A Little Quieter Than Usual, For Now

As many of you know, I’m writing a book called Startup CEO:  a Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company, which is due to the publisher in a few weeks.  I’d originally thought the book would be an easy project since the idea was to “turn my blog into a book.”  But then it turned out that for the book I wanted to write, I’d only written about 1/3 of the content on the blog already!

So the past few weeks I’ve been writing my brains out.  I now have a nearly 100,000 word draft, which needs to be edited down quite a bit, charts and tables inserted, outside contributors added in.

For the next handful of weeks, I’m going to post a bit less frequently than usual – probably every other week – as a result.  But once I get through this period, I’ll come roaring back with TONS of new content written for the book!

I’ve gotten to know a number of Bolster members over the last few years, and one who I have come to appreciate quite a bit is Tim Porthouse. I’m on Tim’s email list, and with his permission, I’m reprinting something he wrote in his newsletter this month on the topic of CEO engagement in politics and current events. As you may know, I’ve written a bunch on this topic lately, with two posts with the same title as this one, Should CEOs wade into Politics (part I here, part II here). Thanks to Tim for having such an articulate framework on this important subject.

Your Leadership Game: “No Comment.”

Should you speak up about news events/ politics?

Most of the time, I say, no!

Startup CEOs feel pressure to speak up on news events: Black Lives Matter, Abortion, LBGTQ+ rights, the conflict in Israel/Palestine, Trump vs. Biden. Many tell me they feel pressured to say something, but are deeply conflicted.

Like you, I am deeply distressed by wars, murder, restrictions on human rights, bias, and hate. But if we feel something, should we say something?

Before you speak up, ask the following questions:

1.      Mission relevance. Is your startup’s success or mission on the line? Are customers or employees directly impacted? Example: It makes sense for Airbnb to advocate when a city tries to ban short-term rentals. It makes sense to advocate for your LBGTQ+ employees when a state tries to restrict their rights.

2.      Moving the needle. Will speaking out change anything? If you “denounce” something or “take a stand,” what really happens? Example: If you have employees in a state banning abortion and you tell them your startup will support them as much as the law allows, this could create great peace of mind for employees. But if your startup does not operate in Ukraine or Russia, then denouncing Russia does little (and Russia does not care!)

3.      Expertise. Do you have a deep understanding of the situation? It’s usually more complicated than it appears, especially at first. Once you speak out, you have painted yourself into a corner you will be forced to defend.

4.      Precedence and equivalence. If you issue a statement about today’s news event, will you react to tomorrow’s event? Why not? Where do you draw the line?Someone will be offended that you spoke up about X but not Y.

5.      Backlash. Are you ready to spend significant time engaging with those who disagree with you?It can get ugly quickly, and mistakes can be costly. Plus, the American public is tiring of business leaders commenting on the news.

6.      Vicarious liability. Who are you speaking for? When you say, “Our startup denounces X”?Does the whole company denounce it? You don’t know, and probably not. Does the Leadership Team? They may feel pressured to support you. What you are really saying is, “I denounce X!” OK, great, then say it to your friends and family. Leave your startup to talk about business.

If your answers are “yes,” – then speak out.

If not, I recommend keeping quiet.

In my opinion, our job is to build great companies, not debate current events.

By not speaking out, you can say, “We don’t talk politics here.” You can shut down any two-sided arguments at work and say, “Let’s get back to work,”removing a big distraction. Remember when employees protested because Google was bidding for Pentagon contracts?

I realize that you will be challenged to make a statement, that, “Saying nothing is unacceptable/ complicit.” But whoever challenges you will only be satisfied if you support their view.

If you still want to speak out, I respect your choice. Some of you will be angry with me for writing this, and I accept that. I’m asking you to think carefully before you make a statement.

(This post, written by my co-founder Cathy Hawley, also appeared on Bolster.com)

The gig economy is a labor market where short-term or freelance roles are more prevalent than permanent positions. It’s generally characterized by having independent contractors rather than full-time positions, but in some locations and for some types of roles, gig workers may be part-time or fixed-term employees.

The gig economy that started with roles like artists, drivers and web designers is quickly expanding to include executive-level roles. There are  a few trends in today’s workplace that are driving this expansion. Startups and scaleups have more flexible, remote-friendly work environments and are looking for creative, less expensive ways of accelerating growth. Executives have shorter average job tenure and are more often displaced or between roles, and they are also interested in the flexibility that gig work can give them.

In a study conducted by MavenLink/Research Now, “The White Collar Gig Economy,” 47% of companies state they are looking to hire contractors to fill management and senior executive roles, including c-suite contractors. At the same time, 63% of full-time executives would switch to become a contractor, given the opportunity. These trends will be accelerated by the current economic downturn and recovery, as some companies have fewer resources, and more executives are displaced.

