Stressed? Don't Take a Vacation

Getting away may seem like the perfect solution to chronic stress, but the author of a new book says the counterintuitive truth is you're better off staying home.

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It's summer and the sun is shining outside your office window.

Starting and running a business is hard work, so it's no surprise that you may register your stress, check out the weather, and conclude this is a great time to take a vacation.

As sensible as this train of thought sounds, science suggests that the chronically stressed may be wrong in thinking that the best medicine is to get on a plane and see someplace new.

That's according to John Coates, author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust. He took to Fast Company recently to explain that our hard-wired instincts when it comes to stress may actually often cause us to take actions that make the situation worse.

Distinguishing between short-term fatigue brought on less than inspirational tasks and chronic stress, Coates goes on to suggest that when faced with the latter, our natural impulses often betray us. He writes:

When we are mired in stress, what we desperately need to do is minimize the novelty in our lives. We need familiarity. But quite often we seek out the exact opposite, responding to chronic stress at work, for example, by taking a vacation in some exotic place, thinking that the change of scenery will do us good. And under normal circumstances it does. But not when we are highly stressed, because then the novelty we encounter abroad can just add to our physiological load. Instead of traveling, we may be better off remaining on home turf, surrounding ourselves with family and friends, listening to familiar music, watching old films. Exercise, of course, can help, in fact there are few things better at preparing our physiology for stress. But when someone is this far into chronic stress its effects, suggests behavorial psychologist Stephen Porges, are mostly analgesic, possibly because exercise treats us to a shot of natural opioids. Again, what we really need is familiarity.

Familiar voices and happy faces let our brain stem know that fight-or-flight is not needed. If you are blessed with a calm family and friends whose fortunes are uncorrelated with your own, it can help enormously in times of stress just to look into their faces and listen to their happy voices, rather than staring at your BlackBerry, gnawing on your fingernails and ruminating over past outrages.

This is advice that will ring true to anyone who has gone on a much anticipated vacation only to feel, after they've returned, that they need a vacation from their vacation to really de-stress before returning refreshed to their normal routine. So next time your business has frayed your nerves, think about resisting your understandable impulse to flee and instead consider cocooning yourself closer to home with the most familiar and soothing aspects of your life.

If you're curious about Coates's cure for short-term fatigue (which might also surprise you), check out the full article.

Have you had the experience of a supposedly stress-reducing holiday actually further jangling your nerves?

 

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London with interests in unconventional career paths, generational differences, and the future of work. She has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch, GigaOM, and Brazen Careerist. @EntryLevelRebel

What a Start-up CEO Really Does

Sound like a glamorous title? In the early days of building a company, it's anything but.

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After a recent talk at a conference, a young man walked up to me and proclaimed to me, "I want to be a CEO, too!"

I just about spewed the coffee I was drinking all over him. I asked him, "Do you know what that means?"

"Well, maybe you can tell me. You are the CEO of your company. How do I become one?"

Oy.

Titles are loaded and, in a start-up, they don't really mean much of anything--even if they do create the illusion to the outside world that you have taken on a certain role. The truth is, if I were to list my actual title it would be:

Tara Hunt:
junior designer, marketing manager, PR manager, copywriter, blogger, product manager, assistant, business development associate, janitor, event coordinator, HR manager, gopher, researcher, analyst, strategic planner, fundraiser, etc.

The past two weeks, I've been elbow deep in Photoshop, laying out new Web pages based on specs provided from our hired design team. We could only afford to have a small number of pages laid out and the general specs defined. To save money, I took over from there. For the month prior to SXSW, I coordinated our Beauty Bar Event, which included designing the schwag to specifications provided by the printing company (good thing I have experience with InDesign and Illustrator and have done print work before), budgeting with the vendors, coordinating staff, raising sponsorships, designing the schedule and layout, and marketing the event.

Quite often I'm researching and writing blog posts, putting together pitch decks, pitching, writing job descriptions, interviewing, doing PR outreach, managing the Web community, emptying the waste bins in our office, and cleaning the bathroom because we don't have the budget for a cleaner.

I'm lucky because I get to share responsibilities with my two co-founders, but I know CEOs who take on coding, budgeting, tax accounting, etc. on top of my stuff.

So, what does a start-up CEO do? Everything except for what you'd imagine a CEO of a company doing. Sure, when you start to grow a company, you can also delegate, which is very much more Chief-Executive-ish, but before that happens? You want something done, you need to do it.

What Start-up CEOs Don't Do

I will tell you what a start-up CEO doesn't do, though. We don't collect a big paycheck, we don't leave at 5 p.m., we don't get weekends or holidays or vacation days. We don't get bonuses, we rarely get kudos, and we certainly don't get a big, gorgeous corner office and a secretary. We don't get power, prestige, or any level of stability or certainty. But we continue to build and do this day in and day out. And we look forward to actually earning a title that means we're in charge, capable, and responsible for the future of our companies.

So what did I say back to the enthusiastic young man who wanted to be a CEO?

"You become a CEO when you've earned the title. I'm still a long ways from earning mine, but with hard work and sacrifice, I know I'll get there."

He didn't look satisfied with my answer.

Tara Hunt is the CEO & co-founder of Buyosphere and previously worked with over 30 startups, including Like.com (acquired by Google in 2010). She wrote the bestseller, The Power of Social Networking. @missrogue

Now We're Internet Guys. Go Figure!

The founders of WinesTilSoldOut.com, Elliot and Joseph Arking, explain how they did it.

Bill Cramer

Elliot and Joseph Arking, 62 and 54, owned restaurants, bars, and two liquor stores in suburban Philadelphia when they got the idea to start a big-box arts-and-crafts chain. It failed, and by 2000, they were forced to sell off everything but the liquor stores. The brothers figured they would return to the simple shopkeepers' life for good. Little did they know that within 10 years, they would be running a $50 million flash-sale site. As told to Burt Helm.

Elliot: I had no interest in a Web store. It just seemed like a waste of time to me.

Joseph: That's when my son came to me and showed me a site...

Elliot: Wine-WOOT!

Joseph: Not Wine-Woot. Woot.com.

Elliot: I think they were the first flash site.

Joseph: They were putting electronics and stuff on at 12 o'clock, and when it was sold out, the site just shut itself down. It was becoming very cultish. We liked it.

Elliot: We had a lot of wine we had purchased opportunistically. It was a container from Australia, with great stuff. That became some of the first product we put on the Web.

Joseph: We built this one-at-a-time site.

Elliot: We paid a company to build it. We didn't even have a high-speed Web connection.

Joseph: We tested all kinds of stuff, with freight or without freight cost included, then a whole bunch of different-size packs...

Elliot: Two-packs!

Joseph: We did a whole bunch of different stuff...

Elliot: A mystery pack!

Joseph: ...to see what was going to sell.

Elliot: We made every mistake conceivable. Selling the wrong stuff...

Joseph: Using the wrong packaging...

Elliot: Broken bottles!

Heating bottles by mistake...

Elliot: Putting the wrong stuff on the site. I was writing all this copy for the Web, which is not easy to do.

Joseph: Eventually, we realized that four bottles was about as much as you could sell a customer of any one wine, and they wanted free shipping. And we guaranteed every bottle we sold. If somebody was unsatisfied, I would send an e-mail with a letter of apology, and we would give an instant refund.

Elliot: The best customer service is not asking somebody to pay for something.

Joseph: Then it started to grow. I would say, relatively quickly.

3 Ways to Make Change Happen

Great ideas don't offer much if you can't put them into action. Use these key rules to make change happen.

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Recently I wrote about companies that end up with a "Museum of Good Ideas." The problem many organizations face is not that they lack for great, transformational ideas--but that they can't get those ideas to catch fire and develop momentum.

One of my friends, Tricia Emerson, co-wrote the book on overcoming one of the core obstacles to idea implementation: the resistance to change. In The Change Book, she outlined some great ways to get companies of any size to accelerate the pace of change.

Many companies, she argues, make big changes in technology, organization charts, compensation, marketing plans and other initiatives, yet just send an email and expect the organization to change automatically. She and her co-author, Mary Stewart, argue that successful change requires the following must-have ingredients.

Get Executive Management on Message

Management communications should be short, clear and consistent when explaining the reason for the change. Slick, multi-page program overview documents are not nearly as compelling as a direct statement, delivered with conviction. And there can't be any light showing among the management team on this change: You need a united front to get employee buy-in.

Position the Change

If you want acceptance of a new idea, position it in such a way that busy people with competing priorities can process quickly. Here are three possible positions:

• Force the change by eliminating the old system. This can be aggressive, but allowing parallel systems for a long transition doesn't ease the pain; it just delays it.
• Create context choices that favor the change. People need a framework to evaluate against. A great example comes from Williams-Sonoma, which developed a bread machine with a roughly $200 price point--the first of its kind. It didn't sell too well, however, until they put out a roughly $300 bread machine. Then the $200 versions flew off the shelves, because people had something to compare it to--they needed a frame of reference to determine if it was a good value.
• Frame consequences in a negative context. Show the alternative to change as being even scarier. We know that people need to understand the upside to be interested, but the downside in order to change.

Make It Safe & Celebrate Success

There is a risk to making change with a certain draconian feel. You don't want to rob people of a positive experience; you just want to ensure you get results.

You create the positive experience when people feel that the implementation is controlled, the process was similar to other implementations, and that success gets celebrated at the key milestones, as well as in the end result. This is where project leadership and communication have the greatest impact.

Take a minute and think of the last year in your company. Consider technology, markets, pricing, people, organization charts, operating parameters and so on: How many changes did you make? If you are like the vast majority of companies in the U.S., you have a long list.

People are change-weary, yet these changes are often in response to a world that is changing even faster. If you want to continue to be ahead of the curve in your marketplace, becoming more effective and accelerating change will offer you a competitive advantage.

Author, speaker and consultant Tom Searcy is the foremost expert in large account sales. With Hunt Big Sales, he's helped clients land more than $5 billion in new sales. Click to get Tom's weekly tips, or to learn more about Hunt Big Sales. @tomsearcy

How to Start a Business Without Really Trying

Threadless co-founder Jake Nickell didn't aim to build a wildly popular online t-shirt shop. But that's what he did--by thinking of the community first and the business second.

How is it possible for a 20-year-old Indonesian designer, who has never been to the U.S., to get his t-shirt designs in stores like Gap?

A company called Threadless.

I've known about Threadless, which is an e-commerce site for user-generated t-shirt designs, for a while. But recently I was able to visit the company's headquarters in Chicago. As I spoke to founder Jake Nickell, I was struck by how Threadless became a business. He said the initial goal was to "give the creative minds of the world more opportunities to make and sell great art." There was no business plan, no marketing scheme, no sales goals--just a desire to support a community.

Well, those creative minds did come together--2.1 million of them--and as they made and sold great art, Threadless became a profitable business that sells millions of t-shirts every year and shines a spotlight on unknown designers around the world.

Nickell didn't set out to build a company around a social good but that's what happened.

Here's how he did it:

Solve the Problem First

In college, Nickell often spent his time online creating and collaborating with other designers. After a while, though, he became frustrated because their creations were stuck in online forums where only a small community would see them. Nickell wanted to see the artists' work go from the screen and onto something tangible. So he partnered with co-founder Jacob DeHart and they created a contest for the online community to choose the best design. The winning design would be printed on a t-shirt.

Their first contest was a hit. As they held more contests, their community of artists grew as well, eventually into the thousands. Threadless became a solution for digital designers to receive recognition in the offline world.

Lesson learned: Solving a problem always came first. Concerns about logistics, competitors, and marketing never crossed their minds when Nickell and DeHart started; their goal was to support a struggling artist community. So before developing, or even visualizing, a sustainable business model, they prioritized the question of how best to serve the designers' needs.

Give Back

Without its community, Threadless wouldn't work, so the company works to keep its designers happy. Forums filled with scoring, voting, discussion, and critique create a space for artists to interact on a global scale. Plus, when a design is selected, the designer receives a monetary reward--$2,000 in cash, a $500 Threadless gift certificate, and $500 each time the design is reprinted.

Tang Yau Hoong, a successful illustrator and graphic designer from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia enjoys the aspect of competition. "I see competing with other members as positive competition to help me improve my designing skills and find my niche in illustration style," he told me in an email.

Lesson learned: Start-ups simply can't afford to neglect the needs of their niche communities. Consider your values and how you can continuously keep serving those in your community through those values.

Make an Impact

Designers around the world have gained recognition through Threadless that they likely would not have achieved otherwise. By shaking up the traditional design industry, Threadless has made an impact in the personal and professional lives of the designers. The 20-year-old Indonesian graphic designer Budi Satria Kwan says, "Since Threadless users are mostly U.S. based, people from half a world away recognize my designs better as compared to the people [in Indonesia]."

Lesson learned: Threadless provides a unique opportunity, and in so doing, challenges the status quo. Over 200,000 artists have submitted designs since Threadless began, and many of them have had their designs featured in outlets like Gap, Apple stores, Target, and Dell.com. The Threadless route isn't typical, even a successful company.

Threadless proves that for-profit companies can do good, just as much nonprofit ones. The question is--how will you do the same?

Ilya Pozin founded his first company, Ciplex, at age 17. The digital marketing and creative agency caters to small businesses and start-ups. @ilyaNeverSleeps

The Only Definition of Success That Matters

To a small business owner, to an employee--to anyone--there is only one way to determine success.

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That's right. One. No kaleidoscope, no cornucopia, no "we're all snowflakes," no we're all individuals.

One.

Sure, success in business and in life means different things to different people. (Very different things in some instances; check out some of the comments on this article about the beliefs of remarkably successful people.)

And success should mean different things. Whether or not you are successful depends on how you define success, and on the tradeoffs you are willing to not just accept but embrace as you pursue that definition of success. We can have a lot but we can't have everything.

I get that, but I also get this. To a small business owner, to an employee--to anyone--there is only one way to determine success. The answer lies in answering one question: How happy am I?

That's it. How successful you are is based solely on the answer to that question.

How happy are you?

Extremely successful entrepreneurs--at least in terms of traditional business success--work impossibly long hours while focusing almost exclusively on building their business. In many cases (some would argue most cases) their personal and family lives are to some degree a casualty of that focus.

Is that a fair tradeoff?

Fair or unfair is beside the point.

Tradeoffs are unavoidable. If you're making tons of money but are still unhappy, you haven't embraced the fact that incredible business success often carries a heavy personal price. Other things are clearly more important than making money, and that's okay.

If on the other hand you leave every day at 4 o'clock and pursue a rich and varied personal life and you're still unhappy, you haven't embraced the fact--and it is a fact--that what you chose to do will not make you wealthy. Personal satisfaction is nice but it's not enough for you... and that's okay too.

Try to compartmentalize all you want, but business success, family and friends, personal pursuits... no aspect of your life can ever be separated from the others. Each is a permanent part of a whole, so putting more focus on one area automatically reduces the focus on another area.

Want to make more money? You can, but something else has to give.

Want more time with family? Want to help others? Want to pursue a hobby? You can, but something else has to give.

What motivates you? What do you want to achieve for yourself and your family? What do you value most, spiritually, emotionally, and materially? That's what will make you happy--and if you aren't doing it, you won't be happy.

Sound simplistic?

It is--but think of all the people you know who complain about the results of the path they have clearly chosen.

For example, I know teachers who constantly complain about the low pay. Constantly. Eventually I say, "Maybe you should change jobs."

"Oh no!" they cry. "I love teaching!"

No you don't. If you truly love teaching you would better accept the inevitable--and it is inevitable--financial trade-offs.

So are you happy?

Defining success is important, but taking a clear-eyed look at the impact of your definition matters even more. As in most things, your intention is important, but the results provide the real answer.

If helping others through social work is your definition of success, you may make a decent living but you won't get rich... and you must embrace that fact. If you're happy, you have.

If building a $100 million company is your definition of success, you can have a family but it will be almost impossible to have a rich, engaged family life... and you must embrace that fact. If you're happy, you have.

If you're not, rethink your definition, because it's not working for you. You can't have it all. You shouldn't want to have it all, because that's the best way to wind up unhappy and unfulfilled.

Ask yourself if you're happy. If you are, you're successful. The happier you are, the more successful you are.

And if you aren't happy, it's time to make some changes.

Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

Performance Reviews: The Metric You're Missing

You might be measuring your employees against every metric under the sun... but here's one you're probably forgetting.

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Where employee evaluations are concerned, many companies follow a more-is-better approach, measuring performance across a broad--often too broad--range of qualities, skills, and proficiencies.

Even so, one crucial element is almost always missing:

Sales skills.

Salespeople need sales skills. You need sales skills. (Every successful person does, in fact, and here's why.)

But every employee can and should play a role in generating sales, especially in a small business--no matter what job they perform.

It's Part of the Job

Here's a great example. A HVAC technician came to our house to do scheduled maintenance on our heat pumps. I showed him where the different units are. My nose was running so I kept taking out a tissue to blow my nose.

After my third, "Excuse me," he said, "Do you have a cold?"

"No," I replied, "I just have allergies or something. I get like this every winter."

"Ah, that's too bad," he said. No big deal. Normal conversation. Off he went to service the units.

About an hour later he came back and said, "I'm all finished. Everything is good to go."

As I was signing the work order he said, "While I was servicing your units I thought about your sinus problems, so I measured the humidity level in your house. It's unusually low even for this time of year. Since your air is that dry that could be what causes your sinus problems."

I had never thought about that; to me, air is air. So he showed me how his meter worked and we talked about humidity.

"Your problem is really easy to fix," he said. "You can add moisture to the air by installing humidifiers on each inside unit. Then all you'll have to do is change the filters every month or so; the rest is automatic. And luckily both your inside units have water pipes nearby so your installation will be easy and less expensive than it is for most people."

We talked more. He knew specs, knew prices, and knew the pros and cons of only installing a humidifier on the upstairs unit and how that would impact overall humidity levels in the entire house.

Anything that might help me escape from nose-blowing city sounded good to me, and I was definitely interested, so he used his iPad to check inventory and installation timelines. In about five minutes he had my appointment on their master schedule.

Five minutes. Sold.

And he's a service technician, not a salesperson.

Why was a technician still able to "sell" me?

He didn't say, "Do you want fries with that?"

He identified a specific problem and need.

He provided detailed information on the spot.

He described the humidity levels in my house, explained how the installation would go, knew he had units in stock, etc. He explained, in detail, how he could solve my problem.

He had the tools to close the sale.

He gave me a quote and was even able to schedule the appointment, eliminating the, "Maybe I should think about this a while...?" black hole potential sales often fall into.

Best of all, he didn't bring in a salesperson.

Do you like being shifted over to a salesperson after you've established rapport with someone else? I don't either.

A few days after our humidifiers were installed the owner of the business called to make sure we were happy. I told him we were and I told him how impressed I was by the way his technician took initiative and how easy he made the process.

"Well, thanks," he said, "But that's really not initiative. It's his job to look for ways to help customers. And it's definitely our job to give him the tools so he can make it happen."

It's your job, too.

Identify specific ways your employees can solve problems or provide additional benefits--in short, generate additional sales and revenue--and give them the tools to complete those sales on their own.

Then add "sales performance" to your employee evaluations. That way you can measure and, more importantly, reward the employees who generate additional revenue--even if they aren't salespeople.

Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

New Group Teaches Teen Girls to Code

Backed by tech giants like Google and Twitter, Girls Who Code launches a summer program to lure young women into the tech industry.

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A new program aims to lure more young women into the technology industry.

Code is power: So says Kristen Titus, executive director of Girls Who Code, a new organization working to combat the lack of women in the technology field.

If you're already working in the technology sector, you may have noticed a shortage of female applicants for job openings. Girls Who Code wants to remedy that by arming young women with coding skills.

This July, the group will launch an intensive eight-week program to get teen girls excited about computer science and engineering.  The program will give 20 New York City teens access to classes on coding, design, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship.  A mentorship aspect of the program will pair each girl with a successful female entrepreneur or engineer to act as a role model.

The initiative is currently backed by tech giants eBay, Twitter, Google, and General Electric.

The big tech companies 'recognize that this is crucial,' Titus says. 'When you're looking at companies whose user base is often 50% to 75% women, it's without a doubt important for them to have their users--women--innovating, sitting at the table, developing, and iterating on products.'

Titus and the group's founder, Reshma Saujani, plan to develop their model in NYC this summer, and then expand the program with Girls Who Code initiatives in cities all across the country in 2013.  

'We want to help these young women think big,' Titus says. ' We want to open their eyes to the world of possibilities that technology can provide.'

Jillian D'Onfro is an editorial intern whose work has previously appeared in Making Music Magazine and Dig Boston, an alternative weekly newspaper. @jillianiles

Free Yourself From Your Desk

Get creative, productive, and happy: Throw on your sneakers and head outside. (Pssst: You'll actually work harder!)

Brandon Christopher Warren via Flickr

Like sharing war stories, entrepreneurs love to talk about everything they sacrificed to make a business successful.

From the outside, it might feel like a pre-requisite of success is sleeping in the office every night and working until you pass out. It has always been part of start-up folklore that when you start a company you give up your life.

This is certainly true in some sense. When you start a company, the drive to succeed and do well by your investors and team is a monumental weight, one that's best described by Paul DeJoe in a recent post on Quora.

The passion for changing the world and creating something truly great is plenty of motivation to take over your entire being. The problem comes when entrepreneurs assume that working hard means never leaving the office.

Our society has such a narrow definition of "work." For many, work occurs when someone is cranking away at their desk, in a meeting, or on a trip to meet with customers or investors. Obviously, hard work is par for the course at a start-up, but work can come in many forms and some of the most valuable "work" can come from getting out of the office.

Whether it is running, biking, golfing, or dirt biking, stepping back and getting some exercise can be the most valuable time you spend. Being left alone with only your thoughts for long periods of time can help clarify problems and enhance creative capacity to come up with valuable solutions. Just Google search the phrases "exercise and creativity" or "exercise and productivity" and you will be swarmed by a list of research studies linking exercise with enhanced problem solving and focus.

Think beyond the desk. Create a culture where work is defined by hitting ambitious goals, making great things, and building valuable solutions. Encouraging exercise and time for your team to escape the day to day and let the bigger picture come into focus cannot be underestimated (but can be easily eroded).

Riley Gibson is the co-founder and CEO of Napkin Labs, a start-up that builds tools to help companies turn their Facebook fans into an army of collaborators for new insights and ideas. For more, check out the Napkin Labs blog. @RileyGibson

6 Tips From the PR Pros

Think public relations is easy? We sure did. But before long we learned that PR is a grind. Here's the best advice we've found for getting press.

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We have a confession. When we left journalism to launch Altruette.com, we knew there was one thing we'd be great at: public relations.

After all, over a decade as writers and editors we'd dealt with more PR people than you could count. We were pros at fielding calls, reading pitches, and taking meetings. This, we figured, was one thing we'd hit out of the park.

Well, let's just say it wasn't quite as easy as we'd imagined.

PR is a grind. PR involves constant rejection--or even worse, silence. PR is really, really hard.

Of course, we're learning--and a few weeks ago we wrote about our own lessons learning doing DIY PR. But the experience has given us a huge amount of respect for the PR pros that are out there pitching, spinning, and informing day after day.

Two of the best we know are Karen Hopp and Liz Bazini of Bazini Hopp. Like Julie and me, they struck out on their own after careers at bigger agencies. They have boundless energy. They are whip smart. Their enthusiasm about the companies they represent is infectious. I asked them to explain, step by step, how they get their clients the right type of press--and I can tell you, their advice has already changed the way we're pitching Altruette.

1. Pick the Perfect Target

"We read a lot. We figure out who's writing what. Who is covering a particular technology and what their take is on it. These are smart reporters who are well versed on very specific areas," says Hopp. Adds Bazini: "If we're representing a company involved in green tech, we'll really narrow it down to the few folks who are handling this."

2. Reference the Writer's Work

Once you've picked the perfect target, there's an art to getting the writer's attention, since this target probably receives dozens if not hundreds of pitches a day. Says Hopp: "I'll draft an email and be sure to mention something I've read by them. Without being too presumptuous, I'll say something like, 'I read your article last week...' and I'll never say 'you missed something,' but I'll suggest that 'you may be interested in looking into this related area.'" Adds Bazini, "Reporters want to know that you're a reader--that you're paying attention."

3. Ignore the Sound of Silence

I know for us, the most depressing response to a carefully crafted Altruette pitch is...nothing. But Bazini and Hopp have had great success with a very simple technique. If they get no response within a few days, they sent a short, sharp follow up, usually in the form of a question. Such as "Lee, any interest in a demo?" Explains Bazini, "when people see a lot of content they sometimes just don't have the time to reply. This way they can just quickly say yes or no." In addition, Hopp cautions, any follow up should be with the goal of providing the reporter with more value. In other words "did you get my email?" is just annoying, while "can I send you samples of the new charms we're launching?" provides new information.

4. Play the Numbers Game

Bazini and Hopp both noted that if their clients are armed with hard data, reporters are much more likely to quote them or be compelled to tell their stories. Says Hopp: "If our clients can give strong numbers it definitely increases the liklihood they'll be sourced. Numbers showing changes in consumer behavior, for example, always seem to be of interest."

5. Don't Fear Hearing "No"

Says Hopp, "We don't hate 'no.' Often times it's not just as simple as no, they'll give us a little more info. If they say 'we're only doing trend stories right now,' that's useful information that's going to help me pitch them better down the road."

6. Be a Source, Not a Shill

Finally, one of the smartest things Bazini and Hopp have done with their clients (at least in my opinion) is turning them into sources for reporters. Says Bazini, "If you have any questions, even if it's background and not for a story, call us.'" That way their clients develop a rapport with reporters which can only lead to good things--and good press--down the road.

Lee Clifford and Julie Schlosser: Lee Clifford and Julie Schlosser are the co-founders of Altruette. They make a line of classic charms that each benefits one of 35 different charities. Previously, they were both editors at Fortune magazine. @AltruetteCharms

Is Your Ego Blocking Your Success?

It can be hard for entrepreneurs to separate their self-worth from that of their business. Here's what happens if you don't.

Flickr/. SantiMB .

It's not all about you.

It's easy for an entrepreneur to fall into the trap of basing his or her entire self-worth on his or her company's performance. After all, running your company determines your schedule, your community, and your daily purpose.  This isn't all bad. In fact, some of it is necessary.  To be a successful entrepreneur, you need stubborn tenacity and tunnel vision. You work 70 or 80 hours a week. Your venture is the last thing you think of when you go to sleep and the first thing you think of when you wake up. 

But when it's time to sell, you need to take a different perspective. Otherwise, you're going to end up yelling at your investment banker the way one of my clients yelled at me:

'You obviously don't understand your job!  There isn't a thing I don't know about my company, and I sure as hell know its value!  If you can't get the job done, then it looks like I should have hired a better investment banker!'

My client, Jason, was shouting down the telephone loudly enough that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.  There was a sharp clunk as he slammed the phone and hung up on me.

Jason was the founder and CEO of a successful packaging company that specialized in recyclable containers for shipping organic fruit and fruit juice. With a good product and some clever positioning, he had grown the company to more than 200 employees, making a little over $14 million in profits. Now he was ready to sell.

We ended up with three serious, qualified buyers. The offers clustered together in a tight range of $80 to $85 million. This was a good deal: a multiple of 6 times adjusted EBITDA in an industry where multiples were hovering around 4.5 to 5. 

However, as you may have noticed, Jason was furious.

You see, several years earlier, one of Jason's buddies in the industry had sold his packaging company for $98 million. Jason insisted that his business was 'better' than his pal's, and declared that he wouldn't take a penny less than $100 million.

Jason didn't realize it, but his demands had absolutely nothing to do with which company was better or more valuable or more successful. Jason wasn't trying to prove that his company was more worth more than his competitor's company - he was trying to prove that he himself was worth more as a person than his competitor was.

Here's where it can be dangerous to let your company define your entire identity. I've seen entrepreneurs who would rather lose their marriage than their business - and, in some cases, they did.  I've seen CEOs who pride themselves on having a balanced life, not realizing that every activity or hobby (whether golfing, or being president of the PTA, or sitting on the board of the local arts council) is still tied, in some way, to promoting the company's growth. And I've seen plenty of guys like Jason who think they have personally failed if their company doesn't outshine everyone else's, no matter how unreasonable the comparison.

Unfortunately, Jason couldn't get out of his own way. Because he couldn't detach his ego from his company, he missed out on an excellent transaction-;one that would have been great for the company and great for Jason personally.

When you start to see any criticism of your company as a personal attack on you, there's a problem.  Make decisions based on what's best for your company, and not what's best for your ego.

David Lonsdale became president and co-owner of private investment firm Allegiance Capital in 2005 and, since that time, has helped the company achieve a growth rate of more than 50% per year.

How to Turn Anxiety into Action

Too much stress can cause you to choke, but just the right amount of anxiety can actually help you reach peak performance.

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Stress is bad. It can raise your blood pressure, upset your stomach, induce insomnia and cause you to choke in high-pressure situations. So avoid it at all costs, right?

Not so fast, say scientists. Research shows that moderate amounts of stress actually boost performance. "Somewhere between checked out and freaked out lies an anxiety sweet spot," reported the Wall Street Journal recently. At this optimum level of stress "a person is motivated to succeed yet not so anxious that performance takes a dive. This moderate amount of anxiety keeps people on their toes, enables them to juggle multiple tasks and puts them on high alert for potential problems," according to the article.

So how can entrepreneurs hit this stress sweet spot? Finding a balance is difficult, as the 40 million American adults who suffer from anxiety disorders can attest. This flood of stressed-out patients inundating America's mental health professionals illustrates the central truth that too much anxiety is a much more frequent issue than too little. Though "some overly optimistic people and those with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder may lack enough anxiety to take action," writes the Journal.

If you're among the majority of folks who overshoot the anxiety sweet spot because of too much stress, there are interventions that can help. For serious stress cases, cognitive behavior therapy may be the answer. The Journal notes:

Turning anxiety into action is also a major component of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is widely seen as the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders. Identifying and challenging self-defeating thoughts, and gradually facing the source of fears, can provide more lasting relief than antianxiety medications, psychologists say.

"If you have to take Xanax to get on the elevator, you never learn that the elevator isn't something to be afraid of," says Dr. [Stephen] Josephson. "You have to embrace the anxiety to overcome it."

But approaching the anxiety sweet spot by confronting your fears need not happen in a clinical setting and isn't limited to those with pathological levels of stress. It's exactly the approach advocated by Justin Menkes, the author of Better Under Pressure. He says mastering anxiety is within the grasp of nearly everyone, as long as you gradually work your way up to tolerating larger and larger stresses much as you would gradually build up your strength and endurance at the gym--pushing yourself but not too much. He says:

You have to build inside your brain, your consciousness and your stomach a knowing that you can handle it. You have to put yourself in situations that elevate your sense of stretch, whether it's a presentation, public speaking or a task that causes you fear. Take initiative on something, but not something that is over your head because what is essential is that your experiences along the way are positive.

If you put yourself in situations that are just so extreme, then the probabilities are you aren't ready and it can go badly. Then your memory attaches negative experiences to pressure and that doesn't help. We want you to associate elevated pressure with a confidence that you can handle it, and you do that by elevating the situations of stress where there's a risk of failure but you're well enough prepared for it that odds are it's going to go well. You put yourself in several of those and then you have that internal memory of 'I can handle pressure.' Then you keep elevating it.

Or if you're an entrepreneur looking to build up your ability to handle anxiety outside of your high stakes professional world, enlist your friends.

"One simple exercise involves memorizing something, be it a poem or the 50 states, and then reciting it before friends at a dinner party, while encouraging them to taunt you if you make mistakes," Menkes suggests. "At first, you are more likely to have missteps in this context. Eventually, you will find that you can do the exercise faster, with more accuracy, in front of an audience than when you do it by yourself."

A tough (if not downright scary) mentor can help you learn to hit the anxiety sweet spot as well.

 

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London with interests in unconventional career paths, generational differences, and the future of work. She has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch, GigaOM, and Brazen Careerist. @EntryLevelRebel

5 Secrets to a Vibrant Company Culture

To succeed, you have to have a stellar company culture. Here's how you can start building a better working environment.

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As organizations like Whole Foods, Patagonia, Apple, Zappo's, Motley Fool and many others have shown, having a vibrant corporate culture is a significant competitive advantage.

So why is it that many companies have no discernible corporate culture whatsoever? Or if a company does, why is it usually negative, or, in the worst case, toxic?

In my experience, I've noticed six recurring factors common to every vibrant corporate culture:

1. It's meaningful. A vibrant culture must be based in something truly meaningful. A bland mission statement is not the basis of a vibrant culture.

Example: "We will deliver operational excellence in every corner of the Company and meet or exceed our commitments to the many constituencies we serve." This is a real mission statement from an organization that will remain nameless, and it is meaningless pap. 

Better example: "We remove every barrier to producing the best possible product." This is essentially Apple's culture and is immediately meaningful. So is something like, "We do whatever it takes to please our customers." This is Zappo's culture, paraphrased.

2. It's externally focused. For a culture to take root in an organization over the long-term, it must deliver added value to the organization's customers or clients. Building exceptional products or exceeding customer expectations (Apple and Zappo's, above) are clearly externally focussed, as are the shopper-centric cultures of Patagonia and Whole Foods.

Internally-focused cultures such as Microsoft's "maximize financial return" (my interpretation) or Google's "hire the smartest people" (again, my interpretation) always lead to eventual decline. Customers work out that they aren't really the center of the organization's concern. 

3. It's depersonalized. As Howard Schultz and Steve Jobs both discovered, a vibrant culture is not the same as a personality cult. In both cases, they built organizations highly dependent upon them as individuals--Schultz at Starbucks and Jobs at Apple--and in both cases they learned that a lasting culture is bigger than any one individual.

Are you building a culture that will last long after you've moved on, or just a personality cult that will disappear when you do?

4. It's not edited. In my career, I've been taken on thousands of 'consultant walks', the factory or office tours led by CEO's or C-level executives who quite rightly, and proudly, want to show off their people and their business.

What's interesting to note is how often those tours are highly circumscribed. The visitor is taken to certain departments, given the opportunity to speak with specific people, because the proud executive wants to show the best side of their organization's culture.

But a truly vibrant culture runs deep and wide in the organization--you can see and feel it in action anywhere and everywhere you go.

Senior executives don't feel the need to edit or manage a visitor's experience.

5. It's not precious. Many businesses treat company culture like it's a Faberge egg: precious, delicate, fragile to the point that it must be protected at all costs.

I've seen companies refuse business because its legalistic culture wouldn't yield to a customer's needs. Others fail to ship product on time because of a so-called 'quality culture' that is, in reality, just a form of corporate narcissism. The company intently checks, re-checks and checks everything over and over lest any small flaw or blemish mar the all-important corporate self-image.

To be truly successful, your business's culture should be less like sone precious object and more like a rubber ball--vibrant, flexible, robust, resilient. It should be able to take a pounding and still snap back, to keep priorities in perspective and to let things slide when the circumstances merit so.

Think of JetBlue, whose original cultural commitment to 'out-fun' Southwest led to an almost catastrophic melt-down in 2007 which ultimately cost its founder and CEO his job. Since that event the company has learned how to mix 'quirky and fun' with 'robustly effective' and maintain a leadership position in its industry.

Les McKeown is the author of the best-seller, Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track - and Keeping It There and is the CEO of Predictable Success, a leading advisor on accelerated organizational growth. His latest book is The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success. @lesmckeown @lesmckeown

The Innovators Behind Wimbledon

A sports event steeped in tradition has gone 2.0. Here's a look at the pioneers turning Wimbledon high tech.

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Darlene Hard serves to Althea Gibson during the 1958 Women's Singles tournament (left); Paul-Henri Mathieu and Gilles Simon on the first day of the 2012 Wimbledon Championships tennis tournament (right).

The first Wimbledon Championship was held on a rainy July afternoon in 1877 at the All England Club off Worple Road in London.

Admission was one shilling'about $5 today'and nearly 200 spectators arrived for the final match. Competitors served underhand or at shoulder height. Rackets were made of wood, strings were spun from cow intestine, and the tennis balls were hand sewn with cloth. Players wore ties and hats. The prize for winning was 12 guineas'about $1,200 today.

Wimbeldon is still played at the All England Club in London, and the players continue to play on grass. But it's no surprise that more than a century of innovation in both technology and process, has radically changed the game.

Here's a look at a few of the companies that have completely disrupted how Wimbeldon works.

Strung Out

The days of intestinal tennis strings are (nearly) over, thanks in part to Luxilon, a family-owned company based in Antwerp founded in 1959.

For most of the company's history, the small manufacturing firm produced filaments for a variety of applications, from medical sutures to undergarments. In the early 1990s, the company began producing a line of tennis strings. 

But rather than using the more conventional nylon, Luxilon manufactured strings from polyester, which offered slightly more friction on contact with a ball, so players could enhance their topspin.

The strings went relatively unnoticed by pros until 1997 when Gustavo Kuerton, a young Brazilian player, decided to string his racket with Luxilon's co-polymer monofilament line of tennis strings. He won three French Opens with it--and the tennis world took notice.

Today, Luxilon sells a branded version of its tennis string--Big Banger--to tennis players around the world, including former No. 1-ranked Spanish player, Juan Carlos Ferrero.

An Infallible Umpire?

If you've watched tennis in the last few years, you've no doubt seen images from the Hawk-Eye camera'which unfold as an animated, slow motion instant replay of a tennis ball as it touches down on the ground. How does it work? The Hawk-Eye utilizes 10 cameras placed around the court to triangulate the motion of the ball in order to replay its trajectory.

The technology was developed and patented in 2001 by Dr. Paul Hawkins, a British inventor who hold a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence. Hawkins founded Hawk-Eye Innovations in London in September, 2001, in order to commercialize his invention.

Hawk-Eye made its debut in 2003 at the Australian Open. In the summer of 2006 it was introduced to the U.S. Open in New York. Just last June did it debut at Wimbledon.

In 2011, Sony acquired Hawk-Eye Innovations, but the company still operates under its own brand. The technology is being adapted for precision-judgement of other sports, including football, cricket, and even snooker, a British cue game.

Green Giants

When it comes to turf, this small, U.K-based company is at the forefront of grass technology (yes, really).  

The Sports Turf Research Institute is the company behind the turf at Wimbledon. Its 70 employees include grass engineers, chemists, researchers, agronomists--all of whom are charged with creating and maintaining the perfect slabs of turf for tennis matches.  

Founded in 1929, the institute (which reportedly brings in around $6 million in revenue) was one of the first to introduce scientific standards to turf management. For example, the guide for Wimbledon's grass maintenance is 33 pages, and includes such details as optimal measurements for ball-bounces off perfect turf.

At the institute headquarters, the company is constantly updating its methods for testing grass; it has, for example, a small machine that replicates a tennis player's skids to sample various grasses' endurance. The company has also consulted with the governing bodies of other turf-played sports, such as soccer's FIFA.

Going Mobile; Going Global

This year, Wimbledon is planning to boost its off-court presence. 

The Championships at Wimbledon and the All England Lawn Tennis Club just announced a partnership with Ooyala, a video streaming service for the Web and mobile devices.

Ooyala, a Mountain View, California-based start-up is set to provide global on-demand access to match highlights and special interviews via the official Wimbledon website and its mobile app. (The company acts as a sort of middle-man, providing Wimbledon the technology to stream various video content to multiple platforms).

The news comes on the heels of the company's series E funding round, which raised $35 million earlier this month, bringing Ooyala to $79 million in total funding.

Launched in 2007 by former Google employees, the company already has deals to facilitate online video content with big brands, including Yahoo!, ESPN, and Rolling Stone. Beyond video, the company also sells an analytics tool, which can give clients valuable access to user data.

Nicole Carter covers start-ups, small business and entrepreneurship for Inc. Nicole was previously a reporter and web editor at the New York Daily News, and her work has also appeared in Consumer Reports magazine. @ncarterinc

Eric Markowitz reports on start-ups, entrepreneurs, and issues that affect small businesses. Previously, he worked at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City. @EricMarkowitz

Be a Social Media Rock Star: 4 Ways

One way to get more social media friends, followers, fans and fervor is to leverage your email marketing campaigns.

Flickr/Andrew J Ferguson

My email marketing company, VerticalResponse, truly believes that email and social media go together hand in hand. Why? Because your messages need to be where your prospects and customers are reading them, no matter what channel they like to pay attention to. And if the stats are right, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin alone will reach over 1.5 billion consumers in 2012.

So I came up with four little tidbits you can do with your email marketing campaign to get more friends, followers, fans and fervor.

1. Be Proactive

Send a "like me" or "recommend me" email campaign to drive people to your Facebook page. Use a template like the one you see below. (This is just one of more than 700 free email templates that VerticalResponse offers.) It's important to have a presence on Facebook since it's the No. 1 social media network that your customers and prospects are using on a daily basis.

Give your followers and fans a reason to "Like" you by giving them a coupon or special offer. A few other ideas to get people to visit your page:

2. Incentivize Your Twitter Followers

Similarly, send a "follow me on Twitter" email campaign with one solo message: Get special deals if you follow us. Using a template like this one here makes designing it a snap.

3. Button Up

In every email campaign you send, include "follow me" buttons that link to your social media profiles. It has become as common as including your phone number, URL and address. Side note: Include the buttons in your customer service emails that you send out when a customer has a question.

4. Pin Your Emails

If you're on Pinterest (like we are!), post the hosted version link of your email to a board. Choose the offer or article you want to show, and in the pin description make sure you use your keywords so that if someone is searching Pinterest for your products just like they'd search Google, they'll find your products or business.

Integrating your email marketing and your social media efforts is the smartest and easiest thing to do to maximize the time you spend setting up your marketing. Do you have any ideas to share? Love to hear them!

Janine Popick is the CEO and founder of VerticalResponse, a leading provider of self-service e-mail and event marketing, online surveys, social media, and direct mail solutions. The company was ranked No. 1,771 on the 2011 Inc. 5000 list. @janinepopick

3 Life-Changing Pieces of Advice

The co-founder and CEO of YouNoodle, explains how simply reframing the problem--and your perspective on it--can change your business and your life.

YouNoodle/Flickr

When I was student at MIT, I learned an important lesson from one of my personal heroes, Amy Smith. She's a hero because she invented the "screenless hammer mill" when farmers in Senegal were struggling with the process of separating rocks from grains when making flour. Expensive screens broke all too easily and were hard to replace in poor remote rural villages. Her invention, which was recognized by the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, looked at the existing problem at a new angle. Instead of screens, she used airflow to separate unground grain and rocks from flour. By applying simple aerodynamics, she eliminated the need for screens altogether, and increased grinding rates by 60 times.

This story has served me well in my start-up career. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, all I need to do is stop fixating on my current solution and redefine the problem instead. Smith looked at the problem from a different perspective, which lead to a solution outside of the box. Similar stories can be distilled into useful pieces of advice that have also helped me along the way:

1. Accept the fact that you are inherently lucky. There is a story about a research experiment that involved two types of subjects. One group self-declared themselves as unlucky; the other believed that they were very lucky in life. Both were given newspapers, and were asked to count the number of pictures from cover to cover.

While the unlucky group took on average two minutes to flip every page and count the total number of pictures on the newspaper: 27. The lucky group noticed on the second page a large note saying "Stop reading here, there are 27 pictures on this newspaper." So they stopped and reported the number within 10 seconds of being assigned the task. So many times we fall into the trap of focusing too narrowly on our daily targets that we miss the opportunity to notice the more creative answers right in front of us. The luckiest people are constantly stimulating the brain with a certain level of randomness through serendipitous encounters, conversations and insights. They are able to focus on a target without shutting down their ability to see beyond that target. They can turn their "blinkers," which block peripheral visibility in horses, into "visors," which give selective views--while still allowing the horse to focus on the race.

2. Don't take advice from golfers if you want to play baseball. Jeff Hoffman, a member of the founding team of Priceline and the most amazing storyteller, makes a point that's invaluable for start-up founders. Sometimes, we think that all smart people are able to provide great advice--and this may be true, to a certain extent. But the real truth is that if you wanted to become a professional baseball player, you wouldn't seek advice from a golfer. Yes, the swings might present similarities, and you might even be using some of the same muscles. However, I doubt the Tiger Woods of the golf world would seek putting advice from the Willie Mays of the baseball community. This is a good thing to remember when we choose our investors and assign Board seats.

3. Your personal happiness is worth working for, professionally. There is so much content out there about the "how" of entrepreneurship, but we sometimes forget about the "why" of this particular career choice. My favorite writer is Jorge Borges; despite all his literary accomplishments, his deathbed regret was that he did not manage to find happiness in life. I think of this often when I have one of those excruciating "bad start-up days" (a much more unpleasant experience, and yet as unpredictable as "bad hair days").

Some days, I genuinely wonder why I put myself through this torture, and then I tell myself that in order to be happy, my road to self-actualization involves creating legacy, and the path to impact is tortuous. The truth is that unhappy people are less creative, productive and more likely to be unlucky. I frequently ask people to share with me the first image that comes to mind when I say "happy moment." This could be reading a book in a coffee shop, a good conversation with a close friend or a challenging run at the gym. I then ask the question: "How many times per week do you have happy moments?" I am shocked to hear that more often than not, people tell me they can't remember the last time they had one of those! I believe--and Chip Conley and Tony Hsieh would concur--that successful start-ups have happy people, which is a requirement for happy customers and happy investors. Creating a start-up culture in which happiness is a core value is very important. What's the worst that could happen, anyway? You might fail to launch a product, but you will still walk away with happiness--it's not so scary after all.

Rebeca Hwang is a co-founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based start-up, YouNoodle, which gamifies innovation through competitions. She is a board member for Cleantech Open, Imagine H2O, and Bases. She was recently named one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders.

The Young Entrepreneur Council is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC published #FixYoungAmerica, a book of proven solutions to youth unemployment. @TheYEC

4 Reasons It Pays to Be Clueless

Forget an MBA. Or even business experience. Some of the best entrepreneurs never would have launched if they had known better.

Courtesy of company

The Dame brothers Brooks, Tanner, and Taylor say their business naivete helped their eyewear company succeed.

Brooks Dame has an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. But when he and his brothers started Proof Wood Eyewear, which offers sunglasses, prescription glasses and accessories made from sustainable woods, they built a successful business by ignoring almost everything he learned there. "Sometimes being a bit naive pays off," he says now.

Here's how knowing too much could be a bad thing:

1. You might be too timid.

Proof Wood started, classically, with Dame in his garage, making glasses for family and friends. People kept telling Dame that he ought to be selling the glasses. Eventually he agreed, and he and his brothers Tanner and Taylor started a small business.

Fifteen days after launching, they arrived at the MAGIC accessories show in Las Vegas. "We walked in to set up our booth not knowing what to expect," Dame says. "The guy in the booth across from us was selling his T-shirts to Urban Outfitters and many other stores. He told us not to get discouraged if we didn't have a lot of visitors to our booth during the show. He said, 'You often don't get a lot of traffic at first--you have to establish your brand.'"

Dame went back to his hotel room that night wishing he hadn't spent the money to come to the show before the company was better known. But the more experienced vendor was wrong: The booth was mobbed for three days. The Dames were so clueless they hadn't even brought an order book with them--they didn't know what one was--but they bought one from a nearby Staples after the first day. By the end of the show, they had signed on 13 stores to carry their products.

2. You might think you know who your customers are.

The Dames created their wooden sunglasses for surfers and skateboarders such as themselves, and they assumed this would be their target market. Fortunately, going to MAGIC gave them the chance to find out they were wrong. "We found we had people interested in the product because it's eco-friendly, and we had hip-hop artists come into the booth and say, 'This reminds me of the wood on my dashboard--I have to have these!' Now we say we have a wide demographic that includes surfers and hip-hop people and housewives." Today, Proof Wood glasses are sold in 120 stores and chains, including Nordstrom, and the company moves up to 1,800 pairs a month.

3. You might make too many plans.

Dame attended an entrepreneurship course that explained how and why a new business needs a business plan. But he didn't write one. "We just did it," he says. "After the company launched, we finally wrote one for a business plan competition, in order to raise money. But the truth is, we've deviated from it so much, we never even refer to it."

Too much planning is dangerous, Dame believes. "I think you can overthink a product. You want to perfect it and make it right, and that stifles you, and by the time you get it out there your time has passed. I think if you believe in your product, you should go for it. That's probably the opposite of everything they teach you in grad school."

4. You might not do it at all.

Early on, Proof Wood naively approached Sunglass Hut, not realizing that the chain was owned by Luxottica, which owns Ray-Ban and many other brands. Proof Wood's only option was to start out selling to small, owner-operated stores and boutiques.

"If we'd realized that, honestly we probably wouldn't have launched at all," he says now. "We're a small group, and we didn't think we'd be able to manage a lot of small shops." Instead, he says, Proof Wood's relationships with smaller shops and boutiques has been a tremendous asset. "Our owner-operated shops are some of our best shops. They're continuous, they support us, and they're always sharing information about us on Facebook and Twitter."

In the end, he says, "We did everything a little backwards. And it seems to have paid off for us."

Minda Zetlin is a business technology writer and speaker, co-author of The Geek Gap, and vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. @MindaZetlin

Best Motivation Trick for Entrepreneurs

Remember the first day you became your own boss? Remember how you felt? Here's how to get that back.

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Pick a first day: The first day you opened a business, landed a huge customer, moved into a new location, or started a new job.

Pick a first day when you felt happy and excited. Pick a day when you walked in and everything felt new: Filled with promise, filled with hope and potential and anticipation... Even though every day is the first day of the rest of your life, pick a day that felt like the start of a better, happier, and more fulfilling life.

Now think about today.

Those feelings? They're gone. They're lost. Today feels the same as yesterday and tomorrow seems like just one of a seemingly endless string of similar days stretching off into the distance.

What changed?

You changed. You adapted.

Adapting is natural. When something good happens, you feel happier for a while. Then you adapt to your new situation and return to your baseline "happy state."

Buy a Porsche and for a little while you feel happier and maybe a little smug... but soon that new Porsche is just your car. Buy a new house and for a while you're happier... but soon you adapt and your new house is now just where you live.

But what about a Lambo? Now that would make you happy. And a house on the golf course... hey, then you would be satisfied.

All of us naturally revise our expectations upwards--and when our expectations go up, our level of happiness goes back down.

Now think back to your first day; say the one you picked is the day you opened your own business. You were excited and thrilled because finally--finally!--you could start calling your own shots. For the first time in your life your professional success--and income--would only be capped by your skills, creativity, and work ethic.

Nothing has changed--except you. You still call your own shots. Your professional success is still only limited by your skills, creativity, and work ethic. You still don't have a boss, still get to do what you love, still get to take chances and seize opportunities and work with people you enjoy.

In reality, today is just like that first day. You just see it differently.

So do this: Step outside your office or your business. Think about that first day. Picture yourself getting ready to walk through the door. Remember how you felt. Remember the goals and dreams you had. Remember how thrilled you were to start a new life.

Then walk back inside.

Look around.

Nothing has changed.

Except you... but now you've changed in a good way.

So smile, nod to yourself, and go kick ass like it's the first day.

Because it is.

Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

3 Ways to Make Your Screw-ups Count

Everyone fails but are you taking on true accountability? Don't fool yourself into believing that no one noticed.

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If I judged everyone by his or her bio, resume, or LinkedIn profile I would believe that everyone I meet was the greatest success story in the world. In fact with so many incredibly successful people, it's amazing there are any economic difficulties at all today. With everyone so content and confident, why does anxiety even exist? Perhaps the therapist business will soon collapse and the drug companies will stop making happy pills.

Well, no need to sell your Pfizer stock. Xanax is here to stay. As long as people keep promoting their strengths and successes while ignoring their weaknesses and failures, they'll continue to create anxiety among themselves and the people around them. It's odd how people think you won't recognize their failures. It's easy to see through the lies, the misplaced blame, the insecurity. In fact the more you try and cover up your weakness the louder it screams and gets talked about by everyone around.

Sure failure and weakness is painful. I get embarrassed when I screw up and negatively impact someone else. Being Jewish I live with the guilt for weeks, or longer. But shortly after the guilt and embarrassment passes, I marvel at the power of my failure. I revel in identifying my weakness. I gain insight and confidence from the experience and wear my wound proudly like a new merit badge on a Boy Scout sash.

Here are the three ways I make the most of my weaknesses and failures:

1. I am fully accountable for them.

Of course my ego wants me to make excuses and rationalize when I mess up in a big way. But it's hard to lie to yourself, and somewhere deep inside I am smart enough to recognize my role in creating a problem or continuously supporting my own obstacles. By always assuming it starts with me, I help others relax. Then I gain the most feedback from the people involved and am able to quickly and easily rectify any damage I caused.

2. I create process around them.

Since I automatically assume I will fail at many things (not all) I am ready and willing when it happens. I have close friends who I consult to give me insight after the experience. I have a list of personal questions that help me examine the circumstances and my behavior so I can see what I did not see before. And I set specific plans for changing any behavior that will resolve the weakness or reduce the risk of failing the same way.

3. I brag about them.

Shortly after I have resolved a major error and reconciled with anyone I have harmed, I share the story with others. It feels good to bare my soul humbly and be more human before others I respect. I often get empathetic feedback filled with more rich insights to help me in life's journey. It also pleases me that retelling stories of my errors with humor provides value to others for learning how to avoid the same mistake, or it brings entertainment, cause who doesn't need a little more laughter every day?

So since I like to practice what I preach, I will cop to a couple of my major failures in recent times and share my take away value as well. (Buy me a drink anytime for the long versions.)

• After several Amazon Bestselling books, I have so far failed at making the New York Times list. I can blame this on many factors, but I am ultimately accountable for integrating the right book with effective marketing to break that barrier. With each new book I refine my marketing process and learn from what doesn't work. The creative challenge of the journey is as fun and thrilling as will be the completed reward.
• After 20 years I failed to steer my Inc. 500 company through the recession, destroying the emotional and financial stability of my family. It's easy to blame the economy but others made smarter choices leading to success during this time, so I get the blame. There are too many lessons from this experience to list here but the biggest one looking back now, is that with careful strategy and persistent execution, I can overcome any setback and turn it into a positive outcome.

We are at the Summer Solstice. A time of change halfway through the year. What better time to be publicly accountable for your failures and weaknesses, and share with your peers the lessons learned. So brag away about your stories of failure and weakness below. I look forward to learning from your mistakes.

An Inc. 500 entrepreneur with a more than $1 billion sales and marketing track record, Kevin Daum is the best selling author of Video Marketing For Dummies. @awesomeroar

Lawmakers Urge SEC to Overhaul IPOs

After Facebook's IPO mess, lawmakers get the ball rolling to possibly change the process.

Public Citizen/Flickr

Looks like some good might come from Facebook's messy initial public offering.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro urging for a makeover of the IPO process'changes that would decrease the likelihood of smaller investors being unfairly punished, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The letter, written by Rep. Darrell Issa of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, read:

The Facebook IPO taught us that, at minimum, the IPO process suffers substantial flaws. In fact, it appears the entire IPO regulatory framework, based on an outdated Securities Act of 1933, fails to provide a market-based solution to IPO-pricing.

Issa also pointed out that, under the current system, underwriters can determine the price of an IPO, despite possible conflicts of interest.

His solution? Issa suggested amending the Securities Act of 1933 and stated that the United State's capital markets will grow weaker if "we continue to protect, over-regulate and coddle our financial institutions."

He called Google's IPO "fairer" and encouraged utilizing a "Dutch Auction" method to set IPO prices based on market demand.

Issa asked for a response with the requested information to be delivered no later than July 3.

Caitlin Berens writes about business innovation and entrepreneurs. Before Inc., she worked at Billboard, SELF, and Better Homes and Gardens. She attended Drake University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. @CaitlinBerens

Report: Best States for Small Business

A new survey of more than 6,000 small businesses determines which areas are most inviting for entrepreneurs.

Photo courtesy of company

How business-friendly is your state? A new study offers some answers.

In partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, Thumbtack.com conducted a survey of over 6,000 owners of small businesses (most with 5 or fewer employees) throughout the U.S..The survey focused on how small business owners viewed the economic climate and overall environment facing them in their specific regions. 

Business owners were asked to rate their cities and states across a number of different categories that affect the success of small businesses. Their responses were then converted into numerical scores and ultimately each region was assigned a grade--A+ through F--for each category in the survey.

Best & Worst States

When the results were in, it turned out that business owners ranked Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and Utah as the friendliest states for small companies. Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii and California had some of the lowest rankings.

'We were surprised at how friendly the smaller states such as Idaho and Oklahoma were, because they typically don't get much publicity for it,' says Sander Daniels, one of the survey's lead developers and co-founder of Thumbtack.com--a website that helps connect customers with service professionals.

'We found though that because they are small their governments are doing everything they can to attract businesses,' he adds.

Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and Utah all received a A+ grades for overall friendliness.Idaho scored best overall, and Rhode Island came in at the bottom, in the 45th spot. (Five states were excluded for having fewer than 10 respondents.)

'Texas was an outlier compared to other big, populous states such as Illinois, New York and California, which scored well below average,' says Daniels. 'Larger states attract business no matter what, so don't typically focus on attracting small businesses.'

Pain Points

Though taxes were a dominant topic during the survey, the survey respondents tended to care almost twice as much about local licensing requirements. Special regulatory requirements weighed strongly on states' overall grades.

'When you open a business you expect taxes,' says Daniels. 'What really came as a surprise to [the respondents] were the costs and problems associated with getting licensing.'

Other important predictors of perceived "friendliness" included awareness  of state and local government training programs as well as individual forecasts for the respondents' own company financial performance.

'A important takeaway for us was how local the issues faced by small businesses are,' says Daniels. 'We found that it wasn't the state and national policies that determined how friendly regions were, but the local entities that small businesses had to interact with on a daily basis.'

 

How Customers Decide to Buy

Before they plunk down the money, customers make these five exact decisions--in this exact order. Your job is to help them do so.

Flickr photo courtesy of zizzybaloobah

Do you ever wonder what's going on inside your customer's head? There's actually a pretty systematic process that most prospective customers go through, says Duane Sparks, author of Selling Your Price.

Before making the decision to buy, he says, customers go through the following five distinct "decision-making" thought processes:

1. Do I want to do business with this person?  Who is this person, really? Do I trust him? Do I like her?

2. Do I want to do business with this firm? Are they reputable? Are they credible? Do I have a history with them?

3. Do I want and need these products and services? Is there a problem that they solve? Is there a goal that they make possible?

4. Does the value meet my expectations? Will I get a quick return on my investment? Is the price in line with other offerings? Is this a unique solution?

5. Is this the right time to make a decision? Is there a reason to buy now? Is the problem about to explode? Is an opportunity slipping past?

This pattern plays itself out in every sales-oriented conversation. Take cold calls, for instance, where the goal is to make an appointment for a more substantive sales conversation.

Decisions in a Cold Call ...

In a cold call, the customer makes the first decision based upon the tone and confidence in the caller's voice. The customer then makes the second decision based upon brand awareness (e.g. "I'm from IBM") or a short description of what your company has done for a firm whose name is familiar to the customer ("We just helped Acme ...").

After interest is piqued, the customer then makes the third decision based upon the benefits stated in the first few sentences. ("... save $1 million in inventory costs.")

The fourth decision is not whether to buy, but whether to have a conversation about the possibility of buying.  The customer now makes that decision, followed by a decision about whether  to conduct the conversation now or delay it to later.

See?  Customers makes those decisions in that exact order.  It's the way their minds work.

... Or in a Sales Presentation

Here's another example: a sales presentation to large group of decision makers.

The audience makes the first and second decisions based upon the reputation of the presenter and the presenter's firm. Often that reputation is "borrowed" from the respected members of the group who are sponsoring the presentation. ("Joe, our CFO, invited us to hear this guy speak.")

The actual sales presentation--if it's a good one, that is--carries the burden of first defining/clarifying needs, then presenting a solution, and finally explaining why this is the right time to buy.

Get the Process Right

There's an important lesson here.  In order to sell effectively, you need to focus on helping the customer make each decision in the proper order.  If you try to "jump the queue" and force a decision that naturally comes later, you'll end up delaying the sale or even losing it.

For example, in a cold call, if you start talking about price before the customer has decided whether you're trustworthy, the customer will almost always assume that you're trying to "pull a fast one."

Similarly, if you start talking about problems and solutions to a group of people who don't believe you're a credible person from a credible firm, you're simply wasting everybody's time.  The decision-makers won't listen--in fact, they can't, because their minds are still spinning around on "Can I trust this guy?"

Establishing Credibility

By the way, the need to establish credibility (i.e., decisions No. 1 and 2) is why many presenters begin by introducing themselves and their companies. However, it's much better if "your reputation precedes you," so that the first two decisions are already made before you present.

For example, in a cold call, if you're talking to a prospective customer as the result of a referral from somebody whom that customer trusts, you can move directly to decision point No. 3, because the first two have already been fulfilled.

Similarly, if you're presenting to a group of people, make certain that as many attendees as possible have "endorsed" your presence and that the invitation to the meeting includes the information that establishes trust and credibility.

If you found this post useful, sign up for the free Sales Source newsletter and I'll send you a weekly update of new posts, along with extra "insider" content.

Geoffrey James writes the "Sales Source" column on Inc.com, the world's most-visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source

Microsoft Windows Phone 8: Should You Make the Switch?

Check out the features that might make you (and your IT guy) bypass iPhones and Android devices.

CNET

On Monday Microsoft announced the Microsoft Surface, its latest foray into the tablet hardware market. Now the software giant has unveiled Windows Phone 8, the new version of its smartphone operating system. The new OS looks impressive on several levels:

• It borrows much of its code base from Windows 8. The result is an integrated ecosystem wherein developers can easily create apps and drivers that can be used on phones, tablets, and desktops.
• WP8, which will support multi-core chipsets, a range of screen resolutions and removable MicroSD, also includes better support for native near-field communication (NFC) between phones, laptops, tablets, and PCs, meaning we could soon see more usable applications for NFC and a real mobile wallet.
• WP8 will get Internet Explorer 10, complete with malware blocking, from Windows 8. IE10 provides significantly faster JavaScript performance and full HTML5 support.
• Nokia's turn-by-turn navigation and offline maps is built into WP8, which means all phones running the OS, not just Nokia Lumia handsets, will have access to these very popular features.
• Microsoft also talked about its renewed focus on its business users. The updated OS, which includes Office apps, will support BitLocker encryption, a secure boot mode, and deployment of Line-of-Business apps such as point-of-sale apps, product catalogs, dashboards, in-field or sales apps, workflow management apps, and monitoring and response apps. Admins will like features that let them manage WP8 devices using the same tools they use to manage the desktop, as well as the ability they'll have to set up apps for users without having to go through the Marketplace.

Is Windows Phone on Your Radar?

While BlackBerry used to be the smartphone of choice for business users, it's no secret that its maker, Research in Motion, has been in trouble for a while. In fact, a recent Nielson report indicates that the BlackBerry has only a 6% market share among recent smartphone buyers.

Apple's iPhone and scads of Android phones have filled in the gap as the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend--in which employees are increasingly bringing their own mobile devices to work and using them to access company resources like email, file servers, and databases--continues.

Apple fans hold up their iPhones and point to an app store chock full of largely safe and secure apps that have made it through Apple's approval process and into the ecosystem's "walled garden." Android users like to boast about how they can customize their phones and choose from a plethora of different devices, unlike Apple's one phone form factor.

But what about Windows Phone? Are the phones that run it even on your radar?

If not, maybe they should be.

The UI is Great for Business Users

I recently tested the 4G Nokia Lumia 900 (running Windows Phone 7.5 Mango) and in many ways preferred it to my Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0. While the Lumia 900 and other current Windows Phones won't be able to upgrade to Windows 8, the Metro user interface it employs remains at the core of WP8. So if you haven't played around with Metro, there are a couple things you should know.

Unlike the iPhone and Android phones which show you screens and screens of small app icons, the Metro UI in Windows Phone features bright and colorful "live" tiles that morph as your phone is synced with real time information.

The People Hub, one of the main tiles on the home screen, can be particularly useful for business users. You can pin an individual, such as a manager or important client, to your start screen in a separate tile. This lets you see new emails, text messages, missed calls, and comments via social media from that person right on your start screen.

Within the People Hub itself you can click on a contact and see all of your latest interactions with him or her, which works out to be an easy way to get a quick refresh on the interactions you've had with someone you're about to meet.

You can also organize your contacts into Groups so you can email, text, or chat with a whole group at once. By pinning a group to the home screen, you'll see missed calls, new messages, and social networking updates from members of the group anytime you launch your phone.

You can also pin documents and spreadsheets to your start screen so as to easily view and edit them. For instance, while at a conference you could pin the event itinerary so as to quickly see what's coming up next or where you need to go.

Apps for Windows Phone

One complaint people sometimes lodge against the Windows Phone ecosystem is that it doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps that Apple or Android have in their app stores.

That's true, but Microsoft is working hard to get developers more invested in coding for the platform. In fact, the company gives developers free phones and promises to prominently locate them in its app store and advertising spots. It also generously finances the creation of apps that are popular on the other two platforms.

As such, many of the most useful apps you can get on the other two platforms are available from the Windows Phone Marketplace, such as Skype, Evernote, Amazon Kindle, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

And sometimes the Windows Phone version of an app is even better than its iOS or Android counterpart. LinkedIn, for example, makes good use of the Metro design in its Windows Phone app and updates its stream in real time with posts from connections, news affecting particular industries and updates from professional groups. It also lets you search for jobs and follow news from your favorite companies.

And business users entrenched in Microsoft products will certainly want to download Microsoft's Skydrive app, which is available in the Windows Phone Marketplace and lets you create and edit various kinds of file types--documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and more--right inside a Web browser, share them with others, and access them from your phone or other device.

If you search in the business and productivity sections of the Marketplace you'll find plenty of useful apps for business. For instance, Call Recorder lets you record phone calls, play them back and upload them to Skydrive.

Your Windows Phone Options

Nokia, HTC, and Samsung make Windows Phone handsets that are available through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile for anywhere from free to $200 with a new two-year contract.

If you don't want to wait for the next wave of devices to emerge with WP8 on board, I would recommend the Nokia Lumia 900. You won't be able to upgrade it, of course, but it's a great 4G phone available for $99 at AT&T, or $50 at Amazon.com.

Christina DesMarais is an Inc.com contributor who writes about the tech start-up community, covering innovative ideas, news, and trends. Follow her tweets @salubriousdish or add her to one of your circles on Google+. Have a tip? Email her at christinadesmarais (at) live (dot) com. @salubriousdish