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 my year-end consumption of ‘top ten lists‘ continues, I came across one on Chicago Now called “The Top 10 Small Business Trends of the Decade” by Barry Moltz.  In the list he mentions several things that have all dovetailed together to define the changing nature of work — most centered around the pros and cons of mobility.

While I certainly wouldn’t argue that his list is wrong, it is very similar to several others I have seen, and I continue to think these lists are only peeling back the first layer of the onion.  Barry’s list includes items in three basic, separate categories:

Mobility:

• The internet allows geographic independent sales and marketing.
• The movement to reduce costs and commuting by working at home.
• Mashing of work and home spaces.

Social web:

• We are more easily able to network and keep in touch with people from our past.
• Size no longer matters.
• Customer Service makes a comeback.
• You are your own brand.

New economy:

• Less credit, more cash is king.
• Less benefits, higher deductibles.
• A new class of employee appears.

The details that Barry highlights in each of his bullets just grazes the surface of these bigger buckets.  And, even more significantly, these are revolutionary social changes that effect all business, not just small business.  What I find more interesting is their unique influence on small business versus their broader social impact.

Mobility
Obviously there is no one who has to be convinced that the second generation of the internet, with it’s capacity for permanent mobility, has changed everything.  Socially it means that states and municipalities have to pass new laws about using cell phones while driving; large business has to implement both policies and infrastructure to support workforces that are increasingly likely to be conducting work outside the corporate firewall; and small businesses can get up and running without having to see their opportunities limited by where they prefer to live.

But the bigger implication about mobility for small business is, I would argue, “the cloud.” Cloud computing (in its broadest definition), and specifically Softward as a Service (such as WorkingPoint, VerticalResponse and Business Online Payroll), is a double-edged sword in the world of small business.  Not only has it made tools and resources that used to only be available to big companies financially accessible to small businesses, but many of these companies are themselves small businesses.

The fact that a couple of developers with a great idea and some solid experience, can now leverage enormous outsourced technology infrastructure to build, host, manage and ultimately distribute their product to anyone in the world is revolutionary.  The cloud has extended everyone’s reach and has eliminated several of the biggest barriers to entry that existed when I started working on the technology space back in 1996.

The Social Web
This, of course, is this year’s hottest topic.  The social web went from being an outlier, specifically and uniquely for either early adopter tech geeks or Gen Y young’ins, to being super hip mainstream, ‘cutting edge’ mass media.  As Barry notes in his list, this has made a huge impact on how brands need to function in order to maintain their integrity — both on a personal and a business level (re: his points about customer service and company size).  But what’s the real seismic shift here?

The true impact of the social web is privacy.  Or, more accurately, the line between private and public.  Never before has it been more blurred, and it’s going to get more confusing before it gets less so.  Therapists will often point out that it only takes one person in a relationship to change the entire relationship dynamic: if you change your behavior, then it forces the other person’s behavior to change as well.  This principle is seen daily on the social web.

When customers change their behavior, it forces business to change.  Hence changes we see in the realm of customer service: a person can complain about a brand experience they had on Twitter, and see anything from immediate resolution to a lawsuit, depending on how the brand in question decides to handle things.

When employees change their behavior, it forces employers to change.  Businesses cannot reasonably ask their employees not to participate in the social web.  So how do they handle react when one of their employees becomes a bit of a social media celebrity, whose personal brand radically out-shines the company brand?

When citizens change their behavior, it forces the government to change.  “Transparent government” and “Gov2.0″ are two other key watchwords from 2009 that were nearly unheard of a year ago.  But now that individuals have come to expect to know things about the companies they deal with by virtue of online information, that expectation has transfered to government activities as well. Two years ago, who would have thought that Congress would have it’s own YouTube channel?  Or that a presidential candidate’s success could have been largely impacted by the use of Twitter?

Where is the line between private and public?  Tools that started out as personal use tools (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) are now platforms for business innovation.  The line between the two is different for everyone, and that creates a challenge, because the choices that one person makes will impact other people, whether those other people like it or not.  How many times have you seen someone post a picture to Facebook or Flickr that includes other people who may not have wanted the picture posted?

