and then there were two

In the midst of life-changing events last fall, another small fire was kindling away.  Sparked during the summer, this teeny little flame was being fanned and fed, nurtured and stoked, until mid-November when a big rush of fuel came and our little fire became fully engaged.  Now as we enter 2011, I am thrilled to officially announce my new adventure and partner-in-crime.

Chef Molly Herrmann of Tastebud Catering has been a client of Segnavia Creative since early 2010.  I have been helping her create a fresh, new strategy and vision for Tastebud and putting some business development projects into play.  During this time, I have also been consulting with Midtown Global Market to reassess their strategies, operations and marketing efforts.  As kismet would have it, between us all, the idea for a new business came to fruition.  Molly worked daily in a shared commercial kitchen space at MGM.  A loosely organized, but committed group of caterers, chefs, and food manufacturers rented this commercial kitchen space to share costs, equipment and such.  The idea?  Wouldn't it be cool if this commercial kitchen expanded (allowing access to more chefs, having had a waiting list for nearly 2 years), the cooking classes expanded (so successful thus far, but not a ton of room to host more people), and we added a retail component (people are always wandering by, wanting to purchase those perky meringues and delicious looking wraps)?

Molly and I wrote a business plan, some initial financial projections, and then wrapped it all up with a bow, not thinking that it had a chance in hell of getting going.  Seriously.  There were just so many obstacles to a project of this scope.  But, indeed, the idea was a good one, and the more energy we put into it, the better it became.  MGM's management and board got behind the project.  Next thing you know, all of that kindling and rolled up newspaper and dryer lint had the match it had been looking for.

When the opportunity was presented to me to partner in this adventure, it couldn't have been a better alignment of timing, my personal passions, my career experience and my know-how.  Food, retail, cooking classes, a start up business, and a good friend by my side.  I knew it was meant to be.

A new business took shape, construction began, chef-tenants signed up, marketing efforts started and Kitchen in the Market was born.

So, as I continue my work supporting entrepreneurs and growing businesses, I launch into a new adventure myself.  The quick answers:

• I am excited to work with and take on new clients for Segnavia Creative.  In my strategic-eye-view, Segnavia is a significant portion of my work life in the foreseeable future.
• I will take on fewer new clients in the next 2 months as Kitchen in the Market gets up and running.
• I have been repackaging my consulting and coaching efforts for entrepreneurs and am excited to launch several new programs this spring.  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I hope to see you at Kitchen in the Market - online, on Facebook, on Twitter, and especially in person.  Come check out our beautiful new kitchen, take a class in our cooking school, and take home something tasty from our soon-to-be open retail grocery.  We'd love to have you.

happy, happy monday

I know this is going to sound like workplace kool-aid of a hallucinogenic sort, but I have come to really love Mondays.  In my still-new world of independent consulting, I have been testing and trying and balancing.  I've been time managing and retrofitting my week.  I've been sorting.  Culling out the unnecessary and unmanageable.  All while maintaining a sense of an integrated, reasonable life as a whole.  And sometimes this journey isn't smooth.

I don't get all excited about typical work hours - or even days, anymore.  I work either when necessary or when inspired.  So if that's 9pm on a Sunday evening, or 6am on a Tuesday morning - or any random time in between - so be it.  And if I need to scoot out for groceries, a client meeting, happy hour with an old friend, my precious time at the gym, well then I do that too.  I work when my clients need me (or need something from me) and I work when my brain is on and the productive juices are flowing.  If I'm stuck or having a less-than-creative day, I stick to billing or financial models.  Or I go for a bike ride to reset.  And when I'm "on" I try to stay in the groove and follow it.  Which doesn't always work out.

But I've also found that my fondness for working with small, entrepreneurial clients has necessarily led to engaging with more of them simultaneously.  So I'm learning to develop that fine balance between rainmaking, base touching, networking, info gathering, relationship managing...and actually doing the work.

I won't say that all that old "traditional corporate workplace" mentality has bled out of me yet, but in the past 10 years I've worked for companies that have started to realize the importance of flexibility and adaptability in our jobs.  With all the travel, conference calls with folks in other countries, and other whacky things in today's work world, we either get integrated or go lose our minds.  And the other key?  I think many company leaders - including me, in my tiny little company - have learned that productivity doesn't directly correlate to a 40+ hour work week.  You don't get 8 quality hours out of an employee every day just because they "show up for work."  You get quality, creative output when workers are energized and ready to work.  Oh and whether I'm working for me or for someone else, 4 hours of meetings a day talking about the work doesn't offset the actual work that still needs to get done!

