Tracy Albright wins the iPhone 3G
A few days ago we posted a survey for everyone who attended BizJam Seattle 08, and promised to give away an iPhone 3G to one lucky person who completed the survey. We sent out the survey to 213 conference attendees, and got back 115 responses, a 54 percent response rate. I guess everyone really wanted that iPhone! As promised we did a random drawing, and the lucky winner turns out to be Tracy Albright an Active member of Biznik who hails from Mercer Island. Congratulations, Tracy!
And thanks to everyone who completed the survey - there’s a huge volume of information in there, and we’re slowly digesting it, and will be using the information to make big improvements in the next BizJam.
We’ll share what we found out in a future post.
1 Comment New supporting member feature: article resource box
When you write an article, Biznik automatically provides a link to your profile at the top and bottom of the article. And until now, we haven’t allowed additional footer information, because it conflicts with our business model (we want visitors to stay on Biznik as long as possible). However, we’ve had many requests from article authors that they would like to include what’s called a “resource box” in the footer of their articles, which allows them to give a brief bio and provide a direct link to their own website.
We’ve listened, and today we’ve added the resource box as a special benefit to supporting members only. The neat thing about the box is that, once you’ve added it on one of your articles, it will appear on all of them retroactively, providing you an inbound link to your site on every article you’ve previously posted.
Here’s how it works: At the bottom of every article, you’ll see a text area that you can edit, where you can provide your bio info.
After you’ve saved it, this is what it looks like:
The fact that we provide this for supporting members only fits within our tiered membership approach, in which Active members get enhanced profiles, and Supporting members get enhanced promotion. This provides a link to your own site, which amounts to enhanced promotion. You’ll also get a nice boost to your SEO from including these, too.
5 CommentsBiznik Profile: Two Helping Hands, Helps Everyone
My name is Christine Haskell and I’m a relatively new member to Biznik. I started social venture labs to blog about socially-minded businesses in the Seattle area. Most recently the Seattle Examiner and Start Up Nation picked up my business profiles so I’m sort of syndicating that content through those avenues. Every now and then, I meet with a Biznikker and get a chance to highlight their great work. Dan suggested I also feature them here. Enjoy!So I met with Elizabeth Lee of Seattle Organizing Works the other day. Her Biznik description says “I’ve been “the neat one” my whole life. That’s a lot of experience! I spent 20 years reporting to “The Man” in increasingly responsible roles in residential and corporate real estate, marketing and customer service, small business and - importantly - project management. All that learning, all that experience, all at your disposal.”
And that pretty much sums it up - she worked for The Man, made the choice to walk, and now does work that completely fulfills her. Who wouldn’t want to be able to say that at The Great Cocktail Party of Life?
After only a year, her business has doubled and her ears are burning with referrals. She takes care of the things people with limited time or who are overwhelmed with the task at hand and responds to the call:
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“I need someone to help me with my Christmas shopping. I have 18 nieces and nephews at various ages and don’t know where to start.” *gulp*
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“I’m selling my condo and need help prepping it.”
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“I need my tennis racket restrung.”
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“I need all these audio tapes transferred to digital.” *double gulp*
To many, these requests might sound like a never ending classroom of nags - to Liz, opportunities. “People say ‘just take care of it’ and don’t want to be bothered with the details. These things are important to someone and the projects need to get done. I like that I can help, that every day is different.”
Most people who are moving and want to get rid of things assume that the only place for it is Goodwill. “There are homeless families moving into their first apartment, or flood victims that would really appreciate and benefit from these items. Sometimes I consign these things and donate the money to a charity. I try to find the right place for these peoples’ personal belongings.”
Somewhat of a pixie herself, it’s hard not to imagine her as one of the Disney Fairies - flitting around with her punch list, refinishing and reallocating items from one family to other families in need.
About Liz
With a combined 15 years experience in areas including residential and corporate real estate, marketing, project management, small business and customer service, we are always up to a new challenge.
Elizabeth manages a full house with 13 year old twin boys, two disrespectful dogs and a husband. She is constantly amazed that there is no bread and milk in the house when she just went to the grocery store, and that there is more laundry to be folded!!! In her spare time (ha ha ha) she is an active fundraiser in the West Seattle community.
