Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Business Owners To Build or Not to Build

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Business Owners To Build or Not to Build There are two primary ways to procure skills that dont exist in your organization. The first, building expertise, refers to training current employees in the new areas. The second, acquiring expertise, involves either hiring new employees or partners or merging with another organization so that the requisite skills are instantly available. I talked tothree business ownersâ€"Robby Berthume, CEO of advertising agency Bull and Beardin Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Kayla Wagner Faires, CEO of digital marketing firm Revel Interactivein Denver; and Rahul Varshneya, CEO of mobile application developer Arkeneain Carrollton, Texasâ€"who made the decision to train existing staff, hire new people with certain expertise or acquire another company. How did you decide you needed to expand your business? Rahul Varshneya: A service business is a people business. People buy from other people based on trust. Once you have a set of people that trust you, its easier to upsell and cross sell and [that] opens up other channels of monetization. Our passion to add more value for our customers now and for a lifetime leads us to expand what we have to offer. Kayla Wagner Faires: We take cues from our clients regarding what is most valuable to them and expand accordingly. RobbyBerthume: First of all, we determine if the expansion is aligned with our brand, business model and growth strategy. If it meets that initial criteria, we validate [if] the market wants it, validate if the market is willing to pay for it and validate that it wont negatively impact other areas of our business or lead to opportunity cost. Beyond this, we launch new products, services and competences using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) style approach. Too many entrepreneurs and business owners lose their focus by going all-in too quickly. Tread carefully until you know you have a winning addition. What has been your process so far for adding products, services or competencies to your existing offerings? Berthume: I frankly dont pay much attention to competition, nor do I let my clients dictate whether or not I expand on my offerings. That client need could be an anomaly, and the competition generally follows a herd mentality. I dont want to imitate, I want to innovate. Im generally wary of spreading our brand and service offering too broadly and adding products or services too quickly. Wagner Faires: We take a strategic approach with a few lenses as we consider adding services. Does it fit within our companys values? Can we provide the service at an exemplary level to our customers versus the competition? Is there a definite customer need for it? If we can say yes to all three, we consider bringing the service on, usually with a trial run first. Varshneya: We continuously look to add products and services to our existing offering. The process is pretty simple and straightforward. We brainstorm internally and then survey our existing and potential clients on every product or service they have bought or intend to buy that complements our offering. For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

The Persona Project Putting Personal Identity Front and Centre

The Persona Project Putting Personal Identity Front and Centre Sponsored by Jobbio:  Jane Reddin, Talent Advisor at Balderton Capital, has extensive experience working with startups and high growth companies to help them scale their businesses by building high-performing teams. Among her pioneering talent strategies is a toolkit which helps companies transform their ability to hire and develop top talent. Her latest project, powered by Jobbio, looks at how a candidate’s personal motivations and drivers affect their potential performance and their overall happiness at work. The premise is this: If a person can be in a role which enables them to be the best version of themselves ie their best whole selves; they are thriving, they stay at their company for a long time, their motivation, and therefore performance, is sky high. Create a strong overlap between company interests and personal interests,  and bingo, you’ve got mission alignment. So, how do we go about working out what those reasons are and then using them to build a compelling employer brand and EVP, which is both flexible enough to make space for individuality and yet still scalable at an organisational level? Building a flexible yet scalable employer brand We already know that today’s talent, particularly Millennials and Generation Z, are looking for more than the traditional, structured 9-5. This is the way we do it here seems to be an unattractive message to the new wave of talent who are motivated to be their “authentic selves” and bring more of their own identity into their working life. Among the many characteristics of their persona types, this generation are looking for a deeper connection to the purpose, the possibility to learn and grow, they want to work with people they connect with, plus the opportunity to pursue their passions and make a significant impact and a positive difference to the world. Startups who can create a flexible and agile culture, EVP and incentive and reward scheme are becoming increasingly more competitive when it comes to peeling talent away from larger corporates. However, creating a bespoke working code allowing each person to dictate their own payback on an individual basis is unsustainable at any sort of scale. There is another way! It is abundantly clear to Jane that a clear, authentic, oft-repeated message which articulates the purpose the why is a vital factor in galvanising a team. People who know what summit to aim for and why, primed with start-up DNA and a desire to make a positive difference to the world, achieve extraordinary feats on a weekly basis. Without this overarching goal, people get busy doing all sorts of things which won’t get the company up the mountain. She has also noticed that teams who are thriving often use the same words to describe why they are there and what motivates them the most. Connected networks, galvanised by a shared purpose, which operate as teams of teams containing diversified but clustered persona types, all focused on achieving an overarching mission, but each empowered to get something unique out of the experience. Attractive, agile and scalable. All this has got her thinking; Is it possible to codify persona types? Are there patterns and correlations, if we collect enough data, which can give us, as employers and hiring leaders, a good chance of appealing to multiple motivating factors so that our highly coveted potential hires simply can’t ignore the fired up feeling they get when they hear about an opportunity at our company? The Persona Project is born.  For this experiment to be a success, she needs your help. She wants to know what turns you on and what turns you off at work. Click the link to contribute.

