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9/11: A picture is worth 1,000 thank-yous

September 12, 2011 By rjones 2 Comments

I wasn’t going to write about 9/11. For a small-business blog, it just seemed tacky or exploitative.

But on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, my neighborhood was awash in firefighters in full dress uniform. I live around the corner from the 1927 Firemen’s Memorial, and firefighters from the around the world had come to pay their respects.

Early this morning, I went out to snap some pictures, read the tributes, and meditate on bravery and sacrifice.

I’m still not going to write about 9/11, but I hope these photos are worth 1,000 words … 1,000 thank-yous, to be precise.

9/11 firefighters' memorial

memorial for 9/11 firefighters

nyc firefighters' memorial

photo tribute to 9/11 firefighters

nyc 9/11 firefighters memroial

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Doughnuts, clients & other things I’m thankful for

September 7, 2011 By rjones Leave a Comment

thanks for your business, thanking customers, business thank-yous

The other day I was sitting in a restaurant (okay, it was a Dunkin’ Donuts, so maybe “restaurant” is too highfalutin a word), when the guy beside me got up, dropped a half-eaten doughnut back into the bag, and headed for the door.

Outside, he strolled past a mentally disturbed woman who sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, loudly demanding contributions from everyone who walked by. As he stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light to change, my fellow diner dropped his Dunkin’ Donuts bag into the metal trashcan on the corner. In a flash, the woman jumped from the sidewalk, dug through the trash, and pulled out the crumpled bag like some sort of buried treasure. The rescued leftovers disappeared into her mouth in a single bite.

I quickly gave thanks for my double chocolate iced doughnut, fat grams and all.

Until that moment, I had taken my breakfast completely for granted — something that’s easy to do when you’ve eaten three meals a day for 40+ years.

A few days later, as I was sending out my monthly invoices, I realized that clients are like doughnuts: After a while it’s easy to take them for granted, and there’s always someone out there who’s hungry enough to pounce on your “leftovers.”

I like to think that I’m grateful for the clients who provide me with a steady stream of work and allow me to maintain an independent lifestyle … but am I truly thankful? I do believe there’s a difference. Gratefulness is in the heart, but thankfulness is on the lips. You don’t just feel a thank-you; you have to say it. And mean it. You have to sell it, even.

Rejoicing over Invoicing

It was the routine “thank you” line on my invoices that made me think of that hungry woman outside the Dunkin Donuts. She made me realize that I probably wasn’t expressing my thanks like I should. My invoices change monthly in terms of hours, projects and total due, but the “thank you” at the bottom of the page? That’s an afterthought. It never changes.

Well, not any more. Every invoice now gets a personalized thank-you every month — something that shows some thought and some heart. Something that says “I never want to take you for granted.”

I’ve also started designing some custom cards that I’ll send out for the holidays this year. Who knows if they’ll make any impression at all. Maybe they’ll just get tossed without a thought. But the point is, there will be some thought on my end — some thought and some thanks. It’s the least I can do for the folks who are helping to make this a banner year, despite the tough economy.

Oh, and there’s one more thing that I’ve never done before: I’ve never said a public thank-you to the folks who keep me well supplied with doughnuts. Without CouponNetwork, ERF Marketing, Inspire and Acquire, Health Planning Source, AllBusiness.com and SmartBrief, I literally don’t know where I’d be.

Thanks for putting your trust in me. Thanks for allowing me to help tell your story.

Thanks for keeping me out of a cubicle — and out of the trashcan.

{Photo credit: 5thLuna via flickr CC}

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Kicking off the antipreneur movement

July 19, 2011 By rjones 12 Comments

Time to open the gates on entrepreneurial identity

I know, I know: That headline violates my own gripe about bastardizing the word “entrepreneur,” but maybe it makes the point that the word itself has got to go. No one really loves the term to start with, outside of the publishing company that owns the “Entrepreneur” trademark and occasionally sues those who cross some invisible barrier to trespass on its intellectual property.

I say, let’s avoid that particular property, but right next door let’s build a public park so open and welcoming and useful that no one would see any point in straying beyond the gates of Entrepreneurland.

Tim Berry, one of my all-time favorite business bloggers, says he’s ready to “make a movement” out of this. If he’s onboard, I think we’re off to a great start. The only problem is, before we can have a movement, we have to decide exactly where we want to go. There’s bound to be some debate on this, but here is what I would hope to accomplish:

First, if we’re going to choose a term to replace “entrepreneur,” it probably needs to be a real word — something already in the dictionary and firmly in the public domain so that it can’t be fenced off by linguistic squatters in search of a quick buck.

