Finally Accepting New Clients

by Erica Cosminsky on February 4, 2012

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At Graduation with my mom and dad. Tons of pictures on Facebook.

For almost 2 years, I have worked with clients who needed human resources style help, e.g. learning to hire virtual employees or contractors, advice on employees vs contractors and other laws, total HR department replacement, and HR consulting.

In December, I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Organizational Leadership with a focus in HR. As I’m moving from a “full load” of undergrad classes, I have decided to open my coaching services to the public. (I did invitation only before). Next week I’ll be announcing several sales for my newsletter subscribers only, that will end on March 10th. I will have a special discount on coaching before I open it up on the website around Valentine’s Day. On March 12th, I will be starting Graduate School focused in Industrial and Organizational Psychology focused in Workplace Efficiency through the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. I’m really looking forward to being able to use those skills immediately with my clients.

If you would like to be notified of the sale and more details on my service offerings, please make sure you are signed up for my newsletter on the right.  Another plus, I’m working on a handy “cheat sheet” on differences between employees, contractors and vendors, with tons of legalities you need to look out for.

Have any questions? Comment below, email me or tweet me! I’d love to hear from you!

Erica

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Gold Star for Office Depot

by Erica Cosminsky on October 25, 2011

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Three weeks ago, I came into my office on Mondayafter we’d had a party at my apartment over the weekend.London, gold star

As I sat down, my chair flung me backwards, in which I hit my knees on the keyboard drawer. As I’m sure you can imagine, I was not happy. I work from home and I have to say I’m hard on chairs. I have back and knee issues that make me sensitive to changes, much less totally breaking. After an incident 2 years ago with Office Max, where I spent $300 on a chair to have the hydrolics break the first week and their idea of insurance was to mail me a new chair piece by piece to determine what piece was broken, I decide to try Office Depot.

(Let me insert here that I am not an affiliate for Office Depot, was not asked to provide any feedback and I don’t really know anyone that works there aside from a casual hi with the girl that usually checks out my purchases.)

Step 1: October 3rd- I called Office Depot, where I bought my very nice orthopedic chair last year. My call was answered promptly. The lady was very nice while I tried to make her understand what my chair was doing that shouldn’t while I sat in my office floor to call her. She told me their policy was to have items returned for warranty inspection. However see as this was a large, very broken item, that I needed to retrieve my mailing label, and UPS a copy of my receipt with a signed note about what happened and that it was too big to mail. Ok. Strange but fair enough.

After I got off the phone, I got in my file drawer to find that the thermal receipt for the chair had rubbed very faint and I could not get a good copy. (Thinking great.)

Step 2: October 4th- I went into the local Office Depot where I purchased the chair. The really nice guy at the service desk gave me the number to the receipt retrieval department.

My assistant called receipt retrieval. I paid for the chair with a now-expired card and the receipt couldn’t be located. The poor lady even dug through the records manually but she was nice and very polite. (Thinking Oh great because my assistant wasn’t much more optimistic.)

Step 3: October 5th- I picked the clearest copy of the poor receipt. Wrote a note with all the numbers I could more visibly see on the original, everything else asked for and packaged it in a manila envelope to mail.

Went to the UPS store. Got a sermon from the UPS lady because apparently you cannot UPS a manila envelope. UPS lady repackaged my two sheets of paper when she could clearly see I didn’t care.

Waiting: So I went home, thinking great this is going to be a fight. I can see them calling me to tell me the receipt isn’t clear enough and they can’t find the transaction. I was busy and they had told me to expect to hear from them in 6-8 weeks so I pushed it to the back of my mind.

October 24th- Checked mail after long day. Envelope from Office Depot Product Replacement. I thought “Ok, here’s the letter asking for more information.” Imagine my surprise when I find a nice form letter and my $200 replacement gift card, especially after only 3 weeks.

I have to say that I was blown away by how courteous and polite everyone was during this claim (expect the UPS woman and Office Depot’s most definitely not to blame for that.) I guess it surprises me more that I spoke to several people in several different locations and they were all nice, prompt and seemed genuinely to want to help. I really expected to have some long drawn out fight that ended up with me having an expensive chair out of pocket, not because of Office Depot themselves, but from past experiences with other retailers. The  simple, honesty and easy experience shines because they simply did what they said they’d do.

As I said, I’m a small business owner. According to my books, I spent $1800 last year on office supplies. I’m pretty sure Office Depot’s made me a life long customer.

 

Erica

Photo Credit Flickr:  Lars Plougmann

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Employee Poaching: What It Really Means

October 6, 2011

So during this volunteer project I’ve been working on, a blog post was written about sponsoring the event. In that post, my writer made a comment about networking and “stealing” employees that she connected with. A certain person who was unhappy that he wasn’t totally getting his way with the event tried to make a [...]

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Experiment in Disconnecting

September 27, 2011

Over the past few months, I’ve had two things bugging me. One: how incredibly high my internet bill was and two: How slow our internet was getting. It gradually got worse and worse even after two different service visits. Today my modem finally died and I decided to act on something I’d been thinking about. I [...]

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Why Sometimes You Just Have to Cut Your Losses

September 8, 2011

In addition to coaching business owners and bosses on how to better manage the people that work for them, I also coach people who are having issues with their bosses. This is a conversation from a recent call used with permission (name removed.) Her: My boss fired me because a project was late while we [...]

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Help Wanted

June 8, 2011

Over the past few months, I have considered hiring an “intern” for my business. Well, it’s definitely time. Intern/Assistant/Helper Wanted I primarily need an assistant. Some tasks could be done remotely, but this person needs to be local to Murfreesboro, TN. This may not look like a typical Job Ad because this probably isn’t your [...]

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Intense Focus?

June 3, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot about intense focus. For the last 3 weeks, I have been taking a May-Mester class. So I’ve been in a classroom from 1-5 everyday of the week. Believe it or not, I actually liked the set up. It was intensely focused. There was no mucking around because we had so [...]

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Therapy in an Email

May 23, 2011

My Intention is to set daily intentions and realize I can’t control everything. Doors open when I stop fighting it. Over the past few weeks, I’ve mentioned my supposed quarter-life crisis a few times. The past 6 months a lot of doors have closed behind me and the next few months just as many more [...]

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Creative Scheduling

May 18, 2011

Recently I started using The Action Method by Behance. It’s based on the book Making Ideas Happen* which I picked up on the suggestion of Jeff Goins. Did you catch his guest post on Monday on Why You Need Creatives in the Workplace? Let’s talk a little bit more about what I’ve learned from Jeff. [...]

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Creatives in the Workplace: Why You Need Them

May 16, 2011

Today’s post is from my friend, Jeff Goins. Be sure to visit his site and follow him on Twitter below. Creatives are weird. Plain and simple. Creative professionals don’t work like the rest of us. They struggle with deadlines and typical 9-5 schedules. They procrastinate and sometimes make excuses. They can be unmotivated and even [...]

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