Lessons from the drug trade, and other entrepreneurial tips

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One of the important lessons in entrepreneurship is to figure out your goal: Do you want to run a small business forever? Grow into a multinational corporation? Or do you want to sell as fast as possible? Your business should fit your personality and your vision for your life.

New York magazine profiles a drug dealer trying to find an exit strategy for his mid-size company. Which sells cocaine, of course. Believe it or not, there’s a market for drug dealerships. And you can tell this guy is an overachiever in the business world because he keeps his client list on an Excel spreadsheet.

Here’s how he explains his plan: “The rule in any business is that you don’t sell your company for what it makes in a year, but for what it makes in two or three or four years, right? Well in my business, you can’t do that. Someone gets arrested and — boom– it’s over. So you gotta sell it based on what you make in, like, six months.”

For those of you who are thinking about entrepreneurship in a less life-threatening product category, try taking Pairwise’s entrepreneurial personality test (scroll down the page to find it). This test tells you if you have the personality similar to other scrappy Internet company founders who Y Combinator has funded.

Y Combinator typically funds young technical-type guys in college or just out of college, (although every time I write this, Y Combinator asks me to say that this is an overstatement and they actually fund a wide range of people.) If you know you are not this type even without taking the test, and you know you can’t stomach the drug trade, there’s still hope.

Current research from the academics says that there is no one personality type for a successful entrepreneur. There are so many ways to be an entrepreneur today that you can create a business to fit your strengths.

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Video blog: Each person requires different management techniques

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By Bruce Tulgan – Each person is different. There are six questions managers need to answer about each employee in order to know how to manage that person. What if you’re not a manager? Consider asking yourself these questions to figure out how to manage yourself better.

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Happy Passover from my blended life

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Yesterday Ryan posted about creating a blended life. His post makes me think a lot about my own set up. I am pretty sure people would say I have a blended life:

1. I work from 8-1pm and 8pm to 12pm seven days a week. Except when I don’t, because my two young sons need something.

2. I take care of my kids from 1pm to 8pm. Except when I don’t because some inflexible business partner needs something.

3. My husband takes care of the kids in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I have a lot of work. And sometimes I do a whole day of kids when he needs to have more alone time.

This is not a perfect arrangement. For example, I feel guilt when I travel to New York City to promote my book — which I’ve done a couple of times in the past few months. And my husband doesn’t have a career he loves.

But what I want to say is that the hardest part of this blended life for me is not the kids or the career decisions or the marital decisions, but transitioning between the everything.

For example, it’s so hard to be with the kids and not think about work. If nothing else, work is just plain easier to deal with. A blended life is great, but focus on the moment is important, as well. Moving fluidly between such totally different worlds often makes it hard for me to keep my mind in one place when it needs to be.

Last night, at my aunt’s house, there were thirty people around a table all focused on telling the story of Passover. For those of you who don’t know, Passover celebrates when the slavery of the Jews in Egypt ended — thousands of years ago. Who knows how much of the story is true? I’m not sure. But we tell it every year, and it’s a very organized meal, and the point is to teach the story to the kids in an organized way. And last night the only kids there were mine. For much of the story, they were actually paying attention. After all, when does a kid get 30 adults telling a story for your benefit?

What I noticed is that I was so happy to be doing the Passover story and meal with my kids that I stopped worrying about work. Stopped thinking about my blog posts and my book sales and all the other things that hum in my mind most moments of the day.

A lot of times it takes doing something out of the ordinary for you to see what you need to be doing now. Passover did this for me. I realized that even though I’m going through the motions of separating from work each day, I’m not making the mental transition as effectively as I could. I hike with the kids, I go to the gym, do the things you’d think would allow me to stop thinking about work. But I’m not always successful.

Passover was so nice because I had a great ability to focus on stuff that wasn’t work. I want to get that more, in my blended life.

