Category Archives: Current Affairs

How Small Business, Sole Proprietors, and Entrepreneurs Are Apples and Oranges

Marketing, Politics Big Biz Small Biz, , ,
Fruit Basket 2
Fruit Basket 2 (Photo credit: AditChandra)

This post starts a new category for this blog, named — for lack of a better name — “Politics Big Biz Small Biz.” It’s based on the assumption that politicians and big businesses want votes and money from an extremely diverse collection of people they call small business. Who are in fact some small business owners, some small business managers, some small and single-person service businesses, some startups, some entrepreneurs, and some others, who have relatively little in common with each other.

To understand how this really works, start by exploring the definition of “small business.” Data collectors define that mostly by how many employees, but definitions are all over the map. The federal government’s Small Business Administration (SBA) includes businesses with as many as 1,500 employees and as much as $21.5 million annual sales, depending on type of business details. Other studies and government agencies cut off “small” at 5, 10, 100, 500 employees.

In practices, buying patterns, and decision making, not to mention motivation and definitions of success, how different is a business with 1,500 employees, or doing more than $20 million a year, from the graphic artist or consultant on her own, or the dry cleaner on the corner? That’s huge. These are not the same thing.

And entrepreneurs? Some people think everybody who owns a business is an entrepreneur. Some think that includes the massage therapist and freelance writer, the self employed; but a lot of them would never call themselves entrepreneurs. And thoughts, writing, ads, and products marketed for entrepreneurs won’t reach these people who don’t define themselves as entrepreneurs.

Amazing fact: More than 22 million businesses legally registered in one way or another in the U.S. have no employees. Some are just service people getting by, some are economic freedom fighters, and some are fake businesses that exist for tax purposes only. They defy classification.

True story: I ran into a business that classified the so-called small business market according to the decision making pattern. There were those in which the owner decided, those in which a functional expert decided, those in which a committee decided, and some others.

What do you think: Is it a small business if it has no employees? Is the owner of a 50-person small business an entrepreneur? Are entrepreneurs only the startups looking for funding? Is the family running the new dry cleaner business on the corner an entrepreneurial family?

Amazing fact: business owners’ political opinions are not predictable. Owning a business doesn’t make a person belong to any party or interest group.

Conclusion: People who own businesses, particularly people who start businesses, but also people who run their own one-person small business, are more likely to be go-it-on-their-own type people than joiners or followers. That’s by definition. So we defy classification systems.

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Do You Think You Can Copy Silicon Valley?

Current Affairs, Leadership, Reflections, Starting a Business, , , , , ,

Doesn’t it seem like every other place wants to be Silicon Valley? We call the New York tech scene Silicon Alley, Portland is Silicon Forest, somewhere in Southern California is Silicon Beach, Austin Texas is Silicon Hills, and so on. There’s job envy, and growth envy. Googling “the next Silicon Valley” generates 46 million hits. 

So I like the juxtaposition of two articles in MIT Technology review that contradict each other delightfully. 

Silicon Valley MIT Technology Review

The first, from MIT Technology Review on July 3, is Silicon Valley Can’t be Copied. Author Vivek Wadhwa subtitled his piece “For 50 years, the experts have tried to figure out what makes Silicon Valley tick. The answer is people.” He explains:

Note that from 1995 to 2005, 52.4 percent of engineering and technology startups in Silicon Valley had one or more people born outside the United States as founders. That was twice the rate seen in the U.S. as a whole. Immigrants like me who came to Silicon Valley found it easy to adapt and assimilate. We were able to learn the rules of engagement, create our own networks, and participate as equals. These days, the campuses of companies such as Google resemble the United Nations. Their cafeterias don’t serve hot dogs; they serve Chinese and Mexican dishes, and curries from both northern and southern India.

This is the diversity—a kind of freedom, really—in which innovation thrives. The understanding of global markets that immigrants bring with them, the knowledge they have of different disciplines, and the links that they provide to their home countries have given the Valley an unassailable competitive advantage as it has evolved from making radios and computer chips to producing search engines, social media, medical devices, and clean energy technology.

