The Boss of You

When my busi­ness part­ner Emira announced that she was expect­ing a baby, my delight at her good news was accom­pa­nied by a creep­ing feel­ing of dread about tak­ing on some of her key respon­si­bil­i­ties at work while she went on mater­nity leave. See, we’d always divided the work­load between us so that while I han­dled all of our studio’s design work, she tack­led all of the sales. And sales work has never been high on my list of favourite things.

We briefly con­sid­ered hir­ing a sales­per­son to help out in her absence, but as a web devel­op­ment agency, our sales process is highly con­sul­ta­tive and tech­ni­cal, and we knew that train­ing some­one to take over sales would be far more chal­leng­ing than hir­ing help on the design side. So it made far more sense for me to set aside my designer’s hat and put on the sales mantle.

Although I knew it was the most log­i­cal solu­tion, I wasn’t sure I was cut out for my new gig. While I love the client-facing side of my work, I’ve always cher­ished the odd work­day when I can turn off the phone, ignore email, and just cozy up to my com­puter to design some­thing new. I’ve always con­sid­ered myself to be 50/50 introvert/extrovert… but sales felt like an extrovert’s game. Would my phone-free days be a thing of the past?

Well, as it turns out, they are. But I’ve learned a great deal about my busi­ness in my first six weeks as a sales­per­son. And I’ve picked up a few things about sales, too — though I def­i­nitely have lots to learn in that department.

It’s become much clearer to me that sales work — at least, the kind of sales we have to do — is not so much about pitch­ing your ser­vices to peo­ple as it is about ask­ing and answer­ing ques­tions. I know that’s what sales gurus have been say­ing since the dawn of time, but I’m late to the party and just fig­ured it out. When some­one comes to me ask­ing about a new web­site (or social media strat­egy, or what­ever), more often than not they have decided on a tool before they’ve decided what their goals are, and it’s crit­i­cal for me to dig deeper to find out what’s behind their decision-making process.

So I ask a lot of ques­tions — and not just “What’s your bud­get?” and “What’s your time­line?” (although those are both impor­tant). I ask them to tell me about their orga­ni­za­tion and their goals — to tell me what led up to them get­ting in touch with us. Their response typ­i­cally con­veys infor­ma­tion about the size and struc­ture of their orga­ni­za­tion, as well as their motivators.

It turns out lis­ten­ing, and ask­ing good ques­tions, is a huge part of what I now do for a liv­ing. And I’ve got a lot of expe­ri­ence doing that, because it’s also a big part of what I do as a designer and web strategist.

This prob­a­bly all sounds pretty ele­men­tary, and I know it is — it’s just that as a sales new­bie, I’m find­ing it a novel con­cept that I might already have many of the skills I need in order to do my new job well. I’ve real­ized that the biggest source of my fear of sales was a pre­sump­tion that I would need a major per­son­al­ity trans­plant. I thought I’d need to become mag­i­cally super-gregarious, able to spin a sales pitch like a spi­der spins a web, and spot a busi­ness oppor­tu­nity at a hun­dred paces.

But I dis­cov­ered that you can be half-introverted and do sales work, so long as you have two key qualities:

1. You take an inter­est in peo­ple, and
2. You enjoy being helpful.

I’d love to hear from other reluc­tant sales­peo­ple — what sur­prised you about sales work? And what lessons have you learned about sell­ing? Share them in the comments.

Oh my good­ness. Where to begin?

We’re only a month into 2010, and already it’s a doozy. Emira’s started mater­nity leave (more on that soon); we just hired a new employee; and we’re in a bit of a tug-of-war on a busi­ness mat­ter that I don’t really think I should talk about here, but will just say that it has eaten up far too much of our time and it would be really nice to have it set­tled, stat. Oh, and we cel­e­brated our 10th anniver­sary in busi­ness.

So, you know, busi­ness as usual: it’s excit­ing and crazy and all kinds of things are happening.

Plus, the Grass­roots Busi­ness Asso­ci­a­tion chap­ter we started here in Van­cou­ver is going great guns, as my mother would say. Every event has been at capac­ity, and next week’s is no excep­tion, which is ter­ri­bly excit­ing and fun.

So you can imag­ine that I am just sit­ting around think­ing to myself, “What am I going to do with all this spare time I’ve got?”