There is a certain amount of privacy that a social web automatically steals from us.  The questions are how much is necessary, and then how much is comfortable.  The tricky part is that depending on the application and the person, those answsers change.  And only being in the first generation of the social web, we are a long way from sorting out those pesky little details.

New Economy
My favorite topic of all, is the new economy (which I would define as the economic realities inherent to our modern lives as a result of, among others, the two factors above: mobility and social web).  But this is also the one that is routinely most difficult for people to get their heads around, because the ripple effect is pervasive, throughout every facet of our lives.

Old definitions no longer apply: “conservative” versus “liberal” are ill-fitting labels in a world of updated economic and social conditions that re-draw the political lines without even trying.  Words like “stability” and “security” are no longer applicable to the job market, after three decades of being considered the corporate Holy Grail.  And in a nation that was spurred to global dominance on the back of an Industrial Age economic engine, a nation of “knowledge workers” now routinely offshores work to less expensive parts of the world on a daily basis.

There are some pretty enormous downsides to the new economy — no more pensions, no more covered healthcare, no more job security.  But there are also some amazing opportunities in it — no more being stuck having to live someplace you don’t want simply because of its proximity to your job, no more expectation of having to let someone else define your rise up the corporate ladder on their terms and timelines, no more wistfully dreaming of being your own boss because it costs too much to start your own business.  Think of it like sky-diving: for some people it represents the most terrifying nightmare imaginable; for other people it is the single biggest thrill they could ask for.

As with most change, the pros can be just as compelling as the cons, depending on your point of view.  Socially speaking, the new economy means that goods and services that used to be out of reach for the average person are now vastly more affordable — everything from international travel to high tech toys.  For large enterprises, the ability to offshore entire divisions of your business means huge cost savings, and leaner in-house talent able to focus on the most high-value added functions.  For small business, the ability to dynamically pull together freelance, geographically distributed teams to execute on projects as needed, means being able to compete with larger firms without having to take on the overhead of formal staff.

So, yes, Barry’s list of small business trends is technically accurate.  But the reality is that the changes his list represents are even bigger.  And the reason they have such an enormous impact on small business is that these factors have already fundamentally shifted the social foundations on which small business is built.

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

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As a content strategist one of the things I spend a great deal of time discussing with entrepreneurs is SEO.  As I’ve written here before, my first goal in any SEO discussion with someone is to help educate them on what SEO is and isn’t, and what it really can do versus what it really can’t.  (Can: help people who know what they are looking for find you; Can’t: wash your dog, change your oil or solve all of your sales and marketing problems.)  And then from there, we can discuss what a reasonable SEO strategy would look like for a small business.

In the end, though, I always end up advocating one thing: valuable content.   And while I often get a lot of ‘yes ma’am’ head nodding around that topic, there is a single critical reason that I continue to make that point: the world of search is on a roller coaster at the moment, and trying to play the SEO game with the current set of rules is only going to get you a short-term win (if that) without putting your focus on strong, valuable content. This is a great untapped opportunity for entrepreneurs, because they are better equipped to move faster than large businesses, full of teams of people whose job would be in danger if they were not longer perceived as critical.

People who are unfamiliar with the online search space often do not understand what I mean when I talk about the imminent changes to the the industry.  Today I’ll cover a few examples, thanks to some new releases that Google has just made. (Examples from Google’s official blog.)

• Personalized search
• Real time search

What is “personalized search“?

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

What is “real time search“?

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

These are two great examples, because they demonstrate why having relevant content on your website is important.  Focusing your SEO energy (and budget) on building link-backs and fine-tuning your keywords has limited value in the long-term, because search engines are going to increasingly focus on other things to establish relevancy.

Just these two changes alone mean that two different people can type in the same keywords but get different results, depending on their personal search history and when they look.  And, if you factor in the increasingly popular localized search, what city those users are in could also impact their results.

What excites me most about these changes is that it further helps in taking the focus off the means and onto the end: your web presence should be about engaging your customers in a meaningful way, finding new customers and enhancing your existing relationship.  Far too many people focus on jockeying for a good SEO position in spite of their content, instead of focusing on the content first and using it as a foundation for successful SEO.

