Millions of U.S. residents either work for themselves full-time or run a small side business, yet only 50 percent of these businesses last at least five years. Regardless of the type of venture your clients are considering or have already launched—from computer consulting or event photography to selling flowers or operating a food truck—their business success depends on having the information and resources they need.

Consumer Action’s updated and expanded small business guide, Micro Business: Preparing for success, walks those who are in the planning stage through the crucial steps for getting their business off the ground, from writing a business plan and choosing their business structure to finding funding and avoiding common start-up mistakes.

For existing businesses, the guide offers information and tips for establishing good bookkeeping practices, finding money to grow the business, expanding their business to the internet, and finding legal and consulting services if needed.

The 12-page guide can be downloaded—free—from the Consumer Action website, and it’s available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean (immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as U.S.-born residents). Community educators can also place a bulk order for printed copies online, or use the attached form to order by fax or mail.

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. Most painfully, you’ll learn that your role in the company has to change.

I’ve seen these transitions as an investor, board member, and CEO. At times they are painful to watch and difficult to manage. Early in my career, I lived it as an employee, and I handled it in the worst possible way.

Here’s What I Wish I Had Known
I had joined MIPS Computers, my second semiconductor company, as the VP of marketing and also took on the role of the acting VP of Sales. During the first year of the company’s life, I was a fireball–relentless in creating and pursuing opportunities–getting on an airplane at the drop of a hat to fly anywhere, anytime, to get a design win. I worked with engineering to try to find product-market fit (big endian or little endian?) and get the chip designed into companies building engineering workstations–powerful personal computers, all while trying to refine how to find the right markets, customers, and sales process. I didn’t get much sleep, but I was having the time of my life.

And after a year there was good news. Our rent-a-CEO was being replaced by a permanent one. Our chip was nearing completion, and I had convinced early lighthouse customers to design it into their computers. I had done amazing things with almost no resources and got the company on the radar of every tech publication and into deals we had no right to be in. I was feeling 10 feet tall. Everything was great…until the new CEO called me in for a chat.

I don’t remember much about the details, but I do remember hearing him tell me how impressed he was with what I had accomplished so far, then immediately the visceral feeling of shock and surprise when his next words were that now the company needed to scale, and I wasn’t the right person to do that. Wait! What?

For a minute I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. How could that be? What do you mean I’m not the right person? Hadn’t he just listed all the great work I had done? He acknowledged it was a lot of progress but offered that it was a flurry of disconnected tactics without a coherent strategy. No one knew what I was doing, and I couldn’t explain why I was doing it when asked. “You’re just throwing stuff against the wall. That doesn’t scale.” I was speechless. Wasn’t that what the first year of a startup was supposed to be like?

Scrambling to save my job, I regained the power of speech, and asked him if I could be the person to take the company to the next level. And to his credit (which I only appreciated years later) he agreed that while he was going to start a search, I could be a candidate for the job. And to top it off he got me a coach to help me understand what taking it to the next level meant. In preparation I remember buying all the management books I could find and reading what little literature there was at the time about how small company management transitioned into a larger one.

And Herein Lies The Tale
I vaguely remember going to lunch with my coach, a nice white-haired “old guy” who was trying to help me learn the skills to grow into the new job. The problem was I had shut down. Even as we were meeting, I was obsessively thinking about the change in my role, my title and my status. “I don’t get it, I did all this work, and everything was great. Why does anything have to change?” But I never shared any of how I felt with my coach. To do this day I am really embarrassed to admit that I have no idea what my coach tried to teach me over multiple lunches and weeks. As we went to lunch, all I could think about was me and how I was being screwed. I literally paid zero attention. In my righteous anger I was unreachable.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but yet again I was, when a month later the CEO said, that the report from the coach said, “I had a long way to go.” The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing. I was devastated.

I quit.

It’s Not About Change–It’s About Loss
If you had asked me a decade later what had been going on in my head and why I handled this so badly, I would have simply said, that:

I was resistant to change
I had made this all about me and never once considered that our new CEO was right.
All true – to a point.

