

Above the door of any serving area in a Ritz Carlton hotel is a sign that reads, ‘Ladies and gentlemen taking care of ladies and gentlemen. ‘This phrase has always served as a dignified and courteous reminder at Benchmark, as it highlights just how far our personal presentation and interactions with others can go. COVID-19 has brought forward a ‘new normal’ in which ZOOM meetings and Skype calls are now our makeshift professional home.
While the quality of your work matters, the conduct and image each of us projects personally and professionally are equally significant. To put it simply, people like to work with other people who are clean, collected, well-mannered, and polite.
COVID-19 has brought forward a ‘new normal’ in which ZOOM meetings and Skype calls are now our makeshift professional home. While this is an adjustment (to put it lightly), this may be our professional reality for the foreseeable future; furthermore, these virtual office spaces be our only opportunity to make an excellent first impression. To prevent the undoing of many days of meticulous upkeep, it’s vital to be consistently courtly, polite, and aware of others during this uncertain time.
So, back to that sign on the Ritz Carlton door, if you can carry yourself like a lady or gentleman in any work-related context, the chances are that you are well on your way to being the sort of worker employers value and coworkers want to be around.
As we all know – in the wine and spirits industry, we are not only called to deliver our expertise but represent the best version of our personal brand both on and off the stage.
Hi everyone,
Well, things are changing fast, aren’t they? I hope you are taking good care of yourselves, your loved ones, and your neighbors.
It is quite the paradox, to be called on to support one another while also practicing social distancing.
I’m feeling nervous and unsettled and have turned to my husband, my best friend, and my family for comfort.
Being an entrepreneur, I am pretty well acquainted with the unknown, but this is next-level! I feel sad receiving emails from many of our colleges that are looking for work. I understand and identify with their struggle. The fact is, Benchmark Consulting is a bootstrapped small business.
We’re going to continue to do the best we can, but no matter how strong we are, I admit there are some things out of my control and this pandemic is one of them. Benchmark Consulting is powering through these challenging times. Our team is working from home, together with their roommates, kids, partners, pets, and in-laws, and following guidelines from the WHO on how to stay safe and protect the community.
I’m really proud of them for rallying. Benchmark Consulting exists for all of us in the wine industry who do it all – well now we’re doing at all at home, aren’t we?
We got this!
Please know that Benchmark Consulting is in business. Benchmarkhr.com is open.
We’re doing our best to keep the lights on for our team, and we thank you for your continued support. We aim to be a source of good cheer, inspiration, and practical advice. I’ll also share my startup story and notes on what continues to keep me motivated to persevere through uncertainty.
Follow along with us on email and LinkedIn.
I’m figuring this out day by day, just like you, so please share and don’t be a stranger.
– Benchmark Team
These are certainly challenging and unprecedented times we are facing, with many unknowns ahead.
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to evolve, we’ve been extremely attentive to announcements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as our suppliers in the industry and taking into consideration the recommendations being made.
Currently, Benchmark Consulting is open and fully operational to service our customers. We are taking necessary measures to practice social distancing, so all Benchmark Consulting employees will be working remotely for the next two weeks. We will be available by phone, by email and/or by text messaging through our cell phones.
We will meet you, virtually!
Please continue to reach out for any of your future employment needs. We will continue to monitor the Covid-19 situation closely and will provide prompt updates to you, our valued customers, as circumstances dictate.
Until then, stay safe and healthy and we look forward to working together again soon!
Thank you,
Dawn Bardessono
Managing Partner, Benchmark Consulting & Team
“Smart people do dumb things.”
“I like the company I work for, but my job isn’t engaging anymore. I’ve been doing this work for four years. And sure, I’ve been promoted twice, but it’s still the same work. So I’ve been looking at other companies. But what if I go somewhere else and that doesn’t work out? I’ll have to move on quickly. And that won’t look good on my resume.”
“Just hearing myself talk leads me to another thing: Overthinking it.”
“The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.”
[accordion title=”Career Insights from…” opened=”yes”]Dr. Travis Bradberry: is an award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world’s leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, TIME, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review[/accordion]
Everyone would like that—it’s easy to like that.
If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence—but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.
Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship—but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?
Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.
At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.
People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”
Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”
Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten thousand.
If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.
Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then … and then nothing.
Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.
I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.
The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser. Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.
But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.
This post originally appeared on MarkManson.net. Follow @iammarkmanson on Twitter.
On October 12, 2017, California joined a growing trend of jurisdictions attempting to address pay disparities by enacting a law that bans employers from seeking salary history information, including compensation and benefit information, from job applicants. This includes the concern that relying upon salary history may perpetuate existing pay disparities.
To address this issue, California’s new law:
Notably, although employers may not seek salary history information, if an applicant “voluntarily and without prompting” discloses salary history information, the employer may consider it in determining what salary to offer the applicant. Unique to California, however, is the requirement that employers provide a pay scale upon reasonable request—a requirement that may force employers to create such a scale for positions.
The new law, which becomes effective January 1, 2018, will be codified at California Labor Code section 432.3, and applies to “all employers,” both private and public.
Employers in California should begin reviewing their hiring policies and practices, including employment applications and recruiting inquiries, to determine what changes may be necessary to ensure compliance with this new law.