Hi Everyone! It’s good to be back on the blog! We took an unexpected break from writing when we realized that we had a huge opportunity to shift our single product delivery of IAM Career SMART! to a multi-product, community, social networking experience. We literally made this transition in 6 weeks. And it’s been a whirlwind…

Have you ever had the experience of just know when something is right and then you dive in 100%? That’s what happened to me.

Six weeks and one day ago, I had a conversation with George Tran (www.socialmarketingman.com) that catapulted me forward what feels like light years.  I was talking with George because I was frustrated with the Learning Management System (LMS) we were using to deliver IAM Career SMART!.

The old LMS felt like a lemon. It worked ok – we were trying to make a go if it – but we couldn’t seem to get traction. Ok, honestly, we didn’t try very hard. We released the product on the old site, had a lukewarm response, and then I asked myself where I was holding myself back.

My honest answer to myself: I didn’t feel like the LMS was a solid platform on which we could build our business and I wasn’t feeling the love from the people providing the LMS. As a matter of fact, my experience with them had gotten to the point that I was weary with every interaction with them. Not a good sign.

Enter George Tran. In one 1.5 hour conversation I was lit on fire. I saw how everything I had been working toward with the IAM material could be supported by his Social Sam platform. Our values of abundance, living life in beta, being real and transparent, building relationships with people, giving people lots of access to information and free help – plus purchase when people were ready -  was supported by this product. I also discovered a word to now use when describing IAM: a movement.

From here things just came together. Now, I’m feeling really grateful for the ‘old LMS’ experience. We learned a ton about what we wanted – and what we didn’t want. We are grateful for the incredible functionality available with our new system, and for the multiple people supporting the system and the many, many positive customer service experiences we have already had. George likes to call these ‘wow’ experiences. We’ve been wowed.

So, we’ve gone from lemons to lemonade, and we’re savoring and enjoying the lemonade more than you can imagine!

You can checkout our new site at www.iamlearningcommunity.com. We are waiting for a credit card processing bug to be fixed, and then we will launch to a core group of what we’re calling Seed Members – people who will help us launch and found this community.

Check it out … if you are a hummingbird, I know you’ll enjoy! (Watch the video on the front/home page and you’ll find out what I’m talking about…)

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