Stepcase Lifehack » Management

Does Your Company Support Your Blog?

Dan Schawbel — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:00:30 +0000

As much as you think blogging and social networking are mainstream, corporate America has not caught up quite yet. Many companies are fearful that they are losing control of their brand — and they are. Companies are trying to put together social media guidelines as quickly as possible, so that employees know what they can and cannot say online, concerning their brand. You’ve probably seen a blog with a disclaimer and blown it off like it didn’t exist and I don’t blame you. Everything you say and do, whether online of offline, is a reflection of your brand and all brands you’re associated with, such as a nonprofit you are volunteering for, your company and even your friends. Most companies are top-down, which means if executives are fearful of social media, then there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to blog or share information about the company online. This, of course, is an opportunity cost because talent is the most important corporate asset!

The research says a lot

Companies haven’t completely embraced social media and some never will. Executives won’t even accept friend requests on Facebook or LinkedIn and most aren’t ever going to use Twitter. IT departments block many sites, including social networks because there is a security risk associated with them. Also, any company with a lot of classified information, in certain industries like legal, doesn’t permit social networking use at all. A lot of journalists aren’t even allowed to have a blog or a website. As you can see from these statistics, there are a lot of hurdles corporations need to get over for social media to become the basis of how business is run.

20% increase in companies blocking social media sites (ScanSafe, August 2009)
100% of CEOs admit to frequently thinking about their company’s reputation (Weber Shandwick, February 2009)
8% of companies have fired people for their social networking use (Proofpoint, August 2009)
Social networking costs firms 1.5% of productivity (Nucleus Research, July 2009)
71% of IT departments block users from social networking (AMA, July 2009)
80% of executives are fearful of social networking risks (Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, July 2009)

Should you work for a company that doesn’t let you build your brand?

No! If a company doesn’t let you build your personal brand using social media tools, your career will be sabotaged because you’ll lose your voice (a freedom that everyone should have). Aside from the first amendment, if your voice isn’t heard, then you suffer a competitive disadvantage because there are millions of other voices out there.

Companies are afraid to lose their employees to competition, which is one reason why they are afraid of employees building their own brands. When employees start blogging and gain visibility through search engines and social networks, they become more marketable and may be recruited by another company. Let’s be honest though; if a company doesn’t allow their employees to use social media, and another company does, wouldn’t it be smarter for employees to change companies? Your brand and online network is your insurance against possibly losing your job in the future. It’s all you’ve got. Make sure you work for a company that supports your career, not just their own agenda.

Companies benefit from your brand

Companies need to understand quickly that their employees can actually help their organization, even when not in the office. A single employee now can pass a corporate message (or even a press release) to the outside world, at a fast space, while maintaining consistency. Employees can also safeguard the corporate brand by monitoring brand mentions on social networks and Google. Helpful employees might take it a step further and answer people’s questions about products and services. Companies don’t even have to pay higher salaries right now to have their employee evangelists support their cause. All it takes is empowerment and a little bit of trust!

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, 09), as well as the publisher of both the award winning Personal Branding Blog and Personal Branding Magazine.

A 6-Step Guide to Networking for First Year MBA Students

srinivasrao — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:00:40 +0000

If you are a first year MBA student, especially if you are at a lesser-known MBA program, networking is going to be an essential component to landing your summer internship.

Start Early

If there’s any piece of advice that I would give first year MBA students it’s that your job search stats the day you start school, and if you are really a go-getter even before you arrive at school. There are several reasons you should start early. First off, the later you start, the less leverage you have when you talk to people. When you start later, people know you need something from them and are less likely to help you in the process. Another reason you should start early is because getting in touch with people can often take time and an early start will save you from scrambling to get things done in a short amount of time. Effective networking as an MBA student is really about planning and an early start will help you formulate a plan.

Informational Interviews/Research

Informational interviews are REALLY important to your networking strategy. First off you may have certain impressions of the industry you want to work in and those impressions could be completely off. For example, when I started business school I was convinced that I wanted to work in the entertainment industry. After about 4 conversations with people in the entertainment industry, I realized I had no desire whatsoever to work in that world. Using informational interviews also enabled me to build a network of contacts at Harrah’s (an organization that didn’t recruit at my school) and get to the final round of interviews for the MBA internship program. Here are a few things that you should keep in mind about informational interviews:

Keep it short and sweet, 15-20 minutes tops.
Have a list of questions about the company/intern program.
Find out what skills you need to develop during your MBA to get hired.
Send a copy of your resume to interviewee prior to the interview.
Don’t ask for a job.
Conduct multiple informational interviews (different perspectives will shed more light on the position and the organization).
Send a follow-up note thanking the interviewee for his or her time.

At this point in your career, it’s highly unlikely that you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, and if you don’t, set one up right away. LinkedIn is an essential asset to networking. If you want to find recent MBA graduates or people who have completed an MBA internship at an organization that you are interested in, LinkedIn is a great way to connect with these people. When I targeted Harrah’s President’s associate summer program, I used LinkedIn to identify all of the current President’s associates at various Harrah’s properties and set up informational interviews with all of them. Thanks to these efforts, when I had my first interview with the recruiter, I was so well-versed about the organization that the first round was a breeze.

Alumni Networks

Depending on where you go to school, an alumni network can be a huge asset. When approaching alumni keep the same tips about informational interviews I offered above in mind. I would recommend you try to reach out to at least one or two alumni a week. If you connect with one alumni every single month that you are in business school (i.e. 2 years) and form a solid relationship, at the end of two years, you’ll have a network of 24 solid contacts who can help you.

Networking Events

With the current state of the economy there are so many networking events going on that it would be foolish not to take advantage of them. If you do a Google search for networking events in your city, you’ll find a list of events that occur on a monthly or even biweekly basis. I recommend trying to fill your calendar with at least one event a week. Try to make at least one solid connection at each event that you go to.

Volunteer Work

In Brian Tracy’s book The Luck Factor, he mentions doing volunteer work as one of the most effective networking strategies ever. While your immediate thought might be soup kitchens and homeless people, there are numerous opportunities to do volunteer work for organizations in your area of professional interest. The most amazing example Brian Tracy gave in this book was how his work as a volunteer for the chamber of commerce eventually led to a committee position, and ultimately connected him to many influential leaders in the community. As a result of doubling his number of contacts, he doubled his income.

Social Life

Your social life can provide another tremendous outlet for networking. Simply turning and saying “hello” to the person next to you at a bar or lounge can connect you to some highly influential people. As a result of doing this, I’ve met other MBA graduates, real estate developers, and other people who could be of tremendous value in my networking efforts.

While each of these strategies is effective at different levels, be smart. Use the 80/20 rule and realize that 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your efforts. So rather than trying to do them all and do them poorly, choose the ones that work for you and do them well.

Srinivas is a volunteer for the Quality of Life Project. The website shares best practices on getting the most out of life from well known types like Richard Branson and Tom Skerritt to lesser known but equally interesting individuals. The mission of the organization is to help people live more enjoyable, purposeful and contented lives. Srinivas also writes at www.theskooloflife.com.

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Break the Rules

Paul Sloane — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:00:29 +0000

Many of the rules that apply in businesses were set years ago and have endured by force of habit. A good example is the QWERTY keyboard, which is in use on all desktop computers. The original QWERTY layout of keys on the typewriter keyboard was designed in the 1870s to slow down the speed of typing because fast operators were causing typewriter keys to jam together. By putting the most commonly used letters e, a, i, o away from the index fingers of the hands, speed was reduced and jams were avoided. Those mechanical jams are long gone but we are stuck with a rule for a keyboard layout that is outdated and inappropriate. How many of the rules in your organisation are QWERTY standards – set up for circumstances that no longer apply today?
If you can find a way to rewrite the rules of the game so that it suits you rather than your competitors then you can gain a remarkable advantage. In the late 1970s the Swiss watch industry was suffering from fierce competition from the Japanese. Major brands like Omega, Longines and Tissot were in serious trouble. Nicholas Hayek took dramatic action. He merged two of the largest Swiss watch manufacturers ASUAG and SSIH to form a new company, Swatch. It took a radically different approach to watch design, creating a low-cost, high-tech, artistic, and emotional watch. Within five years the new company was the largest watch-maker in the world. Swatch rewrote the rules of the watch industry. Swiss watches had competed against mass produced brands by focussing on tradition and quality but Swatch changed the parameters by making watches that were fun, fashionable, and collectable.
Every business operates in an environment of written and unwritten rules. Many of these boundaries and restrictions are self-imposed and accepted without questioning. Often it is the newcomer to an industry who can ask the question, ‘What would happen if we broke the rules?’
This is what Richard Branson did when he launched Virgin Atlantic to take on the might of British Airways, American Airlines and Pan Am. They all played by the same rules; first class passengers enjoyed the best service, business passengers received adequate service and economy passengers got very few frills. Branson eliminated first class and instead gave first class service to business passengers. He introduced innovations such as free drinks for economy passengers, videos in headrests and limousine service to the airport.
The law of the land has to be obeyed but most business rules are there to be broken. Anita Roddick, founder of the retail chain The Body Shop, succeeded by deliberately doing the opposite of what the industry experts did. She saw that most pharmacies were stuffy places that sold toiletries, perfumes and medicinal creams in expensive packaging and pretty bottles. She did the opposite by packaging the goods in Body Shop stores in cheap, plastic bottles with plain labels. It saved cost and it made a statement that the contents of the packages were what mattered. The Body Shop was seen as natural, spiritual, and in tune with an environmentally-conscious consumer.
Picasso broke the rules on what a face should look like and Gaudi broke the rules on what a building should look like. To achieve radical innovation you have to challenge all the assumptions that govern how things should look in your environment. Business is not like sport with well-defined rules and referees. It is more like art. It is rife with opportunity for the lateral thinker who can create new ways to provide the goods and services that customers want.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.
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Ten Great Ways to Crush Creativity

