Why small business owners should just say no to gurus

When you own a small business, people (clients, employees, accountants, relatives and neighbours) are quick to tell you what you can do better. Some of these ideas have merit but most of them don’t. This doesn’t mean that the people sharing them are not bright or capable; it simply means that they don’t have enough context or perspective on your situation to present viable solutions for your business. They are familiar with the part of the business that they touch, but they don’t know your monthly overhead, the reason you’re keeping that problematic employee, why you walked away from a lucrative client, or the major development you’re working on behind closed doors but can’t yet disclose.

Many of the advice-givers are not small business owners themselves, never have been and likely never will be. They don’t know what it’s like to walk away from relative job security to start something fresh. It’s inconceivable to them that for the first few years, you will not take home the same salary you made as an employee because all of your profits will be reinvested in the company. They can’t imagine the agony of staying awake all night the first time you have to fire an employee or how many hoops you had to jump through to keep paycheques flowing in a recession.

While their advice is unsolicited and maybe annoying, all of these would-be sages can be shrugged off. Their intentions are good and, even if they’re not, they’re harmless.

Less harmless are professional “business gurus”, highly paid experts who rake in a lot of money telling others how to succeed. Their bestselling books promise to take your business to new heights, teach you how to swim with piranhas and show you how to get rich working only a few hours a week. They also take their winning formulas on tour, keynoting conferences and adding their voice to business columns. For the most part, they are well-educated, intelligent, articulate and authoritative and have achieved success in their field. I’m just not sure that qualifies them to give advice to small business owners.

Take Jack Welch for example. He joined GE, already a huge corporation, when he was 25 and worked his way up the ranks till he retired at 65. He was Chairman and CEO for 20 years, during which time, the company’s value rose 4,000 per cent. His personal net worth is estimated at $720 million. He has written countless bestsellers on his management style and is an inspiration to many.

Obviously, he is accomplished.  I’m not disputing his abilities but I do wonder what a small business owner can learn from a person who spent his entire career at one company.  Is a corporate hero qualified to give advice to someone running a small ad agency in Toronto or a metal fabrication shop in Dallas?

Guru is a Sanskrit word meaning teacher or imparter of knowledge. In ancient times, a guru was someone who ‘dispelled the darkness of ignorance’. But what if you’re not ignorant? What if you know what’s best for you and your business? What if you can trust your instincts?

A familiar suggestion from the business gurus is to “get out of your comfort zone”. The underlying premise is that your complacency and resistance to change is holding back your business. This is sound advice for corporate dinosaurs clinging to their glory days but I think it’s flawed advice for small businesses. What’s wrong with your comfort zone? It gave you the courage to strike out on your own, guided you into the right business niche and helped you assemble a team that works well together. The one time I followed this advice and ignored my instincts, the results were disastrous.

I’m not saying that no one has useful advice or that you can’t benefit from discussing business problems with a mentor. I just think you'll learn more from a retired restaurant owner than from someone who rode a corporate wave to fame.

In closing I’ll leave you with this wonderful quote about social media gurus from Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and one of the most cited economists in the world: “A social media guru is a term used to assign imaginary expertise in a nascent communications field to an individual with little to no real world business experience”.

5 Lessons I've Learned About Freelancing So Far

Snazzy new logo? Check.  Website? Check.  Solid business plan? Well, sort of.

Just over six months ago, I started a freelance communications business.  With two decades of industry experience under my belt, including 7 years owning an agency, I was ready to truly work on my own.  When I shared my plans to go solo with acquaintances, the response ran the gamut from, “You’ll be surprised how hard it is to make a go of it” to “They’ll be lining up to pay for your services as soon as you hang out a shingle”.  The advice was well-intentioned but not particularly helpful as the people who provided it were speaking from their personal experiences which were informed by the economic environment in which their own freelance endeavours had flourished or floundered.   

I didn’t prepare a formal business plan when I started and it would have been a waste of time if I had because the ups and downs of these two quarters have helped me clarify the kind of work I truly enjoy, the emerging trends I need to focus on and the amount of hours I want to spend building my business and more importantly, my personal brand.  I also know that meaningful freelance work will always be a part of my life, even if I choose to become an employee or take a contract somewhere.

