Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Entrepreneurs: How Work/Life Balance and Growth Can Mix

Those who believe starting a business means fewer hours will probably find themselves mistaken. In reality, small-business owners may be some of the hardest working people in the world, regardless of industry or sector.

It can be especially difficult to sustain effective work-life balance when your business is growing and it feels as if there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Additionally, when the pace of business has picked up substantially, you and your employees may be feeling the pinch.

Since a culture of good work-life balance can be established and encouraged from the top, I asked three small-business owners how they achieve work-life balance during growth periods and also how they model and promote healthy habits for their employees. Here are the insights William Bauer, managing director of Royce Leather Gifts in New Jersey, Rob Biederman, co-founder of Hourly Nerdin Boston, and Mike Mannon, president at WD Communications in Philadelphia, shared with us.

During times when your business is growing like gangbusters and it seems you’ll never get everything accomplished, is work-life balance still a priority for you?

Rob Biederman: Work-life balance is always difficult to maintain in hyper-growth mode. However, through long-term planning, I aim to maintain an average balance over the course of a year, even if there are certain weeks and months when work takes over a relatively unhealthy amount of time. I’ve tried to align my formal work breaks with periods of customer slowness—typically, August and late December holidays—to maximize selling time as a percent of my working year, and to be most impactful in those interactions.

William Bauer: Work-life balance always has to take priority. The more my employees and I feel as though our lives are out of balance, the more likely we will pay a physical and emotional price—and so will our business.

Mike Mannon: In times of intense growth, work-life balance is a priority, but home life definitely takes a hit. I feel like I'm better than I was at 30, or 40. When I'm at home, I want to make sure that I look my kids in the eyes as they're going off to school, try to give them a big hug and an "I love you." Same for my wife! It helps me breathe better when I have to duck back in to start the cycle of calls and meetings and decisions.

How do you model good work-life balance for your employees—meaning, how do you show them that as an owner, it’s possible to do a good job and still pay attention to other priorities?

Bauer: Especially as my business is growing, I find myself immersed in the day-to-day needs of the company—from finding and hiring talent to marketing the opportunities. It’s hard to break away even for an hour, much less for a vacation. However, I take all of my allotted three weeks of vacation time, and I encourage my employees to do the same. After a vacation, we come back to work feeling refreshed and more productive. 

Mannon: I’ve personally stopped cell phone use at family meal times. Also, I take one week of vacation a year to a location with no cell service. The Blue Ridge Mountains are my respite.

Biederman: The employees will only have work-life balance as healthy as the executives demonstrate. Consequently, it’s important for executives to spend some of their working time “secretly”—e.g., at home and not signed in to office communication software. This way, owners can get in all of their required working hours but without setting an “always on” example for the junior staff who will look to them for guidance.

If you observed that an employee was working himself or herself to burnout, what would you do?

Mannon: I have observed it, and it's tough. We're in an industry where, because of the travel and client demands, there are times during the year when there's very little down time. During those times, I ease off on the additional project work and try to be as supportive as possible. If we can bring in another consultant to give someone a break, we do it. I've learned the hard way that the bit of profit you lose is worth it. 

Bauer: I tell my employees who seem to be burned out to embrace the off button. Every phone, computer, etc., has an off button. It's there to be used. When you unplug and step back, you will start to experience one of life’s greatest treasures: perspective. You will think about problems you are wrestling with greater clarity. You allow yourself the freedom to be more analytical and less emotional when you step away and think versus just diving in and responding in the moment.

Biederman: We strongly encourage longtime employees to take vacations—true ones, where they really unplug totally. Many of the diehards will try to avoid these rules. But, typically with some coaching, junior folks will understand that investing in a quick break one to two weeks a year can make them materially more effective during the remaining 50 weeks.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

Do You Encourage Citizen Development?

Many leaders today are missing an opportunity. Their teams spend all day catering to business needs when in fact the business managers can and should be empowered to solve problems themselves.

There is an old saying that goes: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” IT leaders who facilitate low code rapid application development knowledge in employees outside IT greatly improve IT’s efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, they don’t do it nearly enough and spend a great deal of their time rushing around putting out fires with the few resources they have leaving little time for more strategic initiatives.

