The Boss of You

“Bring your whole self, and hold it lightly” – Tim O’Reilly

I had the great privilege to hear Tim O’Reilly speak to the 2012 fellows at Code For America on their first day of a year-long program. This was an unrehearsed speech – really just some introductory remarks for a small audience – but the above phrase, uttered with Tim’s trademark casual brilliance, has lingered with me for several days. It’s wonderful life advice, but his intent was to give the fellows a pep talk on how to collaborate effectively with the teams in which they’ll be working throughout the year.

This one sentence sums up a beautiful paradox for a fruitful life: bringing our whole selves means being self-aware, stepping into our power and recognizing our weaknesses – and living in integrity with everything we are. Holding our selves lightly means practicing at least some degree of non-attachment – to outcomes, and to our egos.

So if we apply these words to business – or entrepreneurship – what does that look like? The answer might lie with another of the CfA speakers, the wonderful Eric Ries, author of the best selling Lean Startup (and a kindred spirit – the world needs more business book authors like him). He argues that every new business is, at its core, a hypothesis waiting to be tested (i.e. that there are customers willing to pay a particular price for one’s product or service) – and that the wise entrepreneur develops a minimum viable product as early as possible in order to test that hypothesis. This may sound basic (and at its heart, it is), but it can be wildly difficult it is to put into practice.

Why? Because doing so requires that we put aside our entrepreneurial egos – which can delude us ad infinitum into believing our vision can and will come to fruition despite all evidence to the contrary – and make room for the reality of what customers actually want.

It requires us to bring our whole selves to our work – all of our creativity, intelligence, and empathy (the better to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes) – while holding our selves lightly enough to be willing to change course based on the feedback we receive. (Ries notes, importantly, that he’s not talking about focus groups or asking people what they want – rather, he strongly recommends using harder data, i.e. actual sales figures, usability tests, and other mechanisms that allow you to measure exactly how competitive your product is.)

O’Reilly and Ries are both techies, but their wisdom applies equally to entrepreneurs in other fields – I spoke to Eric after his talk and he said that some of the most interesting feedback he’s received on his book has come from people running businesses that have nothing to do with software. If you read just one thing Eric has written, I suggest this post, and in particular the section titled, “Starting with just a landing page.” Now that’s a simple, dirt cheap test anyone can try.

It goes against just about everything you’ll glean from the average business book, CEO profile, or networking event, but “holding oneself lightly” may just be the best business advice around. If you can take your ego out of the equation long enough to really listen to what your customers are telling you, your odds of finding a profitable niche go way, way up.

(On a related note, I’m dying to see what Lane Becker’s upcoming book contains – my guess is that it will be a great complement to Ries’s, given Lane’s focus on customer service as the new marketing, via Get Satisfaction. But we will have to wait and see…)

LIke most humans, I’m riddled with habits I’d like to change. And like many folks, who follow the good ol’Gregorian calendar, I’ve been thinking about changing some of them with the turning over of the new year.

I’ve got a bunch of small personal changes I’m trying to make, things like stretching every day, remembering to ensure that I and my daughter take our vitamins, basic life improvement stuff. With work, I’m shooting a little bit higher. My challenge for 2012 is to stop proactively burning myself out.

What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to put a finer description on it, but here’s a scenario that should help to illuminate what I mean.

Last week, things at work went completely sideways. Stuff that was out of my or my team’s control, but exactly the kind of “going to hell” that sometimes just happens in a week. As a result I lost a good half a day or more to crisis management. Not necessarily a big deal, but in an already short week, and one that was packed to the rafters with both meetings and deliverables, that half a day was not there to lose. My resolution isn’t about trying to change the way last week unfolded. Some version of last week is always going to happen in the work world, and in the entrepreneurial world in particular. While it would be awesome to be able to schedule weeks with more wiggle room, or less meetings, it’s realistically not going to happen any time soon. No, what my resolution is about is what happened on the weekend that followed.

