From Here to Autonomy

Notes entering the third week of travel...

I throw the suitcase on the bed. Jesse hates when I do that--airplane germs he says. That case has been everywhere. The zipper on the left side is broken, has been for a while, but I don't want to look for another suitcase yet. I have honed my packing routine with this one. I know what can fit where. I fear that I won't remember things with a new suitcase. Looking at this one I can tell that I've forgotten things by the thickness, or thinness, of the front pocket. I keep jewelry stashed in secret places in case I forget to pack a necklace, or a bracelet. I decide out of guilt to move the suitcase over to my side of the bed.

I don't need to unpack everything--just the used tops, socks and underwear. The makeup and toiletry bags can stay, and the hairbrush, and the belts--those have been placed on the same side and remain untouched. Some items need to be replenished, like my aspirin case, my Q-tip dispenser, my toothpaste, my business card holder. I refill those immediately--I know that I'll never get to them if I wait until early the next morning; my brain is half on then.

I put out my clothes for the next day and plug in all of my electronics at the charging station, even if they don't need it. The chances that I will forget to bring my cell phone or my iPod are lowered when I charge them together next to the computer. I've forgotten many things before--jewelry, charging cords, medication, deodorant--but never my computer.

I hung some clothes up along my bedroom window weeks ago, at the beginning of the travel jag, to spare me from coming home and having to rifle through items in my closet. They've been placed in the order of when I will need them--cold weather outfits, warm weather outfits, cold again. These items are clean and unrepeated. "Unrepeated" is a highly subjective term. Of course I repeat outfits, but I do try to stick to some criteria:

--Can't wrinkle too easily--not a hard and fast rule, but all things being equal the wrinkleable items stay home.
--Haven't worn the last time I was in that city.
--Seasonable
--Has matching elements that are clean
--Will go with one of the two pair of dress shoes I can fit in my case

This criteria makes choosing my outfits the most lengthy part of my routine. It's like a logic problem you might encounter while taking the GRE: If Jory has four clean sweaters, three blouses, three pairs of slacks, two skirts, three pair of tights (two in gray), three pair of clean dress socks, two belts, three necklaces, can only fit two pair of shoes in addition to her gym shoes, must have five unrepeated outfits for meetings in two climate zones and may not check a bag (I forbid it), how many outfits can she create?

This has been my routine since January.

I open my underwear and sock drawers--thankfully I went hog wild at Victoria's Secret over the holidays and stocked up on enough underwear to outfit me for several months without doing laundry, but I'm nearly out of clean socks. I begin my process of bargaining: If I stretched it and wore these socks two days--not consecutively--and wore gym socks with boots, I could pull this off.

Jesse asks if it makes sense to do a quick load of laundry to free up some socks and fitted T-shirts and I tell him no. We have four or five waking hours left to do something together; I'd rather not spend it in preparation for my next trip in the morning.

I throw in some workout gear. My gym shoes hardly fit in the bag and I question for a minute whether I should even bother working out. I disabuse myself of this notion and stuff them in the front pocket. This is going to make it really difficult to stow my bag in an overhead bin, but so be it.

I have a conference that starts in SoCal Sunday, but I'm going to leave a day earlier to visit with my in-laws, who live down there. I love to plan extra time--a day, a dinner--to see people when I'm in town. I've become better about making the time for it. But this also means more time away, more to pack, another appointment, another weekend away. I remind myself: You planned this.

I ask Jess what he wants to do for dinner--let's make something simple here, he says, since I'm home just tonight. I notice we don't have a lot of options in the fridge, but I don't suggest we go and get anything; I rescind my right to add grocery items to the shopping list for the week when I'm not going to be around. Later, after dinner, I notice Jess has broken into the raspberry sorbet I bought weeks ago. We've established an unspoken rule: No griping about Jesse eating my food when I'm not around to eat it. We can always buy more.

