We are now almost officially at our two year anniversary in Austin.  I can say, without a doubt, that it’s been an amazing rollercoaster — not one that I ever would have knowingly signed up for, but one for which I am immensely grateful, in spite of its rockiest moments.

In the past two years, we moved to a new town, started a consulting business, began building a web startup, and adopted a cat (which, for anyone who knows me, knows that is the most bizarre thing on this list).  In addition, I’ve been through more not-quite-fits as potential jobs, decided I didn’t want to work for someone else, then decided I did at least five different times.

I’ve learned what made me love my favorite past jobs, what made me hate some of my previous roles, and what kept me in some places longer than I should have stayed.  I’ve identified the things that motivate me, the things that demotivate me, what I used to want that I no longer want, and what I used to be good at that I now can’t stand doing.  I am now clear on where I want to go, what I want to learn, where I want to focus, and what I want to learn to do better.

I couldn’t say any of these things a year ago. (Or hell, even six months ago.)

I’ve figured out more in the past two years than I set out to do.  It sucked more than I wanted it to.  It was cooler than I thought it could be.  And it’s brought me to the end of one very difficult chapter… which has, quite happily, brought me to the beginning of a new, exciting one.

I am delighted to announce that, as of September 13th, I will be returning to my roots without actually back-sliding: I will be rejoining the never-dull world of ecommerce in my beloved Emerald City by joining the awesome team at SysIQ as an Engagement Manager.

In addition to being a multi-platform integrater of several of the market’s leading ecommerce engines (which is cool, but not necessarily novel), they are also practitioners of well-honed online marketing principals and my methodology of choice, Persuasion Architecture.  In fact, one of their key value propositions is that they can leverage the power of Persuasion Architecture, regardless of ecommerce platform, through a combination of process and technology.

As someone who’s spent the past year studying, working and learning more and more in this space, the opportunity to marry what I know well (ecommerce) with what I want to know better (Persuasion Architecture) by working with a team I like (SysIQ) in a place that I love (San Francisco) was too much to actually hope for.  Happily, it happened, anyway.

(And to pre-emptively answer the first question I keep getting asked: No, we are not currently planning to move to San Francisco. BrainMatch is still here, so Austin will remain home for the time being.  My life will be spent traveling and telecommuting, both of which are A-Ok with an ADD, antsy-pants like me.)

I am spending the next two weeks wrapping up most of my larger client engagements, and shifting the nature of my Indigo Heron products to being largely virtual in nature.  This will take time, of course, but for as much as I am excited about the opportunities that await me at SysIQ, I also feel very strongly that both my husband (who is my business partner), my clients and my business deserve the respect of my continued support, even once I am back to a full-time job.

So, that’s the news.  I am extremely excited by this change, because it represents a lot of work over the past two years (three years, in many ways). It is a move with an enormous amount of potential, and it balances my varying and seemingly conflicting needs in a way that I didn’t dare hope was possible.

And as I look forward to a new array of fun and exciting professional challenges ahead, I find myself profoundly grateful.

• I am grateful to Kevin, Jonas, Lisa and Austin for the past year at Tech Ranch.
• I am grateful to TW, Chris and Pam for some great lessons out of Praxsys.
• I am grateful to my friends and family back home for being so gracious about my tendancy to fall out of touch for long periods of time at a strech.
• I am grateful to Sherry, Ryan, Tim and Kate for helping make me laugh and keep me (mostly) sane through the ups and downs.
• I am grateful to Abdul and Kirra for their amazing ability to be strong contributors to the upswing.
• I am grateful to all my clients over the past two years for their faith and their business.
• I am grateful to John for being generous beyond words, filled with endless support, always taking the opportunity to make connections and being an amazingly good sport when I’m at the end of my rope.
• I am grateful to Donna, Dani, Sara, Kari and Maija who reminded me this weekend during my first visit home in a year and a half that when I’m doing work that I love, I am more likely to develop meaningful, long-lasting friendships with amazingly talented and brilliant people.

And I am especially grateful to my husband, Charles Andretta, II, who is the most patient, generous person I know, and who has rolled with my mind-changing, direction-flipping, emotionally conflicted, career crisis self with a degree of understanding that no one could ever reasonably ask of another human being.  And I am eager for a new chapter where, for the first time since we’ve met, we both feel good about each of our professional direction.

Now, I think it’s time for a glass of wine.  I feel like celebrating.

xoxo

~Alora

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Like many of my peers in Generation X, my parents and my grandparents have never really understood what I do for a living. My parents use the web, so it’s not entirely outside their comprehension, but when it comes to my grandparents: I may as well be communicating with aliens via mental telepathy. Being an knowledge worker in a digital economy is a bit of a leap for people who don’t watch TV or listen to the radio and who rely almost elusively on a paper copy of a newspaper for their information consumption.