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for dedicated work time and dedicated personal time.  It's just that I've come to believe - at least for me - that these times don't necessarily have to be scripted and consistent.  On the other hand...

...recently I've come to adopt Mondays as my revered and fiercely-guarded "productivity days."  And I've found this exponentially important as summer has hit and our weekends are as rushed and busy as our weekdays.  Otherwise we end up arriving at Monday, feeling as if we need a vacation from our weekends!  So I've blocked my calendar and started focusing on what's most important for setting up a solid week.

Mondays now look like this:

• 7ish - wake up, throw in a load of laundry, put on the kettle and deal with the dishes that were ignored yesterday
• tea, email, google reader, review social media for myself and clients, switch laundry
• SHINY OBJECT: reorganize junk drawer, sort through mail and take out the recycling
• 9ish - Starting to really wake up and get going.  Refocus on the week ahead, aka go Post-It crazy.  My technique includes:
• Post-It Calendar - one section for each: clients, boards, bus dev/ops, and personal.  This calendar is a giant pad where each week gets ripped off at the end of the week.
• Post-In Notes - one standard-sized note for each client, stuck all over my desk underneath the Calendar
• I review my Outlook calendar for the week and note on my Post-It calendar the appointments I already have scheduled - client meetings, networking, social, gym.
• I sort through my notes & emails from the previous week, jotting down all the to-dos - by client - on their sticky note. Then I assign these tasks to a day  the calendar when I know I can sit and do.  
• Sometimes I just do the work quickly while I'm jotting it down, giving myself that oh-so-satisfying checked off item.
• (I've just found that this system works best for me, as most time management techniques fail miserably in my world.  I've figured out that I'm way too ADD, multi-tasking, free-association, and overscheduled for something much more complicated.)
• 10ish - more laundry, email, a smoothie.  But by this time, I'm hitting the productivity apex.  So I'm starting to dig into client projects like crazy.
• 5ish - by this time I've done the rest of the laundry, given a light buff to the bathrooms and the kitchen, eaten something resembling lunch (though around 3pm so it's starting to feel a little dinner-ish), and been horribly hard-working with my client deliverables.  I'm truly in "the zone" at this time and am running at full stride.
• If I don't get wrapped back into my client projects, I'll take time to walk over to the studio for a 6:45pm yoga class.  But honestly, the past 2 weeks I've completely missed it.  At 7pm I look at the clock and realize I've blown right through the start of the class.  Bummer, but I value the uninterrupted productivity on this one day so I SCHEDULE the workouts on the other days.  Again, it's about finding a system that works.
• And then sometime around 9pm, I grab a glass of wine and maybe either watch a Law & Order re-run or take my Kindle to bed and am asleep by 11.

And you see what's missing?  No meetings, no clients and - if I've done it properly - no leaving the house, with the possible beneficial exception of going to yoga.  Just a good solid 12 hours of being industrious, productive and effective.  Sure, I go to sleep at the end of the day with the all-day-at-the-computer stiffness in my shoulders and neck, but that's okay.  It's worth it to me to carve out this day of work - for all aspects of my life - in order to stay dedicated and present.

I have actually started to look forward to Mondays now.  What a difference it can make when you joyfully anticipate settling in and being successful in your efforts.  It brings a whole new definition to workplace productivity - one that I've defined for myself and one that I can continue to edit and refine and adapt.  And I will...because I just realized I need a half hour for blogging...

a little spring clean up

Fully 2 1/2 months of the year have passed us by already...how did THAT happen!?  More and more over the past 3 weeks, I've realized how completely disorganized my life has become.  While embarking on serious relationships with both my health and a new fella (old fella, well, it's a long story) - which are both going amazingly well and feeding my spirit - I have completely lost the rest of my way.  Sure, there's an issue of balance going on here but there's also the (wonderful) issue of being busier than ever with Segnavia Creative.  So, this is me not complaining...well, maybe just a bit.

If nothing else, the past few weeks have made me step back, look intently at how I'm spending my time and then hone in on how to be more productive and less frenetic.  Instead of taking things as they come (my natural and slightly procrastinating state of being), I need to find a way to get more proactive.  Gain some semblance of control.  You know, if that's possible.