Paul Sloane — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:00:04 +0000

Leaders have more power than they realize. They can patiently create a climate of creativity or they can crush it in a series of subtle comments and gestures. Their actions send powerful signals. Their responses to suggestions and ideas are deciphered by staff as encouragement or rejection. If you want to crush creativity in your organization and eliminate all the unnecessary bother of innovation then here are ten steps that are guaranteed to succeed.
1. Criticize
When you hear a new idea criticize it. Show how smart you are by pointing out some of the weaknesses and flaws which will hold it back. The more experienced you are, the easier it is to find fault with other people’s ideas. Decca Records turned down the Beatles, IBM rejected the photocopying idea which launched Xerox, DEC turned down the spreadsheet and various major publishers turned down the first Harry Potter novel. The same thing is happening in most organizations today. New ideas tend to be partly-formed so it is easy to reject them as ‘bad’. They diverge from the narrow focus that we have for the business so we discard them. Furthermore, every time somebody comes to you with an idea which you criticize, it discourages the person from wasting your time with more suggestions. It sends a message that new ideas are not welcome and that anyone who volunteers them is risking criticism or ridicule. This is a sure fire way to crush the creative spirit in your staff.
2. Ban brainstorms
Treat brainstorming as old-fashioned and passé. All that brainstorms do is throw up lots of new ideas that then have to be rejected. If your organization is not holding frequent brainstorm sessions to find creative solutions then you are not wasting time on new ideas. Instead you are sending a message to staff that their input is not required. If people insist on brainstorm meetings then make them long, rambling and unfocused with lots of criticism of radical ideas.
3. Hoard problems
The CEO and senior team should shoulder the responsibility for solving all the company’s major problems. Strategic issues are too complicated and high-level for the ordinary staff. After all, if people at the grass-roots knew the strategic challenges the organization faces then they would feel insecure and threatened. Don’t involve staff in serious issues, don’t tell them the big picture and above all don’t challenge them to come up with solutions.
4. Focus on efficiency not innovation
Focus solely on making the current business model work better. If we concentrate on making the current system work better then we will not waste time on looking for different systems. The current business model is the one that you helped develop and it is obviously the best one for the business. After all, if the makers of horse drawn carriages had improved quality they could have stopped automobiles taking their markets. The same principle applied with makers of slide rules, LP records, typewriters and gas lights.
5. Overwork
Establish a culture of long hours and hard work. Encourage the belief that hard work alone will solve the problem. We do not need to find a different way of solving a problem – rather we must just work harder at the old way of doing things. Make sure that the working day has no time for learning, fun, lateral thinking, wild ideas or testing of new initiatives.
6. Adhere to the plan
Plan in great detail and then do not deviate from the plan regardless of circumstances. ‘We cannot try that idea because it is not in the plan and we have no budget for it.’ Keep to the vision that was in the plan and ignore fads like market changes and customer fashions – they will pass.
7. Punish mistakes
If someone tries an entrepreneurial idea that fails then blame and retribution must follow. Reward success and punish failure. That way we will reinforce the existing way of doing things and discourage dangerous experiments.
8. Don’t look outside
We understand our business better than outsiders. After all we have been working in it for years. Other industries are fundamentally different and just because something works there does not mean it will work here. Consultants are generally over-priced and tell you things you could have figured out anyway. We need to find the solutions inside the business by working harder.
9. Promote people like you from within
Promoting from within is a good sign. It helps retain people and they can see a reward for loyalty and hard work. It means we don’t get polluted with heretical ideas from outside. Also if the CEO promotes people like him then he can achieve consistency and succession. It is best to find managers who agree with the CEO and praise him for his acumen and foresight.
10. Don’t waste money on training
Talent cannot be taught. It is it a rare thing possessed by a handful of gifted individuals. So why waste money trying to turn ducks into swans? Hire our kind of people and let them learn our system. Work them hard, keep them focused on our business model and do not allow them to fool around with crazy experiments. Workshops, budgets and time allocated to creativity and innovation are all wasteful extravagances. We know what we need to succeed so let’s just get on with it.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.
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The Era of the Unintentional Entrepreneur: An Interview with Kevin Reeth of Outright.com (Part 3)

Dustin Wax — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0000

This is the third and final installment of my interview with Kevin Reeth of Outright.com (See Part 1 and Part 2). In this part of the interview, I talk to Kevin about the new organization he’s helped create, Unintentional Entrepreneur, which is currently holding events around the country to help provide newcomers to the world of entrepreneurship with the tools and skills they need to get started and build a successful business.
Dustin Wax (DW): Where did the idea for Unintentional Entrepreneur come from?
Kevin Reeth (KR): We were doing a promotion with Newtwork Solutions, giving away free websites for businesses, and we thought, there’s gotta be more that we can do than just running this promotion. It could be providing help and guidance ourselves, but also connecting folks with other entrepreneurs.
We learned an awful lot actually watching what Chris Hutchins did at Laid-Off Camp. I was up at the first Laid-Off Camp and it was something that kind of grew organically and went nationwide. Chris organized several of the initial ones and then they started to spring up and other people who were passionate about this picked it up and ran with it.
DW: What kind of support is out there already for beginning entrepreneurs?
KR: There’s a ton of support but it’s all over the place. You can start with local Small Business Administration and SCORE offices around the country. Meetups have also become a very interesting form of support for these folks, where they’ve done a good job of getting people in certain disciplines together. And there are the older, formal networking groups: professional associations, things like that.
But a lot of it, the really good support, tends to be smaller and more organic. We see this a lot with our customers who sell on Etsy and eBay. They’ve got very active communities where people share stories about what they’re trying to do. They like to get together and they share knowledge, and it’s not just the practical tips and tricks but it’s also the motivation and the inspiration and what keeps them going – the emotional connection that’s important as well.
DW: What do you think is missing from these existing sources of support? What is your role here?
KR: With Unintentional Entrepreneur, the focus really is on those folks who may find themselves in this position but they’re not quite prepared. There’s a pretty significant education component, just in terms of what it means to be self-employed. Just the fact that you now have to pay both social security and Medicare is one of those “You’ve got to be kidding me” moments.
We really wanted to be able to get those basic discussions going, and introduce people to other folks who are maybe a few months ahead of them. If you’re a brand new entrepreneur, you don’t necessarily want to get advice from somebody who’s already made 10 million dollars, because they probably don’t remember what it was like when you’re trying to get that first or second customer. You want to talk to someone who is a few months ahead of you, who’s figured a few things out. That’s really the charter of this initiative: get those people who aren’t quite prepared and help them get a little bit more prepared.
DW: I know you’re still sort of feeling out what you’re doing, but what is the short term goal? Are you hoping to produce local user groups, or are you planning to build this around special events, or what?
KR: The immediate goal is just to generate awareness about this. We don’t have a very clear end game for it. If I had to say what I think an awesome ultimate goal would be, would be if these events spawn groups of committed folks or multiple groups that build up their own networks. But honestly the best thing that could come out of this are a bunch of people who feel empowered to go off and make a go of it on their own and start generating successful businesses. And start interacting with each other themselves.
DW: You just had your first event [at the end of July; there have been more since then]. How did that go?
KR: It went great! There was a very good mixture of people who are evaluating, should I do it, should I not, should I keep looking for a job? And there were some people who had the idea that they did want to make the leap and were wondering if now might be the right time. We had good attendance, we had great energy from the group, a good cross-section, and we also learned a lot about what people are looking for.
Because this was our first event we were very much using it as a sounding board to help figure out what people are looking for, how can we improve this, what kind of resources? So we’re at the very beginning of those conversations. But the fact that we’re having those conversations and people are engaging is very encouraging.
DW: Tell me about the event, what exactly was it? What do you do?
KR: We had people come in, we did half an hour of meet-and-greet, have some pizza and soda and beers, and just kind of socialize and share stories. Then we had three speakers. I actually kicked off the initial one, which was basically “Let’s get the least sexy stuff out of the way, here’s all the stuff you have to do according to the IRS if you’re self-employed.” I gave pretty much an overview of all the compliance stuff, all the tracking and reporting and bookkeeping and taxes and tax tips and things to think about, and then we moved into more of business stuff.
The second presentation was about going out and getting some business: Building a personal brand, letting people know what you’re trying to do, getting online and getting a presence. And then we capped it off with Lorna Li who spoke more specifically on online marketing – how to use the technology to increase leads, how to take advantage of the Internet to maximize your impact from an inbound sales and lead generation perspective.
Those went pretty well, but we got some good feedback from folks in terms of other places where they might like some help and so we’re going to modify that.
DW: One thing that really interests me in general is how at one level in business, everything’s about competition, but at the personal level, there’s this kind of cooperation, a kind of “sharing-ness”. You see these big companies in cut-throat competition but you get a bunch of bloggers or a bunch of developers in a room , and they all just want to help each other out. It’s kind of fascinating.
KR: That’s absolutely true, especially of small business owners. Because very few of them actually do compete directly. They love to just learn from each other and seek to help each other out, and they seek advice from others, and so that organic and community-based nature wins out. For example, we’re in downtown Campbell, and you see the local merchants here, out on the street, talking to each other and swapping stories. There is this great sense of camaraderie – they know that they’re in this together, they all share similar goals and challenges and so they share and learn from each other.
With Unintentional Entrepreneur, too, there’s almost a little bit of the little guy vs. big corporate America, especially if you just left corporate America. To be out there with other self-employed people is empowering! And it’s also a replacement for your social interaction, because it can be lonely – you don’t have your office mates, you don’t have the big crew of people that you could rely on. You’re out there and it’s pretty much you and maybe a couple of other people you interact with, some customers and vendors, so there’s also that social element to this.
DW: How will you know if Unintentional Entrepreneur is successful? What’s your best-case scendario?
KR: For us the ultimate great outcome is that the people who come to these events find that they can be successful, that if they’re good at it and they love it and they stick with it, they’re never going to have to rely on somebody else to give them a job again!
The first round of Unintentional Entrepreneur events appears to be over, but Kevin told me they’re already planning a new series of events, so stay tuned for an event near you – or contact the folks at Unintentional Entrepreneur and see about organizing an event in your own community! Be sure, too, to join the Unintentional Entrepreneur LinkedIn group to stay up-to-date on the latest news.
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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The Era of the Unintentional Entrepreneur: An Interview with Kevin Reeth of Outright.com (Part 2)

