If you have visited Smithereens Blog in the past, you know that its posts largely fell under the categories of either productivity (web solutions, life hacks, etc.), persuasion (sales and marketing tips) or prose (the art of the written word.)


I had a lot of fun writing that blog - met a lot of interesting people, attracted a loyal group of readers and even managed to get my fabled fifteen minutes when some mainstream media outlets picked up a post I wrote on the Rogers iPhone launch. But alas, it was not to last.

At the time, I was working for an employer (Mark Buckshon at the Construction News and Report Group) who encouraged us to be active online and build our 'personal brand.' When I left that position, however, I accepted a post with a large corporation with strict rules about online publishing by its employees and, as a result, had to shelve the blog for awhile.

To make a long story slightly shorter, eight months and one offshore-outsourcing-of-the-entire-Ottawa-office incident later, it was time to make another career change, sooner than I'd hoped. After a lot of thinking, I decided to revive the professional house painting company I used to run here in Ottawa six years ago by partnering with an individual who used to work for me and had since started his own gig. This melding of my sales and marketing experience, and industry background with his production capacity and industry knowledge created Strokes of Genius Painting, what has turned out to be a very successful residential painting endeavour so far. (Fingers crossed!)

Throughout this transition, my path also lead me into an agreement I certainly never expected to arrive at - a mutually-beneficial arrangement with the previous employer mentioned above, who now has me doing advertising sales and a bit of writing for his publishing business during the day and leaving my evenings and weekends free to handle my responsibilities as the marketing and sales half of Strokes of Genius. I guess it's true what they say about the benefits of not burning your bridges!

I'm not exactly sure what this blog will be about, to be honest. And yes, I know that breaks all the rules about successful blogging. But I think one of the reasons why Smithereens was never as successful as it might have been is that maybe I wasn't truly passionate about every post. So this time I am just going to write what comes naturally and focus on on thing: being me. Specifically, I know I want to experiment with more frequent short snippets of observation and photos of funny things I come across, supplemented by longer posts from time to time.

If you like it, by all means, stick around (maybe even subscribe... or RE-subscribe.) And if you don't like it, well, you're entitled to your tastes (even if they are questionable ;).

You can expect at least a couple posts a week, starting later this week. I look forward to seeing you then.

1 comments

  1. Mark David Gerson // November 16, 2009 at 1:41 PM  

    Glad to see you back...in whatever form!

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