And there's no denying that spring is the time to consider things such as organization, fresh starts, clean ups, clear outs and generally making life a bit tidier.  And since this is a blog that's about my work/life integration, you can bet my entire world is fair game.  Here's what I'm thinking about:

• Generally detoxing my home.  I wrote about this for Simple, Good, and Tasty (a website about local, sustainable, organic and fair trade food and the people who love it) back in January which you can read here:  kitchen, bath/laundry, rest of the house.  And I'm happy to say, I've taken a lot of these steps including reducing the number of non-homemade cleaners I use around here, adding plants to the house, using up old candles to make a complete switch to all-soy, getting organized (a bit more about that in a second), and re-enlisting many things around the house to serve new & improved purposes instead of just buying new.  There's constantly room for improvement, but I'm feeling good about just getting started.
• Putting better organizing systems in place, which inevitably has to start with some purging, recycling and an honest consideration of what my needs are.  I know there are a bunch of things that either aren't working or weren't well set up when I re-launched my business last year.  And you know, you just feel like, "Eh, I'm not that busy.  I'll figure out a "real" system once I have more to organize."  So many flaws in that logic, I can barely type it without blushing.  So I'm re-dedicating my dining room as my office (no really, this was an intentional decision last year as I realized that I honestly hated working in my office...and quite frankly, everyone gathers around the kitchen island to eat, anyway) and finding better systems for sorting out business operations,  typical home stuff and an awful lot of recipes.  My curse and my joy.
• Being more and more paper-free.  I sit on two boards and, let me tell you, we produce a lot of paper.  As the boards are becoming more dedicated to sending out digital versions of our minutes, agendas, and other materials, I'm just going to haul my laptop in and read through things on screen.  It's not brain surgery, but it does make life a bit less complicated when all of these theories align to keep the paper down.
• Treating my body to a regular cleanse and also a shift in my eating habits.  I started off the year with a month-long detox; I'll probably continue to do that detox once or twice a year because it's my old standby.  I know it works for me, and I know I can choose it without feeling deprived.  Next, I'm test-driving a 3-5 day juice cleanse from Organic Avenue in NYC.  Well, I wish I lived in NYC because you can just buzz over there and pick up your day's worth of juices, shakes and food to line up with whichever cleanse you've chosen.  But from spring thaw-y Minnesota, I'm going to follow the version publicized by Gwyneth Paltrow in her GOOP newsletter.  (Sure.  She's always going to have that air of "my life is infinitely better than yours" but I think that's mostly because her's probably IS better than mine.  And 99% of other humans as well!  But I can't hate her because she's talented, happily partnered and raising beautiful children, fit & healthy, drop-dead gorgeous and connected.  I (*gushes*) sort of love her even more for it.)  Anyway, she was kind enough to use her connections to get a download on the program, the recipes and after I read this NYT piece about another woman who gave it a go, I decided I'd try it too.   I'm only on Day 2 so I'll spare you any half-baked reviews at this point.  If you get real excited, you can follow Organic Avenue on Twitter here.
• Carving out time to write.  This is one of my true passions and is also an area that needs practice and refinement.  I get that - first and foremost - from just sitting down and writing.  This blog, my personal blog, whatever.  I also get it from writing for my clients (Simple, Good, and Tasty being my biggest blogging commitment at the moment).  But I'm also hungry for feedback, so I have a couple of classes in mind from The Loft in Minneapolis.

Most of all, I'm looking forward to spring.  It's - by far - my favorite season and the continuation of my January 1st fresh start is warmly welcomed.  I can't wait to see what the rest of the year brings.

the trouble with self-marketing

It seems that regardless of why I connect with a client, our conversations all start in the same place: who are you, what do you stand for, what makes you unique, how do you describe yourself and how do others describe you? If you've hired me, it's likely because you want help marketing yourself or your business. And when you hire me, I'll probably push you right into some uncomfortable territory about why you and/or your business are different. Why you are special. What you bring to the table that no one else can. Because at the end of the day, being able to market yourself is the key to making your business a success. Yet it's the one thing that seems to hold great business people back. You're well-versed in why the business is great, but less comfortable talking about why you're so darned fantastic.

