Launching a new company or business division? A new award-winning book by Wayne McVicker, co-founder of dotcom roller coaster Neoforma, offers some been-there-done-that advice that can help you keep your cool in the midst of the maelstrom.

Start-ups can be scary. Whether you’re heading up a new division of an established corporation or launching your own small consulting firm, uncertainty comes with the territory. So many variables are involved-from business and societal trends to employee personalities to competitor attacks to investor pressures-that your new creation will take on a life of its own. You might as well try to raise a predictable toddler. Still, according to entrepreneur Wayne McVicker, there are some common threads and overarching principles that transcend time, place, and type of business.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to pay particular attention to commonsense keys to the development of a strong corporate culture,” says McVicker. “They are the rocks in the shifting sand. The problem is, the whirlwind nature of a start-up makes it difficult for many entrepreneurs or professionals to stay focused on them. You get distracted. You second-guess your decisions. Fear takes precedence over logic. You allow yourself to be swayed by others. And often, even though luck plays a role in the success of any start up, it’s failing to follow the tried-and-true principles that hurts or even destroys a new operation.”

McVicker certainly speaks from experience. And he traces that experience in his upcoming book, Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation, & Corporate Culture (Ravel Media, 2004, ISBN: 1-932881-01-8, $22.95). The book follows McVicker’s journey as the co-founder of Neoforma, the first health care-dotcom-B2B-e-commerce company, which opened its doors in 1996.

By the time of its IPO in 2000, Neoforma had grown from the seed of a good idea into a publicly traded company worth $3 billion. Yet there was trouble ahead. Within four months, the company was in deep trouble, laying off good people and watching its stock value plummet. McVicker “made a few hundred million and lost a few hundred million” . . . just like that.

While Neoforma still exists, McVicker has little connection to it. Yet the lessons he learned from that experience will always be with him. And part of the reason he wrote his book is to share those lessons with others who might benefit from seeing how the commonsense principles that everyone “knows” can be affected during the tumultuous realities of “starting something.”