I think that’s part of why I am often fascinated by generational research: I see how big the difference is in my life versus my parents and grandparents, and I am riveted at the idea of what subsequent generations are going to experience that I am not even capable of imagining. I was thinking about this as I was reading a great list on YoungEntreprener today: 27 Inspiring Young Online Entrepreneurs.

When I look at the companies these entrepreneurs started — Mashable, Volusion, Digg, Box.net, 99Designs, iContact — I can’t help but think that this may be one of those interesting examples that I’ve been looking for when it comes to ways in which Generation Y will be different than Generation X. I think we tend to dismiss many of these success stories as anomalous. And while they certainly are in terms of their success, I am not so sure they are when it comes to what motivated them to embark on their “pet projects” in the first place.

And in the end, I think this really may be Generation X’s most exciting legacy to Generation Y: an internet-driven economy that has made it much more possible for a teenager to have the tools on-hand to build a business that is worth seven-figures even before the first day of freshman year of college. Sure, not all teenagers are going to take advantage of that opportunity; and not all who try to take advantage of it will be successful. But the fact that option is so much more readily available than at any previous point in history is just… well, really, really cool.

My husband’s new startup is about pairing businesses with high school students to crowdsource project work. And while most people love the idea and are eager to get involved, the one consistent source of pushback we do hear is, “What kind of business value do high school students really have?” It’s been a fascinating lesson to me, to see how deeply entrenched that perception is among so many people. Most people don’t have a concern about trusting college students, but the idea of high school students is just jarring enough that some people can’t quite get their head around it.

Personally, I think that lists like this are encouraging. For too long, too many of us with creative talents and inspiration believed what we were told when someone said to ‘wait’ — until after college, until later in a career, until some nebulous date off on the horizon — to pursue our dreams. I love that these young entrepreneurs just considered it normal to start young. It didn’t occur to them that they shouldn’t. It’s further evidence of what (creativity and education specialist) Sir Ken Robinson says: we ‘educate’ kids out of their creativity over time, and teach them not to stand out, not to differentiate themselves from their peers, and to stick to the safest, most boring and most conventional path.

I think it’s sensational that these 27 young entrepreneurs bucked that trend. And I think it’s fantastic that they are high profile enough to help set an example for those who come after. And I think it’s cool that in just my lifetime alone, we’ve gone from 8-track tapes to the iPad, and that there are eager young entrepreneurs who automatically dive in to find their niche. It makes me fabulously curious about what more is to come.

While plenty of people — usually older — scoff at the idea of a 24-year-old CEO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise, I say good for them. Life is short. The only value in “waiting” is if you don’t know what you want to do. If you know, go for it. After all, if you’re going to trip and fall, I always figure it’s best to do that when you’re young enough that you don’t have to worry as much about the dangers of breaking a hip.

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For some people entrepreneurship is a philosophy. For others, it’s the price we pay for an idea we are passionate about. But what’s the difference? And, even more importantly, why does it matter?

I think it matters most if you are in a B2B business yourself. As a business that serves the needs of other businesses, understanding the motivations of your customer can go a long way toward understanding how to sell to them, when not to, and where their comfort levels are.

It also matters socially. Birds of a feather will often flock together, and that is often true of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs tend to have slightly different lifestyles than people who are content to be employees, and as such, they tend to find it easiest to relate to other people with a similiar outlook on life.

Entrepreneurship as a Means

What do I mean when I say ‘entrepreneurship as a means’? I mean that entrepreneurship is the means by which someone can accomplish something worthwhile. Owning your own business may not be your main goal, merely the vehicle to help make your real goal possible.
For entrepreneurs who fall into this group, there are often a myriad of motivators:

• Lifestyle
• Wealth-building
• Passion around an idea

Any of these things can lead someone to set aside the relative ‘stability’ of a J-O-B, strike out on their own, and start building their own business. For these people, while entrepreneurship may be an adventure with its own series of challenges and rewards, it also may not be in their bones, and if circumstances changed, these are often the people who could be content to go back to working for someone else again.

Entrepreneurship as an End

The other side of the coin are the real evangelists. These are the die-hards who will move from venture to venture, opportunity to opportunity, and for whom working for someone else is the psychological equivelant of being buried alive.

This is a completely different mindset, and one that I would guess is in the minority among entrepreneurs, though they are often more high profile. This group tends to have a tenacity that keeps them moving on to a new idea after the last one crashed and burned. This is the group that writes blogs, starts conferences, builds incubators, hosts Meetups, and sponsors competitions.

One of the most important reasons to stop and consider this question is really for yourself, however. Is your entrepreneurial journey a means or an end? The reason I find this question particularly compelling for business owners is that it helps set priorities.

If entrepreneurship is an ends in and of itself, then bouncing from one idea to the next, building multiple businesses at once and having a social circle that is largely composed of other entrepreneurs is probably a common sight.