As I completed my own mid-year review, I challenged myself to write the five most valuable lessons I’ve learned so far.  Here they are:

1. Flex time isn’t free time – As a freelancer, you need to be hyper-vigilant about carving out, organizing and protecting your work time.  Sure, you can do your grocery shopping on a Wednesday morning but in order to meet client deadlines, you’ll probably spend a sunny Saturday afternoon holed up in front of your computer.  The ability to work when and where you want is a selling feature of the freelance life but if you’re easily distracted, it’s probably not the life for you.

2. Do what you do best – When you freelance, there is no workforce, team or department to share your mistakes, absorb your poor judgement or fix your mediocre work.  It’s just you and while it’s tempting to be a jack of all trades, you need to zero in on your strengths and build your business around them.  Work only with clients who are a good fit with your skills, approach and expertise and only accept assignments you know you can excel at.

3. Build your brand relentlessly - If a potential client Googles you, what will they find? If you’re a freelance communicator, their search should reveal a current website, a showcase of your content in the form of a blog or newsletter, a professional presence on Twitter and Linked In, examples of how you give back to the industry through volunteering or mentorship.  You need to make time to cultivate a professional reputation that goes beyond your paid work.

4. Network strategically – As a sole practitioner, you can spend your life in coffee meetings.  A few will yield paid work eventually.  Others will spark new friendships.  Some will frankly be a waste of time – time that could have been spent meeting deadlines, building your brand or learning something new.  Networking is imperative to your success but decide how many hours you will devote to it and be judicious about how you approach it.

5. Learn to say no – The word “no” is a freelancer's best friend so learn to use it and use it with conviction.  Say “no” to people who want you to work for free, family members who need you to pick up dry-cleaning, work that doesn’t fit your abilities, and endless, drawn-out RFP processes with minimal chance of success.  Learning how to effectively say “no” will enable you to say “yes” to more of the things that will make you happy.

She'd be great, if only I could motivate her

If only I could have more autonomy...

When I ran a business, the realization that it was my job to motivate staff hit me like a ton of bricks.  I had just assumed that everyone was motivated by the same things and at first, took a fairly formulaic approach to motivation.  When this didn't work, a mentor suggested that you can't actually motivate another human but you can find out what motivates them and use that to your advantage.  So, how do you find out what motivates someone?  You can ask them outright but you won't always get an entirely truthful answer.  For example, some younger workers claim to be motivated only by meaningful opportunities but my negotiations with them usually revolved around higher salaries and fancier titles.

So, in my lifelong quest to understand how to bring out the best in people (myself included), I was excited to read DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, a New York Times bestseller from author Daniel Pink.  According to Pink, the old carrot and stick approach to motivating employees with external rewards like money is a relic of the 20th century that needs to be scrapped.  He asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction is the "deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things and to do better by ourselves and our world" and to implement this, we need to let people experience autonomy, mastery and purpose at work.  Pink encourages modern workplaces to abandon motivation 2.0 (assume that if you give employees total autonomy they will shirk their duties) and embrace motivation 3.0 (assume that everyone is ready to work hard and do a good job in the right setting).

Pink asserts that people are happiest and most productive when they're in "flow", that magical time when we lose ourselves in our work, becoming deeply engaged in achieving our goals, challenging ourselves and learning new things.  I completely understand this concept and I have experienced it often but if I'm perfectly honest, I'm more inclined to experience "flow" when I'm reading a book on a beach or tending to my garden, in other words, things that are not attached to how I pay the bills.  Pink believes this Zen-like state is also achievable in an office setting and provides many ideas and examples of how to make it happen, including:  

Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) - Focus on results and nothing else, let people work whenever and wherever they want and don't waste time judging how people get the job done.  I love this idea and I can see it working with highly-disciplined individuals in certain environments. However, although Pink touches on autonomy versus accountability, he doesn't really offer any solutions for how to deal with employees who are allowed to work from home at midnight and still don't meet their deadlines.

