Weekly Progress Report! 📈

Chris Hutchings
3 min readMar 14, 2021

On the whole, this week has been a good week. 😀

Early on in the week the news agenda was focusing heavily on Harry & Meghan and also International Women’s day.

In situations where the news is like this, I find myself a little conflicted.

I know from a growth perspective, content covering these topics has potential to get press or shares, but there is already so much of it. Everyone has an opinion, including many who probably shouldn’t.

I feel a bit reluctant to jump on the bandwagon unless we can add a differentiating voice to the narrative. The flip-side of this is that many of the Daily eOpinion participants, probably want to know the views of the public on these matters.

It’s a good example of what I believe in personally crossing over with what the business does and having to put the interests of eOpinion ahead of my own to a certain degree.

On the subject of business interests, this week happened to be an interesting ‘meeting’ week.

In the last performance post I mentioned a conversation I knew would be happening this week that would test my resolve. I was approached by a friend of a friend who required some surveys that didn’t quite fit with the Speedy Poll methodology. It was a tough call as cash is cash but the business has been built on this principle of speed. Throwing it out of the window wasn’t going to work. We’ve worked hard to build our panel and I don’t think it would have gone down very well sending out 15 minute surveys to them.

Thankfully the meetings improved over the course of the week. Tuesday was a lovely sunny day and one bandwagon I’m happy to jump on is the ‘walk & talk’ meetings, ditching Zoom and using the phone.

My third walk and talk of the day led to a great piece of work agreed. We’ll be putting live a research piece for a very cool brand looking at brand perception in the fashion market as well as with their existing users. I’ll put together a case study on this once it’s live.

Last week I sent a Linkedin message to the founder of a CIC (community interest company) in response to something he’d posted that really resonated with me. I proposed a call to discuss the ‘project phil’ initiative we run at eOpinion and whether it was something he could make use of. He said yes and we had a great chat on Wednesday. I have my fingers crossed we’ll be able to do something together but even if we don’t, I met a very cool guy and greatly admire what he is trying to achieve.

This week I had my first session as a mentor through The Youth Group, I signed up with them after listening to a podcast from Helen Saul. I’ve mentored on and off for years and still have a couple of people who I talk to on a regular basis but it’s always been a bit informal. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out and will update here.

I’ll close off this round-up on the subject of the news agenda again.

The end of the week was not very pleasant in the news, a very tragic story that I’m sure you have all heard about. It made me think about the news in general and the impact it has on us all.

Even in a normal week, the news sites are very rarely filled with positive and uplifting news.

And I think this is a problem.

I look at the news sites everyday for potential engaging topics for Speedy Polls and it is very depressing.

i know how it makes me feel and I have to try very hard not to let it get me down sometimes.

Is this something that is affecting society that nobody is really talking about?

Next week is looking good with another couple of exciting meetings lined up. Also introducing some growth activities and ‘officially’ expanding the product line but I’ll give you the full lowdown next week.

Stay safe everybody!

Hope this post has been insightful or helpful, please feel free to ask any questions or provide feedback. You can get in touch here or give me a follow on Twitter / Linkedin.

This post was originally published on chrishutchings.online

--

--

Chris Hutchings

‘Mostly’ documenting the journey/learnings of growing my company. #BuildInPublic. Further details can be found at https://chrishutchings.online