Twelve Things to Keep in Mind When Starting Something

1. Be who you are. If you aren’t true to yourself, your company’s culture will suffer. So will you. A recurring theme during Neoforma’s early days was determining how to present the company to potential investors. Investors wanted to hear that McVicker and his partner, Jeff Kleck, planned to pursue fast and furious growth for their company. McVicker wanted the growth to happen in a more “organic” way. “We argued about whether it was right for us to project an image of ourselves as a very large corporation selling hundreds of millions of dollars of software and services a year,” he writes. “We didn’t doubt that this was possible, but frankly, we would have been quite happy to sell a few million dollars’ worth of software a year.”
2. Hire for culture first, experience second. If someone feels wrong, they are. However exhausting and distracting hiring is, don’t delegate it until after the first hundred employees-and then only very carefully. Early on in the process of staffing Neoforma, McVicker learned the value of listening to his gut. He extended a job offer to a man named Isaac. McVicker disliked him but felt that he had the necessary experience. After some “aggressive and abrasive” negotiation, Isaac accepted the offer, but made Neoforma wait two months-and then quit the first day. McVicker writes about his rage: “This guy hadn’t felt right from the beginning-even though he sounded right. I had focused on his computer skills-which can be learned-instead of more important and innate qualities-like an arrogance, born of insecurity-that would have made him difficult to work with, even if he’d stayed.”
3. Communicate empowerment. In the maelstrom that is a young company, it is easy for employees to feel helpless or isolated. All employees powerfully influence a company’s success and direction. Let them know they are valued and their voices are heard-often and in many ways. Don’t waste the potential of any employee. “By far the most common, frustrating, and damaging issue I had to deal with in those days of frenzied growth was disempowerment,” writes McVicker. “Within this dynamic, unstable environment, employees were convinced that their voices were not being heard. No matter how much we tried to ensure that they were empowered and had access to me and other executives, many felt undervalued. They flooded into my office, yelling, crying, and pleading.” What McVicker learned from this phenomenon, he says, was simply this: “Don’t underestimate the importance of communicating empowerment to your people. It’s one of the most critical functions of a leader.”
4. Learn to release, without letting go. When you delegate (and you must) you can neither control every detail nor allow the idea to get diluted. Make your plan clear and monitor progress regularly. If you hired well, everything will work out. The saga of Larry and Emma, two employees hired in 1998, underscores the paradoxical “releasing without letting go” principle. McVicker told them to take control of their respective departments. Taking this directive to the extreme, they began disregarding his requests and suggestions. When he discussed this behavior with them, they went behind his back to complain. Fearing that he was being a “control freak,” McVicker allowed Larry and Emma to continue their behavior. “In retrospect it’s clear that I should have nipped the situation in the bud,” he reflects. “Not only were they ignoring what I wanted, but they were creating a culture of division and closed doors. Clearly, this was not the culture I wanted for our company.”
5. Balance is not always found in the middle. Make and communicate clear decisions. Changing a position is better than not having one. In 1999, Neoforma needed to cut some projects. One project on the table, which McVicker loved, was a capital equipment solution code-named Picasso. In a classic leadership dilemma, McVicker had to determine whether to make the popular decision to cut Picasso and alienate the people who had remained loyal to his original vision for the company, or make the less popular decision to keep Picasso alive and alienate the others. “In an attempt to be fair to everyone, I came up with a weak compromise that satisfied and inspired no one,” he writes. “We’d keep the Picasso program going, but only allocate it just enough to stay alive. Sadly, my half-hearted decision conveyed uncertainty. The effect was immediate and deeply disheartening.”
6. Do one thing well, then do it better. Then, while you are still improving the first thing, consider doing one, and only one, related thing well. And so on. Neoforma had a powerful catalog and messaging system on its website that was used by thousands of medical professionals. Then, in the interest of expanding their reach and potential, the team decided to “add a few new features.” These features ended up overwhelming Neoforma’s resources to the point that they completely obscured what was good about the site. Traffic dropped precipitously overnight from tens of thousands of visitors per day to hundreds. “We had tried to be everything to everyone-all at once” writes McVicker. “In the process we turned our innocent, obedient child into an adolescent monster. On the surface, it looked much larger and more grown-up than it had been before, but it was raw and unstable underneath.”
7. Regularly wear your customers’ clothes. Most entrepreneurs come from the industry they are trying to serve, but when confronted by the challenges of starting or running a business, they quickly lose touch with the customer experience. One of the features the Neoforma website was known for was its state-of-the-art virtual reality tour of medical facilities. To create this technology, Neoforma and a firm called Be Here Corporation spent days photographing the interior of the Center of Advanced Medicine (CAM) in Chicago. McVicker found that the task gave him and his team a valuable sense of purpose. “Even though we had all worked in health care to varying degrees, we had only an abstract idea of the potential impact Neoforma could have on real people in real hospitals,” he writes. “The creation of this virtual tour solidified our connection to the real thing and gave us a renewed sense that what we were doing wasn’t just good for business-it might actually be important.”
8. The unsatisfied customer is the most important customer. Therein lies all opportunity. In the early days of Neoforma, McVicker was showing off his new website to his father-in-law, a dentist. His father-in-law checked out the feature that allowed visitors to send e-mail inquiries to vendors, but couldn’t see the value since writing an e-mail and waiting for a reply would be slower than a quick phone negotiation. He added that if he could send messages to several vendors at once, that would be a timesaver. So, McVicker sent a specification to the developer that weekend, and by the end of the next week, Neoforma had implemented the new feature. “At its peak, twenty thousand messages a week were being sent from buyers to sellers,” writes McVicker. “We knew that we had significantly improved the lives of many people. I felt very good about that, even though it hadn’t been my idea.”
9. Never let your competitors drive your business decisions. Stay focused. If your competitors come up with something good, your customers will let you know. Right before Neoforma’s IPO, CEO Bob Zollars received a call from the CEO of major competitor Medibuy. The CEO informed Zollars that WebMD was not going to renew its agreement with Neoforma when it expired later in the year, but was instead going to go with Medibuy. Zollars recognized the Medibuy/WebMD deal as a “transparent ploy” designed to “take some wind out of our sails.” “Had Bob not rationally analyzed that the WebMD deal was worthless, he might have been tempted to pay an exorbitant fee to renew the agreement to keep it out of the hands of the competition,” says McVicker. “And he might have been knocked off balance by the notice of cancellation on the day before our IPO. Instead, Medibuy paid an inordinate amount of money to steal a worthless deal from Neoforma-not in an attempt to help themselves, but to hurt us.”
10. Never let your investors drive your business decisions. They are usually smart and can be intimidating, but they aren’t as familiar with your business as you are. Their viewpoint is short-term; yours should be long-term. Pressure from investors was a problem McVicker faced constantly. From campaigning to change the logo to insisting that Neoforma hire certain people, they relentlessly made their opinions known. Perhaps the most painful example of this pressure was when later-in-the-game venture capitalists insisted upon a participating preferred clause. Basically, this meant that if the company were sold, the most recent investors would get their money first-in fact, they would be guaranteed a multiple of their original investments before any money was distributed to earlier investors. This issue caused a major rift between McVicker, who favored compromise, and his partner Jeff Kleck, who was totally opposed to the clause. Kleck eventually agreed to a compromise, but harmony was lost. “As much as I had disagreed with the inflexibility of Jeff’s position on the funding round, I did agree with him on one thing-my new partners, the VCs, were certainly not my friends,” writes McVicker. “I had allowed them to manipulate me into putting my fear of losing everything above my loyalty to a friend.”
11. Listen to all advice, but trust what you know. As you confront frequent obstacles, you may begin to question your core beliefs. Don’t. Be patient. Ideas that require customers to change behavior often take ten or more years to implement. In the midst of their fundraising activities, McVicker and Kleck hired a Stanford Ph.D. and MBA named Sasa to create their business plan. Sasa was insistent that Neoforma should emphasize the health care supplies market (which the founders knew little about) over the equipment market (which they knew very well). Though he had misgivings, McVicker capitulated. “After two months of work, Sasa delivered a hefty document that defined our long-term business plan,” he writes. “I never even read the whole thing. I was much too busy, and I knew the plan reflected where the company could go, not necessarily where I thought it would or should go.” This documented shift away from the founders’ core expertise triggered a very subtle division between them and their customers, and, perhaps more importantly, their company.
12. Enjoy yourself. It is very easy, during the inevitable times of monetary starvation and market inertia, to lose sight of how much fun it is to create something new and useful. In Starting Something, McVicker describes his slide into depression, anxiety, and marital distress that, ironically, accompanied Neoforma’s rise to success. He eventually began working with a business consultant with an unconventional background who got him to dig into the emotional issues that he was trying so hard to keep superficial. To McVicker’s surprise, he found that such an experience wasn’t unusual. “It was not until years later that I would read disclosures by several well-known executives describing the bouts of extreme depression that they had suffered,” he writes. “I didn’t hide under my desk for hours at a time, as one had, but I certainly would have welcomed the idea that such an escape was possible. It would have helped to know earlier that I wasn’t alone after all, that it is okay to admit limitations and seek help.”

