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      "body": "Congratulations @dwilikers! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@dwilikers/birthday2.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 2 years!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_You can view [your badges on your Steem Board](https://steemitboard.com/@dwilikers) and compare to others on the [Steem Ranking](https://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?name=dwilikers)_</sub>\n\n\n**Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:**\n<table><tr><td><a href=\"https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/use-your-witness-votes-and-get-the-community-badge\"><img src=\"https://steemitimages.com/64x128/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTugCUsoXX762vg1CuHRrpnPbfnjPogp8iCGv7F2kSVuj/image.png\"></a></td><td><a href=\"https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/use-your-witness-votes-and-get-the-community-badge\">Use your witness votes and get the Community Badge</a></td></tr></table>\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "body": "I didn’t start looking at looking at programmer job ads until 2006 or so. Or maybe earlier, but then that could’ve been in the era where adults still ran businesses.\n\nAnyway, whether or not it was sooner or later, I didn’t see it until 2006 or 2007. I’ve had a handful of tech jobs, and up until 2015, I — just out of curiosity, of course — would look up jobs, and find a slew of cringe-inducing, popped-collar, dudebro, snarky, nuh-uh girl, Delta Upsilon Mu, aneurysm-inducing job descriptions. They usually go like this:\n\n> **Douche & Co. is looking for a BADASS, Growth Hacking Ninja!**\n>\n> Yeah, you’re sitting at a dusty cube watching the clock hit 5 so you can go home and brighten your day with a little GoT after doing the same BORING work.\n>\n> Well, Douche & Co. is totes **not** boring, and if you’re looking for some FUN work, come work with us! If you’re not into **being a super-cool, hipster NINJA, stop reading right here.**\n>\n> Now, this job is lots of fun, as I’m sure you always take the word of anonymous strangers who have a personal interest in having you believe them. Nerf gun fights? Yeah. Margarita machines on FRIDAYS? You betcha! Air hockey and Friday afternoon bowling? That’s right!\n>\n> So, I know it sounds awesome, right? But what you’ll be doing is just as orgasmic!\n>\n> We’re looking for a Growth Hacker — somebody who can\n>\n> - Create online marketing campaigns on whatever tools we use\n> - ~~Be adept at using the = sign in Excel~~ Be badass at data analytics!\n> - Research different trends\n> - Chit-chat about Game of Thrones (lol, I know it’s Feb, but winter’s still coming!)\n>\n> Don’t email us if you can’t do these things! (Seriously!) We believe in learning & education, but we’re only looking for ninjas right now — sorry!\n>\n> Now, you’ll be compensated handsomely ($25K with benefits — and by “benefits,” we mean, “We give you the benefit of going to the doctor during work hours without docking pay.”), and you’ll be around a great team of people! I mean, these people are so rad they talk about the 1987 Ninja Turtles cartoon still and wear Darkwing Duck t-shirts! Because, it’s unfathomable that people who grew up watching wildly popular cartoon series would talk about them!\n>\n> Punching up the awesomeness burn throttle, we’ve got a sweet office downtown with a great view — and we got stocked fridges (That’s right — 2!) and pumpkin spice (aka cinnamon) lattes! We even validate your parking!\n>\n> What we’re saying here is, you’re not working from home. Like, ever. In fact, you won’t even be _going home_ until 8pm. If you’re looking for a place where you can work and go home to mind your own business, this is not the place for you. Serious NINJAS only.\n>\n> So, are you ready to kick some ass with us? (We cussed! We’re awesome!) Then, to show you want this $25K/year before taxes job as a NINJA, please\n>\n> - Fill out our application\n> - Make a professionally-edited, recorded, and scripted video about why you want to work for an awesome place like this\n> - Tell us about your favorite Spongebob episode\n> - Put your spirit animal in the “Subject:” field (that doesn’t exist)\n>\n> Then, if we think you’re badass enough, we’ll set up and interview with you.\n>\n> We look forward to hearing from you!\n\nThe ability for people to esteem their company and someone else’s job to the point I curse myself for my ability to understand human language never ceases to amaze me. (Or, it’s amaze-balls lol!) I can only imagine the generational progression of job applications:\n\n- My grandparents applied for jobs by walking into a place with a resume and giving it to a manager.