However, if entrepreneurship is merely the means, then your other goal should be clear. Why? Because entrepreneurship takes sacrifices that being an employee doesn’t. While the payoff potential is greater, the investment is far steeper — sometimes at great cost to the rest of your life. Any new entrepreneur needs to understand than before diving into the pool.

Understanding what motivates you is how you know what things to outsource vs. what things to manage internally; it’s how you figure out what are the priorities for your time and how to focus your business objectives; and it’s how you identify your own personal tipping points where the sacrifices are not worth the price.

Entrepreneurs who never stop and consider these points can end up like hampsters on a wheel, with no progress and no recognition of their lack of progress. Knowing why we do what we do, what we hope to get out of it, what we’re willing to pay to get it, and how long we are willing to keep it up is how we build a plan — for our business and for our life.

And, in the end, whether we meet the goals or not, at least sorting out the motivation helps us keep marching on the days when it’s hardest to get out of bed.

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One of my posts on WorkingPoint was about asking the right questions at different stages of your business maturation — there are some questions that you should ask when you’re getting started, and others that you ask several years in. But what questions matter for today?

Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software posted a follow-up to his previous article on VentureBeat in which he asked several new questions, and this time the theme was around managing an entrepreneurs time and priorities.

“If you were forced to hire someone today, how would you define her job such that she would contribute enough revenue to cover her expense?”
This is a great question, because it removes the knee-jerk, “I can’t afford to hire anyone” excuse. Instead, it requires really considering what it would take to make an employees role pay for itself. It may not be possible just yet, but defining what this would look like is a huge step to getting your business to a position where it’s possible.

“Which of your business operations do you hate?”
I particularly like this one because it’s an important reminder that some things we spend time on are such energy drains that they actually will bring down our overall productivity, even on tasks we enjoy. One of the things that entrepreneurs need to understand is how to manage their own energy levels in order to effectively manage my time.

“What initiatives could be done half-assed without significant impact?”
This is a great question because it’s the type of thing that no one ever wants to admit they consider. And yet, to Jason’s point, it’s something that we always need to keep in mind. Every task has a ‘point of diminishing returns,’ where the time and effort you put into it starts to exceed the value that you will get out of it. It is always important to be mindful of that threshold, because otherwise it’s easy to get caught in the cycle of perfectionism that will consume your time with no return.

“If you could get one solid hour of advice from a guru you respect, what would you discuss and what would be the goal of the meeting?”
This question is well-worded because, again, it is forcing you to consider how you are spending your time. It’s not, “If you could ask them anything, what would it be?” It is specifically, “If you could get one solid hour…” Period. Prioritize.

No one has endless time and resources. The people who are most successful are the ones who figure out how to maximize what they have, and work around what they don’t. And one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to remember is that the single most scarce resource you have, is usually you.

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Steve King of Small Business Labs posted his 2010 prediction list at the end of last year, and the first and second items on his list were on the trends around our globally shifting workforce.

Item number one:

The Shift to Contingent Workers Turns Employees into Entrepreneurs: Employers large and small are shifting from full-time employees to part-timers, freelancers, outsourced services, partnership arrangements and other forms of contingent workers. They are doing this to save money and increase business flexibility. Despite the economic recovery, 2010 will see the contingent workforce grow as companies continue to limit hiring of full time staff. Many of these contingent workers will create or work for small businesses.

Item number two:

Personal Businesses on the Rise: Enabled by the Internet and low-cost information technology, the number of personal businesses (one employee businesses) has grown twice as fast as the overall economy over the last decade and exceeds 22 million. With the unemployment rate remaining high and traditional employment options limited, 2010 will be another year of strong growth in the number of personal businesses. The growth in personal businesses will also result in an increase in overall small business formation and numbers in 2010.

Clearly I’ve written about this issue before, and it’s something that always stirs up a lot of controversy because it hits a lot of hot buttons for many people. Personally, I love these trends. Even more than that, I think these trends are ultimately beneficial in ways that most of us currently don’t recognized.

In the 17th century, to whatever extent workers were organized, it was on a guild model that was discipline centric. Whether a person was a blacksmith or a cobbler, their “peers” were other professionals within the same trade. In the most literal sense, they were competitors who had comperable skills and offered similar services. They were mostly what we would now call ‘freelancers’ who were responsible for their own independent businesses, from stem to stern.

With the rise of the Industrial Age, the shift moved away from individual contributors with specialized skills, to collection of skills brought together to work collaboratively as part of a larger enterprise. Because of the financial investment involved with building these enterprises (factories being the most obvious and common example), the rules for workers changed.

A paternalistic model emerged, where large businesses had to lure people to them. Companies would make long-term committments to their people — pensions, healthcare, education for the kids, mortages, and more — and the people would develop long-term (and sometimes even multi-generational) relationships with the company.