You see, this week is much the same as far as deliverables, meetings and commitments go. I have about 30 hours of work to accomplish in 32 hours of scheduled work time. Not much room for uncertainty. And so, my normal inclination (read: bad habit), is to then spend the weekend eeking out every spare moment to “get ahead” on my work for the week. For me, that means using nap times (my daughter’s not mine), evenings and potentially very early mornings to try to “get ahead.” (My partner works weekends so I can’t use him for extra childcare to get these things done, so need to find it essentially whenever my daughter is asleep).  I put “get ahead” in quotation marks, because the more I think about it in the abstract the more I suspect that while I believe I’m getting head with this kind of behavior, I’m not totally sure it’s true. Sure crossing things off my to-do list, puts me ahead of the deliverables game for the week, but not having any downtime at all puts me at an energy and problem solving deficit. So, if, as things always do, shit hits the fan at some point in the week, or I end up in a 1 hour meeting that lasts 2 hours, or I get an unexpected sales inquiry, etc. I’ll have very little energy to call on to react appropriately.

This learning falls, for me, into the category of  extremely obvious but not very easy. When written out in plain English like this, it’s very clear to me that taking the weekend to rest, to enjoy my family, to flake out and watch a compellingly mindless period drama while knitting for 45 minutes, is in fact the best way to prepare myself and “get ahead” for the week. But, when the moment comes and I’ve put my daughter down for a nap on Saturday afternoon, I actually have to put conscious effort into reminding myself of that. And while I sit on the couch watching said period drama, I have to remind myself about 5 times over the course of the 45 minutes, that I am  in fact doing the right thing. Why? I like to think of myself as a pretty smart person, and I know that I will perform better if I do this kind of self-care, however, I’ve reached a point in my life where taking the “get ahead” approach feels more normal and somehow safer to me.

The way I’ve been getting myself out of the habit is by both telling people that I’m doing this — close friends and my partner — so they can hold me accountable to some degree, and by also actually talking myself through the consequences. I’m a worst case scenario planning type person, so trying to be ahead of the game often helps me to relax, even if it cuts into my relaxation time (in some twisted and nasty way). So, to get over that tendency I actually talk myself through the worst case scenario if I don’t do my getting ahead work. At the end of my week, I look at my to do list for the next week, and my meeting schedule, and I figure out what could be dropped if it had to be. Is there a client deliverable I can let go of if things don’t go as planned? And can I deal with the fallout if that has to happen? I ask myself, if I have to call a client and cancel a meeting, or tell them that I’ll miss a milestone, will that be ok? Can I handle doing it? So far, the answer is always yes. And that’s not to say that I don’t value quality work, commitments or my clients, I absolutely do. But, I also know that my clients value me, and that if things go really sideways, then I can give them a heads up and let them know that something will be done a day or two later than expected. There are some deliverables that can’t handle that kind of push back, but frankly when it really come down to it, most can. Most due dates were created by me, and can be adjusted by me as long as everyone gets a heads up. .

I’ll admit, I’m really struggling with this. I had to look at that to do list and talk myself out of working on it no less than four times this weekend (once during each nap and after bed time). But, with the exception of responding to a few quick and easy emails, I did it. I didn’t try to get ahead (now I did have to work an extra unplanned day last week, so I’m winning some battles but not the war here).

I’d love to hear what your goals for self-care and better balance are for this year, and how you’re tackling them. I know that if I can master this one in 2012, I’ll be thrilled.

We’re delighted to have been invited to be part of Etsy’s Holiday Boot Camp for their wonderful sellers of handmade & vintage goods. Our contribution is a special budgeting spreadsheet that we designed for small-scale sellers who are planning ahead for their busy season. Figuring out your shipping rates, gift tagging options, and even budgeting for the extra supplies you’ll need to ramp up production – all of this can seem a bit overwhelming, and we’re hoping this spreadsheet will help you identify all of those extra expenses ahead of time to reduce the number of unhappy surprises ahead.

If we’ve done our jobs, this spreadsheet should help you get a solid grasp of what kinds of costs to anticipate – and should also help you project your sales & profit figures. Head on over to the Etsy blog to get all the details, and let us know how it works for you!