(There's a massive aside here about why I think every college student should be required to have more than just a basic understanding of business and marketing before they graduate. I also think they should get a lesson or three on personal branding and appropriate corporate behavior, though I came to that a little later in my career. But I'll digress at another time.)

With my clients, I get them to dig in. Ask some pointed questions - of themselves and of those around them. The idea is to pull out the words, phrases, sentiments, feedback and criticisms that have helped to form the external perception of who they are, but also the internal perception as well. And you can guess which one is more important.

I willingly admit to being a fan of the TV show "Biggest Loser." I can't help it. There's something very inspiring and real about how these folks overcome everything from complex medical conditions to defeating self-talk to break through the barriers (perceived and otherwise) to good health. You can literally see it when the lightbulb comes on. When they stop talking or acting out of responsibility to something "other" and start engaging deeply with themselves, for themselves. Without exception. But it all comes from understanding who they are and what messages they're sending themselves about who they are...two wildy different things.

In consulting, I'm trying to uncover not only the features & benefits of your business or your product or service, I'm trying to identify the areas where you may end up holding yourself back, despite your commitment to success. There's a little psychology here, but I know that in the end, you have to be able to market yourself in any situation. If you don't believe the key messages that I help you create, you're not going to succeed in delivering the value promised within. So we start with the big chunks of personal branding.

For instance: if you're a consultant just starting out, why should someone hire you? (Hint: it's not because of the technical skills you bring to the table. Who cares? There are lots of great technicians out there. What else?) If you're a mom trying to get back into the job market, what makes you a compelling employee? What do people say about you, and what do you want people to say about you? And most importantly, do we have alignment?

One of the more interesting things I've seen lately is that not only is there NOT alignment, there is a little bit of loss. The personality that tumbled forth naturally when you were in high school & college - once hit with the realities of the work world/adulthood/parenthood - started absorbing different attributes. For one of my clients, the risk-taking goofball who'd likely be found splashing in the corporate lobby fountain now comes off as reserved, deliberate and straight-laced after many successful years in the insurance industry. Some might say that this is a good thing - experience, maturity and growth are all positive. But have you left something of yourself behind in the process? My client was surprised - that shift had all happened over years, but went virtually unnoticed. How could that be?!

I think most of us feel that we have, in fact, lost something along the way. And there are a million reasons why that might happen. We followed a certain path until we didn't. We took care of others' needs ahead of our own. Whatever the reason, taking the step back and thinking about self-marketing comes like a shock to the system. What?! Focus on myself? Toot my own horn? Act as if I'm better than someone else? Hmm...well, if I did that, what would I want to say?

It's easy to see why this is uncomfortable ground. And why it's so important. Keep in mind that you don't have to do this alone. There are a plethora of great books out there about personal branding, marketing, life strategies and empowering yourself. And there are lots of enviable examples. My advice to you is to not walk this path alone. You're too close to this to be objective, critical, or more importantly, encouraging. Find a mentor, hire a coach, take a class - use an expert so you don't wallow in the weeds. I promise you, once you start understanding your skills & talents from an objective point of view, you'll get as excited as I do. You'll see your potential and start dreaming bigger about where you could go next. Who knows, you may even jump into a fountain.

have a dream, bring a lifeboat

Wow, do I ever strongly (ahem) encourage my clients to stay on top of their content production...particularly when said content is a critical path to business development and execution of a strategic communications plan. I can see the forest, I can see the trees. I know how to help and guide. But you, gentle client, have to do the work. And then I go and do a pretty bad job at keeping up on it myself. For all of the very same reasons that my clients struggle. Life, business, busy-ness, summer, visitors, new clients, old clients. I could go on, but this is nothing new to any of us. And content development is just one of those areas that can fall off our radars. So, what's a consultant to do?

I guess I'm trying to put myself in your shoes, figurative client. And think about how I might help you through this facet of your business. There are so many "knowns" out there, so many reasonably expectable bumps in the road. And my general answer to this conundrum is two-fold:

1. Have a plan.
   
2. Anticipate the bumps.
   

You don't get into a car without fastening your seatbelt, right? You (theoretically) pay attention to the flight attendant's safety demo. If you have an allergy to bee stings, you don't leave the house on a sultry summer's evening without your trusty Epi pen. And most of the time it happens so subconciously that you don't even consider what the plan is. Mostly that's a good thing. But in other, trickier places in our lives - like our businesses - a little more cognitive, purposeful thinking helps.