I've taken a similar stance on work-related issues. Things in the office happen, and I can't be asked to sound off on everything, just the biggies. I no longer take umbrage when meetings go on without me, but I do desire connection. I get my reports in early--something that used to be an impossibility but that I've made possible. I check in more. I create tiny threads of connection that are barely perceptible, but that keep me from drifting off into space. Sometimes I swear all I can hear is the sound of my breathing, like I'm in a spacesuit, like Darth Vader. I remind myself I'll be back home soon enough. This is just another mission. And I remember: Once I'm on the moon, I'm at home.

I call my mom from the car. She knows the drill.

"Where are you going?" she says. I haven't told her I was going anywhere yet. I take an ounce of comfort in the fact that the Bay Bridge is far less congested on a Saturday morning, and I'm surprised when I get to the Red Carpet Club at the United terminal and most of the seats are taken. Some are leisure travelers. Most are like me--opening their laptops and getting to work. I actively decide: It's a Saturday. I'm not doing email now. I'm going to blog.

The entrepreneur's guide to looking bigger than you are

A post from Scott Shane on the OpenForum blog stirred some interesting thoughts in me, from the perspective of an entrepreneur and from the perspective of a someone deciding whether to work with entrepreneurs.

The post discusses the pro's and con's of "ham and egging" a rather brilliant term, coined by Professors Amar Bhide of Columbia University and Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School that encapsulates the challenge entrepreneurs have of getting both capital and customer commitments without having either  in-hand. Salespeople are natural ham and eggers, particularly those who are selling in start-up environments. They have to make the case that their company is perfectly capable of providing service X without any experience of having done so successfully.

Having had my share of visits on Sand Hill Road, I can vouch for the importance of having customers in-hand to indicate the future profitability of your concept--the bigger the customers the better. And yet, often without funding those big customers aren't comfortable doing business with you.

The conundrum reminds me of a Superbowl Ad I saw several years ago for a brand I don't remember (go figure): A fledgling start-up gets the big order it's been waiting for, an order so big it threatens to destroy the business. Without capital, the big customer engagements that often attract more capital are meaningless.

And yet, let's be real here: How do you get customers and capital without someone taking a risk on you? Without that friend and family round, or that friend on the inside of a large business who is willing to vouch for you? What gets a business without customers or capital off the ground?

This is a question that fascinates me.

I try to envision how we overcame this in my own business. We had customers before we sought funding, but how did we get customers? Based on my own experience and observation of other businesses, the following can help you generate the spark you can grow on:

Let the first risk be yours: When we launched our first BlogHer Conference (which would later grow into the media company) we goaled to have our costs covered by sponsors. And if we didn't close any? Credit cards. In fact, my partners had already opted to put the conference on their cards when I met them, which doubly incented me to help them find sponsorship. This gesture made it much easier to get sponsorship: We weren't asking for support of an event that we "hoped" to put on; we had a conference that was going to happen, period. This alone made our first sponsors--or customers--believe we were the real deal. We ended up paying off the credit cards immediately after the event.

Applying this further, what's your risk? Some pro-bono work? An out-of-pocket trip to a conference that will provide some needed visibility with future clients? Some savings you dip into to build a prototype? I don't know of a successful venture that has started without some initial outlay of personal resources. Related to this point ...

Don't freebie your way to the top: Yes we get it, you're in start-up mode and don't have the expense account or resources to buy your way onto people's radars. None of us did! In-kind deals you make for publicity, accounting services, office supplies, you name it, are smart at the outset and help you look the part of established business, but don't rely on them forever. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. Companies tend to put their best foot forward with paying customers; chances are, you are getting the dregs of your partner's time and effort.

As you grow, look at your partnerships and consider if they are still providing value. Drop those you no longer need, or that are no longer giving as much value as they are getting. You need every last inch of your resources for growing your business. And if you realize that you are providing less value in an in-kind partnership that you still need, start paying for it. 

Make your asks realistic: When we first approached companies for sponsorship, and later for advertising revenue across our network sites, we researched what the market valued and paid for and factored that into our pricing. When we partnered with more established companies, we made sure we offered up value to match the value we were receiving. This sounds like an obvious one, but there are businesses that learn this the hard way. They don't assess their value first, and so their requests for partnership, sponsorship, funding, you name it fall on deaf ears.