At the executive level, there are a few different types of roles that could be considered ‘gigs’. The most common two are coaching and project-based consulting.  Coaching or advising, and particularly CEO coaching and advising, has become very prevalent over the last 10 years. The CEO hires a coach who can help them navigate new situations and challenges. Often, CEO coaches stay with a CEO for a number of years, helping guide and support them through the stages of company growth. There are also coaches and advisors for other functional areas to provide similar support for other executives, although more commonly these coaches are hired for specific initiatives. 

Then there  is project-based consulting, where executive-level talent is hired to run a specific project such as reviewing a company’s packaging and pricing, performing due diligence on an acquisition, creating a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy, or creating an investor deck for a fundraising event. This type of consulting isn’t new, and it’s similar to what large consulting firms offer. It seems to be more prevalent now for very senior roles than it ever has been in the past.

But the gig economy for executives now reaches well beyond coaches and consultants.  There are also executives who are hired into interim leadership roles while a company searches for a permanent placement. Some roles take a long time to find the right person, but there’s an urgent need for someone to take on the leadership mantle in the interim. If the interim executive is a good fit, and is open to it, it’s not uncommon for this individual to be considered for the permanent position.  “Try before you buy” works both ways — it can be good for the company and good for the executive, too.

An up-and-coming type of executive gig role is the fractional role. We are seeing this more and more in the last couple of years.  Fractional executives can either be consultants or employees, since the expectation is a long-term relationship, on a part-time basis. For example, 3 days or a certain number of hours per week. The fractional executive is responsible for all functional areas as a full-time executive in that same role. The company may be too small to need (or afford) their level of expertise on a full time basis, but needs more than just an advisor or project consultant. The fractional executive generally remains with a company until the company needs a full-time leader for that function, in which case either the fractional executive goes full-time, or the company hires someone new.  Fractional executives may support more than one client at a time, and may also come with a team of more junior functional experts who can support them to take on more work.

Finally, for our purposes at Bolster, joining a company’s board of directors could be considered taking a ‘gig’ role since it’s not a full-time executive role.  Startups and scaleups need independent directors, and their needs change based on their size, stage and strategy. We see a growing trend of companies contracting with directors for 1 -2 years rather than lifetime service. 

There’s a real opportunity right now for companies to capitalize on the expertise of this talent pool without having to hire them for long-term full time roles, and for executives who want to contribute their skills and expertise without the commitment of a 80-hour work week. Bolster is helping bring these two audiences together in a marketplace that matches on-demand executives with companies who need their services the most. Bolster also provides services for members so they can focus on their consulting rather than their business, and for companies to evaluate their executive teams and boards.

Blogiversary, Part IV

Four years on, as the British would say, OnlyOnce is going strong.  Cumulative stats show a steady 457 posts, about one every three days on average (same as it’s been all along), and a scant 409 non-spam comments. Maybe some day I’ll start being more edgy and provocative.  Or prolific.  Or Twitterific.  Or something.

Looking back over my initial “how’s it going” post and the last three anniversary posts, I’d say my reasons for blogging, out of my four original ones, have consolidated now around “Thinking” (writing short posts helps me crystallize my thinking) and “Employees” (one of our senior people once called reading OnlyOnce “getting a peek inside Matt’s head).  But I’d also add two new raisons d’etre to the list:

Book Reviews:  it’s not that I enjoy reading my own book reviews so much as I am glad I’m compiling a list of the business books I’m reading and what I think of them.  While it’s not comprehensive (I limit the blogging to business books, probably about 50% of what I read), it’s come in handy a few times to have a little online library for my own reference.

I like it:  I really, really enjoy writing.  I used to write all the time when I was younger.  High school newspaper editor, creative writing magazine founder, and all that.  I miss it.  Blogging is probably the only form of prose I regularly write now.  And it’s great.  The reawakening and sharpening of my writing skills has even inspired me to dive into a couple creative writing exercises, short stories mostly, in the past year.  So I just like doing it.

And isn’t that reason enough to do something?

Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part II

(If you missed the first post in this series, it’s here.)

So, all companies are now direct marketers — their web sites and email lists make it so, they can’t effectively reach their fragmented audience without it, and consumer permission demands it.  Why is this new to some companies and not others, and what lessons can companies who are new at it learn from traditional direct marketers?

