Entrepreneurial Job Hunting

I'm current looking for a job. Not the lot of an entrepreneur you say. Not so I say. Job hunting is an entrepreneurial activity. "Entrepreneur" used to mean one who organizes military expeditions. Looking for a job has a lot of parallels with undertaking military expeditions and with undertaking a company. I have organized an enterprise called "Tim's Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe."

So how am I being entrepreneurial?

I have to craft my voice. That defines how I differ from the kajillions of other searchers out there. It defines how I present myself and what kind of job I'm willing to accept. I know what my voice is (or what I want it to be) but it's taken me a few months to figure out how to make that manifest in an employment search context.

I have analyzed my assets and liabilities. My assets are my health, my education, my varied and interesting background, my curiosity, lots of connections and so forth. My looks not so much. I don't have a lot of money which means hiring a fee-based employment agency is out. I wouldn't do it anyway. I have a lot of other non-pecuniary assets but I won't go into them.

A big liability is my age. So I have to go for positions in which my age is an asset. Senior this or that. There are problems there I won't go into either. There are more but you get the picture.

I have figured out what resources you have at your disposal. This puts parameters on my job search.

I have figured out what I have to offer. This tells you what I'm "selling."

I know how long you have to look. If you have 5 years to look you can be pickier than if you have to have one within the month.

And so on and so on.

The problem with job searching is that the way it is usually done is that the searcher places himself or herself in a supplicant position. Prostitutes are placed in a supplicant position. He or she has in the back of his or her mind, "Please Mr. Employer, won't you take on poor little pitiful me?" This is depressing to the searcher and what employer wants to hire a down-in-the-mouth person.

You have to have to put yourself on a level with your potential employer. You have to have a plan and a way of showing the person you have something to offer. Maybe you have something to offer that that person didn't even know he needed.

You have to have a plan. You have to know what your objective is because these days you have to put it on your resume. A goal has been called a dream with a date attached. You have to know where you are now. You have to identify the things that have to happen before you can successfully find one. And you have to determine the actions steps you will take to make sure those things come to pass. You have to market your product (a.k.a. you) and have to have an evaluation period at which time you will evaluate your progress.

It helps to have a coach. I have one, but he doesn't really have a good idea of what a mentor or coach is. Fortunately I'm pretty much self-directed and a self-starter.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Attributes

An attribute is something that defines a property of something. People have attributes. A person is tall, short, fat, thin, smart, dumb, good looking, ugly, atletic, so on.

Objects have attributes. A car is blue, a convertible or an SUV, gets good gas mileage, is expensive or not, and so forth.

If you're in business, what are the attributes of your products? How do you rank against competitors on attributes that are important to people. It doesn't matter if your product is the best there is if no one cares about it. On the other hand, it does matter if your product is worst at things that do matter to people. And the value people place on specific product attributes can change. People use to value brand names. Now they value price, accessibility, ease of use, and convenience.

So attributes are important. Attributes matter to people in selecting a mate and they matter when they decide which product or service they decide to use.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

Word-of-mouth is what is generated when someone talks about somebody else. Somebody gets excited about something they saw on TV or bought and tells a friend, and they "catch" the excitement and go out and buy it too.Word-of-mouth marketing is the art of generating positive word of mouth, harnessing excitement around the product or service, and riding it all the way to the bank.

Buzz, viral marketing, grassroots campaigns, blogs, influencers, social media, customer engagement, referral marketing, customer evangelism, reputation marketing-- all part of word-of-mouth marketing.

Positive word-of-mouth spreads like a disease, which is why viral marketing is such a great name for it.

There's negative word-of-mouth marketing too. The old chestnut that if someone has a good experience they tell two people but if they have a bad experience they tell ten is quite true even if the numbers aren't precise. It could be 3 and 7 or 1 and 10. Still, negative word of mouth can kill you. Think what the prospects are of a restaurant succeeding if a food critic shows up the first night and a cockroach walks across his table. Nada is what that place's prospects of success are.

