My high school guidance counselor told me not to bother applying to the Ivy League, despite my high SATs, because "According to your teachers, you're a clear underachiever. You'll never get the references you need."
It was no shock, I'd heard it all my life. Spelling is difficult for me; math near impossible even with a calculator -- dialing a phone number correctly takes enormous concentration - and there were no PCs with Word auto-correct or spreadsheets back then. I didn't hang my head, I had too much dignity, but I hung it internally. I was no good. Somehow, despite trying and trying, I apparently didn't try as hard as other kids did. I would have modest success in life, if any, and it would all be my own damn fault.
It was only years later I learned my faults had a source. A college friend who'd been to a special high school for dyslexics was describing the tricks they'd taught her to manage daily life. "You have tie an imaginary thread to your starting point when you walk someplace that's new to you," she said, "then keep that thread in your mind all the while so you can find your way back again." Oh. Revelation. I thought I had invented that trick and so many of the others she described that day. I wasn't a bad person. I was dyslexic.
It didn't make much of a difference though. When I graduated, still in a world largely without personal computers, I forsook my dream of becoming a professional journalist, because journalists have to spell properly, and accepted the most lowly job in the marketing department of a publishing company instead. If I couldn't be a writer, at least I could be close to it.
A handful of years later, I found myself in an extremely odd position. Feted. Employee of the month, employee of the year, winning regional marketing association awards, written up in the national press, invited to speak at professional luncheons. I didn't know what to make of it. I couldn't even learn to drive a car because making quick decisions about right and left was so terrifying. And I was an underachiever after all, surely these people were mistaken.
Only after I started my first online publishing company in 2000 (an act of presumption for an underachiever such as me, only possible to conceive because I saw so many, quite frankly, idiots starting apparently successful ventures in the dot-com boom) did I learn how I was truly different from other "normal" people.
My staff had phrase for it: Anne Time. As in anything that takes Anne an hour, will take anyone else three.
For more than a decade now, it's driven me crazy with frustration. I would hire top people. Experienced, intelligent achievers. And then I would give them assignments, and everything took them FOREVER. "How is this so difficult?" I would (literally) scream. "I can do this in 30 minutes. What is your problem?"
Most annoyingly, my journalists, far more trained and experienced at their jobs than I with my marketing department background, would take hours to skim through the "beat" gmail and Twitter accounts I set up for them that poured all the news of the day to their fingertips so they didn't need to waste time searching for the obvious stuff. I even held in-house training webinars, "See, you just skim it, and then zap a message to a potential source here, pop out a quick Tweet here and dash off a blog post there. It should take no longer than an hour day. It couldn't possibly take longer,"
But it did. And the myth of "Anne Time" grew, haunting me until I grew half-afraid to set hard deadlines for anything.
Then this weekend I read an article in the New York Times about the advantages of dyslexia . Oh. Well, that explains a lot.
Now I understand why I can read two novels from cover to cover on a lazy Sunday, despite not "seeing" all the words. And how I can skim through multiple email inboxes, with 200+ messages each per day, in a heartbeat. And why reviewing Twitter streams from 300+ contributors for the daily trends take me about 15 seconds. Not to mention why I can only give my CFO a garbled explanation of a financial spreadsheet we need, but then spot the erroneous calculation like a big sore thumb sticking out when she doesn't "see" it. Not to mention why I can leaf through 100 charts intended for one of our new Benchmark data reports and intutively and instantly just "know" which belong in the Executive Summary because they are somehow, obviously-to-me, sexier than the rest.
And apparently dyslexics tend to end up in the design profession. Hence my penchant for Web design, and why my gut has the "right" answer to problems invariable with content heavy sites.
I'm dyslexic, and apparently I should be proud of it...and cut normal people a break.
That said, I still can't spell dyslexia with help from an auto-correct program :-).
