(note – Chef Ramsey does a reality show on Fox called Hell’s Kitchen – not the same show at all)

The premise of the show is Ramsey, a celebrity chef and owner of multiple high profile restaurants around the world, visits small restaurants that are failing and provides 7 days of consulting to turn them around. I’ve noticed several themes that have clear parallels with entrepreneurial ventures in general. For example:

• Understanding what drives profit is important and often counter to conventional wisdom (serving high-end, elegant food is sexy but is much harder to do profitably – the profitable activity often isn’t the sexiest).
• There’s no substitute for roll-up-your-sleeves marketing. When Ramsey analyzes a restaurant, he goes into town and interviews people to see why they aren’t coming. Then he goes out with the owner go out into the general public when the restaurant re-opens for marketing. Lesson 1: lots of the most important marketing is not all that sophsticated. Lesson 2 – even millionaires should never think they are too good to sell to the public. Lesson 3 – Figure out who your customers are and talk to them.
• Lack of product focus is an insidious source of pain for a company. When restaurants have menus with dozens of choices, food production is a nightmare – you don’t get particularly good at preparing many dishes. Plus, your sales staff (wait staff) has a much more difficult learning curve.
• Denial of problems (Ramsey is excellent at facing the brutal truth, usually involving a great deal of profanity) is a killer – once you recognize problems, even deep problems can be surprisingly easy to fix if you take a cold, dispassionate look at them.
• Even one wrong person on the management team can be a company-killer. They need to be excluded from the company quickly once it’s determined that they are the wrong person.
• Managing employees who are friends is really difficult because it’s hard to ask your friends to do things that you expect your employees to do – and it’s even harder to provide firm guidance when required.
• Management is leadership – people have to want to do what you say not just because you pay them, but because they value your approval. You can’t leave your employees in the trenches and hide from crisis. You have to treat employees with respect (that’s very different from coddling), and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy.
• Poor communication among the production (chef), management (restaurant owner) and sales (waitstaff) – often leads to lousy food and lousy service.
• Lack of passion on the part of owners and employees leads to sloppy execution (you can’t provide good service to customers without a passion for what you do). In one show, the head chef realized he really wanted to work with troubled teens (which is why he staffed his kitchen with them) and he left the restaurant to be a social worker.

If you’re interested in becoming a more skilled entrepreneur, I highly recommend watching this entertaining and edcuational show. My wife Cordelia, who also loves entrepreneurship, is also hooked and it’s become quality time for me and the Mrs.

I’ve found good lessons for me as a manager from the show. You may also.

– mike

By Stacy A. Williams

StartupLounge.com seeks to pair qualified investors with qualified companies. Our screening process is pretty rugged but it is not bullet proof. If you ever have a question about the integrity of an investor or entrepreneur that you have met at a StartupLounge event, we want to know about it. Please feel free to contact us if you ever have any questions or concerns about anyone that you have met at one of our events. We are here to be part of the solution – not another piece of the problem.

Some of these “investors” are just self-serving and need the income. We call these small fish: job-seekers, consultants and fund-raisers. They are not really doing anything illegal, but they can waste your time and money because they don’t plan to invest their own money and may not work that hard to find someone else’s for you – no matter how much you pay them.

Then there are the big shot wannabes and pathological nut-jobs. Oftentimes they are the same person. Their payoff is more emotional than financial. They like the long talks on the phone or over beers, and they like the way that you gaze at them when you think they are going to make your dreams come true. It is very often the case that you will waste time, money and opportunity with these types of “investors” because these people are more lonely than rich and desperately need to feel admired and powerful. This type of “investor” will lead you along, make you feel really good about your abilities and then find some reason why the deal won’t work. The relationship generally sputters into oblivion when the “investor” no longer gets the emotional payoff that he or she so deeply craves.

Then there is the most dangerous type of “investor” to encounter – the millionaire imposter. This type of investor will most certainly display the characteristics of the big shot wannabe and the nut-job and will most certainly lack the integrity to go out and try to get a real job – like any self respecting job-seeker, consultant or fund-raiser. This type of “investor” is out to get your money and possibly your identity. The millionaire imposter oozes with wealth. He has a private plane, multiple mansions, carte blanche entrée into the Oval Office and an offshore bank account. And then he encounters you.