About Seattle Organizing Works
A friend of hers was sitting in a sea of moving boxes two weeks before Thanksgiving one year. The movers had packed everything for her. It was now up to her to unpack and she found out how thorough they were, they had even packed her trash. Liz stepped in, putting thing away, creating easy organizing systems… After helping her overwhelmed friend move into a new house after a remodel, she realized she had found a niche. She started assisting real estate agents before stagers were called, to help move all the excess items and store them until the move.
Five ways Seattle Organizing Works can help you today: (taken from her website)
1. Avoid doing things you don’t wanna do. OK, show of hands: who loves organizing? (Why am I the only one raising my hand?) Don’t misuse your limited resources by doing it yourself. Delegate neatening, packing boxes and purging obsolete files and spend that time with your kids, building your business, whatever.
2. Seal the deal. Hey, realtors: I am an expert at getting your clients to de-clutter their homes.
3. Find stuff. I will neaten, yes, and then give you simple project management, storage and time management techniques so you can always find your stuff! (Nothing more aggravating than misplacing some papers that you need)
4. Downsize. With office space at a premium, companies purge and stick employees in teeny, tiny spaces. I can help make the most of those spaces for you and your employees. We also have an active Boomer market as kids leave the nest and it’s time to move into a condo. What to do with all of that stuff? (Call Elizabeth Lee, that’s what!)
5. Improve your karma. Unwanted furniture, poorly fitting clothes, old books? You get the the tax deduction and good is spread throughout the city. I go above and beyond the Goodwill drop off site and find the right place to donate your items.
How Does Seattle Organizing Works Give Back?
With every move she is asked to manage, she has to figure out what to do with items families no longer want. Liz works with the following charities:
- Project Cool for Back to School which is an arm of Seattle King County Coalition for Homelness: provides 1,700 homeless youth with school supplies each fall. Project Cool gives students whose young lives have been disrupted by homelessness a jumpstart on their first day of school. Each child and teen receives a new backpack filled with age appropriate school supplies, along with a gift certificate for new shoes.
- Northwest Hope and HealingThe mission of Northwest Hope & Healing is to provide financial assistance to patients in need, for non-medical support services such as child care, meal service, transportation, and emergency rent. In addition, our signature “Healing Baskets” are assembled and delivered, at no charge, to newly diagnosed breast cancer patients.
- The Sharehouse Collects usable furniture and household goods that you no longer want or need. Recycles these items to individuals and families who are making the transition from homelessness to permanent housing.
Espresso Shot Insights what’s this?
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Find Happiness Where You Are At
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Help People Where They Are At
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Think Creatively
Find Happiness Where You Are At
There seems to be a common misconception people that work in larger companies believe that the small business owner is less educated and as a result left only with small business opportunities. “I want people to know that I’ve taken graduate classes. Small business is not about mom and pop candy shops or little insurance agencies as life’s last resort. It was a choice, not an afterthought.”
When thinking about the advice she was given or what mentoring she has had, she says: “It took me a while to get over someone saying ‘when you are not working you are losing money.’ I no longer subscribe to that notion…so I think you have to assess why you work, and love what you do. I have days I want to put a pencil in my eye, like everyone else…but ultimately, if I didn’t like it, I would stop doing it.”
We talked a little about the satisfaction she gets from her business and several times she emphasized the benefit of flexibility (to her). “I don’t think my boys think it’s great I’m around a lot, but it means a lot to me to be present for them. I know it is important.”
Like many owners, she wishes she had more focus on the planning aspect of her business but is frustrated with the pressure all businesses face to grow-grow-grow. “People are telling me I should do this or that…and sometimes I just have to shake my head and ask ‘why?’ Right now, I don’t want to Twitter, blog, make CDs or speak. I just want to do my job, be there for my kids and wake up another day to do it again.” Liz has a very strong sense of what she wants out of “today” and is good at living in the moment. She doesn’t believe that she is not successful simply because she is outside the hamster wheel, looking in. “I like to tell my kids that I want them to be happy healthy (and that they better go to college.) If they want to be a park ranger, they should be the best one out there.”
Help People Where They Are At
Liz loves it when her client’s have that “AHA” moment. They either find something that was lost, or they discover being organized is a whole lot easier than they realized. Her degree in psychology helps her read her clients’ needs well.