Friday, February 10, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
On Handing Off & Letting Go
"What's your biggest concern about taking this job?" is question we ask all applicants. My assistant Ron (on most days AKA "my Boss"), enjoys a hearty laugh when they reply, as they do often enough, "What if Anne really can't divest of this responsibility? Will she be second guessing me all the time?"
"Oh no worries," he assures them, "She's great at handing over things. She's fine with letting you run with it."
Now maybe it's because I've always been a crap micromanager, or maybe because there are nearly always so many things on my plate (the curse of being an "idea person") that I'm thrilled to offload anything I can.
But, really I think the answer lies in having had longstanding experience with cleaning ladies.
I worked as a cleaning lady myself through college. It was the job that paid for beer, pizzas and sometimes rent. The idea that I was a cleaning lady made my family scream with laughter because I'm anything but tidy. But, being a type A personality, I was very, methodically, good at it, even taking lessons in cleaning lady process management from a team who were the best in the business. (In fact, their employee handbook later directly inspired to my creation of all sorts of best practices handbooks for my own profession, the online publishing and marketing business -- and thus wound up being one of the most practically applicable parts of my college experience. Which in turn explains why you can get a degree in Religious History and end up with my career.)
Nevertheless, after graduation, I swore I would do my damnedest to make enough money to Never Clean Again.
Luckily, after a few years, I was able to achieve this goal. Which brings me to how cleaning ladies are an awfully useful tool to help you learn all about offloading responsibility as an company leader.
If you have a cleaning lady, you know what I mean.
It does not matter how you have decided to arrange the gew gaws on your shelves. Or where the little, red oriental rug should go. Or, even if the dog should be allowed inside the house during the daytime.
Your cleaning lady has very firm ideas on all of these matters. If you try to move things back, stick with the original plan, she will overrule you. She will continue with an iron will to overrule you until you give in. Inevitably things wind up the way she thinks they should be. Never matter that it is Your Home, in the eyes of the law at least.
After awhile, even if you live alone, you are not living in your house anymore. You are living in our house, and she is a decision-maker.
I can sell the house. I can paint the rooms another color entirely. But that little red oriental rug will, apparently, be placed in the entrance to the master bathroom, no matter how I feel about it. As it happens, I feel just fine.
There is a distinct pleasure in allowing other people take control, take ownership of the things that were originally under your domain. Allowing their life, their creativity, their purpose to join in with your own. Together, the outcome is different than what you would have done alone. It's not just that you spent less time, that you offloaded the work, it's also that the end result is slightly different from the original vision.
That's OK with me. That's alright. Ownership is more fun when it's shared. Which I guess means I'm not Steve Jobs, and never will be. There are many paths to being successful in business, and being crap at micromanagement may just be one of them after all.
"Oh no worries," he assures them, "She's great at handing over things. She's fine with letting you run with it."
Now maybe it's because I've always been a crap micromanager, or maybe because there are nearly always so many things on my plate (the curse of being an "idea person") that I'm thrilled to offload anything I can.
But, really I think the answer lies in having had longstanding experience with cleaning ladies.
I worked as a cleaning lady myself through college. It was the job that paid for beer, pizzas and sometimes rent. The idea that I was a cleaning lady made my family scream with laughter because I'm anything but tidy. But, being a type A personality, I was very, methodically, good at it, even taking lessons in cleaning lady process management from a team who were the best in the business. (In fact, their employee handbook later directly inspired to my creation of all sorts of best practices handbooks for my own profession, the online publishing and marketing business -- and thus wound up being one of the most practically applicable parts of my college experience. Which in turn explains why you can get a degree in Religious History and end up with my career.)
Nevertheless, after graduation, I swore I would do my damnedest to make enough money to Never Clean Again.
Luckily, after a few years, I was able to achieve this goal. Which brings me to how cleaning ladies are an awfully useful tool to help you learn all about offloading responsibility as an company leader.
If you have a cleaning lady, you know what I mean.
It does not matter how you have decided to arrange the gew gaws on your shelves. Or where the little, red oriental rug should go. Or, even if the dog should be allowed inside the house during the daytime.