According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, a citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.

Citizen development is possible because end users now have the ability to build a variety of enterprise applications through model-driven platforms and cloud computing services. As long as users understand the principles behind application design and development, they do not have to learn the programming languages that were necessary in the past.

Here are five reasons IT leaders may want to re-consider sanctioning and even encouraging citizen development.

IT Demands Have Gotten Out of Hand

Most enterprise IT departments do not have enough resources to handle every request that comes in and must therefore prioritize by value to the overall business. This means that often, individual groups like accounting and marketing will have important requests put on the back burner while a short-staffed and overwhelmed IT group struggles to keep up. In fact, though, IT might not even be essential in developing solutions for these requests and is simply acting as a bottleneck.

IT Might Not “Get It” Anyway

Even if IT was to take on the request, who’s to say that the IT professional who accepts the project fully understands the requirements necessary to develop the most appropriate technology solution? A citizen developer who has deep subject matter expertise could use a low code platform for rapid application development to more quickly arrive at a solution that meets the department’s needs.

For more where this came from, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Balancing Business Realities with Employee Well-Being

Those who believe starting a business means fewer hours will probably find themselves mistaken. In reality, small-business owners may be some of the hardest working people in the world, regardless of industry or sector.

It can be especially difficult to sustain effective work-life balance when your business is growing and it feels as if there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Additionally, when the pace of business has picked up substantially, you and your employees may be feeling the pinch.

According to a 2015 Ernst & Young study, a third of full-time employees in some of the world’s largest economies say maintaining good work-life balance has become more difficult in the last five years.

Since a culture of good work-life balance can be established and encouraged from the top, I asked three small-business owners how they achieve work-life balance during growth periods and also how they model and promote healthy habits for their employees. Here are the insights William Bauer, managing director of Royce Leather Gifts in New Jersey, Rob Biederman, co-founder of Hourly Nerd in Boston, and Mike Mannon, president at WD Communications in Philadelphia, shared with us.

During times when your business is growing like gangbusters and it seems you’ll never get everything accomplished, is work-life balance still a priority for you?

Rob Biederman: Work-life balance is always difficult to maintain in hyper-growth mode. However, through long-term planning, I aim to maintain an average balance over the course of a year, even if there are certain weeks and months when work takes over a relatively unhealthy amount of time. I’ve tried to align my formal work breaks with periods of customer slowness—typically, August and late December holidays—to maximize selling time as a percent of my working year, and to be most impactful in those interactions.

William Bauer: Work-life balance always has to take priority. The more my employees and I feel as though our lives are out of balance, the more likely we will pay a physical and emotional price—and so will our business.

Mike Mannon: In times of intense growth, work-life balance is a priority, but home life definitely takes a hit. I feel like I'm better than I was at 30, or 40. When I'm at home, I want to make sure that I look my kids in the eyes as they're going off to school, try to give them a big hug and an "I love you." Same for my wife! It helps me breathe better when I have to duck back in to start the cycle of calls and meetings and decisions.

How do you model good work-life balance for your employees—meaning, how do you show them that as an owner, it’s possible to do a good job and still pay attention to other priorities?

Bauer: Especially as my business is growing, I find myself immersed in the day-to-day needs of the company—from finding and hiring talent to marketing the opportunities. It’s hard to break away even for an hour, much less for a vacation. However, I take all of my allotted three weeks of vacation time, and I encourage my employees to do the same. After a vacation, we come back to work feeling refreshed and more productive. 

Mannon: I’ve personally stopped cell phone use at family meal times. Also, I take one week of vacation a year to a location with no cell service. The Blue Ridge Mountains are my respite.

Biederman: The employees will only have work-life balance as healthy as the executives demonstrate. Consequently, it’s important for executives to spend some of their working time “secretly”—e.g., at home and not signed in to office communication software. This way, owners can get in all of their required working hours but without setting an “always on” example for the junior staff who will look to them for guidance.

For more where this came from, head over to the AMEX Open Forum for the full piece.

Building Business Within a Community

The seeds of community can be critical when it comes to choosing a location for a new brick-and-mortar business, and small-business owners are likely to rely on personal connections to develop and sustain a strong customer base.

