Finding the Jobs

When it comes to branding, how you stand out as a personal brand is just as essential as a company brand–maybe even more so.

That’s because so much of entrepreneurial success has to do with building good, solid relationships with clients.  How you’re viewed by them as a personal brand, apart from your company can determine whether or how effectively your company continues to grow, stagnate, or falter.

So how do you create a memorable personal brand?

Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel offers a primer for newbies, entitled How to Brand Yourself:  An Introduction in the magazine Entrepreneur. Here are some of his helpful tips on becoming a successful brand:

– Become an expert on something related to your product or service

– Establish a website or blog under your full name.

– Become the go-to source of information for media outlets.

– Network to connect with other entrepreneurs in your industry.

(To read Schawbel’s complete article, click on http://tinyurl.com/273vbql.)

Do you have a personal brand?  If so, how does it differ from your company brand?

(Photo: http://tinyurl.com/2458s5h)

It’s just what you figured would be required, if what you want is that first sale.  The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Needleman described yesterday in great detail how the most successful entrepreneurs make their time and resources count most.

It comes down to trying everything you can think of to grow your client base, namely volunteering, networking and cold-calling.  Nothing is always effective, she reminded listeners, but keeping yourself in the game of building  your company means a willingness to endure trial and error.

If you’ve got a great product or service to sell, but no track record, for example Needleman suggests that you consider volunteering to work for a nonprofit and then show them that you can shine.  One interviewee she included in her Accidental Entrepreneur column did that and ended up providing networking opportunities that led to paying clients.

Is there a one-size-fits-all way to make that first sale?

Does it just take networking, or just building a Twitter following, or just cold-calling, for example? Those are the kinds of questions addressed in Landing Clients is Hit or Miss, a piece by Wall Street Journal staff reporter Sarah Needleman.

Needleman interviews entrepreneurs and business experts from academe, and a nonprofit group that assists small companies.  One of the things that becomes clear from her research is good news for entrepreneurs:   there are any number of ways to get that first customer.  To find out what entrepreneurs need to do to may involve taking the advice of one of Needleman’s interviewees: be prepared to “try lots of different things.”

What are the “different things” and how and when should entrepreneurs use them?

Needleman joins me to answer these and other questions this Thursday, October 28th at 4:00 p.m. (ET) on Money Matters & More radio.  She’ll spell out in greater detail what entrepreneurs can do to increase the chances of making that first sale. To hear the interview live, be sure to click onto www.Blogtalkradio.com/money-matters–more at 4:00 p.m.

And if you have questions you’d like to ask Sarah Needleman, email them to me at heathertaylormedia@gmail.com no later than tomorrow at 5p.m. (ET).

(To read Needleman’s article in its entirety, check it out at http://tinyurl.com/2g8dmzm)

How, in the midst of so much website content, do niche sites find success?  What does it take to really stand out and draw traffic to your website, and ultimately find a revenue stream?

Before any business launch, these are the questions nearly every serious web-creating, revenue-seeking entrepreneur needs to ask and answer.

Need help?  The New York Times columnist David Carr suggests that we might want to forllow the lead of The Awl. Just a year and a half old, The Awl is a successful website devoted to what Carr calls “strong voices and a literate sensibility.”   After just one year, The Awl drew nearly 500,000 visitors and in the next eighteen months, the company expects to make revenue “in the low millions.”

Not bad for three formerly laid-off bloggers.

How did the creators of the site decide what to write, what kinds of pieces to include?

“Neither of us have particularly good histories of working for other people, our prospects were grim, and so we decided that we would make the kind of site people we know would like to read,” Choire Sicha, co-founder of The Awl told Carr.

While the co-founders of The Awl may be “one or two big accounts” from success or failure, at this point, they reflect the importance of three  key principles to business success, whether you’re trying to draw traffic (and revenue) on the web, or get involved in any other entrepreneurial endeavor.  To succeed:

Be talented. The Awl co-founders were already successful veteran writers and bloggers and recognized their strengths as they moved forward.

Be focused. The company was clear about its goal: to create content that people they knew would want to read.

Be flexible. Instead of being dependent on selling company ads for revenue, the co-founders entered sponsorship arrangements with a variety of well-known companies.

Be financially savvy. While the co-founders concentrate on the quality of their content, they have no illusions about how important it is to understand the finances.  “[w]e can build all the nice little audiences we want, [but] somebody has to figure out  how to explain to advertisers where the value is.”

[To read David Carr's column, Against Odds, Site Finds Niche  (http://tinyurl.com/283vbao)]  [Photo:http://tinyurl.com/29nuuha]

Can The Awl’s business model work for you?  Is it missing any element crucial to business success?  Please leave a comment below.

What’s the only diet you really need?

It’s a “changing your thought diet,” according to author, columnist and coach Martha Beck. How we explain what happens to us is crucial to the way we feel and has a critically important effect on the way we behave.

