Career Advice from Hunger Games

I was pretty surprised at how much I liked seeing the Hunger Games.  I admit that I had pretty low expectations for a movie based on a book written for teenagers.  I expected wooden acting and few surprises.  I was impressed with how developed the different locations were, although I admit I'm less excited for the future knowing now that we'll all end up as flamboyant ravers.

Once Haymitch came out of his (somewhat cliche) drunken state, his first piece of advice to the young protagonist was remarkably insightful.  "Make people LIKE you." That's good advice to all of us.

I've written before about the importance of relationships with other people and how maintaining the trust of other people is critical to persuading people, but not a lot is ever said about how to actually get people to like you in the first place.  I want to outline two things

Something I tried

So, in keeping with my theme for this last year of trying new things, I finally tried something that took a year of effort.

I'll skip the whole story about how difficult it was to organize and how stressful it has made the last month and jump right to the satisfying end: I organized a group of five other business owners and local professionals to give an hour-long presentation at a nearby high school.  Having seen from the teenagers at my church that high-school students are given pretty poor career advice ("Do what you love" and not much else,) I have started a crusade to transfer career advice from those that hold it

How I'll grow my business

It's that sticky place for small businesses. It's that point where the owner has plenty of work to keep him/her busy, but he/she isn't quite ready to bring on more help.  The business is reactionary.  The appointment calendar is booked for the near-term, but beyond the next month or the next quarter or the next contract, business is uncertain.

This is such a common problem for small business owners that I want to share what my strategy is for getting a company to the next stage. 

To give the context, I just started with a small company called Epimedia that does contract work for other companies. Epimedia writes software that makes hardware work. I am now one of four full-time employees of the company.  All of the contracts up to now have come from word-of-mouth. Every year has seen more revenue than the previous year, but the work can be exhausting as we continuously work at our maximum capacity.  We enjoy the luxury of high enough revenues that I can focus some attention on proactively finding new business.  The following is an outline of what I plan to do to find new business:

0. Be sincere
As I mentioned in