There are a lot of reasons for entrepreneurs and small businesses to have a blog, but I’ll let the internet marketing and social media experts make the compelling business arguments for it. I have started this blog for more personal reasons that I think can be as beneficial for the entrepreneur.
It’s the journey, not the destination. If you’re just starting out and developing a business idea, blogging your experience as you move from planning to development can be invaluable. Often our experiences are colored by the outcomes, so if you have a win you may forget all the steps it took to get there, and if you fail, you may be too dejected to uncover where you made mistakes. Blogging about the daily challenges and decisions you make will give you a history to look over at the end and a place to make better choices from in future ventures.
You are not alone. Blogging is one way to form community with people who are working towards similar goals. This is especially useful if you work from home and primarily discuss your ideas with your dog (which I totally do) or the baristas at the coffeeshop you have made your office (which I’m too shy to do).
Ideas beget ideas. A funny thing happens when you start working on your own ideas and solutions: you keep coming up with more ideas and solutions. It feels like the synapses in your brain start firing more rapidly when your work for yourself, which is a good thing, but it can also be distracting. A blog can be a bucket or holding place for your brainstorming, so you don’t spend your day chasing ideas and not getting anything done.
Sometimes you just need busy work. My biggest pet peeve at every job was the inevitable busy work that was involved. Now that I work from home, I’d happily take on some busy work. Small tasks that don’t take up too much brain power are great to have to get your brain firing and to feel a sense of accomplishment. A blog provides good “busy work” tasks. You can write a post in the morning to get your day started, check out other blogs during lunch, and reply to any comments while watching American Idol. You are still nurturing your business while getting a mini mental break.
Learn about yourself and your work style. When you stop comparing yourself to the guy in the next cubicle or worrying about your next manager review and start facing you own strengths and weaknesses as you sit in your apartment by yourself all day, you can learn a lot. Most of the blog posts that come to mind have to do with observations about myself (like noticing I hadn’t worn a bra in 4 days because I didn’t have to go to an office) than with concrete entrepreneur advice. Regardless of where I am professionally in 6 months, the knowledge I gain about myself and how I work with my partner will be valuable in any future endeavor.
An entrepreneur or small business blog can yield wins for your business, but it will also enhance your personal and professional development.
Most entrepreneurs face decisions about systems and thinks about how he/she will communicate, track, plan, manage, and budget for his/her company. When is it appropriate to invest the time and potential money into getting “set up”, so to speak? There is no magical formula that I’m aware of(did I mention that I’m not an MBA-type?), but what follows is our experience and some criteria that resulted.
I spent some time upfront, probably due to some deep personality flaw, exploring options for different tools to use to support our efforts. Having had some experience with Microsoft Project, I chose to stay away from such a clunky application. Besides, it has way more functionality than we need. I considered Basecamp, but ultimately that too seemed to be overkill on a small startup project spearheaded by two people. Ultimately, we decided on using Google docs to collect, collaborate on, and track competitive research, meeting notes, designs we like, and any brainstorming. We also use Outlook for its calendar function. I actually use the Mac version of Outlook which is called Entourage, and has a neat little feature called the ProjectCenter. It has very basic project management functionality; you can set up tasks with notes and invite collaborators. The deadlines appear in your Outlook calendar. We decided this was all the project functionality we needed given that we have short-term (four months), manageable milestones, so it worked nicely.
If I had to give advice to others as to what to consider when thinking about systems to use, I would recommend the following criteria:
Effort. Will implementing a particular system improve efficiency, or will it take you more effort to research, setup, and update than it actually saves? One of my complaints of project management tools has been that I find that updating projects is time-consuming, and I often don’t make use of the plan when actually doing the work, so the effort is not well-spent.
Peace of Mind. Does having the system in place make you feel more comfortable, confident, even legitimate? Well, then maybe a few hours researching will be well-spent if you can take yourself more seriously afterwards. It’s like getting new workout clothes before starting a new exercise regimen; they aren’t necessary, but can sometimes provide great motivation. Just be aware of how much time you spend trying to feel more like your own boss, rather than actually doing work.
