“Don’t take it personally.”
- One guy too many
“…ay, there’s the rub.”
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1
If one more business guy tells me one more time, “Don’t take it personally"...
What do you mean, “Don’t take it personally”?! It is personal. I am a person, I am doing business personally, therefore I take business personally.
I define “taking things personally” as being the instrument of my fate, responsible for my choices, and responsible for the consequences of my choices. If I see myself as the leader of my life and my company, then, you bet, what happens is about me personally. Telling me “Don’t take it personally” is telling me to extinguish myself.
That said, I can’t say I’ve found taking business personally a particularly gratifying process. Starting a company is so risky, and building a business so onerous, I have found myself often personally strained, frayed and depleted by the sheer enormity of the task. Business is hard on a person.
I’ve been given the “Don’t take things personally” advice often enough, though, and have found it well-meaning but so unhelpful, that it merited a step back and a look for a pattern at setting and circumstances. It could still happen, but I can’t remember this being uttered to me by a woman. In any case, in each instance when the advice was given to me by a man, I was personally upset. In each case, the subtext of “Don’t take it personally” was “You’re so personally upset that you’re professionally absent.”
People do business with people. If I’m personally upset, I’m unavailable for business. Light on, shop door closed.
Yet, I treasure taking my life personally. I cherish beyond price the depth and breadth and richness of my personal life.
So what do I with my premise: “I am a person, therefore I do business personally”? What do I do with the advice, “Don’t take business personally?”
I think the premise is flawed and the advice is flawed.
It's not how to “take” business. It’s how to “do” business.
There’s the rub.
New advice to self:
“Don’t do business personally. Do business strategically.”
If I do business strategically, rather than personally, I take business results and business relationships into consideration with regard to my strategy. I don’t take them personally. I’m free to “take it personally” in my personal life as intensely and as acutely as I choose. My business life becomes excitingly, fascinatingly, engagingly about strategically achieving a vision.
My experience is that an either-or dichotomy like this doesn’t always hold true. In an age of transparency, where the personal-professional divide is as clear as broken lines on a road in a rain storm, I’m still going to tweet pics of my cats to my company’s Twitter feed.
My guess is that if I can operate more generally within the context of this new insight - doing business strategically rather than personally - the number of times I hear “Don’t take it personally” will decrease. That’s because I’ll be fully and professionally present to do business.
To grow your business, you need to automate and scale.
- Bob Summers
When I entered the VT KnowledgeWorks Entrepreneurship Summit’s Open Business Concept Competition in February 2010, I believed my company had a business model that could automate and scale and merited an investment of outside capital.
Having been selected as one of five competion finalists, by the time I submitted my pitch presentation slides two months later, I had done much research and much deep reflection. Most importantly, I had stepped outside of my entrepreneur’s passion for my idea and evaluated my business model with the dispassion of a potential angel investor. Thinking as an angel investor might think, I realized my business model could not automate and scale for a variety of reasons and, therefore, could not generate 500% return in year 5 with an outside capital investment. In other words, I realized if I were an angel investor, I would respect me as the founder of a promising company. But I wouldn’t invest in that company for fast, high R.O.I.
During my presentation - the final of five in which the preceding four had business models that could automate and scale - I shared my company’s “business concept,” showed its value proposition and described the needs it addresses. I explained how it works. Then I displayed Bob Summers’s “automate and scale” quote. In essence, I said I couldn’t. Then I clicked to a slide showing that I knew what I would need to do to change that. No market analysis, no revenue projections. I said, "That's all I have to say."
One of the angel investors on the panel put his head in his hands.
At the post-competition networking reception, I shared with two women, who are both friends and colleagues, that I felt I had expressed what was true and needed to be said, but how hard and sad that had been for me. They listened, they heard, they commiserated. I shed a few tears of grief, they supported me, they didn’t tell me I shouldn’t feel the way I did, I thanked them, much comforted, and we turned to network, all in about three minutes.