The world is his oyster and you are his pearl! He loves you. You have vision. He sees potential in you that you never knew existed. You are not like that little snot-nosed Harvard MBA that he had lunch with last week when he was on the coast of Spain. No – you are special and he is going to take time out of his busy life to groom you into the kind of CEO that will change the world. This goes on and on until you feel like you are on top of the world and then he asks for a check. He is not liquid right now. The wire transfer from his offshore account did not go through because it is Holy Week in Qatar. And the funds, by the way, have to be further directed through Minsk and then onto Ontario. Your prince will “roll that amount up in the deal when we sign it”. You are left feeling like you have to meet your mentor’s needs, because after all you are a savvy CEO and this is how things are done at this level. When you find out that the only thing getting rolled up in this deal is your money as your mentor stuffs it in his pocket, you feel violated and duped.

The sad thing is that most entrepreneurs just want the problem and the feelings to go away. They don’t want anyone to know that they fell for such a scam. They look back on their experiences with the “investor” and point out to themselves the red flags they should have seen all along. They beat themselves up because no entrepreneur worth his or her salt would ever have fallen for such a scam. They are afraid that people will talk about how stupid and gullible they are. The fact of the matter is that these imposters are stone-cold professionals who have left a trail of tears and smaller bank accounts far and wide. That snot-nosed MBA is probably crying into his Sangria much the same way you are into your beer.

What should you do when this happens to you? Talk about it! Start first with some trusted friends and work your way up to the authorities and the press if necessary. But for heaven’s sake, don’t keep your mouth shut. That is a sure fire way to ensure that some other honest, decent entrepreneur gets treated the same way – not to mention that your silence will rob you of the cathartic release from your self flagellating rage. Get it out and get it over with. Everyone gets “had” at least once in their lives and probably more than that. These experiences keep you humble, and ironically, make you the savvy entrepreneur that you need to be in order to change the world. Consider it a right of passage and don’t dwell on the past.

In general, qualified angel investors:

• Never ask for money from you
• Do not mind submitting to background checks
• Usually carry business cards
• Will want to see a business plan
• Will have some sort of term sheet that they are comfortable with
• Will not ask you to keep their role private
• May want to coach you but probably not groom you

Now there are some exceptions. Some angel investors are so well known in their communities that they don’t think cards are necessary. This type of person has a lot of cronies who can vouch for his or her integrity. Beware of the glamorous investor who swoops in on his jet plane and never has cards. A qualified investor may ask you not to talk about his or her role in a deal for a while, but if the investor takes on the air of a CIA agent, point him in the direction of Moscow and tell him you heard there were some Commies over there.

Michael Blake offers some questions that you can ask your Prince Charming before you buy the dress for the ball.

Certain questions will help you detect the phonies:

• What other deals are you invested in?
• What other deals are you looking at?
• What was successful about your last deal?
• Talk about an investment you made that didn’t pan out
• How do you spend your time on a daily basis?
• Why are you interested in angel investing?
• Why are you interested in my opportunity?
• What can you bring to the table besides money?
• How do you recommend your funds be allocated?
• Can you recommend an attorney?
• Can you recommend a financial advisor?

—

Note from Scott: If you haven’t seen the presentation by Mike Blake that is referenced here, check out the slidecast we published recently.

As an avid chess player, his passing isn’t so saddening as he had retreated from public life in 1974, and played only a handful of serious games in 1992 in an odd re-match against old foe (and current friend) Boris Spassky. Those games showed that, while still a strong player, Fischer’s skills had been overtaken by new, younger, better-prepared players. Indeed, commentators observed that Fischer’s games appeared frozen in time, not incorporating the years of advancement in theory since 1974. Fischer even demanded that the series be named the World Championship, even though almost nobody recognized the match in that context. Fischer won that match, most likely because Spassky’s age was more advanced and he was well past the physical prime required to play serious chess at a high level.

It is hard to understate the importance of Bobby Fischer in our culture in the early 1970′s and his star briefly lit up the sky with unprecedented luminescence from the chess world. Fischer’s apex was as the bulwark against the Soviet chess apparatus (and it was an apparatus with an entire system designed to dominate the world at the game), and then just stopped. His games had Cold War implications and the world watched his every move as he steadily ground down the USSR’s best players, such as Tal, Taimonov, and Keres, on the long march to the World Championship in Reykjavik in 1972. His style was reminiscent of today’s professional athletes. He set out not to win, but to humiliate his opponents. He was going to force victory down your throat because he was simply a lot better than his opponents, who happened to be the best in the world. It’s one thing to be arrogant; it’s entirely another to be arrogant and then back it up every day. Americans like arrogance. We (rhetorically; I was 2 in 1972) embraced his New York personality. To boot, he loved beating the Commies. He hated them. For a time, he was the perfect icon, smashing the Soviets at their game. ESPN would have loved him and he would have loved ESPN – at least for awhile.