Although McVicker is adamant that following tried-and-true principles is no guarantee of start-up success, he also points out that guarantees aren’t what drive the entrepreneur in the first place.

“There are rewards, many rewards, inherent in creating something new,” he says. “You meet fascinating people and form complex relationships. You learn something every day. You get that intense feeling of accomplishment that comes only from running on pure passion and adrenaline. There is nothing like conceiving a new idea and bringing it to fruition. Of course, much like having a child, you can’t predict with certainty how that child will turn out. But regardless, parents are seldom sorry they had the child. That’s the lesson I most want to convey with my story.”

# # #
About the Author:
Wayne McVicker is an architect and entrepreneur. Having co-founded Attainia, he has served as an executive there since its inception in 2001. He has 25 years of experience in the design, health care, and IT industries. McVicker’s five-year-long wild ride as co-founder, board member, and president of Neoforma (NASDAQ: NEOF) is the basis for his book. He lives with his wife and two sons in Silicon Valley, California. For more information, please visit www.startingsomething.com.

Starting Something won the 2004 DIY Book Festival Book of the Year Award. In the late September press release announcing the winners, Bruce Haring of DIY Convention stated: “McVicker perfectly captures the excitement, strategy, and struggles of building his own venture, a battle which DIY artists and entrepreneurs face on a daily basis. For perfectly capturing that quest, McVicker wins our top honor.” For more information, please visit www.diyconvention.com.