And the answer, of course, would be to start blog­ging for BC Busi­ness magazine.

Yup, Emira and I now have our very own blog at BC Busi­ness, called (what else?) The Boss Ladies. Our first post went up about an hour ago: “Kiss Ser­ial Entre­pre­neur­ship Good­bye”. It’s all about falling in love with your busi­ness and stick­ing with it for the long term. Kinda the oppo­site of being a ser­ial entre­pre­neur. Get it?

We’ll be blog­ging there weekly (though for the first lit­tle while, it’ll just be me, since Emira’s kinda busy right now). Got ideas for top­ics? Let us know in the comments.

I sus­pect most of us cre­ative types have, at one time or another, con­sid­ered pick­ing up a few bucks on the side doing some­thing we’ve pre­vi­ously done just for fun — whether it’s knit­ting ASCII-art wrist warm­ers, mak­ing spicy fruit pre­serves, or mak­ing hand-tooled leather belts. But not all of us want to turn that hobby into a full-fledged busi­ness; there are plenty of fine folks whose Etsy stores are main­tained in their off-hours. But how do you ensure that your extracur­ric­u­lar enter­prise is both fun and prof­itable?

Enter Grace Dobush’s Crafty Super­star: Make Crafts on the Side, Earn Extra Cash, and Basi­cally Have It All, a very help­ful resource for crafters who are look­ing to make a part-time liv­ing from their craft­ing work. It’s a short, portable paper­back — under 160 pages includ­ing the appen­dices & index — and reads like a breezy but infor­ma­tive chat with a room­ful of help­ful friends (which, as far as I’m con­cerned, is way more fun than get­ting your info in dry, bullet-point style). Each chap­ter is illus­trated with beau­ti­ful draw­ings, snappy check­lists, fun exer­cises, and pull quotes that lend the book a magazine-like feel.

(Full dis­clo­sure: Grace inter­viewed me for the book, so I am both root­ing for her to sell lots of copies and a lit­tle biased about the advice con­tained within its pages — since some of it comes directly from me.)

It’s focused on craft­ing specif­i­cally, so although other entre­pre­neurs mak­ing prod­ucts may glean some tips, the spot­light is firmly pointed at pur­vey­ors of indie, hand­made goods — and that’s the book’s strength. There’s a chap­ter on indie craft shows, includ­ing a handy Day-of-Show Check­list; a “How to Make Your Own Light Box” guide for DIY prod­uct pho­tog­ra­phy; and lots of tips on using Etsy effec­tively. (But don’t worry, there’s plenty of info for techno­phobes, and for peo­ple who pre­fer not to go the Etsy route, too.)

The prose is richly pep­pered with tips from expe­ri­enced crafters (and, uh, me — though I am hardly a crafty super­star myself) & writ­ten by some­one who’s been there — Grace Dobush runs her own book­bind­ing “quasi-business, gra­cie sparkles books.

I loved the sec­tion called “Tak­ing Stock,” where Grace talks about the impor­tance of re-evaluating your busi­ness on a reg­u­lar basis, and learn­ing to take input & crit­i­cism from out­side sources. There’s a great bit from Sub­lime Stitch­ing founder Jenny Hart on fil­ter­ing the help­ful input from the not-so-helpful:

Once, a dude started telling Hart what to do with her five-year-old com­pany within the first five min­utes of their con­ver­sa­tion. “I lis­tened politely and con­sid­ered his advice, but I rec­og­nized it as not applic­a­ble to my busi­ness model. You should never apply advice that you don’t under­stand or work with an adviser who doesn’t speak to you in ways that make per­fect sense to you.”

That doesn’t mean you should dis­count an adviser who is unfa­mil­iar with the craft scene. “One of my most trusted advis­ers is some­one with years of busi­ness expe­ri­ence but no direct rela­tion to the DIY move­ment, needle­work or craft­ing. He didn’t start offer­ing advice before he’d spent sev­eral hours lis­ten­ing to me talk about my busi­ness model, my cus­tomers and my goals,” Hart says. “The types of ques­tions he asked about my busi­ness were how I knew he ‘got it.’ He offered advice in our first meet­ing that I had never before con­sid­ered, but it made sense to me and I could apply it imme­di­ately and see results from it. Those were all indi­ca­tors that I was deal­ing with a valu­able adviser.”

