This summer, I broke one of my Rules. Not the kind of rules that were meant to be broken. Nuh uh. One of the cardinal rules of Sarah Bray Staying Sane and Not Losing the House, Dog, and Whatever Else Can Be Pawned.

My crime was ignoring the Rule of Lag. Which goes like this:

Never EVER forget your inevitable client lag times. Lag time 1: The time it takes between the launch of a new marketing initiative and your resulting client inquiries. Lag time 2: The time it takes from inquiry to sale.

Lag time 1: The time between getting your marketing freak on and seeing the results of your efforts.

In an ideal world, we could press “on” and our client inquiries would start coming in. Then we’d press “off” and they’d stop. On, off, on, off, on, off. We wouldn’t have to worry about overbooking or underbooking, because we could just flip the switch and in our clients would come.

Alas, this isn’t the way it works. I have to commit to my marketing plan for 30 to 45 days before I start seeing any measurable results. Your mileage may vary, so test it. Notice patterns. Figure out that lag time and never forget it. Use it to figure out when you need to be hitting hard and when you can lighten up (I don’t recommend that you ever quit marketing completely, but there are times when a lighter touch will do if you’re super busy.).

Lag time 2: The time between your client asking about your service and the two of you signing on the dotted line

Sweet, sweet relief: your clients are asking about what you do and you’re feeling each other out for a good fit. What a great feeling. You can pay your mortgage! Apply for health insurance! Might as well start uncorking the champagne, because life is now a whole lot easier.

Except…it’s not. People are taking kind of a while to get back to you. You’re starting to get nervous. What is wrong with these people?! Don’t they know you’ve got bills to pay? What is wrong with you?

You are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Every industry/niche has built-in lag times that you need to notice, respect, and work in to your plan. I’m lucky. My 2 lag times are exactly the same: 30-45 days. Many people will have a shorter lag between inquiry and sale, and a few could have longer. Measuring and never losing sight of your client lag times is going to help you plan your finances accordingly. And ward off panic attacks, which is always good.

Blogging…Now with part two!

I’m changing up the format around here a smidge. Moving to a Tuesday/Thursday ritual, since Fridays need to be for chilling. And instead of having my Friday round-up, I’ll be adding random interestingness at the end of every post. Hurrah!

Back from Nashville, and I just have to share our nightmare of a car trip with you. Because you know…nobody’s ever had a nightmare car trip with a sick baby.

Our trip was supposed to take roughly 12 hours from Nashville to Virginia Beach. We were ready to go home. It’d been a fantastic week and a half, but you know…ready. We got a little over half way, when our two year old daughter starting scaring us. She’d already thrown up twice (once ALL OVER me) and she was running a fever of 103. But then her breathing started becoming faster and more labored, and her heartbeat seemed to pick up speed. We were in the middle of nowhere, and I was starting to get in mom freak-out mode.

I called the nurse on call and accidentally hung up on her when she called back an hour later. DRAT! (You know when you think you’ve mistakenly called someone because you were fooling around on your phone? And then you quickly hang up? That was what happened.)

So what did I do? I tweeted about it. Right away, my wonderful friend Mark (@markheartofbiz) started asking me questions about what was going on. Turns out, he is a former paramedic. Then he called to walk us through the danger signs for respiratory distress and recommended some things we could do. He also recommended that we wait in civilization until the nurse called us back.

In the end, we got her home safely at around 2am. We put the kids to bed and started to bring stuff in the house when we noticed we were being attacked by fleas. I could not make this up. Apparently, some flea eggs decided to get into our house, wait until we were gone to hatch, and then have a huge blow-out party. And then jump us when we walked in the door.

So, we stripped off the flea-attacked clothes, put on some new ones, woke the kids up, and ran out of the door. After two attempts, we found a hotel that had a room open and got into bed around 4 in the morning. Then woke up at 8 for Lilah’s doctors appointment and discovered that she has some sort of atypical pneumonia.

So yeah…I don’t normally share the day-to-day of life with the Brays in this space, but so many people have been concerned after my panicked tweeting that I thought I’d fill you in. Even after all of that though, it’s good to be back.

And moral of the story: @markheartofbiz is amazing. (Speaking of momentum, he has about 20 spots left in his upcoming course. I know a few people who are taking it, and it sounds awesome, especially since momentum is a particular point of pain for most rockstars I know.)

Moral number two: Twitter is super-useful and will not stop being useful until relationships cease to be useful.