“People like to collect things. There are a lot of hoarders out there. I have been in places where there is no free surface–everything has something on it.” It’s clear she has a lot of patience and kindness when you hear her describe her clients’ relationship to their things.
“When you come across people who make the decision to trim down on consumption you have to be supportive. They have huge separation issues with their belongings. You have to create a map for them, hold their hand–because what they say and what they do are always two different things.”
With some, she tries to bring a certain amount levity to the situation–they need that approach and the experience can be quite cathartic. Others are embarrassed or treat the change like a death in their family. “It can be like losing a spouse or a family member. They keep the clothes that they don’t fit into any more, that they have no business keeping. In that case, they are seeing that a part of them died. Some hang on to the contents of a lifestyle from their past and assume their kids will deal with it - that is a tremendous burden, for them and their kids. These people have to become accountable for themselves, and that is a hard thing to do.”
Liz’s job satisfaction is fed by working with people who want some real change in their lives. “Some people will call me back and I’ll have to start all over. In some cases, an organizer isn’t the first call some of these people should have made - a PhD should have been the first stop.”
Some folks need her to tell them to get rid of things; others need her to sit with them while they hug each thing goodbye. “Each situation is ok. I’m there because there was something that sparked you to want to get out of that unit and make a change and I want to help with that.”
Her attention to detail and the small things is really unsurpassed. She helped plan a family’s bar mitzvah “…and everyone was so busy at the event that they forgot Aunt Tilly who flew in from Minnesota. I had someone on staff to be with her, so that she felt important. Those details matter.”
Need I say more?
Think Creatively
Liz is constantly playing with inventions. “My sister is always nagging me that we invented toilet seat covers in the 70s…and now, they are everywhere!”
It would be hard for me to imagine her an heiress to the toilet seat cover, but I am interested in seeing what she comes up with.
“I have to give birth to something and see it through the Chinese factory — so that my kids will say “she finally shut up and did it. Check back with me in a year.”
And I will.
Parting Words…
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My most rewarding business moment when a client found her mother’s driver’s license photo in a pile of what she believed to be garbage in her home. This was the only photo of her mom that she had left after a flood. She was so happy she just sat and wept.
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My scariest business moment are blocked out.
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Every entrepreneur should work with their sister. I do and we laugh all the time.
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Success to me means I get to have family dinner with my husband and sons every night.
Karen Davis is Biznik member 14,000
Welcome Karen Davis! When Karen joined Biznik this morning, she became the 14,000th member of this little slice of internet happiness. According to her profile, which is pretty thin still, she’s a loan originator from Everett.
We’re looking forward to learning more about you when you have time to update your profile, Karen!
Next stop: 15,000…
Rick Sader: work On your business, not just In it
It’s not very often that you work with vendors who do things like make house calls to ensure that your project gets done on time. So when Rick Sader showed up on our doorstep with signs he’d printed (over the weekend, nonetheless), I was impressed. And you probably were too, if you saw any of the signs at BizJam. Lone Eagle Digital was a sponsor of BizJam this year, and printed all of the gorgeous (not to mention environmentally-friendly-printed-on-recycled-board) signs and banners used at the conference.
I interviewed Rick to find out a bit more about who he is and how he runs his business…
Q: Briefly describe your company and what you do.
Lone Eagle helps people and companies communicate in a big colorful way. We do this by producing a huge range of large-format digital graphics that are used in backlit displays, vinyl & fabric banners, convention & tradeshow graphics, vehicle wraps, window graphics, non-slip floor graphics, photo & fine art reproductions… the list is long.
Q: Have you always wanted to run your own business?
No. The plan ever since my under-grad days was to get my chemical engineering degree and go to school part-time for grad school while working for some big company. That plan was on track except for a couple of “small exceptionsâ€.
Getting laid off from a couple of jobs for reasons outside of my control left a bad taste in my mouth for working for someone else (so maybe the seed for entrepreneurship was planted then). Both of those layoffs resulted in earning a master’s degree. The first was an MBA and the second was an MS in polymer science. It wasn’t until I started working for HP in San Diego that I really had a great job for a great company in a great place. It was…. Great.
Q: How / when did the idea of your company come about?
