Business Lessons From Mexico – Make Time For Family

This is the third post in my Business Lessons from Mexico series.  If you haven’t already done so, please go back and read the first and second posts on “Do One Thing Well” and “Make Sure You’re Protected” for additional context.

One area I personally struggle with, and am always striving to do better with, is making time for family.  Because I enjoy my work, I often find that I’ll try to grab an extra hour here, an additional 15 minutes there, and before I realize it’s time for bed.

This last trip to Mexico, I was unable to get phone or internet service on the beach.  The most advanced technology we used was an iPod to jam out while playing sequence on the beach and playing fart games with unsuspecting visitors.

My wife had the incredible idea to buy a little remote-controlled whoopee cushion.  You take the portion with the speaker and hide it somewhere and then use a remote which looks like a car keychain remote.  Whenever the remote is pressed you get a random and realistic fart sound from the other end.  As juvenile as it sounds, eventually EVERYONE was playing with the little machine.

From little chuckles to long, loud barrel laughs, everyone loved it!  Eventually, once everyone in our little camp had been tricked into believing that the person sitting next to them had no respect for anyone, we had to move on to the neighbors.  They would come over to visit, be invited to the kitchen where grandma would proceed to test their patience.

I don’t think I’ve laughed so much or so hard in a very long time!  The impacts of this 4 day break in Mexico has had on me personally are pretty amazing.  I came back to the United States and have been  hard at work, but things are flowing so naturally.

I don’t find that I’m distracted by Twitter and Facebook as much as I was before I left.  I’m able to whip out blog posts at record speed and I feel I can focus on the things that are most important.  I was able to move a couple of my personal projects forward by leaps and bounds in a matter of days.

I owe this to my family as they have ensured that in spite of a long list of to-dos waiting I always set aside some time with family to be able to recharge and keep from burning out.

Make sure you set aside time to recharge!

Crowd-sourcing Lost Pet Retrieval

We had our landscaper over yesterday and he was doing an awesome job of getting the yard all cleaned up.  While he was working hard, I was trying to get through my homework.  After an hour or so I decided I needed to take quick a break and play DJ Hero with my step-daughter.  I went upstairs and started jamming.

We were playing for a bit and I noticed that the dog was not in his cage and I couldn’t remember seeing him for the last few hours which was unusual.  We began searching the house with absolutely no luck.  It was about to be dark so we decided to drive around the neighborhood and see if we could find little Charlie.  He usually doesn’t go very far so we thought driving with the windows down and calling for him would do the trick.

I didn’t and we spent the next hour and a half driving through all of the neighborhoods near our house.  We had no luck with that either.  We went home to gather our thoughts and try to come up with a plan to get him back.

The next morning we got up early and started again.  Lots of our very helpful friends expressed their sympathy and gave suggestions while we had been sleeping.  We took all of it, we called the humane society and animal control, but they hand’t seen him.  Next we posted an advertisement on CraigsList and created some printed flyers.

We went through the entire neighborhood and put flyers at every entrance or exit for our subdivision!  We literally must have put up at least 40 flyers.  We were excited to see people out with their dogs coming up and taking really close looks at the flyers!  We were very hopeful that the beautiful sunny day would bring about a rescue.

By late afternoon we still had not heard anything!  We were all starting to lose hope again and went back to being very sad and missing Charlie.  On top of this the clouds started to roll in…  A massive storm hit our part of town and obliterated all of the signs that we had put up.  We decided that we’d head to the pound the following day and try to remain hopeful.

During dinner my Fiancée was feeling hungry and sad and decided to check her iPhone for email.  It was there that she found a message from someone that claimed to have found Charlie!  She immediately called and talked to a very nice girl that said she had seen him with one of the neighbors.

She had seen the advertisement on CraigsList and thought to let us know that she had seen Charlie with some of the neighbors.  How amazing is that?!?

To say that the last 24 hours have been a pretty crazy emotional roller-coaster is an understatement, but we’re happy to have the crazy little lion home!

Zero Gravity vs. Jumping Castles

Outdoor event entertainment used to be a relatively simple affair. Whether a kid’s birthday, a craft show, or a local social group’s annual gala, organizers had clear options and they were able to put together solid events without much assistance. Today, however, so many businesses and organizations are competing to arrange the most boisterous, most entertaining, and most talked-about events that finding out what works and what doesn’t, what people respond to and what they shrug off, can be a matter of life-or-death for event organizers. Spend too much on things that people don’t like and that buzzed-about picnic lunch can go from a great investment to a total waste. Book the wrong entertainment and what was supposed to be the most amazing birthday party for your child will be an unmitigated disaster.