Local ownership and even word of mouth, however, only go so far. Physical businesses should continually remind the community of their existence and engage in community outreach to help ensure a pipeline of new customers. I asked three local business owners how they reinforce the strong community ties that can ultimately lead to more sales: James DiSabatino, owner of Roxy’s Grilled Cheese in Boston; Cheryl Munoz, co-owner of Sugar Beet Food Co-op in Chicago; and Janet Schultz, owner ofBlue-J Eco-Friendly Small Office Cleaning in North Carolina.

James DiSabatino: We opened our first food truck in March of 2011. By 2014, we had a second truck and our first restaurant. We didn't have any money for promotion, so we relied strictly on social media to help spread the word.

Cheryl Munoz: We were everywhere all the time. Through our events, like an annual Edible Garden Tour, and cooking and growing classes, we built the Sugar Beet Food Co-op brand by bringing like-minded people together for skill-sharing and fun. We volunteered for other organizations, were present at community events and meetings, and established our presence as a partner in the community. 

Janet Schultz: Blue-J is a socially conscious business employing those on the Autism spectrum. When it was founded, I began networking with the Cabarrus Chamber of Commerce and a number of other local business organizations. I volunteered and participated in events with the Autism Society of North Carolina and Autism Speaks. I also hit the streets in a number of cold calls.

What ongoing activities do you engage in to stay on the community’s radar?

Munoz: Early on, we established a nonprofit organization, Sugar Beet Schoolhouse, which provides food literacy training and development throughout our community. By partnering with area service agencies, schools and businesses, we will continue to build on the goodwill and the groundswell of interest in local, sustainable food that we have fostered over the years. 

Schultz: Blue-J is a give-back company. As such, our employees often participate in volunteer work during their free time. We volunteer at dog washes, we help decorate downtown during the Christmas season, and we collect food for the hungry of Cabarrus County. Blue-J employees have spoken at rotary club meetings, and we had a presence at an Autism Speaks Town Hall meeting. We also held a client appreciation luncheon where we shared our business model with our present clients with the objective of seeking referrals from them.

DiSabatino: We participate in as many local events as we can, allowing people who would not normally try our food to do so. We also raise money for local organizations through ticket sales to the events. It's a win-win. 

For the rest of the interview, check out the AMEX Open Forum.

How to Steal Market Share from Your Competitors

Gaining market share is the process of growing your business by winning business from your direct competitors. To make this strategy work for you, you should first understand your rivals and why customers buy from them, and communicate to those customers why your offerings are more desirable.

Today’s small-business owners realize that to sustain momentum over time, it’s essential to be perceived as a major industry or geographical player and to have the numbers to support that status. I spoke with three owners—John Crossman, president of real estate firm Crossman & Company in Orlando, Florida; Eli Goodrich, CEO of Game Changer Sales in New York City; and Timothy Trudeau, CEO of Syntax Creative in San Diego—about how they approach the market share question.

Timothy Trudeau: [To] be honest with people, even when our competitor had a better offer. Also, sometimes people are willing to pay a little more if they know they are working with someone they can trust. Most industries are communities. People talk. If we didn’t come through for a client, others in our field would know. So we prided ourselves on doing what we said we’d do—and doing it better. Word of mouth has done more for me than anything else.

Eli Goodrich: I just designed a model and launched a unique service. I established ground by defining our company strategy and outlining our delivery tactics. Our prospects hear my vision and plans and that is what they focus on, not who else is in the market. After three years, we still have not faced a competition issue.  

John Crossman: At first, the strategy was survival. We wanted to find a small group of clients and serve them well. We still get repeat business from that core group of clients and continue to push ourselves to provide excellent service.

Have you managed to gain market share over time? Share a technique you’ve employed to make that happen.

Crossman: We are very focused. We don’t try to do everything. We handle leasing, management and investment sales for shopping centers. We don’t claim to be a generalist, and this has accelerated our growth.

Trudeau: I am in an extremely crowded space. Every month, the publications are talking about the flavor of the month and getting people excited about something new. But after the hype dies down, people go back to their normal lives and look for the quality and consistency that they've known and loved. I provide that consistency through active listening, which is simply regurgitating back to the person what they said in my own words. This makes it clear to the person that you are listening and that you understand.

