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Posts Tagged ‘business’

I got the call Thursday that my SeedsBC funding was approved. As of today, I have stopped looking for work. I have a new job. For the next 40 weeks, I’ll be receiving funding and training to start a new web design business. For the next couple of weeks or so, I’ll be attending workshops on marketing, accounting, and business planning. After that, I’ll start calling up the sales leads I picked up during my application process and go on from there.

I feel like say something inspiring or Seth Godin-like about this, but it just doesn’t feel like the right time. This is not a product launch. It wasn’t even a tough decision to make. Freelance contracting made me money. Sending out resumes did not. I’m not exactly throwing off my chains and seizing the means of production. This is just the first, faltering step on a long journey.

Entrepreneurship, for the most part, is still something I’ve only read about in books. I have no doubt a lot of its details are obscured by the triumphalism and tragedy that makes for good business publishing. But I can’t give in to the fear of the unknown. As of now, there is no boss I can beg for my job back. I signed a contract with my government that I would give this venture my full attention. I have a mortgage and car insurance that can’t be paid with anything less than profit. It sounds like pressure, but to me it’s comforting. We spend our whole lives looking for direction, wondering where to put our energies. The only direction I have now is forward.

A common complaint about living in Abbotsford is that there are no good bookstores. We have four, but your choice is Coles in Seven Oaks, Hemingway’s used bookstore, the House of James Christian bookstore, and Food for Thought if crystals and tarot cards are your thing.

Sure, it’s an eclectic selection, but we’re a city of over 125,000 people. We deserve some kind of ostentatious literary presence in our town. I watch every big box development with baited breath. Maybe the shell of Linens & Things will be resurrected as a Chapters. Perhaps that giant red thing will be- aw, it’s just a Shopper’s Drugmart. It’s like we’re the town that doesn’t like to read.

To make matters worse, I think we’ve just passed the point where big box bookstores are profitable. Most of the books I buy are marketed and purchased entirely online. I see an interview or a video from the author and I just sashay down to the Chapters website where everything is (almost) always in stock and cheaper than the brick and mortar store.

Is the idle pleasure of browsing a bookstore doomed to antiquity?

Having an actual physical store is different enough from online retail that we should have them well into the future. The question is how to monetize real life stores. I think we’ll see something akin to the hyper-competitive retail market I saw in Tokyo. Every store had to compete with hundreds just like it in the area. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to try and get customers to spend time shopping. There were streetside barkers, brightly coloured (and colourfully written) deal signs, animated displays, and don’t get me started with the cross-promotion! Who would have thought of using a maid cafe to market transformable cell-phone robot toys? Whatever form brick and mortar retail takes, the common factor is going to be the passion of the salespeople. As much as I hate using that word, if you are going to sling books like a machine, you might as well get replaced by one.

The controversial chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has made plans to announce a pay subscription model for his publications to be viewed on the iPad and other such devices. The plan is expected to include the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the New York Times and will expand into News Corp.’s entertainment properties.

All I have to say is: Good for Rupert Murdoch. News Corp lost 5 billion dollars last year. You could say he’s only doing this because he’s old and the pay subscription model is the only thing he understands, but really it’s either this or shutter the newspapers entirely. That move would certainly cause more shareholders to flee, further reducing News Corp.’s share price, causing him to shut down more divisions, and on it goes until the company implodes. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of situation.

It’s going to be interesting to see if this works. Subscription based services have failed in the past, but that was at a time before you had online payment methods like paypal and 1-click. Today, millions are being made through subscription-based web software, a situation unthinkable in the last decade. It’ll also be a true test of where political opinion lies in the world today.  There was a time when companies like News Corp. could hide their inviability through cheap debt. Now thanks to the recession, we are actually going to see if people are willing to pay money to keep the conservative echo chamber alive.

When people hear the story of Vicky Harrison, they are quick to comfort themselves with all kinds of qualifiers. They leave comments like, she left school, she had mental issues that weren’t reported on or she took the easy way out. None of them seem to address why this had to happen. Vicky had been looking for a job for almost 2 years after leaving college. After over 200 rejections, her self-worth was so low that she took her own life.

I’m not asking why she died. I want to know why she had to send out 200 applications in the first place. Does this system of finding a job produce better workers?

Vicky’s plight is not unique. While the article was from the UK, here in BC the unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds is 15.9 percent, almost twice the provincial average of 8.1 percent. Her suicide is probably just a symptom of thousands, possibly millions of young people who might be suffering debilitating mental issues because they can’t find jobs.

It doesn’t make sense. A generation ago, people that age were getting married and having kids on top of starting careers with things like pensions and a mandatory retirement age. In all likelihood, they were less educated than the current crop of young adults. It’s like we’ve gone from a culture that worshipped youth to one that completely abhors it.

It’s tempting to blame the demographically larger baby boomers for this, but this has been going on ever since Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” was published 20 years ago. I think it has more to do with the fact that we live in the most policy-choked, paternalistic, and gentrified labor system ever produced by human civilization. There are so many rules and regulations in private companies that they end up killing all initiative and decision making. No one wants to bear the cost of training new and unproven workers in that kind of situation.

I don’t know how we’re going fix this system, but we can start by admitting that it’s broken. Most young workers are going to have to find their fortunes outside of official channels like resumes and reference letters. It’s cruel and dangerous to tell them otherwise. Change will come, but it’s not going to be found in the company handbook.

I want you to all ponder this article I found over at Business BC. It says that Vancouver Companies are among the stingiest when it comes to compensation, no matter what the level of employee you are. This ultimately holds back the economy, since businesses either cannot or will not foot the bill for the kind of talent that would make the city a world business hub. Due to the exploitive nature of BC’s, business culture, such a change is unlikely to happen.

