Tag Archives: business

The Delegation Or Outsourcing Imperative

: Image via Wikipedia

I’ve written before on the critical importance of delegating or outsourcing to give you time to focus on the big picture and develop the right strategic direction so your business can grow.

It’s not easy. Some people have an extraordinarily difficult time doing it. I have a friend who’s a very successful but rather harried and definitely overworked leader of a national organization. She often says: “I can do it myself in the time it takes to show someone else how to do it.” I respond: “Yes. When I teach someone how to do something it takes about as much time as it would take for me to do it myself. Maybe a bit longer. But that person is now able to do it forever.” Do the math. It’s an investment of time that will bring you a great return on your investment.

To succeed, without working yourself to death, we all must learn to delegate or outsource. Finding and training people to delegate or outsource to will give you a support system which will facilitate your success:

First – decide what to delegate: the point of delegating is to free yourself, first, from routine, low level or mechanical tasks which someone else can do, perhaps better and more efficiently than you.

Delegate anything low priority or which doesn’t require your personal attention to achieve your primary goals.

Select the most capable person for the task: you may not like to file, but there’s someone, somewhere, who does. Let them do it.

Give clear direction and reach an agreement on expected results: You should be willing to take the time, up front, to review your expectations and reach an agreement on what the end result should be. Communication is a key component of this process.

Be available for questions and mid course decisions

Set a clear deadline with accomplishment milestones along the way

Finally, give credit to your assistant, volunteer or support staff

The only way to develop a support system for yourself is to let the people you delegate to have the responsibility to do what you’ve asked of them; let them do it their own way; let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. Praise them when they complete their assignment. Point out that the completed task contributes to the success of the company as a whole. Give them credit within the company.

Here’s an example from Chaitanya Sagar on how learning to delegate: ,Delegate or Outsource – If You Want Your Business To Grow

“…In the initial days of my company, I did everything myself. I spoke to customers; I interacted with investors; and wrote business plans. At the same time, I cleaned my office and went long distances just to deliver legal documents somewhere. I spent a lot of time on those tasks which were not strategic or something that contributed to my customers. I did everything because I had nothing better to do. If I hired someone else, I would pay them and I’d have to sit idle!

As a small business grows, and as the scale at which a task is done increases, you have to find ways to get the time to focus on the bigger picture. If you don’t, you will get caught up in myriad routine activities, and can’t progress on strategic areas of your business. You have to make time to steer your business in the right direction. And you can do that by delegating work to others, by outsourcing, and at times, it’s as simple as asking the other party to visit your office instead of you visiting them!

My startup has been growing gradually. And some of the rules I had learned in the initial days are obsolete already. Though I saved precious dollars in the initial days doing all the routine work, time and again, I found myself asking myself, “Why am I doing this? How does my customer benefit from it? Should I not be working on something that enhances value to my customer?”

So now I do what is strategic and outsource many activities like coding for my website, marketing material work, accounting, graphic design, etc. In areas I do outsource, I am glad I do because it led to a lot of progress. Inn hindsight, the decision to outsource my work to others has greatly paid off in the following ways:

1. Where it was not my core competency, I rode on other’s competency and made wonderful progress.

2. When the project (such as product development) was over, I had the ability to scale down the activity reducing the “burn rate” without having to fire employees (had I hired them).

3. I was able to save time and could focus on the strategic aspects of the business.”

What about you? Do you have any delegating or outsourcing examples or experiences to share? We would like to hear from you.

Evolution Of A Website – Birth Of A Business

Some time back, I wrote about Business On The Net: The Morphing Imperative and that set me to thinking about my own morphing on the Net . There is a saying “you make the path by walking on it.” Perhaps on the Net, you make the path by morphing on it. And I have certainly done that. For those of you who are interested, this is my story, so far, on the Net:

The Gold Rush To The Net

It was in December of 1994, that Netscape introduced the browser and the Net opened up the rush beyond the engineers, scientists and government workers who were on the Net before. Now the pioneers who saw the possibilities came, the entrepreneurs and techies and just plain people in remote places who longed for communication with the rest of the world.