First, the quick answer — it’s new because it’s being driven by the new technologies the Internet has brought us in the past 10 years.  Those technologies have opened up the possibility for 1:1 communication between any company and its customers that was previously unaffordable to many industries with low price point products.  You never received a telemarketing call for a movie, because making the call costs $3, and all you’ll spend on the movie is $10.  P&G never sent you a glossy direct mail piece for toothpaste, because they’d spend $1 at a small chance you’ll buy their $2.25 product.  But the cost of a banner ad or a given keyword or an incremental email is so low (virtually zero in some cases), that everyone can afford a direct presence today.

What lessons can companies who are new at it learn from traditional direct marketers?  There are many, but four things stand out to me that good DMers do well that are different from the skills inherent in traditional marketing/advertising:

1. Take the creative process seriously.  Just because you can dash off an important email to your staff in 30 seconds doesn’t mean your marketing people should do the same to your customers.  Put your email campaigns or templates through a rigorous development and approval process, just as you would a newspaper ad or radio spot.  There’s just no excuse for typos, bad grammar, or sloppy graphics in email or on a web site.

2.  Use live testing and feedback loops.  It’s hard to test two versions of a TV commecial without incurrent significant extra cost.  It’s impossible to test 20.  But with today’s software, you can test 10 versions of your home page, or 100 versions of your email campaign, almost instantly, and refine your message on the fly to maximize response.

3. Make transparency part of your corporate culture.  Just as you can have a 1:1 relationship with your customers, your customers expect a 1:1 relationship back.  If they want to know what data you store on them, tell them.  If they want you to stop emailing/calling/mailing them, stop.  If they want to know more about your products or policies, let them in.  Think about marketing more as a dialog with your customers, and less as you messaging them.

4. Merge content with advertising.  Old-school advertisers didn’t have to worry about this one, because their ads were always surrounded by other people’s content (TV, newspaper, radio, magazines).  But in direct marketing, your message is sometimes the only message around.  Make it interesting.  Make it entertaining.  I always think the prototypical example of this as the old J. Peterman catalog, which was trying to sell clothing and accessories by creating stories and mystique around each product.  But there are tons of other examples as well, especially around email newsletters.

Next up in the series:  What does this mean for the way companies will be structured or operate in the future?

I Hope I Didn’t Make You Sick, Too

Fellow entrepreneur and MyWay blogger Chris Yeh takes me to task for my post last week entitled Humbled at TED.  Although his blog post was pretty harsh on me — saying essentially that I’d lost my brain and made him sick by fawning over celebrities (which I didn’t do) — his comment on my blog was a little more measured, just reminding me that people like Bill Clinton is human and puts his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us.

I think Chris missed my main point, and since he decided to go public blasting me, I’ll repeat here what I emailed him privately before he decided to blog this:

Oh I don’t put them on that much of a pedestal, although perhaps my post sounded like that. My comments are more driven by a combination of:

– the great things they’ve done for humanity as opposed to the more mundane commercial that most of us do

– the immense knowledge of specialists in fields I know little about

– the level of intellectual discourse among the regular attendees…more than I see on a daily basis by 10x

Plus, pedestal or not, it isn’t every day that one sees Clinton, Bezos, Khosla, Branson, and Brin/Page all in the same room at once. 🙂

Anyway, thanks for the comment. I may blog it and my response.

Still, Chris’s main comment to me is probably a good one, which is that “treating the successful as if they were on another plane simply perpetuates the belief that you’ll never achieve the same kind of success.”  And on that point, he’s 100% right.  There is greatness and success in all of us, whether we’ve tapped into it yet or not.

Context is King

A small post with a good point.  I noticed in The Economist this week something that struck me.  They posted a correction to a prior article.  Publications do that all the time, but this particular correction was placed on a page in the same section of the magazine in which the error appeared a couple weeks before.  Most print publications tend to bury their corrections in the front or the back where they never get seen.  But this one was right in the middle of the magazine, saying “we made a mistake – right here.”  Noteworthy to me for its show of transparency, always appreciated but not seen frequently enough in “official” things.

What Gets Said vs. What Gets Heard

I’ve been on the edge of a few different situations lately at work where what seems like a very clear (even by objective standards) conversation ends up with two very different understandings down the road.  This is the problem I’d characterize as “What gets said isn’t necessarily what gets heard.”  More often than not, this is around delivering bad news, but there are other use cases as well.  Imagine these three fictitious examples:

• Edward was surprised he got fired, even though his manager said he gave him repeated warnings and performance feedback
• Jacob thought his assignment was to write a proposal and get it out the door before a deadline, but his manager thought the assignment was to schedule a brainstorming meeting with all internal stakeholders to get everyone on the same page before finalizing the proposal
• Bella gets an interim promotion – she still needs to prove herself for 90 days in the new job before the promotion is permanent and there is a comp adjustment – then gets upset when the “email to all” mentions that she is “acting”

Why does this happen?  There are probably two main causes, each with a solution or two.  The first is that What Gets Said isn’t 100% crystal clear.  Delivering difficult news is hard and not for the squeamish.  What can be done about it?  The first problem — the crystal clear one — can be fixed by brute force.  If you are giving someone their last warning before firing him, don’t mumble something about “not great performance” and “consequences.”  Look him in the eye and say “If you do not do x, y, and z in the next 30 days, you will be fired.” 