The second, published in the same MIT Technology Review yesterday, is Brad Feld on the Rise of Global Startup Communities. In which “startup scenes are popping up in cities all over the world.” That’s an interview with Brad Feld:

In his by-the-bootstraps guide, the 2012 book Startup Communities, Feld laid out a guru-ish, four-point plan for how to create a growing mass of startup companies. But his rules boil down to just one: entrepreneurs must be the “leaders.” Everyone else—universities, governments, investors—are “feeders” that, though important, can’t kick-start a startup community on their own. Feld says if even fewer than a dozen established entrepreneurs team up and get serious—create an incubator, for instance—that nearly any city from Detroit to Cape Town can create a meaningful startup sector.

Feld’s principles have weight because he’s lived by them. He is a co-creator of TechStars, which gives startups seed money and three months of intensive training. Conspicuously absent from Silicon Valley, TechStars instead operates in seven other American cities, including Boston, Chicago, and Austin.

To me it’s perfectly reasonably that both of these contradictory points of view could be true. That’s good editing.  What do you think?  

The Irony: Complaining about Linkbait with Linkbait

Current Affairs, Journalism, Marketing, ,

Here’s an irony: Mashable’s thoughtful post titled Stop Linkbait Before It Ruins Content Marketing is surrounded by linkbait. 

And what’s there on the right, in the sidebar? An ad, then “what’s hot,” one about an injured kitten and the other about Justin Bieber. Both of which are, well, linkbait. Right? 

The post, by Sam Slaughter, starts like this:

“You’ve clicked them before: ‘5 Things Preventing You From Becoming a Billionaire,’ ‘The Secret Video Obama Doesn’t Want You to See’ and the ever-insidious ‘[Hot Female Celeb’s] Wardrobe Malfunction.’

It seems harmless enough linkbait, but stories like these have the potential to kill content marketing.”

In Sam’s defense, he’s not — despite the title — just complaining about linkbait tactics. Instead, he has serious suggestions, and reminders, of how content can and ought to be different from linkbait. 

The title got my attention because it seemed like one of those impossible quests to change humanity. The linkbait phenomenon he writes about is, like spam, the natural result of what people, en masse, choose to click on. It’s related to the same human phenomenon that sensationalizes headlines, yellow journalism, television news, and tabloids. It’s as old as journalism. I ran into it more than 30 years ago, as a young journalist in Mexico City. And it’s still there today. 

 

The Best-Ever One-Word Answer to A Critical Entrepreneurship Question

Current Affairs, Economics, Entrepreneurship, ,

In one of the best moments of our regional angel investment event last month, keynote speaker Diane Fraiman was asked to name the biggest obstacle to entrepreneurship in Oregon. Her answer (the first emphatically-delivered word of her answer):

Diane Fraiman, Voyager Capital

PERS

It’s been more than a month since and I didn’t take notes so the rest of this post is my opinion, not Diane’s. It wouldn’t be fair to pretend to be quoting. Diane is a partner at Voyager Capital in Portland. She has a great track record and the respect of every entrepreneur I know who knows her, or of her. And this is a sensitive subject because of politics, unions, and public priorities. So don’t blame her for anything except the first word of her eloquent answer. 

PERS is the public employee retirement system. I relate it to public schools, teachers’ unions, political power brokering, and, to my mind at least, chronic budget problems for public schools. Budget problems that are rooted in the so-called tax revolt of 20 years ago, politics of voting blocks, campaign financing, and talking points. For a couple generations, people on both sides of the public employee and teachers’  unions negotiations made compromises that postponed problems for the future. And the future they avoided, back then, has arrived. 

PERS relates to entrepreneurship in a community because it connects to the problem of declining quality of public education. When the quality of education suffers, entrepreneurs go elsewhere. And the entrepreneurs who might move in choose other places where their children and their future employees have better education in public schools.

