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Client Gift Idea: Party-In-A-Jar + Free Download

April 26, 2017 by Jennifer Lake 4 Comments

tyI love making people feel good but, admittedly, gift giving and receiving is not my love language. I’ve had to learn the value of it in business, which I’m thankful for. Each month, I get a little better at it.

I’ve started making sure that writing handwritten notes and sending little gifts to my customers, clients and business partners is a part of my regular routine. I love getting creative with what I give.

Each month I pick 10 people that I want to make feel really good and let them know that I’m thinking about them. This, I believe, will make them feel valued as a customer and want to continue to work with me.

This month, I created a Party-In-A-Jar to give as my gift. In each card, I wrote something I was virtually celebrating with them (job promotion, exciting news, new baby, etc) or told them to keep it on their desk until it had been “one of those days.” That way they could have a little party and pull themselves out of their funk.

This was insanely easy to do with a few clicks from Amazon. You ready?

Shopping List:

Confetti Punch

Bright Paper Pack

12 Pack of Mason Jars

12 Pack of Party Poppers

12 Pack of Slap Bracelets

12 Pack Mardi Gras Necklaces

24 Pack of Drink Umbrellas

100 Pack of Balloons

12 Pack Whistle Bracelets

12 Pack Bubble Tubes

40 Pack Finger Lights

Sheer Ribbon Multi Pack

Avery 22830 Labels

That’s it! Just punch your confetti, put everything by color into different jars and then move onto printing and applying the label on the lid.

CLICK HERE to download a free copy of the Let’s Have A Party (In A Jar) label sheet for you to print off onto the Avery 22830 Labels.

Put the lid on your jar and throw some of your coordinating ribbon around the top. Put the label on and you’re good to go!

Don’t forget to write a handwritten note and put your business card into the card to go with the jar. It’s so important.

I would wrap each of the jars in bubble wrap and put them inside some matching tissue paper. For your out of town friends, throw them into a Medium Priority Mail Flat Rate Box. Seal & Send.

I’d love to see your version of the Party-In-A-Jar. #LTMClientGift

Our Weekend Project Life Pages

March 12, 2017 by Jennifer Lake Leave a Comment

I made it a goal to get the pictures from our weekend right into a Project Life spread. I’m so glad I did.

I realized how much I miss making time to scrapbook. It’s just good for my soul to sit down and get creative and think through the memories of the photos. It makes me grateful and I can be one of those people that misses the little moments because of a big to-do list on the brain.

Here’s are the pages I did for this weekend. I am always drawn to bright colors and my pages usually reflect that.

Left side:

Right side:

Here’s both together:

This was made with only the Project Life and Ali Edwards elements. Super easy and quick.

Our Weekend in Black & White 2017

March 7, 2017 by Jennifer Lake 3 Comments

Every year, I do this thing where I remember I know how to take photos and I bust out the SLR to document what normal looks like to us. The first time I ever did this project I took some of my favorite pictures to date. I will continue to do it as long as I can remember how to work that camera!

Here are a few of the results I got:

Take out your camera and start documenting. Photograph the normal stuff for your kids to see and for you to remember. Don’t worry about the mess. Don’t worry about what they look like. Don’t worry about imperfections. Worry about authenticity. Worry about making sure you’re in at least one of the photos. Worry about missing something worth remembering. Pick the best and put them somewhere you will remember. For me, that will be a project Life page. I’ll share that soon.

XOXO,

The Strugglebus is Real

January 10, 2017 by Jennifer Lake 1 Comment

Every so often I’ll come across a section of a book that will stop me and I’ll have to read it 100 times to think about how I can properly get this point across to entrepreneurs as they struggle to build a business.

I’m knee-deep in my January book list and I’m loving what I’ve read so far. Right now, I’m reading a book that you’re going to have to open your mind to be able to read. If you aren’t about an F-Bomb, this book is likely not for you. Personally, I sometimes think that a cuss word or two (or 100) makes me pay a little more attention to the words because it’s not what most would consider “professional”…or so I’ve been told.

I’m reading a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson. Again, I warned you about the cusses. There are lots of them but if you can be okay with them, you’re going to learn something here and you’ll probably laugh along the way.

There’s this common issue I find among entrepreneurs and that is how hard they try to stay off of the strugglebus. I mean, they’ll really work at it, sometimes harder than just buckling down and doing what needs to be done. Then that doesn’t work out (because SPOILER ALERT: the struggle bus is the only route to entrepreneurial success) and they complain. And when that doesn’t move their business forward, well, that’s when they quit. I see it all the time. Quitters everywhere because the struggle wasn’t worth the reward.

How many times have you heard, “My business isn’t growing like INSERT NAME HERE” or “This is just not fast enough” or “I thought it would be faster” or “This just isn’t for me” from someone struggling to grow their business?

I hear it A LOT. It’s a resounding message in the emails I get asking for advice. It’s frustrating because there isn’t much I can say back to that person except to start rattling off things they haven’t tried before. At best, that holds them over until those things don’t work fast enough either.

You know what that is? It’s entitlement. It’s entitlement disguised as frustration.

Simply put, entitlement is believing that you deserve happiness and that you shouldn’t have to struggle to get it.