Not everything spreads quickly. Some things spread faster than others. To read more about what spreads and what doesn't, there's a host of books. Or you can read the Wikipedia article on Word of Mouth and follow their links.

You want to generate lots of positive word of mouth. It will make you rich.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Little Red Hen Problem

I'm having a "little red hen" problem.

Over breakfast with an old CPA friend recently I outlined a business idea I wanted him to work with me to develop. A comment he made once had caused the idea to happen to me in the first place.

Yes I believe that ideas happen to people. If an idea happens to a person that person needs to decide whether he's the right person for the idea or not. If he isn't he should hand it off to someone else or drop it altogether.

Several months before our breakfast I'd emailed my friend what I was thinking about and he consented to have breakfast with me to discuss it. His response to my email led me to believe he was interested.

He offered me his thoughts and concerns. They were all important issues. Potential areas of exposure. Business focus. Recruiting protocols. The like.

I asked him to work with me to develop the idea. He said I should develop the idea myself. He'd be happy to work with any clients I steered his way but he didn't really have the energy to build the business. I was disappointed in his response because I expected he would be interested. I'm glad he was frank up front. This saved each of us a lot of time.

Too many people go ahead with something they're not really very excited about because they think they "should" or they don't want to disappoint the other person but back out later because they just can't sustain the effort for the long haul.

I thought of the little red hen going all around asking people if they would help her bake a loaf of bread. "Not me," each said. So she baked it and everybody wanted a piece of it. She finally ate the whole thing herself.

Teams are better than individuals because we all have just 24 hours in the day which means we can only do so much. This number doesn't vary by race, gender, or wealth. Bill Gates has as many hours in the day as Tim Bosworth. We can do so much by ourselves. But two of us have 48 hours in a day. Four have 96 and so on. Plus we benefit from synergy and the increased creativity.

Most innovations are produced by teams rather than by one person paddling his own canoe. That's why I want a team. I don't want to go off and bake the bread myself.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Assets

An asset is something from which one can derive a benefit. These include personal qualities such as charm or charisma. Assets also include social contacts, elevated social status from birth, or lots of money.

In a strictly accounting sense, an asset is defined as "a probable future economic benefit obtained or controlled by a particular entity as a result of a past transaction or event." This comes from Wikipedia the free on-line encyclopedia. You can to to Wikipedia or to any accounting textbook and you can get the scoop.

Assets are important because they allow you to do what you want to do. You can buy stuff, or cash in favors from others, or learn about things other people done. They create inefficiencies in the market which you can use to your benefit. They are one of the seven basic cash flow drivers.

When you contemplate going into business take inventory of your assets.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Triangulation

Triangulations means something specific in math but in business means synthesizing information from different sources. Collecting information on the same topic from different sources allows you to get a more valid measure of whatever you're measuring.

For example, if you want to measure audience attendance at a give event. You can get published data from an organization that counts attendees at different concerts. And you have estimates from people who were there and made crowd estimates.

Let's say the published data puts attendance at 335,000. Crowd estimates that were there put attendance at 322,000. They're not very far off. As long as they came from different sources, placing your estimate at 330 is sounder than either one of the sources alone.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Overhead and Operating Expenses

These days, Internet businesses can charge so much less than physical businesses because they have low overhead.

According to Wikipedia:

In business, overhead, overhead cost or overhead expense refers to an ongoing expense of operating a business (also known as Operating Expenses - rent, gas/electricity, wages etc). The term overhead is usually used to group expenses that are necessary to the continued functioning of the business, but cannot be immediately associated with the products/services being offered[1] (e.g. do not directly generate profits).

Overhead expenses are all costs on the income statement except for direct labor,direct materials & direct expenses. Overhead expenses include accounting fees, advertising, depreciation, insurance, interest, legal fees, rent, repairs, supplies, taxes, telephone bills, travel and utilities costs.

Overhead is what you have to keep as low as possible. After all, it's not what you make it's what you keep. It's a basic cash driver.

