Enter the Marcana Dragon

In case you haven’t heard, I have a new article site going, called Marcana.com. Well, it’s not exactly new, but the barrage of daily articles and most of the fantastic new authors in this new incarnation certainly are. I’m talking about people like Will Reichard, JC Hewitt, Justin McCullough and others yet to have made their debut.

You’re going to like Marcana.com for social media articles, marketing articles, strategy guides, startup advice and a heck of a lot more, besides. You should really subscribe now, so you can say you were hip when hip wasn’t cool, or whatever people say at such times. Follow @MarcanaGuides for the latest updates sent right to your hot little hands. Hurry on over. I posted a special how-to article there on Google Analytics today, and you know you’ll want it while it’s good and fresh!

Thanks to everyone who has supported this blog. I will continue to post my more personal reflections on social media, marketing and what have you here, but please plugin to Marcana.com for the bulk of my marketing how-to’s, strategy pieces and reviews, not to mention a whole bonanza of other great articles by an entourage of superb topic experts I’ve thankfully bumped into along the way. This blog is not going fallow, it just got too cramped to house this (very recent) flurry of ideas and ambitions, so now it has the help that it deserves.

As they say in the Chengdu dialect…gumbei!

Red Tape is Good?

"You need this?"

[tweetmeme source=”MarkBrimm”]

Perhaps one of the biggest irritants to any entrepreneur is the legal and technical red tape which larger companies can fly through, but which small business can easily trip over. It can slow your pace just seeing it up ahead. It can bring you to stop entirely and rethink everything you’d planned. It can even back you down if you succumb to the fear of what is entailed.

I learned recently how red tape can slow us down just enough to show us what we need to work on. It made me think how I sped through certain parts of a great plan and didn’t pay enough attention to crucial strategy areas. I got to the point of disillusionment, and then the next morning…I was sitting at my desk feeling grateful for the opportunity to save my idea. And I owed it all to the barriers that I had come up against by rethinking what I was trying to accomplish and how it would play out.

Red tape is scary for an entrepreneur who doesn’t have loads of capital on hand to throw at it. But red tape can actually cause us to rethink what we’re doing to the point of re-examining all the holes in our plans. It can actually show us how we’ve rushed over certain parts in our giddy excitement and neglected crucial legal, strategic and even ethical issues (which directly influence our brand down the line–and us, ourselves). In short, red tape is in reality like that person at the 8-K marker of the 10K race holding the water, asking you with a gesture “You need this?” Maybe you do need it for the last 2 K ahead before the finish line. An experienced runner might be tempted to think “It will only weaken my resolve, upset my body’s stride” but that stride may be in a very different condition 1 K down the line without a refresher in critical fluids to muscles that are nearly cashed.

We all need to refresh our outlook on what we’re doing from time to time. Red tape is, in the end, just a last ditch opportunity to do just that, before we go in too deep to back out. Red tape is…good?