At the same time, in December of 1994, my inspiration for a website was a study I was asked to do for the University of Texas at San Antonio business department. They had a lot of very rough, raw material ( like clippings or tear outs from newspapers) which suggested men make more money than women, even when women own their own business. The term “glass ceiling” had only recently become part of America’s vocabulary, when The Wall Street Journal’s “Corporate Woman” column identified “a puzzling new phenomenon. There seemed to be an invisible—but impenetrable—barrier between women and the executive suite, preventing them from reaching the highest levels of the business world regardless of their accomplishments and merits.”The Federal government’s Report on the Glass Ceiling Initiative in 1991 was still somewhat virgin territory for the public at large. It certainly came as somewhat of a shock to me. I thought, Wow, this is pretty interesting stuff, I bet more people would like to know about it.

I spent 1995 learning more about the Glass Ceiling and the Net, as the two converged in my mind as an interesting topic and a new technology platform to present it. I had to learn HTML coding, as in those early days there was no “What you see is what you get ” software, much less content management systems. It was challenging for many reasons and on many levels ( see Match Your Entrepreneur Story about one of the early Internet conferences in 1995 where I was one of 5 women and about 5,000 men). When AdvancingWomen.com finally launched, we got about a million and a half page views in a month, melting down our server 3 times. ( But that’s another story). Remember, back then, the Net was relatively small with little competition. There were no large corporations. No Hearst, no iVillage, although I later worked with both of them.

So, I got in on the ground floor with my niche, the first women’s website to focus on leveling the playing field for women, although we’ve continued to evolve and, as we’ve increased our offerings on business and technology we’ve also increased our male audience. Our concept morphed as well. In the vein of “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”, we decided, years ago, it was more effective to give both women and men the tools and strategies to succeed with pocket book and voting booth issues, the pivotal levers, than to keep noting the gap between genders. Consequently, as well as connecting with professional women and business owners, we are one of the leading websites among business men in China and Saudi Arabia, and business and technology experts in the U.S. and globally .We have built a diverse community of both women and businessmen on the web. And we have moved on to produce other websites and other business models. But, back to the beginning:

First Revenue – From Advertising

The first revenue I remember having came from Doubleclick, which invented the targeted ad system. DoubleClick was founded in 1996. My site, AdvancingWomen.com was selected for the initial women’s demographic and I went to their opening launch party in New York. It was a heady, champagne toasting moment. I learned a lot about targeting my demographics and managing my website from DoubleClick until we went our separate ways. For one thing, despite the hype and the potential which always seemed just out of reach, I never really made that much revenue from DoubleClick. So , trading glamour and glory for actual revenue, I struck out on my own. In the beginning, without large competitive corporate websites, I would typically make $5,000 per month from each large corporation which wanted to advertise site wide with AdvancingWomen.com. This was when web sites were rising like hot air balloons.

About that time I was courted by a New York Stock Exchange company, led by a rather ideosyncratic mogul, who wanted to create a web portal by pulling together about a dozen sites in different niches. He boasted he could beat Yahoo, the giant du jour, because they were doing everything wrong. AdvancingWomen.com was selected as the women’s niche and it looked like we were headed for a very big pay day, while getting all the money we would ever need to operate and maintaining a lot of control on top of it. For a moment or two it appeared Utopia was on the horizon.

Or, as the Cole Porter song goes, was it merely Asbury Park? Despite the mogul’s billions that vision evaporated in the dot com crash, as did the money I was making from syndicating AdvancingWomen’s content. Remember Isyndicate? One month I was at a huge, plush and glamorous ISyndiate bash in Hollywood, mingling with tech celebs, sipping champagne and sorting through the lavish giveaways. A month or so later they were toast. ( There’s a lesson in there someplace about applying the bootstrapping wisdom of using ingenuity and elbow grease instead of cash. Fortunately, I have always been into using elbow grease instead of cash so I survived, with the sure knowledge that we were still in the very beginning of the infancy of the Internet. DoubleClick also survived the dot com crash, perhaps because of its market leading technology and constant adaptation to ever changing market conditions. It was formally acquired by Google in March 2008. )

The next big uptick came from the advent of Google adsense.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested. I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero. I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing ( although this could be the time for that tide to turn with the Kindle and ebooks apps on mobile devices). I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company that sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was produce truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience. All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads and ads sold from my site. I also made a decision to increasingly lessen dependence on ad revenue because of its extreme volatility. As hard as it may be to believe, I’ve had 2000% swings in ad revenue. And that was not ok with me, even on the high side. I’m a risk taker not a kamikaze pilot. I needed to put a little dramamine into my site to calm the effects of the choppy waters in advertising.