We’ve had the same expe­ri­ences as Jenny on both fronts, so her words really rang true for me. But my favourite part of the book is the three bul­let points with which Grace closes. Every entre­pre­neur could do well to use them as guid­ing prin­ci­ples in shap­ing her business:

• Be informed.
• Be con­fi­dent.
• Be your­self.

You can pick up your own copy of Crafty Super­star at Ama­zon, or buy an auto­graphed copy directly from Grace here.

In the ten years Emira and I have been run­ning our busi­ness together, we’ve devel­oped a high level of ESP. We often joke that we are inter­change­able, i.e. if you talk to one of us, we can pretty well chan­nel what the other might say in response. How­ever, there are also plenty of things we del­e­gate to one another almost entirely, so for instance I have done very lit­tle sales work in the course of those ten years, while Emira has done very lit­tle design work.

With Emira’s due date fast approach­ing, we have been doing some very hard think­ing on how to trans­fer knowl­edge between us so that as I move into the sales role in the com­pany (and while Emira is out of the office for a few months), I have all the resources I need to per­form a job that is mostly new to me. It’s sort of like train­ing for any other job, and it’s taught us a lot about how we might also del­e­gate work to our staff, both now and in future.

This is what a lot of peo­ple describe as “sys­tem­atiz­ing”. And in The E-Myth, Michael Ger­ber frames the same con­cept as a step­ping stone on the road to fran­chis­ing — which is def­i­nitely not our goal, but the idea still stands. And the idea is this: smart entre­pre­neurs avoid hav­ing their busi­ness rely on knowl­edge held by a sin­gle per­son, and instead cre­ate sys­tems for get­ting things done well, that can be repli­cated con­sis­tently by any­one with the appro­pri­ate skillset and training.

We’ve been doing a lot of this at Raised Eye­brow — and in fact, on many fronts we’ve always sys­tem­atized things, whether it’s cre­at­ing check­lists for our pro­gram­mers to use when they’re build­ing web­sites, devel­op­ing ques­tion­naires to use in our design work­shops with clients, or set­ting up tem­plates for doc­u­ments rang­ing from esti­mates to wire­frames and sign-off con­tracts. But of late we’ve been delv­ing into areas where we’ve never thought much about sys­tem­atiz­ing before: we’re look­ing for the sys­tems in our sales processes and our ser­vice offer­ings, to make it eas­ier and more effi­cient for some­one (i.e. me) with­out a lot of sales train­ing to walk our prospec­tive clients through the process of deter­min­ing the size and scope of their project, and pro­vid­ing them with a detailed and accu­rate esti­mate for the work required. This has been an eye-opening process for us, to say the least — and one of the insights we’ve had is that we’re not the only ones ben­e­fit­ing from it. Since we started talk­ing about our ser­vices in terms of “pack­ages,” for exam­ple, we’ve found that our clients are lov­ing it too. It helps them under­stand bet­ter the range of options that we offer, and where their project fits — and as a result, we’re get­ting bet­ter at keep­ing projects within scope (and there­fore within bud­get), and I sus­pect we will also see an upswing in client sat­is­fac­tion since when expec­ta­tions are clearly defined, they are much more eas­ily met (and ide­ally, exceeded).

I’m really excited to see where this sys­tem­atiz­ing process takes us. Obvi­ously there’s a cer­tain amount of self-interest here, in that I’m a lit­tle ner­vous about step­ping into the sales role and I’m really happy to have these new tools avail­able to me; but I’m also very con­scious that the invest­ment we’re mak­ing now has real long-term poten­tial, because once the sys­tems are in place, and we’ve doc­u­mented our processes, we’ll be much bet­ter posi­tioned to stream­line and improve them in future — as well as to move some of the work onto our employ­ees’ plates and free up our time for busi­ness devel­op­ment and other good things.

I’d love to hear your sto­ries on this sub­ject — are there sys­tems you’ve devel­oped (or hope to develop) that are mak­ing your busi­ness life bet­ter? Share them in the com­ments, or shoot ‘em my way on Twit­ter.

Nearly 10 years in, I still get asked all the time how we came up with the name Raised Eye­brow Web Stu­dio. Maybe peo­ple are just being polite to me at networking-type events, but I always take it as a good sign that it’s an inter­est­ing enough name that they want to ask about it.