Dustin Wax — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0000

In Part 1 of this interview, Kevin Reeth (Co-founder and CEO of Outright.com) and I discussed some of the challenges and benefits of entrepreneurship and the emergence of a new breed of “unintentional entrepreneurs” – people who, because of the economic downturn, find themselves exploring the possibility of going freelance, starting their own business, or hiring out as a consultant. In part 2, we discuss some of the technological tools that make entrepreneurship – unintentional or otherwise – a viable option right now.
Kevin Reeth (KR): One of the good things about the timing now is that it has never been cheaper or easier to start a company from the logistics and marketing perspective. The ability to get your name out there, to get a web presence, to get online, to get people to be able to find you, has never been greater. If you just know the basics, you can use technology to better manage your time, better manage your processes, and then get paid and deal with the money. Open Source software, websites like ours [Outright.com], all this new technology has made it a lot easier.
Dustin Wax (DW): What are some of the most effective and promising tools that are out there for entrepreneurs?
KR: We’re big fans of social networks for self-employed people, because what it basically does is kind formalize those informal relationships. And you can get it down without worrying about curstomer relationship software and all that stuff. Of all of them, I think for professionals LinkedIn is the leading candidate.
Definitely get on Google and use Gmail and Google Calendars. It’s free, it’s awesome, and you can tie it to your own domain name using Google Apps for Your Domain. Phenomenal toolset, and it’s completely free.
And we strongly recommend that people take advantage of free online tools to get a web presence. Get a blog on Wordpress or Typepad or Blogger. If you want something a little more expensive, get a domain. Go to GoDaddy, get a domain, get cheap hosting, and get something very basic website up.
We also recommend Craigslist. It’s a great business tool! If you have to buy anything, do not pay retail. See if it’s on Craigslist first. Companies are started and fail all the time. And they’ve bought the things you need and they’re going to want to sell that stuff. You can find a lot of stuff in great condition. Also, you can use Craigslist to promote your services for free or very little.
And then of course, once you do start making a little bit of money and Uncle Sam wants their piece, then we strongly recommend people take a look at Outright.com.
DW: I think the real interesting thing right now is the way that data is being shared between different applications, like from Freshbooks to Outright. Once that stuff starts being really integrated, when you can put your LinkedIn contacts for instance into your CRM program or whatever, that’s going to be pretty interesting.
KR: I think you hit the nail right on the head, and that’s exactly where we’re trying to take this. You see it with The Small Business Web, a site that was put together with the folks at Freshbooks and Shoeboxed and BatchBook and MailChimp. One of the greatest things that has happened in the last few years with the web is, in addition to open source software, the open movement around data flow. You see this with Facebook and the number of developers they can get building on top of it, you see it with Twitter. Most of the success of Twitter is all the people who’ve built stuff on top of it to extend it in really new and creative ways. Making the data open and available basically creates the opportunity for the broader population to innovate on it and it creates little micro-industries. It’s a massive development and I think we are at the very beginning stages of this.
In Part 3 of this interview, Kevin and I will discuss the program at Unintentional Entrepreneur and how they’re working to provide knowledge and support to small business owners, solopreneurs, and freelancers. Be sure to check back Monday!
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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The Era of the Unintentional Entrepreneur: An Interview with Kevin Reeth of Outright.com (Part 1)

Dustin Wax — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:00:00 +0000

With a background including successful stints with Yahoo, eGroups, and Intuit, Kevin Reeth was well-prepared to strike out on his own as a co-founder and CEO of the web start-up Outright.com, a free online bookkeeping platform for small businesses and self-employed persons. In today’s economic climate, though, more and more people are finding themselves thrown into entrepreneurship without a background like Reeth’s as their companies fold or downsize leaving them to strike out on their own.
To help these “unintentional entrepreneurs” get their feet under them, Reeth partnered with Network Solutions to form Unintentional Entrepreneur, a website and organization dedicated to helping newly self-employed workers get off on the right foot as freelancers, consultants, and small business owners. So far, Unintentional Entrepreneur has hosted free seminars in a handful of cities, with more on the way, combining formal presentations with social networking in an effort to provide the information and social environment fledgling entrepreneurs need to start building towards success.
After I wrote about Outright.com at Freelance Switch and on my own site, The Writer’s Technology Companion, several people at Outright.com contacted me and struck up a conversation, culminating in an offer to interview Reeth about Unintentional Entrepreneur and the challenges – and rewards – facing today’s entrepreneurs, unintentional or otherwise.
This is part 1 of a three-part series. In this section, Reeth and I discuss entrepreneurship in general. In part 2, we’ll discuss the way that technology is changing the entrepreneurial landscape, and in part 3 what Unintentional Entrepreneur is doing to help first-time self-employed workers. The interview was conducted on July 17, just after their first event in Los Angeles.
Dustin Wax (DW): Let’s start with a general question: What is an unintentional entrepreneur?
Kevin Reeth (KR): An awful lot of our customers are folks who were working in corporate America and had had paying jobs for years and had lost their job last fall or early this year, had been looking for a job, and had gotten to the point where they had to figure out something to do. And now they’re starting to hang out their own shingle to see if they can earn a living that way.
What’s interesting is, compare them to people who’ve been small business owners or self-employed for many years, who had gotten used to it. People leaving the confines of a corporate job quickly get a pretty significant wake-up call in terms of what it means to work for yourself.
DW: So you have the wave of people for whom entrepreneurship has become an only option, something that came onto their radar as an option not because of an internal drive to do it but because of the economy.
KR: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. This may not have been something that they thought about, maybe they never did have that drive, maybe they weren’t maybe wired that way or maybe they’re more risk-averse. But now they have certain practical realities that are forcing them to consider new options, and entrepreneurship is one of the options they’re considering. And so, they may have never done this before and may not understand what it means to operate as a business right now.
DW: What does it mean?
KR: The first focus, honestly, needs to be sales. If you don’t have people paying you, nothing else matters. You’re not going to be a very successful business for long.
Along with that, when you first get started, it’s all about networking. Your initial business is going to come through referrals, friends and family, and coworkers and associates. It’s not going to be through advertising and promotions, and not from fancy marketing stuff. By getting out there and getting connected to people, you will have opportunities present themselves.
And then where we tend to focus, where Outright focuses is on helping people understand that they need to prioritize their time, that time is going to be their most precious commodity. There’s a lot of stuff you can do dirt cheap or free, but one of the worst things you can do is get bogged down in the details of stuff that really doesn’t matter. Use technology where it can be most effective. Automate the stuff that doesn’t provide value, and doesn’t grow your business. Honestly, the back office stuff, the bookkeeping – we know it’s not sexy. This is not what you want to be spending your time doing. Use the technology available to automate that, so you can be out there, doing sales, servicing existing customers, getting more repeat business, not worrying about where the money is going, whether something is deductable or not, remembering to pay taxes on time.
DW: You said that the first focus is sales. There’s a skill set involved in sales, though, that very few people have. If you’re an engineering person or computer scientist or whatever, how can you develop or sharpen those sales skills?
KR: I think that’s actually more daunting than it has to be. People tend to think about it as, “OK, I have to go do sales, I have to sell myself.” And the secret with networking is that, if you go out there and just meet other people, you understand that all of us are in the same boat at the end of the day, all of us need help. It’s all just building relationships.Even at the big enterprise sales level, so much of sales comes down to whether people like each other, whether they get along, and whether they have a relationship. There is a bias in decision-making around purchases that goes beyond just the rational facts. So you don’t have to be the greatest salesperson in the world, you just need to be able to build relationships with people.
DW: We’ve talked about the challenges facing new entrepreneurs, but what are some of the benefits of being an entrepreneur, especially in today’s economy?
KR: One, I think it will become one of the most empowering experiences you can ever have. It’s one of those things where it is a personal journey for anybody who tries it. A lot of things are going to go wrong. You’re going to fail at a lot of things. But you’re going to learn an awful lot about yourself. You’re going to find out what you’re capable of, and that’s invaluable.
Another great thing is that you will extend your network dramatically. You are going to get to meet so many new and interesting people that no matter what the future holds, you’re going to build relationships that are going to last.
And there’s the education component. You’re going to be forced to learn more in the first three months working for yourself than in years working for someone else. And at the end of it, you will have that knowledge, you will have that experience. It’s going to make you better not only working for yourself but if you ever go back and work for someone else, you’re going to be significantly better at it.
These are not easy things, they’re not free, awesome things that just happen to you, you have to work for them. But the value you get out of that journey is immense.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss some of the ways technology is changing today’s small business and self-employment landscape, and the tools that Reeth recommends for new entrepreneurs. See you then!
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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How to do Good AND Make a Profit