\n- My parents faxed in resumes and called about jobs.\n- I talk about my favorite episode in a children’s show. (Spoilers: The answer is “whatever episode I don’t have to watch.”)\n\nHere’s the thing: I get maybe you jumped on a great opportunity, or, more likely, you built the company, so you’d never admit to running a toxic company where you get to waste company money at Coushatta (or Vegas). But it’s the candidate’s decision as to whether or not you’re worth working for.\n\nA senior-level candidate is 95% likely to be either indifferent or apathetic to anything your office has, and they’ll decide if your team is “great.” And for $25K, it’s a safe bet they’ll assume you and your team are anything but.\n\nWhat people — especially senior-level people — really want to know is if they’ll work on interesting projects, if the people seem competent, if it meets the list of requirements they’ve gathered over the years, and if it’s a fair exchange.\n\n(If you’re hiring in San Antonio, this also means people don’t want to work somewhere that requires 10+ years experience in everything but only pays $70K/year and being on-site is mandatory.)\n\nA company that tries really hard to sound cool reminds us of being a teenager. And last time I checked, we’re not. I like having my own place, sleeping when I want, and not having to go to the back seat of my ’04 Toyota Corolla to have sex.\n\nThe defense for this type of frivolity is basically that company culture is important, and employers need to ensure the candidate is a “culture fit.”\n\nThis is the convenient excuse for “I don’t like the candidate,” but let’s be real — you can’t tell from an application. No matter how personalized a video interview may be, it’s a guess at best and an assumption at worst.\n\nOn the other side of the coin, the candidate has no real way to determine if they like your culture. But if you write job descriptions like the one I wrote, I assure you a description like that will have good people avoiding you like a diabetic avoids yeast rolls.\n\nYou want to know how you can get good and willing people? People that will be willing to put in the extra effort? (Besides paying at least 3x more.) Do what you expect of your candidates.\n\nNowadays, we have — for better or worse (usually worse) — personal brands. That doesn’t mean your company is exempt from having a brand. You have to put in the work just like we do.\n\nNo, that doesn’t mean carefully-edited videos that give an appearance of fun. It means talking (within reason) about what you’re up to, your accomplishments, your goals, your values. It can be hard when you’re small, especially for a one-person team, but in an era where we feel entitled to information, this door swings both ways.\n\nThis kind of stuff she also come spontaneously from employees, too. Trust me, when you do this, you’ll have all sorts of people spamming you their contact info in LinkedIn comments.\n\nLook, I know people will say that if these obnoxious job descriptions didn’t work, nobody would do them. And, I’d also add that most of the time, inexperienced people with the “right” attitude would probably get the job than experienced people (who probably won’t have the “right” attitude).\n\nBut when those inexperienced, “right” attitude people quit your company a year later, they’ll know better next time.",
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      "body": "Here’s something that can help the union of my two audiences.\n\nThe hardest lesson I ever learned was to say \"no\" to something (a client, an employer) that wasn’t a good fit for me.\n\nIn the idealized society we create online, nobody has financial struggles and obligations, but let me tell you I did. I was underpaid, in a single-income family, and my marriage was tough. We weren’t that great with our money, with me having more learned the life lessons on personal finances as a teenager and young adult versus my wife who never learned that lesson until recently.\n\nBut even with wise planning and budgeting, it wasn’t much to live on among 4 people, so I’d been in job-hunting mode for 8 of the 10 years I was a developer chasing opportunities.\n\nThe point of all of this is, when faced with those stakes, I went pretty far into some interviews I knew early on I didn’t want to take. And I wasted my time.\n\nAs a consultant, it’s hard to wrap your head around \"Do business with people you want to work with.\" My post on why your employee engagement sucks is acerbic and likely a controversial opinion, given it was inspired by a commenter I didn’t agree one bit with. That probably will rub people the wrong way.\n\nAnd that’s good. Those people I wouldn’t want to work with, because anyone upset by that is too busy making excuses or focusing on margarita machines to ever fix their problem.