This is a very interesting analysis of BC’s economy. Poverty advocates and the NDP often cloud the issue with emotions and violins playing in the background. Here you have people with options and no time to make a fuss actually avoiding BC because wages are tooo low.

The author of the article makes some educated guesses over why Vancouver companies are so stingy. Our economy was built on exploiting the land, and our treatment of labour is just an extension of that thinking. What’s more, companies leverage the province’s gorgeous vistas against actually paying money for work.

I wonder if it is that simple. Do managers really want the cheapest work available, or do workers bid low for the opportunity to live in Lotus land? Does the way companies spend money play into it? If you look around BC’s IT and software industry, you find a lot of branch divisions and not too many head offices. How are you supposed to pay $100k for a programmer when corporate only lets you use $70K?

It’s tough to get inside the heads of BC’s business leaders. Most of them don’t blog, and there is no way you are going to see a manager walking around with a sandwich board saying “Johnson was late 3 times this week. Fair wages for Fair hours!”

If we want to make something of BC’s economy, we need to cut through the rhetoric and ask hard questions about “the way things are” in business. It’s not enough to just say “make a change”. Legislation isn’t going to help either. The low wages are just the end symptom of a series of bad business decisions. If we don’t know what those decisions are, then companies will just keep repeating them.

“Specialize!” You hear that word so often on copyblogger and other blog monetization sites. They tell you to find your focus, your core audience, your tribe, and sponsors will beat a bloody path to your door. Big media has spent so much time trying to be all things to all people that the only thing that sells in this media-saturated wasteland is a qualified case of mono-mania. People even tell me, “James, baby, you’re a great writer, but you got to find your specialty here.” I’d like to cite them my favorite Robert Heinlein quote: “Specialization is for insects.”

Don’t get me wrong. You might have seen google ads on this site at one time or another. I would love to make $10,000 a month putting out 250 words a day. But what would i be doing to keep that money coming? Could I labour over the right metaphor for my conclusion? Could I write about things that interest me rather than sacrifice all my mental energy on the alter of “my passion”?

I admit I have a little bit of intellectual ADD. I graduated university four courses shy of a BA in English along with my full Bachelor of Computer Information Systems. I believe both disciplines inform each other and make me more well-rounded. This obsession with specialization makes us forget that our greatest ideas come from combinations of many ideas, not ivory tower isolation. It robs us of our potential as human beings.

But why am I writing a blog if I am making sure that not many people will read it? They may be few in number, but this blog does have readers. They are my friends and family. People I want to connect and share my ideas with, but whom I don’t want to bother with a 10:30pm phone call to discuss my latest brainstorm. If this blog is to have a focus, let it be this: It is about me, James Strocel, talking to you. Pleased to meet you.

If you’ve ever felt like your job isn’t future-proof, that you are only running a losing race with Moore’s Law, I urge you to watch this video produced by Penguin Publishing. It starts out a little grim, but like most problems in the world, if you rearrange the facts just so, the answer becomes crystal clear.

Found via BoingBoing

Despite all of the government’s TV ads stating the contrary, we are still in the throes of an economic downturn. The provincial government is still in a hiring freeze, businesses still have trouble finding credit, and the Canadian dollar is still at par with the US. Take any market chart you like and the numbers will likely be negative.

It’s easy to get depressed about figures like these, but I find myself more fascinated by so called “Uncommon” economic indicators surveyed by NPR in Washington State (Link). In this survey, they had people fill in the following sentence: Indicators for me that the economy is getting better or worse is when I see or hear ____ (blank). From 1200 responses they came up with things like the weight of container ships in ports, or the length of lines at Starbucks. After doing some thinking, I’ve come up with a couple of indicators of my own.

-Crowds at dollar and thrift stores

-Home depot setting up bleachers to seat all of their applicants (Many of whom are older adults in suits)

-Seeing the same set of commercials on television over and over again

Has anyone else noticed uncommon economic indicators? If you can think of any, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

I found this neat little animation about procrastination at Fast Company. Basically procrastination can be good if you can simply translate into a worthwhile activity. Your hatred of actually doing that urgent work will be your ticket to motivational bliss.

If you think about it, it kind of makes a case for keeping lots of optional projects on the go. Sure, you’ll have more stuff to put off, but eventually that one activity that you’ll hate the least. Come to think of it, my kitchen needs cleaning…

Sara and I caught he last fifteen minutes of CBC doczone’s “hyper parents and coddled kids” and were promptly horrified by what we found. If the show was to be believed, people our age are in the habit of bringing parents in to salary negotiations, and getting them to phone our supervisors after we say things during performance reviews like “the only difference between me and you is age”. Would somebody tell me when we signed off on this kind of behavior? Do we officially have no shame?

I pray to God that this an urban legend propagated by a few hilarious anecdotes. It’s something to assure retiring baby boomers of their unassailable superiority. I love my Mom and Dad, but I would not have them putting up plants in my office, and my Mom’s quite the gardener. Then again, if people like the Brazen Careerist can make six figures telling people how to keep young workers, maybe there is something else at work here. If companies today are hiring their workers based on school performance alone,  those high grades could be attributed to intense parental involvement. The more these kids see helicopter parenting pay off through their grades, the more they are going to tolerate it. Along with this comes the idea that any advantage, no matter how ridiculous, should be exploited to its full potential. So in the end, we are looking at a very focused section of the work force. These are companies that are looking for the perfect transcript, and get workers who are good at school, but not as good at, say, cutting the umbilical cord.