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Five ways to do better in phone interviews

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The last phone interview I did was for my job at the Boston Globe. And let me just confess that I wasn’t that great in the interview, and I stressed a lot afterwards about not getting the job. But, of course, I did get the job, which I think might be evidence that I write so much about career advice that I am becoming way too hard on myself.

At any rate, I have done tons of phone interviews—on both sides of the hiring equation—so when Sia asked me to write a post on how to do a phone interview, I was surprised that I hadn’t written one already. (Although I have written a bunch about interviews.)

So, here are five tips for doing well in a phone interview:

1. Attend to your surroundings.
If you have an interview scheduled, take precautions beforehand to get in a good spot physically.

Don’t take the interview when you are at your desk and can’t talk freely. Don’t take the call when there is too much noise in the background. And don’t walk from one place to another because the breathlessness that comes from walking and talking at the same time subconsciously conveys lack of authority to someone who doesn’t know you.

If you did not schedule it beforehand, feel free to ask the interviewer if you can call back at a better time. You will not sound disinterested, but rather, you will sound concerned for managing your life by organizing your commitments.

2. Dress for the part.
Consider getting dressed up for your interview, even though no one will see you.

The emails you write to a hiring manager are different than your emails to your friends. You can’t talk to an interviewer the same way you talk with your friends. You know this, but the shift is difficult without practice. And if you are not practiced at talking about business on the phone, it’s hard to get into business mode for the call.

A way to compensate for this is to dress for an interview even though the interviewer can’t see you. In the 90s when people debated the virtues of dumping suits at the workplace in favor of business casual, there was a fair amount of research to show that people took their work more seriously when they were in a suit. That makes sense. Girls act more like a princess when they’re in a prom dress than when they’re in running shorts, and the same happens with people in work clothes.

I’m not saying you should wear a suit all the time. I’m saying that when there’s a risk of sounding too casual or unprofessional on the phone, dressing up a little can actually change how you sound.

3. Stand up.
No kidding. You’ll sound more self confident and dynamic if you stand while you speak than if you sit. Walking around a bit, but not too much, also keeps the call going smoothly. If your body is confined, your speech sounds different than if you have run of the room. It’s one reason that the best speakers walk around instead of standing in one place at the podium.

Using hand gestures is very natural for talking, so allow yourself to use them, even though you’re on the phone. You don’t have to force it. They will just come, as long as your hands are free. And you want to sound natural on the phone because authentic is more likeable. So walking around a room with a headset will actually give you the freedom to be more yourself on the call.

4. Prepare for the most obvious questions.
A resume is to get someone to pay attention to you. An in-person interview is to see if people like you. Somewhere in between those two events, people need to make sure you are qualified and you don’t have any huge red flags. So in a phone interview you can expect people to focus on those two concerns.

You will probably get questions asking you to show that you actually have the skills to accomplish the goals for the open position. Be prepared to give organized, rehearsed examples of how you have performed at work in the past in order to show your skill set.

Also, be ready for a question about the most obvious problem on your resume—often frequent job changes or big gaps in work. These are answers you should practice. Even if your answer isn’t great, a good delivery can make the difference between getting through a phone screen or not.

5. Don’t forget to close.
An interview is about selling yourself, and the best salespeople are closers. Your goal for a phone interview is to get an in-person interview. So don’t get off the phone until you have made some efforts to get to that step. Ask what the process is for deciding who to interview face-to-face. Ask for decision-making timelines, and try to find out who is making the decisions. Don’t barrage the interviewer with questions in this regard, but the more information you have, the more able you will be to get yourself to the next step.

And don’t forget a key component of a successful close—even for a phone interview–is a thank you note to followup.

Finally, after you get done with a phone interview, send out a few more resumes, or go fill out a few more job applications. Hopefully, you won’t need to keep hunting because the phone interview will clinch the job. But it will make you crazy to just sit and wait for the interviewer to take action. If you keep job hunting you are taking action yourself which will make you feel more in control over your situation.