One product which helped me do that was a Job Board or the employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com. From day one, recognizing job boards were an “evergreen” in the business, not subject to the cardiac arrest of a fad, I determined to have a job board. I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demographic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site. Why should they, as they would be creating their own competition? Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.

It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

Time To Ramp Up and Scale Up: Next Step – GGwebGroup

Less than a year after I started I began helping other sites set up and ramp up on the Net.

Today I operate AdvancingWomen.com, Careers.AdvancingWomen.com, AW Career & Biz Blog, Advancing Women in Leadership Journal,
NewEnergyResearch.net, the first of several planned “green business” websites, and a number of diverse websites for clients.

I have recently formalized what I have been doing for some time now: consulting about, creating and overseeing websites for clients, particularly from a web business perspective.

Tina Forsyth crystalized this concept in her book, Becoming an Online Business Manager.

Tina describes a situation in which business owners “already have teams of virtual assistants, webmasters, designers and other contractors, but what they really need is someone to manage all of this; to play a bigger role in their business so that they can grow to the next level.”
Now, as online businesses have grown and increased in complexity, with more sophisticated online tools available, Tina says she is “seeing more business owners who are ready to hire at the management level.”

When I started reading Tina’s writing, it was with a mild shock of recognition I realized I had been doing what she described for a number of clients for some time. Since I had operated a major website since 1996, I had ample experience on the web, so a number of businesses and organizations I had come into the same orbit with had asked for me to help them set up shop online. What happened, in every case, was that I was not just setting up or overseeing the set up of a website and collaborative and marketing tools, but helping them think through the business processes they would need to succeed and grow their businesses. It was a collaboration where I implemented their vision, more like a doctor collaborating with a patient, to diagnose the state of his or her health, determine the level he or she really aspired to reach, then prescribing a regimen for increased fitness to ultimately reach that goal. The actual construction of the website was more like being the pharmacist dispensing the medicine. But, in every case, we’ve worked together to reach the right diagnosis, and we’ve constructed websites which support clients in reaching their goals. Often I not only implement them, I continue to oversee them, so clients can focus on building their business or organization. As we’ve formalized this process we’ve given it it’s own website GGwebGroup and also formalized a team with differing specialties so we can help businesses not only focus, but ramp up fast to seize opportunities.

This is where we are today but the Net continues to morph and I’m sure we will too so………to be continued. Sometime in the future.

Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market

You know, I’m always looking for ways to do business better, faster and leaner. Well, I guess what all of that boils down to is doing business smarter. And two of the smartest people out there dishing out smart advice about doing business are Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. For this interview I have to thank Andrew Warner Internet entrepreneur and founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it. Here’s his take from Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market.

“Seth Godin, Squidoo’s founder, is the best-selling author of 10 books that have helped companies build remarkable products and promote them. He’s never written a book about how to grow in a down market, so I called him up and interviewed him about it for Mashable.

Here’s what he said:

1. Recognize that you’ll have less competition

You should know that this is the best thing that ever happened to you because it makes it easier to be the winner when so many people are dropping out.

The dip is closer and shallower then it would be if these were the boom times.

2. Focus on building value

The emphasis should not be on “how do I raise money and hire people.” The emphasis should be on “how do I build value today.”

Because, every day you’re doing this, you’re building value, connecting with people who find you irreplaceable, then you will become irreplaceable.

3. Expect your costs to go down

Understand that in a down economy, not only is there less money for people to spend on you, but you have to spend less money to make stuff that’s worthwhile.

4. Don’t hire like it’s 1999

It makes me sick to see organizations that race out to hire 50 people, because they think that get big fast matters. And then “it’s not their fault” when they lay off 20.