\n\nSince I do consulting for HR, one thing I go and look at is Glassdoor reviews and interviews. Not because I think they are valid on their own, but because I can see\n\n- Where discontent (if any) comes from (org-wide or department-level)\n- If there are fake reviews\n- How/if the employer responds to feedback\n- How early (and thus encouraged) an employee post is\n\nThese can tell me two things: if there is a problem I can solve and if the org is worth doing business with. When it seems like reviews and what actual senior employees tell me line up with the 3 employee engagement problems — and the org insists they’re not problems — that’s a pass. I can’t solve the problem, because the org refuses to own responsibility for unhappy employees. I don’t want to do business with someone who is willfully oblivious, either.\n\nThese all signify wasting time on people who won’t buy anything, or if they do, they’ll nickle and dime, because they don’t get your value.\n\n## How you can stop wasting your time\n\nAn HR professional once asked how she can encourage employees to leave Glassdoor reviews without making them believe it has to be a positive review. I can make an educated guess when orgs request their employees to do this, and if I can do it, you better believe others will filter those out. If a review has no cons, that’s a serious red flag, and too many of them will defeat the purpose of leaving reviews.\n\nIn other words, don’t encourage employees to leave reviews.\n\nYes, this is counterintuitive, but employee reviews and business reviews are not the same.\n\nIf you’re a consultant, make a list of what’ll make you walk away. Know your standards, because they’re only standards when you’re not willing to compromise them for comp. It really isn’t worth it to get business from someone who won’t take you seriously. The cost of getting that check is more than you’re charging them. Walk away.\n\nNobody will tell you this, either. If you sell for a company, they’ll always acquiesce to \"good\" bad customers. Since the beginning of my times running a business, lots of business owners said you have to be get the bad customers first to get good ones. There’s no conclusive evidence of this. Research the business of whoever says this, and I bet you it’s not sunshine for them.\n\nRemember this: it’s all about value. For orgs, people want to know you invest in them, and you legitimately care. For consultants, it’s not about your time, it’s about your value combined with your knowledge. Focus on those who understand value.\n\n- - -\n\nI’m the Tech Mentor — a developer-turned-salesperson-turned entrepreneur who believes in life beyond code. I teach people how to stop wasting their time.\n\nI write weekdays on Medium and Steemit. I also run Jogral, a company that I spent more time reinventing than operating.\n\nYou won’t find me on Twitter, Facebook, on LinkedIn, but you can follow me @dwilikers here and on Steemit, or email me [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). Be sure to comment on this article!",
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      "body": "<center>![A dog yawning of boredom](https://steemitimages.com/DQmPaDZNuFoEm9j6EA7DVh4aVGyLxHqmT5fanh6gPU2cwGL/image.png) <br>No image macros, here.</center>\n\nA staple of my experience as a professional is meeting a business owner is regularly meeting someone who says\n\n> People are so excited about what we’re doing. We’ve had to turn business away!\n\nI heard this in 2007, and I hear it now in 2018. In fact, I was working on a new email series on dealing with time wasters, and I remembered this line. But it’s so egregious, I decided to write about it, here.\n\nThe context this statement usually appears in is when trying to hire, sell, or partner with someone. The idea is that people are so interested in the concept or idea that they want to progress the business relationship quicker than the provider can accommodate, so the provider decides they have no choice but to decline.\n\nThis is the sign of a time waster. There are really only 3 reasons someone turns down business:\n\n1. They don’t want to do business with someone\n2. They’re not confident they can deliver\n3. They’re shutting down/changing focus\n\nNone of these are impressive. The entire goal of Ditch the Time Wasters is to get you to instantly identify a #1 situation. #2 has a myriad of problems we’ll get to in a second, and #3 speaks for itself.\n\nLet’s talk about the fear of being unable to deliver results. In context, people that have turned down business because of #2 present a scenario where they were in a conversation, a prospect said, \"Yeah! Let’s go!\" and they rejoined, \"We’re not ready yet. Sorry.