I’ve been through two of these, like many of my fellow serial entrepreneurs. Once when the bubble burst around my ‘convergence’ company, Oxygen Media, and now again with my current company, Expo Communications. We’re in a period of high revenue growth, so it isn’t easy to distinguish what is critical spending and what is not. But you should be motivated thinking that your competitors – whether they compete for your customers, users or funders – may be acting faster and more decisively than you are right now. Here were some tasks that I’ve found effective for long-term strengthening:
1)Build Staff 2.0. You never have a second chance to make a first impression. Unless there’s a crash. Then, you totally can. Here are some thoughts about how to build Staff 2.0:
a.Be very skeptical of keeping headcount that is not directly attached to revenue, or in evidenced growth areas. There is no time to be investing ahead of success when success just got a lot riskier. It’s called right-sizing and it will save your company and the jobs that it should support.
b.Start with a blank org chart. Build an org chart with no names of people…just titles and functions. It helps you think less emotionally about who you’d like to keep and more about who the company needs.
c.Do it all at once. I can’t stress this enough. Doing it in a thousand cuts is demoralizing, painful, and will result in losing the staff you need to keep. Work very hard at shaping your target org, then create it in a humane but decisive process.
2)Support the resulting Staff 2.0. Your staff is far from stupid. They know why you made those changes. They silently questioned why that guy over there was writing copy all day. They might have liked that guy and thought he was talented, but deep down they didn’t think he was contributing to the company like they were. After your restructuring, bring Staff 2.0 together, and give them the positive news: this team is the team that you believe will bring the company to the promised land.
3)Extend your payables. Why are you paying on time when no one is paying you on time? You will pay…just a little later. The amount of working capital you will free up that first 30 days will amaze you.
4)Change old policies. This action may not save a lot of money, but it can start a culture of frugality that will benefit the company for years. Tighten the travel policy, and start tracking vacation days. Overhead contracts should be now treated as variable. Cancel all contracts you can terminate, and negotiate new terms with either existing or new vendors – HVAC, cleaning, legal, consultants, etc. Put new cost controls in place, such as additional approvals for discretionary spending.
5)Exude a positive attitude. Be transparent in all these changes and answer all questions about the health of the company, additional staff reductions. This is where your prior planning can help you answer decisively, clearly, and immediately. Having a plan can help you communicate with a level of certainty that you probably don’t really have, but that your staff will crave.
As you make your plans, target a material amount to reduce – try to find over 25% of existing costs. You don’t have to make all the cuts, but forcing yourself to identify potential reductions is the first step toward honestly evaluating whether you need to make them.
There’s a lot written about the Sequoia “world is ending” meeting, with presentations by Sequoia professionals Mike Moritz, Eric Upin, Michael Partner. At the very least, this presentation helps clarify the task at hand during this very complex environment.
Here’s the actual presentation, thanks much to Fred Wilson’s blog where I found the link first. The presentation is MUCH better than any of the writeups, as it provides context to the comments.
I recently spent time with 8 women who were old enough to remember Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10. All were professionals, from Google to Goldman Sachs. Amazingly, only one woman other than myself was on Facebook. No surprise, she was also the CEO of an internet company.
Some were on Linkedin, but seemed to dismiss it as a job tool, not a social network. Regarding FB, privacy seemed to be the loudest concern. “But can’t everyone see it?” was the main objection. The next objection was “Who would want to see it?”. They derided needing to know if their co-worker was now a fan of Michael Phelps, or poking their old college boyfriend.
My description of “completely remapping the social neural network in my brain” didn’t seem to move them much. Transforming my social connections into a movement that I can observe instead of single points that I have to directly contact didn’t resonate. Weakening the isolation that accompanies privacy in favor of participating in a self-selected, partially unintentional social dialogue was baffling.
That said, my group is a strong, fearless bunch of girls, always up for new things (as long as someone else is doing it, too). I’ve set up a ‘secret’ and more public group for them to join, and am sitting back as a few are entering. I’ve been peppering them with advice, which I thought I would list here for those of you who need some courage.
Rules for being 40 on Facebook. 1) Get a picture up. Immediately. Pictures are part of the way the web is becoming personal, less anonymous. Having one up shows that you’re willing to show the person behind the action.
2) Don’t stress over your profile. Profiles are boring and people only look at it once, anyway. Put a few fun things so you don’t seem uptight, but don’t go crazy filling everything out. If you’re over 30, take off your birthyear.
3) Join your school and work networks. Joining networks helps people find you to friend you. The location network you joined when you signed up is lame…it basically lets FB geotarget ads to you, but is too large to be of any use. Go to “settings” in the upper right corner > account settings> networks. Search for your undergrad/grad schools, and the company you work for.
4) Become a fan. Type in a person, politician, cause, even a product or restaurant name in the search box, and then select “Pages” in the tabs. This gives you the ‘official’ brand pages of which you can “Become a Fan”. These show up on your profile. Check out the page first, make sure it seems legit. Michael Phelps has 995,000 fans, and In-n-Out burger has 28,000.
5) Join some groups. Anyone on FB can start a group. I started a group for people who used to work at Oxygen Media back in the day (pre-NBC). To find a group to join, type an interest into the search box, then select “groups” in the tabs. Joining a group shows up on your profile, and is a way to make a statement, without really making a statement. Two that I want to join but don’t have the guts are: “I went to public school….bitch!” and “Zero Population Growth”.
6) Friend Farm. Look at me, I’ve coined a phrase. Everytime you make a friend, go to their friend list and see if there’s anyone you want to friend off it. No one will know you found them by poaching off your friends’ list.