And then one day, he just stopped. He got us hooked on him and the game and then took it away. Fischer was convinced the chess world was out to get him. The only thing worse than a paranoid is a paranoid who is right. The Soviets did manipulate matches. Sometimes the did so by changing room temperatures, sometimes by planting listening devices in Fischer’s hotel room to gain insight into his strategies (now called the Bill Belichek Attack). They made some of their people throw games so that their best players would accumulate less fatigue.

As a result of Fischer’s complaining (and, it should be acknowledged, of Spassky’s own opposition to the rigging, which put him in physical danger and nearly had him withdrawn from the Championship match by his own government), conditions were changed in the finals to make the playing field more level. Many of those changes persist in today’s tournament conditions, including much richer prize purses. Fischer once quipped about refusing to “play for peanuts”. Fischer handily won the match and the title of World Champion, the first U.S. born player to hold the title.

But, like catering to a 2-year old, giving in to Fischer only encouraged him, and he quickly and inexorably slid into mental decay, with perceived conspiracies by Communists and he became quite outspoken against Jews and Zionism. When asked once if he were an anti-Semite he replied “Arabs are Semites and I’m not anti-Arab”. When time came to defend his championship in 1975, Anatoly Karpov was the scheduled opponent (Spassky would later emigrate to France), but when FIDE and the Soviets refused to give in to Fischer’s tournament conditions demands, Fischer refused to play and Karpov won by default. Most commentators agree with Fischer that he “would have creamed him” had a match taken place, and Fischer could have been the one to face Garri Kasparov in 1985 in that seminal chess turning point.

Fischer was so arrogant, so convinced of conspiracies against him, that when he was ordered by the State Department not to play his 1992 match in Serbia (it was a violation of the U.S. embargo to try to outster Slobodan Milosevich), he literally publicly spit on the letter and renounced his U.S. citizenship.

After that match (it is rumored the sponsors never made good on their $1 MM prize), Fischer remained in foreign exile (it turns out he also hadn’t paid taxes since 1974), finally ending up in Iceland, the site of his greatest triumph. And he never played chess – or did anything from what anyone can tell.

But after 1974, Fischer never made any contributions to chess save for one book, “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” which remains a seminal work. Chess could have been elevated to a very high stature in the United States if he had stuck with the game. Fischer died in 2008, but we really lost him back then. Ultimately it is a sad tale of talent wasted and opportunity passed. And Fischer likely died rather unwealthy. He could have and should have been a multimillionaire.

The lesson here is that talent isn’t enough to be successful long term. Brashness and bullying works for awhile but after a time, the world decides you’re just not worth the effort. I’ve met many entrepreneurs with loads of talent but insufficient people skills and with such excessive paranoia and grudge-carrying tendencies, that their ideas simply never got far off the ground because nobody wanted to deal with them. I’m certain there’s a cure for cancer or a high temperature superconductor that hasn’t been developed because the inventors simply lacked the people skills required to make it a reality. People don’t have to love you, but they have to respect and understand you and your idea.

The best momento I have of Fischer’s brilliance is a two volume collection of the 744 tournament games of Bobby Fischer (before the 1992 series), in the “original” Russian. The greatest compliment you can get is the respect of a grave foe.

- Mike Blake

I’d like to note and comment on the passing of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, and a key architect in the destruction of Communism and the ending of the Cold War.

Mr. Yeltsin was as responsible or more than Mikhail Gorbachev for the dismantling of the Soviet Union. In 1991, it was Yeltsin who, as the President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, gathered the leadership of the Ukrainian S.S.R. and the Byelorussian S.S.R. and formally dissolved the Soviet Union from within. Gorbachev only resigned about three weeks later when he no longer had a country to preside over.

Why is this relevant to an entrepreneurship blog? On a personal note, the social and political change that Yeltsin initiated enabled me to get my start in entrepreneurship, providing technical assistance and capital to entrepreneurs in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Those are memories I will carry forever. If I happen to know anything about entrepreneurship, if I got any inspiration, it was my spending 6 years in that region, trying to help rebuild the economy one business at a time. Any advice I provide to help a client or just an entrepreneur in need today stems from my experiences there.

If you think it’s hard to raise seed capital in Atlanta, try it in Minsk.

On a broader note, the social change that Boris Yeltsin ushered in has enabled the following:

500 million people in Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia can now start and own their own businesses. Entrepreneurship was a crime only 20 years ago under anti-”speculation” laws. The entire economy was run centrally. (Imagine the production of your favorite consumer product being managed by an unfirable government functionary).

