Surrounded by the luxurious ambiance of Sé Hotel’s Sîren Uber Lounge, Skybox Ink, in association with Skybox Creative, held their second Green is the New Black Mixer on March 18^th, 2010 in Downtown San Diego. The night consisted of networking with eco-friendly professionals and entrepreneurs, a sponsored raffle prize giveaway, and numerous photo opportunities taken in front of our gorgeous blue Skybox Ink step and repeat banner (created by 858 Graphics).

Sponsors for the night’s event included Eco Corp Home Services, Casalinda Studio Designer Jewelry, Eufora, and eLiveLife.com.

Skybox Creative President, Angelina Sereno, attended The Success Principles Seminar with Jack Canfield in San Fransisco on Saturday, March 13, 2010. An avid fan of The Secret and the power of positive thinking with regard to achieving success, this event was a powerful reminder of the principles to use everyday. For those who may not know, Jack Canfield is the Author of best selling book series Chicken Soup for the Soul. Angelina will be sharing tips and ideas she learned at the seminar. Stay posted!

Angelina Sereno, President of Skybox Creative, with Jack Canfield

Angelina Sereno, President of Skybox Creative, with Marci Shimoff of The Secret

A few of The Success Principles to remember:

1. Take 100% Responsibility in your daily actions (Remember  E+R= O). Event + Response = Outcome – You always have control over the “R” to affect the “O”!
2. Give up blaming and complaining and stay focused on what you want—remember the “arm exercise” and the power of thoughts on your body. Jack performed a Kinesiology experiment with a volunteer from the group [Applied Kinesiology (AK) is a form of diagnosis using muscle testing as a primary feedback mechanism to examine how a person’s body is functioning.]
3. Continue to set monthly, weekly and daily goals.
4. Believe it’s possible to achieve all your goals.
5. Constantly replace your Negative Self-Talk with Positive Self-Talk.
6. Surround yourself with positive people.
7. Ask someone to be your accountability partner and talk to them every day.
8. Repeat your affirmations and visualize your success every single day for 30 days.
9. Practice the Rule of 5—take 5 action steps every day on your Breakthrough Goal. A Breakthrough Goal is something you want but seems impossible at first, if you achieve it, it will be a major breakthrough for you. Try to set at least 2 big breakthrough goals to work towards.
10. Ask for—and respond to—feedback.
11. Maintain a constant state of gratitude and appreciation.
12.  Do something that brings you joy or love every day.
13. Another point he brought up is to get outside your comfort zone. Or the phrase I like best “Do something that scares you everyday”

For more information on success, I would recommend buying a copy of The Success Principles and reading it more than once. Practice and repetition makes the master!

Working in web design and brand development, we are often glued to a Mac computer screen, but it’s always fun to get out into the business world and talk shop with other local professionals. San Diego is booming with a variety of networking events, geared to basically any industry you can think of. Skybox Creative ventured into the biotechnology world Thursday morning during the Bagels @ BIOCOM networking event.

Skybox has worked in the biotech industry on several different projects that included both web development and brand identity (Catalyst Biosolutions as an example). Our style is very clean + corporate, which suits this client’s demographic, so we wanted to learn more about membership to BIOCOM and how to become acquainted with their community of local companies.

We learned about joining the BIOCOM Purchasing Group, which negotiates significant, volume-based savings and favorable terms on products and services frequently used in the life science industry.

We also had the pleasure of mingling with some of the BIOCOM staff, including CEO Joseph Panetta and Director of Communications Teri Somers.

We met some additional interesting people in attendance, including Michael Young, a life sciences marketing executive, Terry Quinn of Global Manufacturing, John E.H. Cox of SourceSolution and Daniel H. Schumann of Invetech.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Iaomai Medical Ministries, a San Diego  medical outreach non-profit, and in nearly record time, we launched their new, fully-custom website: check out the live site here!!

Not only was it wonderful working with Iaomai because of the inspiring advanced healthcare they provide to those most in need worldwide, but President Sean Burgess was extremely helpful providing content, managing some multi-browser testing and supporting our artistic efforts along the way! As a thank you to Skybox Creative for our work on the project, Burgess kindly sent our staff an incredibly beautiful and exotic floral arrangement that literally dropped all of our jaws – it has the largest lilies we’d ever seen!

It was very gracious of Iaomai to offer such a warm gesture, and we in turn commend the organization on their medical outreach, which includes both clinical and surgical procedures during their medical trips. Iaomai specializes in the mobilization of advanced healthcare services to under-served populations around the world. Photo galleries for their most recent trips to Guatemala in 2009 and Jamaica in 2008 are available on the site click here, as well as photos of their most recent fund raising event at the Hotel Del Coronado click here.

Without even asking, Burgess provided a testimonial about the entire web development experience and end product:

“Skybox has been one of the freshest breath of business air I have had in a long time. I am so glad we have done business. I hope your business continues to be a huge success and other potential clients see your diversity and creativity in delivering unique and relevant websites.”

The San Diego Entrepreneur Meetup Group is responsible for hosting a variety of networking events and seminar luncheons for San Diego business professionals.

“Power Lunch: 5 Ways to Massively Increase Your Income” was the topic of today’s luncheon. Karie Kaufmann, Certified Business Coach with ActionCoach, presented the group with a variety of practical ideas to help grow your business. Prior to meeting Karie, we learned that we shared a mutual client, David Dent of CodeB San Diego, small world! By eliciting responses from the group, we were able to create a list of ways to; create more leads, increase your conversion rate, increase the number of transactions per customer, increase value therefore increase the average sale (DON’T DISCOUNT was a strong message she wrote out in large type) and increasing your profit margins by looking at ways you can cut costs.

One of the strongest messages I was left with was the importance of forming strategic alliances – creating and nurturing relationships with people who share your target market but don’t compete. One method to find out who the right strategic partners are is to draw a circle on a piece of paper with your target market/potential client in the middle, from there draw lines outward and think of all the possible people they come in contact with. Once you have your list of potential people/industries, find some local companies and introduce yourself. As long as it is a mutually beneficial relationship, they will most likely agree to meet with you and discuss the possibilities.

Prior to listening to the speaker, we played a game of Networking Tic-Tac-Toe, a first for me! We got to find out more about each other’s businesses and target markets by filling in squares on a tic-tac-toe board. Then as the luncheon coordinator, Doug Means, drew business cards out of his pocket, we put x in that square, the first person to get 3 in a row won a gift certificate for a free lunch at Seau’s Restaurant (where the event was held). It was a fun way to make sure you met at least 9 people at the event and really sparked conversation throughout the room.

Skybox Creative and Skybox Ink ♥ networking! We immerse ourselves in networking and learning all we can about business growth and development. The lunch drew a diverse range of business owners/professionals including, Stasia Shimkus of Arbonne International, Kirk Nigel of KNG Construction, Dave Brodwolf of Domination Marketing, Adrienne Moch – Copywriter and President of NAWBO San Diego, Carol Galloway of PartyLite, Ashley Sellers of National Life Insurance, Jan Naylor-Smith of JuicePlus, and of course Karie Kaufmann and Doug Means who put the event together! We would definitely recommend attending one of their events if you haven’t yet!