Well sure it is. It’s totally your fault Mr. entrepreneur, because you shouldn’t have hired 50 people to start with.

5. Focus on the irreplaceable

The goal is NOT how fast can you hire as many people as you can. The goal is how irreplaceable are your people. How much can you boil down the essence of what you’re building?

6. Get lean to beat the behemoths

When we look at the home runs online. They are not the Daily Beast with $18 million and hundreds and hundreds of people. They’re Twitter, with a tiny team of people who have a very fine focused, vision.

7. Be disciplined about what you’re building

One of the things the guys at 37signals say is, if you want to be on budget and on time, what you have to do is, the day you hit the budget, or the day you hit the deadline, you have to ship. And it’s a race.

So that’s how you do it. You don’t say how do I get more money to match the spec? You say, how can I get the spec out there for the money I have?

- HOW TO: Raise Money in a Down Economy
- Startup Hacks: An Early Stage Checklist
- Startup Hacks: Seven Ideas for Building Your Team
- Startup Hacks: 7 Questions VCs Will Ask You, What They Really Mean and How You Can Answer Them

Hiring Tip #1 – It Starts Before the Interview

When we’ve talked about developing your personal brand, we’ve noted that everything matters. How you talk, how you answer your emails, how you connect with people. Tina Forsyth has much the same thought when it comes to landing a job. According to Tina:

When it comes to hiring I’m reminded of the philosophy:

How you do anything is how you do everything

As an Online Business Manager I’ve done my fair share of hiring virtual professionals over the years, and i’ve found that you can learn ALOT about someone from the very first moment you connect with them (which is usually by email).

How people respond to you from day one can be a good reflection of how they would actually be on a project.

There are a few things you can pay attention to that may help filter out some potentially unsuitable people along the way:

How quickly do they respond to your emails?
I expect a 24 hour turnaround time when I send someone an email (except on weekends/holidays of course). If I send someone an email saying ‘hey, i’m interested in hiring you’ and I don’t hear from them for 3 days I will most likely not consider them further. Most of our projects require a 24 hour turnaround in communication, and if I don’t see that right away it is a red flag.

Did they provide what you asked them for?
If you asked them for specific information, did they provide it in full detail? I’m actually surprised how often I will get a response from a potential hire and they didn’t include half of the information I requested. If they have a lack of attention to details in these early stages it makes me wonder how much would be missed on the job.

What is the tone of their response?
Are they casual or do they take a more professional approach in their writing? (depending on your needs you may prefer either one). How is their spelling & grammar? The actual tone of their response can be very telling – for example if you are hiring someone to response to customer service emails and their spelling/grammar is poor that may not be a good fit.

Do they follow up with you?
If you haven’t responded to someone in a day or so, do they follow up with you? I’ll admit that I sometimes do this on purpose – not respond to an email for a couple of days just to see if the person will follow up with me to check in. If someone is eager/excited about the opportunity they should send a follow up email to check in with you (even just to ensure that you received their last message)
There are of course many things that come into play in the hiring process, but it is sometimes these little things that can make all the difference in the long run. And if you don’t pay attention to them now they could turn into big issues and annoyances down the road.

–

Tina Forsyth is the author of Becoming an Online Business Manager: Playing a Bigger Game with Your Clients and Yourself. She writes and consults in advanced online marketing and business systems for business owners and their support teams. www.OnlineBusinessManager.com

Green Tech – Next Boom Or Bubble Set To Burst?

My company is located in the high tech corridor that runs between San Antonio and Austin, Texas, so I am more than a bit familiar with the wild swings and boom and bust cycles in both high tech and housing.

I was slam bang in the middle of the dot com bust of 2001, having gotten on the Net with the pioneers at the onset of Netscape and the graphical browser. I remember the wailing and the moaning. I even remember a “friend”…… a rather cliche-ridden friend, and not such a rock solid friend, it turns out… saying: “Rather see ya than be ya.” Even in the midst of the crash and the doom and gloom, I retorted,”Are you kidding? A very small per cent of the people are on the Net yet. It’s in its very earliest stages. Bubbles are about over hype and not real profits. The Net is the future.”

