Building a Personal Brand

Dan Schawbel has a new book out, Me 2.0: Build A Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. Branding as a business concept is nothing new. But in the Internet age when it's becoming increasingly possible for individuals to stand out, people really need to pay attention to their "personal brand". Companies aren't interested in retaining employees for life anymore. If anything the trend is toward companies being one day run by an army of independent contractors. There are already virtual companies out there made up of a group contractors working together on a project.

Add to that mix the current economic situation. People are losing their jobs and trying to find new ones among incredibly stiff competition. It's not enough any more to just qualify for a job. You have to market yourself for it.

I've not had a chance to read Schawble's book, but if this article is a sample, it should be good reading indeed. Plus there's likely the added bonus of dual application. If it works for the individual, many of the strategies should work for businesses too.

Here's an excerpt from the article in which he discusses conducting situational analysis:

You can’t leverage social media for career success unless you know where you stand today. This includes taking a good look at your life, what your current responsibilities are, the amount of resources you currently have and your career position. For instance, if you have two children and a full-time job (two children is probably another full-time job), you won’t be able to spend ten hours a day building a community using social media tools. If you’re twenty years old and your parents are wealthy, then you will have more time to invest in your online brand and you may have extra cash to help market yourself. Also, you may have a strong or a weak professional network, which can either support your brand or hinder it moving forward.

When it comes to your career, you need to decide if you’re looking to go to graduate school, start a company, or get a full-time job at a company and climb that corporate ladder. These decisions will impact how you use tools to communicate what you do, who you serve, and how you want to be positioned relative to everyone else, along with your goals and mission.

I may have to add this book to my list of reading.

When Free Stuff Doesn't Help

Havi at The Fluent Self has an interesting post about the hazards of giving things away for free: People tend to save "free" things up for when they really need it.

In her example it's a free massage. The massage was offered to employees so that they'd know how that masseuse works and can recommend them to customers. The opposite happened--the employees save up their free massages for a time when they really need them.

The writer then goes on to ask the employees who aren't using their free massages what their response would be if the massages were offered for $12. The common response was along the lines of "that's a good price, I'd get one today". So offering things for free in this case produces results contrary to the intent, whereas the perception of a spectacular-but-limited-time deal would have worked.

Sometimes less is more, but too much "less" becomes...less.

More Progress in Self-Publishing

(Via @gretchenrubin on Twitter)

Hewlett-Packard has developed printing service that can print magazines on demand at 20 cents per page. A bit pricey for a magazine, perhaps, but making progress.

Social Media and the Modern Business

My germinating business will be an internet endeavor, so I can't afford to ignore social media. But even "brick-n-mortar" organizations probably should be paying attention. Here are couple of articles of interest I got from David Cracknell, Director of Big Tent Communications. (David is following my tweets, for reasons I cannot begin to guess. If it was to get me to read his stuff, it's working--and I'm grateful):

10 Ways to Ensure Social Media Success

10 Twitter tips from The Dog Whisperer (kind of)

Author, Publish Thyself!

One aspect of my business I've been researching lately is publishing. Sooner or later I'm going to need to publish a book or two. Fortunately I didn't fall for the myriad of "vanity publishers" out there and instead found www.selfpublishing.com. I downloaded a copy of their book "Publishing Basics" and was offered a free hard copy as well. Bonus!

I much prefer hard copies to electronic copies. I did my MBA program with ebooks for texts, and if it weren't for a kind employer who let me print them out at work for free I'd have gone blind.

Anyway, I digress. My copy came in the mail this week. The book is short, but packed with information. Yes, it's also a marketing tool for their services, but it's an effective one. They also do a good job of convincing you that publishing is both difficult and possible. They're not building false hope, but they make it clear that there are rewards if you can pull it off.

Almost they convinceth me to become a publisher. But this is, as most things, a case of "you have to spend money to make money" and at this point in time I don't have the money to spend. So publishing will have to come later on in the business plan. But I'm pretty sure it will come.

Side Tripped

Sometimes life and necessity take a hand and change your plans. I'm still working toward The Business, but I've spent much of this week getting another business up and running. Circumstances have pushed me toward becoming a consultant, or at least offering myself as one. It's not my first choice of employment, but at this point it would be a welcome alternative to unemployment.

I'm also brancing out into writing. More on that later, perhaps.

With the economy the way it is, I think I need to have as many lines in the pond as I can. The more options I have the more likely something will pay off. And so for the moment my business plans are not necessarily on hold, but not the main priority, either.

Higher Taxes May Discourage Entrepreneurship

James Manzi in City Journal discusses how the new administration's proposed taxes increases may actually discourage the growth of small businesses. (Hat Tip Instapundit)

Consider a hypothetical aspiring entrepreneur: an engineer, say, with an idea for a new company. First she has to invest a lot of her own time just to develop her idea to the point that it could win funding from a venture capitalist or angel investor. The odds of going from idea to funding are, say, ten to one against. But let’s assume that after working nights and weekends for a year to produce a working prototype, write a business plan, and recruit a team, she finally gets funded by a professional venture capitalist. Having cleared this hurdle, she gets to quit her job and work much longer hours for much lower wages for about a decade. All the while, our engineer knows that she has only a 20 percent chance of steering the company to a successful exit that makes her a lot of money.

That's the current picture. Bleak enough as is, right? So how to Obama's proposed tax increases impact the picture?

Tax increases influence this calculation directly by reducing the size of the payout. The capital-gains tax that hits her when she sells her company is just the first thing for her to consider. Second and more important are increasing tax rates on dividends, interest income, and (again) capital gains—since she will invest the proceeds she gets from selling her company in a portfolio of stocks, bonds, and so forth, and rising taxes will reduce the present value of the after-tax consumption that the portfolio will generate in perpetuity. In the low-odds scenario of success, she will be in a very high-income category, and all of the taxes on the rich that Obama is proposing or implying will apply to her.

So there you go. Our young entrepreneur works long and hard for not much money on the hopes of a big payout at the end, and while the payout is still there, it's not nearly as big as it once would have been. The question is now whether or not the smaller payoff is worth the sacrifice to get there.

The bottom line:

By my figuring, if you use Obama’s campaign proposals for long-run capital-gains, income, and FICA tax rates as a (probably conservative) guide to where rates may go, the prospective entrepreneur would have to increase her estimated odds of success at the moment of funding from 20 percent today to about 30 percent under the new tax regime in order to have the same financial incentive to start the company. That’s a huge difference; in fact, it’s about the same as the margin of difference between the odds of success for a new venture-backed company started by a first-time entrepreneur and the odds of success for a new venture-backed company started by a founder who has already done at least one successful start-up. Any venture capitalist can tell you how much likelier the second guy is to get funded than the first.

I don't think this will discourage everyone from trying, mind you. This scenario is just one of the many ways in which entrepreneurs can make money. It is possible to start a company with the goal of simply drawing a regular paycheck, albeit from yourself, and a larger one than you were getting before. For those people, if they can keep their income below Obama's suggested threshold of $250,000, may not encounter the high taxes.

On the other hand, who goes into business hoping to make less than $250,000 per year? I'd dare say most people would like to think they could make more than that. The question is whether they're willing to give up more in taxes for the priviledge.

I think Manzi is correct that this will discourage entrepreneurship at least a little. But even a little can be a lot.