Now that was are in (or even past, as some claim) an Information Age, the employee model needs to be re-examined. And while plenty of people don’t like the idea of a contingent workforce (and I understand why), the fact is that is an employment model that makes far more sense for the rules that come with an information economy.

Geography is no longer the end-all-be-all of meaningful and well-paid work; large companies no longer have to stockpile human talent like cord wood in the event that the right spark of creative genius will occur for them if they just have enough people thinking big thoughts; and small motivated teams in garages are just as capable of creating lucrative, innovative ideas as multi-billion dollar corporations.

The reason I think that these trends are particularly valuable for entrepreneurs and small businesses is for one simple reason: this change is much harder for large businesses, with large investments, and large real estate holdings and enormous legacy systems (both techical and policy-based) to evolve to match. Small businesses simply have less baggage. This gives entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses an edge that the Fords and Proctor and Gamble’s of the world do not have.

Yes, there are always going to be employees who are simply looking to punch a clock in exchange for a paycheck: not everyone is cut out for the entrepreneurial life (and the fact that our education system is designed to funnel people into an employee role doesn’t help). The number and types of those jobs are going to continue to change and dwindle over time as ideas like Results Only Work Environments continue to gain momentum. But for entrepreneurs the value is in the flexibility.

Knowledge workers are not unlike tradesmen: we think nothing of assembling a plumber, an electrican, a carpenter, a roofer and a painter to build a garage. This is valuable work, and the individuals involved are often ‘freelancers’ who are each specialists in their fields. They have partners they like to work with, but they are individual contributors who must work together to accomplish large projects because it is unrealistic to assume that any of them would have all the skills required to do the whole thing themselves.

Knowledge workers are much the same: if you combine a project manager, a developer, a designer and a systems engineer to build a website, that is a valuable association of individual contributors who come together to deliver a project bigger than what each of them could do alone. Even better, unlike a construction crew, a web team is not hindered by geography, weather or super expensive equipment investment to get started.

Naturally, there are downsides to that model: once one job ends, you need to have another one lined up or money saved to wait out the time in-between work. This model requires developing different skills and exercising fiscal discipline in ways that may not always be necessary when working for someone else. This model also requires a dash of realism that many people who cling to the fantasy of “job security” are reluctant to give up: after all, your company could lay you off as soon as your current project is over with, too. The days of ‘guarentees’ are long gone.

Learning to be flexible and take advantage of what the information economy can offer will make the difference betwee those who succeed in the new era, and those who flounder. That is, of course, why even USA Today has called this The Era of Small Business.

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The single biggest struggles I encounter with entrepreneurs trying to build a business is marketing.  Some small business owners don’t think about it; some don’t understand it; some don’t like it; some cling to the belief that it simply shouldn’t be necessary, as long as their product is good enough.  One way or another, though, marketing is always one of the first places entrepreneurs request help.

And though “marketing” is a broad discipline, one of the best places for many entrepreneurs to get started is their own website.  A website is to business today, what the phone book was in 1985.  And yet, despite all that, according to Carol Tice of Entrepreneur.com, a full 46% of small businesses still do not have a website.

Even more importantly, however, is that — if you chose carefully — your website can be an inexpensive place for you to test your message, develop your content and start reaching out to your customers without the extreme expense of traditional marketing and/or advertising campaigns.  And once you’ve had the chance to hone your material, then you can look at how else you can use it.

So, as promised last week, my focus for the final week of 2009 is going to be on the free tools that every business owner can use to help their business.  When it comes to my work with entrepreneurs, I usually start most clients off with one key recommendation: WordPress.

While most people know WordPress as a blogging application, the fact is that it is a fully matured content management system that makes managing your website far easier than attempting to deal with a custom coded site.  While some large-scale websites may need more advanced functionality, most entrepreneurs that I work with who are focused on getting their first site up and running find WordPress to meet their immediate needs.  Even better, your actual core WordPress functionality is free.

Here are a few quick steps to getting a business website up and running on WordPress in less than 2 hours:

Step 1: Select a hosting provider. (Low cost providers are fairly easy to come by.  My recommendation is to go with one that uses Simple Scripts.  It is a utility designed to help you manage installations of a host of applications on your domain.)

Step 2: Purchase your domain.  This can be done as part of your hosting provider purchasing process.  Many providers will even register a domain for you for free as part of your sign-up package.

Step 3: Once your purchase is complete, log into your administrative system and go into Simple Scripts.  Find WordPress.  Select the option for it to “install” in your root directory.

Step 4: After your installation set-up is complete, log into your WordPress admin and go to Settings –> Permalinks.  Under “Common Settings” select “Day and name.”  Hit save.

