Working with Acquaintances

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The unspoken rule for working with friends or friends of friends is: DON’T.  But there can be magnificent benefits to it – it’s easier to hire them, you don’t have to worry that they’re a serial murderer… and they hopefully carry some loyalty and dedication to performing their work in order to maintain a good relationship with you.  But, there is undoubtedly going to be some pressure on the relationship between you and the referrer in question.

I will offer, upfront, one negative example of hiring a friend of a friend, from my own files:  in a mad rush to find an ASP programmer, I tapped a co-worker’s nephew to help us out with some programming.  He was not responsive as I would have liked, so I ended up going to her too often to ‘bother him’ to finish my job.  This definitely strained my relationship with my co-worker and her relationship with the nephew.  It would have been better for him to simply decline to help (and for me to have given up on him sooner!)

But, I have many positive examples of working with networked individuals.  The key is to keep business as purely business.  Be upfront that you will be honest if the relationship doesn’t seem to be a fit, and you expect them to be equally honest with you.  They should know that they can walk away and should walk away if necessary.    Some tips:

1)      Do not start with the assumption that you will be working together.   Approach an initial discussion as a talk to learn about each other – your project, their skills and interest.

2)      Give them an honest assessment of what you need – do you need them to bring creativity or and autonomy, or are you just hiring them to dispatch  your vision?

3)      Talk about what you can pay, and what your measurements for success will be.    Do they seem amenable or unsure about anything you said?

4)      Let them know your timeline.   Listen to their response – are they emphatic that they can do it within your timeframe?

5)      Let them know your personality and work methodology – do you need constant updates?   Are you hands-off or hands-on?

6)      You should take the time to learn as much about the acquaintance as possible, a ‘soft interview’ if you will.  Learn about their past projects, special skills, past clients, current workload, favorite accomplishments.

If trouble comes up at any point in the relationship, handle it immediately; know when to cut your losses, and keep your shared friend in the loop.  Never speak ill of anyone but be honest.

Example, Instead of saying “That friend you recommended was terrible. They never returned my calls” – you might rather say “Thanks for the referral by the way.  I reached out to your friend but haven’t heard back – timing might not be good for them right now.”  – this lets the friend know honestly what occurred, but you are not passing judgment, in fact you are showing that you are giving the benefit of doubt.

Good referrals are to be cherished.  Thank your referring friends copiously, and remember the hourly rate rules — how much of your time and money would you have spent finding a perfect fit?  Probably less than a nice thank-you dinner..

The Worth of You

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Operations is all about quantifying and measuring things to see what’s effective, in order to make your strategies more efficient (and profitable).  There is one exercise I happen to like to get people thinking from an operational standpoint, and that is to have them tally their own personal hourly rate.

Once you have this metric, it is easy to see that it’s worth it to hire a $10/hour personal assistant to make phone calls and copies; or that paying someone double your hourly rate would be a better choice if they can do the work 10x faster than you!

If you have, or recently had a salary, that’s the simplest way.  Hourly rate is –

ANNUAL SALARY  <divided by> 2080  =  YOUR HOURLY RATE

(2080 is 52 weeks/yr (times) 40 hours per week; a standard annual average.)

Now, if you don’t have a salary or are an entrepreneur bootstrapping it, use your goal salary for this year.

Let’s say your # is $75,000; your hourly rate is $75,000/2080 = $36/hour.

Great, now what?  A few ways to work with this number:

1)      Delegating and Hiring: Look at the people you employ or consultants with whom you contract.  How does their rate compare to yours?  Are they worth it? Are you utilizing them fully for the work they perform?  Are there things you’ve got them doing that should be delegated to someone with a lower hourly rate?   Remember, experts who charge $100-$200/hour are bringing their schooling and years of experience with them, don’t waste their time on items that you should be figuring out on your own.

2)      Time Management: Use this number for calculating mundane tasks.   I’ve used this to decide such life-shattering items as dining out versus shopping  & cooking or taking a taxi rather than riding the subway.   If it will take you an hour to shop and cook dinner at the example rate ($36), perhaps your time is better spent to order take out ($18) and work for that hour on a new client proposal instead.

3)      Budgeting projects/Team Building:  Operationally speaking, you need to evaluate how you are going to divvy up your time and the time of your team.  Your ‘hourly rate’ (ie, your overhead expenses) need to be ultimately supported by profitable ventures.   Some percentage of you or your team needs to focus on running the day to day business, another portion on gaining new business.  That mix will depend on the big picture, your store of funding, cash flow, etc.  But, it is useful to have this hourly metric in your head when looking at short and long term scheduling, rather than a large lump-budget number.

 

All About You

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There are many resources dedicated to ‘The Brand of You’ – whole industries in fact – self-help guides, business schools, books, gurus, and magazines.  They’re all dedicated to helping you figure out who you are, what it is you are good at doing, and what you need to ‘fix’.   But, if you’re on a journey to accomplish any personal or business goal, figuring out ‘yourself’ is the most inherently personal quest you can ever embark upon, and: only you can do the work.

I would argue the following:

1)      You have to start alone, with a premise of who you are and what you do well.

2)      You must boldly embrace your premise, go forth into the world and put it into practice.

3)      By trial and error, you will see where you were right, and when you fail, you will learn where you made mistakes.

That’s the real truth.  You are not going to figure this out by (just) meditation, or a Tony Robbins seminar, or polling your friends and family.  You can do those things of course, but without putting this into practice you’ll never know for sure.

The other caveat is that we are (hopefully) changing and growing and gaining skills all the time.  We evolve and adapt.  So this kind of self inventory must be done regularly, and your self-premise must be altered regularly.

I’ll recap some pointers from the ‘Brand of You’ from Fast Company’s article in ’97 by Tom Peters, a fellow business consultant.

1)      What do you bring to the table, what makes you different?

2)      How do you quantify it? What do you do that adds “remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value”?

3)      What do you want to be famous for?

4)      How do you communicate? This will help you figure out how to brand yourself (ex: are you a Teacher, Writer, Talker, Illustrator?  What is your mode of communication?)

As  a sidebar, there is a new edition of the book ‘Brand You’ coming out in August 2012, and I will post a review at that time.   I like that they are taking a look at some mindfulness exercises, archetypes, and personal appearance – some topics which are usually pushed to the side for more concrete or internally focused topics such as what you can DO or what you WANT.  Here’s the link to their site.