It’s not a simple issue. In our community, teachers are getting laid off and schools closing, and the average number of kids per classroom is way up. But some say the teachers who aren’t getting laid off get better than market compensation. Others say the administrative costs have skyrocketed. Some people believe that restricting funding forces institutions to be more efficient. And I know employers who tried and failed to hire administrators from the local school district because they — the would-be administrators — were getting about 1.5 times market compensation. There’s no room here for knee-jerk reactions. 

I don’t claim to know much about this topic and I don’t want to engage in a political debate. But I do think people who let public education slide should be aware that declining quality of schools affects the entire community, not just kids and parents. It hurts job creation, startups, economic growth, housing values, crime, and all those other hard-to-quantify facts that make one town in the U.S. a better place to live than another. 

I wish more people would realize the far-reaching impact of communities failing to maintain the quality of public education. And I’m glad Diane Fraiman added that into a conversation around communities, startups, and angel investment. 

(Image: courtesy of Voyager Capital)

Is It Stupid to Ask for a Better Email Address?

Business Mistakes, Current Affairs, Web/Tech, , ,

He asked me about my business plan review, something I like doing, and that I charge for. I should be happy, right? And forthcoming? 

bigstock paranoia boy in tin hat

But his email address is three letters having nothing to do with his name, plus three numbers, at yahoo.com (like nnn###@yahoo.com). So I asked him, before sending a work sample, to give me a better email address or identify himself better. 

Am I off base? Is that stupid? Like blowing off a potential client? 

On one hand, maybe this person just doesn’t want to use real email because he (or she) doesn’t want me to spam back. I get that. Nobody I know likes to give an email address to the wrong person.

On the other hand, from my side, it feels like I’m corresponding with, even sending information to, somebody who has a generic name and generic email address, a complete throwaway address. There’s no web footprint at all. 

What do you think? 

And too bad, too. Right? That it’s dumb to just trust? And who trusts first: Him (or her) or me? 

What’s Up in Colombia…

Current Affairs, ,

… looks like growth to me. Economic growth. The result of, among other things, political and economic stability.

Colombian economic boom

I’m posting today from Bogota, the capital of Colombia, during a week-long work visit recording business videos in Spanish. My opinion here isn’t formal economic analysis, just what’s obvious from a few days in the country. I don’t claim any expertise on this topic.

Still, if you search for “economic boom in Colombia” in any of the major web search engines, you’re going to see a lot of recent articles. And facts to back up the general optimism of the people I’m doing business with this week. Something special is going on here. This economy is growing despite the worldwide problems we’ve seen since 2007. And, perhaps more interesting, many of the articles and most of the people I’ve been talking to attribute the growth to fundamentals like political stability and decline of crime.

Some say that the U.S. so-called “war on drugs,” especially as it relates to the situation in Colombia of 10-20 years ago, may have helped this country stabilize and grow. So maybe it didn’t make much difference in the U.S., but it at least it probably helped the economy and the people of Colombia. Foreign investment grew more than 25% in the last year, and the per capita income has grown fourfold this century. The numbers are impressive. Colombia’s debt to GDP runs about 27 percent, compared to 73 percent in the United States. And Economic growth is running at about six percent per year.

I post here occasionally about my country-in-law, Mexico, where I spent 10 years of my youth. It seems only fair to post here about what’s happening in Colombia. Good news doesn’t get enough coverage.

(Note: the image here was courtesy of the Colombian embassy)

How to Hide Your Opinions as Data

Current Affairs, , , ,

Here’s an idea for you. Use this to influence politics, win fame and/or fortune, or attract the opposite sex. Push a point of view. Make your own opinions look like data. 

bigstock-Cartoon-Sheep-Flock-34387394.jpg

First: Invent a high-sounding name for an association or interest group in some significant topic area. Call it the Association of this or Federation of that. Make it non profit. Make sure it sounds like an official-sounding group, representing people who matter in the topic area. For example, entrepreneurs, or small business owners, voters, concerned citizens, like that. 

Second: Generate, publish, and curate content that cushions and maybe hides your one-sided opinions on two-sided (well, multi-sided, because there are rarely only two sides) social, political, and economic interests inside high-sounding larger issues. Attract people who share your point of view. 

