Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line: FunnyBusiness

Share Your Lessons Learned From Your Biggest Business Mistake

When I saw Seth Godin's post on lessons learned from his biggest business mistake, it made me smile. First, because his biggest mistake is a whopper and the lesson learned is something everyone can benefit from.

The second reason is  much more personal. For about a year I wrote a non-bylined column for the Chicago Tribune on exactly that topic.I've been feeling very nostalgic about the newspaper business.

Each week I would interview small business owners who shared the lessons learned from their biggest mistake..
There were recurring themes.
Some their biggest mistake was thinking that an employee ( retail) would care about their store the same way they did.
Others shared they were uncomfortable  with billing clients. Instead of asking for a portion of the fees up front or halfway through, many waited until he project was complete to send the bill and then felt vulnerable when  at the end of the project the client insisted on negotiating the fee.

One of the more common mistakes was trying to do everything themselves-- including reading contracts and writing personnel agreements.

Here is Seth's mistake.

My biggest mistake (at least in terms of income avoided) was not believing in the world wide web in 1994.

My biggest mistake: Was believing in the world wide web in 1995.

We so believed in the power of the world wide web that we took our eye of the ball of our traditional business. We thought people would embrace and adapt to the online world a lot faster than they did.
It was and still is a painful mistake.

What I learned is timing is everything, patience is a virtue, and even though people say they hate to go to the grocery store it doesn't mean they would be happier if they didn't have to go.

So what is your biggest business mistake and what did you learn from it?

The not so bright future for Maternity Leaves

My son Noah was born 24 years ago on a Monday afternoon. Noah and I stayed in the hospital until Thursday. During my free time in the hospital I finished ( on a yellow legal pad) a presentation for a financial institution. I was under deadline.  On Friday the nanny stopped by and for two hours I attended a meeting on the presentation I had completed during my hospital stay.

I did not take a traditional maternity leave. I didn't feel I needed it. I kept thinking of all those grandmothers who gave birth and went back to work in the fields. My attitude was "if they can do it, I can do it."

I owned an agency and in order for every one else to get paid, I felt an obligation to continue working.  But that was my choice and I have always known that that is not the choice most people would want to make.

While I did not take a real maternity leave, I did change my work hours and I was always back home by 3:45 in the afternoon. And until Noah's dad came home for dinner I don't think I stopped holding Noah for one minute. Having my afternoons with Noah was a huge gift. It was my maternity leave --it lasted over two years until my nanny had a heart attack and Noah went to daycare. 

When my daughter was born, there were more people in the office to do the work and I actually took two full weeks off without doing any work. But Berit was an easy easy baby. She ate  and slept and so after two weeks Berit and I returned to the office. That's where she stayed until she was six months old when she went to the day care center in  my office building.

As the owner of a business, I had the freedom to have the maternity leave I wanted to have. Most women and experts agree moms need those first few months to bond with their baby and physically recover from childbirth. Most women can't arbitrarily say - I'm leaving work 2 hours earlier than I used to be with my baby ( without suffering a pay cut) I could. I could always cut into my work day to be with my children.

The gloomy economy is causing businesses to rethink maternity leaves. It is a troubling trend. It's a trend I wrote about at BlogHer.

The Perfect Gift For Your Boss: Work Sucks And How To Fix It

Ask anyone who owns their own business and they will tell you all the things they miss about working for a major corporation: regular paychecks, discounted health care, paid vacations, and all those other perks that come with being part of a Fortune 500 organization.

However, even with the regular paycheck and health care benefits, most business owners will say that it would be hard to work for a major corporation again because they'd miss their freedom.

That's why I was so shocked to learn that Best Buy has implemented a program that Timothy Ferris, author of the
Four Hour Work Week calls" the most radical workplace experiment the Fortune 500 have ever seen."

It's called the ROWE Concept: Results Only Work Environment. Businessweek featured the concept in 2006 with a piece called Smashing The Clock

One afternoon last year, Chap Achen, who oversees online orders at Best Buy Co. (BBY ), shut down his computer, stood up from his desk, and announced that he was leaving for the day. It was around 2 p.m., and most of Achen's staff were slumped over their keyboards, deep in a post-lunch, LCD-lit trance. "See you tomorrow," said Achen. "I'm going to a matinee."