The best way to ace an interview is to be interviewing for your dream job. It’s so easy to sell yourself when you are a perfect fit for a job you’re dying to have. But it’s really hard to identify what that dream job is. And then, of course, you need a path to get to that job. Here’s a course helps you identify the best job for you and shows you how to get it: Get Your Dream Job Now!

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Twentysomething: Why I don’t want work/life balance

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By Ryan Healy – At the office full of twentysomethings where my girlfriend, Niki, works, everyone was comparing their salaries, and the owner of the company got really angry. And his being angry made for a tough week, so Niki asked him if she could take Friday off.

He said, “If you’re going to be successful you need to start putting your career before your life.”

Of course she took the day off.

When she told her mother about the situation, her mother said, “If you don’t put your life before work you will never be happy.”

Hearing this conflicting advice from two of the most influential elders in your life is confusing. What does Niki’s boss say to his kids when he gets home? Does he tell them to put work before life? What would Niki’s mom say to young people she works with? Would she tell them to go home early?

This whole notion of needing to separate work and life implies that your career, which takes up about 75% of your day, is something you simply try to get through so you can go home and do what you really enjoy for the other 25%. What a terrible way to live.

I wholeheartedly believe that my life has a purpose. My purpose is to be successful, genuinely happy and to make a difference in this world somewhere along the way. Not a single one of these values can take a backseat to another. The balance doesn’t work, we already know this. I don’t want to choose. I want a blended life.

Occasionally I need to contact an older co-worker late at night or on a Sunday. Typically, I email the person, receive no response and the work waits until the next day’s business hours. Usually, I am hesitant to call and bother older people during their “home time.” My home time is not sacred. I have grown up being connected twenty-four hours a day, I have no problem with sending a quick work email or organizing my inbox during these supposed “off” hours.

There is no need for me to keep work life and home life separate. The majority of week nights you can find me in front of the computer chatting with a friend, watching TV and messing around with MySpace or Facebook. I may as well send out an email or finish up a work briefing at the same time. When I told my friend about this post, he said, “Work/life balance? That doesn’t even make sense.”

Think about it, he is absolutely right. I would never dream of saying I want a Family/Life balance or I want a Friend/Life balance. Is work so terrible that people don’t want to consider it a part of their lives? I sure hope not, because if that’s the case than the next fifty years of my life are going to suck!

The lines between work and life have been blurred for years. I have decided to embrace this fact and work on the best blend for my life. Whether this means working hours that fit around my schedule or being paid for results rather than the amount of hours worked, I’m not sure. I will leave that question to the management consultants and human resource experts. In the meantime my peers and I will keep searching for this blended life, while everyone else continues to run in circles failing to achieve their so-called balance.

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New feature on Brazen Careerist: Twentysomething

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Ryan Healy will write a new feature on Brazen Careerist called Twentysomething. Presently, he is working at his first job out of college, at a Fortune 500 company, and thinking of starting his own company (of course).

I met Ryan through Brazen Careerist. He told me he was starting a blog with his friend and he asked for some guidance. I read the first post on his blog — Employee Evolution — before he had even set up a way to subscribe, and I liked it so much that I asked him to email me when he posted again.

When I read Ryan’s posts, I found myself thinking, “I should write about that topic.” And then I thought to myself, “Wait. I can’t write that. That’s a topic for a twenty-two-year-old.” So I asked Ryan to write on Brazen Careerist so someone is addressing all those fun topics that Ryan dreams up that I couldn’t really steal, even if I tried.

I have already learned a lot from him. In today’s post Ryan writes about a “blended career.” You can see in one of my comments that I appropriated his phrase before his post was even published. I’m looking forward to picking up a lot more from him as we go along.

Memo to managers: Manage!

