Action Items From This Week:

1. Work/Life Balance a. Still working on figuring this one out but I feel I have a bit more solid footing... barely. Maybe the issue is that I don't have a clearly defined path in my mind. This makes it hard to set great goals and strive towards them. When the end is not clearly defined, it's a bit harder to be motivated to keep everything in order.
2. Event Planning a. I'm in the middle of planning a future Vancouver and future Quebec City competition. I have local partners in both areas who are helping search for venues, and will hopefully have both of those booked by the end of the week. b. In terms of how I want to make these competitions better and different, I still need to work on that, but the first step is to have venues booked and delegates confirmed.
3. Come up with an accounting solution - I feel like this will continue to be pushed as it's something that is so easy to ignore, until it's not. I will start on it this week and at bare minimum create a Wave account.

Problem & Challenges:

1. Modularity a. Modularity is something that I've been thinking about a lot but still haven't managed to sort out. I'm trying to compartmentalize the business processes so that they can be easily scaled and sourced out. I think this is important in making sure that everything runs efficiently. This week I attempted to test out the process of shipping puzzles. I packed up all the necessary items (cubes, printers, packages) and got a friend to ship out all orders for a week. This was to test how easily it would be for an employee or contractor to do this task. b. The main issue I had with this process was customer service. I gave him an email, and told him to use it to contact customers regarding new orders that come in. All old issues, I will handle. This didn't end up working out too well. Repeat customers who already had my email address would reach out to me, or they'd message us both. I also couldn't really monitor the emails that were being sent out, not that I didn't expect him to do this well, it just feels a little weird to give up control of. This opened my eyes up a bit to the need of streamlining a customer service process. The current one only works with a small amount of orders, and with me at the helm. This is definitely something I should look into turning into a better process.

Action Items Planned for Next Week

1. Book Vancouver Select Winter - Things needed to be done here are confirm delegate, schedule, and venue.
2. Book Quebec City Select 2018 - Here as well, I need to confirm delegate, schedule, venue and dates.
3. Use Wave accounting - I want to take a deeper look at Wave and explore whether or not this is a solution I can work with.

Contacts or Resources Needed

None that I can think of this week.

Company Updates, News and Successes for the Week

1. Sales have been coming in quite steadily, seeing a boost over September.
2. Repeat customers are doing really well - we now have 6 customers that have spent over $500 on the site in their lifetime as a customers. This is the milestone that I have set as the top of our rewards program.
3. Also had a very successful YouTube video!