7) Lastly, after you’ve done everything, go prune your personal newsfeed. Almost everything you do in FB is broadcast in your newsfeed, which will show up on all your friends’ newsfeeds. Because FB is a robot, it often sounds like English is its second language, and something like “Daphne Kwon is no longer single” is just embarrassing. Hit your name in the top menu bar. Mouse over any news item you don’t want broadcast, and you’ll see a little “edit” button on the right pop up. Click it and select “delete”.
After a while, when you have time, check out all the fine-tuning under “Settings” in the upper right under account settings and privacy settings. Don’t over do it on the restrictions…. You didn’t go join FB to be private! Take a little risk for a while, let yourself ‘out there’ and see what happens. Who knows. Maybe some day you’ll ask me about Twitter.
Last night Bill Hildebolt and I attended the annual Techcrunch Meet-up in the valley. There was a definite dearth of East Coasters there. We did meet some new folks at cool SF companies. But more importantly, we saw a bunch of old friends at even better SF companies. Here’s a more detailed run-down of some of the HBS contingent we saw there: Heather Harde : has to be one of the classiest people in the joint. CEO of Techcrunch, and our personal ticket connection. (Heather, we should have pulled a Todor and just yelled “BUT WE KNOW HEATHER” at the doorpeople.) Michael A, I don’t know you, and while you looked like you adore Heather, as a woman I have to implore you not to give your beautiful CEO a noogie on the head during speeches. It’s a hair thing. Tom Patterson : gets second billing because it was his “not-yet-40” birthday. He got sung to by a bunch of drunk entrepreneurs (I think the VCs were lip synching) and a free cake. I thought that big fake check was for you, too, but alas, it was for malaria . Tom’s the CEO of Wize.com, a soon to be partner of Expo. Raj Kapoor: whose lovely doctor wife Lydia is due any day! MD at Mayfield and one of the best friends an entrepreneur could have, having been a great one himself. Carol Linburn , group product manager for mobile authoring at Adobe and one of the nicest people in the valley. Trying desperately at the party to feel like an entrepreneur again. We asked her to go back to work that night and, for the love of all that is holy, get flash working on the iPhone. Steve Abernethy The founder of squaretrade.com and the only guy I know that got kicked out of the Apple store during the iPhone debut because of anti-competitive practices. Steve, Expo taped at the NY Apple store without incident… Todor Tashev: Director of Investments at Omidyar Network. His wife sings with Sting. Erik Eklund. Stealth. I’m afraid to even link to his LI profile. Dana Shapiro Marotto , Marketing at ExpertCEO that just launched in Q2 of this year. Dana, how did you get into HBS with a CPA? Did you just not put that on your application? Elliott Ng in marketing at Uptake.com, who we saw in line and then completely missed the entire rest of the party.
Was great to see others, like Bong Koh, Deb Schultz, Sam Lessin (another NYC interloper, but he’s like 12 so he fit right in).
Oh, and I cannot fail to mention that as a NYC citizen (our car-related excitement is limited to flagging a hybrid taxi), despite all the change-the-world ideas at the party, the most motivating was seeing Jason Calacanis’ Tesla up close and personal. Bill was hyperventilating. Go electric.
clean out your email box. this unbelievably fast simple program will list the largest files on your computer. You will be surprised how much you (vs Microsoft) junks up your hard drive with useless videos/pictures/files, that you might not even know you had. Click here: http://www.delphiforfun.org/Programs/Utilities/list_large_files.htm
Select “Download Executable” even though every fiber in your body feels that you should never click something that says Download Executable.
If you do not know what a file is, DO NOT DELETE IT. I disown you and your kin if you delete files and you don’t know what they are.
Here’s a video from a guy that shows how to use it.
Am trying a new service, Xobni, that is a little app attaching to Outlook. Gives you a history of your correspondence with an email address, combs for phone numbers in the email, remembers attachments the person sent you. There’s a nice flash demo, but really you just need to try it. I tried to take a screenshot from my computer, but i realized i probably shouldn’t show you my inbox.
Two cool features that make it worth introducing into your life so far: 1) It completely sees old mail and mail in personal folders outside of my Exchange server mail. The search function is fantastic since Outlook won’t let you do a universal search of multiple .pst/.ost files. 2) You can see an hourly breakdown of how often the sender has written you, so you can tell their emailing habits (or at least their email habits as it pertains to writing you.) That way, you know if you’re most likely to catch them at their email in the morning or evening.
Warning: Use it now since they got acquired by Microsoft so I’m sure the product is going to totally suck from here.
New sites I’m addicted to that have helped me solve business or personal problems. I cannot say they’re the best, fastest, slickest — or even new, but I love what they’re trying to do and use them myself. Ask any questions about them. Glance.net. In love with it. I think it’s not as reliable and probably not as fast as the page refreshes, but whatever. There is no downloadable app for participants! I got a cool URL and just send people there to see my browser. Free trial (we have 17 employees, so I can probably get 17 months free….)
Phanfare.com I actually ponied up to pay for this one. $50 for the year, unlimited bandwidth. Put up gigs and gigs of pictures that my friends can fly through. I hate flickr. There. I said it.
Rubicon.com The jury’s still out on this one, but I love the concept, and they tried really hard to integrate us at expotv.com. Feel free to ping me if you want to hear about our experience with them.
Thefunded.com This one i’m not addicted to in a daily way, but when I actually get on it once in a while, i stay on forever. If you want to know what i’ve written about VC’s, i’m under “anonymous”.
Co-founder and CEO of Expo, video commerce solution based in New York City. Former CFO of Oxygen Media and member of founding team. Entrepreneur, wife, mom.
