October Additions

New materials have just been added for presentation skills and leadership in both the government and private categories. We hope you are enjoying using these materials and are having a successful year in this difficult economy. Consider using them even more since they are a great way to produce materials useful for your company or agency with almost no effort. We all need to encourage and assist our employees even when there isn't a lot of funding.

As always, please let us know if there are any areas you want us to cover that don't yet exist. Best of luck to all of you.

Steve & Mike

New Plug & Play Focus Newsletters For Supervisors

Our latest addition to the database is a dozen Focus newsletters in a Plug and Play format. In this first go around we just custom designed a dozen of the Focus newsletters for public sector supervisors. These newsletters include topics normally associated with supervisory development. There is an instruction sheet on how to customize the newsletters, but it could hardly be easier. In this format you place your seal in the designated section and number the volume and issue appropriately. There is a Happenings section where you can put events or reminders about issues or a short calendar list of events that are unique to your organization. We are supplying this from the response we have gotten on what is the simpliest format we can provide that allows some customization. We hope you like it and as always we hope you can provide us some feedback. As we draw into our close of our first year we still believe that for the money this is one of the best and most cost effective methods of supplying training information and in communicating with your employees. As always thanks for your support! Best Regards-Mike & Steve

Mid-summer Updates

We've just added new files for the corporate and government sectors. The materials have been added to mentoring, supervision, team building and the hiring/interviewing categories.

We hope you're having a great summer and getting lots of use from the getsimplysmart.com training materials and newsletters. Let us know if there are any categories or specific materials that might interest you or your organization and we'll work toward getting them posted for you.

Thanks for being our clients.

Mike & Steve

Free Training Materials & Newsletters to Try

We have just put some documents on Get Simply Smart that are in Microsoft Word and free to download. You can't use them commercially unless you are a client of ours but you can freely try them out and see how easy they are to modify for real-world use. Examples of our three newsletter types and several training briefs are there for the taking.

When you are on the home page, simply click on the link in the "Welcome" section at the top that says "CLICK here to download samples (docs)you can use." and it will take you to the page where you may download the individual documents.

Enjoy and let us know if you have any questions by writing to info@getsimplysmart.com. We believe we're the best thing going for inexpensive and effective training materials and newsletters. We hope you agree but if you don't, feel free to let us know. Also let us know what materials you might like to see added to make your life easier. More materials for subscribers are coming soon.

Mike & Steve

New Host Servers for Get Simply Smart

Get Simply Smart has just been moved to a new group of servers due to our hosting company changing its architecture. This has created an amazing amount of grief for us but, if all goes well, this is the only way you'll know about it.

The only thing you might notice is a feature on our materials listing that shows all materials that have been added in the last 60 days by displaying the title in red. Due to our migration to the new servers, we were unable to retain the original dates on the files so everything will be showing as new for the next 60 days. We just couldn't find a way around that one.

As always, we will give you a blog entry for new things being added. If you sign up to follow our blog, you'll get an email when we post something here so you don't have to continually monitor it.

If you have any problems since the move we just completed, be sure to click on the contact us button and let us know. Thanks for your patience and for being our customers.

Mike & Steve

New Stuff On Get Simply Smart

We are constantly upgrading and adding content. We have had some interest on ideas on how to use the site so we just added an E-Book that will walk you through how to use the Newsletters, Power Points and Training Briefs. You can find the E-Book on our home page and access the information by clicking on the link. This will help you maximize the value of your subscription. It will also give you ideas on why a subscription to our website is Simply Smart! Check out some of our new training briefs on creativity, commonly misused words, behavioral interviewing techniques, and some new supervisory articles. As always if you have some suggestions e-mail us with your ideas.

Mike and Steve

Get Simply Smart Gets A New Look

We asked for input on what people thought of our website and the overall consensus was that the "simply folksy" look we thought we had working for us might be working against us. A number of our clients said you have to look more corporate and that will give more credibility to the great materials inside and how "corporately crisp" your newsletters look. The result after hours of debate, mumbling under the breath, and dirty looks between Mike and Steve was our new look-simple to navigate yet not corporately cold. We tried to incorporate a softer, easy to read color contrast throughout the site. The only page we left with the black background and blazing bulb was the blog. Let us know what you think, in particular any feedback on materials and how you use them. P.S. If you wanted a white background Steve sympathizes with you, he lost that one! Then again Steve is color blind so maybe not the best judge.

Training Needs Analysis Materials Added

We are always looking to respond to the input of our clients. We just added some training needs analysis materials and checklists to allow any organization to survey training needs in-house. This was a result of one of our clients asking the question if we would be posting any such materials in the near future.

If you have some suggestions we would love to hear from you. At present we also working on some website design changes to address some aesthetic and navigation issues to better the quality of your Get Simply Smart subscription experience.

Best Regards-Mike and Steve

PowerPoints Doubled

We have just posted a number of new PowerPoints that double our initial offerings and we have more for the future. If you have some ideas for new PowerPoints in subject areas you would like to see just let us know. We add content every month to the database to make your subscription more valuable. With PowerPoints you will probably want to customize them so they fit your needs. Even if you need to customize the presentation we have reduced the time you will have to spend on the creation.

New Materials Added to the Site

Happy New Year to all you blog followers. Thanks for your interest in GetSimplySmart.

New materials have just been added:

SimplySmart Team Building document added to the SimplySmart Team Building folder.
New folder named SimplySmart Negotiations with eight new documents inside.

Note that if you sign up on the blog site here to be notified that you will get an email whenever we update the blog so you can almost effortlessly stay informed of what we're doing and when we add new materials.

We hope you and yours have a prosperous 2009.

Thanks,
Mike & Steve