Anne Giles Clelland

Don't Take It Personally

“Don’t take it personally.”
- One guy too many

“…ay, there’s the rub.”
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

If one more business guy tells me one more time, “Don’t take it personally"...

What do you mean, “Don’t take it personally”?!  It is personal. I am a person, I am doing business personally, therefore I take business personally.

I define “taking things personally” as being the instrument of my fate, responsible for my choices, and responsible for the consequences of my choices.  If I see myself as the leader of my life and my company, then, you bet, what happens is about me personally.  Telling me “Don’t take it personally” is telling me to extinguish myself.

That said, I can’t say I’ve found taking business personally a particularly gratifying process.  Starting a company is so risky, and building a business so onerous, I have found myself often personally strained, frayed and depleted by the sheer enormity of the task.  Business is hard on a person.

I’ve been given the “Don’t take things personally” advice often enough, though,  and have found it well-meaning but so unhelpful, that it merited a step back and a look for a pattern at setting and circumstances.  It could still happen, but I can’t remember this being uttered to me by a woman.  In any case, in each instance when the advice was given to me by a man, I was personally upset.  In each case, the subtext of “Don’t take it personally” was “You’re so personally upset that you’re professionally absent.”

People do business with people.  If I’m personally upset, I’m unavailable for business.  Light on, shop door closed.

Yet, I treasure taking my life personally.  I cherish beyond price the depth and breadth and richness of my personal life. 

So what do I with my premise:  “I am a person, therefore I do business personally”?  What do I do with the advice, “Don’t take business personally?”

I think the premise is flawed and the advice is flawed.

It's not how to “take” business.  It’s how to “do” business.

There’s the rub.

New advice to self:

“Don’t do business personally.  Do business strategically.”

If I do business strategically, rather than personally, I take business results and business relationships into consideration with regard to my strategy.  I don’t take them personally.  I’m free to “take it personally” in my personal life as intensely and as acutely as I choose.  My business life becomes excitingly, fascinatingly, engagingly about strategically achieving a vision.

My experience is that an either-or dichotomy like this doesn’t always hold true.  In an age of transparency, where the personal-professional divide is as clear as broken lines on a road in a rain storm, I’m still going to tweet pics of my cats to my company’s Twitter feed.

My guess is that if I can operate more generally within the context of this new insight - doing business strategically rather than personally - the number of times I hear “Don’t take it personally” will decrease.  That’s because I’ll be fully and professionally present to do business.

Gotta Love Handshake 2.0

I made this video to apply to pitch to angel investors for the first VT KnowledgeWorks Entrepreneurship Summit in 2009.  While I was disappointed not to be selected to present for the first Summit in 2009, and disappointed in general for the second Summit in 2010, re-watching this video makes me laugh with joy.  About Handshake 2.0, what I am doing and why, I am not disappointed at all. 

Anne Giles Clelland is the founder of Handshake 2.0, an enterprise of Handshake Media, Incorporated, a Blacksburg, Virginia-based social media public relations and marketing agency.  She is passionate about people, their work and companies, and sharing the good news with a global audience about what company leaders and founders are doing and why they're doing it.

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The video and text is an example of a Handshake 2.0 Warm Handshake.

Nice Company. But Can You Automate and Scale?

To grow your business, you need to automate and scale.
- Bob Summers

When I entered the VT KnowledgeWorks Entrepreneurship Summit’s Open Business Concept Competition in February 2010, I believed my company had a business model that could automate and scale and merited an investment of outside capital.

Having been selected as one of five competion finalists, by the time I submitted my pitch presentation slides two months later, I had done much research and much deep reflection.  Most importantly, I had stepped outside of my entrepreneur’s passion for my idea and evaluated my business model with the dispassion of a potential angel investor.  Thinking as an angel investor might think, I realized my business model could not automate and scale for a variety of reasons and, therefore, could not generate 500% return in year 5 with an outside capital investment.  In other words, I realized if I were an angel investor, I would respect me as the founder of a promising company.  But I wouldn’t invest in that company for fast, high R.O.I.

During my presentation - the final of five in which the preceding four had business models that could automate and scale - I shared my company’s “business concept,” showed its value proposition and described the needs it addresses.  I explained how it works.  Then I displayed Bob Summers’s “automate and scale” quote.  In essence, I said I couldn’t.  Then I clicked to a slide showing that I knew what I would need to do to change that.  No market analysis, no revenue projections.  I said, "That's all I have to say."

One of the angel investors on the panel put his head in his hands.

At the post-competition networking reception, I shared with two women, who are both friends and colleagues, that I felt I had expressed what was true and needed to be said, but how hard and sad that had been for me.  They listened, they heard, they commiserated.  I shed a few tears of grief, they supported me, they didn’t tell me I shouldn’t feel the way I did, I thanked them, much comforted, and we turned to network, all in about three minutes.

I came home at the end of the next day, the last day of the Summit, so tired I needed a nap just to prepare for bed.  When I awoke and walked into the kitchen, I saw the bouquet.  I read the card and began to cry.  It was from one of the women.

Sometimes it feels lonely steering the ship, but that doesn't mean you don't know the course.

I do know the course.  I am navigating by the stars of my vision. 

I can barely express how seen I feel, how moved and inspired I am that she can see the stars, too, and that she found they  merited a bouquet.