Remove financial incentives and just pay everyone a healthy flat salary - Sounds good, but what's healthy? Is it the going rate in the industry or a few thousand more?  Is it what you think the employee deserves or what they believe they've earned? Pink argues that commissions, bonuses and even billable hours don't work and just force people to get creative when filling out forms and I can't say I disagree.  But human nature suggests that that there will always be people who think they're working harder or contributing more than their peers and who will expect external rewards, whether it's in the form of more money, extra vacation time or public recognition.

Let employees run free for a few hours - Informed by the reality that even the most creative person can get crushed under the weight of a deadline, Pink shares stories of companies which carve out time each month for employees to work on something completely unrelated to the business and not connected to compensation at all.  In this free time, liberated from client demands or management constraints, employees can really get their minds working and come up with their best work.  According to Pink, this is how Google News was conceived and scientists at one organization even won a Nobel Prize for Physics for something they developed in their non-work time. I can get behind this.  Many marketing types would say that the work they do for fun is much more creative than what they're "allowed" to do for clients. But when every single day is packed with new deadlines and fresh crises, how would a consulting firm find the time?

The book is well researched and Pink backs up his claims with reams of scientific data, study results and real-life examples although most of the workplaces he mentions are large tech companies and the scenarios don't always translate to an advertising agency or a retail outlet. I enjoyed the book, would recommend it, and I agree with Pink that the old models of motivation and reward are not working and are no longer applicable.  I would even say that this approach, or a form of it, is worth a try.

But I'm still skeptical about his belief that inside every seemingly lazy, disaffected worker is a hard-working Einstein just waiting to burst out if only the workplace culture is revolutionized.  It doesn't take into account the many personality traits and innate differences that shape humanity.  In my experience as an employer, wife, friend and mother, I know that some people genuinely want to do a good job at everything they touch and will respond to any kind of motivation.  Others can only excel if they're passionate about the subject matter.  Still others are purely transactional, will work for money, do no more than what's required and don't care what you think of them. Some thrive in a structured environment where they're monitored closely and there's little room for distraction and others can be trusted to work at home and not spend the day watching Tom and Jerry reruns.

What do you think?  Are you ready to embrace motivation 3.0?

Ten Surprising Things I Learned While Running My Own Business

For eight years, I co-owned a successful Toronto PR agency.  At its peak, we had 13 employees and a nice portfolio of global brands and local start-ups.  I’m a freelancer now but I often draw upon the lessons I learned at the helm of a “real” enterprise.  Some of them might be interesting for you if you’re running a small business or thinking about it:

1. The business is always with you - A small business is like a child.  It’s just as demanding and it needs you 24-7.  It makes you work on your days off and puts a damper on your vacations.  It wakes you up early and whispers to you when you’re sleeping.  It's unpredictable and just when you think you've got it figured out, it hits you with the office equivalent of teething pain. 

2. Rules are not a bad thing - When you start, it's tempting to eschew boring, restrictive things like time sheets, office hours and signed contracts but eventually you will need them and they are a lot harder to introduce later on.  Take the time to develop processes for your office, your employees and your clients.  You won't alwyas look at them when things are good but you'll rely on them when relationships sour.

3. When you are responsible for someone's livelihood, you make decisions you wouldn't make as an independent - We all know when a client isn't a good fit or when it's time to turn down another low-paying account.  And when it's just you, you can do that.  But when people are relying on you to pay the bills, you will sometimes compromise to keep the cash flowing.

4. Management theorists are not always right - There is no shortage of business gurus peddling their books, preaching about swimming with sharks and getting out of your comfort zone.  The thing is, most of them aren't actually running a small business and some have never even worked in a corporate setting.  Read the books, stay abreast of the trends but remember, the concepts are theoretical.

5. You can't lead without a map - When finding clients is your main focus, it's easy to forget about business goals that aren't related to sales.  While you don't need a sophisticated vision/mission statement, you do need a plan for the kind of company you want to create.  If you don't have a roadmap for growing your business, someone else will grow it for you, and not necessarily in the way you envision.