The tidal wave of changes in the search space is going to make it increasingly hard to duck the real question for all businesses on the web: are you saying anything worth paying attention to?  If you are, then these updated techniques will only help you.  If you are not and have been playing SEO-peek-a-boo, then these changes are going to expose that.

I see far too many entrepreneurs who have been taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous “SEO consultants,” and one of my chief missions is to help prevent that wherever possible. So before you look to hire SEO help, ask yourself if you are prepared to actually create (or pay for) good content for your website.

In the modern web-based business world, there is an updated version to your grandmother’s old saying:  “If you don’t have anything relevant to say, don’t say anything at all.”  These new changes by Google will continue to make that point.

(This post is part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series and was originally published on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.)

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For some families, business is just part of the package.  As someone who grew up in a family-owned business, one of the reasons I ducked-and-weaved every time my husband used to bring up the idea of us owning our own business was because I saw a lot of headache (and heartache) as a result of mixing business and family.

Eventually I stopped fighting the inevitable, but I remain constantly aware of the fact that my husband and I have two very different relationships: one as spouses and one as business partners.  And there is no way to avoid the fact that there are times when the needs of one relationship create tension in the other.

A recent post on Forbes, When Siblings Don’t Pull Their Weight by Gene Marks, showcases an example of how one family business found a resolution to some of these challenges: a set of three siblings bought the family business from their parents, and eventually ran into a problem because one of them wasn’t pulling their weight.

The solution Gene discusses is rather clever, but it’s a long-term solution.  In my experience working with family-owned businesses, there are two common challenges that surface in situations like this:

Avoidance. This was, predictably, part of the pattern Gene discussed in his sibling example: the problem festered for quite a while before a solution was found, because no one wanted to rock the boat.  Everyone was afraid of upsetting their parents and generally causing family strife, so the two siblings who were carrying the heaviest burden of the business avoided saying anything for as long as they could stand.

Urgency. Often this becomes an issue because of avoidance — though it can also be a matter of size.  The longer you avoid a problem, the more likely it is that it will get worse until you have no choice but to deal with it.  And usually, by the time that happens, you’ve got a much bigger mess on your hands than you would have had if you’d handled it sooner.

Small businesses in particular are often cursed with tight enough living conditions that too big a crisis can quickly sink the entire ship.  One of my clients owns a business with his wife, and after a few years of growing it, they decided to bring her daughter in to help run the daily logistics.  The idea made sense for all concerned, and so they got started.

Unfortunately, over time, the daughter’s idea of “a full work day” did not jibe with her step-father’s.  Since the point of bringing her on-board was to off-load as much of the burden from the parent’s as possible, the fact that they were shelling out an enormous percentage of their revenue to pay her salary while not seeing any real reduction in the number of hours they were putting in started causing a problem.

It didn’t take long for my client to get very frustrated: his wife was responsible for managing her daughter, but she didn’t want to be the bad guy.  Unfortunately, she didn’t want her husband to do it, either.  Relationships all the way around quickly grew strained, until the point that family events were palably uncomfortable for everyone.  The situation went on for more than two years before outside circumstances intervened, and the daughter left the business of her own accord.

Now, while they still maintain the same workload as they always have, their financial burden has dropped by more than 20% since they no longer have to pay her salary.  In a small family business with extremely narrow operating margins, that 20% has been a huge relief.  But the real problem was avoided, instead of resolved.

Working with family presents a set of challenges over-and-above the normal assortment that comes standard in most small businesses.  Earlier this year at Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, I asked Wine Library‘s Gary Vaynerchuck about his experience joining (and ultimately taking over) his family’s business.  My specific question was how they all got through it without hurting each other’s feelings.

His answer, of course, was that they didn’t.  He said they constantly hurt each other’s feeling in the beginning, and it took a long time to make work.  But the important thing was always to remember that, no matter how hard it was to integrate their different styles into a rational working relationship, they were family and they loved each other.  They wanted to work together, so they just kept trying until they got it to work.