Step 5: Activate Akismet.  Akismet is a WordPress-built comment spam system.  Unless you want tons and tons of porn spam comments clogging up your website, make sure you turn on this Plugin.  In order to do that, you will need to go to WordPress.com and create an account (or login if you already have one).  Once in, select “My Account” from the main navigation, and then click on “Edit Profile.”  The alpha-numeric code you need (your API key) will be right at the top.  Copy it, and then paste it into your new WordPress install on your domain, in the Akismet settings page.

Step 6: Go to Appearance –> Plugins –> Add New.  This will give you a menu of different plugins that you can add to your installation of WordPress to help you customize it and get the functionality you need for your business website.  Some of the common plugins I recommend include the following:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Google Analytics for WordPress
3. XML Sitemaps

I recommend these as starting points for new site owners, because they are extremely important in both driving and understanding traffic.  Additional options that I personally use are plugins for social network activity and “related post” plugins that recommend other articles that are similar to the one the reading is currently viewing.

You’ll need to follow the instructions for each of the plugins to make sure they are properly configured once installed.  Good plugins will walk you through the process, so as long as you follow the instructions, you should be able to get things set up fairly quickly.  (And remember, in a worst case scenario, you can always delete the plugin and then reinstall it, if there is a problem.)

Step 7: Pick a “theme.”  In WordPress-speak, a “theme” is the design of your site.  There are, literally, thousands of themes to choose from, many of them are free.  And even “premium themes” are reasonably affordable, ranging anywhere from $20 up to $200.  I recommend starting with something free, and going from there.  The first place to start looking for themes is within the WordPress admin itself.  Under Appearance –> Add New Themes you will find a menu that allows you to browse different themes, see what you like, and install them to try them out.

If you want to use a theme from a different location (such a Woo Themes, which is a popular seller of business themes for WordPress), you will need an FTP utility that allows you to transfer files from your computer up to your hosting provider.  An application such as FileZilla is also free, and comes with easy instructions that can walk you through the process.  (And any theme you download from another website will also give you instructions on where to upload it once you need to move it into place.)

Now you’ve got a website.

Of course, while this first part is what intimidates many non-technical people, the fact is that installing the site is actually the easiest part.  The hard part is developing your content — what needs to be on your site, what makes sense for your customers, and how should it be organized to be both findable and valuable.  Later this week we’ll cover more tools to use to help you manage your website and develop its content.

A couple of last words of advice on setting up your site with WordPress:

• Use a secure password that you can remember.  Far, far too many people either leave a default password in place (which they can never remember) or use one that is too simple (which can easily be hacked).  Keep in mind that this is your business website, and treat your password appropriately.
• WordPress issues updates to the code fairly regularly.  It is important to try to stay current, because a great many of the updates are security related.  Once the basic WordPress installation has been upgraded, often the plugins will need to be next.  You will get messages whenever you log into the admin, so just follow their instructions and you should be fairly safe.
• WordPress is very easy to get comfortable with, even for the least technical people.  So play around in the admin (or, even better yet, set up a second install in another directory on your website, so that you can experiment without damaging your main website).  To learn more about WordPress, I recommend checking out Yoast.com. Yoast is a site all about WordPress and maximizing it’s value.  There are tutorials, information, recommendations and a great deal of content there for someone trying to get up to speed on how to get the most out of their WordPress install.

Finally, many people ask if they can use free WordPress hosting for their blog. For businesses I strongly discourage this for a couple of reasons:

• Free WordPress hosting does not get your site running on your own domain, which is vital for your search engine optimization (SEO).
• Free WordPress hosting has a very tight number of themes that you can chose from, and you cannot modify them without paying.
• Free WordPress hosting has storage space limitations that could limit some of your multimedia options for posting content.
• Free WordPress hosting does not allow you the opportunity to generate any revenue through advertising.

This article was originally posted on WorkingPoint’s Small Business Blog.

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I am guilty of a great many assumptions. There are a lot of things that I take for granted — the types of things that come naturally to me, the perspective I have on things, the business insights I rely on, the experiences I draw from — are all things that frequently turn out to be a bit more unique to me than I always assume.

One of the biggest assumptions I make is that the only real learning — in both life and business — is attained by doing. And usually doing is a constant experiment. Do, make a mistake, re-do, and repeat as needed.

But what about people who actually do learn in a more academic way? People who want and need to first read, then discuss, then process, then internalize and then try? And is it possible to be successful in life — and especially in your own business — if that’s the process you need to go through to learn?

That’s a perfectly fine solution for a 19-year-old, just getting started, who is still in school. But what about a mid-life professional in a career change, or launching a new venture? What do they do? If you’re trying to get a new business off the ground, you don’t get the luxury of pulling to the side of the road and going back to school for a couple of years.

For some of us, that’s ok. In fact, for some of us, that’s fabulous. But for others, it’s overwhelming, upsetting, frightening and debilitating. What is their solution?