Here’s the thing, nobody gets a struggle-free ride, even if the people you’re wrongly comparing yourself to (hand slap) have social media feeds that are lying to you about their perfect lives. And guess what? We don’t deserve a a struggle-free ride either. We deserve nothing. We are entitled to nothing.

Entrepreneurship is a struggle. Every day. Even if you grow fast, it’s still a struggle. The struggles are just a little different. We ALL have to pay our dues. At one point or another, we all have to learn the lessons about how to reach people and how to connect with our customers in a way that helps our businesses grow. Most people aren’t innately and divinely born with that knowledge.

We need to embrace the amount of time it takes us to make our business our success story. There’s no boss to fire you. You can choose to not fail (which is great for anyone who is afraid of failure). For some of us, our ride on the strugglebus for this particular journey is going to be shorter because we likely have a long list of failures, misses, dead-wrongs, and growth opportunities in our past. We already saw that struggle though at one point which makes this one seem like a shorter ride.

What I want you to understand is that hard is required to own your own business. Nothing worth having is easy. We don’t need to be frustrated that it’s hard and it takes a long time. I want us to be thankful for it. The harder it is, the more we’re learning and that’s going to give us a shortcut down the line. I want us to be like Lieutenant Dan strapped to the top of that shrimp boat yelling at the storm to “bring it!” We need to own the struggle because it’s required.

Your attitude about having the get on board the strugglebus is what determines your fate because you can’t get ANYWHERE without it. It’s the only ride to business success. Might as well choose a seat.

Lean into the struggle this week. Own it as part of your job rather than be frustrated because it’s holding you back. The sooner you accept it the sooner you grow.

Have an amazing, difficult week!

31 Things: Story 26 & 27

July 12, 2012 by Lindsay Teague Moreno 1 Comment

Okay, here we are again.

I think the first one is going to hurt every time I read it down the road, but it’s real and that is what matters. I hope the girls understand how much I value my relationship with them when they read this story. I also hope I look back at this and smile at how much better I feel about my family situation as opposed to how I feel right now. I’ve left some of it private because I’m not trying to put anyone on blast here on the ‘ol blog. Plus, that’s not the point of this story, it’s just to paint a real picture of what our family situation looks like.

The second story makes me smile about how scrapbooking has come full circle for me over the years.

Story 26: Covet | “Maybe It’s the Grief Talking”

i know it’s a sin to covet, i’ve clearly not mastered this. there are a ton of things that i want. i’m selfish like that. it’s an area of opportunity in my life. fact.

the thing i want more than anything are family members that play an active role in our lives. really, i want family members that play an active role in my girls’ lives. i believe family is so important and yet, we find ourselves seriously lacking in this department.

this is probably a really serious and personal topic to be broaching in this kind of a forum, but i think it’s important to be honest about it.

look, i realize that my mom played an irreplaceable role in our family. she was the one that was fully invested in our happiness. she called, she video chatted, she saw us every month once we moved from arizona to colorado. she knew what we were doing and what was going on with us. i’m not sure why, but it feels good to be loved like that.

my brothers and i do talk more now than we did when mom was around…the same goes with michael’s siblings. michael’s sister crystal came to visit with her family and besides my aunt mary, they were the first and only family members to actually come and see us in reno. i love that they came out here. i hope we’ll make this something we do regularly with her family. … michael’s younger brother jacob is great. he visited with crystal this year, but he is still in high school, which makes traveling difficult. … michael’s grandparents love the girls so much but they have a hard time traveling. my grandma is very sick and i honestly don’t even know if she knows the girls’ names.

…and there you have it. all of the dirty laundry, if that’s what you want to call it.

it’s strange to hang out with friends and their families. it becomes painfully clear what we’re missing out on. it’s the helping hand. it’s the environment where we can just let the girls go and be themselves without worrying that they’re getting on someone’s nerves. it’s being able to just leave the girls with someone for a few hours or a couple of nights because they want that time with the girls.

so, like a jealous little kid, i covet the relationships that others have with their family and i feel very, very, very alone. maybe this is just grief talking, maybe it’s not. either way, it’s hard.

Story 27: Hobby | “Priorities Change”

this book, right here? this is my hobby.

the best thing about it is that my hobby serves a great purpose. someday, i’ll look through these books and laugh at all the crazy things we did. i’ll cry because my babies are so grown up now. i’ll be so glad that my hobby involves recording memories.

i got into scrapbooking in my last semester at arizona state (2003). i got so into it, in fact, that it became my job for a while. i worked at scrapbook stores and i created layouts for publication. i loved that job. i was good at it. when i started at university of phoenix and broke up with my ex-boyfriend, i let scrapbooking go. i quit all of my design teams and i didn’t pick it up again until right before i got married. even then, i only did it here and there. as soon as boston and teagan entered the picture, my scrapbooking days were over. though i missed it, i just didn’t make time for it.

priorities change.

fast forward 3 and a half years. i’m feeling guilty about not getting memories and kid stuff into books for the girls. it’s important to do that because you never know what might happen in life (see “listen” story). i came across the “project life” scrapbooking system and i immediately wanted to do it. i decided to try it digitally since all my scrapbook stuff is boxed up in the garage. i started in january and i’m going to keep at this. i hope i can catch up with my photos from the last 3 years and then give copies of these books to boston, teagan & kennedy when they’re older.

priorities change.

it is time for me to make our memories a priority again.