In our book, we wrote a lit­tle bit about how we came up with the name, but I thought I might elab­o­rate on it a lit­tle bit here, in case the details of our nam­ing process might be help­ful to others.

When we started our busi­ness in early 2000, most of the web firms in town had names that evoked high tech in the sense of machin­ery: their brands con­jured up cool steel, pol­ished glass, hard edges, and sharp cor­ners. We felt there was a gap in the mar­ket­place that could be filled by a per­son­able, approach­able firm that mar­ried tech savvy with an inquiry-based, con­sul­ta­tive approach that pri­or­i­tized great com­mu­ni­ca­tion and smart process over gad­gets and hype. And we were cre­at­ing a bou­tique firm led by two women — a nov­elty at the time (though that’s thank­fully no longer the case). We wanted to embrace that gen­der dif­fer­ence, since we knew it would be one thing that set us apart from the competition.

So we set out to craft our­selves a name with a hint of fem­i­nin­ity — just a hint, mind you, and noth­ing heavy-handed — and that car­ried with it a sense of fun, cre­ativ­ity, and smarts. We began brain­storm­ing ideas that alluded to our gen­der with­out going so far as to have a ref­er­ence to women or girls in the com­pany name.

When we wrote down the qual­i­ties we wanted in our name, an image sprang to mind of the 1940s film noir “dame”, that quin­tes­sen­tial smart, sophis­ti­cated, and witty woman whom noth­ing gets past. We free-associated words and phrases that described the dame, and it wasn’t long before the image of a lone raised eye­brow — at once inquis­i­tive, amused, ironic, and ele­gant — came to us.

If I recall cor­rectly, we both liked it imme­di­ately, but I’m pretty sure we kept going for a while longer, until we had a list of sev­eral can­di­dates. (The runners-up are, I’m afraid, lost to his­tory.) And at that point, we sat down in front of the com­puter and checked the avail­abil­ity for the var­i­ous names in their dot-com incar­na­tions. RaisedEyebrow.com was hap­pily avail­able, and that pretty much sealed the deal.

We knew we wanted to add a descrip­tive phrase to make sure peo­ple read­ing our name under­stood what it was we did, at least in a gen­eral sense. (We actu­ally didn’t want to get too spe­cific, since we knew that given we were work­ing in the ever-shifting online land­scape, our ser­vice offer­ings were likely to change over time.) So after eval­u­at­ing many dif­fer­ent options & com­bi­na­tions, we set­tled on “Web Stu­dio”: “web” for obvi­ous rea­sons, and “stu­dio” to con­vey that we were an approach­able, bou­tique firm with a focus on design.

If you look closely at our process, it cov­ered many of the same steps every entre­pre­neur takes when defin­ing other aspects of her busi­ness: Iden­ti­fy­ing core prod­ucts & ser­vices (online com­mu­ni­ca­tions & design), defin­ing a tar­get mar­ket (niche), and eval­u­at­ing the com­pe­ti­tion and oppor­tu­ni­ties for dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion (gen­der, approach­a­bil­ity, small scale). It’s impor­tant to tackle each of these before choos­ing a name, since you’ll want to make sure your name neatly sums up all three, com­mu­ni­cat­ing what you do and how you do it to the peo­ple you’re sell­ing to. Once you’ve got a firm grasp on those things, you can start brain­storm­ing words and images that embody dif­fer­ent aspects of your brand; I encour­age you to drill down into the most promis­ing ones, like we did (from fun, fem­i­nin­ity, & intel­li­gence, to film-noir dame, to her sig­na­ture ges­ture, the raised eye­brow) — the results can be rewarding.

I’d love to hear some of your busi­ness nam­ing sto­ries. How’d you name your baby?

I hope it will come as no sur­prise when I say that we don’t always live up to the stan­dards we put forth in our book. We’re human, after all, and although we believe pas­sion­ately in cre­at­ing and cel­e­brat­ing new mod­els for suc­cess, not every day at Raised Eye­brow is a ban­ner Boss of You day. Some days get away from us; there are times when bal­ance escapes us; and of late there have been more than a few occa­sions when I’ve found myself feel­ing more than a lit­tle hyp­o­crit­i­cal that I wrote a whole chap­ter on how entre­pre­neurs need to treat them­selves like val­ued employ­ees, while I’ve been tir­ing myself out, pulling evening and week­end shifts in an attempt to keep from being swept under by my workload.

