Tag Archives: Business

Busy Work vs. Actual Work

by in Mentorship, My Experience, Personal Development, , , 0 Comments

By Poornima Vijayashanker

Recently a young woman named Margaret reached out and asked me for some guidance regarding her business. So I took the time to walk through her product, and then did a deep dive into the numbers behind her business as it related to customers, revenue, expenses, etc.

Before I sat down to give her any advice, I asked Margaret what she wanted, and her response was to scale her business. She wanted more. More customers and revenue.

And she wanted to make it happen in the next six month, that was her goal.

I said OK, and proceeded to give her some specific advice on how she needed to change her product, and suggested some marketing experiments. But every time I gave her a suggestion she shot it back at me with an excuse.

Finally, I just got tired of her pushback, and told her, “This is just my feedback, ultimately you can do what you want, it’s your business after all. I will not be offended if you don’t follow any of this. After all you have more depth of knowledge in this business than me. I’m just telling you what I see.”

I think she got my point, and started to come around. Margaret finally admitted that what was really holding her back from considering my suggestions was that she just didn’t have time.There were other things she was working on related to the business, and while she admitted they were less important she felt like she needed to get them done.

That’s when I realized what was going on in Margaret’s head. She had a disconnect between what constituted as work that she needed to be doing to build the business, and just getting things done to feel like she was being “productive”.

This is a classic mistake many of us make, I know I’ve been guilty of it too!

My vice is that I LOVE to clean, and sometimes instead of overlooking a modestly messy office I will spend time organizing everything until it’s pristine. When I could have just lived with it for a little bit longer and focused on doing more sales calls!

But I have learned the hard way that being too busy makes it hard to meet goals and bring dreams to reality.

How do we reconcile this?

First we have to consciously take a look at our task list and cross things off that either don’t matter or can wait. Like me and cleaning…

Second, we need to get a deep understanding of cause and effect when it comes to achieving our goals. For example, if you are running a business and want more customers (goal or effect), then you’ve gotta do some sales and marketing (cause). But it’s not enough to call up thousands of people, you’ll once again just be doing busy work. To be effective you need to understand the process for prospecting, dig into what channels your customers maybe hanging out on, then come up with a plan, and try running some experiments.

Why do we gravitate towards the busy work or staying busy? 

There are two reasons:

1. At the end of the day we want to feel accomplished.

It’s easier to feel accomplished if you can see results. When I see a clean desk I know I’ve done something. But I don’t always see results when I’ve spent the day coming up with a sales plan or making 200 phone calls! Instead I might feel rejected by the people on the calls and lose motivation. This is why a lot of people like to stay busy doing other things, they feel like they’re accomplishing something, but if you dig in a little deeper they’re just not using their time effectively.

2. It’s hard to know if your efforts are making progress.

You might be doing a lot, but if you really want to know that you’re being effective, you have to track the numbers across all the things you’re doing. I learned that it wasn’t enough to do 200 phone calls, I also needed to do some follow ups, answer questions, and keep at it for a few weeks or months before I got a sale! And if at any time things weren’t working, I knew I needed change up my process, not just blame the lack of success on it.

Remember that you cannot expect to hit a goal by doing unrelated things. You’ve got to think about your approach to hitting a goal and the steps, tasks,or activities you’re doing to achieve it. Finally, realize that number of hours of effort does not translate into results!

Did you recently realize that you were sinking hours into a project or doing work that was unrelated? What was it, and what made you realize that you were stuck doing busy work?

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Don’t assume you can just hire a sheryl

by in Startups, , , , , 2 Comments

Each week, Startup Edition poses a single question to a group of bloggers from the startup community. This week’s question is “How do you turn your idea into a startup?” Karen’s answer? Don’t assume you can just hire a “sheryl” to do all the hard work. 

by Karen Catlin

[dropcap bg=”#ba82e0″ color=”#ffffff”]A[/dropcap]few months ago, I introduced two of my friends to each other, both of whom are named Joe. Ever since, they’ve been working on a startup idea, doing the usual market research, talking with potential customers, designing wire frames, and so on. I caught up with the two Joe’s over lunch recently, and our conversation touched on a number of topics, including operational plans for their future company.

