-employers but I decided it was better and healthier to focus all of my energy in a positive direction so that I could achieve my new goals and put bread on the table. However, ten years later it still lingers in the back of my mind and I remember the horrible feeling at that time.

It’s really important to me that I enjoy what I do and that in Fuzion we provide a great work environment for all of our team.

I call it #WinHappy

If you find that a screw is being turned on you do your best to take control.

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion (for ten years now!)

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Posted in Bullying, HR, Legal, Motivation, Personal development, Positivity | 14 Comments »

Worrier or Warrior?

April 28, 2013

Warrior or worrier

Being in business can be great fun, it can be really satisfying and that overall feeling of being a master of your own destiny just can’t be beaten.

However at times it can be a very lonely place with huge stresses and one where things can be constantly challenging.

One feeling that never leaves me is that feeling of worry ….there is always something to worry about, where will new business come from, how will we pay those bills, how will we sort that problem, how will we improve on the great year that we just had?

That worry niggle is always there to one degree or another. At times you hardly notice, it’s just a tiny little niggle at the back of your mind but at other times the worry monster is bigger and you find yourself waking up and your first thought of the day is..that worry!

That’s when I find the warrior appears, when you have to dig deep, you delve into your reserves, you have to find extra gears inside you and you have to work harder, be more creative and make bolder moves and do new things.

During a typical year I find myself moving from worrier to warrior at regular intervals, ironically with the very most being achieved when the warrior appears!

Are you a warrior or a worrier?

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion are a Marketing,PR and Graphic Design agency with offices in Dublin and Cork in Ireland

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Posted in Motivation, Personal development, Positivity | 8 Comments »

Can nice guys win?

April 16, 2013

Albert Einstein - Man of Value, succession planning

I was chatting to a good friend of mine recently who runs a really successful business – we hadn’t seen each other for quite a while so it was great to catch up.

We spoke about life, work, music, kids, getting old, favourite movies ..in truth we could still be there chatting!

We were having the usual conversation about how hard you have to work these days to be successful and he told me a story about one of his competitors who received the worst possible news a while back ….he had cancer and he needed time off for treatment.

That type of news puts everything into perspective .. 

My buddies automatic reaction was to ring his competitor and offer him any help that he needed (in the background) to keep his show on the road.

While they were fierce competitors there was always mutual respect and unlike some of the other competitors (news leaked out about his poor health and customers were romanced) this was clearly not a circumstance to take advantage of.

Over a year later as this mans diagnosis was not good he decided it was best for the survival of the business and the protection of his team to sell on the business to a competitor.

There was only one bidder he seriously considered ….nice guys can win after all!

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Tags:,
Posted in Friendship, Motivation, Personal development, Positivity | 16 Comments »

Learning to Crash Land

March 27, 2013

Plane on the Hudson

We were passing some time in New York (we were there for the christening of my brother’s daughter) on a bitterly cold January 15th, 2009 so we found ourselves in the cinema.

We came down the escalators after the movie finished to hear loud sirens and watched as police cars, ambulances and fire brigades sped by in quick succession.

We grabbed a cab to Penn Station and the female taxi driver agreed to take us once we weren’t going in the direction of the Hudson – a plane had just crashed in the river. Her mum called on her mobile and warned her to quickly get out of Manhattan.

By the end of the short cab ride the incident was clarified on the radio – it wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was a freak accident caused by a flock of Canadian Geese and the Captain, Chesley Sullerberger, a former Air Force pilot managed to land the plane safely on the water with all 155 passengers very shook but all in one piece.

Thank god ..

Two days later we touched down at Shannon Airport and grabbed a newspaper to catch up on news since we had been away. Right on the front page we read about one of our clients, a hotel in Kerry that had gone into liquidation – not only did they owe us quite an amount of money but it was obviously the loss of a client.

What were we facing this year?

Over a period of the next few weeks we lost a few really good clients as the wheels came off the economy and budgets were being slashed by everyone – we had just moved into offices only a few months previous and it felt like our plane was plummeting!

Of course we panicked, of course we were worried but we dug in just like we always do. We had a great team and we needed to have faith in ourselves and in our ability.

I remembered clearly one of the lessons of Napoleon Hill in his book published in 1937 “Think and Grow Rich” – Have faith and believe that you will succeed ..he spoke about something that he called “The Secret“.

We have always adopted a positive philosophy, which has served us well – Two months later we won our biggest account, we picked up a few other accounts and later that year we started running training courses – it was an incredibly tough year including some other large bad debts but somehow we managed to bring our plane in without losing any of our passengers!

Since then business has continued to be challenging with plenty of turbulence but thankfully we continue to have faith and we always seem to survive, grow and thrive.

One of these days it will get easier ..won’t it?

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion are a Marketing, PR and Graphic Design firm with offices in Dublin and Cork.

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Posted in Irish Economy, Motivation, Personal development, Positivity, Recession | 5 Comments »

Chris, Seth, Mitch, Wisdom and the Power of Reply

March 17, 2013

Chris Brogan

It’s Sunday morning and I’m waiting for my weekly email from Chris Brogan, CEO of Human Business Works and co-author of the excellent books Trust Agents and Impact Equation about online and human behaviour.

Every Sunday he writes to me and shares some experience or learning, which is nearly always enriching and really valuable. He does this without fail and incredibly this costs me nothing. I really appreciate his generous spirit and openness and the fact that he does take time to write to me.

Of course he doesn’t write to just me – he has a huge “fan” (he’d never call us that but I’m going to use the word) base and we are all privileged to get his Sunday best!

The other amazing thing about Chris is that he has mastered the art of “reply”. If you send him a simple reply to his Sunday email telling you enjoyed it, he’ll actually come back to you and say thanks.

There is an actual person at the other end of that email who is quite happy to interact with you as well as just broadcast his message ..he’s genuinely interested in what I have to say.

I do appreciate that if he has to reply to thousands of emails he won’t have a life and we do need him to be bright and rested and able to send us those nuggets of wisdom – thanks Chris for your valuable time.

We’re really lucky to have so many really clever and quite brilliant people sharing their insights, experience and very often genius with us online.

I’m talking about bloggers who quite freely share their gems of wisdom on a regular basis with us including people like Chris, Seth Godin and Mitch Joel.

ReplyThe big difference with Chris is that he replies and interacts.

This in my view is the most powerful thing that he does and it’s this that sets him apart from the others..

Click here to sign up for his Sunday Service.

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion are a Marketing, PR and Graphic Design firm with offices in Cork and Dublin

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Posted in Blogging, Brand Loyalty, Marketing, Motivation, Positivity, Publishing | 10 Comments »

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