This isn’t a “poor me” post, though. Rather, it’s intended as a note to myself for future ref­er­ence, and I hope some of you may also find it useful.

Last week­end, dur­ing one of my afore­men­tioned extracur­ric­u­lar work sprints, I got a mes­sage from Emira sug­gest­ing that I take a day off this week to make up for some of the over­time I’ve put in recently. I might never have come up with that idea myself, so I’m grate­ful to her for putting it to me. My par­tic­u­lar brand of worka­holism leads me to lose all per­spec­tive about what’s really urgent and impor­tant — I find that at a cer­tain point, every­thing feels urgent and I have trou­ble see­ing an end to the to-do list.

But I knew when she called me that she could see I needed a break, and I took it. Bet­ter yet, Wednes­day was a hol­i­day, and I took today (Thurs­day) off as well, so I had two days off in a row, midweek.

It has been a revelation.

Not since my last vaca­tion have I felt so cen­tered and clear­headed. I spent most of yes­ter­day doz­ing away the sleep deficit I’ve been build­ing up (along with the nag­ging snif­fle & cough that have been lurk­ing around me), but this morn­ing I woke up with an energy and a sense of pur­pose I haven’t felt in sev­eral months.

Here’s why this is impor­tant: I know that tomor­row when I go to the office, I’ll make bet­ter deci­sions than I would have made two days ago. I’ll be more patient with clients, col­leagues and myself; I’ll have a clearer sense of pri­or­i­ties; and if all goes well, I won’t have any clients tell me I look like I just rolled out of bed. (This actu­ally hap­pened on Tues­day. Not my favourite thing to hear.)

Aside from that last, some­what face­tious com­ment, all of those things are very good things. They’re things I think every­one I work with would pre­fer to see from me on a reg­u­lar basis. So I need to remem­ber this feel­ing I have right now — and the next time I find myself drown­ing in work, I hope I can also remem­ber that tak­ing one day out of the office can have extra­or­di­nary results.

OK, future self? Hear that? When you’re work­ing too hard and you think you can’t pos­si­bly afford to take a day off: Take a day off.

I first came across Tressa Brotsky’s gor­geous organic soft toys and goods for wee ones at the Moss Street Mar­ket in Vic­to­ria BC this sum­mer. My mom wanted to pick up a gift for her acupunc­tur­ist, who was expect­ing and I was happy to tag along to one of my favourite com­mu­nity mar­kets. I was imme­di­ately taken with Tressa’s gor­geous wares and her eye for design, detail and an ele­gant sim­plic­ity in style. That’s a heck of a lot of praise to heap on a seem­ingly hum­ble set of organic cot­ton burp cloths and such, but if you take a look I think you’ll agree they are the loveli­est burp cloths you can find.

Since then I’ve admired both Tressa’s lovely goods and, as I started fol­low­ing her blog and learn­ing more about her, I had a hunch that she’d be a great resource for me to turn to for wis­dom around my pend­ing moth­er­hood and entre­pre­neur bal­anc­ing act. I recently had a lovely phone call with her dur­ing which we talked about sell­ing goods online, build­ing a busi­ness, bal­anc­ing moth­er­hood and run­ning a small busi­ness and all kinds of other good stuff which I’m excited to share with you here.

Tressa’s describes her­self as always hav­ing been some­one who was mak­ing stuff. In uni­ver­sity, at UVic, she was sculpt­ing, paint­ing, and from how she tells it gen­er­ally liv­ing in her stu­dio.  Even­tu­ally her eye for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful things met her desire to find qual­ity organic prod­ucts to use with her young daugh­ter and she started mak­ing her own receiv­ing blan­kets, cloths and toys. Dress Me Up was born. She began the busi­ness by sell­ing at the Moss Street Mar­ket (the same mar­ket I first found her at), and even­tu­ally took her stuff online through other retail­ers and then with an Etsy store and now her own Shopify site.