Next, as long as we’re replacing a long, awkward term, it follows that the new word should be easy to spell and relatively short, befitting the limitations of Twitter and the frustrations of a virtual keyboard.

Finally, I would argue for a term that’s as broad and inclusive as possible. Language adoption relies on usage, and you don’t gain users by excluding people. The best term is one that encompasses all the different varieties of those we currently call “entrepreneurs” — founders and buyers, tinkerers and turnaround artists, profit seekers and social visionaries.

With all those criteria in mind, I wonder if “venturer” might be the term we’re looking for. According to the Random House Dictionary, “venture” is defined as:

  • (n) an undertaking involving uncertainty as to the outcome, especially a risky or dangerous one
  • (v) to take a risk; dare; presume
  • (adj) of or pertaining to an investment or investments in new businesses

“Venturer” isn’t a made-up word; it’s listed in the dictionary, with roots that trace back to 15th century Middle English. Given that history, I can’t imagine that any court would uphold a trademark claim.

What do you think? Does “venturer” capture the essence of what we’re all about? Is it the kind of term that we can embrace and standardize as an open-source alternative to “entrepreneur”?

If you like the word “venturer,” then here are two simple steps you can take to help speed its adoption:

  1. In the comment section below, show your support with three little words: “I’m a venturer”
  2. Any time you’re tweeting about a small-business topic, use the hashtag #venturer. When it becomes a trending topic, others will start to take notice, and we’ll have an honest-to-goodness linguistic movement underway.

And if you don’t like the term “venturer”? That’s fine too, but please feel free to suggest an alternative. As long as we can come up with something — anything — that’s better than “entrepreneur,” I promise to get behind the movement.

Photo by flickr user KTDEE

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5 reasons we need a new term for “entrepreneurs”

July 15, 2011 By rjones 10 Comments

French cuisine

I’ve decided that I’m sick of writing about entrepreneurs. Not sick of the topic, by any means, but sick of the word itself. If ever there was a term that outlived its usefulness, this would have to be it. With all the smart people out there writing and thinking about the topic, surely we can come up with a better term for people who innovate, take risks and start something new.

I can think of at least five good reasons why the word “entrepreneur” is all wrong:

  1. It’s French. Not to be jingoistic here, but France probably isn’t the first country you’d associate with the scrappy, independent spirit of startup businesses. French is totally appropriate when discussing food (escargot) or sexual affairs (rendezvous), but for small business? Not so much.
  2. It’s ridiculously hard to type. In 20 years of writing about the topic, I’ve probably typed the word “entrepreneur” 20,000 times — and I still transpose letters almost every time. The computer keyboard simply wasn’t designed for a word with so many e’s and r’s in such close proximity.
  3. It’s not Twitter-friendly. When you type the word “entrepreneur” in the middle of a sentence, with a space before and after, you’ve already used 10% of your 140-character allotment. Throw in a Thai or a Russian name in the same tweet, and that’s pretty much all she wrote.
  4. It’s been thoroughly bastardized. Mompreneur. Solopreneur. Intrapreneur. Herpreneur. Lefthandedredheadpreneur. Okay, I made the last one up, but you get the point. Enough already.
  5. It’s just begging for a lawsuit. This is where things get serious. As BusinessWeek reported recently, EMI, the company behind Entrepreneur magazine, has a history of suing entrepreneurs who use its trademarked (!) term. While I’m a big believer in intellectual property, this seems like a classic overreach. If EMI really believes that its long, awkward, oft-bastardized French word is worth a constant stream of cease-and-desist letters, then maybe it’s time to devalue that word by finding something better.

So there you have it: plenty of good reasons why it’s high time to find a substitute for “entrepreneur.” The problem is, I don’t have any brilliant ideas for what that substitute should be. I kind of like “venturist,” which is 25% shorter than “entrepreneur,”  much easier to spell — and sounds vaguely Latin rather than French.

I might actually start using “venturist,” although I’m not exactly wedded to it. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think — any brilliant ideas for updating the rickety, litigious term “entrepreneur”?

(Photo by flickr user prisme06)

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In business biography, less can be more

July 6, 2011 By rjones Leave a Comment

In an uncertain economy, it’s big news that Go Daddy is selling itself for a reported $2.25 billion. So why do terms like “elephant hunt” and “Danica Patrick” keep popping up when reporters analyze the deal?

Chalk it up to the power of storytelling — for good or ill.