Your cleaning lady has very firm ideas on all of these matters. If you try to move things back, stick with the original plan, she will overrule you. She will continue with an iron will to overrule you until you give in. Inevitably things wind up the way she thinks they should be. Never matter that it is Your Home, in the eyes of the law at least.
After awhile, even if you live alone, you are not living in your house anymore. You are living in our house, and she is a decision-maker.
I can sell the house. I can paint the rooms another color entirely. But that little red oriental rug will, apparently, be placed in the entrance to the master bathroom, no matter how I feel about it. As it happens, I feel just fine.
There is a distinct pleasure in allowing other people take control, take ownership of the things that were originally under your domain. Allowing their life, their creativity, their purpose to join in with your own. Together, the outcome is different than what you would have done alone. It's not just that you spent less time, that you offloaded the work, it's also that the end result is slightly different from the original vision.
That's OK with me. That's alright. Ownership is more fun when it's shared. Which I guess means I'm not Steve Jobs, and never will be. There are many paths to being successful in business, and being crap at micromanagement may just be one of them after all.
Monday, January 2, 2012
How I Evaluate Potential Employees: LinkedIn, Aptitude Surveys, & Emotional Intelligence
The good news is, we're hiring! We're looking for a marketer for all our pubs as well as an editor/evangelist for WhichTestWon.
When you're a small company, the stakes are enormously high for each new hire. Someone who doesn't work out can easily set you back six months or more.
I've never found resume-surfing useful. Too much BS, too hard to compare apples-to-apples. LinkedIn profile surfing is better, especially for online marketing and editorial positions, because those skills are exhibited in your LinkedIn profile. I review the quality of your connections and groups, whether you link anywhere, if anyone recommends you, your Twitter stream, etc. (Yes, I've dumped some people who had great resumes but lousy LinkedIn pages into my "no thanks" pile in the past.)
I also use our online application forms, built via our FormStack account (I used to use online survey software, but the URLs scared applicants thinking my job opening was survey spam) to do the first round of evaluations. Some questions are the same - your contact info, your LinkedIn ID, etc - but mostly the questions are developed specifically for the position in question.
I ask two types of questions -- one set is for specific hands-on experience; ie., please rate on a scale how expert you are at each of the items on a list of what's required for the job. The other set is for rating your likes/dislikes for various parts of the job. I've believe you not only have to know what you're doing, but you have to have a genuine enthusiasm for it to work at our company.
BTW: If you rate yourself "very high" in everything on both lists, chances are we'll knock you off the list as well. Nobody is excellent at and utterly enthusiastic about every part of a job. It's unrealistic.
And yes, sometimes I stick in a few ringers -- asking about talents or activities which are not involved in this job -- for the purposes of weeding people out. For example, our marketing job is 90% tactics/ 10% strategy, so I asked applicants how much they liked strategy. If you answered that strategy is your favorite thing in the world, I know this is not the job for you.
Lastly, although about half our staff works virtually and I've hired plenty of great people in the past who I never actually met until ages after they started working for me (in one case six years), after being burned a few times, now we try to meet every top candidate in person. Even if they'll work virtually.
Only by looking someone in the eye can I evaluate their emotional intelligence and sense of responsibility. Either you're a "grown up" or you're not. It's nothing to do with physical age. Some people are born "grown up" and others never get there. Again, we're a small company. I'll always make the time to train a grown-up, but there's no room for hand-holding kids.
So what about calling references? Unless your references are for a company that's at our same growth-stage, and for a job that's a fairly good match, I've found references surprisingly useless.
Actually, I've been seriously led astray by genuine, positive references in the past, not once but several times. Your super-star student or employee could turn out to be my stinker. So, for me reference calling is a pro forma activity to cross the 't's, and nothing else.
Want to work for my company? You'll work hard, learn a lot, be fairly self-directed, and get in on what is still pretty much the ground floor of a growing concern. Our gross sales tripled last year. We're targeting 50% minimum growth for this one.
