For those of you who know me well, you can picture my desk. For those of you who don’t, I’m a piler people. My paper situation is a heap of organized chaos with a dash of crazy. I live in a very paper heavy world. Drawings, brochures, faxes, proposals, invoices, revisions and it goes on and on and on. It’s not an ideal situation, or a very green one for that matter.
I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of companies going paperless, albeit a little skeptical. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a fantastic idea. I’m just trying to grasp concept versus reality – at least in my world. But do you know the average office employee uses approximately 10000 sheets of paper per year? I saw a figure that equaled out to around $3600 per person per year for the life cycle costs. That’s a lot of money!
Even if a company can’t go “paperless” there are still many ways to decrease actual paper consumption. Get some good ideas from Waukesha County Wisconsin – they have had great success during their paper reduction initiative. See some of their tips and tools:
So, in the spirit of a new year – resolutions and all. I’m testing a couple ways I can implement more digital files and less paper usage. I think it’s mostly going to be a discipline thing on my part, habits are hard to break you know!
Peace + Love + Furniture (and paper)
Courtnay
In the past week I’ve met with approximately 30 people – a mix of both vendors and clients. When meeting or greeting these 30 or so people, I gave or received a hug from 11 of them. Now, I know that’s a strange thing to keep track of and I usually wouldn’t tally up a hug list (cause that’s weird), but clearly this hugging phenomenon triggered a response because here I am blogging about it.
I’ve been pondering this all weekend in anticipation of today’s post but find what I’m trying to say hard to put into words. Maybe all the warm and fuzzy feelings have gone to my head and I’m reading too much into it, but those hugs represent the way I want to do business. I’m not saying we all need to replace handshakes with hugs so don’t start running the other way! :) I am saying my company and the way I do business are defined by the relationships built. In my opinion, the people I genuinely like to greet with a hug are certainly people I want to continue doing business with both as client and provider. These people are or are becoming good friends. I mean how much fun is it to work with all your friends every single day?
Am I being too much of a romantic? I don’t think so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the old saying that people do business with people they know, like and trust. Isn’t a hug a good indication of all that? I know I wouldn’t spend my time and money with people I don’t enjoy working with.
So really business isn’t always just business. It’s people and it’s very personal.
Peace + Love + Furniture
Courtnay