About the Book:
Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation, & Corporate Culture (Ravel Media, 2004, ISBN: 1-932881-01-8, $22.95) is available at bookstores nationwide and all major online booksellers.

Tiffany Bass Bukow is the CEO & Founder of the #1 Personal Finance Website for Women and Families – www.msmoney.com. My life mission is to help people and the world thrive through creating companies that provide money, career and life skills education.

My talented and brilliant mentor coach,  Deb Martin shared some valuable information with me awhile ago about the 4 stages of transition.  This material along with my personal story have become a big part of the focus of my life coaching business.

The purpose of sharing the 4 stages of transition with you and my life coaching clients is to shine a light on human behaviors and feelings through the natural cycles of change.

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.  -Martha Beck

Not too long ago, I made one of the most important decisions in my life. The promise to leave corporate America and give my entrepreneurial calling a shot.   When the corporate culture  I was immersed in changed to a game of micro-management, I began to feel a slow and certain suffocation. It was time to leave the job that was killing my soul.

Today I understand that without the extreme discomfort, I may have never allowed myself to follow my dreams.

Stage 1 – Discomfort

A change is coming on. You can feel it. You can smell it. But you might not be sure what the change is or what to do about it. The more you fight it and try to get logical about this change, the longer you’ll stay in the discomfort stage.

You may feel:

• Reluctant, Fearful, in Grief, Angry, Confused,Uncertain, Negative, Defensive, Reactive and Trapped.

• You may Distrust your decisions and your intuition.

• You are likely to Worry more than usual.

Recommendations:

• Stay with your routines that you know Work for you.

• Don’t Over Commit to others at home or at work.

• Allow yourself to go Internal when you need to.

Create a 10 Luscious Daily Habits list and stick to it. Make these “habits” nurturing, easy and fun. Now is not the time to try to lose weight or start a new exercise routine. Create habits that nurture you without calling up your willpower.

Items on my Luscious List:

Meditation, yoga, bubble baths, reading, watching the sunset, fresh flowers,
listening to great music, playing with my daughter, drinking a cup of tea and writing.

As important as it is to nurture yourself through your pain and discomfort, going internal is key to healing and flowing into a graceful transition.

Stage 2 – Going Internal

You may start to protect yourself from the discomfort and go internal. You detach from your “old” self in order to allow for your new change or transition.

You may become:

• Contemplative, Seeking, Questioning, Protective, Spiritual and often Emotional.

• You are likely Quiet, Detached and Withdrawn.

Recommendations:

• Journaling is a great activity at this stage.

• Sometimes reading can be helpful.

• Get yourself into nature, preferably alone.

• Walks on the beach, an evening around a warming campfire, digging in the dirt, a hike along a woodland path, collect pine cones or stones – Anything to immerse yourself in the great outdoors.

When you begin to heal from the discomfort by nurturing your mind, body and soul its time for exploration.

Stage 3 – Exploration

In this stage, you are starting to feel like you have some direction. You have an inkling, about your upcoming transition and what it’s all about. You are ready to learn more and give birth to this new change.

You may feel like:

• You are experiencing new Energy and Security.

• You become Optimististic, Confident, Willing to Experiment with New Ideas, and Learning.

• You are Eager to Dream about new possibilities.

• You are looking for a new path and ready to commit to it.

• You’re discovering a vision.

Recommendations:

• Read about new things and continue to journal.

• Explore relationships and new connections.

• Learn more about what interests you.

• Take a class. Get some training.

• Do something creative.

• Allow yourself to experiment.

Now that we have navigated  through the initial discomfort of a transition, going internal to heal ourselves and rolling up our sleeves to explore new frontiers, we are ready to move into the Renaissance stage.

Stage 4 – Renaissance

Your vision is becoming clear and you’re ready to live your dream .

You will experience:

• You are highly committed, creative and optimistic.

• You are also determined to make changes and do so at a much faster pace.

• Things seem to flow for you.

• Mentally and physically, you’re at the Top of Your Game.

• Everything is Possible.

Recommendations:

• Allow yourself to flow, Allow things to happen.

• Be in love with your new Discoveries and your new Energy.

• Ride the wave.