Of course, I had kept my costs low and had to make a profit. I didn’t have a venture capitalist leaning over my shoulder and breathing down my neck saying “Capture eyeballs, forget profit. It’s a real estate grab and a race to critical mass.” I was slowed down by the need to build a profitable business now, not later. And, that turned out to be a good thing.

So the question is, will green tech be the next big bubble that bursts?

Here’s how I look at it.

Business is all about cycles. If a particular sector becomes overheated and rampant with speculation, there naturally are going to be some wild rides.

Let me put it this way. If you got all excited about real estate values booming and put your money down on two high dollar condos in Miami or a couple of spec houses in Phoenix, you may have to walk away from your investment with only your experience to show for it.

If, on the other hand, you bought your own home, or a rent house in Phoenix, at a reasonable price, you can just live in it, or rent it out for enough to cover the mortgage, for two or three years or most of your life. The real estate market will recover and your investment will recoup its losses and continue to rise. All you need is time. And, if you structure your investments or your business right, you will have time.

Time is the answer to most investments and most businesses. Time to grow. Time to accumulate…..assets, customers, understanding, markets. Time to ride out the downturns and take advantage of the upturns.

That’s why it’s so important to conserve your cash, and if you’re a small business or an entrepreneur, run your business with an eye towards thrift. That will give you the ability to withstand the sometimes sudden shocks and typhoons that hit the market and your business in particular.

If you create a business that offers real value, and you are careful with your cash, you will survive and thrive.

Green business, or the green tech sector, is no different I think. It offers a lot of value and increasing efficiency for the future. It is only at the very beginning, as the Net was in the 90′s. It’s a good time to get in before the field becomes incredibly overcrowded. Will it be here for the long term? I would make a serious bet on it. In fact, I am making some serious bets on it. Just put on your hard hat for that inevitable fall out when the speculators have climbed too high and created an avalanche of nay sayers. But that, too , will pass. And you will still be there to reap the rewards.

A Viable Path To Bootstrap A Startup

I have bootstrapped a number of startups in different industries. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that bootstrapping consists of using your own brain, wiliness, sweat equity and resources, rather than have a bank or investor fund you. Which ….99 to 1…. they won’t anyway. So it’s a good thing you’re looking at bootstrapping

And in the current economic climate more people are looking at bootstrapping…. or freelancing as an entry into bootstrapping… than perhaps ever before.

There are a number of tried and true formulas, which will help you bootstrap, and we’ve shared some of those before. But the advice that follows stands out, in part, because the author, Evan Carmichael, YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager, takes some of it a step further. We always tell you to outsource. But Evan discusses how to stairstep your outsourcing from free labor to part time help, to hiring full time, which is exactly the smartest way to do it, I think.

Well, here’s Evan himself in YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog » 7 Steps To Build A Startup From Scratch With No Money.

“I recently did an interview about how to build a business up from scratch with little or no money and I used my own story as an example.

Here are the steps that I took.

This process helped me build my business with $0 in startup capital.

Hopefully you can learn from my experience and make it even better.

Step 1: Moonlight Until You Find Something That Works

I’m a big believer in not spending until I’m earning so I started my company while working at a venture capital firm in Toronto. I used my site to drive traffic, expose myself as an expert, and drive leads for the venture capital firm. I was driving thousands of people to my website and began to wonder if there was a way to monetize that traffic beyond lead generation for the venture capital company.

I found out about Google AdSense and put it up on the site as an additional revenue generator. In my first month (January 2005), I made $8.38 – not much to write home about.

Step 2: Tweak, Tweak, Tweak

Too many entrepreneurs jump full in with no plan and no proof that your idea will work. It’s always better to tweak the concept while you already have some sort of stability in your income. I wasn’t about to go full time making $8.38 a month.

My next step was to learn as much as I could about how to better optimize my ads and how to drive more traffic to my site. I read every ebook, blog, newspaper article, and website that I could get my hands on. There were a lot fewer resources than there are today. I learned as much as I could in the extra time I had and implemented the ideas I learned. Slowly I started making more and more money.