Go Daddy dead elephant

Go Daddy is synonymous with its flamboyant founder, Bob Parsons, who built his Phoenix-based company into the world’s leading domain name registrar, with revenues estimated at more than $1 billion a year. Parsons realized early on that low prices and high volume would drive growth in domain registrations, and he hired scantily-clad “Go Daddy Girls” to help spread the word among his core market of young, male technology types.

Every year the company gets tons of press for its risque Super Bowl ads featuring celebrities like race car diver Danica Patrick and personal trainer Jillian Michaels — plus the accompanying “too hot for TV” clips that drive traffic to the Go Daddy website.

In other words, Parsons created a story about sexual mores and social boundaries that helped to differentiate his company in what is, essentially, a commodity business. But the funny thing about pushing boundaries is that you never exactly where they are until you’ve inadvertently stepped over them, as Parsons seemed to do earlier this year with an elephant hunt in Zimbabwe.

Rather than quietly jetting off to pursue his hunting pastime halfway around the world, Parsons posted a video on his blog, including footage that showed him grinning proudly over the carcass of his fallen prey. When animal-rights groups protested the killing, he indignantly portrayed himself not as a sportsman, but as the Great White Hope of the poor, benighted African villagers whose crops were being trampled by the elephants.

While many supporters rallied to Parsons’ defense, tens of thousands of exasperated Go Daddy customers voted with their wallets, transferring their domain registrations to competitors such as Namecheap and Network Solutions.

Parsons insists that nothing will change at Go Daddy after his billion-dollar payday, but I suspect that’s not entirely true. Big investors are buying the company for its steady revenue stream, and they won’t have much patience for a founder who doesn’t know the difference between self-aggrandizement and self-immolation. Just look what happened to Ted Turner, the “Mouth of the South,” after Time Warner bought out his media empire.

For other entrepreneurs, the lesson to be learned from Go Daddy is this: Every founder has both a personal brand and a company brand, and same stories that build up one can tear down the other. When you’re trying to decide how much of yourself to reveal, make sure the decision is based on economy rather than ego. Still not sure? Imagine yourself in a buyout situation, and ask whether your new corporate bosses would wince at your revelations.

When your reputation is at stake, sometimes less is more.

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Why taxes and ballots should go together

April 19, 2011 By rjones 2 Comments

They say there are only two certainties in life, and blogging isn’t one of them. The long gap since my last post can be explained by one of those certainties — and fortunately it wasn’t a death.

Tax Day has finally come and gone, meaning I can now get back down to business. According to the National Small Business Tax Day paperworkAssociation, 57% of entrepreneurs spend at least a full workweek on their taxes, which means the IRS is a bigger drain on productivity than Twitter or Angry Birds.

I realize that taxes are a necessary evil, and I try to be scrupulous in paying what I owe. But when America’s smallest businesses spend an average of $7,274 per employee just to comply with the intricacies of the tax code, something appears to be seriously wrong with the system.

Every year in early April, Washington starts buzzing about ways to make the tax code simpler, fairer or perhaps flatter. Then every year by early May, those efforts have been largely abandoned, and politicians get back down to spending our money with abandon. They know they don’t really have to worry about fixing anything for one simple reason: Election Day is still half a year away, and voters have a short memory.

Is it a coincidence that Tax Day and Election Day are spaced at opposite ends of the calendar? I’m skeptical. I suspect the architects of the modern U.S. tax code had the foresight to build in a six-month cooling-off period between the day we “hire” our lawmakers and the day we pay their salary.

When Washington is ready to get serious about fixing the tax mess, one simple step would jump-start the process: Move Tax Day so it falls about two weeks before Election Day. If voters were to pay their taxes and fund their government at the same time, the political debate would quickly get a lot more focused and a lot more urgent than it is now.

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Just what the world needs — another blog

January 27, 2011 By rjones Leave a Comment

Yes, I realize there are already more than enough small business blogs out there, which is why I’ve resisted starting yet another one.

I promise I won’t use this space to tell you what I had for breakfast or to engage in uninformed political ramblings.

Instead, the PenPoint blog will largely be an expansion of my writing for SmartBrief on Entrepreneurs and SmartBrief on Small Business. I read probably 50 sources a day in search of the top stories, and there’s always something that especially captures my attention. Since SmartBrief summaries are short and punchy, I’m often left with the feeling that there’s much more to be said.

This will be my place to say it, and I hope you’ll say what you’re thinking, as well. Question me. Challenge me. Call me crazy. I can take it; I get that at home all the time.

One other special area of interest for me: What venture capitalists dismissively refer to as “lifestyle businesses.” I’m writing a book on that topic, and I’ll share some of my thoughts and findings along the way.

So, enough navel-gazing. Let’s get on to the good stuff. I thank you for coming along.

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