• Rejoice in your new found freedom.

Each transitional stage can last from weeks to months. You’ll move more quickly through a difficult stage if you honor yourself . Renaissance, feels like it will last forever. It doesn’t.        Transitional stages are cyclical …

What stage are you experiencing right now?

How long have you been in this stage?

What have you learned you need to do right now for yourself and to honor the stage you are experiencing?

After navigating the 4 steps of transition I have successfully reinvented myself by living my dream and have become an Unconventional Bohemian Goddess. The natural cycle of  discomfort, internal time, exploration and renaissance, allowed me to become a best selling author, certified yoga instructor and professional coach with a thriving life coaching practice.

Discovering your groove and creating a luscious life is all aboutallowing for grace through the transition.

Shann Vander Leek is the Founder of True Balance Life Coaching and Co-founder of Seize True Success. She is a Coach Training Alliance certified professional coach, and certified yoga instructor. Shann is a prolific blogger, published writer and co-author of the Best Selling Book – Wake Up Women BE Happy Healthy & Wealthy. Shann’s personal style and direct approach have guided and inspired many in overcoming personal and professional challenges. Her background in sales, marketing and client development, along with leading a talented sales force for many years prepared her for the business of professional coaching. Shann inspires women in transition to create balance in their lives through personal coaching, yoga and creative expression. Telephone and email consultations make her accessible to clients all over the world. To find out about her Coaching Programs for Women, call Shann at 231.668.111 or visit www.truebalancelifecoaching.com

I attended a tech entrepreneur talk last night, and was struck by the speaker’s insistence that the best way to move ahead with a tech business is with a partner. He also thought that it is best to wait a few months until you have worked together to discuss equity shares, etc.

It is true that partnerships can be very beneficial, especially in the tech industry, but my experience is that partnerships are also very difficult to manage, and take lots of care and attention … like a marriage.

In fact, I think that a partnership is just like a marriage in many ways, except in a business partnership you typically see more of each other and you don’t have sex and love as a foundational glue to get you through tough times.

The No. 1 reason for divorce is disagreements over money. Thus it is no surprise that business partnerships can be rocky, since the relationship centers on money – how it is spent, how it is made and, ultimately, how it is split between the partners.

To avoid a nasty fate, here are the three things I recommend to all business partners, regardless of whether they are just starting out or have been together for decades:

1. Establish a Shared Vision: you will not succeed as a business partnership if one of you wants to be a millionaire and the other simply wants to have a modest income. Likewise, if one of you wants to revolutionize the industry and the other wants to use best practices as a foundation for a solid, proven business model, you will struggle. Establish a shared vision that you both believe in. Write it down and make all future business decisions based on this vision. Of course you will each have additional goals and desires, but this shared vision will always unite you and make decisions smoother.

2. Establish an Exit Strategy: yes, this is like a pre-nuptual agreement, and it couldn’t be more important. I know, I know, it takes all of the romance out of the engagement, but it is very necessary. A simple but excellent partnership exit strategy gives you both a clean way to exit the business partnership without going to divorce court, which will leave both of you with nothing but depleted bank accounts and a bad taste in your mouths.

3. Meet Quarterly: establish a regular, no-excuses quarterly meeting during which you do not discuss day-t0-day operations of the business. All you should talk about in this meeting is how your partnership is going. Review your shared vision – make sure you are both still holding up your end of the bargain. Review what you are each doing and discuss behaviors that are driving you crazy about each other. Again, this takes away some of the romance, but it also allows you to air differences before it’s too late to remedy them.

Most of us have heard the expression “stop and smell the roses” which encourages us to slow down and enjoy the scenery instead of missing out on the small and special treats in life.

When you run a business, this can seem like an impossible task. Personally, I struggle with taking the time to stop and smell the roses. I often feel that when I take a break, I have to go into overdrive to make up for lost time and find myself running on empty.

Running has become an outlet for me to mentally slow down and be fully present. On a recent long-distance run at my sister-in-law’s in Gloucester, MA I was struck by the almost over-powering smell of beach roses along the path. As I ran, I realized that I could run AND smell the roses as long as I made a conscious effort to do so.

