Peek Inside Love Made Visible

This popular book offers dozens of stories of true callings discovered, tough job markets navigated, businesses launched, expanded and reinvented… a rich buffet of dreams fulfilled. not with magic, but with replicable methods you can employ yourself.  With spirit, strategy, support and structure, Alanna’s clients thrive!  The Table of Contents is directly below, or you may skip down to a sample chapter called Employee to Entrepreneur to Enterprise.

Love Made Visible:
Values-Driven Approaches to Work/Life

Table of Contents

Praise for Love Made Visible

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction: The Love- & Values-Driven How and Why of the Work/Life Who and What You Are About to Read

Ch 1: Jump and the Net Will Appear: Moving Your Career Forward Before You Know Where You Are Going

Ch 2: Frustrated Fabulous Artists: Creative Career Paths

Ch 3: Fast Tracks: Type A Overachievers and Work/Life in the C-Suite

Ch 4: Letters After Your Name: Credentialing and Confidence

Ch 5: Making Lemonade (…When You Think Your Job Is a Lemon But Leaving Isn’t an Option)

Ch 6: No Draft Picks, Just Many First Rounds: Life as a Free Agent

Ch 7: Employee to Entrepreneur to Enterprise… Oh My!

Ch 8: Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Workplace Relationships for Better or for Worse

Ch 9: Blessings in Disguise: Stories of Career Death and Rebirth

Afterword

About the Author

Love Made Visible Keynotes and Workshops

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Chapter Seven
Employee… to Entrepreneur… to Enterprise… Oh My!

The process of becoming yourself, of awakening your audacity and dreaming a bigger dream than you have ever allowed yourself before, is delicious exhilaration – for the one becoming, yes, but equally so for those of us privileged to bear witness.  My practice has always included working with entrepreneurs, both emerging and established, and it brings me great joy to be able to serve their visions.  Entrepreneurs are exciting and excitable: they grab onto ideas and run with them, full tilt, no thought but making it to the end zone… which is a tremendous gift most of the time.   Occasionally, as they make their headlong touchdown play, they suddenly become aware of the expectations of the roaring crowds, or the six or eight defensive players from the other team heading straight for them, and they briefly take their head out of the game.  Naturally, that’s exactly where a good coach comes in (…and this brings us to the end of the football metaphor interlude because we’ve exhausted my knowledge of the game!)

Like Free Agency, unless you grew up in a family business, entrepreneurship involves stepping way out of familiar territory to chart an entirely new course, learning to tolerate feeling like the ground is shifting under you and finding your centre of balance within you instead of somewhere out in the world.

