This past Christmas season, Logan told me had needed to finish picking up a few things, but would be home soon. HOURS later he returned and explained that I would understand what took so long on Christmas. Instead of doing a bunch of gift giving to each other, we only filled each others stockings because our trip to Hawaii was our early Christmas present to ourselves 🙂 Because of how long he was gone, the fact that we were only doing stockings, and we had little budgets for the stockings, I had no idea what he had done. But when it came time to pull things out of the stockings on Christmas morning, I knew exactly what took him so long. He knew that I was hoping to read more business books this year and he had spent hours at Barnes and Noble searching for two perfect books. One of those being The Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus. The book’s subtitle is “How to get big things done in your workshop… all year long”

First off, if you like to read and to be able to apply things to your business as you read, this is such a good read! Plus it is a fast one! I got through this one in a couple hours and would read it again. I really enjoyed the way Eric Harvey wrote it. It kept me engaged and I couldn’t put it down! Here were just a few of my favorite things from my notes on it-

• The very first section of the book talks about making your mission the main thing. Everything should revolve around your mission and that will help make your “workshop” run all year long. Monday was good timing for me to blog our mission statement, huh? I didn’t even plan that one! I’m telling you, knowing why you are in business and what your the purpose of it is is very important.
• Right after it wrapped up talking about your mission, it hit me hard. We are supposed to focus on our people (employees). For me, the employees are my brides. A lot of the time, I get so caught up in impressing other photographers, that I lose sight of who really matters- the brides!! I know this is one that I will constantly be working on.
• Everything we do is a reflection of us. Our business has our personal signature on it and that means that we need to be careful and attentive with what our signature says about us. The hope would ultimately be, that our brides would want to tell everyone about us because of our personal signature. Their experience with us would have been so amazing, that they want to tell others! And we would again deliver that same personal signature with the next bride.

If you are in the market for a good book, grab this one! I promise it’s a good read even outside of the Christmas season 🙂