Grown ups only please ;-)
When you're a small company, the stakes are enormously high for each new hire. Someone who doesn't work out can easily set you back six months or more.
I've never found resume-surfing useful. Too much BS, too hard to compare apples-to-apples. LinkedIn profile surfing is better, especially for online marketing and editorial positions, because those skills are exhibited in your LinkedIn profile. I review the quality of your connections and groups, whether you link anywhere, if anyone recommends you, your Twitter stream, etc. (Yes, I've dumped some people who had great resumes but lousy LinkedIn pages into my "no thanks" pile in the past.)
I also use our online application forms, built via our FormStack account (I used to use online survey software, but the URLs scared applicants thinking my job opening was survey spam) to do the first round of evaluations. Some questions are the same - your contact info, your LinkedIn ID, etc - but mostly the questions are developed specifically for the position in question.
I ask two types of questions -- one set is for specific hands-on experience; ie., please rate on a scale how expert you are at each of the items on a list of what's required for the job. The other set is for rating your likes/dislikes for various parts of the job. I've believe you not only have to know what you're doing, but you have to have a genuine enthusiasm for it to work at our company.
BTW: If you rate yourself "very high" in everything on both lists, chances are we'll knock you off the list as well. Nobody is excellent at and utterly enthusiastic about every part of a job. It's unrealistic.
And yes, sometimes I stick in a few ringers -- asking about talents or activities which are not involved in this job -- for the purposes of weeding people out. For example, our marketing job is 90% tactics/ 10% strategy, so I asked applicants how much they liked strategy. If you answered that strategy is your favorite thing in the world, I know this is not the job for you.
Lastly, although about half our staff works virtually and I've hired plenty of great people in the past who I never actually met until ages after they started working for me (in one case six years), after being burned a few times, now we try to meet every top candidate in person. Even if they'll work virtually.
Only by looking someone in the eye can I evaluate their emotional intelligence and sense of responsibility. Either you're a "grown up" or you're not. It's nothing to do with physical age. Some people are born "grown up" and others never get there. Again, we're a small company. I'll always make the time to train a grown-up, but there's no room for hand-holding kids.
So what about calling references? Unless your references are for a company that's at our same growth-stage, and for a job that's a fairly good match, I've found references surprisingly useless.
Actually, I've been seriously led astray by genuine, positive references in the past, not once but several times. Your super-star student or employee could turn out to be my stinker. So, for me reference calling is a pro forma activity to cross the 't's, and nothing else.
Want to work for my company? You'll work hard, learn a lot, be fairly self-directed, and get in on what is still pretty much the ground floor of a growing concern. Our gross sales tripled last year. We're targeting 50% minimum growth for this one.
Grown ups only please ;-)
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Hell Is Your Feet During Conference Season
New York, Denver, New York, Boston, Phili, San Francisco, New York, and then New York again... and then some. Recession be damned, this fall conference season was insane. If the economy actually gets better, ever, it will only be worse on my poor feet.
(On the other hand, my pet-sitter is going on a luxury vacation in January with what she earned from me.)
So here are my rules for your feet during conference season:
- When traveling, pack some slippers or slipper-socks in your carry on to wear en route. Don't stay in your shoes, no matter how nominally comfortable!
- Wear disgustingly comfy shoes or boots for the 'to the station/airport' and 'to the hotel' part of the trip. Slip ons (clogs or Uggs are great) if possible. You don't have to look spiffy when you check in to fancy conference hotels, only afterwards.
- Bring at least one pair of shoes per day of event -- don't think you can wear a pair twice in a row! (Sharon, you know what I mean.)
- Buy event shoes in a size larger than your normal office shoes. Your feet may swell on concrete-over-thin-carpet floors, or due to excess flying or standing. Also if you need to add insoles, you'll need the extra room. (Thanks to Hope for this tip.)
