2019 Rent The Chicken Owners Conference

The main goal of our recent workation to Florida and back was to prepare for our upcoming 2019 Rent The Chicken Owners Conference. We hammered out about 90% of the details while away including an itinerary, detailed schedule, PowerPoint presentations for each session, team building exercises, ice breakers, restaurant for dinner, and more! Pictured to the right was Homestead Phil's make shift work station.

Fast forward nine days after returning home from workation and we were off to Erie, PA for the Owners Conference! We arrived a day before almost everyone else. It was not a religious Conference but we hosted the Conference at the Benedictine Sisters of Erie's Monastery. They have a great meeting space with living room furniture and hotel-like room accommodations PLUS a staff who makes meals for the sisters! So we paid a fee for the room, for the bedrooms, and for the meals. EASY! Well.. until the snow started piling up :) We are thankful that everyone who registered attended and no one got snowed in while at the Conference!

We had 20 attend including Homestead Phil and I! It was our biggest Conference to date! One of our new Affiliates attended and at the end of the Conference said "I had no idea how you guys were going to talk about chickens for 12 hours over the course of two days... but you did it! And kept it interesting!" haha

We discussed 2018 Year in Review followed by presenting our 2018 Top Performer award to Homestead Kate who serves Toronto & South-Central Ontario with Rent The Chicken and Hatch The Chicken.

We awarded Homestead Monica and Randy in Indianapolis with Most Improved as they quadrupled their rentals from 2017 to 2018!

We also honored Homestead Fletcher, Homestead Kate's son, as the youngest attendee and this was his 3rd Conference. Homestead RayLee was honored for her commitment to supplying photos for us to use on social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and now Snapchat!

Our vendor partners and organizations provided fantastic giveaways. Some provided enough for everyone to have one and others gave a bigger donation so we raffled those off to all who attended. From there we had sessions on operating individual Rent The Chicken locations, marketing, time management, and accomplishing tasks now with long-term in mind.

And we were introduced to some fun games... Has anyone played Exploding Kittens?? What a hoot!

It's safe to say that we all came away exhausted and overloaded with information but inspired to make 2019 the best year yet!

The Masked Singer

Contains spoilers
While on "workation" recently, our internet didn't permit us to stream like we are used to and our antenna only tuned in like 3-4 stations. One of the stations was Fox. As I wrote about recently, I watch a few shows on Fox already including The Cool Kids and also Last Man Standing. I've watched a ton of previews for The Masked Singer but didn't think it would be on my radar of shows to actually watch!

As I was watching, just listening to it lured in Homestead Phil to watch with me. We caught the last half of episode one. Granted I am way behind on pop culture and I only know about 10% of the guesses made by the judges but I still enjoy the show! We also missed the first sing-offs, watched the last one, and watched the hippo be selected then unmasked. Although we live in Western Pennsylvania, Homestead Phil is not a Steeler fan and has been on a football watching hiatus for two seasons now. When the hippo was unmasked, we knew exactly who he was!

What I know is that there are only 12 Singers and we've now watched them all perform. It's going to be a short season for The Masked Singer!

Prediction: Again, my pop culture knowledge is slim so I'll give you my predictions. I'm so confident in one of my predictions, I bet my friend Deanna $5. She thinks The Bee is Gladys Knight.

The Bee: Tina Turner

My only other prediction is that the Raven is Raven Symone. No one else is predicting this so I'm likely incorrect.

How about you? Any predictions? Is the deer Peyton Manning? Is the peacock Donny Osmond?

The Shift.

This time of year is full of resolutions and goal setting. It can also be a time of reflection on previous goals and resolutions. This time of year for us is a big shift. The last month or so, I've been sick twice (boo!), and will the number of incoming calls decreasing, instead of sitting at my desk, I made good use of baking cookies & spending extra time with loved ones. I wrote about a lot of that last week.

The week after New Years for us is always about The Shift. The Shift from a slower pace being plopped right back into the swing of things. Every January, we host our Rent The Chicken Owners Conference inviting all of our Rent The Chicken Affiliates to a local conference to kick off the upcoming Rental Season. Homestead Phil and I work on sessions that we will present at the conference, meals, social times, etc. We work on coordinating logistics, prepare the itinerary, and more. At the same time, we start to hear from more of you via email, telephone, smoke signal (j/k .. seeing if you're still reading!). We also increase our Affiliate Group Conference Call schedule from once a month to every other week through April. Soon, one of us will always have to be home during the work day as the calls get to be so often that they are hard to field on the road with just the iPad. I am not even complaining! Incoming calls are needed or we won't be renting chickens! As even more time continues, both of us have to be home during regular business hours. Homestead Phil ran a report recently on our incoming calls of April - June of 2017 vs April - June of 2018. We had over 900 more calls in that three month period in 2018 than 2017! Say, what?! We anticipate that 2019 will have an even higher inbound call volume!

We set a number of business goals but not typically many personal goals. Maybe this year will be different. I'm fairly certain, one can make new goals even without changing the year, right?

One goal: running. I really hope to be able to start running again soon. With two major sinus infections that caused my lungs to not function to full capacity in the last 5 weeks, I haven't been able to get out even when the weather has been nice enough. Maybe within the next week, my lungs will cooperate and I'll be able to share my running adventures again!

We were on a workation recently and Givi Kitty joined us in our little RV. We started using this term a few years ago where we are still connected to our phones / emails / social media, etc but we are working off-site or unavailable for a few hours during the week day. We could NEVER go on a workation in May for reasons I explained above. I think I could learn a lot from Givi Kitty as I likely don't rest enough. (I think she could learn from me as I don't think she works enough! haha) Here are some pics we snapped of her during our workation.