The answer is different for every family.  Some businesses are too delicate to withstand the turmoil that comes with family strife; other businesses may be too delicate to withstand replacing a family member.  The only real key is to find a way to be honest and don’t fall into the avoidance trap.  It’s possible to be honest about difficult issues and still be kind.  But the longer you let something fester, the harder that becomes.

The old saying, “Bad news doesn’t get better with age” holds true here: if you keep something bottled up, eventually you’ll explode.  It’s bad enough to have a fight with someone you love.  But the last thing you want is to wait until it’s so bad that your business can’t bounce back.

So remember, bite the bullet, be honest and remember that they are your family.  Working together may not be the solution you had originally hoped for, but I guarantee, your holiday dinners will be much better if you don’t have to rely on the lawyers to intervene when it’s time to pass the cranberry sauce.

(This post is part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series and was originally published on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.)

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Entrepreneur-turned-VC, Mark Suster, recently posted an article on his blog, Both Sides of the Table, highlighting what he considers to be the essential qualities of entrepreneurship.  At the heart of his post is a very, very simple philosophy: entrepreneurs just do it.

For some people, this is easy.  Moving ahead, pulling the trigger, motivating people into action, moving at light speed — categorize it however you like, but how comfortable you are with this type of thing often starts out as being a very basic part of your personality.

For other people, however, this is much, much harder.  Whether it’s a fear of being wrong, a need to collect input from numerous different sources, or just a methodical decision-making process, some people are very uncomfortable churning through a couple of dozen decisions per day, and tap-dancing their way around obstacles in real time.

So what do you do if you want to own your own business, but rapid-fire decision-making did not come baked into your DNA?  Here are a few tips and tricks I use when working with new entrepreneurs, to start getting them comfortable with what the role demands of them:

Define and document your process
Everyone has a different process for making decisions.  But for most of us, it’s intuitive and has evolved over time.  We often don’t think about it, or even recognize all the steps.  The benefit of sitting down and writing it out (I often either recommend a flow chart or a bullet list) is that it helps us be aware of places we are likely to get stuck or where we become repetitious.

Focus on what your process actually is, not what you’d like it to be.  (You can work on changing it later.  Start off by understanding it.)

Even more valuable, however, is having this on hand when it comes to working with others.  Because if you can show your partner or your staff what your decision-making process looks like, it helps manage their expectations.  It also identifies at what point you need input, and at what point they need to be prepared for action.  It sounds amazingly simple, but it’s invariably far more powerful an exercise to go through than most people expect.

Once you’ve documented your process, the next step is to identify the part of the process with which you are least comfortable (generally speaking), and at which point in the process you most frequently find yourself getting stuck.  Sometimes it’s the same step, sometimes it’s not.  But again, breaking it down and really thinking about something that you do instinctively is critical if you are going to start changing your habits at all.

Partner up
For as nice an idea as it is that we are all always going to keep our promises to ourselves, the truth is, our promises to ourselves are often the first ones that we break.  So for most of us, accountability is most successful if it is to someone else entirely.  So find a parter, coach or collaborator.  It’s like having a workout partner for the gym: sometimes knowing that someone else is expecting you is the only way you’re going to make it.

Whether you go to an organization like SCORE for a mentor, or you hire a business coach, or even a part-time project manager to help you with planning and organization, sometimes the best thing you can do for your progress is to put yourself — and your money — on the line.  Putting some skin in the game is almost always good for the end results.

Break it into bite-sized pieces
Some projects and efforts are just huge, and until you dice and slice them, they are simply too overwhelming to make any real progress.  So break it down.  Again, this may require some outside help, but once you have your efforts broken down into logical chunks, it’s much easier to define tactical next steps for each piece, and then to show — and see — progress.

The best rule of thumb is to keep every piece to 8 hours (or a day’s) worth of work or less.  Don’t let anything get too big, and it’ll be much easier to stay focused.  If you’ve parsed out your steps into day-by-day sized pieces, then you will also often find that the difficult decisions that seem huge in their original state are also broken down into more readily managable sizes, making them easier and faster to resolve.