When you start a business, you want to start with spending as little money as possible. Many people come to me saying, "I'm starting a business and I need a loan." If you don't have sufficient resources to start a business without borrowing large sums of money, give serious consideration to not starting it. The last thing you want to do is go broke because you had to pay a bunch of interest before your business ever got going.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Your persona

"Persona," as defined by Wikipedia the free on-line encyclopedia defines a trade secret, is "a social role or a character played by an actor." It's a "second self created by the author and through whom the narrative is related." Your persona has a character structure which I blogged about on 6/14/2010. Read the Wikipedia entries and follow the links.

What has this got to do with entrepreneurship? Everything, actually. You have a persona "out there." What is it? You have a voice. It's either a carefully developed voice that communicates your uniqueness or you proceed mindlessly through life.

I've said the writing and entrepreneurship are different manifestations of the same thing. Understand who you are. Who you need to be. How you're communicating your uniqueness. You're an entrepreneur starting to work on establishing and growing a new business. You're a writer starting to work on a new story. What's the difference?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Trade Secrets

Wikipedia the free on-line encyclopedia defines a trade secret as

"A formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information which is not generally known or reasonably ascertainable, by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors or customers. In some jurisdictions, such secrets are referred to as "confidential information" or 'classified information'."

Go read the whole Wikipedia article and follow its links and google it and look at other sources.

Sometimes people who start businesses get so defensive about the "trade secrets" of their business they are unable to get people to help them. One guy came to our mentoring team asking if his idea was worth patenting. He wouldn't tell us what the idea was so we couldn't help him. I don't know how he expected us to help him. You have to share with people what you're doing before they can agree to help. If you find a reliable person to approach they're going to understand the need for keeping your idea under wraps.

Most ideas are not all that revolutionary anyway. The God is in the implementation. Not until you commercialize the idea will you show that there is value in them worth stealing. You're generating cash. If you've not created anything worth stealing yet you were to sue somebody for "stealing" your idea, you wouldn't win because you haven't created anything worth stealing.

Don't get me wrong. Once your business gets going and you've produced the value you need to protect your processes and products from poaching. But don't get too hung up on it at the start. Spend your time, money, and attention attracting a talented team to help you develop your idea and get it to market.

The thing that will help you is in the implementation, not just the idea behind it.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Character Structure

I pulled out of my stack today this descripton from Wikipedia of "character structure." There's a short article on it with references to Freud and others. You should read it.

It basically refers to what Martin Luther King called the "content of our character." It's indicated by how a person relates to himself, to others, and his environment. Is he or she self-centered, defensive, jealous, brave, timid, honest, etc.

The old TV program from the 1950s and 1960s about Wyatt Earp called him "brave, courageous, and true." The Boy Scouts has a number of other traits it markets. The U.S. Marine Corps calls them "the few, the proud, the Marines."

Animals have certain traits acribed to them. Rabbits are often seen as timid. Bears are ferocious. Dogs are friendly. Coyotes sneaky. On and on and on.

Writers talk about character structure when they craft their stories. A person's character acts like a box. Certain skills and abilities can be found in the box, others are outside of it. Over the course of a story we like to see a character grow the size of the box.

What's the content of your character? What's your brand? Are you brave, courageous, and true? Are you sneaky and timid and cowardly? What do other people think it is? What do you want it to be? What do you want to be remembered by?

Think about this before you go into business. Your voice is your announcing the content of your character to the world. Are the things you are doing and saying consistent with this voice, or are you telling people you're generous, but acting niggardly?

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Advertising

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, defines advertising as a "form of communication whose purpose is to inform potential customers about products and services and how to obtain and use them." Read the Wikipedia article and follow the links.

You can also go to any library or text book or the web and learn tons of stuff about it.

We all need to communicate and promote our businesses but we don't necessarily have to do advertising. Print advertising has diminished in importance as our society has changed and web-based adveritising expenditures has begun to outstrip them. Internet advertising is either way ahead of print advertising or soon will be. Advertising on social media sites has moved up as well. Facebook is or was the 5th largest country in the world or will be.