Arvind Devalia — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:00:50 +0000

With the world economic and business outlook still so uncertain, a key question is just how the businesses world can continue to do good as well as maintain their bottom line.
Over the last few years, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become such a buzz word for business people with companies sprouting all sorts of CSR initiatives, but are companies really embracing CSR because they believe in it or are they in it for entirely selfish reasons?
Are they really acting out of some kind of moral duty or is the reality still that they only care about the bottom line?
In simpler terms, CSR means “doing the right thing”. A company’s commitment to CSR therefore implies ethical conduct and a moral sense of what is right and what is wrong, and it should aim to eliminate or minimise any negative impact of its business activities.
With the unscrupulous behaviour of the major banks over the last few years which has led to the current worldwide economic downturn, never before has it been so pertinent that business people are seen to be doing the right thing.
Even President Obama has been urging businesses to do the right thing and become socially responsible. His approach and vision is refreshing from all that has gone before us for so long.
So the business person today faces a major dilemma. Whereas on the one hand, his or her company has to minimise the negative impact of its business activities on the environment, employees, suppliers, customers and the wider community, on the other hand it is only by maximising the company’s return can all these stakeholder groups be served adequately.
What is Personal Social Responsibility?
The pre-requisite for understanding and accepting the need for CSR and subsequently implementing it successfully is the concept of Personal Social Responsibility (PSR).
PSR is all about doing to others what you would like others do to you. It is about recognising how your behaviour affects others, and holding yourself accountable for your actions. It is about being in integrity and doing the right thing for the right moral reasons.
The key question to ask is how can we as individuals and businesses improve the world?
Ideally a PSR aware person will:-
1. Always endeavour to have a positive effect on others.
2. Have a mind set to contribute.
3. Refrain from causing negativity in his environment e.g. by throwing litter on the ground, or by gossiping.
4. His social and economic activities will have a positive or neutral impact on the environment.
However the real challenge the world faces today is for people at the top of the business world to do the “right” thing for themselves, their children and the world.
Increasingly more and more companies must wake up to their responsibilities to the environment, the larger community and the global implications of their activities.
Create your own PSR vision and journey
Clearly the business debate is no longer about whether a company should make a substantial commitment to CSR but just how? Business people really do have to get their CSR act together and actually start doing stuff.
So where do you begin? Start by firstly becoming aware of the concept of PSR. By coming from a place of being socially responsible for all your actions, you will immediately begin to think differently. And that will form a solid foundation for understanding and developing CSR in your business.
Remember that PSR is more than just merely recycling paper or giving out money to your chosen charity. It is all about taking a firm stand and making a commitment towards giving back to society and at the same time ensuring the long term viability and profitability of your business.
To get you started, my PSR vision is that as individuals we always do the best for us and the people in our lives, and at the same time our businesses endeavour to do the best for the world at large.
Reach your own PSR vision by spending some time and answering the following questions. These questions will help you to develop your own understanding of PSR and CSR and ultimately create a plan of action that suits you and your business:-
1. How will the world be a better place because you have lived?
2. How will the world and future generations benefit from your company’s activities?

3. What legacy are you leaving behind through your work?
4. What would you like to be said about you after you die? And about your work?

5. If you only had six months to live, how would you spend some of that time making a difference in the world? In which area would you create the most urgency and why?

6. What does Corporate Social Responsibility mean to you? What does it mean to your company / business?

7. Do you believe that you and your business have a moral duty to respond to world problems? Why? What’s the ideal response to the various problems?

8. Can companies be socially responsible and be profitable at the same time? What level of profits is acceptable to you and why?

9. What do you think about this statement – “Responsible business should be about profit making, not profiteering?” Why?

10. What positive lessons can you learn from businesses that you think have a social conscience? What do you really like about the ethics of those businesses whose ethics you admire? What can you learn from them to apply in your own business?

11. If your children asked you if your business was ethical in all its activities, would you be able to look them in the eye and honestly say YES?! If NOT, what will it take for you to answer YES?

12. What legacy is your business creating for the children of tomorrow? Socially? Ethically? Environmentally?

13. What do you NOT want your business to continue doing?

14. If there was one thing you could change about your business and its ethics policy, what would it be? When will you make this change?

15. What is really stopping you and your business from being more socially responsible? What will you do next?

16. Having been on this short journey of discovering Personal Social Responsibility, how will you now live your life differently?

17. In what ways will you apply Personal Social Responsibility in your life from now on?
So begin today on your journey through this exciting, challenging and ultimately fulfilling world of business ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.
Make your life and your actions count from today.
Make it happen! Good luck and enjoy your journey.
“Come from a place of being socially responsible – you owe it to our future generations.” ~ Arvind Devalia
Arvind Devalia is a performance coach, social entrepreneur, speaker and writer who aspires to live a life of contribution, connection and celebration. His blog “Make It Happen” focuses on making things happen in your life and the world.
His main books are “Get the Life you Love and Live it" and “Personal Social Responsibility”, both of which are available from Amazon.
To get Arvind’s FREE ebook “Make It Happen”, click here
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What You Need To Know To Make Sense of Business Bartering

Susan Baroncini-Moe — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:00:45 +0000

Bartering, trading one good for another, is becoming increasingly popular as the value of the dollar continues to plummet. There are several bartering systems available online (some better than others) and activity on these web sites has increased as the economy has gotten more and more troubled. However, when you move into cashless economies, it’s easy to get sucked in. Here are a few things you need to know to make it work for you.
1. Use an established bartering system.
Bartering on your own is often fraught with difficulties. Establishing “what’s fair” is rarely easy, especially if you’re the guy who charges $100/hour and you’re negotiating with someone who charges substantially less. One hour isn’t always equal to one hour, and that’s not always an easy concept to explain.
Instead, use established systems that operate with their own version of “dollars” and have structures in place to ensure that everyone follows through on their end of the bargain. The way these systems work is that you join the system and let people know what you have to offer. People use dollars they already have in the system pay you for your products or services. Then you use your system dollars to pay for products and services that you need.
2. Use bartering systems as a marketing tool.
Bartering systems can act as a solid marketing tool for your business, when used the right way. People already in bartering systems have dollars that have to be spent in the system. So you’re entering a marketplace of willing investors.
Plus, people tend to look at these dollars slightly differently from “real dollars” and are more willing to spend them. Bring the right product or service into the system, and you could introduce your product or service to a large group of willing buyers very quickly.
3. Avoid getting too heavily invested.
One thing you want to avoid is getting too heavily invested in any bartering community. If there’s something in the system that you really need and would have invested in anyway, this can be a good way to obtain it. However, you can’t guarantee the quality of the professionals in the system. Just because they’re in the system doesn’t mean they’re the best ones for the job.
And let’s face it…your mortgage company and the utility companies probably don’t accept bartering dollars. You need real dollars for the real world, and bartering dollars just don’t transfer.
4. Spend your bartering dollars right away.
There’s another truth about bartering dollars, and that’s that all of these bartering systems are businesses that are owned by someone. In this uncertain economy, companies go out of business in the blink of an eye. So make sure you don’t leave your bartering dollars in these systems for long. Spend your dollars quickly, just in case, so you don’t have thousands invested in this system that could drop off the face of existence without any warning.
5. Transition bartering relationships to cash relationships.
When clients ask me about entering into bartering systems, I advise them to keep their offerings to introductory services only. Figure out which services frequently act as a “point of entry” to your business and offer those as barters, then convert your bartering clients into cash-paying clients as quickly as possible to avoid getting too heavily invested in the long-term.
And, make sure you don’t get behind the eight-ball on any transaction — don’t offer to barter for something you yourself have to pay real dollars for.
6. Prepare for taxes.
Finally, don’t forget that the IRS views bartering dollars as exactly the same as real dollars. Earn a dollar in a bartering system, and you’ll still have to pay taxes on that money in real dollars later. Plan accordingly!
Bartering can be a great way to market your business and gain new clients and trade for services you need for your business. However, there are pitfalls. Plan ahead, avoid being too heavily invested, and transition barter clients into cash-paying ones, and you can benefit greatly from these systems.
Susan Baroncini-Moe started her entrepreneurial adventures with a lemonade stand. Now, Susan is the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans, dedicated to helping you design a business you'll love or transform your business into optimized profitability. Learn more at BusinessInBlueJeans.com.Other links: Blue Jeans Web Sites and Susan's No Suits Allowed! E-zine.
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How to Be A Good Web Firm Consumer