Scope and Scalability. Depending on the nature of your business, it might make perfect sense to invest a lot of time upfront thinking about systems, either because your business plan is large in scope or because you need to be able to accommodate rapid growth. Both scenarios require good organization and infrastructure to be most successful.
My husband and I are opposites on many fronts, which is a good thing in many cases, and certainly in our business ventures. We tend to balance out each other’s strengths and shortcomings. Kris is definitely the CEO type; he’s creative, inspired, unafraid of failure, interested in throwing ideas out and seeing what sticks. I probably am more the COO type; I am strategic, systematic, organized, and interested in understanding how things work. He’s the idealist; I’m the realist. It’s a nice combination, when in the right balance. What happens when it gets out of whack? Plenty, as it turns out. We’re trying to operate in the rapid prototyping mode; get a product together quickly, get feedback, edit, repeat until satisfied/gazillionaires. But we’ve each managed to create roadblocks to our progress that are just byproducts of our personalities.
It might have sounded flattering when I described Kris above, it was not intended to be. His manic creativity and idea generation is sometimes more of a problem than anything else. For example, just as we were poised to be ready to get a site up on schedule in mid-February, Kris had another idea. A good idea, one that if implemented correctly could at least be a short-term win in a less competitive space. So we dropped everything and have spent two weeks developing this. The inherent problem is that this could go on infinitely, as I have seen in the past with Kris’s ideas. He comes up with an idea, is quick to start implementing, and promptly abandons it when the next idea comes along. I am only lucky that he does not do this with wives. Will the idea-chasing ever pay off? Not without some serious follow through somewhere.
I have certainly created some bumps along the way myself. Because I am so concerned with how things work, I often think more about the process than the product. And because I’m a long-term thinker, I’m not a great short-term doer. Bummer, because I’m currently the main resource in developing our product. To date, I have created a few delays. The first was that I didn’t feel comfortable contacting vendors without an @domain.com email. Nevermind that we don’t have a website or anything yet. So I delayed a task for three days because I didn’t have the “right” email address. Absurd. I also agonized for days over what systems we would use for communicating, tracking, planning, and project management. I mean, we are a married couple who live and work in the same small space, and I’m obsessing over setting up my Outlook calendar and deciding whether we should use Basecamp, or if Google docs is sufficient. Systems thinking is useful when you actually have something to organize, but apparently a handicap when you have no content.
So we’re still experimenting and trying to find the best way to make use of our respective skills. We have a lot of potential as business partners, but we both need to stop looking at our different big pictures and start working already.
I feel like I’m being sucked into some weird entrepreneurial vortex in which I get lost for hours looking at blogs and websites and products from small businesses. When I was a cubicle resident, I hardly met anyone that worked on their own, and when I did it was like my bikini waxer or masseuse or someone who provided a tangible service, and seemed to be struggling a bit doing so. Now that we’re venturing out on our own, I feel like everybody – the peeps at the coffee shop, the peeps who write blogs, etc – works for themselves. I enjoy being a newcomer to this world, but I have to watch myself because I find that I’m so engrossed in observing that I forget to participate. What are my deliverables for this week? What tangible thing am I working on?
I haven’t been this inspired and excited about work in . . .well, ever. The problem is that it’s not translating neatly into production. I’m trapped in happy look-at-all-the-entrepreneurs land, and not getting my own work done.
Maybe this is a question that plagues only the few restless spirits out there, but we’ve been having a long (5 months!) debate about where we should live as we branch out on our own. The debate is wrought with many angles, such as network vs. family, cost of living vs. resources for startups, city energy (+ distractions) vs. suburban withdrawal (+ boredom), freedom to travel vs. stability. Phew. You’re probably starting to see why it’s been going on for months, and why we can’t decide.
Some of the factors broken down:
People. The people you’re surrounded by are always important, but having a supportive network when you’re starting your own business is key. Right now we live in San Francisco, where thanks to serious job hopping and higher ed, we have a great community of people we know. This network, in combination with the start-up vibe in the Bay Area, makes it a great location to start our business. The downside? All our friends and family are on the east coast.