I was delighted they were already thinking of operations. It was in sharp contrast to something I heard from a prominent venture capitalist earlier this spring, who said there was a new phrase being used by the startup community: we’ll just hire a sheryl. That’s right: many early stage startups who VCs for funding have not yet figured out how to turn their idea into a successful business; they assume they’ll be able to hire someone as smart and capable as Sheryl Sandberg to do all the boring stuff, all the heavy lifting to make the company successful.

While I believe this VC meant this as a compliment to Ms. Sandberg that her first name has become a noun, synonymous with a critical role in a tech company, I took it as a sign of arrogance. Founders should never assume they can just hire someone to make their company successful. They’ll need to do more than just come up with the business idea, the prototype, and funding pitch; they’ll need to roll up their sleeves and do a lot of the grunt work. They’re going to have to scrub the proverbial toilets, and maybe even a real toilet or two.

What operational responsibilities should an early-stage startup team be thinking about? Depending on the product and the business model, the list might include:

  • Business development: What partners are critical to the success of your product? Who is going to manage and nurture these relationships?
  • Customer acquisition: Once your founding team has exhausted their list of contacts, how will you attract more customers? How much are you willing to pay for each one?
  • Customer support: How will customers contact you when they have problems? Who will respond to them?
  • Technology: How will you deploy your product? Will your initial implementation scale as you acquire new customers?
  • Metrics: What are your key metrics for measuring the success of your product? Who will analyze and report on this data?
  • Legal: What contracts will you need? Who will oversee the relationship with the law firm?

 

So, as you develop your initial product offering, make sure you know how you are going to be operationally effective. And your plan should not be “we’ll just hire a sheryl.”

–Karen

NOTE: This post is part of Startup Edition, weekly wisdom from founders, hackers, and designers who answer a single question each week. Click here to see other answers to this week’s question: “How do you turn your idea into a startup?”

Femgineer Spotlight: Sophia Han Chung, Software Engineer at Facebook

by in Femgineer Spotlight, Frances Fridays, , , , , , , One Comment

Interview by Frances Advincula

This week’s Femgineer Spotlight is Sophia Han Chung, software engineer at Facebook. She has worked for tech giants Google and HP, as well as built uber cool games for EA. I’ve admired her from a distance for sometime now, after reading her article “Fighting Stereotypes One Day At A Time.”

 

You’ve worked at big companies such as Google and now, Facebook. What are some strategies to get your voice heard as a new hire, when you are surrounded by the world’s smartest computer scientists?

Be confident. Speak up in meetings. Make your opinions heard. There have been too many times early on in my career when I’ve been a part of discussions and have been too scared to state my opinion. When you’re the new/young female engineer in the room, its easy to get intimidated by a room full of overly-confident men. It took years before I realized that my opinions were just as important and my ideas carried merit. The earlier you realize your own value and take control of your confidence, the more successful you’ll be in your job.

 

 What’s a typical day like at Facebook?

Joining Facebook has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. Not only do I get to work on a product that I use and love, I get to work along side some of the most brilliant and creative people in the industry. It’s a young, social culture, and everyday I feel like I’m coming in to be with friends.

A typical day is filled with a lot of coding, brainstorming about how to make our product better, eating amazing free food from our many cafeterias, and socializing with coworkers. Many nights after work, people get together for games nights or happy hours. Every few months we also have all-night hackathons — a chance to build a prototype for any idea you have to improve Facebook. It ends up being a giant party and some brilliant ideas have been built in hackathons (ex: Timeline, Facebook videos). Each day is different, but at the end of the day I get to see my work impact the lives of over 1 billion people, which is beyond rewarding.

 

If you could tell your 21-year old self anything, what would you tell her?

I would tell myself to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial. I didn’t even consider the startup path when I graduated college because it wasn’t a safe and stable career like what the big corporate jobs offered. Being young is the perfect time to try new ventures and take big risks. There’s such a low cost for failure and experiences are worth so much more. We’re still just at the beginning of what technology can do for us, and there’s so much opportunity to change the world. I would tell myself to believe that I can make an impact.

 

 

 

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