Susan Baroncini-Moe — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:00:55 +0000

So you’ve hired a web firm to design your new web site. Now what? Today I’m completing my Business Web Series and talking about what you can do to be a good consumer of web site developers and designers.
Just like most business owners have tales of woe from having their web sites designed, most web developers and designers have stories of their own. Educate yourself, hire the right experts to help you through this process, and hold up your end of the bargain and you may sail through without being the star of one of the web firm’s horror stories (or your own!).
1. Negotiate knowledgeably.
When you get a quote from a web firm, it just makes good sense to shop around. But when you shop around, compare apples to apples. Comparing a quote from an American firm, where you’ll most likely have an English-speaking team to work with, with a quote from a firm in a Third World country, where living expenses are a fraction of U.S. costs, just isn’t fair. You don’t want to approach your web firm with, “Why does it cost this much, when I can have a site built in India for $300?”
Also, if you’re working with that rare breed of web firm where you’ll get both web strategy advice and search engine optimization, you simply cannot compare the pricing with your standard web design firm. So make sure you’re comparing like quotes before you consider asking for a price match.
2. Hold up your end of the bargain.
One of the most frustrating things for a web developer is when the client doesn’t provide timely feedback. In many cases, when you hire a web firm, you pay for part of your web site upfront, then you have to pay the rest just before launch. If you’re not providing timely feedback, not only are you holding up the launch and jeopardizing your timeline, but you’re also keeping your team from getting paid. In this economy, that’s not good for anyone. So make sure you pay your bills on time and provide responsive, useful feedback quickly to keep things moving along.
In addition, if you haven’t hired the web firm to provide you with content or copywriting, make sure you provide them with your content in a timely manner. The last thing you want is for your web site to be held up because you haven’t delivered the materials, or worse, launch without content. Make sure you
3. Be smart and educate yourself.
I recently talked with a potential client who’d been spending hundreds of dollars each month for a firm to “do search engine optimization” on her web site. She had no idea what that meant, but kept paying them anyway. In the meantime, this firm hadn’t touched her code or her copy, two of the hallmarks of a pretty substantial scam in my book.
I’m not suggesting that every small business owner should know everything about what constitutes good or bad SEO. If you don’t have the time or the technical know-how to educate yourself in what your web site needs or to learn enough to know when you’re being scammed, then you need a trusted adviser who does know these things and can watch over your project and protect your interests.
4. Don’t be swayed by “pretty.”
This one isn’t so much about being a good web consumer for your developer’s benefit as being a good consumer for your business. Too many business owners today are persuaded that “pretty” is the most important part of their web design. It’s not.
An attractive web site certainly is important, but it’s not the most important thing. There are specific business elements and “screen real estate” issues
like what goes “above the fold” that you need to pay attention to as well. And these things may be even more important than “pretty.” Stay too focused on the appearance of your site and you’ll likely end up with a site that doesn’t meet your business needs and has poor usability. Instead, try to strike a balance between the appearance of the site and meeting your business goals. Again, if you don’t know how to do this, hire someone who does.
Having a web site designed can seem like a harrowing experience for many business owners. The investment in a strong web site can seem substantial for the micro-entrepreneur, especially considering the many potential pitfalls. That said, if you don’t have the time, inclination, or tech-savvy spirit to learn what you need to know to avoid those pitfalls and be a good consumer (for your own good, as well as the good of your design firm), hire an expert who can navigate the process for you and help you meet your business goals.

Susan Baroncini-Moe started her entrepreneurial adventures with a lemonade stand. Now, Susan is the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans, dedicated to helping you design a business you'll love or transform your business into optimized profitability. Learn more at BusinessInBlueJeans.com.Other links: Blue Jeans Web Sites and Susan's No Suits Allowed! E-zine.
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How to Hire A Web Design Firm

Susan Baroncini-Moe — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:00:40 +0000

How many times have you heard stories of people who hired web firms to design and develop their web sites and either got substandard sites or the developer ran off with their money? Or what about the entrepreneur who “hired” his nephew/friend/daughter to design the site for free, and the results were disasterous and this small business owner didn’t feel comfortable offering much constructive criticism on a job done for free?
As a small business consultant, I’ve heard these stories so many times. And I go back and forth between feeling heartbroken and really angry on behalf of my clients, for what they endured before finally seeking help. That is why I decided to write this series of four articles on web sites for small business. Today, in the third article in this series, I’ll share with you my best tips for hiring a web design firm.
When you hire a web firm, your job as a savvy consumer is to make sure your web firm has the right components as well as the answers to several questions before you give them your hard-earned money. Here are some things to look for and questions to ask, as well as a few red flags to watch out for:
Look For This: A Real Business
Your web design firm should be a real business. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they need a big office and overhead. What it does mean, however, is that you should probably avoid hiring your family members, friends, and “that guy you know from church” as your web developer. You need a business relationship with your web team for many reasons, including so that you can feel comfortable negotiating, providing honest and critical feedback, and being straightforward if there’s ever a time when you aren’t happy with your firm’s work.
Don’t be afraid to ask for references. You should be able to get a couple of client names and phone numbers so you can talk to real people and get a solid feel for what it’s like to work with this team.
Look For This: A Web Site
Your web firm should have a web site — a good one. It doesn’t have to be designed in a style that you like, but generally speaking, it should have the components I talked about in my last article. Don’t let any web firm tell you that they’ve been so busy working on clients’ projects that they haven’t designed their own site. If they don’t know that a strong web site is the calling card for their business, they probably shouldn’t be designing a web site for your business.
Further, you need to see a portfolio of their previous work and it should be easy to find on their web site. Most of the porfolio sites should still be live. However, if you come across some sites have changed or that are no longer live, don’t necessarily hold that against the developer. In this economy, companies are going out of business right and left. Plus, companies often re-design their sites and may or may not use the same team to do it.
Question to Ask: What are the components that my web site should include?
If your web firm starts to answer this question without asking about your business, consider that a pretty big red flag and run the other way. There are some general components that most business web sites should have (print out my last article for easy reference), however when you’re working with a web firm, they shouldn’t answer this question unless they know more about what you do, what industry you’re in, and what you want your web site to accomplish for your business.
Question to Ask: Will you design my site from scratch or use templates?
A strong web design firm will design an original site for you. They won’t send you a site design that looks generic, or that is based on a pre-fab template. Price can be a good indicator for whether your team is using templates or original designs. If the estimate for your site is under $1,000, it’s more likely that you’re not getting an original design. However, I’ve seen several firms charge what I consider a ridiculous amount of money to provide a pre-fab template site.
Why is a template bad? You want your web site to stand out as original and distinct. Your site should be designed to carefully reflect your brand. How much can a template design represent your brand, if others around the world have the exact same web site that you have? What distinguishes you from them? Smart investing in your business makes sense, and for most businesses, investing in a solid web site that incorporates at least the elements I recommend, as well as embodies your branding, makes for a strong ROI.
Question to Ask: How will you incorporate search engine optimization principles into my site?
When you ask this question, if all they do is talk about meta tags and keywords, that’s a big red flag. If a web firm is serious about their business, they should know and understand principles of SEO and how these principles apply to the code, the copy, and all of the content of your site.
If they talk to you about using Flash for your site, ask them if that will cause any problems getting your site content indexed. Take note of how they answer this question. The actual answer is murky and complex and they shouldn’t just say, “Flash isn’t a problem for Google.”
Question to Ask: Do you work with or have a business relationship with any small business consultants?
The best web firms often have business consultants on staff or have a relationship with small business consultants who can work with clients on developing business concepts that may not have been addressed previously. For example, if a client wants a web site that reflects his/her brand, but that brand hasn’t been fully developed, it helps the web team create a better site if a small business consultant is involved.
But beware: the wrong consultant can muddy the waters, while the right consultant, one who understands both sound business principles as well as technical jargon and web lingo can often bridge the gap between developer and client, making the communication smoother and providing key contributions that make the end product much stronger.
In fact, you may want to look for a small business consultant first, before you hire the web team. A good consultant should have a relationship with designers and developers s/he’s worked with before. This is a great way to get the benefit of working with someone your consultant has already vetted, and your consultant can get better pricing than you’d get on your own. Plus, if you choose the right consultant, you can have him or her working with you and your web team as an intermediary, and s/he can head off any potential disasters, keep your team accountable, and manage the project for you so you can focus on your business.
Look For This: Pricing
Just like any other industry, there are those who will overcharge and those who try to undercut the competition. Your challenge is to find the pricing balance. If you pay too little in terms of the dollar amount for your web site, you may pay more in other ways.
Several experts suggest that you can outsource your web design to overseas developers to get a fabulous web site for a very, very low price. While there are cases where this strategy can work, you must be cautious. There are many unseen costs associated with this kind of overseas outsourcing.
First, if you don’t know how to find a reliable, high quality team overseas, you risk giving your money and/or sensitive personal information to unscrupulous vendors.
Second, when you work with overseas vendors, you may experience language barriers that are difficult to overcome. This can result in disaster for your web site. Don’t get me wrong — there are some phenomenal web firms around the world, and you can get a good price, but road to finding these firms is littered with firms that will provide shoddy work or worse.
[Note: I'm frequently asked if eLance is a good place to find a web design firm. On the whole, there are both phenomenal and terrible designers on eLance. You'll find freelancers who are excellent at what they do, folks who are just average, unscrupulous people who will do poor work and run away with your money, and people who are just starting out and using eLance as a means to providing low-cost web sites in order to build their portfolio. Like eBay, you can check ratings and reviews from former clients, but in my experience, these reviews aren't always accurate indicators of future performance. Can you get a fantastic price working through eLance? Sure. But you're taking a gamble: you may ultimately pay a higher price if you don't get what you want and can't get your money back, then have to pay another designer to fix things. My best advice for working via eLance is to use the Escrow system. Don't pay more than half upfront, and don't pay for the completed design until everything is done.]
The best solution is to work with a reputable firm with references that will take your budget into account and find high quality solutions that fit what you can afford.
Question to Ask: Can you develop my site in a content management system?
If you want to manage your site yourself without learning HTML or Dreamweaver, ask your web team if they can develop your site using a content management system. Within this framework, you should be able to manage your site, including editing, adding pages, deleting pages, and more, from virtually anywhere in the world that you can access the web via a browser.
The Most Important Thing You Should Know:
Your contact at your web firm should be able to talk to you in your language, but also be able to easily converse with the programmers. You need someone who can explain things that you don’t understand without being condescending, and make web principles you should know accessible. Customer service is paramount in the web industry, and you want someone who will return your e-mails and phone calls in a timely manner.
Keep in mind that while the design responsibilities fall squarely on the shoulders of your web design firm, you have some responsibilities as well. Next week, in the last article in this four-part series, I’ll talk about how you can help your web design firm create a phenomenal web site for your business.
Susan Baroncini-Moe started her entrepreneurial adventures with a lemonade stand. Now, Susan is the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans, dedicated to helping you design a business you'll love or transform your business into optimized profitability. Learn more at BusinessInBlueJeans.com.Other links: Blue Jeans Web Sites and Susan's No Suits Allowed! E-zine.
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How to Get Promoted

