by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

On Friday we wondered if we would get to swim in the sea. Following a week or more of fierce storms with a consequent build up of debris, the sea was so murky. The locals including ourselves were reluctant to swim. Thursday we stood on the beach discussing why it was taking so long to clear. We didn’t swim that day.

Then overnight, as if with the wave of a magic wand the sea had become crystal clear. You could see the fish and your own feet.

Life itself is like that sometimes I find. Last week I was in one of my "overwhelm" states. HOW would I get everything completed IN TIME?

Des says let’s get everything that is in your head onto a spreadsheet. VOILA, magic wand time again! I have been able to get clear and move forward. What’s great is I am checking things off. This give me good feelings as well as giving me clarity.

What do you do when things are not clear?

Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Sandcastle Moments

For the child,
that the sandcastle
will disappear
with the next wave
is irrelevant.

She lives joyfully
in her imagination
in the moment!
–Des Walsh

Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Happy Easter!
Love
Suzie, Des, and Liz

by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

I was inspired with the words from this billboard advertisement
which graced Snapper Rocks during the recent QuickSilver
Roxy Pro Surfing Championships.
Just in case you are curious the full image can be seen here

With so much gloom and doom around you have to ask what kind of
future do you feel

We can all choose to feel the way the doom and gloom merchants
would like us to feel or we can change our emotional vibration
to feel positive. In other words we can choose to feel a
prosperous and bright future. It is up to us!

So will you have positive feelings about your future today?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

When it is high tide, we climb some stairs to get from Rainbow Bay to Greenmount Beach.

On Friday as we were climbing the stairs I said to Des: “We don’t have an idea for Beach Notes this week. As we walked along the path we noticed some tourists photographing a bush turkey in a tree. Bush turkeys are usually seen scurrying around the ground, making what we call a mess, throwing dirt onto the pathway, but for them is just part of making their nest.

An idea came to mind, talk turkey: To speak frankly and get down to the basic facts of a matter.

Des often says one of the things he loves about me is my openness and honesty. He tells other people that “what you will get with Suzie is how it is: you mightn’t like it but you will always know where you stand.”

Recently I have been some conversations with myself on this exact topic. Have I been talking frankly with myself or have I been in a slight state of delusion?

Sometimes it is easier for me to “talk turkey” to an other than to myself.

What is your talk turkey story?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

Des emerged yesterday morning only just awake saying “I have a great idea- I’ll tell you at the beach!”

As we walked down to the water’s edge, Des began to talk about his idea and related it to

the book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and make the Competition Irrelevant by W. C. Chan and Renee Mauborgne

He then decided to illustrate this by drawing how he sees red ocean / blue ocean in the sand.

The beach is such a great place for seminars!

Des was saying at this time of global economic anxiety, instead of trying to compete harder in the Red Oceans of existing market focus we should look for or create Blue Oceans of new opportunity.

An example from the Blue ocean strategy book is how Yellow Tail wines, from an until then little-known company Casella Wines, took the American alcoholic beverages market by storm.They did this precisely, not by competing with powerful, entrenched wine companies, but by way of a market strategy which targeted people the US wine companies had ignored or neglected.

His example of a Red Ocean (red because of blood in the water) was where so many many people selling services in the social media field target younger audiences, the growing market of baby boomers using social media is not being similarly targeted.

What is your blue ocean strategy?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

In any business there is an advantage to be gained in every now and again stepping away from the details of what we are doing and all our tasks, however essential and urgent, so that we can look at our challenges and the business itself from a more “elevated” perspective – a bird’s eye view.

Not an original thought, but how many of us do it? And if we do it, do we do so often enough?

The thoughts and the questions were prompted by seeing a new structure – a kind of observation platform made of scaffolding materials and a sheet of corrugated roofing – at our local beach, Rainbow Bay.

Every year about this time we have the week-long spectacle of the Quiksilver and Roxy Pro surfing championships at Rainbow Bay , or as surfers probably think of it, the famous Snapper Rocks break. The whole end of the beach, in the area surrounding the Rainbow Bay Surf Lifesaving club building, becomes a kind of instant tent city, with temporary shops, cafe, exhibition space, media center, and what appears to be a large chillout area for competitors. The event brings champion surfers, men and women, from around the world, and pumps large sums of money into the local hospitality industry.

We love it!

It also brings hordes of photographers, who set their tripods or other camera props up on the beach or on the rocks, to capture the performances of the competitors.

The observation tower at the other end of the beach is a new development this year. We spoke the other day to the guy in it, who was set up with still and video cameras, in a position commanding a totally uninterrupted view of the whole beach and looking straight down to the area where the surfers are doing their stuff over the coming days.

There is no question that he will have a better overall picture of what is happening than will his colleagues/competitors on the beach. Some of their photos and videos might be more striking than his, but he will be able to take pictures that they can’t take from the level of the beach or the rocks.

He has a bird’s eye view.

Have you been able to get a better picture of your business by stepping back and getting a bird’s eye view?

Any tips you would like to share, about how to do that most effectively?
Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh