Thursday, August 28, 2014

Why the experts aren't helping

In August of 2009, the CNN web page ran an article titled “How to get a job in 100 worlds or less. In almost every case the professional career consultants gave advice that presumed the candidate had skills that very few real life candidates have.
These 7 people gave great advice. The problem is that they gave half the advice – strong on what and short on how! While the article was written to be short and fast, the very structure of the article causes more problems than it solves. Since it is written in the expectation that the reader can actually use the suggestions, when the unprepared reader bumps up against the reality of their own limited abilities they are left more discouraged than before they read the article.
Each of you reading this article, by the very fact of taking the time to read this article, are outliers. You are not “average”. If your response to what I am saying is “learn those skills” it’s because by nature or education you’ve gone that one step farther than most people either know how to go or have been taught to go.
My point is that you cannot apply your standards for yourself to those poor souls who are floundering in their job search.
The key to economic recovery is people working at well paying jobs. Working people with good salaries have money to buy stuff and companies need them as customers to survive. The out-of-work people need help do each of the following:
  1. Not just discovering companies that might use their skills, but companies that need those exact skills AND have a current opening. This is key because having exactly the right skills, presented in exactly the right way on Monday is worthless if the job closed on the preceding Friday or doesn’t open until the following Monday.
  2. Help analyzing job requirements and matching them to their own skills. A lot of people have to change career fields in today’s market and have great skills that will crossover to other industries or jobs. Since their expertise is in the work they do and not in marketing their own skills, most won’t know how to discover or explain how their skills crossover into the new fields and industries.
  3. Help tailoring their resume to showcase how their skills match the job requirements. Most people try to write a resume only once every few years and thus are not very good at succinctly explaining their skills and abilities. Most people don’t have enough practice to tailor their resume to showcase their crossover skills.
  4. Access to a wider set of contacts and information about which companies have current openings and whom to contact, by name. The helper must become the referrer. The vast majority of jobs don’t naturally build large networks In fact; most workers don’t have networks and don’t know how to build them.
  5. Lastly the HR people must learn that many of the best candidates are not and need not be the best professional job seekers. Unless job search skills are job performance skills, the candidates that have the best job search skills are not really professional engineers or clerks or whatever; they are professional job seekers and once they start work, they will immediately start looking for their next job.
Before you say: “Hire one of the companies in this article to teach you and to supply the contacts you need.” Remember you are talking to someone who has just lost his or her job, thus has no income and really can’t afford to pay for professional help. These kinds of support are what the state unemployment offices should be supplying and rarely if ever actually deliver.
The solution will come from one of two sources. Either from someone within the system who recognizes the deficiencies and has the authority to make the necessary changes, plus access to the funds to pay for the extra resources. The other possible source is some “genius” outsider who can disrupt the existing process in some unexpected way.
Since genius is where (and when) you find it, the most likely solution will be a slow process of small changes within the system as lone individuals discover ways to place one candidate at a time and try to formalize the things that work.
Don't just toss this aside as just another rant. Remember that defining the problem is always the first step in solving it.w 

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Startups
Startups are fundamentally different from anything else you can do in business.

In many ways a starting a company is just like raising a child. Everything is for the first time - new and untried. No matter how much experience the people have designing the product or servicing the customer; with a startup it’s still the first time that particular task has ever been done with those people in exactly that way.
Just as an established company has to build a relationship and reputation with a new customer, a new company has to build a relationship and reputation with every customer. An established company has staff interrelationships that are just being built in a startup and will inevitably impact how and how well those people work together.
Every new product or service will have problems to solve. Just think about the last time you bought a new TV or a new car. You had a learning curve just to figure out how to set the clock or the date since every TV or car has a slightly different procedure.
An established company has processes and procedures for most of its day-to-day operations. A policy for handling customer complaints and refunds, and a set dollar amount that the service person is authorized to spend without asking permission and so on.
The first key lesson for a startup to learn comes from the French philosopher Rene Descartes – Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
The takeaway from this is for you to keep close track of problems and successes to develop processes, procedures and guidelines to deal with future issues. This deceptively simple practice is the key to scaling your business and allowing you to add staff without losing the very things that set you apart from the competition.
Every startup begins with an idea and that must be turned into a plan to actually create a product or to deliver a service. Depending on the business that plan might be very simple or complex but just like planning a trip to the grocery store without a list you end up forgetting the lunchmeat!
While a better plan generally leads to better results, its far too easy for you to get caught up in trying to write the perfect plan and to account for every possibility, leading to the well known “analysis paralysis”.
The second key lesson for a start up is - A good plan implemented today is better than a perfect plan implemented tomorrow.
George Patton
Your takeaway this time is that while you must do enough planning to know were to start, what you need to start with and where you are going, you should start actually doing something as soon as practical. Just like that mythical trip to the grocery store I mentioned earlier, you can always add or subtract items from the during your shopping trip, but start filling your cart!
Reading the startup advice in most business magazines you will see the reoccurring theme to not let finance hold you back. While this is good advice in the main you still need some cash to get started.
I can start a ditch digging service with a car or truck (or a bus ticket) to get to the job and a $15 shovel. Without that transportation and the shovel I can’t start a ditch digging business! I specifically chose a ditch digging business since the cost of tools is just about as low as you can get, but as you can see there is a minimum you need to get started.
How many times have you seen a need for a service or product that you’ve thought “I could make a lot of money building that or doing that for that customer”? In looking at exactly how you could make the product or deliver the service you find that you need some cash up front to buy the raw materials and tools to actually build the product or deliver the service (and by the way feed yourself till you get paid) and decide that you just don’t have the cash to make it work?
Most of us have shelved the idea and moved on looking for something we can do with the resources we already have or use what we do have to get a sample together to get more funding.
Its OK to look for opportunities within your budget or skill set, it is also OK to look for ways to expand your budget or acquire new skills but to you really only have those two choices. My business experience has taught me that more ideas fail for lack of funding than funding is wasted on bad ideas.
The key to places like Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas is not the universities that turn out educated people, although that helps, Its not the co-location of research and development branches of big businesses although that helps too. The “secret sauce” is the people willing to risk their cash on new ideas!
The last takeaway is that you should never saddle yourself with so much debt that you lose control; but never borrow just enough to give yourself a case of the shorts. You've got to have enough cash to finish!