One day my wife, who is a busy oncologist, came home from work and had just had it. The university where she worked was giving pay cuts to everyone and asking them to do more with less. That started her job hunt. Not knowing where we would end up started me thinking of what I could do to enable us to be open to moving where she could find a great job. By that time, I was getting a little restless at HP anyway so the idea of starting my own business was really appealing. Since I was an R&D engineer developing inkjet printers for HP, the prospect of starting my own service bureau sounded great. I knew a lot about the technology, the materials, the applications, and the markets. One day, HP released their newest large-format inkjet printer – a 60â€-wide machine that cost about $20k. The first customer that bought it paid for it with the very first job they had! That started my in-depth planning. That was in late 2000. We moved away from San Diego in Dec 2002 and I officially started Lone Eagle Digital Imaging, LLC in April 2003.
Q: How many hours do you work a day on average?
At HP, my time spent working was typically from 7am – 5pm and it was digital - I was either working or not. Now I put in longer days but it’s at all hours, it’s split up throughout the day, and it’s all for the benefit of MY business, not for someone else’s. I may “start†at 6am and “finish†at 11pm but being self-employed gives me a lot of freedom to other important things during the day. Since my wife is an over-worked oncologist, I pick up a lot of the slack around the house and with our 11-year-old son. For example, I drive him to school, swim team, Tae Kwando, etc. which Vicky could never do. Here’s another great example. Since I work at home, Andy & I are doing “independent study†of 6th grade math this summer. If all goes well, when he enters 6th grade in the fall, he can go right into 7th grade math class. I could never do that with him in any of my previous jobs. Isn’t that awesome?!
Q: What was the last book you read?
I read a lot. It helps you make connections among disparate, seemingly dissimilar subjects. I’ll give you three that I highly recommend:
1. Super Capitalism (Robert Reich) – our behavior as consumers is quite often at odds with our behavior as citizens (think about buying a car).
2. Memo to the President Elect (Madeline Albright) – our next president has a lot of mending to do. I met Dr. Albright at a book signing sponsored by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
3. Who’s Your City (Richard Florida) – even though we have email, the web, video conferencing, etc., there are still plenty of economic & social benefits to living in a diverse community that’s right for you and your work (I’m living THAT premise right now).
Q: Who are your role models / mentors and why?
Charles Lindbergh is my hero and namesake of my company. He had a remarkable life. I guess I’m in the market for a mentor.
Q: If you could give blog readers one piece of advice what would it be?
I’d give them the same advice that I should be following more closely myself. When business is slow, you gotta focus on working ON your business, not IN your business. This concept crept up again last Thursday nite as I was chatting with Lara from Biznik at The Mcleod Residence. She confessed she’s also guilty of this. For me, I’m not gonna get more business by testing a new media to print on or by tweaking the ICC profile for an existing media to get slightly better color. Those things, however, are easy, I like doing them, and makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something. A far better use of my time, albeit more difficult, would be to contact & develop relationships with potential clients. This is far more important, but because it’s harder, and the risk of rejection is there, and maybe I’m not very good at it, it doesn’t get done nearly enough. Lecture over.
Q: Do you have any future expansion plans?
Big time.
BizJam photos!
The BizJam photos are here! Malcolm Smith, BizJam’s rock-star photographer, has posted tons and tons of photos on the official BizJam photo sharing site, www.sharemyalbums.com.
Here’s the direct link to check out the photos:
http://www.sharemyalbums.com/ViewPublicAlbum.php?Page=1&pid=669
I’d like to say a big thank-you to Carsten Winsnes, for sponsoring BizJam and providing the sharing site for us all to use.
By the looks of these photos, the event appears to have been a big success! Would you agree?
Interview with BizJam title sponsor ideablob’s Ami Kassar
BizJam has an awesome title sponsor this year: ideablob.com. It’s a site designed to help small business people share great ideas, and vote on the best ideas. The winners get $10,000 each month from Advanta, a company that issues credit cards to small businesses. Advanta has a really interesting history - they got their start loaning money to school teachers to tide them over during the summer months and during strikes, something that at the time was unheard of in banking circles. We like being associated with a company like that, and I hope you find time to meet Ami at BizJam. Here’s a bit more background, from an email interview I did with Ami recently…
Q: Tell me briefly the story behind ideablob.
While there are a variety of idea sites, there is a problem. That is, many good ideas need some capital. So, why not develop a platform to fund these ideas?