Finance tips for the self-employed

Finance tips for the self-employed This is probably what you think self-employed looks like: Im at an amusement park with my kids, in the middle of the week, and Im on a conference call while I watch my son try to get on a ride. Being self-employed looks so nice at an amusement park. The self-employed are always free to go on a vacation. They pick up their friends at the airport in the middle of the day, they show up for poker night because they can stay out late, and they can plan their wedding without having to pretend they are working. Close up, though, most self-employed people are completely stressed about money. That money part is what I hate about being self-employed. Anyone who says they dont love a steady paycheck is lying. A paycheck is so nice. Its reliable like a friend, it makes you safe, it gives you a way to organize your life. Heres how I deal with the worrying: 1. Pretend you have an out. Sometimes I have to calm myself down by telling myself Ill solve my money problems by taking a regular job. One fantasy I have is getting a job at Microsoft. Once I was giving a speech at a human resource convention in Seattle. And a top HR guy from Microsoft was there. And he wanted to talk to me. I thought, Great, Ill sell him something from Brazen Careerist. Then I thought, No. I just want a job. I thought Id do anythingeven read resumes all dayif hed just give me a steady paycheck and access to the amazing health care they give autistic kids of employees. I hear Microsoft is ending that insurance plan. I wonder if this will help me stay more focused on running my own company instead of looking for escape routes. Probably not. 2. Forget living in the moment. Instead, live five months in the future. Your clients will take too long to make a decision, no matter how long they take, and they will never pay immediately. So instead of fighting the lag-time, you should always be earning money for five months out. If you are spending your days trying to drum up business to get revenue five months from now, you feel safe, knowing that its not an emergency. Any closer than that and you feel like if you dont close youre gonna die. 3. The only way to feel rich is to be able to dump an awful client. Thinking five months out frees you to dump a client, and its so so fun to dump a client who misbehaves. Its a way to assert your power as a freelancer even though you have no power because if you dont get money youll starve and have to get a staff job somewhere (and you probably cant because most self-employed people are largely unmanageable in a corporate hierarchy). I had a client that signed a contract to pay half up front, and then didnt. And the company was so late it was almost time to give the speech. And I said, if you dont pay this week, Im not doing the speech. I loved that. I loved that because I dont need the money from the speech. Im okay for right now. Well, I mean, Id really like the money this week. But Im okay for next week, so I liked telling her to fuck off. 4. Have one great client. You need a lot of schemes. You have to always be pitching different people different stuff because you dont know whatll stick. But you really need one client that is great, and pays on time, and makes you love doing your job. That client gives you sanity. For me that is Federated Media. Really, I could write a whole post about how much I love them. They are so easy to work with and they sell ads that Id never sell on my own, because Id get impatient and tell the advertiser to fuck off before I collected any money. So Federated makes my life great, because I can blog about anything and say yes or no to anything and they just roll with it, and keep selling ads. Well, they did tell me to remove the word fuck from a post. But thats how you know that Federated didnt pay me to write this post. Because they allow pretty much anything except obscenities, which they say fuck qualifies as. 5. Self-employment stability requires doing stuff you hate. Be a grown-up. Self-employed doesnt mean you love everything you do. I have done stuff to appease editors that drove me crazy. I have given speeches to groups of people that were all at the conference with the sole purpose of cheating on their wives. I do lots of stuff I dont like. I remind myself that I do it so that I can have a job that I pretty much love. To cope with the bad stuff, you have to find a way to trick yourself. Like, I dont love the pressure, but I love writing about the pressure.