Millions of people from the region have emmigrated to the Western countries and Israel where they have established businesses of their own – often in fields completely unrelated to their original fields of expertise. Plug: If you’re interested in Russian food, I love the New Odessa on Clairmont Road.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are all prime technology outsourcing destinations, providing some of the best programming and scientific talent on the planet.

Local and foreign-backed venture firms continue to expand operations in the region.

Russia is actually an attractive tourist destination.

Even the Russian “oligarchs” are entrepreneurs. They played by rules that were different from ours and even their fellow countrymen, but they invested capital and acquired assets (often at great physical risk) and have demonstrated the powerful potential of the Russian economy (much of it lost to diffusion by the chaotic environment.)

Finally, the end of the Cold War that Yeltsin enabled by first destroying the Soviet Union and then embracing friendly relations with the West, enabled us to move money away from defense spending and into the private sector. That extra cash was a big factor in enabling the dot-com revolution (and bubble, but Boris Yeltsin didn’t tell us to invest billions in vaporware companies using eyeballs as a valuation metric).

Boris Yeltsin was a very flawed leader in many ways. The movement to democracy and rule of law in Russia is a work that has been suspended, partially because he didn’t fully understand the very institutions he was championing. The corruption Yeltsin vowed to defeat was simply shifted from Communist bureaucrats to other Communist bureaucrats. His economic policies were much less ineffective than they might have been because he didn’t stick with any one policy long enough. He drank too much and didn’t eat enough cabbage and cucumbers.

But he stood on a tank and waved a flag that he could have been shot for waving in August of 1991. He helped make the world a much safer place, and Russia is now better off economically for the reforms he launched, and the impact of those reforms are felt here in ways subtle and obvious. And they fundamentally changed my life and made me a better person, entrepreneur, and friend.

Spasibo Boris Nikolaevich i vsevo nailuchsevo.

– mike

Back in March, Krishna contacted me through my blog here. We ended up meeting in person at one of the TechLINKS Mixin’ and Minglin’ events (hint, hint!). As I would do with any new person that I meet at a networking event, I asked him “so what do you do?” He replied “I tell stories.” I then served up the logical follow-up question, “what kind of stories do you tell?”

Krishna smiled. “I tell your stories.”

You see, a few years back, Krishna and his family were on vacation. While merrily driving along toward their vacation spot, and in a bizarre twist of fate, all of the media devices in the car broke down. No games, DVDs, or music! Now with nothing to serve as a buffer between his kids and a viable insanity plea, he had no choice but to improvise. To make up for the lack of distractions, Krishna started telling “stories” to his kids. By his own admission, he just started making them up. The stories lasted for several hours! By the time the Avva family reached their destination, Krishna’s professional future was clear. It was time to move on from being a software project management professional to helping others by telling their stories.

So sit back, take a read through his story, and at the end, when you realize that your company’s marketing copy stinks, I invite you to contact him! We are planning on using him in the near future for our stuff, and I would highly encourage everyone out there in Pothole-land to give him a look.

Do you have a problem selling your new product? … Maybe your ad copy isn’t a grabber.

What’s the difference between an ad that technically tells you everything you need to know about the product and one that grabs you by the throat and says “I GOTTA HAVE ONE OF THESE!”

It’s all about putting words on paper (or screen) the reader/prospect wants to read. Nobody likes to be sold to, but everybody is interested things that appeal to their needs, whether it’s to improve office efficiency, make them look smart to their boss or look sexy. Let’s read a story that shows the difference. Of course the example is exaggerated, but that helps to show the difference between boring, typical ads and one that gets your product or service noticed (and bought).

The Story

Two entrepreneurs, Jack and Bob, sat at the bar before the trade show.

“You know, we launched this huge advertising blitz six months ago for our new high density gizmo and yet nobody knows about us or it.” laments Bob.

“What’d you do for your advertising?” asks Jack.

“We put an ad in all the trade journals right at the beginning and we sponsored a couple of events around town. I even see our ad posted on engineer’s cubicle walls when I visit prospects because of the woman in a bikini pointing to the gizmo in the ad.”

“Let me see your ad.”

Buy our SuperX gizmo. It provides all your office data storage needs with up to 5 Terabytes of storage capacity. SuperX provides the required data back within 1.28 µsec and is reliable 99.98% of the time. SuperX provides at least 3 months of uninterrupted service before needing a short 15 minute refresh period that can be scheduled at any time of the day. It will run efficiently with any OS released since 2001.

SuperX is 15 inches high, 12.32 inches deep and 6.786 inches wide. It weighs only 10 lbs. It comes in 3 colors, black, tan and grey, to match any office décor.