That was the basic inspiration for Ideablob. And, we think that $10,000 is the right amount to prove out an idea.
Since launching in October, we have provided funding for 8 and soon to be 9 ideas.
I was attending an un-conference in Northern Israel. I saw this really cool computer animation presentation by a young artist. I thought about how much her world would change if she had a little capital to launch her business. When I returned to Advanta, we decided to launch ideablob so that we could provide other idea makers with a place to get great advice and a little capital.
Q: How are you involved in this project, and what’s your role?
I’m the Chief Innovation Officer at Advanta, which is one of the largest credit card issuers for small businesses. The Innovation Team is charged with inspiring and connecting with the small business community. Ideablob is one of these projects.
Q: How can ideablob be useful to someone growing a small business?
Of course, the opportunity to win $10,000 is a big factor. But there are other considerations. For example, it’s a great exercise to put your idea into writing. It helps to flesh things out. Something else: Ideablob has a thriving community of advisors made up of experts and peers, which provides valuable feedback for new ideas. It’s something that’s quite unique on the Web.
Q: As someone involved in building a community site, what has been your biggest challenge so far? Your biggest success?
I think the big challenge is that there is no playbook. In other words, you need to try lots of things – and some of it will work.
As for the biggest success, it would be the quality of our users. They are providing a wealth of new ideas and advice.
Q: Why is ideablob sponsoring BizJam?
Biznik is successful place where business people network. We think this is absolutely critical for aspiring entrepreneurs. After all, it can be lonely when starting a business – and there are many pitfalls.
I also like the local aspect. This makes it easier for business people to help each other. I think we get too involved in virtual communities. Instead, face-to-face meetings can be extremely helpful.
Q: Will you be attending BizJam
You bet, I look forward to it.
New sitewide search makes it easier to find people, articles, events and discussions
We’re happy to announce a significant improvement to the Biznik site today: sitewide search! You can now search from any page of the website. Just enter your search term, and the results are automatically split into four separate categories: members, events, discussions, and articles. If there are more than five results in any category, you can click through to the search results page of the given subject, where you’ll see the rest of the results of your search.
To use the search, just click in the search box, located at the top of every page (see image below):
The results are grouped by type, with members first:
Next up: we’ve got some big improvements to the quality of the search results right around the corner.
I’d like to say a special thank-you to Biznik’s newly hired web developer, Matt McCormick. This is his first feature release, and we’re delighted to have him on our team. Great job, Matt!
Happy searching,
Dan
Office Nomads: A Vibrant Community That We Can Be Part Of
Office Nomads is a coworking space, a community office space for people who don’t like the isolation of working from home or the chaos of working in a coffee shop. It’s also a supporting sponsor of BizJam (where they’re running the networking lounge), and the place where Lara and I host regular workshops. In short, Office Nomads is to the real world what Biznik is to the virtual: a working community. Jacob Sayles founded, funded, owns, and operate the business with his business partner, Susan Evans, and I interviewed him to learn more about how he turned his passion for community into a business.
Q: Have you always wanted to run your own business?
I have always maintained that I was not a business person and that I would never start my own business. I didn’t have a change of heart I just didn’t realize that my passion and drive to create something was leading me down this path. At one point, after we had opened our doors, I took a moment to reflect back to the objections I had and realized I still have them. The traditional way of doing business where “It’s not personal” is absurd and I refuse to act in that manner. Business is fundamentally personal and it’s the human element people are starved for in our excessively convenient, self-serve, corporation dominated world.
I’ve held a number of jobs and worn many hats. In college I worked as an industrial painter at a chemical plant. I got a Computer Science degree and worked at a number of startups writing software. I went to massage school got licensed as a massage therapist. I’ve worked odd jobs as a bartender and handyman and for 4 years I ran a free taxi service here in Seattle to amuse myself and show people it’s not always about money.
Q: How did the idea of Office Nomads come about?
I had been fantasizing about something like this for many years and it continually evolved. In April of last year it had been coming up more and more often so I decided to give it some space to see where it would go. I had heard that some folks down in San Francisco were doing something similar so I searched around and discovered coworking. I knew in an instant that was what I wanted to do and proceeded to make it happen. I met Susan in July because she had been talking with a mutual friend of ours about her fantasy of neighborhood office spaces where people could walk to work rather then drive. She was still traveling in Nairobi but when she got back we met for coffee and it didn’t take long to convince her we should do this together.