I often have con­ver­sa­tions with prod­uct pro­duc­ers (and fash­ion design­ers, jew­elry design­ers etc) about whether or not they should con­tinue to have an Etsy site (or start an Etsy site), if they are sell­ing their wares through their own site online. Many folks seem to feel like the Etsy pres­ence will some­how cheapen, or lessen their main sales chan­nel through their own web­site. Tressa’s expe­ri­ence mir­rors my thoughts on the mat­ter exactly. She’s expe­ri­enced an incred­i­ble level of sup­port, pro­mo­tion and traf­fic through her Etsy site that would not have come to her via a stand alone site and it has con­vinced her to keep a shop up there. Some of her best PR hits — like being found by Celebrity Baby Blog, which even­tu­ally led to great cov­er­age and all kinds of fur­ther spin-off cov­er­age in major pub­li­ca­tions and some long stand­ing rela­tion­ships with retail­ers — have come through peo­ple search­ing through Etsy for prod­ucts to include in spreads/reviews. Add that to the active and sup­port­ive com­mu­nity around Etsy and she’s really happy to keep her store going there. One of the other ways she uses her Etsy store in a dif­fer­ent way from her main Shopify site, is to add some one-off or more flex­i­ble prod­ucts that aren’t nec­es­sar­ily a part of her main line. For exam­ple this year she’s mak­ing some gor­geous hol­i­day stock­ings from vin­tage wool, which she’ll be sell­ing through her Etsy site. She also uses the two stores to offer her goods in two dif­fer­ent cur­ren­cies — her main site is in Cana­dian dol­lars while the Etsy site is in US. Another use that Tressa has very wisely put Etsy to, is for research­ing what other prod­ucts sim­i­lar to hers are in the mar­ket. She is a smart cookie.

As for wis­dom to share around bal­anc­ing moth­er­hood and a thriv­ing busi­ness, she told me she wishes she had hired sup­port ear­lier. This is a com­mon story for many small busi­ness peo­ple — Lau­ren and me included — par­tic­u­larly those of us with an eye for detail and a bit of a pho­bia of risk. She’s started bring­ing in other mom’s, who help with the pro­duc­tion and sewing of her prod­ucts to assist her and has some­one else who helps with admin and pack­ag­ing of orders. She’s found that over­all she’s had to learn to get more com­fort­able with risk on dif­fer­ent lev­els from being respon­si­ble for pay­ing other peo­ple, to being will­ing to invest money into the busi­ness to help it grow. At this point, now that her busi­ness is grow­ing and enjoy­ing suc­cess, she has to try to not only bal­ance being the kind of mom she wants to be with run­ning the busi­ness, but also finds she needs to try to bal­ance the every­day minu­tia of run­ning the busi­ness and tak­ing care of the admin­is­tra­tive end, with find­ing time to be cre­ative and work on new prod­uct designs. Over­all, she shared with me, the biggest chal­lenge has been pick­ing up and learn­ing the skills required to run a suc­cess­ful organic soft goods busi­ness along the way, as she really didn’t start out think­ing about build­ing a busi­ness per se. That learn­ing curve is cer­tainly a lot of entre­pre­neurs strug­gle with try­ing to stay ahead of.

You can find Tressa’s gore­geous wares in her stores and from the fol­low­ing fine retailers:

• Dress Me Up
• Dress Me Up on Etsy
• Fawn & Forest
• And you can fol­low her on Twit­ter here

Hold onto your wal­lets, the Van­cou­ver craft fair scene is ramp­ing up to run full throt­tle through until the hol­i­days hit us. Com­ing up in a few weeks is Make It! which focuses on one-of-a-kind hand­made items and includes DJs to round out the sound­scape of your shop­ping expe­ri­ence. For a list of exhibitors click here and to keep on top of the details check in on the blog here.