Our prototype customers liked it a lot. Please buy several soon.

“Sure, I’m willing to do anything now. Otherwise, we’ll have to fold up shop soon.”

The next morning at breakfast, Jack pulls out a single sheet of paper. “Here, take a look at this and let me know what you think. This is the type of ad that grabs my attention.”

Bob studies the content:

How can 5 Terabytes help you sleep better at night?
How many times have you had an employee walk up to you and say, “My PC just crashed. I lost all my data. The big presentation is in 3 hours and I can’t recreate it by then. I haven’t backed up my PC in 6 months.”

After you get over your initial desire to strangle this person, you learn the rest of the staff hasn’t backed up their systems either, because the process is too slow or complex.

You also recall the conversation with your Director last week about the limited budget you have for the rest of the year, but you can’t afford to allow work to stop completely for a crashed PC. Worse, you may lose customers if you can’t respond to them quickly.

How can a manager responsible for core products in their company operate effectively, without key support tools? The answer is not very well.

What you need is a tool that will take care of all your company data in a way that is seamless to your employees, secure in its storage, reliable and won’t break the bank.

Imagine your Director’s delight, when you walk in presenting a system that ensures your employees have confidence in, that makes their job easy and ensures they always have their information, securely stored.

When you call us, we learn your specific data storage needs and adjust the system for your environment. When we bring the system in, we will make sure all your IT people are trained in its support, or if you want, we will provide a support plan that meets your budget.

After the system is incorporated into your network, we invite all your employees to lunch to learn about the easy set-up for their PC to automatically and privately store their important files every night after they go home. And then of course, we’ll show them how to access their material at any time, in case their PC crashes or their material gets corrupted by malicious software. Only they and their immediate manager will be able to access the material.

Within a month, you look like the company savior, because no key information is lost and your employees are far more effective.

“We usually had anywhere from 1-3 lost work days per month, because of various employees losing their data and having to recreate it. With SuperX, we were able to cut that loss out and keep functioning smoothly.”
Dave G.
IT Manager at Company X

For important technical specifications about the system, a handy cut-out card is provided in the bottom left corner of this advertisement.

We provide the system for a free initial 30 day trial period. If you are not completely satisfied with the performance and ease of use, we will take it out of your environment, free of charge. If you call us before July 15th, the lunch to train your employees is on us.

Jack responds, “Yes, for the following reasons:

• Now you address your prospect’s needs and why this product will help them.
• The headline is specific to a concern they face.
• They feel confident that you will help them succeed.
• You provide a satisfaction guarantee
• You also provide a sense of urgency, by offering buy lunch, if they act quickly. We both know that most people will not pass up a free lunch.
• Also, you will need to run the ad several times, because when they read it may not be when they need it. By running it several times, you build familiarity and trust. Also, it will be fresh on their minds when they do need a solution.

By the way, pictures of bikini clad girls will not sell your products. In fact pictures don’t really add anything to the ad, unless they help to understand the emotion you are driving for and the product you are selling.”

Bob folds the paper and puts it in his pocket. “Thanks a ton Jack. I’ll pass this along to my marketing team when I get back. This should lead us to profitability soon.”

Krishna Avva uses stories to tell your prospects why your products are the ones they absolutely must have. His writing reflects 20+ years of experience in telecommunications and custom solutions development as a software development manager, project manager and product manager. His stories take complex technologies and explains them so his 3rd grader can understand. It all started 4 years ago when all available media devices broke down in his car with hours left in the trip. Call him up at 678-935-7343 (or visit his web site) to learn how this life changing experience with 2 bored daughters, ages 5 and 9 at that time, turned into a new career to help you grow your business.

Cheers.

Greetings Pothole readers and listeners! I have a fantastic treat for you today. No, I am not going to sing to you! Nor am I going to do my one man reenactment of Brokeback Mountain. Instead, we have a very special podcast today – how about $25,000 worth of free career coaching, courtesy of Ricky Steele, one of Atlanta’s premier business networkers?

This past Friday, I invited my good friend Ricky Steele to come out and speak to the Kettering Executive Network (KEN), a professional networking group here in Atlanta to which I belong. Ricky was kind enough to allow me to pin a lapel mic onto him and record his speech for preservation here at The Pothole. Those of us in attendance received a lot of inspiration and motivation from Ricky’s material, and I’m sure you will too.

In this presentation, Ricky shares his view of what a good networker looks like. While doing so, he offers his “seven habits of highly effective networkers”, and shares many of his business networking strategies along the way.