It took me another decade to realize if I had been really honest with myself it wasn’t about fighting change at all. Heck, every day something new was happening at our startup. I was agile enough to keep up with innumerable changes and I was changing lots of things myself. It was actually about something much more personal I wouldn’t admit to myself – it was that these changes made me fear what I was losing:

I felt a loss of status and identity: I had been judged inadequate to continue in my role and my stature and the value of my skills and abilities had dropped.

I felt a loss of certainty: I was now competing to hold a job I thought was mine forever in the company. At least that’s what I thought my business card said. Now I was adrift and didn’t know what the future held.

I felt a loss of autonomy: Up until now I used my best judgment of what was needed and I was doing what I wanted, when I wanted it. I was fine making up a strategy on the fly from disconnected tactics. Now we were going to have plans and a strategy.

I felt a loss of community: We had been a small tight team who had bonded together under extreme pressure and accomplished amazing things. Now new people who knew none of that and appreciated little of it were coming in. They had little trust and empathy with us.

I felt the process lacked fairness: No one had warned or told me that the job I was doing needed to change over time, and no one told me what those new skills were.

What Was Going On?
Researchers have found there’s a link between social connection and physical discomfort within the brain.

Being hungry and being ostracized activate similar neural responses because being socially connected is necessary for survival. Although a job is often regarded as a purely economic transaction, the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system.

Looking back over the decades it’s clear that the new CEO was right. Even though these losses triggered something primal, I did need to learn discipline, pattern recognition, time management, separating the trivial from the important and the difference between tactics and strategy. I needed to learn to grow from being a great individual contributor to being a manager and then a leader. Instead I walked away from learning any of it.

I probably added five unneeded years to my career.

What Should I Have Done?
Today it’s understood that all startups go through a metamorphosis as they become larger companies. They go from organizations struggling for survival as they search for product/market fit, to building a repeatable and scalable business model, and then growing to profitability. And we are all hard-wired for a set number of social relationships. This mental wiring defines boundaries in growing an organization–get bigger than a certain size, and you need a different management system. The skills needed from employees differ at each stage.

Search Build Grow 2

What I wish I knew was that if you’re an early company employee, it’s not likely that the skills you have on day one are the skills needed as the company scales to the next level.

The sentence above is worth reading multiple times as no one–not the person who hired you, the VCs, or your peers–is going to tell you when you’re hired that the company will likely outgrow you. Some (like your peers or even the founders) don’t understand it, and others (the VCs) realize it’s not in their interest to let you know.

The painful reality is that products change, strategies change, people change. Things have to change for your company to stay in business and grow.

What Should My CEO Have Done?
When my CEO was explaining to me how the company needed to change to grow, he was explaining facts while I was processing deeply held feelings. The changes in the organization and my role represented what I was about to lose. And when people feel they’re going to lose something deeply important, it triggers an emotional response because change feels like a threat. It’s not an excuse for my counterproductive behavior, but explains why I acted out like I did.

Startup CEOs need to think about these transitions from day one and consider how to address the real sense of loss these transitions mean to early employees.

Loss of status: It’s almost impossible to take away a title from someone, give it to someone else, and still retain that employee. Think hard about whether titles need to be formal (VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, etc.) before the company finds product-market fit and/or 10s of people, as you can almost guarantee that these people won’t have those roles and titles when you scale.

Loss of certainty: Startups and VCs have historically operated on the “I’ll deal with this later” principle in letting early employees know what happens as the company scales. The common wisdom is that no one would want to work like crazy knowing that they might not be the ones to lead as the company grows. I call this the Moses-problem–you work for years to get the tribe to the promised land–but you’re not allowed to cross over. The company needs to give formal recognition for those individuals who brought the tribe to the promised land.

Loss of autonomy: This is the time you and your employees get to have a discussion about the next steps in their career. Do they want to be an individual contributor? Manager of people and process? Special projects? These shouldn’t be random assignments but instead, offer a roadmap of possible choices and directions.

Loss of community: Your original hires embody the company culture. Unless you have them capture the unique aspects of the culture, it will become diluted and disappear among the new hires. Declare them cultural cofounders. Help them understand the community is growing and they’re the ambassadors. Have them formalize it as part of a now needed on-boarding process as the company grows. And most importantly, make sure that they are celebrated as the team that got the company to where it is now.

