What a day Friday turned out to be. I remember saying, some time ago, to a group of small businesses that I was helping through my consultancy, that in business they would have days where they would need to deal with every emotion under the sun.

It's been a while since I have had a day like that, but Friday was one of them thanks to some great sales work by one of the team, some fantastic support from my MD and some hateful behaviour from an adviser we lost some weeks ago. Wow what a day!

The official launch of the networking continues to take up much of my time at that moment and I think I will have to work over the weekend to get all the loose ends tied up.

My day started with meetings with team members and a young lady who I would love to be one of our first ambassadors for the Norwich networking events. 

Meetings done I got on with the task that has filled my days for the last week or so; the writing of the networking procedure manual for all the BDC's. During the remainder of the day we got the good and the ugly turn up. Gladly the good was much more influential than the ugly, which was nothing more than someone over stepping the mark and trying to cause trouble with only half the story in place! 

The good was some fantastic sales from one of the crew and you'll have no idea how pleased we all are that this guy managed to get these results. A great effort and we hope a great confidence boost for him going forward. The ugly is not worth the effort, other than some say it shows what a lucky escape we had. In any event the result was a really positive outcome from MD Andy who once again showed practical examples of the ipatter values. 

It's like I've said on many occasions before, people will try and rain on your parade. The reason they do this is usually because they don't have one of their own!

My top tips for the day:

Today has reaffirmed that people react differently to failure. Some immediately accuse others, while some take the responsibility themselves, even if it's undeserved. Next time you experience a failure, resist the temptation to place blame, or create bad feeling to cover your failure. Take these three simple steps instead:

Always think before you act - Don't respond immediately or impulsively because you can easily make matters worse. Take your time and consider all the possibilities and how you might react.

LIsten and communicate - Never assume you know all the facts, never assume you know what others think. Gather feedback and then explain your own actions and intentions.

Search for lessons to learn - Mistakes happen. It may be that you're to blame, someone else is, or no one is. Create and then test hypotheses about how and why the failure happened to prevent it from happening again.