Hey Reader!

I spent the other day creating my workshop page on my website. Here, you will find what workshops I offer (in a one-hour webinar or four-week email class formats) and where I'm teaching next. Did I mention the best part is I'm getting paid to do this? Maybe at some point I can make a few bucks off of time invested vs how much I'm getting paid.

My first four-week class ended last week and it was a lot of fun! I sent out lectures 3x a week and engaged with the students over email. I even prepped for my lectures! I created a slide deck with everything (well mostly everything) we talked about hitting all the big important stuff. The deck was 89 slides! To be sure, the deck was not just slides with never ending paragraphs of texts, how tedious!, but images with important words or short lists with lots of title slides sprinkled with a few memes. I'm teaching this class as a 1.5 hour webinar this Saturday. I'm going to go through and see if I can ditch any slides for the class.

Welcome Mr. Lisa!

Most of you don't know me personally but my partner, Mr. Lisa, works in cybersecurity for Global Mega Corp and is being laid off next week. The tech market is beyond awful and while he has over 20+ years of experience in the tech field, he is competing with people who worked at Google, Twitter, Facebook, and so on.

We came up with the idea of adding Mr. Lisa on to NGI as a tech consultant as a value add-on to NGI's existing services. He would handle back-end tech stuff like cybersecurity, servers, and databases to name a few. We've has already performed a cybersecurity assessment for a client and he'll be meeting with the client in the next couple of weeks to talk game plan and strategy. This is all very exciting.

I've reached out to several groups I'm creating and teaching classes for on several topics Mr. Lisa is an expert in about having those classes and they are on board with having him teaching! It's very busy around here!

Mr. Lisa and I are working on creating templates, email signatures, and other stuff so that we are cohesive as a company. We're getting even more legit!

Upgrading Tech at NGI

As a one person show, I've researched, trialed, and made decisions about tech and software NGI uses to fit my needs. I am also price conscious because NGI is still super new and I want to make sure that what I'm using is right for my business.

As a solo person, this worked fine but once Mr. Lisa came on board, he had opinions.

One of the opinions is to migrate NGI's email and storage capacity to Google Workspace rather than my current set up of using a plain old Google account and Dropbox. The primary factor that sold me was when Mr. Lisa told me that while I had separated my personal and business stuff, in a way, it was co-mingling in that I was using Dropbox for both personal and business stuff. Moving to Google Workspace would be for business stuff only and if I ever got audited or sued (!) that it wouldn't affect my personal documents.

(To be sure, I have business insurance to protect me if someone DOES decide to sue me. Maybe they didn't like my scheduling their content or something.)

Google Workspace is a whole 'nother beast and the email migration went okay but because we created a whole new account separate from my previous business email account, those work emails were not imported over. Once I figured out how to important the old into the new, instead of keeping the file structure I had carefully created, it dumped majority of the emails into a single inbox. That took some time to go through!

So! everything is separated now. Just don't sue me. :)

In Which Lisa is Shocked Yet Again She Runs Her Own Business

I have two laptops: one for personal and one for NGI. I typically use both as my desk is large enough to work with each comfortably.

A friend reached out to me the other day to see if I was watching the Nottingham Forest vs Arsenal football match, which is on Peacock. Peacock has been iffy on letting me watch live games, even though it's part of my subscription, so I said no. She said that Forest were doing great defense and I should check out the game. I was working on my personal laptop and thought to myself, "Self. You have a wide-screen monitor. Just play the game on your work laptop." Honestly, I was scared to do so because for that hot second I wondered if I was going to get in trouble! After that millisecond thought, I realized I am the boss! and I own this laptop! The feeling of being able to not have to answer to anyone felt amazing. I opened up a browser tab and put on the game. It was a draw with nil-all.

(I know you did not subscribe to NGI Presents to learn about English football (or as we call it, soccer) but Forest is 3rd in the standings after the last several years of being near relegation. I don't know what put the pep in their step but go Forest!)

Social Media Tip

Tip: Creating a consistent voice

Why: My online presence in my personal life is mixture of critique, commentary mixed in with swears and pictures of my dog. I also post on what's happening in my life (personal and work). I also talk a lot about mental health, DE&I, and anti-dieting. And we can't forget Jane Austen! My writing style and voice is personable and conversational. Wherever you find me, you'll note that I'm consistent across all my platforms.

This is what your audience wants: consistency and authenticity. Whether you are telling a story, promoting a product, and sharing something personal, you want your voice and tone to be the same. Your audience isn't stupid and they have zero problems leaving you if they find you to be inauthentic.

Meme of the Week

See you in a few weeks!

Lisa and Thursday

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