Oh, and P.S. – if you sell your stuff on Etsy, you can subscribe to the Holiday Boot Camp by email by signing up for the Etsy Success newsletter. It’s a fun & super-useful newsletter – highly recommended.

Photo credit: Nicole Licht

I’ll be giving a version of the Small + Successful webinar Lauren and I gave for Citrix back in June at School House Craft in Seattle on September 24. The session description is below. The conference itself looks fantastic and includes daily opportunities to have your Esty shop reviewed by an Etsy admin. Sweet.

Small + Successful: how to define and achieve success on your own terms

This workshop will address the value of being small, defining success for yourself and tips for evolving and growing your business in your own way.

Emira Mears, author of The Boss of You, will cover topics related to building an intentional and successful small business including:

• Why small (business) is awesome
• The importance of defining (and redefining) success for yourself
• How to make a small business sustainable
• What healthy and profitable growth might look like for you

Over the rest of July, I’ll be answering some questions that were raised during our Small + Successful webinar we ran last month with GoToWebinar. We had several excellent questions, but sadly ran out of time to address them all. You can see the previous Q & A about bad reviews here and another about sharing your passion with your customers here.

The specific question here was “If you have a service business can you say “NO” to some people knowing it may cost you that client? If you feel in your heart you will be better without them is it good to just let them go?”

The quick answer: yes. Let them go.

The longer answer is how you let them go in a professional manner and how you assess when it’s time to say no.

To tackle the first: letting go of work in a professional manner one great way is to actually have another provider you can refer clients to. This runs counter to a lot of business wisdom which sees other providers as the competition and not people you would collaborate with, but I challenge you to think differently. First, it depends here on why you’re saying no. It may be because you’re currently far too busy (and if that’s an ongoing trend you may want to look at ramping up your internal resources so you can handle more business instead of just saying no) or it may be because someone isn’t quite the right fit for you and your services. In the case of the former, try to form a reciprocal relationship with a colleague where you send business to them when you’re too busy to handle it and they do the same. This doesn’t need to be a formal agreement, more of a handshake as it were. We have colleagues we respect and admire who we send business when we’re too swamped and we know they do the same. Being able to say no to potential work, but actually assist that person in finding someone who can help them rather than just shutting the door in their face, will in fact leave them with a positive impression of you, which may, in the very long run come back to you. Over our nearly 12 years in business now, we’ve had to regretfully say not to some clients and, as I say, pass them on to colleagues. There have been more than a few who a few years later call us up for another project noting that we were always their first choice (for whatever reason) and asking if we now have space to take them on. Having been helpful that first time they called by making a solid referral helped cement their positive impression of us. Now if you’re saying no because someone isn’t quite the right fit — for example we often have people asking us for some services we simply don’t offer, though they’re closely tied to what we do — then it really does benefit you to help them find someone who is a better fit. For us, that can mean the skillset doesn’t quite match with our studio or it might be the size of project. In either case, again helping them find the right provider and being helpful about connecting them — to their best of your abilities, you don’t need to go the distance here — will leave them with a positive impression of you.

What if you’re saying no because they are actually a problematic client, ie/ you can sense they aren’t going to be a good client or you’ve worked with them before and know they aren’t a good client. Well, this should be easier but often it’s harder. It can be really hard to turn down a person when there is an existing relationship, that said, if you know it isn’t good for your business (or your happiness levels) then saying no is imperative for the health of your company. Here you can be in a bit more of a pickle as referring them to a friend or colleague, if you know they’re not a good client, is not going to win you karma points. So what do to? You basically have two routes here: be honest (but professional) or be evasive (but professional). In the first instance, find a way to let them know that you haven’t had a good working relationship, something like “I don’t think that we’re a good fit creatively” or “If we’re going to work together again I’m going to need to charge you $X more given that our last two projects together have gone significantly over budget” or whatever the problem is. The professional bit here is that you clearly can’t say “I don’t think we should work together because I think you’re a bit of a whack job” so you need to find a way to get to the business conflict at hand, not the personal one. If it’s not possible to get out of things in a business-like fashion as described above, you may need to be evasive. Using something like “I’m currently too busy to take you on” or “I’m no longer taking on projects of this nature” or what-have-you is one way to go. The danger here is that if you are in fact still looking for work or taking on projects of that nature then you now have a person out in the world who is perhaps telling people that you are too busy/no longer providing that service. So make sure your evasive excuse is one that isn’t going to bite you in the rear.