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It’s official now: Young people are in the driver’s seat in corporate America. Job offers are plentiful, and hiring managers are scrambling. Stephanie Armour, reports in USA Today that he majority of hiring managers feel like they have to convince a candidate to take their job. And one-third of employees are already looking to leave after six months. This is true even in what we used to see at the most desirable fields, like banking.

The rules of what makes a good candidate are changing, and so are the rules of what makes a good manager. Good candidates provide high value on day one, a key since they are more likely than ever to leave early. And a good manager knows how to give employees what they need to be effective every day they are with the company.

It sounds like mayhem, right? In fact, we are watching the emergence of a more collaborative, hands-on, caring approach to management than ever before, and the result might be a workplace that is more productive and fulfilling for everyone.

The energy for this change comes from the convergence of the fact that millennials refuse to stay in jobs that don’t help them grow, and businesses are desperate to recruit and retain young employees . Even the big firms, such as Ernst & Young, pursue initiatives such as recruiting via Facebook, text messaging, and video blogs in an effort to be heard above the cacophony of voices courting young workers.

Enter Bruce Tulgan, author of It’s Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need, (and video blogger on Brazen Careerist). Tulgan is evangelizing a new kind of management — where people actually do it.

“We have an undermanagement epidemic,” says Tulgan. “Managers walk around saying, ‘I’m hands off, I’m letting you do your own thing.’ ” But what they really mean is, “I’m busy. I’m doing my own thing. I cannot hold your hand.”

But Tulgan says that today’s workers want flexibility and customized work environments. And, “there is no chance on earth that a manager who is not engaged can be flexible and generous.” For example, Tulgan says, “Managers who keep really close track of results don’t care when the work gets done.”

If the recommendation to check in with employees daily makes you cringe, you are probably not in your 20s. Millennials were raised to have adults training them, coaching them, and making sure the world went smoothly so they could learn and grow to their fullest potential.

So it’s no surprise that this is what young people want at work. Annemieke Rice is a great example of a millennial at the office: a highly motivated, tech-savvy, educated employee who wants a lot of face time. She is a student services coordinator at Northeastern University, and she is more than willing to work for the lower salary typical in higher education, just to have a boss who mentors her, challenges her, and opens new doors.

“One of the reasons I’m so motivated is because my boss really lets me know she appreciates me,” Rice says. “Like, she stops by and gives me special projects to do. And she’s always available to sit down with me and let me ask a lot of questions about the back story.” Rice also expects regular feedback and guidance so that she is always on a productive path within the organization. Previous generations saw a manager as someone who collected dues early on — a sort of ticket-taker for the ride up the corporate ladder. So a manager was someone to be avoided at all costs.

Rice, however, would never think of waiting until later to start learning the nuts and bolts. She wants to see her boss regularly because Rice views her boss as a teacher for the adult world. “I would rather my boss tell me now that I’m doing it wrong than I do it wrong for the next 20 years and don’t get to where I want to go.”

Managing someone like Rice is a lot of work. But young people today are consumers for everything — even when it comes to shopping for a boss. So if you want to hire top talent, understand that top talent wants to be managed by top talent. And you’re not top if you are not hands on.

And before you say you don’t have time to manage, understand that Tulgan has heard it before. “Managers who think they don’t have time to manage spend their time managing anyway, but it’s all crisis management that could be avoided if they were hands-on managers every day.”

Here is a list from Tulgan of five how-tos for managers:

1. Manage every day, not just on certain occasions, such as a project explodes.

2. Solve small problems every day so they don’t grow into big ones.

3. Have lots and lots of boring conversations instead of one, big conversation.

4. Reward people for what they accomplish; don’t treat people equally because accomplishments are not equal

5. Think of empowerment as helping someone to succeed instead of leaving them alone.

Tape the list to your keyboard if you’re a manager. Email it anonymously if you’re poorly supervised – and if nothing changes, shop for a new manager, of course.

