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

Relationship-Based Sales for Non Sales People

Everyone in every role needs to sell.  Even if just getting coworkers, friends or spouses to compromise with your ideas, you can benefit from some simple sales techniques.

I never intended to be a sales person.  I was so annoyed by the mall kiosk sales people that trick their potential customers that I used to even doubt the value of sales people at all.  Sales people were (in my mind) people that sought commissions at the expense of everyone else.  Though I still think that some sales people take that approach, I've very much enjoyed the last three years that I have spent as a sales person.  I want to share some basic insights that have universal application even to people that aren't paid on commission. Similar to my topic from a previous post, the best opportunities go to those that are comfortable talking with others and

Walking away from "Good"

It's been official for a couple of weeks now, although the paper work was just put in place last Friday. The announcement was made to the team this morning, and the job posting will likely hit LinkedIn this afternoon. Let me know if you know anyone that would be a good Tektronix account manager in New Mexico because I'm quitting my job.

I'll be joining a couple of friends at Epimedia.  At this point there are four of us full time with a couple of contract programmers.  We write software to control hardware.  

I've alluded in my blog posts to the fact that

What are you working towards?

I've been enjoying Tony Hsieh's memoir Delivering Happiness about how he grew and sold LinkExchange and then grew and sold Zappos.  In the book, he describes the deal that he made with Microsoft as part of the LinkExchange sale.  His portion of the sale would be $40 million.  He received 80% at closing, but to help with the transition, he was required to stay with the company for one year to receive the remaining 20%.  At first, he dutifully went to work and sat around checking email and taking long lunch breaks as he put in his time.  After a short period of time he realized how bored he was, and realized how

Buy the book

I've read or listened to about 25 books this year.  I can't get into fiction books, so they've all been business/management/marketing/motivation/sales/entrepreneurship books.  The most influential book I've read this year, no question, has been Seth Godin's Poke the Box.  (I wrote a little summary of it here.) Amazon has cut the price of the book to

Get off the bunny hill

The temptation to stay on the bunny hill
The bunny hill is the nearly flat run closest to the parking lot at every ski resort in the world.  Bunny hills are designed for first timers to have a relatively safe place to learn how to use their bindings, control their edges and use chairlifts. 

The temptation of the bunny hill is to get stuck in an endless loop of taking one more run before moving to the advanced runs.

Catching edges forever
 The problem with waiting until you are ready to move up is that you may never be ready.  You can refine and practice and focus, and you'll still occasionally lose your balance and fall. The non-intuitive truth of snowboarding is that it is actually easier to stay in control at higher speeds.  At reaaaaally low speeds, it's tough to stay on one edge or the other. 

Learn the basics, then get to the steeps
The bunny hill has an important role.  It's good to practice getting on