This chapter explores two stories: one a transition from employment to entrepreneurship; the second a larger leap from entrepreneurship to a true enterprise, embracing Michael Gerber’s oft-quoted idea that you’re not really in business until the operation makes money whether you are there or not.  Business is tough enough; living in conscious alignment with your values every day is even tougher.  Running a consciously values-driven business, a social venture?  I stand completely in awe.  When you experience the stories of the following clients, I predict you will, too.

~~~

When I began working with Meredith, I knew that we would do great things together.  I liked her immediately; fortunately, the feeling was mutual, and we developed an instant rapport as we found ourselves finishing each other’s sentences from the get-go.  She was already the kind of woman who would succeed if she chose to no matter what she did: smart, articulate, beautiful in a gentle, unassuming way, yet also determined in an assertive and daring way.  So why did she even call me, you might ask?  If it’s not clear from the other chapters by now (or if you’re dipping and dabbling into the book in whatever order you choose), my clients tend to be people who have been blessed with considerable gifts and have mastered many of the arts of using them.  There is no deficit or dysfunction here: the work is about actualizing human potential.  And Meredith knew that she could do more of what she wanted and be more of herself if she got some outside perspective, a few fresh ideas, a little strategy… and some help dealing with her fears of success so that she would, in fact, “choose to” live the life she imagined for herself.  Yup, that’s what I said: fears of success.

We all know – experientially and intuitively – that it is common for people at all stages of life to fear failure.  Being vulnerable, putting ourselves out there, and possibly not measuring up, being found wanting… we know what it feels like to want to avoid something, even if it’s something we want very much, to avoid the risk that we might fail.  What fewer of us realize is that we can be just as afraid of success – often in the very same instance – paralyzing ourselves with damned if we do/damned if we don’t scenarios.  Meredith had left her job as a junior public relations consultant about a year and a half before we started working together.  She had been grossly underpaid and underappreciated for what she had been doing, but was a strategic enough thinker to realize that it was a good move for her to suck it up in that company for a few years because they had been around for decades, weathered at lot of industry ups and downs, and would teach her the ropes in a pretty short period of time: PR Bootcamp, we later came to call it.  When Meredith sat down with me for the first time, she had just landed a substantial contract with a $5M/year corporation, a small client compared to the accounts she had handled in her previous firm but a very big deal for her small business, and she had made the very bold move of hiring an assistant to help her with research and project coordination.  She was excited, happy, looking for an edge to help her speed up this steep growth curve and get to the next level.  We talked about her 3-5 years goals (downtown offices; six or seven people working under her; a well-deserved reputation for delivering value and results that drew larger and more substantial clients to her each year), her strengths (quick thinking, creativity, well-tended relationships in media and communications, thoroughness, integrity), and her strong desire to work with the right kind of people – as she put it, not just spin doctoring to clean up the corporate image of any company who could pay, but more of a naturopath, optimizing wellness for businesses with heart.  A woman after my own heart, both in values and metaphors!

I told Meredith I thought that she presented a great foundation to build on and I was very excited to be working with her.  “This is going to be great!  So, where shall we start?  Operations?  Sales?  HR?”  I bubbled enthusiasm.  Meredith looked at the floor.

“Well, hmm,” I tried again, gentler this time, “I suppose we could start more micro and specifically look at how you would like to manage the relationship with this one new client?”  Meredith shuffled her feet.  The woman who came into my office was rapidly shrinking before my eyes.  Another looong minute ticked by.

“There’s a lot to do, isn’t there?”  I noted softly.  Meredith played with the button on her cuff.

“So much potential.”  I was speaking almost inaudibly now – almost, but not quite.  She was listening.  “People expect an awful lot.”

Tears began to slowly trickle down Meredith’s cheeks.  We just sat together for ten or fifteen minutes, me doodling a little, passing a kleenex, Meredith  letting her tears fall.  Finally she said, “I see so clearly where this can go.  I’m so lucky.  This is an amazing opportunity.  People I went to school with, my team from my old company – they’d give anything to do what I’m doing.  My God, I’m only 30 years old and I have an assistant!  Do you know how long I have wanted an assistant?!  But now I have a payroll to meet.  And so I landed [ABC Company].  Great!  But now I have this client who is fully aware that he’s the largest on my roster.  He’ll be calling my cell phone on Sundays soon.  He knows he owns me.  I pay my mother’s mortgage.  I take care of my brother’s kid’s braces.  I have another proposal to do this week.  It never stops.  I want this, I do.  SO much!  Yet I still don’t know if I want it enough.”

“Sounds more like you don’t know if you want it to be like that.  Or, really, I think you know you don’t, don’t you?”  Meredith nodded.

“The decision is whether you can believe that you can let it be different, whether you can create a kind of success that you get to experience the way you want it to be,” I said.

“Yes.”