I think of advertising as different from other forms of communication in that the business pays for specific messages. For example it pays a media outlet $X for N number of spots. If that same business stages a rock concert and pastes its corporate name all over everything it's something else, public relations probably.

If the business hosts a dinner at which a prominent person has paid to give a pitch for his business, the dinner is probably part of a public relations campaign, but the speaker is advertising. A thin line, but you get the point.

Be very careful what kind of promotion you do. You should have a tight business plan and sound monetization strategy. Then watch your expenses, be pretty confident it's going to get results, then make sure you get good advertising that doesn't break you and measure, measure measure. Any good advertising plan will have an evaluation strategy. If it's not paying off after X number of months or years, you rethink your approach and make appropriate adjustments.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Trying to Fill the Bag from the Wrong End

This past week I talked with an associate I've know for several years. He's very smart and very articulate. He's got an idea for a business and has been wandering around from mentor to mentor finding no satisfaction.

He's come up with a solution and is looking for a problem to solve. Seems to me he's trying to fill a bag from the bottom, which is closed off, rather than from the top, which is open. You can try bag after bag but if you approach each one from the wrong end, you'll be ultimately unsuccessful. Turn the bag right side up and some of your stuff will fit in, maybe all of it if your bag is big enough.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Accounts Receivable

Accounts feceivable is another one of the cash-flow drivers of any business, whether General Motors or Corner Drugstore LLC. Managing accounts receivable is as important as managing accounts payable in keeping your business afloat.

Accounts payable are those funds you owe other people. Accounts receivable is what they owe you. Once you sell something to somebody, every day you don't get paid is lost money. In fact measuring the number of days people take to pay you you is critical.

A friend of mine who does forensic architecture has insurance companies for almost all of his clients. They take on average 180 days to pay. It's like lending money to your customers.

You should do everything you can to get payments in the door. But if a customer is in trouble, work out something with him so that at least you get some of your money. Be nice, you might need him some day.

Sometimes it helps to charge a service fee for payments outstanding after some number of days. Or you might offer a discount for early payment. You may not be able to enforce it in court, but it might encourage customers to pay you earlier.

The biggest problem with small businesses is that they don't send bills out in a timely fashion. Once a service is provided or a product is sold, get a bill out to them. Our accountant still hasn't billed us. We want to pay him, but we need a bill because we don't know what to pay. Don't let that happen to you.

You can look up accounts receivable on Wikipedia or go to any accounting book or website and it will tell you all about them.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Accounts Payable

Accounts Payable is one of the cash-flow drivers of any business, whether General Motors or Corner Drugstore LLC. Managing accounts payable is key to keeping your business afloat.

Accounts payable are those funds you owe other people. You have to pay your bills or you can't live. And if your supplier charges you interest on late payments, too many late payments can at best amount to a drain on your cash or at best can drive you under, particularly when the bills are owed to the government.

Late fees on credit cards and NSF charges on checks will also kill you.

To be successful you have to manage your accounts payable consistently and appropriately. I use my credit card to manage my finances. I make sure I pay off my balance every month by the due date. Without fail. I pay on line to that I can wait until the last minute to pay. That lets me know that the payment has been made when it's made. If I mail it in I have to wait 2 weeks to make sure it gets posted. Sure, they'll probably wave off the penalties, but that's needless headache. Plus you have to write out a check and and pay for a stamp.

I have to make sure I know when that payment is due because they can slip in an early due date me. And if the payment comes on a Sunday, they may not pull the money out until Monday and then charge me. This month the 24th is a Thursday so I'm cool.

It's normally the 24th but one month it was the 22nd. If I'd missed that one I'd have to pay $40 for a late payment plus interest on the money. I don't keep a very high balance so the interest wouldn't have been much but since my balance payable is normally below $300, that $40 amounts to more than 10% of the payment.