Q: What is the long-term vision you have for Office Nomads?
The most important thing to understand about what we are doing at Office Nomads is that for us it’s about building social capitol not making it rich. To achieve this we need a sustainable business and that means making a profit but profits are not our motivation. This makes conversations about competition and franchising particularly amusing to us because that just doesn’t make any sense. We want to build a space that facilitates a vibrant community that we can be a part of. I don’t want to place any restrictions or have any preconceived notions about where this will lead but I’m exited to see where it goes.
Q: Who are your role models / mentors and why?
There are a number of great people in the coworking world and it would be difficult to name them all. Brad Neuberg coined the phrase and Chris Messina and Tara Hunt from Citizen Space in San Francisco have championed coworking from it’s inception. Alex Hillman from Independence Hall in Philadelphia has been a very vocal advocate from early on. Eva Schweber and David Kominsky from Cube Space in Portland were instrumental in the creation of Office Nomads sharing their business plan and startup stories last summer when we were just an idea. Julie Duryea from Souk, also in Portland and Derek Young from Suite 133 in Tacoma have been hugely supportive and we are grateful to have them as friends.
Q: What was the last book you read?
Urban Tribes by Ethan Watters. It’s not the last book I’ve read but it’s one I’d definitely love to recommend. Ethan was part of the group that started the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto in the mid 90s and he has some excellent insights into the world of community building.
Q: Why do you do what you do?
I just want to live a full and rich life and surround myself with people who are similarly motivated.
Interview with BizJam sponsor Entellium CEO Paul Johnston
BizJam is thrilled to welcome Entellium as a sponsor. And since I don’t know much about them or the their products, I asked Entellium CEO Paul Johnston a few questions to learn more…
Q: Tell me the short story about Entellium.
Like all budding entrepreneurs, I started Entellium with the desire to change the world in some way. My goal was to build a suite of products that would make sure smaller business owners are able to automate all the mundane tasks so they can continue to do what they love – and compete successfully with the big guys. The idea was simple— focus on user-designed innovation to create a better user experience, match or better the functionality of our competitors, offer a better value proposition, and include free 24/7 support for every subscriber. The good news—it’s working. Entellium solutions harness the energy and vibrancy of small businesses, while being intuitive to use and reliable. We have maintained our focus on smaller businesses, and helped our customers make their businesses more successful.
Q: What is CRM?
Simply put, CRM or Customer Relationship Management is software that helps you develop, manage and improve your customer relationships. CRM allows businesses to better manage their sales and customer support operations, to capture more leads, streamline sales to win more deals, and better build and maintain successful relationships.
Q: Isn’t CRM mainly for larger enterprises?
It is true that in the past CRM was only for large enterprises, being very expensive and requiring a lot of technical expertise. Entellium has changed that completely making CRM software custom designed for small businesses with easy to implement and use solutions that even the smallest of small business can afford.
Q: Can the smallest of small businesses benefit from using CRM software?
Small businesses with just an owner come to Entellium with a single problem: they have too much paperwork to track so they’re losing valuable time, and likely, valuable sales. Automating the manual processes lets them focus on selling and doing what they love – that’s why they opened their business to begin with!
Q: What makes Entellium different from other products in the same space?
Unlike other CRMs, which generally target large enterprise businesses, sell a watered down version to small businesses, and the pricing, contracts and extra services are over-complicated. Entellium’s CRM has the features that small businesses ask for most, designed in such a way that they can get up and running quickly, without extensive deployment time. Being focused exclusively on small business means that our solutions are easy to use and implement, and integrate easily with your Outlook and financial software. And unlike other CRMs, Entellium supports our customers with a service level agreement, 24×7 live chat support included, and a money back guarantee. All this makes buying and using Entellium CRM risk free.
Q: Why is Entellium sponsoring BizJam?
Entellium and BizJam share the common goal to help small businesses grow and succeed. BizJam helps small business network and find contacts, Entellium supports small businesses with software to help manage those contacts to grow their business. All that plus the opportunity to support our local small business community, is why Entellium is sponsoring BizJam.