So as I sit here on my three month count down to my own mat leave (which will be wholly sub­si­dized by my com­pany), our fed­eral gov­ern­ment is about to finally pass some leg­is­la­tion that would bring mat leave ben­e­fits to the self employed. Bad tim­ing or me? (I’m too far down this road to be eli­gi­ble). I’m not so sure. As when I read the fine print  I’m not sure I would take it if I had the chance. The pack­age the feds have put together presents a bit of a Faus­t­ian bar­gain for the busi­ness owner. Not to get too caught up in dry/dull Cana­dian tax law here, but the ways things cur­rently work busi­ness own­ers like myself don’t pay into Employ­ment Insur­ance, and we aren’t eli­gi­ble. While it would be great to have the option to pay in (which the new Mat/Parental leave changes would offer) we’re cur­rently just liv­ing entirely out­side of the system.(To be clear, as employ­ers we do pay into EI for our staff).The new mat/parental leave leg­is­la­tion would have the self-employed, who wish to be eli­gi­ble, pay in for a year prior (which is frankly a bit of a tricky one, as I know very few peo­ple who’ve been able to time their con­cep­tion dates that well and given that it takes roughly 40, not 52 weeks, to grow a human you’re going to have to have some real foresight/magical crys­tal ball pow­ers or risk pay­ing in for more than a year or get­ting caught unaware and inel­i­gi­ble). Then comes the real devil in the details: once you’ve accepted the mat/parental leave you need to con­tinue to pay into EI for the rest of the time you are self-employed (not sure what hap­pens if you switch your busi­ness alto­gether and become self-employed under a dif­fer­ent com­pany). That means, that for the max­i­mum ben­e­fit of $447/week (tax­able income) for a total of 50 weeks (so $22,350 total before income tax), you’ll have to start pay­ing EI for a  year ahead of time and then con­tinue pay­ing it for the rest of the time that you have a busi­ness (details on this here at the gov’t site). Note that as the employer and the now eli­gi­ble “employee” I assume (but can’t at this time ver­ify) that you’ll be pay­ing both the employer and employee con­tri­bu­tions to EI (so dou­ble the cost to your busi­ness over what the typ­i­cal employed indi­vid­ual pays for this ben­e­fit). Edited to say that I have since learned that you would only need to pay the employee and not the employer por­tion of the EI.

Now, fair is fair. EI is insur­ance after all, it’s not just a pot of money that we each deposit cash into and then get to with­draw exactly what we put in, but given the many other prob­lems that the cur­rent EI set up presents for moth­ers who run busi­nesses, I’m not sure this is really an improve­ment. And here’s why:

• Flex­i­bil­ity: I’ve been doing a lot of research/talking with other moms who run their own busi­ness and many of them say that the flex­i­bil­ity that run­ning your own busi­ness affords is actu­ally great for rais­ing a child(ren). That said, it’s hard finan­cially and per­son­ally. It requires tak­ing some seri­ous down­time, and then pok­ing your head back in to make sure that your busi­ness is also still run­ning. Tak­ing a full year off is sim­ply not real­is­tic for most self-employed women or busi­ness own­ers. That means that unless they then do their reg­u­lar work unpaid, they would not be eli­gi­ble for the max­i­mum ben­e­fit any­way, as they’re like to be back at work (and there­fore earn­ing money and inel­i­gi­ble for the ben­e­fit) before the year is out, though they cer­tainly won’t be work­ing full time dur­ing that period.
• Ben­e­fit level: I don’t think I’m alone in find­ing the max­i­mum ben­e­fit that women are eli­gi­ble for for mat leave kind of insulting/out of touch/unrealistic. If you’re run­ning a small busi­ness, as I am, you are mak­ing a heck of a lot more than $22,350 a year. Or you really should be if you’re get­ting paid appro­pri­ately. The cur­rent max­i­mum I feel is totally out of touch with women’s real­i­ties in the cur­rent work­force. (NB: This crit­i­cism also applies to female employ­ees who have long been eli­gi­ble for this ben­e­fit too. If I were at a direc­tor level in a com­pany, or heck even just earn­ing a liv­ing wage here in an expen­sive city like Van­cou­ver, $22,350 before tax salary would not be a liv­able wage for a year, espe­cially when you look at adding in the expenses that a new house­hold mem­ber brings).
• Long term cost: The ongo­ing cost of the ben­e­fit to the indi­vid­ual and the busi­ness can not be over­stated. Adding in addi­tional EI pre­mi­ums as over­head for the busi­ness and for the indi­vid­ual has to be weighed very care­fully against the short term gain of what I’ve already argued isn’t a really awe­some ben­e­fit pack­age. I think the thing that busi­ness owners/self employed women really need to look at is not just the first year, but the first 5 or 6 years of their child’s life (assum­ing here that they’ll only have one child dur­ing the life of their busi­ness). Their capac­ity to work full time is almost cer­tainly going to go down over those ini­tial years as their expenses go up. Adding onto the bot­tom line cost of their busi­ness and tak­ing money out of their take home pay dur­ing what are already vul­ner­a­ble years for their busi­ness, (from what I’ve heard from many women who walked in these shoes) as they try to bal­ance moth­er­hood and busi­ness own­er­ship may not be the best longterm strategy.

