A couple of things I wanted to share tonight…

I found Family Matters Radio on the internet and after listening to a couple of interviews by Caroline and Jacquie, I just knew I wanted to talk with these dynamic women! We had a fun conversation - check out our radio interview (scroll down to the audio portion)…

I’ve also been participating in a lot of interviews lately which have recently landed on Nielsen’s Small Business Resource Center, Entrepreneur Magazine, and even my home-town Baltimore Sun! Check out Make Your Marketing Plan Matter along with all the other great small-business resources they have there as well as Small Businesses Can Make Performance Reviews Positive Experiences. I was able to get a book mention in Entrepreneur magazine story called The Brighter Side: Transforming a Negative Experience into a Positive Business Idea (sounds like me, doesn’t it!?), but I am looking forward to seeing the quote in print (it looks small on the internet!). As the list keeps growing, keep checking on my Press page to see what’s new.

There was a lot of good stuff that didn’t make it into the articles so I am guessing I am going to have to expand on these in the future…

Whether you are a parent or not, you have had to make choices between personal and professional. Read my guest blog over at my friend Ponn Sabra’s blog on how I make those choices. And while you’re there, take a look at the cool tools she has to offer entrepreneurs for marketing over the internet through her EmpowerWomenNow.com website. Her e-book on creating a search-engine optimized press release is chock-full of valuable insight!

An article today in the USA Today “Work or Stay at home: It’s Still Quandary For Moms” re-sparked the age-old mommy wars. Why does the press see it as only a two-sided choice? Let’s get the debate REALLY started!

First of all, a war requires two parties to disagree. I have a lot of friends who stay at home with their kids and I have a great respect for them. I don’t judge them because they made a different choice in life and they don’t judge me for working, at least as far as I know. If we would just quit worrying about what other people think, the other side would get tired and leave us alone. After all - no one likes to pick a fight where the other party isn’t fighting back, such as how Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, handled an insensitive remark from a colleague. It could have started a war. In response, she simply smiled, brushed it off, and focused on getting home to see her boys. I believe the reason she was able to do that so easily is that she is at peace with her own decision to continue not only working after having kids, but running a successful software company. If more women were at peace with their own decisions there would be no war.

Secondly, it consistently amazes me that most of these “Mommy War” reports leave out the option exercised by so many women to start their own business. Granted, not all moms are cut out to run a business but I maintain that there are a lot more women out there who haven’t realized they fit the bill as a “woman entrepreneur” yet. Do they see it as ‘unattainable?’ It is hard, to be sure, but if you find the right path it is SOOOOO worth it! And for those naysayers who say you can’t be a good mom and be serious about your business…tune ‘em out like Sabrina did!

I am sitting here watching one of my all-time favorite movies “A League of their Own.” In addition to being really funny, it has some great quotes to inspire entrepreneurs and other success-driven people.

• To achieve the incredible you have to attempt the impossible. Wow - SOOO true! How many times do we let the obstacles keep us from even starting something?
• There’s no crying in baseball. I love this one, too. It’s OK to have a pity party, but at times you need some tough love. My equivalent to some of the women entrepreneurs I work with is “put your big girl panties on and deal with it!” Same thing although coming from Tom Hanks it does sound a little better.
• It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, anyone could do it. It’s the hard that makes it great. Bingo. Building a business is hard. Achieving your dreams is hard. But that is what makes the accomplishment all the sweeter. Remember that next time you reach a gut-check or it gets too hard. How bad do you want it?

The added bonus of this movie for me is it was the last movie I watched with my dad a week before he died. The cancer had moved to his brain and he had trouble understanding subtle humor, but the outright funny scenes and one-liners in this movie made him laugh. To this day, it makes me laugh and cry - sometimes at the same time. What a great gift.

Here are a couple of interviews that have been posted online that I wanted to share with everyone:

Growing your Business, interview with Fred and Lyna. Since neither Fred nor Lyna are parents, this is an interesting discussion about being an entrepreneur and how non-parents can relate.

B-Net: Useful Commute: Parenting Skills Can Help Your Business, interview with Carmine Gallo of Gallo Communications. At just under 8 minutes, this one is a short but sweet look at applying parenting skills to your business, whether it is your own or you work for someone else. Please listen to it and if you like it, recommend it to others!

ADDENDUM on 9/10: This one from Work at Home Moms Talk Radio just posted today. And thanks to Kelly McCausey for her fun interview and book give away!

Great Labor Day reading: Fortune Magazine reported that the UN published a survey that found only 18% of American’s are clocking in over 48 hours per week. This suggests to me a couple of things:

• Being productive and getting more done in less time was not counted nor is valued
• No one surveyed entrepreneurs or small business owners
• Someone thinks running a family is a leisure activity

In addition to waving caution because we don’t appear to be working enough, the article also pointed out that we have, on average, 117 hours of ‘leisure’ time per week. Note that that includes sleep (because sleep is optional?). So if we take out the weekend (assuming we actually don’t work over the weekend), we’re left with 13.8 hours a day for sleep and non-work activities. Assuming you’re lucky enough to get the recommended 8 hours of sleep per night, you have 5.8 hours per day when you’re not working or not sleeping. I have to assume that running kids to soccer practice, preparing dinner, or commuting to work is also included in that paltry 5.8 hours. When did those tasks become leisurely? Any women entrepreneurs want to weigh in on that?

I believe the bottom line points to Americans taking a more integrated approach to work and life. We value productivity and believe we can be valuable at work and have a life (some call this work/life balance, though I before to see it as creating a sustainable life). We may not be punching the time clock as often as other countries, but it would also be interested to look at what type of work those other countries such as Peru and South Korea are doing.