The only thing I can think of is finding a mentor. But how does someone who needs an immersive learning experience find a full-time mentor to come into their new business for 3-6 months, and walk with them as they learn to navigate the treacherous world of a startup? Is it possible? And how does an unfunded startup compensate for that?

I’m genuinely curious and truly want to know how to blend a more traditional academic learning aptitude with the daily chaos of a startup business venture. The two feel mutually exclusive to me, but I feel confident that it can’t be an entirely unique problem, either. Someone somewhere must have solved it. But who? And where are they? And what did they do?

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As a career management advocate turned Entrepreneur Evangelist, I recently had an epiphany that clarified some of the change I’ve experienced over the past two years, as I’ve moved from my old life to my new one.

I’ve been lacking an effective metaphor to describe both the process and my present (and potentially future) state.  This has been tremendously frustrating (for both me and my husband), because my state of mind on this journey radically colors the choices that I am (or am not) comfortable making.

I think I finally figured out how to define it more effectively  We often talk about a “career path.” I think this is inaccurate. I think the right phrase is a “career highway.”

Right Lane = Stability-Motivated Employee

• One career and as few employers as possible.
• Stability reigns supreme.
• Even calculated risks are uncomfortable.
• Large enterprises and government positions often appeal most to this category.
• A single employer career with a stable retirment plan and reliable benefits is the Holy Grail, and boredom is acceptable at work in exchange for stability.
• Any necessary excitement can be sought outside of work when needed.
• “Progress” is most frequently measured in proximity to retirement, more than rungs climbed up a career ladder.

Second Lane = Migratory Employee

• The modern normal.
• An employee who will have 2-4 careers in a lifetime, and an average of 12-15 different jobs.
• Stability is important, but not above all else.
• Calculated career risks are worthwhile, if not occassionally exciting.
• Jumping to a new job is always a possibility if a more appealing opportunity presents itself.
• This employee is often heavily motivated by autonomy and new challenge, secondarily by money.

Center Lane = Freelancer

• The newest class of employee, often placing a premium on freedom and flexibility above stability.
• Often easily bored, and prefering variety with risk to stability with stagnation.
• Commonly enjoys being a solo entity, and is disinclined towards growing a business that requires taking on the responsibilities of having employees.
• Collaboration with other freelancers is often a successful and preferential model.
• “Dollars for hours” is the most common financial model, which can cause business development challenges.

Fourth Lane = Self-Employed

• Small businesses, often family or small-team owned/managed.
• Frequently limited in scalability.
• Often heavily reliant on founder(s) for success.
• Lifestyle businesses and brick-and-mortar neighborhood businesses often fall into this category.
• Not uncommon for an owner to discover that they ‘own a job’ rather than ‘own a business.’
• Freedom and wealth-building often started out as core priorities; over time, the realities of business limitations can undermine those objectives if this was not the intended final growth state of the business.

Left Lane = Business Owner

• Scalable businesses of all sizes.
• Owner/founder has decentralized systems, processes and critical knowledge enough to allow for empowerment and delegation among staff.
• Vacations and sick days for the founder are possible and cause little in the way of organizational chaos.
• This business is a strong candidate for potential sale, since success is not wholly dependent on the original founder for success.
• Owners/founders who build this type of business can/do often build more than one over the course of their lifetime.

Obviously this isn’t an entirely clean mapping, and different combinations can blend a bit to create a bit of a hybrid. But I think that the most meaningful part of the highway metaphor is the idea that people can change lanes over time. Different life factors can influence which lane someone chooses.

• I have seen dozens of female Second Laners have children, and then suddenly switch into either Right or Center Laners (depending on both their personality and their skillset).
• I have watched numerous Second Laners get laid off and decide to take on an entrepreneurial opportunity by moving immediately to the Center Lane, sometimes working their way farther over as time goes by.

This has been my path. I was an obsessive, workaholic Second Laner who was finding a ton of meaning and fun in the career that served me well, paid me nicely, stroked my ego constantly and took me on great professional adventures for a decade. When I hopped off the highway to move to a new town, I (arrogantly) assumed that I’d be able to just hop onto the new road in my new town without any trouble, and slide right back into the Second Lane again.

Unfortunately, my timing sucked. We left New York for Texas the week that Lehman Brothers decided to implode under the weight of their reckless decisions, and all of my pre-move job interview work collapsed with it. While not technically laid off, I found myself in the same position as many people who were: I was suddenly at loose ends with an inability to find a company that would let me do what I knew how to do. So, I shifted to the Center Lane.

The reality, though, is that at the time we started our business, I used the language that I knew my husband wanted to hear: and it was all Left Lane language. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he was going for, and that’s how we discussed it. The problem, of course, was that — like many new Center Laners — my hope was to bide my time until I could jump back into the Second Lane.