I came home at the end of the next day, the last day of the Summit, so tired I needed a nap just to prepare for bed. When I awoke and walked into the kitchen, I saw the bouquet. I read the card and began to cry. It was from one of the women.
Sometimes it feels lonely steering the ship, but that doesn't mean you don't know the course.
I do know the course. I am navigating by the stars of my vision.
I can barely express how seen I feel, how moved and inspired I am that she can see the stars, too, and that she found they merited a bouquet.
I may write a report with that title some day. As far as I know, I can’t yet. My hometown doesn’t have any women angel investors.
According to the Center for Venture Research (.pdf) in its March 31, 2010 report, in 2009 women angels represented 11.3% of the angel market.
Of 9 apparent angel investors in a hometown project, then, one would predict the list would include a female.
It doesn't. And in preparing Handshake 2.0’s Angel Investor Guide to Blacksburg, Virginia, we didn’t find women angel investors on other lists, either.
What I don’t know is whether or not this is a problem.
An angel investor must be an accredited investor and meet several criteria, including a net worth of a $1 million or an individual annual income of $200K per year. Women in my hometown qualify.
I see three possibilities.
One would be a a problem. Two can be changed if merited. Three represents a conscious choice. I champion that. So I am interested in possibilities one and two.
Why am I interested? We're a corporation with a vision for regional economic development. Current development initiatives are focused on entrepreneurship, particularly with regard to starting, mentoring and funding technology companies, primarily started by men, primarily funded by men. I want to know that the small percentage of women angel investors (currently zero according to my research) is not a fundamental flaw in the big plan.
Does our region need women angel investors to grow? If any angel investor will do, man or woman, I've got other sizzling subjects to think and write about. If we do need women angel investors, then let's remove any obstacles that exist and let women know about angel investing. If they choose to participate, let's create a hometown in which their deals can thrive.
***
From Angel Investing Needs More Than Just a Few Good Women on the Kauffman Foundation 2006 report Women and Angel Investing: An Untapped Pool of Equity for Entrepreneurs(.pdf):
The report notes that the total number of women angel investors is smaller than women's collective wealth, education, and experience suggests is possible and calls the shortage of women angels "as a missed opportunity for women, for the entrepreneurial community, and U.S. competitiveness as a whole..."
"Angel capital, whether invested through organized angel groups or by wealthy individuals acting independently, is essential to entrepreneurial start-up activity in the United States," said Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation. "Considering that women's financial power and wealth has grown in the past 20 years -approaching half of the nation's net worth - it appears women are under-represented in this type of investing and that we are missing an opportunity for new investments and perspectives. The gap between the potential and actual participation of women as angel investors raises important questions that need to be addressed."
From the Center for Venture Research (.pdf) March 31, 2010 report:
Women-owned ventures accounted for 21% of the entrepreneurs that are seeking angel capital and 9.4% of these women entrepreneurs received angel investment in 2009. Both the number of women seeking angel capital and the percentage that receives angel investments are low compared to the overall market. These data indicate that when women do seek angel capital they lag behind the market yield rate by 5%.
From Confidence and Angel Investors: Does Gender Matter?, 2008:
We investigate whether men and women angel investors have different levels of confidence based on participation in the angel capital market, rate of investments, and stage of investments. We find evidence consistent with women angels having lower levels of confidence compared to men, although we do not suggest that this difference is deleterious for women angel investor's wealth. However, women entrepreneurs, who disproportionately seek funding from women angels, may have more restricted access to early-stage capital than men.
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
- H. L. Mencken
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
- Henry Fielding
Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.
- Carl Sandburg
I was taught it’s impolite to talk about money. The goal of that social norm is probably less about preserving social harmony than about avoiding the discord of social hierarchy. When how much money you have and how much money I have are secret, we can co-exist as equals. But when I learn you have more than I do, or vice versa, an overt hierarchy is born. Comparatively, perhaps becoming competitively, one of is one-up. The other is one-down.
I have written and spoken openly of my desire for my company to be a contributor to regional economic development and was even called out to specify my vision. Part of that vision includes fostering an entrepreneurial culture.
