The Boss of You

As we’ve blogged about in the past, one of the first traditions we instituted when we started Raised Eyebrow was honouring International Women’s Day, March 8, as a statutory holiday. It felt consistent with our feminist principles as well as just a fun thing to do (hello, mid-week day off in March!). Over the years, we’ve celebrated in all kinds of ways – including simply putting our feet up and taking a rest. But as we in North America don’t have much in the way of established International Women’s Day traditions, I sometimes find myself wondering how to celebrate it. In case you’re in the same boat, here are a few ideas.

Of course, this list is skewed entirely towards the things that are top of mind for me & that I’m particularly passionate about these days. I’d love you to share your suggestions in the comments.

• Buy a mimosa branch (or appropriate substitute) for a woman you love. This is how they do it in Italy & other parts of Europe, and it’s a simple, lovely gesture to show your appreciation.
• Write a note of gratitude to a woman you admire. Tell her as specifically as you can about how what she’s doing rocks – not just that it does, but why & how.
• Get yourself on Kiva, Kickstarter, or IndieGoGo and support a woman entrepreneur’s project. Nothing makes you feel more amazing than helping make someone else’s dream a reality.
• Give to a local women’s charity. Yes, Planned Parenthood needs your support, but consider donating or volunteering in support of your local women’s shelter, drop-in centre or community health clinic. These are places where even small gestures, like dropping off a couple dozen muffins, can light up the whole place.
• Do something nice for yourself. You work damned hard the rest of the year. This is your day to treat yourself with the love and compassion you extend to others.
• Visit narrowthegapp.com, get outraged, then do something about it. It’s infuriating that the wage gap is simply not narrowing at the rate we need it to. Gina Trapani’s latest piece of awesome will help you take concrete action.
• Bask in the creativity and genius of women artists. Poets like Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds, and Margaret Atwood; musicians; filmmakers; visual artists; and photographers inspire me every day.
• Watch a woman give a TED talk, and then do what you can to get more women speakers at conferences in your field.

OK, what else? How do you celebrate International Women’s Day?

For those in Vancouver, I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow night (Tuesday February 21, 2012) at the Mom CEO Academy about the very tangible positive impacts that celebrating success can have on your business and career. Registration is free for first time attendees.

I’m looking forward to expanding on this topic, which I wrote briefly about last year for BC Business in this Why Women Need to Celebrate Success post. I’m also really looking forward to meeting with other mama’s running businesses, as the last few months of nose to the grindstone work is making me feel a little isolated from y’all.

I’ll share some of the feedback and more thoughts on my presentation later this week. If you are able to make it, feel free to share your thoughts and feedback on this post as well. See you there!

I was intrigued by a piece in Saturday’s New York Times about academic “power couple” Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers – economists, partners & parents of a 2-1/2 year-old, who have been collaborating on research into the economics of family life. Or, as the Times calls it, “Lovenomics.”

(Sidebar: I actually heard these two speak a few months ago on the Freakonomics podcast, in an episode called “The Economist’s Guide to Parenting” which was recommended to me by a friend during my third trimester of pregnancy. Both thought-provoking and a barrel of laughs, I highly recommend it. Stevenson and Wolfers are both whip-smart and highly entertaining, whether you agree with their analysis or not.)

There’s a quick guide to the “Basic Principles of Lovenomics 101″ here, which gives some advice (based on the couple’s economic research) that might surprise some. (The four principles: “Don’t marry. Work alike. Outsource. Have children.”) The bit that particularly caught my eye was this:

Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson aren’t married. Why? Taxes, mostly. Ms. Stevenson says the tax code essentially creates “a subsidy for affluent husbands” by treating a working couple’s dual income just as it treats the same amount of income earned by a working married person whose spouse stays home. That makes working relatively expensive for women, particularly those with children. A married working couple often pays for child care and, if they’re relatively affluent, they may also buy many meals out and hire a house cleaner. Such expenses effectively lower their income. Their tax rate, however, remains unchanged. “It’s a system that tries to convince women to stay out of the labor force,” Ms. Stevenson said. Mr. Wolfers and Ms. Stevenson, who have a young daughter, have consulted a lawyer so that they have legal rights similar to those of married couples, like power of attorney. (Emphasis mine.)

Tax laws are different here in Canada (where common-law couples have the same rights and responsibilities as married ones), but I hope our American readers will find this helpful – and spread the word. This feels to me like a critical piece of information & it’s the first I’ve heard of it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there are no good reasons to marry – ranging from smoothing out immigration processes to less rational motivations like romance – but if Stevenson’s assertion is true (and I have to believe she knows what she’s talking about, given she used to be the chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department), it has massive ramifications for women in the U.S.. In short, if you’re planning to have kids – or simply prefer to pay others to take care of the usually-unpaid work that women shoulder disproportionately, whether it’s meal preparation, housecleaning, or elder care – don’t get married.