Third: Generate official-sounding research and data by asking the people you’ve attracted to your one-sided tribe about the issue you want to influence. Since you have a high-sounding official name (small business, or business owners, for example) your research seems to prove that your point of view is valid, or common, or the majority. 

And there you have it. An issue-oriented group pushing one side only publishing one-sided data that sounds like more than it is. 

Is this any organization you know? 

(image: bigstockphoto)

Memorial Day, Draft Lottery, Reality TV, Flags

Advice, Current Affairs

It seems like it often rains on Memorial Day where I live, in Western Oregon. Today is no exception; it’s cold and rainy. And it rained all night, so there’s a thick mist cushioning the quiet hills I live in. From my house, across a small valley, through the tall trees, I can see the flags on a cemetery on the other hill. A lot of the graves have flags today.

I’m thinking about the flags. How many from this century, Afghanistan, Iraq? Hard to tell. They’d be so young, somebody said.

Whether they died in 1943, or 1969, or 2007, they were all so young.

Switch to reality television. 1969. The draft lottery. They put the 366 possible days of the year in transparent plastic eggs, one each for each possible birthday. The put them all into a giant transparent barrel like we see in lotteries these days. They spun the wheel. They drew a date. Those of us born on that date got a number.

My number was 243. I didn’t get drafted. I didn’t go to Vietnam.

By 1969, most of us opposed the Vietnam war. We talked about what we’d do if drafted. Al became a conscientious objector, emptied bedpans for two years. I was engaged to be married, but that was not going to get me out of the war. But a January birth date did.

It turned out later that somebody did a statistical analysis on the draft lottery and the dates. They started on January 1 and threw them in from there day-by-day to December 31. The later birthdays tended to be on top. Or so I read later.

But we didn’t oppose the people, our peers, who fought. Whether it was their choice, or not.

Few in my generation chose to go to war. One who did, who graduated with me from Notre Dame, chose ROTC. Traveling around Europe, he collected military paraphernalia. His father was in the army. His grandfather had been in the army. He volunteered to be a helicopter pilot, and he died in Vietnam. In his helicopter. We weren’t that close, I heard about it later. My memories of him are of a 20-year-old kid having a wonderful time during a year in college abroad, laughing, drinking Austrian beer, learning; as alive as any memory could be. What a terrible loss.

Memorial Day, patriotism, flags, wars. Protests, anti-war, opposition. Memorial Day isn’t about war, or politics, or patriotism, or whatever might be the opposite of patriotism. It’s definitely not about flags. It’s about young people who died, and the people left behind who loved them. And all the people who endured it, risked their lives, went through the hell of it, for whatever reasons.

I lucked out. I won the reality TV of the last half century, the 1969 draft lottery. And I thank God for that. And honor and respect the ones who went, for whatever reasons. And hope that we can end the present war without causing chaos, and more death and suffering; and that we never fight another war again.

Millennials Schmillennials and Generation Generalizations

Current Affairs, ,

Joel Stein opens his Time Magazine cover story on Millennials:

Time Magazine Cover Millennials

I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.

Ah yes, as he points out with tongue in cheek, there is proof: studies, statistics, and data. 

If nothing else, the so-called millennials generation, and all the writing, thinking, analysis, and opinions about that generation, are proof that in today’s drowning-in-information world, there is data to prove anything. 

If you want to knock people in their twenties, search the web for “millennials selfish” (300,000 hits) or “millennials entitled” (600,000 hits) or “millennials lazy” (150,000 hits) and you’ll find plenty of alleged data. 

On the other hand, if you want to praise them, do the search for “millennials entrepreneurship” (250,000 hits) or “millennials ambition” (1 million hits) or “millennials thoughtful” (5 million hits) and you’ll find plenty of alleged data for that too.

Conclusion: The generation generalizations are fun. They make us think. They’re like riffs on personality types of horoscopes, the best of them delightfully creative, finding traits that seem to make sense on the surface. But millennials are no more classifiable than generation X, baby boomers, or any of those. The world changes, but people don’t.