Among larger event organizers, there are some pretty reliable options that can generally keep the kids entertained at relatively low cost. The most common is having one or a number of “jump castles,” colorful inflatable play spaces in which kids can run around, bounce, jump, and play games. Another is a so-called “zero-gravity” machine, a large contraption that allows people to strap in and experience the sensation of weightlessness by jumping, bouncing, and flipping to extreme heights. To our knowledge no “compare and contrast” of these two has been done, so for the benefit of everyone struggling to decide what to book for their next event, we’re going to run down the basics on these different approaches and see what makes each of them a unique choice.

Jump castles have been around for a while now, so the practice of having one for an outdoor event is widespread and widely understood. Someone comes over, blows the thing up, the kids run around for a while, and then it’s deflated and taken back. Yet while the activity is pretty uniform, jump castles are a wonderfully diverse category of entertainment. There are jump castles with princess themes, Spiderman themes, old-time train themes: name something that kids like, and somewhere out there is a bright shiny jump castle you can rent to indulge the little ones’ favorite fad. This visual stimulation is great for young kids, and the interactive environment is good for games and socializing, but jump castles have their share of drawbacks, too.

That same socializing aspect that we say can be a benefit can also be a problem: the castles get crowded, and with more people there are more arms flailing, more legs kicking, more fingers poking, and more heads bouncing around, which can be a recipe for complete disaster. One kid jumps at a funny angle and all of a sudden you have a pile of bumps, bruises, and tears that’s just begging for some overprotective parent to have a freak out. Not pretty.

So safety can be an issue. Though you would imagine these things would require some certified adult supervision, part of the trouble with jump castles being so common is that it is not always certain that the 17-year old who was sent to set it up is qualified to monitor nine kids bouncing around simultaneously. And the fact that most adults really can’t (or shouldn’t) use the castles because of size and weight issues means that the age restrictions cut both ways: the youngest children can’t use it because there are no adults to guard them while they play.

Zero-gravity machines are a different kind of entertainment, and since they’re far less common it makes sense to explain how they’re used. These machines are set up in a relatively large space, and each one has a number of stations extending from it, complete with harnessing, into which a person is secured. Once harnessed in, the users experience near-weightlessness as they hang from the bowed, springy extensions, free to jump up and down on large launching pads that help them reach incredible heights in relative freedom. Buoyed against their own weight, the users are able to jump to massive heights or execute aerial acrobatics like something out of Cirque du Soleil, all while safely strapped into the machine.      

Unlike jump castles, zero-gravity machines are basically a solo activity, and so the ability to socialize is limited. There are multiple stations so you can have more than one person using it at a time, but of course the pace is still going to be slower than a jump castle. While that does make it less social than jump castles it greatly decreases the likelihood of injury. Similarly, since users can move about as they please in a jump castle and they’re strapped into a zero-gravity machine, there is also a trade-off between decreased freedom and increased safety. Some people would say being alone makes it easier to experience what the machine can do since you don’t have to worry about others or their safety while you are using it.

Age restrictions are somewhat less of an issue with the zero-gravity machine as adults and children can be safely strapped in, and though very young children probably don’t have the motor skills and larger adults may not fit or may weigh too much, the range of ages that can use the zero-gravity machine is greater than those who can use the jump castle. Related to this somewhat older skewing of those using the zero-gravity machine, there is not going to be the same kind of visual fun for the kids that a themed jump castle brings, though the sight of mommy and daddy flipping around 15 feet in the air may be entertainment enough. And that is part of the consideration as well: if you’re booking entertainment not just for kids but for lots of different people, the zero-gravity machine is definitely the way to go.

The experience of using the zero-gravity machine is what really gives it the edge, since it’s hard for a jump castle to emulate the view you get or the feeling of flying you experience when you’re using it. Of course this is tempered somewhat by some of the drawbacks of the machine. It certainly takes up a much greater space than the jump castle, which can limit the venues at which you can roll it out. It easily fits a roughly 50’ x 50’ space, so without at least that much space to use it may be better to either change venues or book some other entertainment. Also, since these machines must be professionally staffed by two people the increased safety will most likely mean an increased cost, though that depends on your market.

Overall these two kinds of event entertainment have their pros and cons, and each is able to take advantage of its core strengths to provide good value to event organizers, whether your event is a birthday party with 50 people or a large festival with 5,000 people. If you’re on the fence your biggest considerations should be the ages of the people you’re entertaining and the size of the venue, but all things considered equal we’ll take weightless mid-air flipping over a bouncy game of tag any day.

For more information on Zero Gravity, visit Atrevete!