So, want to transform your life, your business, your relationships, the world?

The change required is mental, says Beck. That’s because once you change your internal conversation, you change the way you feel about your life.  And that’s where transformation begins.

For example, if you tend to have a pessimistic, glass half-empty sort of outlook, incorporating the “changing your thought diet” would include conscientiously practicing the art of paying attention to the way you feel when something bad or disappointing happens.  This means when destructive, negative thoughts cross your mind, go ahead and label them as negative and let the thoughts pass by.

Allowing them to pass through your mind performs an important task.  It allows you to reflect on whether your initial (negative) assessment was correct, or whether there’s another, more optimistic explanation.  Why is optimism a good thing?  If you want to live a long, healthy life, science has proven that an optimistic outlook trumps a pessimistic one.

The way the “changing your thought” diet works is simple–and brilliant–because it requires only that we stop and really pay attention.  Especially when we tell overly negative stories to ourselves about things that happen to us. Once we practice optimism routinely (not to be confused with being a Pollyanna), the paying attention exercise becomes habit-forming.

Without so much negativity, we can begin to feel better about ourselves and transform our lives.

And what about dieting to lose weight?  It turns out that it depends alot more on mind than matter.

Want to figure out where you land on the pessimism-optimism spectrum?  Check out Martha Beck’s What’s Your Explanatory Style?  A Quiz in the August 2004 issue of O, The Magazine.

What do you think of Martha Beck’s approach to personal transformation?  Try it and let us know.  In the meantime, please leave your comments below.

The truth about how elite runners succeed may come as a surprise to most of us.  We all probably think that we already understand why certain runners can achieve elite status, and that it has everything to do with sheer skill. They become elite runners because they’re simply faster that everyone else.

But no.

In a fascinating article by Gina Kolata in today’s Health section of The New York Times, experts on elite athletes and marathon runners tell a decidedly different story.   Instead of sheer physical skill, elite athletes’ success depends much more on mental capacity.  While physical capacity is very important, apparently what separates those who become champions from those who don’t is the same factor that helps determine who becomes a successful entrepreneur, business leader or careerist:  attitude.

According to sports medicine physician, physiologist and elite athlete Dr. Jeroen Swart, although the rest of us may think “elite athletes have an easy time of it,” that’s not the case.  “[I]t never gets any easier, you hurt just as much.”

So how do elite athletes manage?  Dr. Swart suggests that “elite athletes are able to motivate themselves continuously and are able to run the gauntlet between pushing too hard–and failing to finish–and underperforming.”

New Zealand elite runner Kim Smith concedes that she possesses “some sort of talent toward running…[and that] there “are a lot of people out there who were probably just as talented. You have to be talented and you have to have the ability to push yourself through pain.”

Do you find ways to push through the “pain” of business setbacks?  What are they?  Please share them with Money Matters and More readers by commenting below.

(To read the complete story, check out http://tinyurl.com/2559l3c)

(Photo: http://tinyurl.com/2cc29h3)

Is Starbucks’ new effort to offer a wine, beer, and cheese-filled menu at a few of its Seattle stores borrowing from the Avis playbook?

It certainly sounds like it.  Like Avis, Starbucks seems determined to “try harder.”

Decades ago, Avis hit a home run with its, We Try Harder campaign.  The company knew that Hertz was the leader in car rentals.  Avis’ reaction?  In a brilliant ad campaign, it willingly conceded the point.  To earn business, Avis proclaimed, the company was willing to try harder.  “We try harder because we have to,” was their motto, (shortened simply to “We try harder.”)

Success quickly followed.  According to the Avis website, “prior to the campaign, Avis had just $34 million in revenue and losses of $3.2 million. One year later, revenues had jumped to $38 million and for the first time in thirteen years, Avis turned a profit of $1.2 million.”

It’s no secret that Starbucks is getting intense competition from the likes of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.  And, not unlike plenty of other companies, Starbucks still feels the effects of a slow economy.  With its new launch, Starbucks looks like it isn’t standing still.  It’s testing something new.  Again.

So the question is, will customers warm to this new transformation, complete with new “green” renovation, more individualized surroundings and the option of regional wine and beer, plus local cheese offerings?

Will it work?  The verdict won’t be in for awhile.  If it does, Starbucks will certainly deserve the praise (and profits) showered on Avis for its “try harder” approach.

Is Starbucks on to something?  Would you patronize one of its new stores in the evening for the new fare?  How have you shaken things up in your own business?

Please leave a comment below or email me at heathertaylormedia@gmail.com

Messy success is a good thing.  Really.

You know the kind.  It’s the stop and start, begin and end kind. Messy success is successfully launching a business, but the path to get there involves lots of detours along the way, including the fact that it takes alot longer than you thought it would to become profitable.

Or it’s when you work really hard to get a new job, but it doesn’t really live up to your expectations.   And you have to figure out what to do next.