I know a lot of you readers/listeners are not from the Atlanta area, and you may not be familiar with Ricky Steele, so please allow me to introduce him to you.

Ricky Steele is the Chief Development Officer for Thompson Technologies, where he focuses on sales and corporate relationships. Ricky is the consummate networker, having been a client partner with Korn/Ferry International, a director for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Chairman and CEO of QuadBase Software, President and CEO of Innovative Media, Founder and President of SunBelt Transportation Group, and Publisher of Georgia Travel Publications, Inc.

He is the author of the acclaimed book, The Heart of Networking. According to Ricky, it was a best seller last year — he sold 15 copies in his neighborhood in a 2 week period, and that was a standing record until the Girl Scouts muscled him out with their magazine subscriptions! All kidding aside – it is a fantastic read – and it is a book that personally changed my life for the better. You can order a copy through his web site at rickysteele.net.

Ricky was honored as the Georgia Small Business Person of the Year and also one of the Georgia Jaycees “5 Outstanding Young Georgians.” He is intensely active in community service – for him, the bedrock foundation of networking, of leadership, and of life. Steele is the founding chairman of both Atlanta’s Table and Hospitality Helping Hands, a former board director for the Atlanta Community Food Bank, Hands On Atlanta, Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau and most recently a Trustee for Leadership Atlanta.

So, without further adieu, click the play button above, or download the MP3 to your iPod or a CD and ramp up your networking efforts by listening to one of the best. If you know of someone in your network who could benefit from Ricky’s message, do them a favor and forward them a link to this page. You’ll have done a good service to them, and they will hopefully thank you for it later.

And oh, by the way, if you need some IT staffing love, look no further than Thompson Technologies. Ricky, David Thompson, and the rest of the gang there stand by their word, their promises, and their people – traits that are seemingly hard to find these days. They’ve been a tremendous asset to the folks within my own personal business network, and I implore you to give them a chance to help you and your associates as well.

Cheers.

- Scott Burkett

Over 90% of job seekers use job boards as a tactic to seek a new position; however, surveys indicate that less than 4% of hires for management-level jobs currently occur through any Internet site. Most jobs, approximately 70%, are secured through networking with their personal or business network and about 20% of management-level jobs are obtained through recruiters.

Recruiters can become an integral part of your professional or even personal network and can provide you a competitive advantage in your career advancement. Recruiters are well educated and trained professionals. You should value their counsel and advice, and listen to their guidance. Unfortunately, the industry is not viewed this way. The typical attitude is “you call the recruiter up; if he is interested in me, he will talk to me; if not, he won’t even bother to call me back!” If you look at the relationship, that is not surprising. You are an unknown person calling someone up saying “I need your help, I need you to find me a job, I need you to do this or that for me,” but you have not taken the time to develop any relationship! In essence you are asking help from a stranger. It is not uncommon to receive little response. Recruiters tend to place people they know first.

On the other hand, if you take the time to develop a relationship with a network of recruiters, your results will be much better. Many successful professionals have learned the value of the art of networking, as expressed by such authors such as Thomas Stanley in his Networking With the Affluent and Bob Littell with his philosophy of NetWeaving. Bob Litell summarizes this strategy/philosophy as “good things happen to those people who make good things happen.” When you perform acts of kindness and generosity for others without immediate expectation of reward, you build lasting and valuable relationships that ultimately reward you. You may consider this the professional implementation of “The Golden Rule”, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

So, how do you develop a relationship with a recruiter?

The first step is to meet the recruiter. It is always better when someone can place a face and a personality with a resume, but few people go beyond this basic first step to develop a relationship. When a new job-seeker calls a recruiter, most recruiters will go through the process of trying to match the skills of that candidate to available positions, but the reality is that recruiters get thousands of resumes, so a new candidate is just a pool of skills. What is much more effective is to build a relationship with a recruiter or network of recruiters over time. Doing so will allow you to be treated much better and provide more opportunities, since people will likely try to first place and give priority to those they know.

You can make a lasting impression by working to help recruiters before you need them. As an executive, take calls from recruiters even when you are not seeking a job and use that as a starting point to build a relationship. Simply ask the question “what can I do for you?” Help source talent for your recruiter contacts. Notify them of placement opportunities within your firm or associated firms. Keep in touch with your network of recruiters over time via phone, email or even greeting cards. In addition to applying this strategy to recruiters, you may also nurture a relationship with personnel in an HR department of companies in which you have interests.

Networking has been proven to be the most effective means of building a successful professional career. Recruiters should be an integral part of your networking strategy.

