Entrepreneurship

How to sell anything to anyone

People are always asking me what our business model is for Brazen Careerist. Now that we have a network of 150 great bloggers, we are focusing on companies. A lot of companies come to us asking for access to the bloggers. Not surprisingly, companies want to recruit from the bloggers and their friends. But we …

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Start-up skill: Find people who compensate for your weakness

The update on my company is that Ryan Healy and I are not talking to each other. Well, he is talking to me, but I am giving him the silent treatment.
Still, I am confident that things are going well. First, because I am bad at the silent treatment—I have too much to say all the …

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Announcing the launch of BrazenCareerist.com!

It’s the big moment where I tell you to go check out BrazenCareerist.com. It’s the first stage of our company, and it’s a network of fifty young bloggers who I love, all blogging about their professional interests.
This would be a great time to tell you the grand story of the birth of my grand company.
When …

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How to decide if you should start a company

Do you want to know how to tell if you have a business idea that will succeed? You know what? I don’t know how you know that. And if I did, I’d be a venture capitalist, right? But I do know how you can tell if you have a business idea that is worth reorganizing …

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Use the entrepreneurship boom to improve your corporate job

The new wave of entrepreneurship is changing the startup landscape for sure. It’s nearly free to start a company online, even teens are having wild success, and young people are flipping web sites like boomers flip houses.
Life as an entrepreneur has never been so fun, but that is very annoying to hear if …

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Obama's victory in Iowa sheds light on today’s workplace

My brother just started school at the University of Iowa, and this was his first caucus. He describes a room totally crammed full of young people: “It was basically all the students caucusing for Obama and the adults dispersing among the other candidates.”
In the end, in his Iowa City precinct, the students sat victorious at …

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4 Ways to sidestep corporate hierarchy

Most people stay at a company less than seven years. Most young people stay at a company less than two. So why are companies still set up for people who stay 40 years and climb the ladder? It makes no sense, and frustrates nearly all workers.
Well, all workers who aren’t at the top of the …

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How to recognize the good and the bad of team diversity

Ryan and Ryan P found this great test by JT O’Donnell to find out personality type. Of course, we have each taken tons of personality tests, but what I really liked about JT’s test is that it was only twenty questions, and it revealed each of the three of us perfectly.
The test immediately explained why …

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Confidence boosters that work for me

I woke up today with crust all over my left eye: Pinkeye. And on the way to the bathroom I stepped on edible gold-leaf dust for decorating cupcakes. And apparently sometime in the night the cat ate my son’s map of Wisconsin. And threw it up.
At times like this, I wish there …

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Underreported hazards in early-stage startups

It’s Tuesday, which is usually the day for the Twentysomething column. But Ryan announced last week that he’s quitting as a columnist. I’m not surprised. He’s gone through a huge transition – quit his job in Washington, DC, started a company (with me), and moved to Madison, WI – two blocks from me.
It’s …

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Twentysomething: Preparing for life without health insurance

By Ryan Healy – About a month ago, my brother, Dan, was in the hospital. Originally, the doctors told him he had a small cut, and he should use some Neosporin to prevent infection. A couple of days later, they told him he had a staph infection. Staph infections are bad, but for my brother …

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Big announcement: I’m starting a company!

Before I tell you about my company, I want to tell you that ever since I started spending eight hours a day on my blog – which was about two months after I started blogging – I have always thought of the blog as a business.
People would marvel that I could spend so much time …

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How to start a business from your corporate cube

Starting a company is cheap enough that you don’t need to raise a lot of money to do it, but you still need to feed yourself. A popular route is the in-between step of being an entrepreneur while still working in a corporate job.
This means there are a lot of people running companies …

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Try this: Don’t ask for what you want when you negotiate

When I founded my first company I didn’t have time to find someone to date, but I knew that I wanted to get married. So I followed all the advice I had read about how you should tell people what you want in order to get what you want. I started telling everyone that I …

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What to do in college to prepare for entrepreneurship

One of the most popular goals among young people is to have their own company. This doesn’t mean people want to necessarily build the next Google or Facebook.
For many students this means smaller companies where you can have fun with friends while you think of cool ideas and then enjoy the steep learning curve of …

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Twentysomething: Forget the big city, try middle America

By Ryan Healy – Soaring education, housing and health care costs in recent years have made simply staying afloat in a large metropolis next to impossible without a huge salary and benefits package.
These rising costs are causing the well educated to “sell their souls” to law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms to maintain …

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Twentysomething: Start a company in 3 days with 70 friends

By Ryan Healy – According to adults the world works in a centralized, hierarchical structure and that’s the way it will always be. They say young people will eventually adapt and accept things for how they are, despite the fact that decentralized websites and organizations have defined our childhood and early adult years.
I don’t …

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What to write to make your business card sing

A few weeks ago I wrote about the braided career. The idea is that in order to create stability in a world where career change is frequent and job security is non-existent, you need to be managing three things at all times: your personal life, what you are doing for work now, and what you …

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In today’s workplace, young job seekers hold the advantage

Companies are having a hard time recruiting and retaining young talent, and as a result are accommodating what would have once been considered extreme demands. “The scales have tipped in favor of knowledge workers, creating a seller’s market for the next 5 to 10 years,” writes to Stan Smith, National Director of Next Generation Initiatives …

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Twentysomething: When working on vacation isn’t work

By Ryan Healy – Vacation days are a benefit. We are allowed 10 or 15 days of vacation per year so we can completely relax and forget about work. I have full intentions of forgetting about my job for the six days I am in California. I might check my e-mail once …

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