6. You can't do everything - This is one of the toughest lessons for business owners to learn, especially in a consulting business where human capital is the equity.  The only way to expand is to hire other people, train them, trust them and let them sink or swim.  Yes, mistakes will be made but if you micromanage, you will never get out of the office. Note: I'm not sure I ever perfected this.

7. You won't believe the paperwork - Until you are big enough to pay someone to take care of your non-core business, you will be a CEO, HR director, accountant, procurement officer and sales director and you'll be up to your ears in tax forms, leasing agreements, photocopier rentals, paycheques,  invoices, IT upgrades, and, sadly, termination papers. 

8. Never count your chickens before they hatch - Nothing is confirmed until everyone signs on the dotted line.  People will accept job offers and then change their minds.  Potential clients will ask you to spend hours on a proposal only to decide they're going to handle things in-house.  And people will tell you the cheque is in the mail when it's still on their desk.  Be conservative in your projections.

9. Things move much slower than you anticipate - Occasionally you'll get a new client who needs you to start immediately, but more often, the sales cycle is glacially slow and there can be a few months from a first meeting to winning the business to working on the account to seeing that first cheque.

And most importantly...

10. If it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't right - You will know within a couple of months if something isn't working whether it's a project, a new employee or a new office process.  But no one wants to admit they made a mistake so you hold on and hope that things will change.  They rarely do and you end up having a tough conversation two years later than you should have.  Follow your instincts.  They're what got you where you are. 

Tire Kickers - A Little Respect Please?

I haven't blogged for a couple of weeks, partly because I was in the country with my family, squeezing out the last days of summer. It was a wonderful vacation temporarily disrupted by a major etiquette violation I've decided to share in the context of a troubling trend for us entrepreneurs - the professional tire kicker.


An expression from the used car lot, the "tire kicker" is a person who wastes the time of a salesman though he has no intention of buying. We're not selling used cars at Palette PR but we are getting calls from many people who feel that investing in PR might be just what they need to weather the economic storm. Only, they're not sure how much they want to spend, what their objectives are, or when the project might start.


And, before taking the plunge, they need some assurance that it's the right step. This assurance comes in the form of a meeting in which we share our expertise, show examples of past work, talk about how we might help them and try to get a sense of what they're looking for. While we don't get an idea of the budget we are often promised that "while the initial amount will be on the low side, there is great potential for it to be increased if we're successful". This meeting concludes with a request for a two-or-three-page proposal in which we provide some free ideas for what a campaign might look like. A week or so later, we may be asked to come in and present the ideas in person to someone who is positioned as "the decision-maker". We are told that, if we can impress this mandarin, then the business is as good as ours. Sadly, all too often, this person has "difficulty understanding our vision" and asks for another memo with more detail on how things will play out. And on it goes until, after not hearing from them for a few weeks, we follow up with the potential client, only to find out that they have: a) decided they're not interested in PR after all, b) loved our ideas and have decided to do everything in-house, c) decided to work with another agency and haven't had a chance to inform us.

The person who disturbed the tranquility of my recent vacation was one such potential client, looking for PR assistance in an area in which I have considerable expertise. In order to make a decision, he needed a proposal very quickly. In a telephone conversation, I agreed to prepare a document for him within 48 hours. As an agency principal, I am always engaged in building the business so I begged forgiveness from my family, closed the door and put my work hat on. Five minutes after sending it to Mr. potential client, I received the following e-mail: "Thanks but we've already hired someone".


There is a professional way to look for an agency partner and many organizations respect it by clearly stating their budget, objectives and expectations for the project before meeting with agencies. Some work with search firms like Agency Link and some even compensate participating companies for ideas. When the process is over, these organizations call the unsuccessful parties as soon as the decision has been made and, in an ideal scenario, offer meaningful feedback that will help them do a better job next time.


I realize that, in trying times, it's tough to decide where to spend your marketing dollars and the wrong choice can have lasting consequences. But, that doesn't mean you have the right to waste anyone's time on phantom projects that may or may not happen, with a budget that may or may not materialize and the promise of future, more lucrative work that may or may not come to pass.


That's just not good etiquette!