Goodrich: We currently generate about $5 million in revenue. Our competitors’ revenue seems smaller or in line with ours. However, defining a specific market size is difficult due to the fractured nature of our target audience, which is composed mostly of startup or early-stage international companies. Also, many companies are not broadcasting that they use external teams to drive client acquisition.

What do you do on a daily basis to make sure you are the best at what you do in your industry or local area?

Goodrich: A rigorous schedule of education, study and prospecting is key to our success. I divide the day into these specific functions and rarely deviate from the plan. There are limits to time, but to be the best requires a balance of continual education and revenue growth.

Trudeau: I am a voracious reader. Books on business, leadership, economics, politics and history not only keep my attention, but they help me get better at my job. I’ve also assembled a team of people who are each good at something different. I'd rather have our creative director be in charge of making things look pretty than trying to do that [myself] while I am working on landing a large contract.

Crossman: My goal is simply to serve: serve my clients, serve my employees and serve the industry.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX Open Forum. 

Managing Workplace Conflict in a Small Business

When a small business grows and adds new employees to the team, inevitably there can be some friction. For entrepreneurs who may have worked on their own for a while, staff conflicts are new and not necessarily welcome developments.

The incidence and implications of workplace conflict have troubled leaders for a while. Back at the end of the last decade, Myers-Briggs publisher CPP Inc. commissioned a major study that found U.S. employees spent around three hours per week dealing with conflict. Twenty-five percent of employees reported that conflicts led to sickness or absenteeism, 9 percent said it led to task or "project failure," and 18 percent claimed they had witnessed people leaving their jobs because of conflict.

I reached out to three small-business owners to learn how they effectively manage staff disputes in their companies. Here’s what Hesam Meshkat, CEO of device resale company Guzu.com in New York City; Sarah Schupp, CEO of college resource company UniversityParent in Denver; and Jason Shah, CEO of meeting organization firmDo.com in San Francisco had to say.

What’s the most challenging staff dispute you’ve ever encountered? How did you cope with it?

Sarah Schupp: Sales and production often have tension, but in my organization it hit a breaking point because it was “us vs. them,” and [it] felt very toxic. Sales thought production wasn’t doing enough, and production felt the same way about sales. It was frustrating and took me years to figure out. We finally have a team that communicates openly and has mutual respect for what everyone brings to the table. We got there by defining our core values and vision for the company. Slowly, team members left if they didn’t match what we’d identified as central and non-negotiable behavior. We also resolved conflicts by being more open about everyone’s roles and responsibilities. We uncovered that much of the tension was around a lack of understanding about the different ways that everyone was contributing.

Hesam Meshkat: Our worst staff dispute occurred when we were restructuring our business model. Two employees felt their jobs were at risk and got into an argument born out of defensiveness. We resolved the conflict by assuring them that their roles were secure.

Jason Shah: I once managed a team on which there was frequent conflict between an introvert and a more aggressive employee. I worked with the latter team member to understand the implications of one's actions. After a level-headed conversation with all the parties involved, we were able to get on the same page and have more respectful team conversations.

What are your best practices for preempting employee altercations?

Meshkat: We cultivate a positive work atmosphere that revolves around transparency. We always tell our employees to discuss serious concerns with management so we can attend to them early and they don’t get out of hand.

Shah: The best way to preempt employee altercations is to simply have an inclusive culture. When people share values and a sense of purpose, altercations are few and far between.

 

46

Shares

 

These three business owners discuss how they keep workplace conflicts from damaging employee morale--and their bottom line.

JUNE 12, 2015 

When a small business grows and adds new employees to the team, inevitably there can be some friction. For entrepreneurs who may have worked on their own for a while, staff conflicts are new and not necessarily welcome developments.

The incidence and implications of workplace conflict have troubled leaders for a while. Back at the end of the last decade, Myers-Briggs publisher CPP Inc. commissioned a major study that found U.S. employees spent around three hours per week dealing with conflict. Twenty-five percent of employees reported that conflicts led to sickness or absenteeism, 9 percent said it led to task or "project failure," and 18 percent claimed they had witnessed people leaving their jobs because of conflict.