Loss of fairness: Just telling employees “a change is going to come” it is not sufficient. What are the new skills needed when you scale from “search” to “build” to “grow”–from 10s to 100s and then 1,000s of people? How can your existing employees gain those new skills?

Lessons Learned
VCs, founders, and CEOs now recognize that startups grow through different stages: search, build, and grow.

They recognize that employees need different skills at each stage
And that some of the original employees won’t grow into the next stage
But while these changes make rational sense to the CEO and the board, to early employees, these changes feel like a real and tangible personal loss.

Loss of status and identity
Loss of community
Loss of autonomy
Loss of certainty
Loss of fairness
CEOs need to put processes in places to acknowledge and deal with the real sense of loss

These will keep early employees motivated–and retained
And build a stronger company
For employees, how you handle change will affect the trajectory of your career and possibly your net worth.

Don’t be the last to understand Cryptocurrency, blockchain, Smart Contracts, and the decentralized web.  There is nothing illegal about it at all.  Some say it’s media free and the web was originally intended.

Once selling and competitive advertising became apparent, some of us decided to build a “Decentralized web”.  Some call it the dark web and believe it’s where illegal activities occur and hacking gurus hang out.  This could be further from the truth.

There are hackers on any platform of the web.  These are engineers, programmers, inventors, IT professionals, students, etc…  Basically people from all walks of life. Most research and development are performed on black background screens, hence the name “Dark Web”.

You see, these people have been around for a long time.  Most work in an environment called “open Source” networks.  A good example is Reddit.  Reddit is an open source site that allows a community to work together to solve problems, create new software, assist each other with problems coding and writing everything from the behavior of software to games published on the web.  Oh, we also pitch in where needed to bring Business software, firewalls, Artificial Intelligence, digital currencies, websites and more.  BTW, did I mention that these communities work freely and independent of any regulations.

So you see, there is nothing to fear when advancements are becoming the talk of media and buzzwords are used out there.  It’s just the people who want in and knowledge to understand what’s going on.

These communities are self-regulated with some minor rules such as, each contributor has an ID that verifies who they are and their level of expertise.  Some participate for the fun of it, challenges and other seek to build something to bring to the market sell or for a business solution for clients.

To sum it up, there are tons of open source sites and platforms we refer to as communities.  Most software giants have some sort of community that allows engineers, coders, developers, and individuals to usee their data, cloud, storage, and platforms for research & development (R&D).  The term “Dark Web” only refers to an R&D space where IT professionals hang out to bring the latest digital toys and game to the masses.  Absent, is the advertising, media selling, and competition for likes, followers, and notoriety.  Therefore, it’s dark!

“Father” (Part #2)

‘My son, do not forget my law, But let your heart keep my commands’ (Proverbs 3:1 NKJV)

If you’re a dad, God expects you to be the leader in your family. That means: (1) You must want to lead. Without good leadership, the chances are your kids are headed for a life of trouble. Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr said, ‘If you look at the one factor that most closely correlates with crime, it’s not poverty, it’s not unemployment, it’s not education; it’s the absence of the father in the family.’

(2) You must know where you’re going. Without clear direction for your own life, you can’t guide your kids. God expects you to enable your children to make wise decisions in such crucial areas of life as sex, money, relationships, marriage, and the vocations they choose. These are make-or-break issues. It’s your job to teach them both in precept and practice what those crucial life issues are, and to help them make godly decisions in each one.

(3) You must ‘be there’ for them. Let’s use this acrostic on the word DADS: Direction. Availability. Discipline. Spirituality. The most crucial component on the list is ‘availability’. Why? Because if you’re not available you can’t give direction, your discipline will be resented, and your spiritual leadership will be rejected. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you don’t lead your children, someone will lead them for you. If you’re not there for them someone else will be—someone you may not like … And when that happens, the greater problem isn’t that you won’t be around; it’s that you’ll no longer be missed! In the Bible, God is called ‘Our Father’. So today ask Him to help you become the father your children need.