The secret is, if your supplier is charging you interest from the date you incur the charge, pay the balance as soon as possible. If your supplier is not charging you interest, delay payment as long as possible, but make sure you pay on time so you keep good credit.

My dad's father, who owned and operated a hardware store in Cleveland, always told him he'd have lost his store if he hadn't kept good credit so that when times were tough his suppliers cut him some slack. Good advice.

You can look up accounts payable on Wikipedia or go to any accounting book or website and it will tell you all about accounts payable.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

The Accounting Equation

Whether we run General Motors or our own independent sole proprietorship we need to know the basic accounting equation.

Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia says this about it:

[It]is the foundation for the double-entry bookkeeping system. It shows how assets were financed: either by borrowing money from someone (liability) or by paying your own money (ownership equity).
Assets = Liabilities + (Shareholders or Owners equity

The formula can be rewritten: Assets - Liabilities = (Shareholders or Owners equity)Now it shows owner's interest is equal to property (assets) minus debts (liabilities). Since in a company owners are shareholders, owner's interest is called shareholder's equity. Every accounting transaction affects at least one element of the equation, but always balances.

This covers everything from acquisition of a major corporate asset to buying a cup of coffee at your local neighborhood caffeine den.

Before you spend any money on anything, think what you'll get in return for it. If the return isn't justified, don't spend the money. If buying coffee gives you $3 of enjoyment or allows you to relax or think a little differently, go for it. Also think what else you could do with that $3 which might return more than that.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

The Sounder Principle, or, Don't Get Too Comfortable

In the film Sounder from the ‘70s about a poor black farm family in Louisiana during the 1920s, the father played by Paul Warfield has just returned from a stint on a work farm.

In has absence his son developed an opportunity to go away to school. His father returns from prison and the son doesn’t want to go because he wants to be with his dad. The son relents after his father tells him he just can't get to used to being in that town or he’ll never achieve.

Though the context is different isn’t this the way it is for us today? We are that son who must not get too comfortable where we are because that very comfortableness blinds us to the fact that the world is changing around us and we’ll be left behind if we stay back doing the same thing we’ve always done in the same way we always did it.

This is a wonderful film for many other reasons as well. If you haven't seen it, rent it. The scene when the father arrives home is worth a lifetime.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Cyberspace and the New Frontier

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 advanced an important historical thesis: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner saw specific benefits of the frontier and raised questions about the future of American development once the frontier closed. This thesis has reemerged in writings about the Internet. According to Jeffrey R. Cooper (2000) “the opening of cyberspace is nothing less than the reopening of the American frontier, an undoing of the Turner Hypothesis (2001).” Who says there's no future in history.If you want citations write me.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

"What's a Book?"

In an I-pad ad recently, one of the characters says, “What’s a book?” That caught my attention. The book will soon go the way of the “ice box.” It will be much more like an I-pad and we’ll just call it a book. But it won’t be an I-pad either.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Benefits of Unpredictability

I always need to be put in situations not of my making. Formulating a plan and keeping to it is important but confronting unpredictability shakes me out of my normal routine and provides a valid test of whether the routine I have made for myself really works for me.

This weekend I attended my stepdaughter's wedding. It was a Jewish wedding and I stood under the Houpa (sp?) to support her union with my son-in-law. It was wonderful. I had never been to a Jewish wedding before.

Also, it was in a park on the Chesapeake Bay and took place over 4 days. A big four-day party. And there was an element which was very unpleasant which I had to deal with each of the 4 days. I won't go into it. How I dealt with it was a measure of myself to myself.

I would not have chosen to take a vacation at that time. But it was what it was and I went. I've come back with clearer ideas about what I should be doing and wondering about whether I have beend doing what I have been doing in the best way. I'm not sure I would have thought about that had I not been dragged away when I was.

So here I am easing back into my life. But it will be different than my previous life.

My goal here is to connect entrepreneurs with the individuals, groups, or information they need to climb all the way to the top. How am I doing?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.