The second cause is that, even if the conversation is objectively clear, the person on the receiving end of the conversation may WANT to hear something else or believes something else, so that’s what “sticks” out of the conversation.  Solving this problem is more challenging.  Approaching it with a lengthy conversation process like the Action Design model or the Difficult Conversations model is one way; but we don’t always have the time to prepare for or engage in that level of conversation, and it’s not always appropriate.  I’d offer two shortcut tips to get around this issue.  First, ask the person to whom you’re speaking to “play back in your own words what you just heard.”  See it she gets it right.  Second, send a very clear follow-up email after the conversation recapping it and asking for email confirmation.

People are only human (for the most part, in my experience), and even when delivering good news or assignments, sometimes things get lost in translation.  But clarity of message, boldness of approach, and forcing playback and confirmation are a few ways to close the gap between What Gets Said and What Gets Heard.

Run, Brad, Run!

A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here).  While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons:

1. We wanted to support research into finding a cure for MS to honor and support one of our earliest colleagues, Sophie Miller Audette who was diagnosed with MS about 5 years ago (and is still going strong as one of our key sales directors!) – and since then, two other members of the Return Path extended family have also been diagnosed with MS
2. We wanted to support an organization with a focused mission and one where our contributions could really make a difference
3. Accelerated Cure has a very entrepreneurial, innovative culture that’s consistent with our own – and a solution-oriented approach to their cause that resonates with our business philosophy

We got introduced to Accelerated Cure by Brad Feld, one of Return Path’s venture investors, who is a friend of Art Mellor, Accelerated Cure’s founder and CEO.  Brad’s an interesting guy for many reasons, but one reason is that he has a goal of running 50 marathons (one in each state) by the time he’s 50.  He has eight years and 40 marathons to go, and to make it a little more significant he decided to try and drum up some sponsorships for his quest and donate the money to Accelerated Cure. 

Return Path has decided to be one of Brad’s anchor tenant sponsors by pledging $1,000 for every race he completes.  This is half of Brad’s goal of $2,000 per race, and we hope it will inspire others to donate so he can beat his goal.  Of course, Brad wants to do more than just run these marathons – he wants to, well, accelerate his performance.  So, taking a page out of the VC handbook, we’re setting up an incentive program for Brad of an additional $500 donation for every race that he completes in less than four hours. 

Besides liking both Brad and Accelerated Cure, this particular vehicle for donating money is especially meaningful to us.  A good number of Return Path employees past and present have run marathons and even competed in triathlons and Ironman competitions (including yours truly, but in a way that certainly makes me want to keep my day job).  And Seth Matheson, Accelerated Cure’s new development director who has MS, is an avid marathoner who is contemplating an Ironman competition himself.  And as I always tell our team members, running a startup is a marathon, not a sprint!

You can follow Brad’s progress – and make a donation yourself – here.

No Recession at Return Path

I know, I know.  I shouldn’t jinx us.  But we’re growing like mad at the moment, so much so that we have well almost 50 open positions now across all divisions of the company.  If you want to come join one of the fastest growing, most innovative, and just plain coolest places to work in the industry, we’d love to talk to you.

What’s driving the growth? 

• All our operating units have open positions.  Sender Score (deliverability/whitelisting) has the most openings and is growing explosively.  But Authentic Response (market research) and Postmaster (lead generation) both have openings as well
• Geographic expansion.  We have a bunch of openings in Europe as well as in the U.S.  Other parts of the world…stay tuned for later in the year (or let us know now that you are interested once we get to your corner of the globe)
• The power of email.  Parts of the economy may be a bit choppy now, but online marketing, and email in particular, are going strong.  Clients are finding the e-channels to be more and more effective and efficient ways of driving sales and customer loyalty

Visit the careers page at our web site to have a look — all the new jobs probably aren’t posted yet, but many are, and the rest are on the way shortly.  This is a fun and exciting and rewarding place to work.  Trust me.  I’m completely unbiased.  No, really.  Come join the team, or refer others!

OnlyOnce Now MultiLingual

If you look in the left sidebar of OnlyOnce, you will now see a box that says “Translate This Page” with a dropdown that lets you pick the language.  Google Translate takes over from there and does the heavy lifting. 

Global world…awesome service.  Thanks, Google!

Thanks Brad and Ross for the tip.