“How about we decide, together, right here and now, to believe that you can?  That exactly that is possible.  You decide what success looks like, you create it.”  Meredith looked at me long and hard before replying, “You’ve really done this before?  Because sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. I should want this – it’s everything I ever wanted.  It’s just not happening quite like I thought it would.  I mean… seriously… I mean, you’ve done this before?  Helped people succeed even when they sometimes lose touch, sometimes don’t even want to but then they do, want to, I mean, again?  Oh, God, I’m not making sense.  I don’t even know what I mean.  I guess, it’s just, I mean, seriously, have you. . .?”

I leaned toward Meredith, put my hand on her wrist, looked into her eyes: “I seriously have.”  Meredith held my gaze for a full thirty seconds and then said, “Let’s start with operations.”

Over the next year and a half, meeting weekly for three months and then on alternate weeks from there, Meredith and I spent a lot of time detailing her mission and vision for her company, building a manual of systems for client relationship management, account protocols, proposal templates.  We developed a profile of her ideal client and questions she would ask herself to determine whether or not she should pursue certain projects or say yes when work was offered.  We turned that profile into an assessment tool to be administered to every client, something her assistant could also learn to do, freeing Meredith up for other things.  We analyzed her sales cycle and figured out the steps she went through in the very best client relationships and developed a formula to replicate those relationships in her handling of new clients.  We took apart Meredith’s schedule and set “time zones” for certain types of work travel, meetings, writing, mentoring her assistant, self care, and her social life. With each step Meredith’s confidence increased.  She never got over the occasional need to ask why on earth she was doing this, whether she was still on her right path – those questions don’t go away, Dear Reader!  Answering them just becomes matter-of-fact instead of matter-of-panic – but she did get to a place where she knew that the impulse to ask the question stemmed from a fear of being overwhelmed, and was a valuable early warning indicator that she needed to create a bit more space for herself, schedule in some break time, reward and appreciate herself for all she was doing.  There is no point in being self-employed if your boss is still a slave-driver!  Helping my entrepreneur clients implement employee engagement strategies for their own retention is some of the most fun I ever get to have!

Two years later, Meredith had promoted her first assistant and hired two more, one full time and one part time, and she’d landed several more $5M – $10M clients.  One day, when I was sending a quick note to her to thank her for referring a new client for me, I asked Meredith what part of our work she had found most valuable.  She said her answer surprised her – but it didn’t surprise me.  In our second session, when she had come in with spreadsheets and marketing plans and four cross-referenced job descriptions we could use to benchmark her new assistant’s role, I asked her to do a journal entry for homework for me.  It’s an assignment I give to most of my clients, and it never fails to work out best for those who like it the least.  (Meredith, if you’re wondering, hated it.)

Here’s how we got started:

Alanna to Meredith: “Go home tonight, take a hot bath, put on your coziest clothes and make yourself whatever drink is most soothing to you…”

Meredith: “What, like wine?  I shouldn’t drink on a weeknight.”

Alanna: “Tea.  Cocoa.  Wine, if it’s what you find most relaxing.  Hot water and lemon, whatever.  Then get out your journal…”

Meredith: “I don’t have a journal.”

Alanna: “Stop on the way home and pick up a nice, bound notebook you can use as a journal and then take a hot bath…”

Meredith: “Then I have to stop and clean my bathtub, too.”

(Some people need more help with the relaxing part of this than others, and that’s okay.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  As it should be.  I knew Meredith went someplace to get manicures and massages sometimes so I tried another tack.)

Alanna: “Okay, then, make an appointment at your favourite spa, soak in their hot tub, use their steam room, breathe in the  lavender and eucalyptus and then go to their lounge area with your journal and write the following…”

Meredith: “I can’t…”

Alanna: “Sure you can.”

Meredith: “But…”

Alanna: “We made a deal that if you could not see how it would hurt you, in body or integrity, you’d at least try any suggestion I made in good faith, remember?  I’m not asking you to walk the plank.  It’s a SPA!  A little notebook & some writing!  I think we both know you can handle it.”

Meredith (giggling): “What do I do?”

Alanna: “Write today’s date, two years from now, in the top right corner.  This is your journal of the future, the future you desire, the one you are creating now.  It will be a summary of all of our work together.  Begin like this: ‘I almost can’t believe how far I’ve come, or how easy it all turned out to be once I let it.’  And then write all the wonderful things you will have done, all the successes you will have enjoyed, all the comfort and ease you will feel, by the time we have travelled these next two years.”

This conversation had to be repeated three times because weeks went by and Meredith kept not doing her homework.  “I couldn’t get an appointment in a spa,” came the first excuse.  I don’t know where you live, but here in Vancouver there is a spa on just about every urban corner and a few tucked into some industrial areas as well.  We are the most buffed, exfoliated, plumped and massaged generation of women – and men, in fact – that ever lived.  I googled a spa directory, printed the page and told her to pick one by the following week.  And when the next week came, the excuse was: “Writing in the future is silly.  It’s too woo-woo.  I feel goofy.”  Okay, you can feel goofy, no problem – it’s still your homework, so you do it feeling goofy.  “I don’t write in journals.”  It’s just paper and pen.  Use a computer if you want – just get it done.   Then came the phone calls: “Alanna, I know we’re supposed to meet tomorrow but I have a deadline and I won’t be able to make it…”  Back and forth, excuses and drama, until, almost five weeks after we first talked about it, Meredith finally brought me a ten page journal entry, slapping the book on my desk with a “There!  I hope you’re happy!”

