Why I Do This Work

by Robertt Young

I have been in business development, sales and training for the last 20 years. I have always been a bit of an enigma in the sense that I not only sold training programs but I delivered them too. This has its own set of unique rewards and challenges.

On the reward side, I am paid for sales. And when I delivered what I sold, I am paid for that too. The challenge however were the nagging questions: When do I sell? When do I deliver?

When email came along, that added another level of complexity to what I was doing. Before I got the EDGE I was buried in email and paper. I was trying to balance my delivery schedule and new business development- following up with clients and closing sales. I felt completely overwhelmed. When I was at work I was thinking about home; when I was at home I was thinking about work. My focus was suffering, my sales were down and I was working 14 – 16 hour days. I lived in my inbox when I was in the office and spent a lot of my time managing email rather than calling clients, prospecting and managing my accounts. I carried everything around in my head and things were falling through the cracks.

A friend of mine then told me about a position opening up with a company in California. They taught time management and sold a paper-based planner. I interviewed with them and was hired to sell and train. The “system” was a combination of unique thought processes involving how to deal with everything on your plate and manage everything in your life. As I began to use the “system,” I found my life coming together; I regained almost an hour of productivity a day and my life felt in control. A colleague at this company decided to start her own company, utilizing Microsoft Outlook as the tool instead of the paper-based planner. She asked me to come to work for her.

It was at this point that everything came together for me. It addressed the one thing that was missing from the “system” I had been using- how to deal with email and the resulting frustration from the inbox. With this new tool, I was able to manage everything in one place. The new “system” complemented and enhanced everything I had learned before. And when I delivered the workshop, two interesting things happened. At the end of the day, participants would actually stay after the class and continue to work in Outlook. I would also get emails and phone calls from participants telling me how the workshop had changed the way they work and helped them be more productive.

This is the story of how I got the EDGE. I do this work because it enables me to teach the very system that helped me.