Saturday, July 24, 2010

Linked In

Men in White is a member of the Thought leaders group, and attends the monthly sessions by the Futurist and all round good guy Craig Rispin.

Craig has mentioned to me a few times about the importance of having a professional presence on Linked in. As a small business owner, updating a profile on the internet always seems to gt a low priority ranking in the list of things to do.

At the July 2010 session Craig talked about a blogger called Guy Kawasaki that got an extreme makeover on his Linkedin profile.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/linkedin_profil.html#axzz0uavyTHSN

It's an inspiration to me, as I am starting a virtual makeover on my linked in profile. The first step is to get a professional photo of myself! I will report back in a week on this task.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Practical Solutions for a Tough New Planet

Men in White often talks about "what" we do (give people the best customer service and quality painting solutions) and also a bit about "how" we do it (with good management we reduce waste and produce long lasting paint jobs), however we seldom talk about the "why". That's interesting, as the motivation behind Men in White is the 'fire in the belly' that get's us out of bed in the morning. WE don't do it purely for the money (that's a result, not a motivation).
Nope. The reason "why' we run Men in White is because we know we can make the world a better place than we found it. We work in a in industry where there is lots of waste and simple incremental changes can make huge reduction in waste very quickly. For example:
Men in White has been using an all acrylic system since 2005, and all 'wash up' water is treated with flocculent, so that the acrylic paint is separated from the water. This means that the paint can be disposed of as solid waste and the water can be re-introduced into the water cycle or recycled for more wash up (we favour the second option). With practice this extra step can be achieved easily.
Men in White accepts as fact that water is a limited resource and in the future (www.billmckibben.com) we will have a lot less water to play with here in Australia.
Men in White offers practical solutions for a tough new planet.
We think that is a pretty good answer to the 'why" question.