And I was.

What follows is an abbreviated but representative condensation of that journaling:

I can’t believe how far I’ve come.  When Alanna bullied me into writing this damn journal entry two years ago, I thought the whole thing was completely lame and couldn’t see why or how it would do me any good.

(Nice to get the hostility out on the table right from the start, don’t you think? I always tell my clients when we get going that there may be days they don’t like me as much as today, and that’s okay.  If they like me every minute, I’m probably not doing my job to nudge them out of their comfort zones.)

I can’t stand being someone who won’t do her homework, though, so eventually I had to give in and do it.  I wrote about how my business grew without sucking the life out of me, and how I reconnected with what I liked about my work and taking it to the next level, even though I still didn’t believe I could do that.  Once I got going, it turned out to be easier than I thought (she’s making me say that!)  Each meeting or piece of homework made a little more sense than the last, and each time I went out on a limb and did something I wasn’t sure would work or didn’t think I was ready for, I was pleasantly surprised.

(Meredith went about 4 pages like this, just working up to the idea that this journal would be an okay thing to do, ‘meta-journaling’ about the idea of the journal, and then eventually breaking through and beginning to write the actual contents of the journal itself.)

I started to feel more confident about my work with my new clients.  I got tons of creative ideas and my work just began to flow.  My assistant took on all the details and administrative stuff that can get me bogged down so I could focus on the campaign management work I really enjoy, and she took an interest in learning more about account management as well, so she could pitch in, in a meaningful way, as workload increased.  Pretty soon I was earning double what I was earning the previous year, and more easily taking care of all the people in my life who need me.  I was afraid that I would be overwhelmed by all the responsibility, that I would drown in the pressure, but I eventually began to relax and know the growth would kind of take care of itself and I would have plenty of stability. I just needed to remind myself to relax into it.  Cool!  My second assistant came on board just 9 months after my first, like a new baby.  A huge step but definitely the right one.  We got slammed with a bunch of new clients just heading in the New Year and worked some crazy hours to make it all happen but it was so worth it.  We pulled together as a team, figured out how to be a company and work at this level.  It was trial by fire and I loved it!  Good people doing a hard thing well.  I forget sometimes that it’s what I love but that year I remembered.  By summer I was ready for a break and I took my first ever two week vacation since going out on my own>  Left the whole company to C and J to run.  I was so scared, but they stepped up and made it all work.  They even put together a proposal for a new client and landed it all on their own!  In the second year, coming up on my fourth as a business owner, I made a commitment to running a healthy business on every level and hired a nutritionist and trainer to work with our whole team and we all ran a 10K together that Fall.  We all lost the weight we gained eating donuts while writing press releases the previous winter, and felt stronger than ever. Pretty soon my life started looking so good I felt like I’d been silly to be so worried: it was really just a matter of one step at a time, focusing on the big picture, doing what works over again and refining it.  I felt solid, smart and very lucky.  At the end of the year, we had done record profits and I was able to offer profit-sharing to my team, do some renovations on my condo, put my 15 year-old Toyota Tercel to sleep and buy the Jeep that I’ve always wanted, with a roof rack for my bikes and camping gear and space in the back for friends and dogs.  I love my clients and I love my life!  I have come a LONG way!

I smiled as Meredith and I revisited her experience.  It was now about five years after she wrote that journal, our first work term together over, followed by a three year break, then another nine months together as she tackled setting up new offices and change managing expansion to include three more people on her full time staff and a month-long trip to Southeast Asia.  So what made the exercise so powerful?

“Doing it – or really not doing it for so long – made me realize how afraid I was to dream.  Like if I put everything I wanted down on paper, I would have to do it.  It would be all about keeping up and I’d feel even more pressure.  It would be even more work.  But then we kept talking about my business, this homework, my life really, being my project, mine to create.  Which meant I could decide to create it as doable, manageable.  Hard work and long hours, yes – I don’t mind that.  But not drowning in pressure, all stressed out.  I could feel like I was getting somewhere.  And the very best part of the journaling came way later, when I would pick it up, re-read it and realize how much of that I accomplished.  We did about 80% of what we set out to do in that first year and a bit alone, way more than I would have done if I hadn’t trusted enough to lay it all out.  Now I write a journal like that at the beginning of every year.  It sets my course and keeps me there.”

I have no doubt that Meredith will soon be running a major enterprise – if she chooses.  She has everything she needs to make it happen.