Improv instructor Matt Smith will emcee BizJam soireé
The BizJam party on Thursday night will be emceed by Matt Smith, a long-time Biznik member who teaches improv, among other things. He’ll keep the evening flowing, and has a special collaborative event planned. Read on to learn more…
Q: Briefly describe what you do for a living.
I am a benefit auctioneer and a communications consultant. I am also an improviser and film actor, and I teach improv to actors and in the workplace.
Q: You seem like someone who has successfully turned his passion into a business. What was the biggest obstacle you faced along the way?
Stretches of poverty.
Q: Tell me about the workshops you teach. Are they relevant for business owners?
When you learn to improvise, you leave 1 million rules at the door and replace them with 5 or 6 new ones. Once these basic principles are understood and learned, you have a lot more room to move. You can see more and farther. Your options increase. That’s why it’s a great skill for business owners. If we can’t shift paradigms every now and then in a timely manner, we are often out of business.
Q: What piece of advice would you give, based on your experience, to anyone building a small business?
Look for what you do better than anyone else and build on that. (I guess that’s the hedgehog principle.)
Q: What’s the last book you read?
Artful Making
Q: What are you planning for attendees on Thursday night at BizJam?
We are going to do something called “Story Wave.†I’ll tell a short story, and then we’ll break up into groups and one person will tell a story he or she’s inspired to tell because of listening to my story. Then another person will tell a story she or she was inspired to tell because they listened to that person’s story. The idea is to resist deciding what story you’ll tell until it’s your turn. It’s a listening exercise more tthan anything else. It’s also a lot of fun.
Intuit’s Laura Messerschmitt: Listen to your customers
As many of you who are Biznik members probably remember, Laura Messerschmitt is the person at Intuit who contributed a lot of articles to this community back in April. We’re thrilled that Intuit is continuing it’s sponsorship of this community by sponsoring BizJam. Laura will be attending, and there’s a good reason to drop by her table and say hello: she’ll have a free copy of Learning Accounting Essentials for every BizJam attendee.
I interviewed Laura to learn a bit more about Intuit, and what small businesses like ours can learn from their success.
Q: Tell me briefly what you do at Intuit.
I am a Product Manager in our QuickBooks group. I regularly go out to visit small businesses and see how they are managing their finances. I then go back to the office and design QuickBooks features that I think will help them streamline their finances or make it easier for them to manage and control their finances.
Q: Tell me the short version of the Intuit story.
In 1982, Scott Cook noticed that his wife was struggling to balance her checkbook. He thought that there must be a better way. He developed the first version of a software called Quicken to help his wife and other consumers to manage their personal finances. Since then, the company has grown into business finance software (QuickBooks), tax software (TurboTax), payroll, website design, and other services.
Q: How does a large organization like Intuit connect with and understand the smallest of small businesses?
We started as a small business! And, from day one of building this company, Scott Cook talked to his customers to find out how he could help them. He would sit outside of a store and when he saw someone buying Quicken, he would ask if he could come with them and watch them install and use the software. Based on these visits, he would make improvements to the software. To this day, we have kept this tradition: Our employees regularly go out on what we call “Follow me home†visits where we watch our customers manage their business and learn what is keeping them up at night.
Q: Why is Intuit interested in sponsoring BizJam?
We started our relationship with Biznik back in April. We’ve been very impressed with how Biznik is so committed to the solo-entrepreneur and in making them successful. Intuit is also committed to helping solo-entrepreneurs, so it’s a good fit. I can’t wait to come to BizJam and meet everyone who I’ve been interacting with online.
Q: Intuit has been called “the most admired software company in America” for three years in a row by Fortune Magazine. Why do you think that is?
Personally, I think it’s because we are so focused on doing the right thing by helping small businesses be successful and by making sure that we are connected with our customers. I’ve always been amazed at how pervasive the culture is. Every product manager, marketing manager, and senior leader has gone out to visit a small business customer and has, often times, developed an ongoing relationship with the business owner to run ideas off of. As such, decisions at Intuit are informed by the desire to help small business owners achieve their business dreams by trying to solve their everyday problems.
Q: Is there any lesson that a small business can take from that?
Absolutely! My advice would be to conduct research with your customers to find out how to improve your products and services. Ask a subset of your customers: How did you find out about my business? What made you decide to buy something from me? What did I do well in serving you? What could I do better? As long as you are open to hearing their answers, it will help you go a long way towards improving your business.