Under normal circumstances, an early-afternoon departure would have been totally un-Achen. After all, this was a 37-year-old corporate comer whose wife laughs in his face when he utters the words "work-life balance." But at Best Buy's Minneapolis headquarters, similar incidents of strangeness were breaking out all over the ultramodern campus. In employee relations, Steve Hance had suddenly started going hunting on workdays, a Remington 12-gauge in one hand, a Verizon LG (VZ ) in the other. In the retail training department, e-learning specialist Mark Wells was spending his days bombing around the country following rocker Dave Matthews. Single mother Kelly McDevitt, an online promotions manager, started leaving at 2:30 p.m. to pick up her 11-year-old son Calvin from school. Scott Jauman, a Six Sigma black belt, began spending a third of his time at his Northwoods cabin.

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

Read more about this experiment and how its increased productivity at Best Buy by nearly 40% and reduced turnover by 90% in some divisions at my blog post on BlogHer.

You can also check out the blog of Work Suck's authors Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson as they talk to the many skeptics who say it can't be done in my office.

If You Believe The Commercials,Yogurt Is The Official Food of Women

If you love yogurt, if you hate yogurt, you will love this Sarah Haskin's take on the marketing of yogurt --specifically the targeting of yogurt to women.

I discovered the video while reading BlogHer'sSuzanne Reisman's Post ,C'est Bon? No Your Gender Marketing and rBGH Yogurts Suck.  Before I actually saw the video I read the entire post. Since I was reading this around 7:30 last night and had not had dinner yet, I decided to fix myself a yogurt parfait which consisted of some Bear Naked  Vanilla Almond Crunch granola, a container of Trader Joe's Pomegranate Greek Style yogurt and some dried blueberries, mangos and pineapple.

Only then while I was munching on my yogurt parfait did I click on the video. Here's the thing -- if I had not had the yogurt my other choice for dinner would have been part of the half eaten rotisserie chicken that was in my frig. Yes I am a woman over 40 but fortunately I do break the stereotype, there is no Activa in my frig.

Confused? Watch The video.

Why I'm Disappointed To Learn About Barbara Walter's Sex Life

  Time was when I had Barbara Walters on a pedestal. It was a long time ago--at the start of my career. But to discount the importance she played in my professional life would be denying my  personal history.

For years I believed Barbara Walters succeeded because she was smart and simply worked harder than anyone else.
She was my inspiration. Because of her, I believed if I had the talent and I worked harder, I could succeed as well.

Because of her I believed that a woman could be successful without the requisite couch time.In the early 1970s for a woman to be successful in television news was an anomaly. The sexism and parochial attitudes were pervasive.

Barbara Walters did not give the public appearance as someone who was a bed hopper. Funny thing about public personas.

In 1973 I had an opportunity to sit in on broadcast of The Today Show. During my time in the control room I heard some "gossip" about Ms. Walters that I discounted as stupid boys being jealous. So it was a rumor that I kept to myself until last week.

More about what I heard  and  why I simply didn't want to believe it  on my Sunday post at BlogHer

Image Credit Image Credit: NewsGroper: These Blogs Are not Real

At Just 9 Months Old, Adiri Is a Rising Star In The Baby Bottle Business

Since introducing the world to the baby bottle that looks and feels like a mother's breast,The New York Times has featured the company on the front page of its business section and it has become a must have product for celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry

The company is run by three women: two attorneys and a marketing executive. None had any experience in manufacturing. In its first year, the company estimates it will earn a conservative 2.5 to 3 million dollars.

CEO Jennifer Morrill had no intention to run this business. She inherited it, along with a life insurance policy from her dad --the original inventor of the product.  When she tried to sell it, no one was interested.

The rest is the Adiri story. To read how these three women are turning the baby bottle business upside down check out my post today on BlogHer.

European Salaries Not Keeping Up With Price Increases

For some time I've been having Euro envy.There are those reports of Europeans taking advantage of the falling dollar and hopping over here for vacations and shopping sprees.

A few months ago, when the prices of a hotel rooms reached astronomical amounts in New York, taxi drivers blamed the European.

Envy is never a good emotion and as it turns out, life on the other side of the Atlantic is having its economic challenges as well. The New York Times has a report on Europe's middle class == a group that is definitely not hopping over here for shopping sprees. As The NYT reports, they're having a hard time finding enough money to buy a baguette.

When their local bakery in this town south of Paris raised the price of a baguette for the third time in six months, Anne-Laure Renard and Guy Talpot bought a bread maker. When gasoline became their biggest single expense, they sold one of their two cars.

Their combined annual income of 40,000 euros, about $62,500, lands Ms. Renard, a teacher, and Mr. Talpot, a postal worker, smack in the middle of France’s middle class. And over the last year, prices in France have risen four times as fast as their salaries.
[...]
“In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble,” Ms. Renard said one recent evening in her kitchen, as her partner measured powdered milk for their 13-month-old son, Vincent. “The French Revolution started with bread riots.”

