One Red Hot Country Mama!

Followers of this blog will know that for the past three years, I have been running my own marketing consulting business (at www.convertinnovations.com). During that time, I have had clients of all sizes, worked on interesting projects, and have tripled the business, then shrunk it down again. I have learned a lot of lessons in my years as an entrepreneur, and I would like to take the opportunity to share them:

• Not all entrepreneurs are these amazing inspirational people. Some people are entrepreneurs because they cannot get a regular job, or they can’t stick with one. I went into it with this idealized view of people who chose the independent route, not realizing that many are there because they have no other choice, and many are totally not inspirational at all. Also, a lot of entrepreneurs idolize large companies, rather than seeing small enterprises as the best.
• Employees will never care about your business as much as you do. No matter how good someone is in interviews or discussions about a job, they will never be as invested. I realized that it is much better to work with complimentary and equal people, rather than having a full-time employee.
• It is not impossible to do business with friends and family, but it can complicate the relationship. Although it is fun to work with friends at first, it can be challenging as well in terms of maintaining the friend-side of that relationship.
• As an entrepreneur, you have a lot of freedom, but you also have a lack of security. Even accounts that seem rock-solid for years can change with no warning. It is important to keep your eyes open at all times for new opportunities in case this happens.
• The vast majority of business owners in Canada are white men. If you are thinking of entrepreneurship as a way to change the status quo in terms of our established social hierarchy, it is not that easy.
• Finally, always get payment up-front with new clients! If they are too cheap to pay up-front, you never know if you will get payment later.

So – as you can probably gather, some of these lessons were difficult, YET, I still want to be an entrepreneur. Especially now that my son is born, being a work-from-home person gives me opportunity to be “out there” doing cool stuff, but also, I have time to be with my son as much as possible.

For my next steps, I think I will continue consulting, but mix in other opportunities, such as teaching, developing iPad apps and building a non-profit or a think tank. I want to give back to the world more, and that what is there now is still not enough. Onward we go!

I am reading the biography of Mohammad Yunus, the father of Micro credit with much interest. At the heart of Micro credit (advancing small loans to people with no credit history or capital) is the idea that the poor can lift themselves out of their own circumstances using entrepreneurship.

This is counter to how some see the poor -  people who do not want to work. Others see the poor as victims of the flaws or inequality in the system – that the poor are especially powerless to change. The approach is then to pump more money into the system to give the poor a chance. Essentially, there are two options – either you go to work for someone or you accept hand-outs. Yunus is putting forward a third option – being self-employed.

In Micro credit programs undertaken in the US for example, Yunus said that there was disincentive to become entrepreneurs from the government in the form of reduction in welfare payments and other welfare benefits. He also says the administrative burden of businesses in the West is high, making it difficult for non-professional to start businesses. Any entrepreneurship programs that do exist, are based on training which he thinks is not necessary

In Canada in particular, I find there is a general distrust of business, and people with conscience want to stay away. He makes an interesting point:

I am not a capitalist in the simplistic left/right sense. But I do believe in the power of the global free-market economy and in using capitalist tools. I believe in the power of the free market and the power of capital in the marketplace. I also believe that providing unemployment benefits is not the best way to address poverty. The able-bodied poor don’t want or need charity. The dole only increases their misery, robs them of incentive and, more important, of self-respect.*

He continues on a justification of using private-sector means to help the poor:

We can condemn the private sector for all its mistakes, but we cannot justify why we ourselves are not trying to change things, not trying to make things better by participating in the economy. The private sector, unlike the government, is open to everyone, even those not interested in making a profit.

The challenge I set before anyone who condemns the private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?

I agree with his point. The government is very hierarchical and naturally authoritative, where as entrepreneurship is free and creative.

I am proposing two changes to this basic feature of capitalism. The first change relates to this overblown image of the capitalist entrepreneur. To me, an entrepreneur is not an especially gifted person. I rather take the reverse view. I believe that all human beings are potential entrepreneurs. Some of us get the opportunity to express this talent, but many of us never get the chance because we were made to imagine that an entrepreneur is someone enormously gifted and different from ourselves.