Paul Sloane — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:00:07 +0000

If you work in a large organization and are ambitious for career progression then here are a number of things that you can do to assist your journey.
1. Do your job well. I know that this is stating the obvious but it is the starting point.   For promotion it is a necessary but not a sufficient requirement that you perform your current duties diligently. Many people think that this is all they need to do and that the rewards, recognition and promotion will follow. Corporate life is not ‘fair’ in this sense. Many people do great work and are passed over. You need to excel in your current role and do much more to climb the ladder.
2. Get noticed. One of the best ways to be promoted is if a senior manager in another department wants you. But this can only happen if they are aware of you. So you have to find ways to get in front of other people, particularly senior people, in a way that displays your good qualities and makes you memorable.
3. Volunteer. If someone is needed to present a proposal on behalf of your department, volunteer. If members are needed for a cross-departmental task force, volunteer. If the social committee want someone to help organize the staff barbecue, volunteer. Take on additional responsibilities both inside and outside your department. This shows that you are willing to get involved and it gets you noticed.
4. Discuss your ambitions with your manager. Make sure that your boss and your boss’s boss know that you are keen to be promoted. You can do this in a quiet professional way. Do not threaten or demand. Have a discussion where you ask the question, ‘What do I have to do to get promoted?’    Develop a plan. Senior managers understand ambition and there is nothing wrong with being ambitious so make sure that they understand your goals.
5. Work well with people. Many people who are technically proficient and excellent at task management do not get promoted because they lack people skills. Be aware of how you are perceived. Ask for feedback. It is not a question of popularity; it is more about communication, trust and dependability.   Try not to make enemies. Find ways to work effectively with other people and you are more likely to be seen as ‘management material’.
6. Contribute ideas. Make positive, constructive suggestions for how things could be done better. Most managers (though not all) welcome this and it will signal that you are someone who can think about bigger issues. It shows that you welcome rather than fear change.
7. If you cannot move up, move across. Look for ways to broaden your experience. It you cannot move up in your area then consider moving across into a different area of the business at the same level so that you can learn new skills and make new contacts.
8. Have a plan. Set yourself goals for advancement and measure progress against them.   If you need to acquire certain skills or experiences then plan to do so. If you are turned down for promotion, ask why. If you cannot meet your plan in your current organization or if you can make no more progress or if you no longer enjoy the work then look elsewhere. There are plenty of opportunities for ambitious people who work hard and are keen to learn.
Paul Sloane is an author and speaker on leadership, innovation and lateral thinking. His most recent book is The Innovative Leader. He helps organizations improve innovation, creativity and leadership. He is the founder of Destination Innovation. He has written 15 books of lateral thinking puzzles and hosts the lateral puzzles forum.
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5 Components Your Business Web Site Needs

Susan Baroncini-Moe — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:00:08 +0000

Last week I talked about why a strong web site is crucial to your business. Today I’m going to talk about five components your web site needs and why you need them. Bear in mind, however, that these five aren’t the only components you need. At the end of the article, I’ll mention a couple of other things you may want to include. Now, you can’t just slap these components on a web site and have something great. You’ll still need some solid graphic design, good usability and ease of navigation, plus you definitely want to make sure your design, copy, and code are developed using principles of search engine optimization. With those cautionary notes aside, let’s dive in to the five components you need for a successful web site.
1. Opt-In Box
If you’re not capturing your visitor’s details with an opt-in box, you’re missing one of the greatest marketing tools available online today. An opt-in box is a place where people enter their name and e-mail address (or just their e-mail address, but I’ve found it’s useful to have more information), and then they subscribe to your e-mail newsletter or e-zine (pronounced “EE-zeen”). You can start building a relationship with your subscribers with regular, useful contact (defining “regular, useful contact” is a separate article in and of itself).
2. Who you are
Generally speaking, if you’re selling either a product or a service, you’ll want your customers or clients to trust you. Part of building trust is sharing a bit about you and how your company got started.
3. What you do
Obviously, if you want to sell your products or services, you’ll need to talk about them. This is where good marketing copywriting comes in handy. If you’re not good at writing marketing copy that converts visitors into buyers, hire someone who knows how to do it well. Investing in good copywriting can make all the difference.
4. Sticky content
Sticky content refers to any content on your web site that attracts people and keeps them there, kind of like flypaper. Consider your blog, articles, audio and videos, and other resources, to be the flypaper that keeps visitors “stuck” to your site. The longer they stay at your site, the more likely they are to convert into buyers. There is, however, a point where your content will hit critical mass and can be too sticky. If you give too much away, your potential buyers won’t need to buy. They’ll settle for the freebies and never convert into sales.
5. Contact Information
Potential clients and customers will want to know how to contact you for several reasons. If they can contact you, they can buy from you with the assurance that if they experience any troubles with the product, they’ll be able to ask questions or process returns easily. Also, they can ask you questions before they buy. There’s a long list of other reasons customers and clients may want to contact you, and they’ll feel safer buying if they can contact you easily. So provide at least phone and e-mail, and if you can, provide a physical address as well. If you work from home, don’t post your home address. Instead, get a P.O. box or a box at the UPS Store and post that instead.
If you’re selling products or services online, in addition to these five components, you’ll do well to invest in a shopping cart system and a payment processing system. Forcing potential buyers to contact you to get purchasing information ensures that those buyers will go elsewhere most of the time. We live in a high-demand, instant gratification world. If someone is shopping in the middle of the night or on a Sunday and they want what you have to offer but they can’t get it when they want it, they’ll buy it from someone else who can deliver instantaneously. Don’t give your potential buyers a reason not to buy from you.
So how do you implement all this stuff? How do you get a web site with these components, plus good design, good usability, and strong SEO? Next week, I’ll talk about how to hire a web firm to design your site. I’ll tell you how to educate yourself so you know enough to ask the right questions and know when you’re getting the right answers, how to balance value and price, and what red flags to watch out for.
Susan Baroncini-Moe started her entrepreneurial adventures with a lemonade stand. Now, Susan is the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans, dedicated to helping you design a business you'll love or transform your business into optimized profitability. Learn more at BusinessInBlueJeans.com.Other links: Blue Jeans Web Sites and Susan's No Suits Allowed! E-zine.
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Are you Satisfied?