Not everyone is a natural born entrepreneur.  But there are tons of people who are willing to do the work to make the transition, including being ready to push themselves out of their comfort zone to get there.  There is nothing wrong with wanting to analyze details in more depth; just be aware of the fact that being wrong is ok, and that there are very few decisions that can’t be reversed if they really need to be later.

Often times it’s not possible to know for sure that an answer is right until you’ve explored the wrong one a bit.  But if it doesn’t come naturally to you, find some help.  There are lots of people who have been there and figured it out already.  Take advantage of their expertise and get their assistance building a system to help you make the transition you need.

(This post is part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series and was originally published on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.)

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In the American Express OPEN Forum article, Effective Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born by Yvonne DiVita of Windsor Media Enterprises, the author discusses some tips to cultivating what is called “word of mouth marketing.”

Aside from just being a reasonably trendy buzzphrase, word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing tactic designed to maximize the marketing leverage possible by having your customers talk about you and help be evangelists for your goods and services.

Statistically speaking, there is tremendous value to this, since most professional networks are most valuable at their fringes: it’s not your direct connections that offer the most opportunities, it’s actually your connections’ connections that offer the most.  Word-of-mouth marketing is meant to capitalize on that fact.

Yvonne’s post covers some standard practices, particularly when it comes to the social media world.  But her focus is on word-of-mouth value in the online space, and I would argue that in order to be effective, you need much more than just a plan for social media strategy.  In order for word-of-mouth marketing to work as a part of your business development efforts, it needs to be part of the normal process you develop with your clients.

Here are a couple of items that I would add to her original list:

• Make recommendations part of the process

• Include references as part of agreements

• Offer incentives to referral business

These are tactics I use with clients all of the time; and even more importantly, they are approaches that my clients respect and which are highly valuable, particularly in smaller or more tight-knit communities, where personal references are particularly important.

Make recommendations part of the process
When I teach a class or offer a workshop, one of the first slides in my presentation is my word-of-mouth proposition: if, at the end of the class, the participants felt that what I provided them was a valuable use of their time and money, I would like a publishable quote from them to that effect.  In exchange, I offer them an additional or enhanced service as a thank you.  Since I often offer a free half hour of consulting service with the purchase of a workshop, my normal incentive is to add an additional half hour to their follow-up session.

Since the only reason for them to come back to me for one-on-one services is if they feel that what I am providing is of value in the first place, this is a reasonable offer that in no way fosters dishonesty or disingenuous feedback.

And by leaving the format up to the client, they can submit the quote to me on a 3×5 card that I include in their course materials, via email, or post it directly to my Facebook Fan page or my LinkedIn profile.  Either way, this helps to ensure that I am capturing usable feedback from clients, and their expectations are clearly set from the beginning.  Most of my clients are also entrepreneurs, so they are always very aware of why this trade is worthwhile to me, and genuinely supportive of my request.

Include references as part of agreements
While a quote from a client is valuable, there are some clients who are the jackpot.  And for those clients — as good as a quote may be — a direct reference is even better.  And, depending on the brand of the person or firm, this can sometimes be the key that gets you into other doors.  If you have a client who falls into this category, write into the agreement that as long as you hit your deliverables on time and to satisfaction, that they will be willing to provide direct references for you to other potential clients.

Again, this is not a request that business people will typically object to.  It’s just a request that most people forget to make.  Put it out there as part of the normal exchange of goods and services, deliver your end, and then most people are all too happy to deliver their end of the bargain.

Offer incentives to referral business
Again, this is something I always include in the opening remarks of any meeting I have with a client: if they refer a paying client to me, I will offer them something in return.  Depending on my portfolio of work at the time, it could be a free one-on-one consulting session, it could be a new class or workshop I’m teaching, or it could be some other special need that they have.

Whatever it is, the key is in giving them a reason to discuss what you can do with other prospective clients outside of you direct network.  If a client is coming to you for you services to begin with, then that is only because they consider what you have to offer as valuable.  Therefore it is reasonable to expect that discounted access to your expertise is a potentially worthwhile trade off for them.