\"\n\nThis is the sign of someone who doesn’t know how to sell and is ignorant of possibilities. What if I told you that also between 2007 and 2018, I’ve [read about](https://hbr.org/2013/12/sell-your-product-before-it-exists) business owners who, even when they had nothing to show for yet, managed to get the business and find a way to deliver?\n\nOkay… what if I told you I know people who have sold a product before it’s finished? Now, what if I told you **some of the same people humble-bragging about turning business down have done it in the same breath**?\n\nWhen it comes to launching a product, especially software, it usually benefits to have pre-launch customers. That’s normally what a beta is for. One client even had a customer before building their product. Did I mention these were paying customers?\n\nAs I said, #2 happens because of the lack of knowledge on how to **close** a deal. When you have an actual product, it’s tempting to see the value as the product rather than the provider. WordPress is so popular it’s spawned startups focused entirely on delivering solutions such as [plugins](https://tri.be), [managed services](https://wpengine.com), and [designs](https://themeforest.net) around it!\n\nBut WordPress itself is **free**. The value is in the provider that understands the customer’s problem and can provide a solution. That’s a [service](https://medium.com/ditch-the-time-wasters/why-i-dodged-starting-service-businesses-7d639869d399) which just happens to have an actual software product around it.\n\nWhat I’m saying here is if there’s a problem you can solve for the customer (and if you can only solve it with your own SaaS product, you can’t solve it), the opportunity for a deal is still on the table.\n\nNow, if you’re concerned about not having enough staff who can deliver, that’s slightly different. You messed that up by not being realistic. (By the way, a lead gen company trying to sell you on their services isn’t \"turning business down.\" It’s not business until there’s a \"yes.\") You also messed that up by [pricing based on time](https://expensiveproblem.com/list) or project completion. I’ve even seen firms have waiting lists for customers. If someone’s willing to wait 3 months just to work with a specific person, there’s no excuse to turn down business because of delivery.\n\nSo, what if you’re a person looking to establish a business relationship, and you have someone tell you this. Why are they a time waster?\n\nSimple. This is a person who’s easily compromised and lacks confidence. If that person knows they can’t deliver, but decided to have the conversation with you, anyway, they might be desperate, unsure, or immature. They might under-price themselves and cheat you. I worked for a startup that would do this when they realized they under-priced, and yet **never learned the lesson to price better**. It’ll give you a headache, so just say \"no.\"\n\nBut whatever you do, don’t go bragging about how you did.\n\n- - -\n\nI’m the Tech Mentor — a developer-turned-salesperson-turned entrepreneur who believes in life beyond code. I teach people how to stop wasting their time.\n\nI write weekdays on Medium and Steemit. I also run Jogral, a company that I spent more time reinventing than operating.\n\nYou won’t find me on Twitter, Facebook, on LinkedIn ([here’s why](https://medium.com/@dwilikers/what-losing-my-sales-coach-made-me-realize-about-trusting-myself-f79eb9324112)), but you can follow me @dwilikers here and on Steemit, or email me [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). Be sure to comment on this article!",
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      "body": "Honestly, I think lead gen is all about trial and error. If you wish to get results <i>now</i>, then it's best to just go to networking events and get your name known in your community. People online that share their lead gen strategies are successful with those strats because it helped them. There are so many variables involved and they were able to figure out something that worked for them. That doesn't mean it'll help you. You just have to adapt those strats and create your own. Trial and error. Definitely get back on social media. There is too much leveraging power there for entrepreneurs not to be involved in someway. Especially since you'll be able to attract more eyes to a website using it effectively.",