Step 3: Go Full Time

I looked at how much I was spending on my apartment, food, entertainment, etc and once I started to hit that revenue number with my website, I jumped ship and did my business full time. It wasn’t a lavish lifestyle by any stretch but I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my monthly bills. I knew that if I was able to build a site in my spare time that could support my entire lifestyle, then if I gave it a full go, I would be able to do much much more!

Step 4: Get Free Help

As your typical entrepreneur I wanted to grow very quickly and took on too many responsibilities. I was doing manual data entry when I should have been doing more value-add work. But that manual work still needed to get done. The solution? Get free interns. I started with foreign language interns. They were basically university students who came to Canada on a student visa for work experience but they couldn’t get paid for the work. I couldn’t give them too many communications projects because English was their second language but I was able to unload a lot of the work off of my plate.

The next free help I got was from high school students who were on a co-op term. I was able to give them more tasks where they were able to connect with partners and customers because they were fluent in English. They sounded very young on the phone so they usually stuck with email.

Step 5: Hire Part Time Help

At some point you’re going to need more skilled labor than the free interns. They were a stepping stone to help you grow and take some of the work off of your plate but you’ll eventually get to the stage where you need people who don’t need as much hand-holding. But you don’t have enough money coming in to support both you and them. The solution? Hire part time workers. The first guy I hired was for one hour per day to update my database. He worked for me for five hours per week which was much more easy to manage. I wasn’t going broke and I got a skilled worker to help me grow my business. It wasn’t as fast as I would have liked, but it was growing nonetheless.

I hired people to create code for my website, write articles, do marketing projects, edit content, sell advertising… almost anything you can think of. But they were all part time to start. I had an entire organization running with people working only a couple of hours per day. The good thing was that they worked every day… so every day we made progress forward. I found people using elance as well as hired friends and family who wanted to help as well as make an extra pay check. At one point I had eight part time people working for me.

Step 6: Hire Full Time Help

Just like you eventually outgrow your interns, you will also eventually outgrow your part time help. At some point you’ll realize that it’s too much work to co-ordinate all the various part time staff and you need more from them. Some may be able to step into full time roles while others will not be able to commit to more hours because of the other jobs they have. You’ll likely end up having less workers but will get more work done. For example, when I hired my marketing manager, he was originally one of the guys working for me on a part time basis. By hiring him I ended up not needing four other people who were working with me in marketing related positions part time.

Step 7: Figure Out Your Job Description

This is where I’m at now. What is it that I love to do and who do I need to hire to take over the jobs that I don’t want to do anymore? In January I brought on two new full time people to free up more of my time. When you’re first starting a business you end up wearing all the hats but as you grow I believe the whole point of entrepreneurship is to do something you love doing. If you have the opportunity to design the perfect job, why not go for it?

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve built your business up or how you plan to do it if you had a $0 budget.”

For more pearls of wisdom on entrepreneuring, from Evan and others like him, go to YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog

And if you have any thoughts yourself on bootstrapping or entrepreneuring, and you’d like to share them, we’d love to hear them

Do You Have The Entrepreneur Temperament?

Andrew of BizLaunchBlog offers this on the entrepreneur temperament. Do you see yourself in here? Do you see even a little of yourself in here?

Signs you’re probably an entrepreneur

You business is your life and hobby
You often do and then think
You don’t like being told what to do
You often have dreams about your business
You constantly find ways to innovate everything
You hate small talk
You don’t REALLY read long contracts even though you say you did and recommend people should
You’re very impatient
You hate standing in line(queue if you’re English) to buy something
You hate meetings
You look forward to Mondays
You have a short attention span
You don’t read long emails
You send out short emails and sometimes people think you’re rude
You hate being told you’re wrong

If you think this is you, don’t just sit there, go out and start and business!

6 Strategies To Help You Keep Your Job

It’s true. In some companies, even those which we thought were invulnerable, pink slips are raining like confetti. And that’s if the company can manage to keep its doors open. The unemployment rate among college-educated workers has jumped 41% over the past year, and there’s no end in sight.

Smart job strategies to avoid layoffs offers some suggestions and I’ve added some of my own thoughts in italics.

1. Stand out and step up

Strategy: Make sure higher-ups know you by solving problems and taking on high-profile projects.