So let's start at the beginning: a plan. How many entrepreneurs start businesses without a decent business plan, marketing plan, schedule to allocate their time, etc? Most of us are guilty of this...and in more than one of those categories. For whatever reason, we believe it's better to just get started than it is to plan. And believe me when I say, I'm impatient, quick-thinking, speed-talking and an Activator. I tend to jump first and measure how high that cliff was later...and not even always then. So it's one of those places where I have to work hard to impart the importance of a plan on not only my clients, but myself as well. Without at least a general map of where you are headed, it's going to be very difficult to get there.

Then we think about the glitches. I believe contingency planning is just as important as planning those basic elements of your business. What I refuse to believe is that naming and acknowledging contingencies is the same thing as opening yourself up to defeat. I appreciate those that say "failure is not an option" because I absolutely believe in the need for setting your mental energy in the right direction. But this isn't failure I'm talking about. It's the inevitable ups and downs and twists in the road that require our sharpest thinking and creativity. And it's difficult to be thoughtful and innovative when disaster (real, imagined or whatever) is at our door. Long-term planning is for stretching, big fat hairy audacious goals. Short-term planning is for tactics and contingencies, and identifying little course corrections that might be required to navigate through tricky waters.

Laying bare our fears of failure and thoughtfully addressing the "knowns" can make the unknown little surprise events much easier to manage. We aren't in crisis mode ALL THE TIME (have you ever had a job like that? I have.). We can stay level headed, we can ask for advice and brainstorming from other smart people, and we can put some switches in place should they need to be flipped.

So give it some thought. What are the top 5 things that MIGHT happen? Are they related to money, reputation, amount of work, what? What are the worst case scenarios? How would they affect your business and what ideas do you have about mitigating those impacts? Who would you call on for help? Advice? A kick in the butt? And what might you do next time to potentially avoid this situation in the future?

Create a plan. Then find the emergency hatch so you know where to find it.

bee in my small business bonnet

Small business owners – listen up. There’s no sense running around any longer pretending social media isn’t for you. This is a brand new marketing world these days. No one’s saying you have to give up the old ways in order to embrace the new. And no one’s saying you need a MySpace page. Somewhere on the continuum of traditional horses and new media ponies, there is a ride for you. But, particularly for smaller businesses, eschewing this new fangled media because you don’t understand it or see how it could work for you doesn’t make great strategic sense. At this point, I just beg you to stay open minded enough to consider the possibilities. Ok? Ok.

Sorry about this, I had a couple of frustrating conversations last week with clients that made me want to whip out my PC and start blogging on the spot. My point isn’t that traditional marketing and advertising are bad. Nor is it that only new methods of marketing will help your business. That’s not my point at all. But, let’s face it, most small businesses are operating on a limited budget and cannot afford to put all of their eggs in a single gilded basket. A well-planned, thoughtful and strategic marketing and communications plan will help ALL businesses regardless of which marketing levers you choose to pull. Whether you’re retail, B2B, a consultant – whatever – there are ways to manageably blend social media marketing into your strategic plan to help build your bottom line. But the first question always should be: where on earth are you trying to go?

A targeted consultant needs to build up “subject matter expert” cred. A retailer needs to connect with her customers and know what they want. A restaurant needs to keep track of what other restaurants are doing in their market, genre and industry. And hear this: all of these things end up generating revenue! But you can’t just pull levers and push buttons willy-nilly and expect a successful (much less repeatable) result. Nor can you pull the blanket up over your head and wait for it all to just go away, already!

Social media is so NOT on one of my potential client’s radar that she laughed out loud, rolled her eyes and informed me that Twitter was only used by 20 year olds. (Her customer is 30-55 year old women.) I hesitated. Because realistically, any single tactic is not going to work if a client is disinterested to the point of venom. I realize that just because I have consumed the sugary beverage, it doesn’t mean others are here with me.

And yet this is where I go sideways. Because I think the best small business owners are the ones with natural curiosity and a desire to learn what’s affecting them. They are willing to put a goal in place, fight for it tenaciously but then retreat and course correct when necessary. Shutting down and fighting evolution in business – and believe me folks, you could call social media one of those evolutionary points – means potentially atrophying and dying off prematurely. Like everything else in life, leading from a place of fear and lack of knowledge does not propel you to wisdom and success.