‘So God granted him what he requested’ (1 Chronicles 4:10 NKJV)When Jabez prayed, ‘Enlarge my territory,’ he was saying, ‘Lord, I want more than I’ve got, and I’m asking You for it’! This man had great ambitions, and God blessed them.

There are three common misconceptions that can keep us from having great ambitions:

(1) We confuse fear with humility. We say, ‘Oh, I could never do that,’ and think we’re being humble. But that’s not humility. That’s fear; that’s lack of faith. A truly humble person would say, ‘With God’s help I can do it. With God’s blessing I will do it. I may not be able to do it on my own, but with God’s help I can’. That’s real humility.

(2) We tend to confuse laziness with contentment. We quote Paul: ‘I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances’ (Philippians 4:11 NIV) … But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t set goals. Paul wasn’t saying, ‘I don’t have any ambitions or future plans’ … Just the opposite, in fact! He spoke of ‘reaching forward to what lies ahead’ (Philippians 3:13 NAS). If you don’t have a dream or a goal, ask God for one.

(3) We confuse small thinking with spirituality. Some people say, ‘I serve God in my little way’. Why don’t you start serving Him in a bigger way? Why not let Him use you more? Other people say, ‘Well, I’m just fine the way I am. That’s the way God made me’. It’s wrong to blame God for your lack of growth, because He has provided all the tools and ideas you need in order to grow. Bottom line: think big or you’ll get in God’s way!

‘Oh, that You would bless me indeed’ (1 Chronicles 4:10 NKJV)

Jabez prayed that God would bless him in three specific ways:

(1) ‘Enlarge my territory.’ He had a dream of owning more land, and he asked God to bless that dream. When you stop dreaming you lose direction. When you stop setting goals you stop growing. You must have something you’re pushing towards. As long as your horizon is expanding, you’ll be spiritually and emotionally healthy.

(2) ‘That Your hand would be with me’. God’s hand represents His power. Jabez realized that if he got more territory it meant he would have more responsibility. He would have greater demands and more pressure, and he would really need God’s help in his life. So he requested God to be with him … And when you ask for God’s presence in your life, you can be sure He’ll answer.

(3) ‘That You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain’. Jabez asked God for His protection. Why? Because in those days the more land you owned, the more influence you had, and the better known you were … And that made you a bigger target. It’s still like that today. The more successful you are, the more critics you have. The more territory you own, the more your enemies will attack you. The closer you grow to the Lord and the stronger you become as a Christian, the more the devil will harass you because he doesn’t want you to grow. But you can be sure, as Jabez was, that with God’s protection you don’t have to fear anyone or anything. Do you want to break out of mediocrity? Then pray the prayer that Jabez prayed.

“Position Yourself To Receive”

‘The wise listen to others’ (Proverbs 12:15 NLT)

Positioning yourself to receive—makes all the difference! For example, as you read this, if you position yourself to receive by saying to the Lord, ‘I will take action on what You show me,’ you’ll benefit more than if you read it just to be motivated or inspired. To resist or to receive—that’s a choice you make every day. Nothing dies quicker than a new idea in a closed mind. It’s impossible to learn, if you think you already know it all. One of the reasons Jesus reacted so strongly to the Pharisees was because they refused to receive what He had to say. A wrongly positioned mind is like a microscope that magnifies trifling things but can’t receive great ones. Every situation, properly viewed, is an opportunity. But opportunities can only ‘drop into your lap’ if you position your lap where opportunities drop. When you don’t position yourself to receive, it’s like asking for a bushel while you’re holding a cup. Too often our minds are locked on one track. We’re looking for red so we overlook blue; we’re thinking ‘tomorrow’ and God is saying ‘now’. We’re looking everywhere, and the answer is right under our nose. When a person is positioned correctly, he or she is ready to receive all God has for them.

The Bible often uses simple words. The original term means ‘thick, dull, and sluggish’, and it describes those who are insensitive and unreceptive to the thoughts of others. When God sends His messenger with an idea or a different concept outside of what you have envisioned, don’t dismiss it without relevance. And another thing, only God chooses His messengers. God will speak to you through people, but unless you listen you won’t hear what He has to say. So today position yourself to receive.