Clemens Rettich — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:00:35 +0000
In September of 1960, J.F. Kennedy engaged Richard Nixon in the first presidential candidates’ debate. Kennedy’s opening statement in that debate has now become the famous “I am not satisfied” speech. What Kennedy’s team rightly strategized was that in any competitive environment, political or businesses, sustainable success starts with focusing on your own house. You will not win the race by focusing on the competition. There are a number of reasons for this...

Why A Good Web Site Matters To Your Business

Susan Baroncini-Moe — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:00:35 +0000

For most businesses, a web site is one of the most important investments you can make. Entrepreneurs are either overspending or underspending on their web sites, and many have no idea what they’re doing or why. So today I’m going to talk about why a good, solid web site really matters to your business, and in the next two weeks, I’ll follow up with articles on the core components your web site needs to work well for you, and how to hire a solid web firm to build your site affordably.
1. Your web site reflects you as a business owner and professional.
If your web site looks professional, your potential clients will think you’re a professional who has enough clients and enough income to have a site built for you. If potential clients visit your web site and it looks half-assed and home-built that’s how they’ll perceive you.
If you’re a web developer, by all means, build your own site, as that will reflect your capabilities. Everyone else, hire a solid company that can do a good job, not just in building your web site, but in getting it seen and in building it wisely to maximize the traffic you’ll get.
2. Your web site can mean extra local business.
Even if you’re primarily brick and mortar, having a solid web site can mean extra business. Local clientele often perform seaches online and find your web site, encouraging them to walk into your store. If they find your competitors and they look more reputable or solid than you (or if they have a web site and you don’t), you’ll lose business, just because of your web site. And, when you’re mentioned in the media or on review sites like Angie’s List, you’ll need a web site to help people find you.
3. Your web site can mean global business.
Did you ever think about getting orders from Australia or Malaysia? Launching a fantastic web site means you’ll instantly become a global business, allowing you to expand your clientele to a much larger audience. Your web site is visible in almost every country around the globe, and that means you expand your potential client base by millions. You’ll still want to keep your target market in mind, but an international audience may still find you appealing.
4. Your web site can generate media interest.
If a journalist is looking for an expert in your field to quote for an article, s/he is more likely to choose the business owner whose web site looks professional and clean than someone who looks like they don’t really know what they’re doing. And as most of you know, a mention in the media can be powerful for your business!
Don’t do your business a disservice by putting up a shoddy web site. Take care and invest wisely in your business web site by hiring someone who knows what they’re doing. Next week I’ll talk about what components you need in your web, and in two weeks, I’ll cover how to hire a web company.
Susan Baroncini-Moe started her entrepreneurial adventures with a lemonade stand. Now, Susan is the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans, dedicated to helping you design a business you'll love or transform your business into optimized profitability. Learn more at BusinessInBlueJeans.com.Other links: Blue Jeans Web Sites and Susan's No Suits Allowed! E-zine.
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The Fast Track Past A Failed Project: 5 Steps

Thursday Bram — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:30:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a pretty big project — a book — for going on eight months. This week, I got word that the project had been scrapped, at least as far as the publisher was concerned. It was a pretty big let down for me: we were only about two months away from the end of the project. Since I’ve gotten word, I’ve been working through everything from shock at the news to anger at some of the other people involved. When you’re emotionally attached to a project — which can happen just because of the sheer amount of time you’ve been working on something — hearing about its cancellation can take it out of you. You get knocked down; it’s important to get back up again and keep moving forward.
1. Find Out The Whys
It’s not unusual to be shocked, or even have a little bit of denial, when something happens to a project you’ve worked hard on. In many cases, you’ll probably get advice to just move on and get past it — but there are plenty of reasons to actually find out a little more about the circumstances. At the bare minimum, you’ll want to be able to avoid similar issues in the future. Such information can make the situation a little more painful in the short run, but I’ve found that if I know what happened, I get a little more closure with the whole situation. Don’t assign blame, though: even when one person was clearly at fault, you’ve got better things to do than focus on that.
2. Resolve and Repurpose The Project
Just because you’ve received word that a project has gotten axed doesn’t mean that you simply walk away from it. Assuming that you’re a principal in the project — that you have control over the information and resources of the project — you may be able to reuse at least certain elements of the project towards your future efforts. If you’re lucky, you may even be able to turn around and repackage the project for another client entirely. If you don’t control the project, you’ll still need to shut down the project, box up files and so on. Even if it seems like there’s no point to doing so, it’s worthwhile so that if you can restart the project or reuse a part of it sometime down the road, you can do so easily.
3. Profit From Your Time
If the project really did go very wrong, you may find that your expected payment isn’t forthcoming. That sort of situation makes it particularly important to repurpose your work. However, there are certain ways to profit from your experience on a given project, despite an unfortunate ending. You can update your resume or portfolio in light of what you work you’ve done, take a look at how the project has expanded your network and even wind up with the leftover resources from the project. Taking a look at these opportunities can be a way to keep your mind on the bright side when thinking about what happened. You should expand on what you have, if possible. Maybe you can pick up a letter of reference or get an introduction for another project.
4. Check Your Reputation
You may not be able to come out of a failed project smelling like roses. Depending on the environment you work in, a big cancellation may become part of your reputation. With the number of people looking out for themselves in some industries, there may be a few people that decide to cover their out responsibilities by placing the blame on you. Complaining or justifying your actions won’t really help in such a situation. The best option is generally to find opportunities to prove such rumors wrong. Even if you aren’t going to start looking for a big project immediately, taking care of small projects or tasks well can go a long way towards reminding people of your skills and willingness to work hard.
5. Gear Up For The Next Project
No matter how big this project was, it’s unlikely that it’ll be your last project of all time. Instead, you’ve got plenty more to look forward to both in your professional and personal life. You may as well start getting ready for the next one: that can include going out and finding another project. Even if you don’t take on another big project for your work immediately, it may be worth actually seeking out something — it’s just like getting back on the horse after a fall. Taking on a big even at your church or planning a new project around one of your hobbies can help you get past a disappointment, but there’s not a limit on the types of projects that can help you get back into your groove. In fact, deviating from the normal types of projects you find can help you move past a less-than-ideal situation much faster.
Sometimes you can find yourself in the middle of a disappointing project — one that simply gets canceled. Even projects that look pretty good from your view point can get cut. But that doesn’t mean you have to let the situation turn into your personal bridge to nowhere. No matter how much time, effort or even emotion you have invested in the project, take the steps necessary to move on and move towards better and lasting projects.
Thursday Bram blogs about a variety of topics, from personal finance to small business. She is the author of an upcoming book on the tools and tricks you need to build a career you can take with you during long-term travel. More information about Thursday and her book, Working Your Way Around the World, is available on her personal site, ThursdayBram.com.
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Build Your Personal Brand by Working for Free

Dan Schawbel — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:00:33 +0000

After reading that headline, you may think I’m insane or tell yourself that working for free is out of the question. There have been millions of layoffs since the end of 2007 up until now and for college graduates, the competition might make you comatose. The NACE reports that 41% of students haven’t even started the job search and 27% of graduates are going to graduate school because of the bad economy. Of course, going to graduate school is going to put you in more debt and you’re betting on the economy coming back in two years. If you’re trying to get a job right now, you’ll notice that many employers are cutting down salaries of current employees and offers to new hires. Although, your education is a factor in you getting a job, what’s more important is your work experience. Just like content is king on the internet, your experience is king when it comes to getting a job. Today, I’m going to explain why you might need to work for free for at least part of your time each week.
When interviewing, experience trumps income
Have you ever noticed how resumes don’t have salaries next to each job you’ve had? You’ll ies ever find a resume that lists salaries or internship compensation. Salaries are negotiated if there’s a job offer that doesn’t meet the applicants standards. Corporate salaries are based on job title and you can salaries at various companies by doing to Glassdoor.com. Since, salaries aren’t listed on resumes, your experience becomes the most important element in getting a job, aside from how you present yourself online and in an interview. I took two non-paid internships while in college to gain more experience, thus building my personal brand to become a stronger applicant.
When I applied for jobs, the experience I gained at those companies really made a difference and it was well worth the compensation sacrifice. Since it’s hard to get a job right now, start focusing on building your credentials, enhancing your resume and acquiring skills that can help you in future job searches. It will pay off and you’ll forget that you had to sacrifice compensation.
Work for free so you remain active
The worst thing you can do right now is sulk on your couch, with some potato chips, and a coke. Well, there could be worse, but the point is that you need to stay active at all times. Recruiters don’t want to talk to people that have been out of the job market for a while, without remaining relevant to their industry or at least trying to acquire some experience. You never want to get into a situation, where you’re in an interview and you’re asked “so what have you been doing recently, I noticed that your last job ended six months ago,” and then not have a good answer.
Find people in your network that can help you stay active, by working for them for free if they can’t pay you. Also, you can do community service or start your own company to at least make it seem like you haven’t given up and that you are aggressive and actually care about your career.
Work for free while having a side job
If you work for free to gain experience, you’ll still need a side job to make money. Work for a company for free part-time to gain experience and also work for another company to get paid. If you want to get money, and things are getting tough, then it’s not a bad decision to do retail or work at a restaurant to pay the bills.
If you do that, and you invest time in building your personal brand online, gaining experience by working for free part-time and job searching constantly, you should be in a good position to get a job when it becomes available. A lot of college students are making these hard decisions right now because they realize that they don’t have a choice. If you want to stay ontop during tough times, you’ll have to make tough decisions, but you’ll want to make them before everyone else does for yo.
Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, 09), as well as the publisher of both the award winning Personal Branding Blog and Personal Branding Magazine.
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Make Your Passion A Priority At Work