Big opportunities can make or break a business.

See how these small-business owners got the job done.

Go Now

OPEN Forum reached out to three small-business owners to learn how they effectively manage staff disputes in their companies. Here’s what Hesam Meshkat, CEO of device resale company Guzu.com in New York City; Sarah Schupp, CEO of college resource company UniversityParent in Denver; and Jason Shah, CEO of meeting organization firmDo.com in San Francisco had to say.

 

We finally have a team that communicates openly and has mutual respect for what everyone brings to the table. We got there by defining our core values and vision for the company. Slowly, team members left if they didn’t match what we’d identified as central and non-negotiable behavior.

What’s the most challenging staff dispute you’ve ever encountered? How did you cope with it?

Sarah Schupp: Sales and production often have tension, but in my organization it hit a breaking point because it was “us vs. them,” and [it] felt very toxic. Sales thought production wasn’t doing enough, and production felt the same way about sales. It was frustrating and took me years to figure out. We finally have a team that communicates openly and has mutual respect for what everyone brings to the table. We got there by defining our core values and vision for the company. Slowly, team members left if they didn’t match what we’d identified as central and non-negotiable behavior. We also resolved conflicts by being more open about everyone’s roles and responsibilities. We uncovered that much of the tension was around a lack of understanding about the different ways that everyone was contributing.

Sarah Schupp, CEO of UniversityParent

Hesam Meshkat: Our worst staff dispute occurred when we were restructuring our business model. Two employees felt their jobs were at risk and got into an argument born out of defensiveness. We resolved the conflict by assuring them that their roles were secure.

Jason Shah: I once managed a team on which there was frequent conflict between an introvert and a more aggressive employee. I worked with the latter team member to understand the implications of one's actions. After a level-headed conversation with all the parties involved, we were able to get on the same page and have more respectful team conversations.

What are your best practices for preempting employee altercations?

Meshkat: We cultivate a positive work atmosphere that revolves around transparency. We always tell our employees to discuss serious concerns with management so we can attend to them early and they don’t get out of hand.

Shah: The best way to preempt employee altercations is to simply have an inclusive culture. When people share values and a sense of purpose, altercations are few and far between.

Schupp: The best way is to hire based on values, and then continue to make values central to the culture. When an employee isn’t getting along with the rest of the team, it’s usually because their values are not aligned with the team’s values. But when everyone believes that we’re all operating under the same intentions, disputes are rare.

For the rest of the interview, check out the piece on the AMEX Open Forum.

Are You Properly Leveraging Your Retiring Boomers?

I've observed an interesting phenomenon. Condo sales in the town where my in laws live, West Palm Beach, were picking up. As someone who studies workforce trends, this is the opposite of what I expected to happen. The baby boomer generation, I thought, does not want to retire to Florida and play golf and mahjong all day. They want to stick around and keep contributing.

It turns out I had only part of that right. Boomers want to keep contributing, but they are buying up the condos so they can do it from a pleasant and relaxing climate. And today, when I read Joe Scott’s BizJournals article on boomer offboarding, I thought that perhaps we are finally starting to get it.

Scott points out that the last employer in a boomer’s career invests significant dollars in training, salary, retirement savings matches, and in some cases, healthcare. Therefore, it really doesn’t make sense to hand them the gold watch and say goodbye. How about encouraging them to work “from the lake?”

Retirees Are Talent for the Taking

Most retiring boomers have every intention of starting encore careers from a diverse array of physical locations, so why not leverage our investment and their knowledge to prevent a skills gap and worker shortage in our organizations? Once they are respectfully offboarded from full-time employment, boomers can act as external contractors, using technology like videoconferencing and virtual reality to work on individual projects, mentor employees, and advise senior leaders. As trusted resources that often have long histories with organizations, retired boomers are far less risky than brand new hires.

This approach to boomer retirement sounds obvious, so it’s surprising how little it’s actually used. According to a 2013 Aberdeen report that was referenced in SilkRoad’s Rhyme and Reason for Offboarding paper, only 29 percent of organizations have an offboarding program in place, and only 10 percent of offboarding programs are focused on retirees.

For more where this came from, check out the full post on the SilkRoad blog.