Recently I was at a Bootstrap Austin meeting and Bijoy (www.bootstrapaustin.com) led the discussion – What is Bootstrap?
Listen to the Pod Cast here:
Even more fun, I got to give my opinion first and got a great plug in for what BridgeATX does. Woohoo!
It is a 20 minute conversation, but it is well worth it if you want to talk about entrepreneurship. And as always Bijoy is an AWESOME speaker. 
Enjoy and have an awesome Memorial Day Weekend!
I am involved in a lot of different organizations in Austin.
One of the common issues that I see come up is trying to define exactly what the organization is and what the organization does for its members. An equally trying challenge is defining what the organization is not. Sometimes organizations have defined charters – but over time as officers and interested parties change the organizations change away from their charter. Or, the charter is reinterpreted.
I was just talking to a friend of mine. She was considering rejoining an organization for a very large amount of money. She was weighing out the pro’s of being a member versus just being a non-member and paying that price to attend the events. What she didn’t know was a recent discussion that I had had with the leader of that organization.
Recently, I was contacted by the organization in question because there was a sponsor for one of their events that was a competitor of mine. The sponsor had requested that no competitors attend this event. This organization had never made such a request of me (or anyone else that I know of). I have been to countless other events within this organization that were sponsored by competitors (there’s lots of recruiters out there).
This request upset me because the organization (which I also paid a hefty amount to become a member) had a tradition of holding networking events every month. However, due to a leadership change, there had been no networking events for several months. The only one so far this year (which was to be held late in April) was the event that I was asked not to attend. So, basically I had paid a bunch of money to not get to go to the only events that I wanted to attend.
I told the leader of this organization that he/she was sitting on a critical pivot point for their organization. This was supposed to be an organization that served its members. Now, all of a sudden in a blink of an eye the organization was now serving it’s event sponsors instead of its members. Sponsors were now being given the right to tell the organization which members could attend and which could not attend.
The excuse that was given to me was that the sponsor had paid a lot of money to sponsor the event. The sponsor has paid this money each year for the past 3 years. So, since this sponsor had been such a valuable sponsor they were going to meet the sponsor’s demands. How about the large sums of money that were being paid by its members?
I asked the leader of this organization whether the organization was there to help it’s members or whether it was there to provide a pool of people whom sponsors could pick from. I was given no clear answer other than the sponsor had full authority to do it for this event and the leader would go back to the board to find out what the policy should be going forward. I have not heard any response on this policy.
The other thing that is truly upsetting is that non of the membership of this organization know that a decision has been made in favor of a sponsor over an individual member. Slowly but surely this organization is changing out from under its members.
Yes, this organization does have other events. However, for a lot of other reasons the other events either don’t interst me – or I’m not allowed to attend because they are for a specific sub group of the membership to which I do not apply.
This particular organization had involved me in a discussion in December about how to increase membership. Lots of smaller businesses showed up to participate in the discussion. Our main complaint was that small businesses needed to have some way to be able to participate without having to shell out all the money that large businesses could easily afford. At that point I asked whether the organization was truly there to help small business members.
This organization is in crisis. In reality, this organization has been in crisis for some time.
I write this blog not to cause any ill will towards this organization. I have been very careful to leave out any details that could help you determine which organization it is.
Instead, I’m writing this to warn organizations how terribly important it is to define the mission for your organization and stick with that mission. If you stand by your mission, then people really can’t argue with you about what your organization is trying to do. You take it or leave it but you understand.
When you start to make decisions that are not in line with your mission, it causes bad blood and causes many people to become very upset. We all know how I feel about burning bridges.
It will be interesting to watch what happens with the organization in question over time.
This week was a real eye opener for me.
On Monday I was laid off from my job as a Technical Recruiter for a very large public staffing company. I was faced with the choice of starting a new business or going back to the Technical World that I had worked in for 12 years. Last summer, I had read the book “Eat, Pray, Love” and it inspired me to do what you love. My love was working with people to help them grow their businesses.
I decided to take the great leap of faith and start my own business. I could always go back to technology later if it didn’t work out. I assessed my strengths and came up with my new business.
I am a born networker. When I was little I used to spend my time talking to grownups at all of my parents parties. Children who were around my age had nothing interesting for me to learn. Grownups and their stories fascinated me. As I grew older I did whatever I could to never forget a friend’s birthday (no facebook reminders then). If I moved or a friend moved I tried my best to keep up with them. This was long before the days of the internet where an email address could travel with you wherever you went. I felt an intense need to connect.
As I got older I found that I may not know the answer to everything (okay, I knew the answers to very few things) but I knew who I needed to go to to find the answer I was looking for (this was before Google). I was able to pair people together in order to drive a solution. Naturally, I am a bridge builder, hence the name Bridge Austin (BridgeATX).
The next question became “how do I make money doing what I love to do”.
I had already found that I loved technical staffing. It allowed me to put a special slant on the staffing model since I had already worked so many roles that I was now staffing (BA, PM, Developer, QA, Implementation, Support, Data Mining, etc). I was able to look at the candidate and decide if I were my client would I want them to work for me. I also received great satisfaction from helping to make the connection between two needs. One need being a client who needed an employee who could fill their role perfectly and the other need being the job seeker who needed a job that they were going to love.
I also needed to add in my love for meeting people and finding out what they do. The more people I met, the more connections I was able to make. If someone were to tell me – “I need to move my business” - I would immediately think of all the people I knew who could help make that happen. I know companies who lease commercial real estate, who give commercial real estate loans, who do the physical move, who rent (or sell) the office furniture, who set up the wiring, who print the business cards with the new addresses, who ………
This all lead me to decide to start my Business Bridge Building Business (say that 5 times fast). For the time being I know that I want to continue to be involved in Technical Staffing. There are just too many people out there who need that right now. However, I also want to become know for the goto person for anyone with a business problem looking for a solution by partnering with another business.
So, that’s where I’m sitting now.
Wish me luck!
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