Cost of Living. When you’re trying to bootstrap, any way you can cut costs is worth exploring. In San Francisco, we live in the second most expensive city in the country. With two people working, we live in a fantastic neighborhood with lots going on. With only one income stream and working from home, suddenly our small pricey one bedroom is a lot less appealing.
Energy. What are the things that you need in a city or town to maintain your motivation and enthusiasm for your work? For me, it’s at least one coffee shop with free wi-fi, an academic or intellectual vibe, and a few 25-35 year old up-and-comings. There is this and more in San Francisco. You know where it’s not? Windsor Locks CT, where I stayed with my family in November while finishing my master’s thesis. I did not get much work done at all. No wireless internet, no cute coffee shops. It’s the kind of place where people “mosey on up to the internet”.
Time. Where are you going to most effectively use your time? Right now we are totally mobile, and it’s really appealing to think of going to Mexico, or living in San Diego for the summer, and Tahoe in the winter. But while we’ve never had the freedom to travel like that before, there’s a danger that all that moving around will cause us to lose focus and not get stuff done. I am notorious for justifying just about anything when there’s a time limit on my stay in a city. But when you’re trying to build a product, suddenly you don’t want what happens in Vegas to stay in Vegas.
So that’s the short list of criteria, but it certainly makes it tough to decide. You can always leave it up to your friends.
Since we’ve started dating, Kris has been coming up with ideas for his own business. Most of these were sketched out on the backs of cocktail napkins over pours of whiskey, and later forgotten in the haze of hangovers and blackouts. The entrepreneurial spirit has been strong within us always, and that’s not necessarily a flattering thing. Kris is motivated to do his own thing because he has ADD and wants to control everything. I want to work on my own because I’m a bitch and have a hard time following orders and systems that are inefficient and don’t make sense (like the ones at every company I’ve worked at).
While we’ve long wanted to work on our own, it does not mean that we were ready to do so. For one thing, we had a lot of growing up and learning to do in our twenties; while it is a decade that has seen many early twenty something CEOs, we are not part of that camp. We also had some maturing to do on the financial front. We both incurred bad debt in college, and had to do penance when we got our first jobs. When our disposable income finally increased, it was very tempting to buy all the toys and food and liquor we didn’t get to have before, like say an x-box 360 and a flat screen TV in one afternoon. Finally, we did not have good time management skills, and it’s not entirely Guitar Hero’s fault. While Kris worked in-house in startup environments, I worked as a consultant part-time and completed grad school, so we worked a lot during the week, and drank to forget on the weekend. OK, fine, and we do play a lot Guitar Hero.
So if you’re a hard-to-work-with, binge-drinking slacker couple with some ingenuity, and are wondering if it’s your time to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams, here are our tips on things to consider:
Where does your time go? If you use most of your downtime to cure hangovers instead of work on your ideas, then you may not be ready to venture out on your own just yet. After a solid decade of binge drinking, we’re ready to hang up the (vomit) towel and make better use of our time. Which isn’t to say that we won’t be going out at all, but we won’t be hemorrhaging all of our time and money drinking every weekend.
Are you ready to walk away from the security and comfort of a job? A stable, comfortable income is very nice to have, but it also makes you a slave to working in-house. When I finished grad school, I knew that it was a good time to experiment before I get attached to a title or salary bracket in a company.
Are you ready to bootstrap? It isn’t easy to go back on a diet of ramen noodles, but it makes it a lot less risky to work for yourselves. Kris earns enough that we can live on one salary while we get started, so we don’t have to borrow money to try out different ideas.
Do you respect what you each bring to the venture? For couples, it’s important to identify where your skills are complementary, and where you may have potential conflict. It was a long, painful road for us to figured out how to work with each other. A few years ago, we tried to write a sitcom script together, and didn’t get past the opening scene without getting into a huge fight in Starbucks. The problem we had was we each thought our way was the right way, and wouldn’t compromise our vision. Recently, we’ve completed a few fun projects together, and were able to do successfully, because we worked to fulfill one person’s vision with our collective talents. It just takes some experimenting to figure out how to work together.
If you’ve answered yes to most of these questions, then you’re ready to get started. Now pour yourself a drink and start sketching out a plan.