ADDENDUM: From the same report, a different take on it. The Buffalo News reports the findings from the UN report as “Americans are more productive than any other country.” Unfortunately I can not locate the report on the web (nor did either article link to it!) so I can not draw my own conclusions, but such is the challenge with the press…it is all in the spin!

An article published in The New York Times Last week about Family-Leave Values reassured me that my choice to become an entrepreneur was the right one. It detailed some very depressing cases where people have been let go from their jobs because they were parents. What has this world come to when people are penalized for doing what comes, uh, naturally? Apparently even those who don’t have kids are not safe, either. People have been fired for taking off work to care for a sick spouse or an ailing parent. Some businesses are starting to get it, but it may just be up to us small businesses and entrepreneurs to show them how we bring in profits while caring for our employees.

When I started my first company 12 years ago, my goal was to prove that you could build a (highly) profitable company and honor people’s needs for work/life balance, including my own. We were successful and won several state and national awards for our creative attention to our employee’s needs. I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t always easy. There were several lessons we learned along the way that other companies, even the very small ones, can learn from:

1. Work/life considerations must come from the top. Building a company that respects the fact that there is more to life than work requires top-level commitment. It has to trickle down through all ranks of managers from the highest to the lowest.
2. Measurements must reflect the company’s commitment to results, not “face time.” Where possible, we had to make sure we valued results, not time in the office. This was especially important for remote workers.
3. Managers must be trained to manage flexible work schedules. Not everyone knows instinctively how to manage for results or measure productivity instead of accounting for hours. We found that we had to train our manager in how to manager people remotely and how to develop work plans and goals that reflected what we really wanted in our business – a contribution to our bottom line – rather than just showing up.
4. You must be able to say ‘no.’ In our business, not every position was conducive to a flexible work schedule. Some jobs really did have to be present in the office and we had to be prepared to make that call. It can not be flexibility at all costs.
5. Policies must be formalized and administrated fairly. Finally, because we sometimes said no, we had to have our policies documented and monitor the implementation for fairness. Any flexible work schedule request that came in had to be reviewed by the employee’s manager’s manager to make sure we were staying consistent and fair.

The benefits of looking after our employees can be monetized by low turnover rate. The cost to hire and train new people is high and it is more economical to keep good people, not to mention the negative impact high turnover can have on morale. By building certain philosophies into the very culture of our companies, we can set a new standard for running profitable businesses that recognize employees as people with lives outside of work.

Marci Alboher knows me. We’ve never met, but it is clear from her new book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work / Life Success (Warner Books) that she has my number.

Although not specifically a book about entrepreneurs, Marci’s book speaks directly to me as a ParentPreneur. She introduces a new term –slash – which makes me an author/consultant/speaker in slash-speak. Most entrepreneurs I know, especially women entrepreneurs, are slashes, too.

The slash idea, as Marci has so aptly observed, is about recognizing our own personal complexity and embracing the multiplicity of our passions. It is about designing our own life by not being afraid to follow our dreams, even when they take us down seemingly unrelated paths at the same time. How often does trying to raise a family and build a business seem like divergent paths? But yet we continue on and find ways to make it work.

In this engaging book Ms. Alboher, who herself is a slash as an author/journalist/speaker, shares stories of how other people – with a chapter dedicated to working parents - make their slash lives work and offers tips for aspiring business owners on the personal side of what is needed to survive as someone who carries multiple business cards. So if your answer to the question “What do you do?” depends on who is asking or you have various interests you hesitate pursuing because you don’t think they fit well together, you may be a slash, too. Marci’s book will entertain you with stories of others who are slashes and enlighten you with ways to successfully juggle your particular present/future/desired interests.

Last week after we returned home from our vacation, my daughter and I went to our local Border’s book store to see my book on the shelves. Imagine our surprise and my embarrassment when my book was no where to be found. When I inquired at the information desk, I was given someone else to follow up with. I hid my dismay from my daughter, but knew I had to do something about it. I really wanted her to see it on the shelf. Ok, I really wanted to see it, too.

As soon as I got home, I called and e-mailed the contact name I had been given and then waited patiently. In my e-mail I explained that not only was I a LOCAL author, but that I profiled several successful entrepreneurs from across the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area. Less than 24 hours after my request, I received a reply. Not only had the local contact responded, but because Wiley is my publisher, she had contacted the national account and event manager. They expressed an interest in not only getting my books into their stores (I found out it was in some area stores), but they wanted to work with my publisher to put together an area-wide book signing tour. So I went from not even having my book in my local store to planning an area-wide campaign. See what happens when you ask?! Don’t ever forget that YOU are your best advocate. If you don’t go for what you want and deserve, no one else will do it for you! What have you got to lose!?

I received an e-mail from a young (20-something) woman, newly married and no kids (that she knows of). She had read an advanced copy of my book and got so much more out of it than she (or I) had expected! Without going into the details, she had been receiving pressure from her family about quitting her job when she became a mom. After reading my book, she says she “finally feels released of that pressure.” She went on to say that The ParentPreneur Edge was one of those “…rare ‘reads’ that moved (her) and allowed (her) to learn and grow in ways that (she) truly believes will have an amazingly positive impact on her future.” Wow. I literally cried when I read that. THAT is why I wrote the book - to have a positive impact on others, though admittedly I imagined parents getting the most out of the book. Who knew?! You don’t have to be a parent to get it. That is better than any good book review or media coverage. That is real!