So how do you assess when it’s time to let go of a project and say no, particularly if it means ending an existing client relationship? At it’s core, you’ll know in your gut. But, as business people we often like to have a little proof before making decisions that can impact our bottom line. So here are a few things to ask yourself:

• Is this client causing me undo stress/emotional upheaval that is sucking the joy out of my work? Sounds overly dramatic? It isn’t. It happens.
• Is working with this client preventing me from taking on other work that would be more fulfilling/make me happier/make me more money? Sometimes freeing  yourself up to take on more lucrative/rewarding work is exactly the kind of risk you need to take to bring your business to the next level.
• Am I ever going to be able to make this client happy? If you answer no to that last one, end the relationship. It’s dangerous spending all your time and efforts on a client that you know in your gut you’ll never please. It will both wear you out (see the first bullet) and it will mean that you are losing the opportunity to build a client base that will advocate on your behalf by giving glowing testimonials about your work. That latter piece can be quite a liability in terms of garnering you new work over the longterm.

Over the rest of July, I’ll be answering some questions that were raised during our Small + Successful webinar we ran last month with GoToWebinar. We had several excellent questions, but sadly ran out of time to address them all. You can see the previous Q & A about bad reviews here.

I really loved this question, in part because I have never been asked it in this way, but also because having a passion for your business is one of the key values that unites a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the world of small business and the practice of passing that love on to your clients and customers in a very deliberate way is one I can definitely get behind. Afterall, we all know that there’s a positive energy that builds and magnifies when people bring their passion to a situation.

So, how to do that? I can think of a bunch of examples, all of which start with being as explicit and open about your passion as is professional in all your interactions with your clients or customers. Specifically:

• Don’t be afraid to be passionate or opinionated in blog posts, professional tweets or in other professional social media presences that you maintain;
• Feel free to use everyday business interactions like invoices to share a bit of information or love with you clients, we’ve altered the traditional “message” window in Quickbooks to have messages like “Thank you so much for your business, we adore you so” and other similarly affectionate and honest messages;
• If it suits you and your business: do some public speaking about your profession/art/craft/skill wherein you talk about what makes you love the work you do and the people you do it for, Lauren did a great talk about being curious for a living at our local Pecha Kucha night, which you can see here;
• Start (or maintain) a newsletter for your clients/customers in which you update them on new happenings in your business while also sharing the pieces of work you’re most excited about.

In short: don’t be afraid to be explicit about your love for what you do, as long as you don’t go the full distance to creepy and are in fact walking that line between professionalism and all-out fan-girl love for what you do, customers will feed off the energy you bring to your business interactions.

Lauren and I are huge fans of our clients, and not just because they pay our bills. We truly, honestly really do love our clients and consider ourselves insanely lucky to get to work with some talented and amazing people who are helping to make the world a better place. Plus, a bunch of them are just downright awesome, kind, insanely funny people. We once received a Fedex’d box of homemade cookies (gingersnaps, my favourite) from a client, seriously these people are awesome. But, the question at hand was

Whenever you communicate with your clients — email, invoices, receipts etc. try to infuse that communication — and tell them you love them. We have a “we love our clients” party to celebrate and connect with our clients.

Over the rest of July, I’ll be answering some questions that were raised during our Small + Successful webinar we ran last month with GoToWebinar. We had several excellent questions, but sadly ran out of time to address them all. Here’s the first one.

Now that user generated content and social networking are the norm of the online world, it’s common place for even the most awesome of brands/products/services to suffer from negative online reviews. As business owners who pour our hearts and souls into what we do, hearing negative feedback can be really hard. Really, really hard. Sometimes devastating. It can also have a very real impact on our bottom lines if the negative reviews have high visibility or outweigh the positive ones.

So, what to do about negative reviews of your business on the interwebs?