Tactics in Summary

• Meet your network of recruiters.
• Keep in touch with recruiters even when you do not need one.
• Assist your network of recruiters with locating talent.
• Assist your network of recruiters with notifying them of open positions in your company or others.
• Take calls from recruiters and discuss their needs, not just yours.

Biography

Jerold Recht is Vice President of National Personnel Services and Chapter Leader for the United Professional Sales Association. National Personnel Services has over 30 years experience in executive search, outplacement, and career coaching.

A special thanks to my old friend Jerry Recht of NPS for serving as our guest blogger this week. Great job, Jerry! Maintaining strong relationships with executive recruiters should be a key focus of all management professionals. I never tire of hearing him groan when I call him up and shout “have you found me a job yet?” ;)

Have an opinion on a topic relating to technology, leadership, venture capital, entrepreneurship, business networking, or the Atlanta business scene? If you or someone from your organization would like to participate as a guest blogger here on The Pothole, by all means let me know! This is a great way to get your message out into the blogosphere without necessarily having to create and maintain your own daily blog.

Cheers.

According to Derek Haynes of Atlanta-based Highgroove Studios, CIOs & CTOs that don’t investigate Ruby on Rails could be missing out on the holy grail of web application development – faster development, cheaper development, and vastly more usable applications. As our guest blogger this week, Derek provides a nice executive overview into this fascinating technology platform.

“Mom – is my bedroom still available? I’ve run into some financial difficulties.”

It sounds over dramatic to talk about a web application framework as a life-changing experience on par with marriage, college graduation, and the birth of a child, but Ruby on Rails (Rails) has had more of an impact on my professional career than any other event.

In the spring of 2005, I was reluctantly leaving a startup I co-founded where an application built with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) formed the basis of our business. Development was a nightmare. Besides being slow and overly complex, it wasn’t fun. If starting a car was like building a J2EE application, I’d have to spend 10 minutes configuring the engine before I even started the car. It doesn’t matter how nice the car is – if it takes me 10 minutes to start it, I’m not driving it.

The J2EE development experience could lead a person to swear off technology, purchase a hotdog cart, and head down to Atlantic Station.
As I’ve never been much of a cook and I lack street-vendor-hawking skills, I decided to give up on that idea.

Luckily, the story gets better. If you have an iPod around, go ahead and cue your favorite “I was down but now I’ve risen” song. Reading about Rails for the first time was like walking out of an evangelization camp where 2 people were cured of cancer and a third was cured of blindness. I was re-energized – ready to take on web applications with a framework that looked like it was the freakishly perfect child born from Google and Apple. Development was fast and fun and the code was amazingly readable. If Valentine’s Day hadn’t already passed, I might have asked my significant other if I could bring my laptop and reserve another seat at the dinner table for my Rails application.

Today, my relationship with Rails is even better, and instead of sleeping in a twin bed in my childhood bedroom, I lead Highgroove Studios, a growing web development studio with locations in Atlanta, GA and San Mateo, CA. Largely because of Rails, we’re delivering applications on-time and on-budget, while creating pieces of work that literally change our clients’ views of what a web application can do. While I’ve seen how Ruby on Rails can impact my services firm, I’m also witnessing how it can change larger organizations. CIOs & CTOs that don’t investigate Ruby on Rails could be missing out on the holy grail of web application development – faster development, cheaper development, and vastly more usable applications.

I’m going to cover Rails at a higher-level in this article and talk about some of the great side effects of Rails development. I’ll cut out the discussion on moving to Rails and the technical differences between Rails and other frameworks as plenty of resources covering these topics already exist. There’s a great article on migrating enterprise development to Rails by Rick Bradley, a project manager who is doing just that. IBM also has a solid piece on the technical differences between Rails and J2EE.

Rails In a Nutshell

The goal of Ruby on Rails is to make web development simpler. It’s fairly new, having recently reached version 1.0, and is an alternative to building applications in J2EE, .NET, PHP, or any of the other web frameworks and languages. Rails, built on the Ruby programing language, makes it vastly more productive to write web applications – as much as 10X faster than J2EE. Besides the productivity increases, Rails also has the best support of the for mentioned frameworks for implementing AJAX technologies. AJAX allows a web page to change state (for example, adding a message to a page without reloading). Web applications that utilize AJAX can blur the line between a desktop application and a web application.