If all of us started to view every single human being, even the barefooted one begging in the street as a potential entrepreneur, man or woman to explore his or her economic potential, the old wall between entrepreneurs and laborers would disappear. It would become a matter of personal choice whether an individual wanted to become an entrepreneur or a wage earner.

Who would have thought… an almost Marxist justification of entrepreneurship. I obviously don’t think that Micro credit and entrepreneurship are the catch-all solutions to global poverty. The political issues such as corruption and wars, environmental issues and system, race and gender inequalities still exist and contribute to the problem. But I find Yunus’s approach a refreshing contribution to solving the poverty problem.

*All references are from pages 205-207 of Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus. 

I am pleased to announce that I launched my business website this week! You can find it at:

www.convertinc.com

I actually have been in business for two months, but I have been so busy with customers that I haven’t had time to focus on branding – which is a great problem to have. Thanks to my two best friends from highschool for creating my logo and my name .

I was at the Indigo bookstore at the Manulife Center the other night watching an interview Heather Reisman, CEO of Chapters/Indigo interview Gerald Schwartz, Chairman and CEO of Onex Corporation. The talk was about entrepreneuralism, and I found both of them very inspiring. Heather talked about how life is long, so even if you can’t "have it all" right now, you can have it all in your lifetime – citing that she started her company, Indigo, when she was 48.

Gerry was a realist – admitting that he worried about the risks that took and about the mistakes that he made. He also mentioned that when assessing a risk, he spent much more of his time weighing the potential pitfalls in the risk, rather than the potential upside, which I found to be very good advice for an entrepreneur.

Perhaps since Heather and Gerry are married, a questioner at the end of the interview said something to the effect that "behind every great man is a great woman", to which Gerry replied:

I don’t think that is true. Some entrepreneurs are single. Some are homosexual. Some are women themselves. But, I will tell you about how great it is to have a partner.

I thought this was a wonderful response, because Gerry as an older, straight man could have taken the traditional route and waxed poetic about his wife and her supporting role in his life. Although his statement did not reflect the reality and questioning the fairness that a woman is ‘behind’ a man, I thought that his answer was a great step in the right direction.

Well – it is official – yesterday was my last day working for my major client, which means for the first time in my 10-year career that I am not working full-time or contract for a major corporation (the smallest place I have worked is 2,100 employees). I packed my personal stuff away and am moving the desk in my home office to some space I leased downtown (King and Spadina)… one employee (myself) so far.

Now, I am starting a Web Marketing consultancy called Convert Marketing which focuses on strategically using Web Marketing in a number of creative ways.  More information will follow as I build it (it will be a week or so). I am really excited about this new independent life.

To get inspiration, I am reading an excellent book right now called How She Does It by five-time CEO Margaret Heffernan. It is about the rise of women entrepreneurs. Between 1997 and 2006, privately held businesses owned by women grew at three times the rate of all American privately held firms. The book explores why so many women are starting their own companies. I find this comparison to immigrants fitting:

Women starting new businesses have something to prove. They may need to prove to themselves that the companies that undervalued them in the past were wrong. They may need to prove their idea is right or that they really can repay a personal loan. They may need to prove that their values, their instincts, and their natural ways of working are just as good and just as effective. It may be all those things. Such women have a lot of psychic skin in the game. In this respect, women entrepreneurs remind me of a new wave of immigrants: driven out of a land they found hostile, taking big risks in their determination to create a New World where they can succeed on their own terms. America was built by such pioneers and, today, its economy continues to be enriched by the fresh thinking of women who don’t accept defeat. *

Heffernan follows hundreds of female entrepreneurs and comments on their stories. Interestingly, when women start companies they tend to hire for diversity, unlike men:

Perhaps the greatest test of all of whether a culture is fair or not can be shown in its hiring. Men’s companies hire predominantly men. Women’ s businesses hire men and women equally. The same applies to their boards of directors: Women appoint men equally, while men favor themselves at a rate of three to one. This may be because, having been on the receiving end of discriminatory hiring, women are determined to not repeat the mistake. **

So – more women-owned companies are better for all women! Hopefully mine will be too. To the New World I go .

*Pg 10-11 of this edition
**Pg 80