It's not just in France-- all over Europe workers are feeling their middle class lifestyle disappear because wages have not kept up with inflation --- prices have risen 25% since 2000 and as one person said if your salary doesn't keep up with inflation you begin to feel poor.

The Leaked Microsoft Video: What embarasses some may motivate others

Labeled as "stupid, embarrassing,laughably awful,"  Microsoft has been taking major heat for a video intended for its Vista sales team that leaked onto YouTube.

Actually, I don't think it's so bad--for what it is---an internal video for a sales meeting. Anyone who has ever gone to a sales meeting knows that for outsiders the insider jokes and humor always fall flat.

It's like overhearing two lovers whispering sweet nothing into each other's ears. It may sound great to the two lovers, but to the eavesdroppers its an eye roll.

What seems juvenile and insipid to the outsider, can help build morale for those tasked with selling.Such it is with internal sales material.  It is for a targeted audience. What motivates them, may embarrass us.

This was not a commercial. This was an internal video. We should be embarrassed watching it--we are not the intended audience. But just because we're embarrassed, it  doesn't mean that it didn't do what it was supposed to do: motivate the troops, create community and remind them that the company was supporting the product.

Many years ago, I was retained by an major insurance company to motivate their sales team to promote a particular life insurance policy. We decided to go with a cowboy theme ---not sure why but we selected a cowboy -- it seemed like a good idea at the time. We also created an audio in the style of a 1930's radio program to promote the benefits of selling this product.

The sales team said they were insulted. They said that we had trivialized their professionalism. On the other hand, they all remembered the product---for years. And that was the problem, the one point the client had failed to share before we went all out with this "high creative" was that it was a lousy product.

High creative and lousy products don't mix well. They only tend to embarrass and insult. Which could explain why people are so embarrassed by the video. It's hyping a less than stellar product. They used a spoof of the quintessential music video and they tainted it with a product that consumers are saying,

"Thanks, but no thanks." 

Nalgene Pulling Water Bottles with BPA AFTER Canada Bans BPA in Baby Products

When it comes to plastic bottles, you won't be finding these numbers on products sold in Canada --that's because  these numbers indicate the product has BPA. Last week, the Canadian government  banned all products containing BPA --a chemical widely used baby bottles and the beloved Nalgene water bottle.

From The Washington Post

The move in Canada adds pressure on U.S. federal regulators to reexamine their position on BPA, which is suspected of causing breast and prostrate cancer, diabetes, hyperactivity and other serious disorders in laboratory animals. This week, a federal health panel in the United States for the first time expressed concerns about BPA.

Although the U.S. government isn't even close to banning BPA--companies are taking a proactive stand and voluntarily recalling these products.

For more on this dramatic change in American corporate behavior, check out my post on BlogHer.

The Disappearing Workload

A couple of months ago my garage door stopped working properly. I could open it, but every time I tried to  close it the door would lower to within six inches of the floor and then open again.

There was a fix...I just had to hold down the keypad until the door hit the ground. The big exception was the  remote door opener in my car--- no matter how long I held it down, the door would not close.

So to get out of my garage I had to open the door, drive the car into the driveway, get out of the car, punch in my security code into the garage door's  "keyless entry pad", press down the keypad until the garage door closes completely, get back in my car, slam the door and drive away.

Two weeks ago I went on Craig's List in search of a garage door opener fixer.The repair guy answered in inquiry but when he found out where I lived, he opted not to continue the correspondence. I was amazed. Who in this economy can afford to turn away work?

Wherever I go I hear the dreaded words, " It's slow." Whether its the nail technicians, hair stylists or restaurants that seem to have plenty of seating these days, it's getting harder to earn a buck.

Today The New York Times confirms this observation.

The gradual erosion of the paycheck has become a stealth force driving the American economic downturn. Most of the attention has focused on the loss of jobs and the risk of layoffs. But the less-noticeable shrinking of hours and pay for millions of workers around the country appears to be a bigger contributor to the decline, which has already spread from housing and finance to other important areas of the economy.

[...]

As people bring home paychecks that do not go as far, they are forced to economize, eliminating demand for goods and services that once captured their dollars, spreading pain to providers like auto dealers and lawn care providers. They, too, must trim their outlays on pay, shrinking working hours more and furthering the slowdown

“It means spending slows going forward,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the trading and research firm ITG.

Yesterday I found someone else on Craig's List to fix the garage door. He said business has been slow. He also mentioned he's originally from Minot, North Dakota where it seems they've discovered oil

"So," I asked, " Are you planning to return to Minot?"

"Not quite yet,"  said like a man who may be glad he's from Minot but doesn't want to be from Minot.

Reminding me to remind myself the hope springs eternal.