Social media, like any single platform or tool, will be neither your deliverance nor your demise. It’s not a silver bullet and it does take some time and thought to implement. So, no. Social media isn’t for everyone. Unless you want to have a direct and immediate conversation with a particular audience, that is. To me, that’s an incredibly powerful reason to dip a toe in the water and ask a few questions. Dream a little. Adapt and evolve. Grow up.

strategic life planning? lifestyle blueprint? personal branding? ...shoot me now?

I'm stumbling around in verbiage these days. Up to my knees and tripping through all of this overused linguistic blah-blah-blah. So called trendy terminology that only seems to make people feel more out of the loop than in it. And I'm finding myself paralyzed instead of inspired. My personal triggers these days are words like "life coach," "personal branding," "hurried woman syndrome," and when I see them I am overcome by the urge to crawl into my bathtub with a box of wine and the 5th volume of Harry Potter, never to emerge again.

I'm coming around to one of those big "life defining statements," I believe. I'm trying to unearth my true self, give her room to really breathe and grow, and challenge her to become more than she ever thought possible. Or maybe, I'm trying to get me out of her way so that she can be as big and forceful as she's always known she could be. Waaaay down deep. But part of me being in my way is that I need those damned words and concepts to help outline what it is that I want to make my living at.

As I've said before, I'm more of a lifestyle person vs. a work/life balance seeker. Instead of trying to measure myself by how many hours per week I work and how much time I allow for myself and for my family & friends (and then become increasingly bitter and overwhelmed by the whole equation), I'm approaching things from a slightly different perspective these days. I don't want work/life balance, particularly not in that order! In fact, I think it's a truly unattainable concept which serves mostly to frustrate and deaden our sense of true fulfillment. Who came up with this ideal anyway? It's based (in my opinion) in a very dangerous weighing of work on one side of the scale with everything personal on the other. Yes, we have to earn a living. And yes, we have to care for the people, spaces, pets, plants, and communities to whom we are responsible. But who gets to define what "balance" looks like?

It would be easy to dismiss my perspective. Sure, I've done the 70 and 80 hour work weeks, but I've never done them with kids at home, more than one mortgage or a life-threatening illness. But I did hop on the habitrail and wore the corporate dunce cap so snugly around my head that I destroyed my marriage instead of growing it. I made a lot of money, I made a lot of truly exceptional friends. I've been hired and fired and laid off. I dabbled in small businesses and large corporations. I don't mind saying that I've been forged by fire and I know what it's like out there - both by the unique and personal experiences of those dear to me, but also by the trial and error that is my life. I'm not saying I have all of the answers because if I did, I'd have picked the winning Powerball numbers long ago and punched out of this rat race. But I have my battle scars too. I like them. I earned them.

My argument is that the very acceptable pressures in our Americanized lives - personal ambition, family pressures to have this career, the simple choice of our college majors - all serve to define our boundaries instead of open our eyes. My approach these days is to remove all of these barriers - perceived, self-imposed, guilt-ridden - and let our creative selves out to be innovative and thoughtful and free! But we sometimes need the words to help us clarify and tell our stories. And then we get into trouble by trying to weigh one of those words or phrases against another. How much does "mommy" weigh? What about "Vice President?" Or how about simpler things like friend, sister, daughter, mentor, inspiration, energizer - because we need to be these things too sometimes. And we likely won't be getting paid for it.

But all of these words, they're killing me. So what do you call this process? Is it blueprinting your life? Charting a course? Creating a strategic life plan (much as I would create a strategic business or marketing plan)? And if I help someone else do it, what does that make me? If I tread near the "life coach" waters, am I only credible if I have a certification from some trade organization in order to call myself coach? I don't want to be a therapist; there are too many good ones out there that do amazing work. What on earth do I call myself?

I want to be a map maker, I guess. I want to help you start to put some focus on your journey, identify a few potential destinations, brainstorm a couple of possible routes, list the necessary equipment to navigate, and pick out some worthy travel partners, and provide a backstop upon which you can bounce crazy sightseeing adventures.

That's why my business is called Segnavia Creative; in Italian segna means sign, segnare means to mark or indicate. Via means road. "Finding your way forward" is my mission, both for individuals and the businesses I serve. Now, if I can just figure out what to call this voodoo that I want to doo...