- Carry a spare pair of shoes in your bag to change into when your fellow attendees insist on an after-event drink or three. Most of them are either (a) male or (b) 20-somethings, so they have no idea of the physical pain you'll go through just to follow them down 6 city blocks to the 'cool' bar for refreshment. (Better yet, learn to say 'no thanks.")
And I might add, don't share a hotel room, to save money, with your decade-younger COO, because you'll be wracked by jealously of her sophisticated younger-woman's wardrobe and then make bad shoe decisions as a result... but I won't because surely you know better. Right?
(On the other hand, my pet-sitter is going on a luxury vacation in January with what she earned from me.)
So here are my rules for your feet during conference season:
- When traveling, pack some slippers or slipper-socks in your carry on to wear en route. Don't stay in your shoes, no matter how nominally comfortable!
- Wear disgustingly comfy shoes or boots for the 'to the station/airport' and 'to the hotel' part of the trip. Slip ons (clogs or Uggs are great) if possible. You don't have to look spiffy when you check in to fancy conference hotels, only afterwards.
- Bring at least one pair of shoes per day of event -- don't think you can wear a pair twice in a row! (Sharon, you know what I mean.)
- Buy event shoes in a size larger than your normal office shoes. Your feet may swell on concrete-over-thin-carpet floors, or due to excess flying or standing. Also if you need to add insoles, you'll need the extra room. (Thanks to Hope for this tip.)
- Carry a spare pair of shoes in your bag to change into when your fellow attendees insist on an after-event drink or three. Most of them are either (a) male or (b) 20-somethings, so they have no idea of the physical pain you'll go through just to follow them down 6 city blocks to the 'cool' bar for refreshment. (Better yet, learn to say 'no thanks.")
And I might add, don't share a hotel room, to save money, with your decade-younger COO, because you'll be wracked by jealously of her sophisticated younger-woman's wardrobe and then make bad shoe decisions as a result... but I won't because surely you know better. Right?
Monday, November 14, 2011
Research, Rename, Relaunch! Dispensary Business News Is Now MMJ Business Daily
Pride goeth before fall.
I've always had a knack for new publication development. Now I've learned I can't depend on it too much. Market research kicks knack butt.
This summer we launched Dispensary Business News for professionals running (legal) storefronts serving card-carrying medical marijuana patients. It seemed like a good idea because these pros have very few sources of relevant business information; the news changes daily, often dramatically so; and it's a booming billion+ dollar industry.
In reality, it was a crappy idea because people who run MMJ storefronts rarely read news online. Some don't even have email addresses - not for work, nor for personal email. And, some just weren't professionally-minded enough to care much about professional news.
So, in October with help from another publisher in this market, we launched a formal market research survey asking a wide variety of industry pros what they wanted from an online trade journal in this niche.
The result launched today -- Medical Marijuana Business Daily, featuring exclusive news analysis for legal and financial pros, as well as vendors in the industry. Lesson learned - always run a survey prior to launch. Don't just count on your "knack".
I've always had a knack for new publication development. Now I've learned I can't depend on it too much. Market research kicks knack butt.
This summer we launched Dispensary Business News for professionals running (legal) storefronts serving card-carrying medical marijuana patients. It seemed like a good idea because these pros have very few sources of relevant business information; the news changes daily, often dramatically so; and it's a booming billion+ dollar industry.
In reality, it was a crappy idea because people who run MMJ storefronts rarely read news online. Some don't even have email addresses - not for work, nor for personal email. And, some just weren't professionally-minded enough to care much about professional news.
So, in October with help from another publisher in this market, we launched a formal market research survey asking a wide variety of industry pros what they wanted from an online trade journal in this niche.
The result launched today -- Medical Marijuana Business Daily, featuring exclusive news analysis for legal and financial pros, as well as vendors in the industry. Lesson learned - always run a survey prior to launch. Don't just count on your "knack".
Monday, August 8, 2011
Our Semi-official Corporate Photo at Newport RI HQ
I'm posting this to prove that even though we mainly publish online, we're real world people in real world offices. Nope, this is not my spare bedroom ;-).