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Coachology: Hone your interview skills with Jason Warner

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Yep, that’s right. Our very own Google Guy Jason Warner is doing Coachology this week. For those of you who don’t know, Jason has interviewed a bazillion candidates as an in-house recruiter at Microsoft, Starbucks and now, at Google. And he has strong opinions about what works.

This week Jason is offering to coach one of you on what to do in an interview so that you get the job. Jason will spend an hour on the phone with you practicing strategies and techniques you can use to shine.

When I was asking Jason to do this week’s Coachology, he agreed immediately, but he said he wanted to do follow-ups until the person got the job. This is something I love about Jason – that he genuinely wants to help. So in addition to the initial phone call, next time you’re interviewing for a job, Jason will talk with you again, to prepare for that specific interview.

If you want to work with Jason, send an email to me with Coachology in the subject line and include three sentences about why you would be good to work with Jason. Deadline is Saturday, March 30. Jason will pick the winner.

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Use self-esteem as a career tool

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I am fascinated by self-esteem because it’s such a huge differentiator among everyone – even among the smart and talented. And I don’t think people can fake it. Maybe it is my own, overzealous self-esteem when it comes to my ability to read self-esteem, but I think people reveal their own levels no matter how hard they try not to.

And I don’t think I’m the only person who is fascinated. I read commentary about Paris Hilton, (that I have spent way too much time trying to retrieve online,) that said that the reason we are fascinated by her is that she has an unshakable sense of self. You can argue that you don’t like who she is, but it’s hard to argue that you’ve ever seen her feeling insecure about who she is.

A lot of self-esteem is dependent on self-knowledge. Knowing what you want and what’s important to you. This is why the infamous Starbucks memo is infamous — because the chairman of the company outlines the company’s weaknesses so clearly and accurately. The memo shows unabashed and on-target self-reflection.

I want that. I want what the chairman has and also what Paris has. One of my biggest worries is that I project an image of myself that I do not fully understand. And this is, of course, a career issue. The people who do best at getting the career they want are the people who understand how they appear to others.

But you don’t want to put too much stock in how others view you. Hold on to yourself in the face of peoples’ opinions; this is what I tell myself all the time. And then I think about how Seth Godin does not accept comments on his blog because he thinks he reacts too strongly to how other people see him. Maybe Seth could take some lessons from Paris in this regard. Meanwhile, Seth’s idea that he can only hold on to his self-esteem if he is not exposed to other peoples’ direct input seems a tenuous spot to be in during the era of Web 2.0.

I think self-esteem will be different soon. After all, millennials are the self-esteem generation, and maybe they will commodify self-esteem in a way that is not even accessible to Seth or me. Their parents brought them up with the idea that the most important thing was self-esteem – they played soccer games where everyone’s a winner because everybody played. Some people call millennials narcissists, but I think those people are taking their own self loathing out those bursting-with-confidence twentysomethings.

There is a sense of celebrity that permeates millennials. They have been online for so long that they assume everyone is looking at them, no matter where they are. In this way, millennials have a strong sense of self that they assert constantly. And when I was interviewing Rebecca Blood (a celebrity in her own right – at least in the blogosphere), she said that celebrity is so mainstream among kids today that young Hollywood debutantes may be better role models for how to act than the kids’ own parents.

Soon after that, I saw a very public scene of a girl getting dumped, and I realized that it’s a great example of a seemingly mainstream young person being able to hold onto her self-esteem by adapting to celebrity status in a matter of minutes.

Some of you will argue that celebrity status has nothing to do with self-esteem. But I can’t help thinking there is a connection between one’s ability to live in front of a web cam and one’s ability to hold onto a sense of self no matter what is going on around her.

So maybe the best training for being successful at work is to learn to think about yourself in terms of celebrity before you get there. Because the people most secure with themselves are the ones who stand out in the workplace.

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Mastering the new entrepreneurship

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The barriers to entrepreneurship are crumbling, and every six months, technology makes starting a business easier and easier.