Why Rails

1. Time is Money
   While 10X productivity increases might only apply to specific projects, I haven’t worked on a web application that could be developed faster in a framework other than Rails. Other knowledgeable people agree. With Rails, there’s basically no configuration within an application. All of the needed components are available when you start your project. There’s also zero turn-around time to view changes in code (Ruby is a scripted language, which means you don’t need to recompile code to view changes in your web browser). I’ve found that “zero turnaround time” is one the best ways to encourage developers to write more maintainable code. With J2EE, developers might avoid refactoring bad code as the time to recompile and restart the web server serves as a major deterrent. With Ruby, it takes seconds to view the changes.
2. Rails’ earliest detractors have become it’s biggest supporters
   This may be the greatest sign – an acknowledgement by many of the leaders in the Java community that Rails has really gotten to the root of the web development problem. Many people who have a considerable investment in Java are endorsing Rails. In the words of Levar Burton of “Reading Rainbow” fame, don’t take my word for it…
3. Smaller Teams = Better Projects
   Small teams can accomplish a lot with Rails – and there are few arguments against small teams in development projects. Instead of delegating work to a development team, I can personally lead and develop our applications (while doing it profitably), and I can afford to hire a few of the best instead of a lot of the rest.
4. The Rails community is the cream of the crop
   Developers who use Rails do it because they recognized there must be a better way – I’d argue they have a much better sense of the pieces needed to complete a successful project than a “heads down” coder. “Big Picture” coders need less management attention, which again leads to more successful small teams.
5. …and it’s easy to switch if you don’t have Rails experience
   While the number of Ruby developers pales in comparison to other languages, it is an extremely easy language to pickup. I have few reservations about hiring a developer without Ruby experience as they don’t need to know a lot of details about the framework – they just need to be good coders.
6. When usability matters (and when doesn’t it?)
   Many people associate Rails with great-looking applications. Because Rails has fantastic AJAX support – implementing AJAX is becoming trivially easy – the framework works great with small teams that have the ability to work on the interface design and the backend functionality. Usability is more important than ever – people have less and less patience for tedious applications today, and Rails gives developers the tools to make applications easier for its users.
7. Higher Quality
   We’re not perfect, but the amount of broken code that’s been rolled out in our Rails projects is far less than the number of bugs I’ve experienced in applications with other frameworks. This is largely because it is far easier to implement unit testing in Rails as compared to other frameworks. Unit Testing is a way of automating tests – developers write scripts to test out parts of an application, and can then run these at anytime in the future. Just added a new feature and not sure if it will break other parts of the application? Simply run the tests and see if they all pass.
8. But can it scale?
   One of the major items of concern raised by those in the Java community is whether Rails can scale. The bottom line: there’s no reason why it can’t do it better (and cheaper) than Java. However, there hasn’t been an eBay-like application written in Rails to prove this theory (but there haven’t been a lot of new eBay-like applications as a whole either). Scaling is never simple, but there’s no reason why it would be any harder in Rails.

As the framework has matured, it has become more and more difficult for Rails developers to cite cases where Ruby on Rails development should not be the framework-of-choice for web applications. As it grows, some of the framework’s relative weaknesses, like a lack of internationalization (support for multiple languages) and a complicated server setup are fading.

I’ll leave with a quote by David Geary, the author of Core JavaServer Faces and a Java-to-Rails convert:

Biography

Derek Haynes is the founder of Highgroove Studios, a web applications studio specializing in building elegantly simple Web 2.0 applications. Before starting Highgroove Studios, Derek worked in a variety of industries – from sales in a Fortune 100 company to software development in a 6-person firm. Graduating with High Honors from Georgia Tech, Derek bleeds black and gold.

A special thanks to Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios for serving as our guest blogger this week. Great job, Derek! As IT leaders, we should always strive to explore new efficiencies, and how they might fit into our strategic technology plans.

Have an opinion on a topic relating to technology, leadership, venture capital, entrepreneurship, business networking, or the Atlanta business scene? If you or someone from your organization would like to participate as a guest blogger here on The Pothole, by all means let me know! This is a great way to get your message out into the blogosphere without necessarily having to create and maintain your own daily blog.

Cheers.

We have lined up a number of guest bloggers already, and are continuing to look at others who may be interested in participating. This is a great way to get your message out, but not have to deal with running and maintaining your own business blog.

Up first, we’ll have a great article by Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios. The Highgroove gang are making some great strides in driving the Ruby and Ruby on Rails movement here in the Atlanta tech community. As our first guest blogger, Derek will talk directly to you CIOs and other tech decision makers as to the benefits of the Ruby on Rails framework. I know most of you are wrapped up (and heavily invested) in Java and .NET, but you have to see Ruby on Rails to believe it.

If you or your organization have an interest in participating, and feel that you have some content that marries well with the themes of this blog (see sidebar under the logo), by all means let me know!

Cheers.