After a rough few months, I was finally given that chance. And, as luck would have it, it was on a trial basis. My new employer wanted the chance to check me out, and I certainly wanted the chance to check them out. As it turned out, that was the best thing that could have happened to my Career Highway Navigation. Going from the Center Lane back to the Second Lane suddenly felt painfully confining. Stifling, even. I was miserable within a week. I never saw that coming, and was a bit shocked to finally get what I’d wanted only to discover that I didn’t want it anymore.

So, after informing my employer that I didn’t foresee being able to sufficiently fill their needs, I stayed around to help them hire my replacement and then ultimately left. Back in the Center Lane again, I was at loose ends once more, but this time with a purpose. I just had to figure out how to make it work.

During this time, my husband began working on his startup. Everything about my husband is Left Lane. The idea of any other kind of business simply doesn’t make sense. And as a deeply collaborative person, he recognizes that he’ll need help to build a business that fits the bill.

Yet when it comes to me, in my professional life, I’m still in the Center Lane. I know that I don’t want to be in the Fourth Lane. But I’m honestly not sure that I want to be in the Left Lane, either. There are variations of the Center Lane model that are more lucrative and more sustainable than a strictly ‘dollars for hours’ model (which I also don’t want), but I’m not at all convinced that I can’t attain the degree of freedom I am looking for, accomplish the wealth-building I seek and manage to stay in the Center Lane.

But then, that’s part of the point: my A-#1 priority is freedom, above all else. I am not risk adverse (obviously), and I enjoy primarily being an individual contributor who occassionally collaborates on larger projects with others; I also don’t want to go back to managing people, projects, processes or products (been there, done that)… but I also don’t want to go back to working for anyone else. Given that, I don’t really see a solution other than the Center Lane for me.

My husband’s priority is to change the world, build a team of empowered collaborators and inspire the people who come into contact with his business to find creative solutions to large-scale problems. This is a goal he could never accomplish from the Center Lane. To do this on the scale that he wants, he needs to be in the Left Lane.

I always like the way the Left Lane looks. But I am increasingly less convinced that I’ll ever necessarily make my way all the way over there. But I’m also increasingly less convinced that I necessarily need to. With some proper planning and organizing, I could find that the Center Lane is the place that I’m happiest. Only time will tell. I just hope that next time I find myself switching lanes, I’m aware of it in time to turn on my blinker.

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Last spring, I was reading the annual WorldBlu list of the most democratically run organizations in the world. One of the companies that caught my eye was one whose democratic organizational practices included eliminating a formal vacation day policy.

I remember making a mental note of the idea, because I liked it and wanted to keep it in mind as part of our plans for developing our business over time.  To me, it seemed like a logical extension of the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) concept, which has proven very effective at large companies like Best Buy, while having always been — at least to some extent — a natural part of my career DNA at almost every company I’ve ever worked.

This debate has recently been kicked into the spotlight, thanks to Netflix fairly high profile stand on this position — what started off as a simple presentation (see below) describing their corporate culture, quickly turned into a big debate on the specifics of their vacation policy.

A recent article in Business Insider, Henry Blodget inspired a great deal of commentary when he asked readers what they thought of the idea — most of the responses are in opposition to the idea of a no-policy policy around vacation days. On Entrepreneur.com, author Tanya Payne added a fairly dismissive comment by asking, “Is Netflix run by a bunch of hippies?”

I’m fascinated by this debate, in large part, because in my experience as a white collar, tech professional is that — whether or not it’s “official,” every place I have ever worked has done precisely this. The reality, however, is just that: this is not something that places with hourly staff, or huge organizations are likely to find either appealing or even terribly practical.  So, for me, the question is not, “Does a ‘no vacation policy’ policy make sense?”  But instead, “When does a ‘no vacation policy’ policy make sense?”

As someone who works in a geographically independent profession on dynamic, project-specific, virtual teams with entrepreneurs and small organizations, this is sort of an obvious no-brainer. Even more importantly, what I like best about the idea of a ‘no policy policy’ when it comes to vacation time, is the fact that forces team accountability: either the person taking a vacation makes the necessary arrangements to be covered while they are out, or the person who hired them has to acknowledge that their staff is not mature enough to handle the responsibility of being treated like an adult — in which case, whether or not that person should stay needs to be asked and answered.