But maybe what deserves our attention most is what happens in-between these successes and less about the final results. Maybe it’s how we land after the small, medium-sized and even enormous failures that count most.

That notion of the in-between time, the period between successes, as well as the successes themselves crossed my mind as I discovered a recent column in AARP, The Magazine (November-December 2010.)  Written by veteran journalist, author and former Today television correspondent Jane Pauley, the column explores the connection between setbacks and opportunities.  Regarding her short-lived daytime talk show in 2004, she says, “Before The Jane Pauley Show even started, I told my kids that its odds weren’t great but that my definition of success was having the courage to try.”

That willingness to try is on display in Pauley’s current latest effort, Your Life Calling part of a Today-AARP collaboration. Her monthly show segments include interviews with people who are reinventing their lives.

To check out the next segment, tune into Today on Tuesday, October 19th between 8 and 9 a.m. Eastern.  Previous broadcasts can be found at aarp.org/jane.

What’s your “messy success” story?  Did you learn anything about how to be successful from a setback?  Leave a comment below, or email me at heathertaylormedia@gmail.com.

How do we become lovable, or at least customer-friendly?

In the case of the company Sweetgreen, it might just have to do with telling your story in a really vivid way.

Sweetgreen’s story even sometimes includes parking tickets.

The impact of receiving a parking ticket, along with experiencing other inconveniences both have alot to do with the way the DC-based company thinks.

Sweetgreen, which sells frozen yogurt and salads to its customers has increased its revenue more than 300 percent since its creation three years ago, according to the New York Times. In a city full of competitors offering similar fare, Sweetgreen has managed to figure out ways to clarify and spread its fully-formed philosophy — “random acts of sweetness” — in a way that’s designed to get its customers talking about–and buying its products.  Here’s a sample of how it thinks:

“If you biked to work on a rainy day or received a parking ticket, you may have experienced our random acts of sweetness. It’s a mini movement that we created to make your rainy day brighter, or your mood a little lighter. Usually in form of a green envelope containing a gift card, our goal is to share the sweetgreen happiness to our community – no matter how big or small.”

In the often crowded, parking space-challenged Georgetown area of Washington, DC, the idea of returning to your vehicle and finding a parking ticket may be frustrating, but probably not entirely unexpected. On the other hand, returning to your car and finding a gift card from Sweetgreen attached to your windshield, positioned beside that nasty ticket–well now there’s something that can at least take the sting out of the fine.  And maybe give you a reason to patronize Sweetgreen.

At least until you have to write the check for the parking ticket.

(For more about Sweetgreen and ways businesses use stories to market our products and services, check out M P Mueller’s fascinating blogpost in the New York Times. (ttp://tinyurl.com/2eb8gyl)

What do you think of Sweetgreen’s approach to increasing its customer base?  What would it take to get you to try a new product or think more favorably about a new company?  Leave a comment below, or email me at heathertaylormedia@gmail.com.

That question quickly came to mind while reading Justin Fox’s interview with Robert C. Pozen, in the Harvard Business Review. And although you may have never heard of him, Pozen has alot of useful advice to offer the rest of us when it comes to being more productive, to getting things done. (To read the interview in its entirety, check out http://s.hbr.org/ded4S.)

Pozen used to have two full time jobs, one as chairman of an investment management company and as a senior lecturer teaching a full class load at Harvard Business School. Now he’s become the chairman emeritus of the company, but still teaches at HBS, takes on alot of writing and speaking assignments, serves on corporate boards and provides support to a variety of non-profit groups.  (For argument’s sake, let’s call Pozen wildly successful.)

What I found so fascinating about the interview is how Pozen, clearly a very intelligent and professionally accomplished person, relies so heavily on preparation.  It’s as if he’s decided that intelligence and competence can take you only so far if you don’t plot out your path and make it routine.  He behaves like someone who views preparation and routine like a driver who’s chosen to put his car on cruise control or a pilot who chooses to put her plane on autopilot to ensure that he or she gets the desired outcome.  No leaving things to chance.

And it’s nothing complicated.  “Every night I look over a schedule of exactly what I’m going to do the next day…I’ll write down a few words about what I want to get accomplished,” says Pozen.  “Then, on the same page as the schedule, I’ll compose a list of tasks that I want to get done that day, in order of priority.  As the day goes by, I check off the tasks that are completed.  At the end of the day, I review the ones not done and decide when I should do them in the future — or to delete them if circumstances have changed.”

Those are the basics.  Pozen also describes how he adapts when his schedule changes unexpectedly and how including a 30 minute nap in his daily regimen improves his performance.  (To hear another advocate of napping at work, check out the Tony Schwartz interview from the Money Matters & More radio show.  Click on the media player on the right side of this page.)

What do you think?  Is Robert Pozen’s approach too simple to work for you?  If so, let us know what’s missing in his plan of action?

(Photo:  readyaimorganize.com)