A new entrepreneur asked me to review her business plan; she was hoping that her fledgling Web site would be acquired. Just the fact that she was already talking about acquisition concerned me:

"What's your growth plan?" I asked her. She turned over the one sheeter she'd handed me, which had a paragraph about "Future earning potential": She'd build an eCommerce component and syndicate her content. I wondered, to whom and with what? She had yet to earn anything with her site and had never done anything like what she was promising she'd do. She was ham and egging unsuccessfully.

Unless you have a tangible grasp of the value your business provides, you cannot effectively get customers or funding. How are you basing your projected earnings? How can you position your current status to indicate that you are providing value? How many people do you attract? How much savings have you achieved for clients? How many have reported you exceeded expectations? There are so many ways to find ways to quantify your value--just pick some!

By the same token don't undervalue what you offer."Getting by" is not a business strategy. When people ask you what you charge, have an answer and, provided you have a rationale for it, stick to it. When we first went into the marketplace, few companies were selling premium advertising on blogs. The market was still unproven and hence undervalued. But we insisted on our pricing, which was commensurate with what premium non-blog sites required. We argued the point with advertisers and were willing to make good if we underdelivered, but we didn't settle for free trials or egregiously lowering our rates to close. Now, there's more data on the effectiveness of blog marketing that bolsters our pricing, and we're glad that we don't have to argue to raise our pricing to the level where it should have always been. It's much harder to justify raising your prices after the fact.

Bloggers can be the worst offenders of undervaluing their product. Hey, I have nothing against blogging for others for free, but when I'm getting something that I need out of it--exposure, clients, or experience writing about a new topic. But if you are writing for a site that is leveraging your popularity and expertise for its own gain, of course you should be compensated. Ask yourself, "am I getting new readers, clients, or a credential from this?" If not, that's OK, but at least get paid for it.

As a rule of thumb, consider value first, then worry about the money. And if you can't afford not to worry about the money, plan a deadline in the future by when you must be making money, or stop what you are doing. Successful businesses must have proven value first and foremost. For all the debate over how well (or badly) Facebook and Twitter are monetizing, I still think they did things right by building addictive tools first, and then figuring out how to back in a business model. Imagine their first sales calls if Facebook had done it the other way around: "We're going to build the world's largest social network; and here's what we're going to charge you today for that ..." Would you have written a check?  
 
Speak!: Speaking can help you leap over some of those nagging obstacles that throw off aspiring entrepreneurs. You know the ones--missing chunks of experience that on paper may make you seem like a bad bet, or a flimsy Rolodex. By speaking you can provide your know-how in a "warm" setting, for people who can catch a glimpse of your competence without the walls that they might normally set up when they feel they are being pitched.

When people feel they are learning something, they will give you and your product the benefit of the doubt. They are more willing to ignore, or find a way to compensate for, the unchecked boxes. I think of vendors that I meet at conferences that I might not normally think about as viable business partners, but whom I see present. Seeing their work in context, or their knowledge of a subject, I start to build a case for them: OK, he's never built a version in a live setting, but what if we get him in a conversation with our developer?... So this isn't a fit for me, but it's a TOTAL fit for one of my clients. I'll just provide an intro...I wonder if she'd want to speak at our business conference? You get the gist.

Career women, before women could have careers: The Madame Curie Complex

I'm not sure from which chromosome our interest in women and work originated, but I'm convinced that the passion is genetic--only expressed in different ways.

My twin sister Julie is a gender historian and has always focused on women's role in society. Her last book, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, explored how early American women memoirists captured a version of history so little known because men's accounts were taken as the public record. Her new book, The Madame Curie Complex, explores women's often uncredited contributions to science.

One of the most moving parts of this book is my sister's foreword. She draws a comparison to her subjects with her own struggle to write a book while teaching college courses in a town three hours away and caring for an infant (and later another infant). My sister struggled to fit it all in, but she had resources--domestic help, work policy, and a spousal support. The women she writes about didn't. They worked despite societal expectations and fulfilled all of their domestic duties with little, if any, support.

For me, this book is a reminder that work-life issues did not exist as a result of more women entering the workplace. They existed long before; they just weren't recognized.