I also like that it eliminates what can seem like arbitrary favoritism in a crisis. Several times in my career, I have seen different sides of this equation, and all of them support the reasoning behind a no policy approach:

• A co-worker’s husband had a massive heart attack and, as a result, she was out of work for about a month. She had neither the vacation nor sick days accumulated to cover her time off, but no one for a second questioned that. She needed to be home with her family, and — even more importantly — now that their income had just suffered a massive (and indefinite) hit, the last thing she could afford to do was to have to chose between paying the bills or taking care of her husband and kids in the wake of a family crisis.
• As I was leaving another company, my final paperwork indicated that I had a negative number of vacation hours, based on my accrual rate and the amount of time I’d been with the company. However, the person handling it “wasn’t going to make a big deal” about it, and let it go without docking my final paycheck the even out the number of hours in my vacation bank.
• During a particularly high stress time in my years with another company, my boss — being both perceptive and prudent — recognized that I was overly taxed and at the end of my rope. With a non-negotiable Thursday morning instant message, he effectively kicked me out of the office for the following week and told me to clear my head, get some rest and that he didn’t want to see me until a week from the following Monday.

In each of these cases, the “official” policy said one thing, but the culture of the organization over-ruled it when circumstances arose. I think that doing this is far more dangerous — and potentially rife with conflict — than simply stating, “We do not count your vacation hours. Be a grown up. Plan accordingly, and work with your team to make sure your responsibilities are covered.” Because at least that policy sets the expectations.

The problem with exception-based end-runs around official policies is that you can’t prevent them. But, worse yet, they are fickle. It depends on the people involved, their relationships, the timing, their responsibilities, etc. That is where I see the vast majority of unfairness playing out, because there is no way to stop someone from working out a special arrangement because of “special circumstances.” The trouble with that, though, is who defines what the special circumstances are, which ones warrant a special deal, and what happens when someone else’s “special circumstances” are dismissed as less worthy of special arrangements?

Of course, the flip side in my universe is that I am a workaholic who seeks out high-chaos environments where no one ever only works 40 hours per week. I also specifically work in smaller organizations with a lot of flexibility, where working from home is standard, and where expectations are different. If there is one thing I learned working in the airline industry, it’s that there are different rules for hourly customer service teams than there are for backoffice salaried teams. Is that fair? Probably not. Is it avoidable? If it is, it’s probaby only possible while an organization is still small. (And even then, I’m not sure I’d be willing to bet the ranch on that.)

So, while I find the debate over the no vacation policy issue intersting, I guess what I mostly find is that it’s ignoring a tremendously important factor: it depends on your team, your culture, your services and your business. As with many things, the smaller the organization, the easier some of these things are to manage this way. Often times, stricter, formal policies arise out of a need for clarity that comes from too many different managers managing too many different teams that have too many different people. Clarity is a security blanket.

I think there are better ways to accomplish that clarity that are both more fair and more respectful, but a formal policy can definitely have its value. But then again, so too is there value in a boss recognizing that a member of his team is burned out and needs some time off, whether or not they have the official hours banked to take it.

I guess the real key boils down to three vital questions:

1. What kind of business do you want to run?
2. What kind of people do you want to hire?
3. And what kind of boss do you want to be?

It is probably only with a specific combination of answers that a no vacation policy can make sense. But, I’d venture to say that where it does make sense, it’d be hard to find a really good reason not to do it.

This post originally appeared as part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.

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As if year-end wrap up lists weren’t enough fun by themselves, I thought I’d share another particularly good ‘list of lists’ specifically designed for small business owners.

SmallBizBee compiles a list of their most popular published list, to create the Top 10 Small Business List Posts of 2009 master list.

Ranging from topics such as free online classes and business training, to customer acquisition, marketing tips, and more, SmallBizBee’s got helpful lists, tips and suggestions for entrepreneurs of all stripes, with all types of business needs.  And their year-end list of lists does a great job of bringing together a list of their most popular ones of 2009.

1. 85 Absolutely Free Online Business Classes
2. 105 Absolutely Free Online Business Videos and Lectures
3. 10 Ways to Market Your Business When You’re Broke
4. 10 Ways to Advertise Your Business On the Cheap
5. 13 Ways to Win Customers for Free
6. 10 Tools Every Small Business Marketer Should Have on Hand
7. 9 Powerful SEO Tips for your Small Business Website
8. Over 90 Field Tested Guerrilla Marketing Tactics
9. 5 Things They Don’t Teach You in Business School About Being an Entrepreneur
10. 20 Surefire Ways to Use Twitter for Business

With an unpredictable economy, record unemployment, a virtual freeze on small business lending, and reduced growth in businesses across the country, 2009 has been a year when ‘bootstrapping’ your small business has come back in style.  As a result, understanding what tools are available to help entrepreneurs get the most bang for their buck has been an on-going theme.

To wrap up 2009, and hopefully to help ring a more prosperous 2010, I will focus my last week of 2009 blog posts on free and/or low-cost tools to help entrepreneurs start, grow and manage their business.  And as we wind down 2009, I’d love to hear from WorkingPoint customers and visitors, on what tools you’ve found and use for your business that simply make your life easier.

Besides WorkingPoint, of course.

This post originally appeared as part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.

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