As a result, entrepreneurship has become more appealing to a wider range of people. If you measure success in terms of personal growth and flexible work, their success rate is sky high.

Here’s a list of the old and new ways of thinking when it comes to starting your own business:

Old: Entrepreneurs are born with a specific set of character traits.

New: Entrepreneurship is learned.

There is no single way to be an entrepreneur, according to research by Saras Sarasvathyof the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. There are actually many different types of personalities that can succeed because there are so many different ways to structure a business.

The key is to pick a business that plays to your personality traits. For example, someone who has lots of charisma and leadership skill, but little interest in day-to-day details, should probably run a larger company than someone who’s capable of doing all the dirty work required for a one-man show.

Old: Raise money and spend a lot of it on advertising.

New: Raise no money and spend no money on advertising.

The viral efficiencies of Web 2.0 make today’s Internet very effective for spreading good ideas quickly. You can think of an idea and test it right away, and if you get traffic to your site the idea is good. If there’s no traffic, that’s not a sign to spend money on advertising, it’s a sign that you don’t have a good idea.

Reddit, for example, was started by two twenty-somethings who emailed their friends and invited them to use their new online tool. Their friends liked Reddit and passed the email on to their own email lists. No advertising budget whatsoever was required, and two years later Conde Nast acquired Reddit.

Old: Women will get power in corporate America and change it.

New: Women are getting what they want by leaving corporate America to start their own businesses.

While a steady stream of press releases touts the increasing flexibility of corporate jobs, it isn’t happening in practice. But instead of pounding their fists against the doors of corporate human resources departments, women have put their energy toward growing their own businesses.

More businesses are started today by women than by men, and most of the sole proprietorship businesses are run by women. This tells us that women have won the fight for flexible jobs by creating them for themselves.

Old: The self-employed are happy because they’re doing what they love.

New: The self-employed are happy because they have control over their work and they have a flexible lifestyle.

The idea that you need to do what you love is more of a platitude than solid career advice. Instead, the best advice might be to do what fits your life best, and create a life that you love.

Rebecca Ryan, CEO of Next Generation Consulting, writes about how instead of living to work, people today are working to live. In this context, self-employment is a very effective way to create a life you want.

Old: Climb the corporate ladder, learn the ropes, then start a company.

New: Start a company to get out of climbing the corporate ladder.

Learning the ropes at a big company is sometimes slow going. You often only learn what your own department does, and if you have a really bad job, you only learn what your department does from the perspective of the copy machine. This is no way to learn about business.

The fastest way to learn about business is to try it. And since there’s very little cost to starting an Internet business, you can try one, fail, and start another, and another, as a way to teach yourself about business.

Eventually something will stick, and even if it doesn’t, you’ll probably get enough experience to skip the drudgery of the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder.

Old: Entrepreneurship is all or nothing.

New: You can test the waters by starting a company while you have a corporate job.

Setting up shop online is a matter of using your mouse and clicking on the kind of features you want in your store. And there are new ways to do business online that didn’t exist even two years ago. For example, you can buy and sell web sites on 24-hour message boards, and you can set up an arbitrage business around buying and selling web traffic.

Many new types of businesses are ideal for pairing with a career you already have. Marci Alboher wrote a handbook for starting this kind of life: “One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success.”

Old: Starting a business is risky.

New: Staying in corporate life is risky.

Most businesses succeed, most jobs end. The statistics about most companies failing assume that most entrepreneurs want to run the next Microsoft. In fact, most people don’t. They just want a flexible, fun, rewarding job.

In that respect, if a company provides fun, flexible work for even a short period of time, you can say it’s a success even if it fails soon after.

Old: Do a lot of planning and make sure it’s going to work before you start.

New: Forget the big plan — just try it.

If it doesn’t work, just try again. This is not true for, say, starting a restaurant, but for a company with little cash outlay there’s little risk to running without a set plan.

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