So what can the fed­eral gov­ern­ment do to sup­port the grow­ing and sig­nif­i­cant body of women who are self-employed/running small busi­nesses, mak­ing up a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the Cana­dian econ­omy and at the same time try­ing to have and raise families?

For starters, they should talk to some women who’ve been there. From all the dis­cus­sions I’ve had this pack­age they’re offer­ing (though to be fair they’re just look­ing at rework­ing EI it’s not a bill aimed at help­ing women busi­ness own­ers specif­i­cally), this EI change is pretty much out of step with what this sec­tor of the econ­omy is actu­ally look­ing for.

From what I hear and from all the research I’ve done, the resound­ing answer if you asked women what one thing they really want would be: child­care. Now we had this debate — though I would argue in a rushed and sen­sa­tion­al­ist fash­ion — a few  years ago when the Con­ser­v­a­tives took power from the Lib­er­als fed­er­ally. And arguably the Lib­er­als failed us by tak­ing so damn long to roll out a decent child­care pack­age for the many years they were run­ning the show, but this topic needs to come back on the table in a very seri­ous way. From an eco­nomic per­spec­tive we need to help the many women who are mak­ing valu­able con­tri­bu­tions to Canada’s econ­omy in the busi­ness world by pro­vid­ing them with bet­ter, cheaper and more read­ily avail­able child­care for chil­dren from infants on up. And do not get me started on the whole monthly child­care ben­e­fit the Con­ser­v­a­tives intro­duced. That is not in any­way a replace­ment for/supplement for bet­ter, cheaper and more acces­si­ble child­care. (Of course this would ben­e­fit all fam­i­lies not just entre­pre­neur­ial ones, which should only strengthen the argument).

We also need to relook at the EI pro­gram as it stands for maternity/parental leave. I strongly feel that it would be a much more attrac­tive option if it offered more flex­i­bil­ity for women in terms of the period of time they could take it, or how they could struc­ture addi­tional income over that period of time, say some­thing that allowed them to make more money as a sup­ple­ment that was aver­aged over a period of 3–4 years, or per­haps just the abil­ity to take the leave in pieces over a 3–4 year period rather than all in the first year. And frankly it needs to be higher. Women (and father’s tak­ing parental leave) should be able to expect that they’ll get more of a decent income dur­ing that period of time. While I’m cer­tainly happy to live in a coun­try that offers a year long (50 week) ben­e­fit to par­ents, and know that many employ­ers do top that ben­e­fit up, I know that there is room to improve on what we are giv­ing par­ents. I hate to get all cheesy on y’all but par­ent­ing is an impor­tant part of our soci­ety, and these are peo­ple who are going to go back to work and who are on a lim­ited term for tak­ing the ben­e­fit they’re not just peo­ple look­ing for a free ride from EI (though that said, I find argu­ments against decent EI pack­ages that focus on abuse of the sys­tem totally aggravating).

So now that I’ve had my very long rant tell me, what would your gov­ern­ment be able to do for you as a par­ent and a busi­ness owner to make the whole bal­anc­ing act a lit­tle bit eas­ier? (And hold­ing the baby so you can take a shower, doesn’t count).

If, like us, you have admired Dai­ly­Candy for its smart, savvy style finds (not to men­tion stun­ning, uber-consistent, and clas­sic design), you might enjoy this video I spot­ted over at the Har­vard Busi­ness blog: biz blog­ger & ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Tony Tjan inter­views Dai­ly­Candy founder and edi­to­r­ial direc­tor Dany Levy about her jour­ney as an “acci­den­tal entre­pre­neur.” (There’s a text tran­script of the inter­view, too, for those of you not inclined towards video content.)

The bit that res­onated most with me was that she is clearly dri­ven by her pas­sion for con­tent rather than a lust for world dom­i­na­tion. “It was some­thing I knew I’d love to have. I liked doing the dig­ging; cut­ting out pages of mag­a­zines and tack­ing them to my bul­letin board. And I knew pro­gres­sively more peo­ple didn’t have time to do that. It seemed like a great fil­ter for peo­ple, to know what was going on in their city.”

Smart lady. Def­i­nitely worth check­ing the rest.