~~~

Antonio is a client who came to me when he had about 20 people working for him, most of them subcontractors in his software development company which provided custom, web-based inventory management systems for large manufacturers, importers and exporters.  I don’t for a minute understand the lines of code Antonio writes or the Six Sigma-inspired warehousing and distribution systems his clients require.  Fortunately, I do understand inspiring dreams, and Antonio’s dream touched me deeply.

Antonio wanted to have enough growth and stability in his organization that he could turn a core team of contractors into full time salaried employees, expand sales and systems, buy a building for their offices, give shares in the company to a few key people, develop those employees into leaders over a few years, and then sell them the company in installments, working less and less himself until the company buy-out became his retirement/pension plan.  Oh, is that all?!?   Antonio knew what he valued from the beginning: people, teams, quality, longevity, heart. The problem as he saw it, the gap between his considerable skills and intention and the manifestation of his dream, is that the business wasn’t really scalable yet.  He had over a hundred small-to-medium sized clients but what he would need to really put a foundation under the company’s growth is to have three or four really big, probably multinational, corporate clients who entered into long term contracts which generated revenue every month in software customizations, training, and technical support.

Antonio was clear, confident and ready to get down to work, so we put together a plan to manage his time so he could carve out eight hours per week to work on his ‘big fish’ goals while maintaining his current responsibilities. We reviewed a previous year’s worth of Requests-for-Proposal (RFPs) to see what his client companies were looking for, and strategized the capacity-building he would need to do to handle the workload when he big clients came on board.  We evaluated the performance of all of his contractors and identified which ones seemed like the best candidates to be his first full time, permanent employees, and sought legal counsel on his corporate structure and employment agreements.  Finally, the first ‘big deal’ RFP was written and he made it through the screening round to have an opportunity to present his offerings in person to the management team at a large and well-known corporation.  So, naturally, that’s when all the resistance Antonio had ever felt about his business came pouring out to knock our carefully laid plans well off the rails!

“I can’t work with people like that!” Antonio exploded as his presentation date loomed. “They’re all put together.  Their expectations. . . I mean. . . I can’t. . . I mean. . . Well, %$#!  I can never fit in, not in that world!”

Antonio was not a man given to profanity; in fact, he was circumspection itself as I knew him.  I sat up a little: I knew this was going to be a good day for his business.  “What world?”  I asked.

“With those corporate dragons!” he blurted incredulously, like I must be terribly dense because everyone sees anyone with an office and a pinstripe suit somewhere in their closet as a character out of King Arthur’s court or Harry Potter.  I smiled.  The choice of images here is actually highly instructive.  The stage of work/life development at which Antonio found himself was a place I see my clients pass through often – and by that I mean revisiting or cycling through often for each one of them, not just once each by a volume of clients.  Nope, dragon-land is a regular stopping place.  How long and how often we stop is all about what we do when we get there.

“Here’s what I see,” I said.  “In fifteen years of walking alongside people while they sort out their goals and pursue different career and business paths, I’ve noted one, and really only one, major difference between the people who eventually break through barriers and soar to great heights and those who stay more stuck.  People who go farther and live deeper have found more of a comfort level with fear, and with ambiguity.  The people you think are more successful – and let’s be clear that I don’t accept the premise that simply having a corporate job or earning a certain dollar figure equates with success, even subjectively, but let’s just accept, lightly, some hypothetical shared understanding of what work/life success is – those people have all the same fears and doubts and baggage as anyone else.  They have just learned how to recognize fear as a frequent companion on their journey, rather than something to be rid of before they can move forward, thus they don’t get stopped as often or for as long as many other people do.”

“Great. So successful people like fear?”  Antonio mumbled cantankerously under his breath.

