Talking about Boomers Next Step

Last Thursday, US time – Friday my time – on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio I had a great chat with my friend and colleague Bill Vick.

You can listen to the episode – or download it to listen later – at this link Bill Vick on Des Walsh & Friends.

Although separated by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, Bill and I have worked together for a few years now. It is a mark of how business has changed in recent years that we have been able to collaborate, co-author books and now begin planning for an ambitious new project, without ever having met face to face and without spending a vast amount of money on communications. In fact, most of our communication is via email and Skype, which means there is no cost to either of us, apart from the regular internet connection charges we incur anyway.

We have produced, with publisher Happy About, the book LinkedIn for Recruiting, which went through two editions and which we finally “retired”:  the e-book version of the second edition is now available free of charge and can be downloaded from the link in the sidebar here. We also published, independently, the audiobook – DVD and e-book – Big Biller, based on a series of interviews with highly successful recruiters and other industry leaders.

And now, as we discussed in last week’s BlogTalkRadio session, we are about to launch our Boomers Next Step project, to help boomers meet new challenges, especially in terms of career and business.

Bill, never a man to let the grass grow under his feet, has in fact already got the project going, with a stack of resources and a series of fascinating video interviews on the Boomers Next Step project site.

We’ll be making some specific announcements over the next couple of weeks. If you would like to know more and be kept in the loop, check out the Contact page on Boomers Next Step: if you give us your details there or get the RSS feed link, we will be able to keep you posted.

We’re both excited about this project and I’ll endeavour to provide the occasional update here on Thinking Home Business too.

Guest for the first episode of 2010 for my BlogTalkRadio show is Becky McCray

One of the many interesting and inspiring people I met at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in 2008 was Becky McCray, who among other accomplishments publishes the rural and small town online resource Small Biz Survival. We have been in regular contact since then and I was delighted when Becky and another friend, Becky’s colleague Sheila Scarborough expressed interest in being guests on my Des Walsh & Friends program on BlogTalk Radio.

It would have been good to have both Becky and Sheila on together so they could talk about their exciting new venture, Tourism Currents – social media learning for tourism – but for Sheila fans, be assured she will be my guest in the first week in February. Anyway, each will doubtless be happy to talk about Tourism Currents individually.

Becky is a woman of many parts: a genuine small town entrepreneur who somehow combines being a liquor store owner, a business advisor and a cattle rancher and still makes time to be active on Twitter and other social media platforms.

Becky and I love swapping rural type stories – what in Australia we call “bush yarns” – and I am really looking forward to the session in the latter part of this week (that’s Thursday in the US, Friday in Australia).

Scheduled Time:

In the USA: 12 noon PST, 3 pm EST on Thursday, January 14.
In Australia: 7 am AEDT (Sydney time) on Friday, January 15.

The link: Des Walsh & Friends

Image credit: Becky McCray by Roxanne Darling, via Twitter: Creative Commons

Many Baby Boomers are looking, voluntarily or involuntarily, at career change: Wall Street Journal careers columnist Alexandra Levit has some sage advice to offer.

Several years ago a friend of mine lost his job and was obviously feeling devastated. In his fifties, he clearly lacked confidence in being able to be employed again.

I knew he had a lot of skills and a lot of experience which could be applied effectively in a range of situations, some no doubt beyond the confines of the career path he had pursued for some years.

I tried, unsuccessfully I believe, to get him to do an inventory of his skills.

The good part of the story is that after a fairly short interval he found a job in the field he had worked in for many years.

But that might not have happened and at the back of my mind was the nagging question of whether I could have done more to help him realise what he had to offer, other than what might appear on a standard resume.

The answer came today when I was watching and listening to an interview by my colleague Bill Vick with Wall Street Journal columnist Alexandra Levit who specialises in writing about careers and has authored several books, including New Job, New You: A Guide to Reinventing Yourself in a Bright New Career

Responding to a question from Bill, about Baby Boomers who are looking at career change options, Alexandra said she encourages people to sit down and do a self assessment.  ”Boomers, like everyone” she says, “should take the time to do a self-assessment.”

They should write down (or type) what are their values, how do they prefer to work..” And then, she says, they need to make an inventory of their skills. Work out what they have accumulated that is transferable to other areas. The idea is to “build a profile of themselves”, so they can see how they can transition easily to a field they might not have worked in previously.

So the inventory of one’s skills becomes part of an overall self-assessment.

The whole interview is a gem and I recommend it heartily to anyone looking at a career change or who knows someone who is doing so. It could make the difference between making a successful transition and getting stuck in the doldrums, or worse.

If doing business with a sense of fun works for Richard Branson, that’s good enough for me

In recent weeks my partner Suzie Cheel and I have been very preoccupied with re-focusing our consulting business. Today, prompted by a four year old blog post about Sir Richard Branson’s business values, we reminded ourselves about the necessity of having a very clear, understandable, easy-to-communicate values framework for the business. And that led to a very productive discussion about our marketing.

Although we have had the consulting business in place for over twenty years, and our formal company structure for some sixteen of those, what we have been setting up with our all-new, all singing and dancing Social Media Powered Marketing is in many ways a new business, with some of the usual challenges attendant on such ventures.