Writing and Talking About Angel Investing

From two weeks of writing online about angel investing, and talking offline with others, I've observed that angel investing is a long-tail subject, i.e. of interest to a specific customer segment, or niche within the larger market.

In other words, a few are highly interested in, even impassioned about, the subject.  Many are not.  The readers of Handshake 2.0 are currently not, gauging traffic to the site when posts regarding angel investing are published.  Interestingly though, members of the larger market are already seeking the information in the posts through their use of Google.  For now, then, I've moved discussion of the subject here, to my CEO blog.

I responded to a comment with this:  "We have a convergence of start-ups and investors in a way that I have termed 'a culture of entrepreneurship born of consciousness rather than opportunism.'"

For those with plans for regional economic development, that convergence has been the result of painstaking strategy.  If all goes according to plan, that convergence will have economically explosive results. 

That will be news.

In the meantime, for those interested, I will compile insights and research in this blog's Angel Investing category and will continue to write a series of posts on angel investing. 

Here's the progression of my thinking and research so far, most recent first:

My Hometown's Women Angel Investors, 4/1/10

Angel Investor Guide to Blacksburg, Virginia, 3/31/10

Thinking Like an Angel Investor, 3/24/10

Angel Investor Comments on Becoming an Angel Investor, 3/23/10

Talking About Money, 3/22/10

Becoming an Angel Investor, 3/22/10

An Entrepreneur in Every Garage, 3/19/10

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Annie Johnson, writing for the Blue Ridge Business Journal, made an important contribution to the discussion of local angel investors in On a Quest for Capital, 3/22/10

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Added 4/21/10:  Handshake 2.0 still seems the right venue for some posts on angel investing. 

Ten Bottom Line Stats About Angel Investing, 4/20/10

Both that post and Angel Investor Guide to Blacksburg, Virginia are receiving interesting comments and I'm adding relevant links in the comment section as well.

Here's the link to the category with all the posts on Handshake 2.0: Angel Investing on Handshake 2.0.

My Hometown's Women Angel Investors

I may write a report with that title some day.  As far as I know, I can’t yet.  My hometown doesn’t have any women angel investors.

According to the Center for Venture Research (.pdf) in its March 31, 2010 report, in 2009 women angels represented 11.3% of the angel market.

Of 9 apparent angel investors in a hometown project, then, one would predict the list would include a female.

It doesn't.  And in preparing Handshake 2.0’s Angel Investor Guide to Blacksburg, Virginia, we didn’t find women angel investors on other lists, either.

What I don’t know is whether or not this is a problem.

An angel investor must be an accredited investor and meet several criteria, including a net worth of a $1 million or an individual annual income of $200K per year.  Women in my hometown qualify.

I see three possibilities.

1. Obstacles to opportunity prevent women from becoming angel investors.
2. Women are unaware of angel investing as an investment opportunity.
3. Women are aware of angel investing as an investment opportunity and choose not to participate.

One would be a a problem.  Two can be changed if merited.  Three represents a conscious choice.  I champion that.  So I am interested in possibilities one and two.

Why am I interested?  We're a corporation with a vision for regional economic development.  Current development initiatives are focused on entrepreneurship, particularly with regard to starting, mentoring and funding technology companies, primarily started by men, primarily funded by men.  I want to know that the small percentage of women angel investors (currently zero according to my research) is not a fundamental flaw in the big plan.

Does our region need women angel investors to grow?  If any angel investor will do, man or woman, I've got other sizzling subjects to think and write about.  If we do need women angel investors, then let's remove any obstacles that exist and let women know about angel investing.  If they choose to participate, let's create a hometown in which their deals can thrive.

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From Angel Investing Needs More Than Just a Few Good Women on the Kauffman Foundation 2006 report Women and Angel Investing: An Untapped Pool of Equity for Entrepreneurs(.pdf):

The report notes that the total number of women angel investors is smaller than women's collective wealth, education, and experience suggests is possible and calls the shortage of women angels "as a missed opportunity for women, for the entrepreneurial community, and U.S. competitiveness as a whole..."

"Angel capital, whether invested through organized angel groups or by wealthy individuals acting independently, is essential to entrepreneurial start-up activity in the United States," said Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation. "Considering that women's financial power and wealth has grown in the past 20 years -approaching half of the nation's net worth - it appears women are under-represented in this type of investing and that we are missing an opportunity for new investments and perspectives. The gap between the potential and actual participation of women as angel investors raises important questions that need to be addressed."

From the Center for Venture Research (.pdf) March 31, 2010 report:

Women-owned ventures accounted for 21% of the entrepreneurs that are seeking angel capital and 9.4% of these women entrepreneurs received angel investment in 2009. Both the number of women seeking angel capital and the percentage that receives angel investments are low compared to the overall market. These data indicate that when women do seek angel capital they lag behind the market yield rate by 5%.

From Confidence and Angel Investors: Does Gender Matter?, 2008:

We investigate whether men and women angel investors have different levels of confidence based on participation in the angel capital market, rate of investments, and stage of investments. We find evidence consistent with women angels having lower levels of confidence compared to men, although we do not suggest that this difference is deleterious for women angel investor's wealth. However, women entrepreneurs, who disproportionately seek funding from women angels, may have more restricted access to early-stage capital than men.