Actually I asked an artist working at the gallery across the street from us take this snapshot today to celebrate Natalie Tomasso's first day back from maternity leave. That's Natalie at the left. She's Senior Reporter for our WhichTestWon.com publication and just about to take on additional reporting duties for our Dispensary Business News publication.
If you were a MarketingSherpa (my last company) customer in the past and you called customer service, chances are you got Ron Perry on the line. He's been with us here at Anne Holland Ventures for nearly four months, and sometimes the thought of seeing Ron's smiling face across the office from me is a good reason to get out of bed in the mornings. Ron is, obviously, the guy in the middle.
And that's me in blue.
BTW: Look how big our windows are. We're put big trees in front of each to shield us a bit from tourists gazing in. Sometimes though people open the door and march right in because they think... well, goodness knows what they are thinking!
We have had a few readers drop by, which is always fun. But, since we're often on editorial deadlines (with three weeklies), it's much appreciated if you contact us ahead of time.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Why We Launched Dispensary Business News
Walking at a brisk pace around a nature sanctuary in Newport RI, my business partner Cassandra Farrington and I completely ignored the glories of sun, surf and wildflowers because we were so caught up in our excitement about launching new publications.I guess that's what makes us true entrepreneurs. It's not about money, and even less so about fame. The act of creation, of inventing an idea and then making it come alive! The daily joy of working with your team producing this thing together. And to be able to count your success in a palpable way, whether it be customer fan mail or monthly revenues. That's just so much more fun than yet another spectacular Newport sunset. (Yeah, you can see why I sucked at early retirement.)
I'm a high-volume idea factory, so Cassandra tried to reign me in, "Anne, first let's tightly define the attributes of a business niche that's worth us going into." We both agreed a niche had to be:
- Growing at faster than 7% per year in new companies, products, or divisions, with a matching growth in overall revenues.
- Primarily American-based, but strength in other English-speaking countries would be cool as well.
- Dominated by many, preferably thousands, of smaller companies with under 50-100 employees, so we'd have a large potential customer account base we could market to via direct response (vs. fewer, larger Fortune 500 accounts that may require a sales team.)
- Under-served by business publishers offering nitty-gritty practical instructions about growing a stronger, healthier company in their specific niche.
- Actively feeling "pain" that kept execs up at night with worries about how to expand, stabilize, or manage their business, which might be addressed with the nitty-gritty type of practical information we're becoming known for.
- Reachable through existing media or lists including bloggers, industry events, government licensing lists, relevant vendor's customer and prospect files, and broader trade publications.
Worth noting - the words "Internet marketing" or "marketing" weren't on this list of attributes! While we presumed we'd cover marketing as a topic for each niche, and we already publish in one marketing industry area (WhichTestWon.com which covers A/B testing), we wanted to focus on our passion for helping the entrepreneurial community, as opposed to the marketing community.
"You know what industry meets all these requirements," I said. "Medical marijuana dispensaries!" I was joking. Well, sort of. Because as we both thought about the idea we realized it was a perfect fit.
And what a marvelous way to show the world that we really are serious about serving entrepreneurial niches outside of the marketing industry. I'm sure you could make jokes about A/B testing medical marijuana, but I'm really not going to go there ;-)
We hired a great Editor/Reporter Chris Walsh for the launch. He's based in Colorado, which is currently the state that most other states are watching carefully as a sort of poster-child for the safe and sane development of a legal, for-profit, medical marijuana retail industry. We've got several other employees based in Colorado as well, so it was also a good corporate fit. In fact now, we're nearly evenly split between Rhode Island and Colorado. Surf and turf.
Anyway, if you or someone you know is in this industry, please do point them to our newest -- free -- resource Dispensary Business News. It's not for patients, politicians, or activists. It's simply for the business owner who is trying to make a go of it in this confusing, burgeoning, exciting, and exasperating industry. We're here to support you.
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