Perhaps a bit of an ironic admonition on Valentine’s Day, but when it comes to women’s financial well-being, I don’t have a lot of time for hearts & flowers – I’d rather have the cash in pocket, thanks.

(And hey, this doesn’t mean you can’t still throw a big party if you’re so inclined. Just skip the whole official registration part, which you have to admit is the least fun bit anyway.)

I’m thrilled that CV Harquail referenced my post about Sheryl Sandberg in her piece, What Women Want from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, on Forbes.com today. Not only because I’m flattered, but also because the traffic from Forbes alerted me to the piece in general, which is an excellent read.

Harquail does a great job of praising Sandberg for the work she has done, for speaking out publicly about gender inequality in business, leadership and tech, while also affording Sandberg the praise that I agree she is due for being a vocal, feminist, business leader. Then she lovingly calls on Sandberg to do more. A lot more. Harquail argues primarily for Sandberg to lead a significant shake up of the board which is currently “made up of “rich white guys—not terribly representative of the wide open world Facebook claims to represent“.”

She suggests, quite rightly that,

Getting women on the Facebook Board would be a public, symbolic, inspirational, functional and financially-responsible demonstration of commitment to gender equity at Facebook.

And then goes on to enumerate the various tangible benefits to the company that such representation would provide. I can’t agree more, both with the specific call to Facebook to diversify its board — afterall, as she she points out, it would then better represent the largest group of its users — with more women and people of colour, and with her call to Sandberg to do everything she can to make that happen.

If you care about women in leadership and concrete steps we can take to make a difference, I strongly recommend reading it. And, if you happen to be in a position to influence a board or leadership decision in favour of better representation of women, this might just be the rallying cry you need to inspire you to do the (what may be very hard) work to make it happen.

Today our business, Raised Eyebrow Web Studio, turns twelve. In our industry, that’s a long time. A really long time. When I look around we have few peers who are still in the game (by which I mean firms, many of our peers are still doing this work but have started and folded companies or switched jobs several times since 2000).

I don’t want to go too much into our industry and the changes it’s seen here, but for those who haven’t been following along from the start I will paint you this little picture:

Picture two gals, one of them (me) only 24, sitting in the corner of a bedroom with two computers. One of them had a 40 gigs hard drive and at that time I remember thinking it was more space than I could use in a lifetime of digital files. We had to share dial-up internet while we waited for the phone company to get us up and running with DSL, a process that took months. By share, I mean we had to literally unplug the phone cable from the back of one computer and move it to the other  in order to check our email. Wireless internet was the stuff of sci-fi movies. Launching websites took so long that we would start a launch process and then go make lunch while we waited for files to upload. Those were the days.

At the time, we didn’t start a web company because we wanted to be the next big thing in design, or as a starting point to our first IPO. We started because we were tired of working for other people, we wanted to do business our own way, and we wanted both more choices and more control over where our careers took us.

I’ll admit, twelve years in, some days it feels like we’ve lost that control. Things get busy. Sometimes busy doesn’t seem to quite cover just how frantic days can get. And, sometimes, with all that busyness comes a sense of loss of control. A sense that you’re just scrambling to keep your head above water. On the other hand, with that busyness comes opportunities. Sometimes truly staggeringly awesome opportunities. Right now I have a very full roster of amazing clients that I’m working with, in some ways I feel like I’m doing some of my best work for them, and I’ve got a number of really interesting new types of projects currently operating at a low simmer. Projects that I’ll stop being cagey about very soon and announce here, I promise.

A collaborator on one of those projects emailed me today to congratulate us on a dozen years in business and in her email said this “[it] gives me hope for our daughters – they can do ANYthing.” And, I predictably fell into a puddle of tears. This “they can do anything” bit is one measure of success I often forget to measure against. That’s probably because it is a bit intangible and hard to articulate, but in part I went into business to prove that I could. That as a woman, along with another woman, we knew how to run a tech company. That we deserved to make more than we had been making working in tech and that we could have a positive impact on the industry. I had no idea that I would end up co-authoring a book on how to run a small business, that I would get to speak at major international tech conferences, or that I would get to collaborate and partner with some of my heros, eventually even calling some of them very dear friends. And while it’s a bit too “rah, rah” for me on a normal day, today I’m going to bask in all that I’ve achieved  just a little bit. And I’m going to hope that by showing leadership and working for positive change in business and my industry I am in fact doing my bit to level the playing field for both my step-daughter and my daughter. That some of where the industry was when I started twelve years ago will seem as antiquated and out-dated as dial-up by the time they get there.

And to those of you who’ve been around since the early days, and for some of you that means the old Soapboxgirls.com days. Thanks for being a part of our community, for coming to hear us speak, for buying our book and for reading along. We couldn’t have done it or enjoyed the ride as much without your participation.

“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.