With the growth of an entrepreneurial culture rich with ideas and companies comes the need for investors to grow start-ups into enterprises. While secrecy is often the norm in networks of investors, someone knows who’s in, and some declare themselves openly.
Annie Johnson, writing for the Blue Ridge Business Journal in On a Quest for Capital, details the context of the state of angel investment and venture capital investment in central and southwest Virginia. Several investors she interviews share the terms of the deals they've done.
To that we add this data on Handshake 2.0: To be an accredited angel investor, one requirement can be that an individual has a net worth of one million dollars.
As of the last census, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 43% of household incomes in Blacksburg, Virginia were below the poverty line.
A few up. A lot down.
It’s time to talk about money.
May the risk to our social harmony from outing our social hierarchy be worth the reward.
An entrepreneur walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Your dad, your client, a Hokie, and your swim coach are all here.”
Ha! It’s not a joke!
An enterprising entrepreneur eager for an opportunity to pitch to angel investors, I entered the VT KnowledgeWorks Entrepreneurship Summit’s Open Business Concept Competition. It’s who you know - so did a whole lot of other people very familiar to me!
The official word will come out soon, but here are the finalists who will pitch to compete for the prize of business acceleration at VT KnowledgeWorks on Wednesday, April 7, 2010:
Anne Giles Clelland - Handshake 2.0. C’est moi.
Robert H. Giles, Jr. - RRx / Rural System. That’s my dad.
Z. Kelly Queijo - SmartCollegeVisit. That’s my client, colleague and friend.
Amjad Hussein. That’s a fellow Virginia Tech Hokie whom I’ve not yet met but very much look forward to meeting.
Frederick Cook - Actifity. That’s my triathlon swim coach who taught me to reach ahead in the water like Superman!
So now I’m competing with my dad, my client, a fellow Hokie, and my swim coach?
Crazy.
Crazier is that I’ll also be a co-presenter at the Summit. Let’s see, present on Wednesday morning, pitch on Wednesday afternoon, watch my dad, client, Hokie, and swim coach pitch on Wednesday afternoon, go to TechNite Wednesday night (for which I am honored to have been nominated for Entrepreneur and Rising Star awards – thank you, nominators!), then Thursday afternoon, watch my dad, swim coach, and VT KnowledgeWorks colleagues pitch live to angel investors.
I need a whiteboard.
An entrepreneur walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Your dad, your client, a Hokie, and your swim coach are all here. But the angel just left."
Hey! That's not funny!
:)
See you at The Summit!
Wheaties is the middle layer of my daily morning breakfast, along with two other cereals from General Mills, Wheat Chex on the bottom, and Cheerios on the top. I train for sprint triathlons and will admit that branding works and that I think many mornings, as I have for almost half a century, I am eating The Breakfast of Champions.
Knowing I'm a Wheaties fan, my husband bought me a box of the new Wheaties Fuel, sporting photos of my fav front-of-the-Wheaties-box athlete, triathlete Hunter Kemper, and four other guys. I posted a Twitter update - a tweet - "I'm guessing the target market of new Wheaties Fuel is guys." Then I wrote this sassy post: Wheaties Fuel Reaches Target Market - Female Baby Boomer Sprint Triathletes and tweeted about it.
Wheaties Fuel is on Twitter. @Wheaties_Fuel noticed my tweets and replied. A conversation ensued, even a few emails, and then the ultimate online fan experience occurred - Hunter Kemper tweeted my post!
That was about a month ago. I tweeted about eating Wheaties Fuel before shoveling snow a few times. Then I entered a hard time from which I am recovering well, but I'm still a little vulnerable. Kindness, in particular, makes me weepy.
I got tears in my eyes when this arrived in the mail yesterday.
Thank you, David and The Wheaties Team, for this box of Wheaties Fuel autographed by Hunter Kemper, yes, in it's own collector's case. First I cried. Then I laughed with joy. You truly fueled my spirit.
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