It’s involved getting out of our comfort zones and some 4 am starts to take advantage of coaching sessions from the USA. And balancing other commitments, including family ones, some travel, my ongoing coaching commitments and so on.

We have been attending to a lot of practical details of how the business will work, getting clarity about our target market, developing marketing plans and initiatives, ensuring the supply of some outsourced services, developing product. All good, all necessary. But not much, at least explicitly, about the values framework.

Then today, in a management magazine I was scanning over breakfast, I read some comments by a top executive which reminded me of how essential it is for any business with long term prospects to define and articulate its values. I made a mental note to get around to that. “Too busy” right now, of course. Which if I heard a coaching client say I would no doubt ask, so when would be a good time to identify and document your company values?

Physician, heal thyself!

It’s not that we are working in a values-free zone, or that we don’t have shared values guiding the way we do business. Just that we had not had that specific conversation to identify our values in sufficient clarity to guide and monitor the way the business operates.

No doubt because I had been thinking briefly about these issues, my eye was caught a bit later in the morning, while fixing some photos that had somehow gone missing from older blog posts here, by a post I had written back in 2005 about the values espoused by Sir Richard Branson for his Virgin brand enterprises. One version of those values lists the following:

• Value for money
• Quality
• Reliability
• Innovation
• Sense of fun

The first four make eminent good sense to me but I like particularly having “sense of fun” inscribed as a key company value. I suspect that, in a sea of companies offering internet marketing services, it could be easy to think we have to be and be seen to be Very Serious.

Because business is serious, right?

Well, if Richard Branson and Virgin can be so successful (and not just in monetary terms), we can hardly be said to be irresponsible about our business if we choose to be known as people who are committed to having fun, as well as to providing value for money, quality, reliability and innovation, and whatever other “serious” values we might choose to incorporate.

Incidentally, taking time out just now to have that conversation about our values and to agree definitely that Sense of Fun was going in the list, we went on to have a further, very productive conversation about our branding – which frankly until this morning had been a bit fuzzy and is now clear enough for us to have a story we are keen to tell. But you know how it is, we had spent some money on branding and would now have to change and probably spend some more money.

We took the long view, better to get it right now, even if there is a bit of extra expense, than to stick stubbornly to something just because we have paid some design costs. Specifically, we are switching from “Webarts Online Marketing” to “Social Media Powered Marketing” – if you check out the site in the next day or so, just imagine that the name has been changed .

All in all, a fast trajectory of marketing clarification and decision-making between breakfast and lunch, triggered by the initially disconcerting and disruptive effect on my thinking from seeing “sense of fun” listed as a business value. But a process which rapidly pulled some loose threads together and which we believe gave us a better framework with which to proceed.

So what would your business look like if you incorporated a sense of fun as a key value? Or have you already done that? Or does the idea appal you?

I’d love to hear about  any other companies you know of – including your own – that have incorporated a sense of fun in their values framework. No doubt there are some obvious ones, such as clown services for children’s parties. But what “serious” businesses are there, besides Virgin, which include a sense of fun in their values, explicitly or implicitly in the way they deliver service?

[Image credit: "Branson posing with the band", courtesy riz94107 on Flickr, Creative Commons]

Home Office Organizer Brandie Kajino Shares Some Wisdom on Being Practical About the Junk

First, a confession: I have never had a consistently tidy desk.

There, I’ve said it – and that wasn’t really so bad.

It was so good in those days long ago when I had a secretary who used to organize my desk, my schedule etc. But once I chose the home based business option – and really, I have never looked back – I found I had to take action, on a fairly regular basis, to sort things, toss some and generally re-establish some semblance of order.

As for example yesterday, when I decided I could not work another day with the piles of paper and books that threatened to cascade all over my desk if I made any sudden move. I had a big sorting, throwing-out and filing for an hour or so and was then able to get back to business.

Which kind of works for me. But still, when I meet people who are experts on how to organize your office and probably your life, my first reaction is somewhat of an attack of the guilts.

Take Brandie Kajino, for instance.

Actually, when you meet Brandie you won’t feel bad, because she is such a delightful, happiness-spreading person.

And she is an expert organizer, specializing in helping people sort out their home offices. Actually, she is The Home Office Organizer.

What brought all this on was my reading today a post by Brandie in which she basically admitted she is human and does not have some regime of tidiness which is in practical terms unattainable by some of us less naturally neat mortals.

And if you have ever worried, as I have, that you are not as organized as you should be, you owe it to yourself to read Brandie’s wonderful post, “Organized” is NOT Code For “Perfection”.

Just as a taste:

Being organized doesn’t mean you have to have color-coded cabinets or files, have everything (including the dog) labeled and forgo your work to keep everything spotless. What it DOES mean is some semblance of order that makes sense for you and your life. And that means a daily decision to keep things in working order.

If you want to see whether Brandie might be able to help you, why not take advantage of her no obligation 15 minute consultation?

And no, FTC and whoever else might ask, I don’t get a commission. I just know Brandie knows her stuff (and how to help the rest of us from letting our stuff get in the way of our business).