Well this is an evergreen. Don’t wait until a recession to practice this. It should be your every day mantra.

2. Be a money-maker

Strategy: Share client leads or ideas to generate revenue even if that’s not part of your responsibilities.

No kidding, Watashi. No one fires a money maker.

3. Don’t be a Don Downer

Strategy: Hang out with the people the boss respects most. The halo of their good reputation may extend to you.

Not too sure I’d waste my time hanging out with anyone when there’s work to be done. But then I’m a recovering…but not much…workaholic. And I’m not sure anyone fires a workaholic either, since they’re usually doing the work of 3 people.

4. Increase your value

Strategy. Keep on top of advances in your field and expand your expertise beyond your core area.

Another evergreen. Don’t wait for a recession to do this. Do it day in and day out, rain or shine.

5. Go beyond your job description

Strategy. Look for problem spots that you can help fix. And pitch in whenever extra hands are needed.

No kidding. Who wrote some of these? The office slow poke? ( No offense meant. I know they gave some good examples which is worth a lot I guess.)

6. Make a sacrifice

Strategy. Volunteering to take a pay cut during an industrywide downturn can make you look like a hero.

I am really not too sure of this one. I’m not sure anyone should step up and devalue themselves. If you’re the CEO or one of the top management of a company by all means, step up to the plate and ask for a pay cut. You’re the responsible party. But, for employees below that level, I think the better advice is to keep your salary the same and offer to take on more work.

These are my thoughts. But if you want to compare them in detail, go to Smart job strategies to avoid layoffs and read the whole piece…lots of examples.

A Tip Of The Hat To New Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Tech Veteran

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz

Former Autodesk Chief Executive Carol Bartz, 60, will be the new CEO at Yahoo. And that’s a Yahoo! for a woman playing with the big boys in the hallowed tech preserve. And another kudo for not backing down when the pundits start sharpening their knives for her.

Bartz has a long string of successes so she is well equipped for the job:

Executive chairman of the board, Autodesk
CEO, Autodesk, 1992-2006
VP of worldwide field operations, at Sun Microsystems, 1983-1992
Product Line and Sales Management positions at Digital Equipment and 3M
Director on boards of Cisco Systems, Intel, NetApp

Tons of awards, but who’s counting? The point is Bartz has smarts, experience and moxy.

Some of the pundits have quibbled that she’s a manager and operating person not a Mergers and Acquisition guy. Did anyone here see Wall Street?

We thought the goal was to run a company, not necessarily sell it or break it up and sell the pieces.

In an online conference call today, Bartz confronted the pundits head on and came out swinging:

“Let’s not put ourselves in some crazy timeline. Let’s give this company some frigging breathing room. Everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should or shouldn’t do–that’s going to stop,” she said. Her first meeting with Yahoo’s managers was set for 10 minutes later, she also said. Another moment came when asked about how her background at a company selling software to companies would serve her at an Internet company selling ads and serving a large consumer audience. Bartz was quick to slap down the doubts about her expertise as nonsense.”
“I didn’t know CAD (computer-aided design) when I joined Autodesk, I didn’t know hardware when I joined Sun,” she said. “I have brain power to understand what it takes.”

Now there’s a woman who knows who she is and is about to show us all. A tip of the hat to Bartz and our hearty congratulations

Need a job? CREATE one! Personal Coaching To Help You

Need a job? CREATE one!

Simply Hired is partnering with Sramana Mitra, Forbes columnist and author of Entrepreneur Journeys, to bring you an online entrepreneurship forum. The open forum will take place on January 14th, 2009 at 11am PT/2pm ET and will center on job seekers taking their careers in their own hands by learning to create jobs now.

During the 60-minute session, Sramana Mitra will answer participant questions in real-time about all aspects of entrepreneurship including:

* forming a business idea

* finding great mentors

* funding your business idea

* mistakes to avoid

* anything else participants might ask

The session is open to everyone, however only the first 15 participants to register will have the opportunity to interact with Mitra.

The forum is free to all participants and will be run on the Dimdim Web Conferencing platform. To register for this event, go to http://entrepreneurshipforum.eventbrite.com or visit http://www.dimdim.com.

Check out the press release for more info!

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