So, while Yvonne’s list had some good points, keep in mind that the principles behind word-of-mouth marketing are all based on people building relationships and then talking about them with others.  There is nothing about that process that has to happen online, so incorporate some basic practices into your normal client interactions, and see how they take to it.

More often than not, your customers want to see you be successful — if for no other reason, than so that you can stay in business and continue helping them.  Reminding them that you need their help reaching new customers and giving them specifics ways to do that, and then rewarding them for it, is something that most of them will respond to very well.  All it takes to get started is to ask.

(This post is part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series and was originally published on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.)

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As someone who consumes most of her daily doses of new information through the blogosphere (as opposed to traditional media), there are different bloggers I read for different reasons.  As I’ve been trying to streamline my process for writing more (and better), myself, I’ve been thinking more and more about what I specifically get out of the different bloggers I read.

There is Ross Dawson, who writes Trends in the Living Network, which I love because he addresses the juncture of technology, business and society in a way that is uniquely in-line with my interest in that intersection and no one else covers it in quite that same way.

Scott Ginsberg from HELLO, my name is BLOG is another one whose articles I always read because he breaks things down into bite size pieces (which makes implementing change so much easier), while operating from the basic premise that being approachable is a learnable skill, and just because someone may not be born that way, doesn’t mean they have to spend their life being considered unapproachable.

Eric Ries of Startup Lessons Learned writes one of the best blogs on entrepreneurship, and of course, there are a few others, such as MyVenturePad, which comes in handy for aggregating a ton of content from different places that makes it easy to sort through when I have the time to block off for it.

Umair Hague writes the Edge Economy on Harvard Business, which I love because his view of society and economics is one of the only ones I have found that recognizes that the Industrial Age is over, and that the rules of the Information Age are different.

But while all of those are good intellectual stimulus, there are two bloggers whose writing is far more personal, and who routinely manage to strike right to the heart of things, even if they don’t know it.

Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist
As a workaholic female ENTJ entrepreneur from the tech sector with a knack for being problematically honest who moved her family from NYC to the middle of the country for lifestyle reasons, I have met very few women I can truly relate to.  Penelope is just about the only one.

What I love most about Penelope is that she is every bit as blunt in real life, and you can’t predict what she’s going to say next.  She cuts straight through normal bullshit that people are used to just putting up with (like the fact that making Christmas a national holiday is divisive and inappropriate), doesn’t turn to jelly apologizing profusely when she offends someone (like her notorious miscarriage Tweet) and always manages to spark a realization just by being direct (like pointing out to me, when we met at SXSW in March, that I should be doing a better job of making sure that my network included people younger than me, not just older).

The even more valuable thing I get out of Penelope’s writing, though, is the fact that for some of us, work really is easier than a personal life.  Even once we have an actual life, it’s still easier to hide in work and neglect it, avoid it and pretend that it doesn’t make us crazy.  While I definitely don’t necessarily like or want many of the same things in life that she does (such as kids and living in a cold climate), she reminds me that I’m not as anomylous as I often feel for being a confident, successful Gen X professional who doesn’t take direction well and who is always going to find clients, conference calls and project timelins far easier to navigate than the messy interpersonal relationship stuff that comes with being married.

Joshua-Michele Ross, Opposable Planets
Josh is one of those people who comes into your life and who, from the moment you meet, is obviously and clearly a far more powerful, creative and interesting force than even he seems to understand.  I first met Josh almost ten years ago, and we worked together for nearly three years — the last one of which we shared an office.  As we all always knew was inevitable, Josh has continued to do very cool things, demonstrating his brilliance and being both insightful and motivating to the people who know him.  And, all the while, being ethically-centered, well-grounded and astoundingly humble.

It doesn’t matter whether he is doing video interviews of technology and business leaders, whether he is in front of the camera doing videos for Forbes, whether he is meeting with clients about their online strategy, or whether he is finding a new and particularly incisive turn of phrase to distill an amazingly complex thought into something readily digestable, what makes Josh most incredible is that he’s got the rarest of all possible talents: he makes the people he interacts with feel smarter, just by being around him.