While running my business, I sometimes get so caught up in reaching the goal that I forget to enjoy the small joys of being an entrepreneur. So on a recent business trip, I decided to put the idea into practice. ((I left a day early (where I usually practice “just in time” airline juggling) and went out for a great dinner in my client’s town. I brought a non-business related book and spent the evening reveling in the experience. The next day, I was ready to tackle the world of work. A smaller “pause” and a night at a nice hotel helped me re-focus, re-charge, and re-energize. Had I taken several days off, I probably would have been more stressed about the things piling up at my office and wouldn’t be able to appreciate the small perks of business travel. This conscious effort to pause and smell the roses allowed me to enjoy running the business.

Running a business effectively requires both great attention to results and intense focus on tasks. It also requires time to recharge the batteries and slow down the pace. Coming to a complete stop may not be an option, but by consciously looking around you to observe and appreciate the non-business moments going on in the vicinity, you are more likely to enjoy what you do while you are doing it. So try it! Don’t stop and smell the roses and notice how it affects your business.

As you may know, because I couldn’t resist telling everyone , I had the privilege of talking with the former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers yesterday, who recently authored the book Why Women Should Rule the World and is on a speaking tour. So of course, it follows that I have to blog about it. She’s easily one of the coolest, smartest political women I have ever met, has years of experience in politics and seems to know everyone, too. And she had a lot to say about women in politics — one of my favorite topics. There are definitely still problems that women face when trying to make it in politics and business, but the fact that women like her are doing and saying something about it is really exciting to me. Some of the most interesting things I’ve learned from her…

Women get paid less than men, in part, because women are less likely to ask. Especially young women. Myers cited a fascinating study from Carnegie Mellon University that studied a bunch of graduate students who were going out into the world to find their first post-college jobs, and found that men often got higher starting salaries were an astonishing seven or eight times more likely to just ask. And did you know, that by failing to negotiate that first salary, women stand to lose $500,000 by the time they’re sixty?  Women, apparently, are much more timid when it comes to negotiating their salaries and asking for what they’re worth.

There still aren’t enough women in politics, business, science, and academia. Women currently occupy 75 seats out of 438 in the House, and 16 of 100 seats in the Senate. 77 percent of university presidents, in a 2006 study, were male. Women held 14.7% of all Fortune 500 corporate board seats in 2007.

What would happen if women ruled the world? The main argument that Myers is making is that if women had more access to power, the world could be a better place. Women are exceptionally talented at communication, relationship-building, negotiation, and leadership (and she cites plenty of studies to back that up– read her book if you want all the evidence). Getting more women in positions of leadership in politics and business could lead to fewer wars, it could give a huge economic boost to developing countries; it could improve the environment, economy, and education system, which could have a huge ripple effect. Communities could be healthier, businesses more productive.

It’s also worth noting that she’s not a man-hater, although I’m sure she’ll get called that, since most feminists get called that at some point. In fact, I doubt you can be a really successful, notable feminist without being called a man-hater, bitch, or whiner at some point. But despite that, it is worth noting that she is a feminist but NOT hating on men. She thinks women should rule the world…but alongside men, not without men.

I often get a lot of questions and funny stares when people, particularly people in college, find out I write for a political website specifically for women. Is it feminist, people ask? No. So then why do women need their own site? Well, in part because when men talk about politics they claim to speak from a universal point of view, but when women talk about politics it’s still seen as a “minority” point of view — or I wouldn’t get such reactions in the first place. A political website written for and by women still elicits a double-take from most people because it’s still an uncommon thing. But it’s a necessary thing — and that’s why we’re doing it.

When men talk about politics as if they are experts, people listen and believe them. When women talk like experts, even when they are experts, they have to prove their credibility first and then people listen (maybe — but if they have a bad hair day or something, forget it). The problem Myers highlights in her fantastic book is exactly the problem that CJP exists to fight: the tired belief that women can only succeed in the corporate world and political world by becoming more like men and hiding the things that make women different.

Instead, what needs to happen is that women need to own their differences and talk about how our differences are positive, instead of hiding them. And people, particularly women themselves, need to recognize that our differences can actually make the world better.

Hear, hear! That’s what we’ve been hollering about at CJP forever!