1. Perspective. There are always going to be grumpy people. There are always going to be people you can’t please. Sometimes it’s due to a misunderstanding of what you actually had on offer, sometimes it’s due to the fact that you did indeed fall short, and sometimes it’s because that particular customer was having a particularly terrible day which ended up colouring their experience of your business. Bummer? Yep. But, don’t let one or two negative reviews — especially if they don’t resonate with your perception of your business — drag you down. Try to look at the bigger picture. If you’re getting mostly positive reviews and a few negative/critical ones, don’t go changing on a whim to please one or two people, even if they’re the loudest voices. That said,
2. Learn. Once you’ve got the perspective and distance to not take things too personally or be distracted by a lone grumpy voice, sit with the review and see if there’s something you can learn. Is this an opportunity for you to improve? Is there something you could have done differently? Is there a way to change your product or service to address the critique? Online reviews — both the good and the bad — can serve as an ongoing focus group for your business. Learn from them when you can.
3. Don’t feel obliged to respond. Responding to feedback from customers online can be a really powerful tool, particularly in the world of social media. There are gobs of stories about grumpy customers being turned to evangelists through hearing that a company has been listening to their criticism and is interested in improving. When you see those opportunities, jump on them. But. If you strongly suspect that someone just can not be pleased or is maybe a little bit nutso (let’s all just agree this happens sometimes), be ok with walking away from your email/the internet for a while and forgetting you ever came across that feedback. You don’t actually need to make everyone happy.
4. Negative reviews can build trust and boost sales. A lot of businesses are scared to include user generated product reviews directly on their websites for fear that negative reviews will hurt their sales, but it turns out the reverse is in fact true. People buy from companies/brands they trust. When customers only see positive reviews, they tend to get suspicious, whereas hearing some negative reviews helps to convince them that real people are trying and reviewing the products. Makes sense, no? So as long as the reviews out there in the world aren’t overwhelmingly negative, a few detractors may even help boost your brand.

I’m kind of developing a business-girl crush on Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. Who knew?

I wrote about her Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders TED talk on BC Business earlier this year, and devoured a more recent New Yorker piece on her the other day over breakfast. The New Yorker piece is a long, but thought provoking read, for any of you interested in women in leadership positions, regardless of whether or  not the tech sector or Facebook specifically are of interest to you.

Here are the four big lessons I took away from it:

1. Date before you partner in business. The article outlines how Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg met many times over several months to get to know each other and their respective philosophies about business, growth, leadership etc. better before she left a highly lucrative career at Google to join a then not-profitable Facebook. I’ve been advocating a lot lately for “dating” prior to partnering in business. The stakes are high for all of us when choosing a business partner, even if you aren’t playing with the kinds of dollars that Sandberg was, you are afterall talking about your means of making a living. Figuring out a way to test the waters or really, really interview one another before taking a joint partnership leap just makes good business sense.
2. Even extremely powerful women have trouble claiming their power. (And this needs to change). The article quotes Pattie Sellers, and editor at Fortune, saying that “most of the women on the Most Powerful Women list—Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Oprah, and many others—had a hangup about the word when we started ranking them” in reference to inviting Sandberg to their Most Powerful Women Summit. That’s hugely eye opening for me, to think of some of the de facto most powerful women not perceiving themselves that way. Seriously.
3. Focus on what you have the power to change to improve women’s role as leaders. As I mentioned in my own analysis of Sandberg’s TED talk, I do take some issue with Sandberg’s philosophy around women and leadership, which puts the onus for changes squarely on the shoulders of women themselves, rather than focusing on the institutions and systems that continue to preference men. After reading this article, I’m going to go out on a limb and read between the lines of what Sandberg has said publicly on the matter and posit that she’s well aware of the institutional limitations (how could she not be, she’s a female COO in Silicon Valley for Pete’s sake), but she’s decided to focus on the things that we as woman do have the power to change and take that up as her charge. In particular, she keeps looping back to her “have a personal partner who is truly your partner” message, as one of the keys to success for women in the workplace one which I know first hand is totally vital. I’m personally also a big fan of keeping an eye on the institutional and policy changes necessary for a true powershift for women in leadership, but I’ll take her message of changing what we have the power to change right now and run with it as well. For more on her suggestions, do listen to her TED talk.
4. We all still have a long ways to go. Aside from the point about powerful women not identifying as such, I think one of the most thought provoking points in the New Yorker article is Facebook’s lack of any female representation on its board. Sandberg has argued that women need to be in more positions of power like this, and so, as the author asks in the article, why hasn’t she demanded to be on Facebook’s board (or perhaps suggested a female colleague who would be a good fit)? There’s no easy answer to that question in the article, and Sandberg doesn’t seem to have come up with a good one publicly. While I will hands down commend her for the incredible work and leadership she has shown in her role, there’s obviously still work to be done here.