Thursday Bram — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Maybe one of your goals involves traveling the world or maybe you’re looking for enough time to help with a cause you feel passionate about. Either way, though, you likely have a prior commitment to an employer — or at least to paying rent and eating on a regular basis. Most of us are not in a position to quit working and spend all our time on those activities that we’d like to make a priority. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t add our own priorities to our work — it’s possible to incorporate our own interests into our work even if we haven’t landed our dream jobs.
Talk About Your Passions
Your interests may have absolutely nothing to do with your job: most corporate jobs don’t take your passion for the arts or your after-work involvement in sports into account. But that doesn’t mean that limiting your discussion of such topics will pay off in the end. If you want to balance your work with your passions, it’s worth making sure your work actually knows that you have a few passions.
I went to school with a friend who took an IT job immediately after graduation, despite being far more interested in making films. Just talking about his passion opened up some opportunities for him: he’s gotten involved in national competitions for films on his employer’s behalf, gotten access to company property for sets and props for his own projects and has been able to add some interesting responsibilities to his resume that actually involve making films. At the very least, he’s turned his job into something he enjoys — but he also has moved a little closer to working in a job that focuses on his passion, rather than incorporates it.
You don’t need to dominate every conversation around the water cooler, but it’s worth mentioning your hobbies and interests when they’re relevant. And if you see a clear path to bringing your interests to work, speak up. Even if it’s as simple as something like asking your employer to sponsor a local sports team, the company probably isn’t aware of the opportunity — or benefits — of sponsorship.
Look for Flexibility
There are certainly passions and professions that don’t really intersect: if your employer primarily targets local customers, you probably won’t be able to convince the company to send you to Thailand. That fact doesn’t stop a web designer that I’ve worked with in the past. She doesn’t have any interest in running her own business or freelancing — she likes the company that employs her. But she also enjoys spending about half of each year in Thailand. With a little flexibility on both the designer and the employer’s part, they’ve come to an agreement that works out pretty well for both of them. She telecommutes for months at a time, making sure to be in the country for those projects that her employer really wants her to handle inside the country.
Once again, you’ll have to actually mention that you’re looking for some flexibility to actually get it. As long as you have a pretty clear idea of what you want — leave work early once a week, telecommute or any other option that makes it easier for you to devote time to your priorities — and how you can turn that into a benefit for your employer, ask for a meeting with your supervisor. You may not get a ‘yes’ straight away, but if your employer sees that you are serious about making a change, you’ve at least built a starting point.
Skip the Bluffs
Adding your own priorities to your work day isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do. There will be cases where bringing the two together just isn’t possible, times when you have to focus on the fact that your employer is paying you money for your time and the company just isn’t interested in your hobbies. That’s okay. You don’t have to stop trying to focus on your passions during your 9 to 5 — it’s just time to step back and asses the situation.
There’s a danger in pushing too hard for one of your own priorities. There are plenty of examples out there of folks who told their employers that another priority or the need for flexibility and heard that the company couldn’t or wouldn’t offer them any help. In such situations, there is a temptation to try to bluff — to suggest that if you’re needs aren’t meet, you’re ready to move on. Such a bluff is generally not an ideal option. That isn’t to go against my suggestion to simply talk about your passions, especially to your boss. Instead, it’s an issues of the force you put behind such discussions.
Instead, before things progress that far, it’s worth considering your options as a whole. For the time being, the best option may be keeping your job as your main priority: you still have after hours to work on your own projects, and you can slowly work towards finding a new job or business that allows you to shift your priorities. Your alternative is making the jump now: you can start a job hunt in earnest, hopefully focusing on jobs to are more closely related to your own pet projects. Or you can strike out on your own, focusing on freelancing or building your own business focused on your own priorities. It’s a question of which option is practical for your own situation.
Thursday Bram blogs about a variety of topics, from personal finance to small business. She is the author of an upcoming book on the tools and tricks you need to build a career you can take with you during long-term travel. More information about Thursday and her book, Working Your Way Around the World, is available on her personal site, ThursdayBram.com.
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Are You Doing Business In The Cloud?

Thursday Bram — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:30:00 +0000

All of my email addresses are directed to my Gmail account. Most of the documents I need on a daily basis are on Google Docs. I’ve been slowly moving towards living in the cloud. In a way, this has been very good for me: I can access just about everything I want, whether I’m in my office, at someone else’s office, a friend’s house or anywhere else with an internet connection. But there are downsides. If something happens to one of the services I use, I’m up the proverbial creek — and the same is true if something happens to my internet connection.
Business In The Cloud
Keeping personal data in the cloud is one thing, but uploading the information you rely on to earn a living is an entirely different matter. The benefits are huge. Just the ability to pull up files while visiting a client’s office can make the difference in landing an account. But risks go hand in hand with those benefits — the likelihood of something happening to your data in the cloud is about on par whether it’s personal or work-related, but the consequences can be far more complicated.
So far, it’s been difficult to determine whether the risks outweigh the gains. Working from the cloud can be incredible: with just a netbook, you can often access everything you need for a project from half way around the globe. A business will to upload files to the cloud can make it much easier to work with telecommuting employees, along with clients who may need easy access to information. It doesn’t hurt that many online applications come with a price tag that makes the cost of the software many companies currently rely on absolutely laughable.
Personally, I’ve found that moving my own work into the cloud has made a major difference in my ability to work on projects. I can work just as easily from a coffee shop as from my office. There were no barriers to me moving my work into online applications, though: if I had needed a supervisor to sign off on my choice of applications and whether they were online, getting to the point that I am now might have been almost impossible.
Getting The Okay
Depending on who you work for, moving into the cloud may not be a simple matter. If you’re self-employed, you must reassure yourself that your information will be safe in the online applications you plan to use. That sort of reassurance can include:
Security: If you’re placing any sort of sensitive material online — financial information or files your competitors would be very interested in looking at — you’ll want to double check that each application you use has sufficient security measures in place to protect your data.
Backups: In the event that something happens to your data online, you’ll want to make sure that you have a backup in place — even if that means manually downloading your data on a regular basis. Remember, not even Gmail works perfectly every day.
Contingency Plan: Making sure that you have access to your information goes beyond creating a backup. If you’re planning a presentation that relies on a file you’ve saved to an online application, for instance, have a contingency plan in place in case you don’t have internet access or you’re not on a computer with the right software to use it.
All that is necessary just to make sure that you’re able to work in the cloud effectively. If you’re adding an employer to the equation, though, things get more complicated. At a bare minimum, you’ll have to convince your supervisor that your idea to work in the cloud is not only effective but will clearly help the company.
When it comes to working in the cloud, the “better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” approach seldom works. If you’re thinking of taking even a small amount of your employer’s information into the cloud, I’d recommend against it. Some employees sign contracts specifically stating that they will not share information with a third party — which can include Google Docs. Others get issued a company handbook stating essentially the same thing. That means uploading information to the cloud could constitute a firing offense if something goes wrong.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t convince your higher ups to move into the cloud, though: it just means that you’re going to need to be able to reassure them on issues like security and backups before you even think of uploading one file.
Are You In The Cloud?
Have you already moved into the cloud? If so, it would be great if you’d be willing to share in the comments how you addressed the issues that go with keeping important information in the cloud. Personally, I stick with a handful of trusted sites, and I still have a few pieces of information I don’t put into the cloud. For instance, I keep my financial records on just one computer in my office.
I do know some people who simply aren’t interested in moving any of their work into the cloud, for one reason or another. If you fall into this category, it would be great if you’d share your comments on why, as well. Is it due to one of the concerns I listed above, or another issue altogether?
Thursday Bram blogs about a variety of topics, from personal finance to small business. She is the author of an upcoming book on the tools and tricks you need to build a career you can take with you during long-term travel. More information about Thursday and her book, Working Your Way Around the World, is available on her personal site, ThursdayBram.com.
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You Want Engagement? Then Start Being Clear!

Clemens Rettich — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:00:40 +0000
You want engagement. But no one’s buying. If you want something done you have to spell it out in detail, or even give up and get to that ugly “I’ll just do it myself” place of the defeated manager. You feel like every time you turn your back, the wheels come off the bus again. You’ve got zero engagement.So how do you fix that?