“Well, yeah,” I mused, noting not for the first time how few words it sometimes takes to make my point.  “Successful people have learned to like fear.  Some have gone so far as to make fear a best friend or close associate, understanding that excitement and challenge are often equal parts desire and fear, and it’s the prospect of facing our fear that charges us as much as any other part of the experience we seek.  And those other successful people, probably the lion’s share of the group, while not sold on becoming bosom buddies, have at least learned to like fear enough to pass some time with it, like a co-worker or acquaintance.  Fear is at least not intolerable to them.”

“So the rest of us won’t let fear be our friend.”  Yup.  Antonio was really catching on.  And his succinctness impressed the hell out of me.

“So how come it feels like we have to fight it?”  he puzzled.  I wish I had good answer for that one.  Many people smarter than I have devoted their lives to cultural anthropology and similar studies to look at where human beings have filed ‘fear’ in their social vernacular.  They haven’t come to complete consensus, and I can’t begin to do justice to their research.  What I can say is that many societies make a dance with fear part of a rite of passage to help a young person learn how to move forward in life: think Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces or the solitary vision quests of Aboriginal peoples.  And that’s where Antonio’s first analogy becomes so apt: the dragon.  When we learn to walk with fear instead of fighting it, we move forward with a companion a little closer to Puff, the Magic Dragon, and a little less like Smaug, the fire-breathing carnivore of Tolkien legend.

Antonio had already come so much farther in his professional life than most people ever will, and he was getting ready to do something very hard, which should not be diminished.  But that’s what he signed up to do.   Entrepreneurs are not the sort of people who can be happy playing it safe.  They went out of their own to forge their own destiny for a reason.  It can just be hard to remember that reason some days, and that’s when it’s good to have someone else around who holds that memory, holds the space where desire still lives.

I reminded Antonio of the number of clients I have who see him as a ‘dragon.’  People like Meredith, in fact, who couldn’t even imagine managing 10 people on her team, let alone the 20 he had, let along his grand and beautiful vision of turning his company over to his employees one day.

“Yeah,” Antonio said, “But you and I know it just looks that way to her because she’s not there yet.  When you get here, you find it’s all the same stuff, just more people.”

“Exactly!” I replied.  Antonio was getting better and better at making my points for me.  “And here’s what I know about my corporate executive clients like the ones you’ll speak to next week: they can’t understand why you see them as dragon-worthy.  They know that they do the same stuff, too, just with more people and more zeroes on the invoice.  And somewhere in their goals for next year is securing an account with a company that they think of as so big it’s become mythic to them, and they are scared to give the presentation they need to give.  We all construct dragons out of our fears sometimes.  That doesn’t change.  We change.”

“Okay,” Antonio sighed.  “Uncle.  I’ll give the presentation.”  We focused on reviewing his intention for the meeting, ensuring he was not cutting any corners, that all of his methods and proposals would scale to whatever size the business might grow to and whatever a large clients needs might be.  The real gift of the proposal process turned out to be the way it provoked him to look intensely at every aspect of this business: the big fish client he wanted but didn’t think he was ready for provided the lens through which to evaluate all of his systems and processes, and make them better at their work for all levels of clients, and for the benefit of his team themselves.  Necessity is still the mother of invention more times than not, after all.

Antonio didn’t wind up getting that first big bid – another gift because he was able to lower his fears further by seeing, up close, with his own eyes, that even very large companies were sometimes constrained by budget and timeline.  The principals on that bid told him they thought he had the superior product but they needed something simpler and more cost-effective just this one time.  I think Antonio was happier to get that feedback complimenting and contextualizing his product in the market than he would have been to get the contract!  It told him he was on the right track yet gave us a bit more time to work through his fears before he did his next RFPs – both of which he did close.  For many months to come, as he began counting as clients and friends many large, corporate ‘pin stripe types,’ as he liked to call them, Antonio would pause and take note when fear came along to join him.

I can’t say he ever got to love it, but he doesn’t go to pieces, anymore: he just kind of laughs at himself, rubs his beard and gets back to work building his empire. (Oh, and a picture of Puff the Magic Dragon, torn from one of his son’s pop-up books, adorns Antonio’s desk to this day…)