The long, long list of things I love would have two things right up near the top: striving for self-improvement(*), and the elegant use of technology to help humans do better. When the two come together, I get really, really excited.

I discovered a lovely and incredibly useful tool a while ago, but was recently reminded that it’s not as well-known as it deserves to be. This is my attempt at rectifying that situation.

People who love self-improvement like I do: meet HabitForge.

It’s a brilliantly simple tool that helps you start & maintain new habits. Those habits might be, well, anything. Some of mine include:

• Get up 15 minutes earlier and walk to work.
• Take 5 minutes in the middle of my work day to simply breathe.
• Show up for people the way I promised them to, and be consistent in doing the little things that keep my relationships solid.

Here’s how it works:

1. You create a free account, and enter your email address.
2. You set up a new habit that you’d like to keep.
3. HabitForge sends you an email first thing every morning, asking you if you were successful at _______ (whatever the habit was you described). The email contains two large text links: YES and NO.
4. You click the appropriate link.
5. After 21 days of consecutive “YES” answers, HabitForge congratulates you on your success, and stops the reminders. (The whole thing is predicated on the idea that it takes 21 days of consistent behaviour to start or change a habit.)

If you click “NO,” the clock is reset and you start over at Day 1 of 21. It’s that simple.

There are some additional options you can enable, such as adding some text about what’s motivating you – this text will appear every few days as part of your check-in email, to remind you of the all-important why behind your actions. (There are spots for both the pain you’ll feel if you don’t change your ways, and the benefits you’ll reap if you do.) You can also choose to make your progress public, for added accountability – or to join a group that’s striving towards similar goals.

I personally think this little app is absolute genius. If you’re a fan of Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, I can see HabitForge making the daily checklist much easier. But even if you only use it occasionally, the whole process is so simple that it’s well worth using it for support. For me, a daily email is a much more reliable reminder tool than putting it on my to-do list (too easy to slip to the bottom), my calendar (too full already), or goddess forbid, a mental note (there’s simply no way I can count on my memory for 21 days straight).

Highly recommended. If you’ve been meaning to make a change, no matter how small, give it a try.

(* With due respect to Danielle Laporte, whose excellent post, “Why Self-Improvement Makes You Neurotic,” is one of my all-time faves, I have not yet found a suitable replacement for the term “self-improvement” as shorthand for “practices that bring me closer to feeling a sense of personal integrity and power.”)

Just cross-posting this from our Raised Eyebrow blog, in case any Boss of You readers are interested – or know someone who might be!

Last year brought our first-ever Raised Eyebrow baby, when Emira gave birth to a delightful wee girl – and she seems to have started a trend. There’s another baby (actually, two babies… she’s having twins!) on the way, and as such we’re seeking a maternity leave replacement for our beloved Client Manager, Anna.

If you’re someone with above-average technical skills – i.e. you’re fluent with the web and are the kind of person other people ask to show them how to use newfangled technology – along with a friendly, approachable disposition, an aptitude for juggling priorities and deadlines, and excellent customer service skills, please have a look at our Client Manager posting. This is a one-year maternity leave replacement position, plus 2-4 weeks of training time.

We’d also appreciate any help you can give us in spreading the word, so please pass this along to anyone you know who might be a fit. And if you want some insights into what it’s like working here, I encourage you to read Colin’s post on the subject.