While I know many people who have paid Josh many compliments over the years (both directly to him, and in the third person when he wasn’t around), over time, I think what they all boil down to is just that.  No one leaves a conversation with Josh feeling drained, stupid, patronized or diminished in any way.  That’s his strength.  You can’t help but like who you are and how you feel about yourself after you’ve spent time with Josh. (Even if that means, these days, that I only get to do that long-distance, via his blog.) And because of that, there is no one whose success I find more inevitable than his.

And they are both great reminders to me about how I know I can be better at a wide range of things.

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I was reading an article this weekend, on Entrepreneur.com, and it actually made me a little snarky. In Health Insurance, a 401(k) and…Facebook?, author Justin Petruccelli discusses a new Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey in which 58% of teenage respondents stated that the ability to use social networks would be a factor in their decision-making process when it came to employers.

Since Justin and I are the same age (34), it’s probably easy to assume that my source of pissiness was the same as his: Get over yourself, you big babies.

In point of fact, though, my source of pissiness is him being pissy about these survey results. Because, while I may have nearly two decades on the participants of that survey, add me into the group for whom that would make a difference. And while my reasons may not look the same on the surface, I’d venture to say that they probably aren’t as far off as some of my old fart peers might assume.

During my entire career, I have only spend three and a half months working at a company that was neither a startup nor a tech company. You know why I only lasted 3.5 months? Because the 30 year old company had a 30 year old culture that hadn’t seen any modern influences since the Nixon era.

What became crystal clear to me in that environment — an environment, by the way, when even during the NYC public transportation strike, when some of us had absolutely no means of getting to the office at all (depending on where you lived) vehemently prohibited anything as ‘lax’ as working from home — is that the technologies and business practices a company adopts speak to who and what they are as a business.

Here is what it says to me about a culture, if a business blocks access to social networks:

• You don’t trust your employees. If you have employees who are abusing the problem, then grow a set, fire them and leave the rest to do their job in the way that makes most sense for them.
• You are not allowing your employees access to valuable tools for business. Whether it’s current events, industry news or general networking with peers in other companies, Twitter is the single most powerful tool I have in my daily arsenal. I get complex questions answered faster, find out industry-specific news more quickly, and generally manage to navigate my knowledge worker day far more effectively with Twitter than I ever did without. If an employer didn’t let me have access to it, I wouldn’t work for that employer.
• You are sticking your head in the sand and may as well paint a great big target on your ass. If you are restricting access to social media, then you are deliberately choosing to ignore changing trends in the marketplace around you. As an employee, any employer who deliberately did that would be someone I would think twice about working for, because I would read that as an indication of their attitude toward change and innovation in general.
• You are being capricious. Blogs are social media. Are you going to block access to those, too? If so, that would include most major news outlets (after all, NYT is on WordPress), and source of current events. And what about Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Yelp, YouTube, Flickr, Trippit or LinkedIn? They are all social networks. You going to block them, too?
• You are misallocating resources. Does your IT team really have nothing better to do with their time than to lock down the firewall to prevent me from getting to Twitter? IT talent is expensive (I know: I’ve spent a well-paid career in that space), if you can’t think of something better for them to do than that, they you are not the type of company I want to work for.
• You are missing the point. Social networking (and text messaging) is how that age group communicates. Cutting them off from that would be like cutting me off from email and expecting me to be as fast, as accurate or as deft at navigating my day. Just because you and I have different preferred methods of communication does not make yours more valid than mine.
• You are setting a bad precedent. If you are summarily blocking social media, what other innovations can I expect that you will dismiss as having no value, despite the fact that your staff could find them profoundly impactful?
• You are fighting an unwinnable battle… which just makes you look lame. Business 101: Pick Your Battles.  The more time goes by, the more of your employees will have the same ability to ‘waste time’ via their smart phone as they do via a web browser. Are you going to confiscate their phones when they come to work, too?

So yes, if I was exploring working for someone, one of the things I’d want to understand was their social media policy. Absolutely. Just like having the ability to work from home when necessary, I consider that essential for my ability to be able to do my job well.