Nisha Chittal is a writer and journalist who currently serves as Associate Editor of CitizenJanePolitics.com and is a political columnist for UniversityChic.com. Her personal blog is Politicoholic, where she offers commentary on a range of topics, including but not limited to politics, technology, and the changing role of women and Generation Y in politics today.

A few months ago I read The Four Hour Workweek. Awesome book, but pretty unrealistic in terms of the specifics (i.e. 4 hours per week) for most of us. As with most books though, it had some interesting gems. Most important, I think, is the concept that our businesses can really benefit from more operational systems. In fact, I think the author based most of his how-to-run-a-business recommendations on one of my favorite books of all time, The E-Myth Revisited.

The most important take-away from this book, and what has been most helpful to me, is that most entrepreneurs do not create systems for their businesses. Rather, we just kind of wake up each morning and put out fires as needed throughout the day.

While this works for a while, it can’t help but get exhausting for us. Worse, when we consider when and how to hire someone to help us to put out the fires, we have no idea where to begin because we really don’t know exactly what we do each day.

The concept of putting together operational systems, even (perhaps especially!) for a solo-preneur who doesn’t have anyone working for her, is really breakthrough for me and for most entrepreneurs who I know, as it helps us manage our fires more effectively and, more importantly, allows us to hire a team of people who can help us avoid them altogether.

Catching a fish is no easy feat.

While certain countries, such as Japan and Peru, show an increase in the # of female entrepreneurs, by in large, men are twice as likely to start their own businesses as women. More than that, there are very few dissimilitudes in the way both genders approach business to account for the disparity.

So what’s stopping us?

Well, for one, GEM’s study finds that women tend to be less optimistic about the risk of starting a new business or making a change. This causes women to be less confident about their ventures and as a result, the fear of failure kicks in and results in a flight response.

While fear of failure has often been attributed to killing a women’s drive, and I, for one, am no less of a chicken, in this regard, how do we go about dispelling that fear and ridding it from our consciousness?

Getting personal for a second, when I had a miscarriage earlier this year (from which I’m still reeling from a bit), my gut reaction was what an absolute failure I was. I had a similar reaction when I lost my job, a month after I had my miscarriage. It wasn’t quite as severe, but I the same feelings of shame surfaced again.

I was angry at myself for feeling like a loser, but came to realize, that falling short is perhaps a woman’s greatest insecurity. Just look at how we’re conditioned from our youth to find, not just any Alpha Male to mate with, but the one with the right genetic combination to satisfy the lofty expectations of our family and friends, and if we’re lucky to meet our own. We have to compete with how many other women? (aside from mom, sister and ex-girlfriends?)

So how do we empower women to feel confident and optimistic about change and risk without tapping into their deep-seated fears about their competencies? In short, how do we level the playing field?

The United Nations is working on an initiative called “gender mainstreaming” that is about identifying gaps and bridging understanding in developing countries. In Lativa, women-owned businesses favor hiring women and it’s proved to be an effective way of ushering a new generation of women into the workforce there. And in Finland, women-owned businesses show the most profitability so they are exploring ways to make executive roles more gender-neutral and merit-based. (as opposed to the ‘ol boys network)

With the word “Change” being tossed around like some cheap dime store whiskey lately in presidential campaigning, I’m hesitant to cheapen a sentiment here. Let’s just say the world won’t get better overnight, but progress can and should be made everyday.

BizzyWomen.com is a web community committed to empowering professional women, career women and business women around the globe.  We’ve recently launched and invite you to check out our great content from a wide variety of contributors: from learning from female entrepreneurs on TV, to a vibrant discussion about our female vice-presidential candidate, to the powerful women leading Generation Y, to insight into maternity leave policy in the U.S., BizzyWomen is focusing on tough issues and addressing them.

It’s an easy step to make for BW to move from merely writing about poignant issues to doing something about them.  I want to recruit you to our lending team, BizzyWomen, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. You choose who to lend to – whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq – and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

If you join our lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you’re a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva “count” towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you – but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!

Check out the BizzyWomen lending team, and learn more about lending teams on Kiva in general, by clicking here: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=community&action=viewTeam&team_id=703&_isc=e1eef358-ce5c-102b-ac3c-ecd46065da15.

Thanks,
Editors, BizzyWomen