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      "body": "Stop me if you've heard this one.\n\nYou're starting a business. You did the research, figured out your target, you know the messaging and everything to get started. You don't have a big budget—in fact, bonus points if you came from nothing, living off more calories than food, and you've got a family.\n\nThe #1 question is: how do you sell?\n\nI mean, you know _how_ to sell, but how do you:\n\n- Generate leads\n- Prioritize events you attend\n- Get your name out there\n\nYou want to get your name out there, because you figure nobody's going to your website or responding to your e-mails, because they've never heard of you. You haven't spoken at TEDxWhatever, you just barely started making use of the channels you want to pursue, and even then, nobody's paying attention.\n\n**But what do you _do_ to get business?**\n\nMost of the answers online are hand-wavy. Start a blog, get on social media, make your website, do some work for free, ask people in your network. I've done all of those things, and I recently [abandoned my social networks](https://medium.com/@dwilikers/what-losing-my-sales-coach-made-me-realize-about-trusting-myself-f79eb9324112) while committing weekdays to [blogging at least on Medium](https://medium.com/@dwilikers/) and finding a way to grow on Steemit. Yet, there's still [people out there with \"coming soon\" splash pages](https://letsworkshop.com/getting-clients-and-portfolios) that never change, because they're already getting clients and can't focus on their site.\n\nAnother hand-wavy answer is \"use SEO.\" My first startup job was at an SEO company, and awhile we've come a long way since 2007, SEO is a _marathon_ not at _sprint_. The expectation is _eventually_, my website will help generate leads.\n\nBut it's not generating leads _now_.\n\nFor the last few weeks, I've relied on chambers of commerce directories and searching \"VP HR [insert city here].\" That'll generate a few HR results on LinkedIn—enough to send at least 10 cold emails a week. Most websites are focused on deciding whether or not these people are even _opening_ the emails, which leads to some paid service to get open rates.\n\n(Incidentally, this is easily measurable, so I guess these services are just convenience services.)\n\nSometimes, I'll hear a CRM (e.g. HubSpot) has some leads you can generate, and when I try I end up in a loop of not being allowed to login to my account or not getting access to what is supposed to be there.\n\nBasically, there's a lot of incomplete techniques for finding people you can do business with. Manually doing it isn't working, and the cold emails have a 5%ish response rate, and half that leads to an appointment.\n\nI don't know about you, but it's a lot of work studying a customer, creating a system, and following through for 2.5% of people to agree to an appointment. (If you were applying for a job, [Lindsay Mustain of Talent Paradigm](https://www.talentparadigm.co) says that you'll get about the same success rate, so it's not just a sales thing.)\n\nI think the reason everyone has lots of vague, semi-plausible lead gen techniques is because nobody _really_ knows what works. Either that or they _do_, but it would scare people off to hear _slow and steady wins the race_. Most people will be learning how to make their own everything to save on groceries like I did, which runs contrary to the \"follow your dream\" platitude at large in the professional world.\n\nNevertheless, selling's a lot easier when\n\n- Someone can set up the appointments for you\n- Your perceived expertise impresses the people you're trying to do business with\n- You have either time or money\n\nLast year I built a product I couldn't sell. Now, I'm in the process of open sourcing it, as I find an area I want to specialize.\n\nThat is, professionally speaking, I care about integration and business efficiency. In tech terms, I help HR leverage APIs and command-line tools to find data that simplifies their work. Outside of that, I help new business owners stop wasting time on things that don't matter.\n\nWriting is the most interesting channel to achieve all this right now, so for me, the slow burn, possibly effective approach is to write and get my writing out there to get more business.\n\nAt least then I'll be able to definitely answer the question of how I got leads.\n\n- - -\n\nI’m a developer-turned-salesperson-turned entrepreneur who believes in life beyond code. I do 2 things: teach HR how to better leverage APIs and teach aspiring software freelancers about the business side of freelancing. In short, I teach people how to stop wasting their time. I write weekdays on [Medium](https://medium.com/@dwilikers/) and [Steemit](https://steemit.com/@dwilikers). I also run [Jogral](https://jogral.co), a company that I spent more time reinventing than operating.\n\nYou won’t find me on Twitter, Facebook, on LinkedIn (here’s why), but you can follow me @dwilikers here and on Medium. Be sure to upvote and comment on this article!",
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