For those of us old enough to remember the internet before the web, I recognize that what is transformative about social networking is that it has made things that used to be hard much, much easier. I, for one, am not going to volunteer to hop in a time capsule and go back to making things harder again. Not if I can help it.

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Many people don’t think about it specifically, but know it intuitively: if you want good customer service, skip the big guys and go to a small company. In Small Business’ Competitive Advantage, I discuss that Customer Service is the magical pixie dust for small business.

Think about your normal daily experience: if you need to deal with your bank, your insurance company or your utility provider, you call an 800 number, where you are greeted with an automated message, a phone tree that routes you through a series of menus, as much automated information as they can possibly prepare, and then — if you’re problem is too complicated to automate — eventually you may get a person.

And then what happens?

You have to repeat your account number, despite having entered it already (at least once); you have to answer questions to validate your identity (or, worse yet, you don’t, which always begs the question: who else can get into my account?); and then you can get around to your question.

In many cases, by the time you get to speak to a real person you are dealing with a call center on the other side of the planet, non-native speakers (who sometimes struggle mightily with English), and in worst case scenarios, people who are clearly reading from a script with very little real understanding of either the nature of your problem or how best to handle it.

And when it’s all said and done, how often do you go through all of that, and get off the phone feeling totally confident that your issue was resolved? Rarely. More often than not, most of us get off the phone feeling like we just got the run around so badly that we need to double and triple check our next round of statements to make sure no one messed anything up.

All in all, because of the economic needs for businesses to automate and off-shore customer service functions, the general state of Customer Service is often crap.

This is where small business owners can be Superman. Seriously. For most small businesses, we don’t have the volume to go through all of that expense and hassle. Our customers often have our direct phone number. They know where to find us, how to reach us and what our specialty is. And while that may not always be great for our daily productivity (and it can certainly be abused at times), it gives small business owners the chance to leave our customers with a far, far better customer service experience than the one they just had with their credit card company.

We talk so much about business that we often over-look the most important fact of all: business is conducted between two or more PEOPLE. Sure, there are functions that can be automated and there are often good reasons to do it. But when you leave your customer feeling like less than an actual person, you’ve just provided a lousy customer service experience. Small businesses, because of logistics, have a built-in advantage. And it’s one we should all remember to take advantage of.

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Last week I wrote an opening rant about “strategists.” In the comments that ensued, I am now inspired to clarify what I mean while I continue to write this series. I am not talking about consultants who are hired to help hone and build out a strategic vision for an organization; nor am I talking about internal specialists who are dedicated to researching and advising on strategic direction. What I am talking about are managers or department heads who identify as “strategic visionaries” and who consider the banalities of “management” to be less important than defining an over-arching strategy.

The single biggest issue I find when I come into an organization to help get things back on-track, is that when leaders are entirely pre-occupied with a strategic vision, there is a tendency to ignore employee development and management activities.

The irony, of course, is that a good strategist understands that employees are the key to making their strategic vision come to life. Yet time and time again, I have found that groups with the most strategically-focused leaders are the ones where the employees are the most neglected.

The problem, I believe, is in the misalignment of how a leader identifies — and what they actually like to do — versus what is part of the responsibility of the role. How many people who consider themselves innovators, visionaries and strategists are placed in the role of manager? And, honestly, much about managing people is terribly “innovative”? Very little of it. Managing people is down-n-dirty work.

Someone who manages people has to deal with messy details like:

• team members who don’t get along
• people who are not living up to expectations
• talented people who are bored thanks to being under utilized
• political entanglements with other departments
• hiring freezes that prevent backfilling vacated positions
• low morale among teams
• budgetary constraints that prevent a manager from paying an employee what they are truly worth
• helping form a career development plan so team members don’t stagnate
• being honest with a staff member when there is no future for them with the organization

Face it, none of that is sexy. But someone who can’t or won’t do those things is not someone who should be managing people. And yet it happens all the time: a strategically oriented leader is put in the role of a manager, because leadership likes the idea of having a strong strategic direction developed for the department.

Nothing wrong with that. Of course the best departments are marching towards a strategic vision. But if you don’t take care of your team in the process, who exactly is doing the marching?

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