Tag: reputation

High-Tech Drama

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“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain

I’ve been listening to The DropOut podcast about the trial of Elizabeth Holmes that is starting this week and it’s got me hooked. Elizabeth Holmes is the woman who dropped out of Stanford after one year and started Theranos, a company she said would revolutionize the blood testing industry because with just one drop of blood they could analyze for up to 200 factors. She raised billions of dollars of investor money, signed a huge deal with Walgreens, was on the cover of Fortune magazine, and lived a 5 star lifestyle. The technology never worked. Now she’s standing trial for 12 counts of fraud and facing 20 years in prison. She maintains her innocence saying this is the resistance you meet when you try to change the world.

This is not the uplifting, inspiring content that I usually listen to but I find it so reminiscent of my early career in tech that I can’t helped be taken in by the characters. When I graduated from college with my electrical engineering degree, I spent a lot of time working on projects as a consultant at Microsoft in its early days. They were growing so fast they gobbled up engineers. The narcissistic, massive egos, show-off-smart, bullying personalities they describe at Theranos remind me of some of the people I worked with back then.

Microsoft revolutionized the idea of giving stock to employees and they did it at all levels of the company so when the company did well, everyone made money. It was a big change from the old days when the engineers were paid a salary and when a company was successful, it was usually the sales people and the executives that got rich. At Microsoft in those early days when the stock went up so fast, everyone was getting rich. I remember working at a trade show with a Microsoft employee who just sat and watched the stock ticker all day so that they could calculate what “they made” during that day.

It made their employees very loyal and very proud but created a lot of arrogance and petty behavior.  I observed people who met with resistance to an idea and would throw a fit announcing that “they were going to retire.” Usually it was someone that was in their mid-30’s. <eye-roll> Once I working on a tech conference where we were practicing the keynote speech and a MS executive didn’t like the version of the script he was given. He shamed and bullied the person who had stayed up all night working on the recent revisions in such a loud and vocal way that it made me physically feel ill just to watch.

I probably learned more about human behavior, leadership and integrity in those days than all the rest of my career combined. I don’t work with those types of clients any more and other than the lessons that I’m grateful to have gleaned, I don’t miss those days. My 6-year-old daughter said something about someone in the news the other day – “Well, they are famous so they must be good.” We had to take a minute to talk about how character and values don’t necessarily come with fame and fortune.

In the coming months we’ll find out whether the jury will hold Elizabeth Holmes accountable for the billions of dollars she lost or whether that’s the price of doing business. In the years since Theranos went defunct in 2018, she’s started a relationship with a man from a wealthy hotelier family and they had a baby born just 6 weeks before the trial started. However it turns out, listening to the details as they are presented, being reminded of my days watching the power of money makes me so grateful for my life now in the slow lane where I earn my living with no drama attached.

Minding My Own Business

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“If what you believe does not impact how you behave than what you believe is not important.” – Shaykh Yassir Fazaga

This year I’m celebrating having my own business for 20 years. It’s hard to unpack all that means to me but my business was there before I got married and carried me through when I got divorced. It gave me the flexibility to trek to Everest Base Camp for 3 1/2 weeks when I was single and has given me the time and money to have kids as a single woman now. It’s held different structures like when I had business partners and employees and like now when I am a sole proprietor with subcontractors. There have been ups and downs that seemed so huge that they’d swallow me at the time but now in hindsight are now just good stories. While many of the things I’ve learned are specific to my company’s focus which is to provide consulting to businesses about how they can better implement computer collaboration like document sharing and approval processes, the three most key lessons are life lessons:

  • Always pay everyone else, including the government, before you pay yourself. I remember the first payment I got 20 years ago was for $5,000 and it seemed like so much money that I went out and bought a tile saw so I could tile the floor of my home office. But once I paid the state and city taxes, my start up costs and legal fees, my take home was about $1,200. I could still afford the tile saw but I learned not to look at any payment as my money. Instead I pay my expenses often before the client remits payment so that when I look at the bank account, I know how much I can pay myself.
  • Finish your projects and create relationships, and your reputation will take care of much of your marketing. After my business partner told me of my now ex-husband’s infidelities and it became clear we needed to all go our separate ways, I was left maintaining a small office building that we all still owned together. It was after the financial crisis of 2008 so the building was worth less than the mortgage and we couldn’t sell it. So I went to the local SBA office to talk with someone about how to restructure the loan. He gave me a series of things I had to do, accounting, legal and structural and told me if I did, we could restructure them. It took me five months of hard work and when I made an appointment with him and returned, he said, “Wow, you came back. Not many people do.” Which made me cry. And I also was able to reshape the loan to work until I could sell the building. That same tenacity in finishing projects and maintaining my reputation through all circumstances has worked to give me repeat business and referrals that have made the business easier to run over time.
  • Have faith. Every year at this time, my business slows down in late summer because people are on vacation. It doesn’t matter that it’s different customers on one year versus the next, it always happens. And I always worry. So the third lesson is have faith. I think of it like the story of Manna in the Bible. Enough manna would fall each day to feed the Israelites when they were in the desert. But they couldn’t store it from one day to the next. They had to have faith it would come again the next day.
    So I spend August doing my part – honing my skills and reaching out to people and sooner or later my pipeline fills and the business continues. Like with all problems, worrying only drains the energy out of what needs to be done so I’ve learned take a deep breath, focus on faith and keep working.

I’ve heard the phrase “it’s not personal, it’s business” many times. It seems often right before someone is unkind or unfair to someone else. I’m guessing whoever coined that phrase didn’t run a small business for 20 years because at some point it becomes indistinguishable. But when your values are infused in your business, it can be a beautiful thing.