Small businesses hiring more online workers
When Casey McConnell started text messaging marketing company Qittle he took the traditional route of hiring onsite employees. But he soon realized it was more advantageous to hire workers online.
“We found it was easy to find these specialists or people that we could hire for a certain amount,” said McConnell, the CEO of Qittle. “We didn’t have the extra overhead and we just got the project done. It’s really easy for us to ramp up our needs or pull back using contractors. If we had an internal staff it’s pretty hard to fluctuate like that.”
Qittle’s preference to hire workers in the cloud is reflected in Elance’s recent survey that shows 83 percent of small businesses plan to hire half their workers online within the next 12 months. Only 10 percent of those surveyed plan to hire predominantly onsite workers (90 percent).
Elance, a marketplace for online workers, has posted more than 600,000 jobs ranging from programers to virtual assistants. Small businesses prefer to hire online because of flexibility, speed and economy of the process cost, according to Fabio Rosati, the CEO of Elance.
“So if you’re a small business owner, you can think of a hybrid model of hiring (online and onsite workers),” said Rosati. “You can think about what skills and what talent you need onsite. You can also decide what skill set you need to be in the cloud which is much more cost-effective and much more flexible.”
Elance’s Online Employment Report shows the number of businesses hiring online has increased 107 percent since last year. Elancers earned 51 percent more last year and earned a record $38 million in Q3 2011.
Rosati said more and more companies will decide to hire in the cloud. “I predict that at some point 99 percent of businesses will have between 5-10 percent of their hiring done online because it makes so much sense.”
Jane Pauley tackles reinvention
– SecondAct contributor Kerry Hannon is a Contributing Editor for U.S. News & World Report and the author of “Whats Next? Follow Your Passion and Find Your Dream Job”. This article originally appeared here. –
Jane Pauley, the former star of The Today Show and Dateline is back. Last year, the 60-year-old newscaster returned home to NBC’s Today, launching a monthly segment called Your Life Calling with Jane Pauley.
The series profiles people over 50 who reinvent themselves, their lives and their careers. “We’re going to live longer than our parents’ generation, and there comes a point when you ask yourself, ‘What am I going do?’” Pauley says. “You can only play so much golf.”
In her mid-50s, Pauley asked herself that same question. She wasn’t hitting the links, but she was missing in action for a few years after NBC cancelled her daytime talk show, The Jane Pauley Show, in March of 2005 after one season. “It felt like failure,” she says. For the first time in her life, she was unemployed. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.”
But like many of those she profiles, Pauley has found a way to redeploy her skills to tell the stories of her peers, who are discovering their next chapter. “After the daytime show, I presumed TV was behind me and wasn’t looking for a television job when I had The Today Show/YLC epiphany in a hotel room two years ago,” she says.
“Your Life Calling is the first thing in my long career I’ve ever actually invented. It is my entrepreneurial debut.”
Jane, In one question above, you say you envy people who follow their passion. Then in the next, you describe yours! I know from my own experience that for many people, a passion cannot always be seen when you are in the middle of it.
When I turned 50, I was struggling with the same issues. I started watching myself and noting when I felt happy and I discovered that my favorite thing to do was cook. I also decided I was a Jack of all Trades, Master of none. So at 53 I decided to become excellent at something. I went back to school – against my husband’s wishes – to culinary school. It’s a long story, but one thing lead to another and I am now an Executive Chef for a small company and having the time of my life. I just kept putting one choice in front of the other until one day I realized I was having a blast! You are doing that too,whether you realize it or not and I think now you have really found your niche. Keep up the good work. We love you out here! 
Chef Lynn
What the Mob can teach the startup industry
– Connie Loizos is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –
Forty-four-year-old Louis Ferrante hasn’t led a life that might naturally lead to business consulting. As a teenager growing up in Queens, New York, he stole car batteries that he “sold for $10 to get a slice of pizza and play video games.” Later, Ferrante moved on to stealing cars for joy rides, then taking orders from body shops looking for cheap parts. From there, it was a short leap to hijacking trucks and selling their contents through a neighborhood “fence.”
Eventually, Ferrante ran his own crew as an associate of the Gambino family. “When you’re hijacking trucks on the street in Queens, the Mafia is going to hear about you,” he tells me. “It’s not like they come down and say, ‘We’ll kill you if you don’t pay us.’ They take you under their wing.”
In fact, Ferrante might still be a mobster today had state law enforcement and federal agents not taken him down while he was still in his 20s. But even high-powered defense attorneys like Barry Slotnick couldn’t save Ferrante from what would eventually be more than eight years in prison, where he says he fell in love with books -– and out of love with the Mob.
Explains Ferrante: “When someone was killed, you didn’t ask what happened because if you did, they’d want to know why you asked and you’d be dead, too. But I always assumed the guy deserved to die.” In jail, playing cards with “the killers of people I knew,” Ferrante says it became apparent that most of the murders were fueled instead by simple greed. He decided that “however long I have to do (in jail) I will, but when I get out, I want to be done.”
Luckily for Ferrante, his old cohorts let him go his own way when he was released from prison in 2003. Using his life experiences as fodder, he’s gone on to become a successful writer. His newest book, “Mob Rules”, offers surprisingly insightful lessons about what the Mafia can teach legitimate businesspeople. I reached Ferrante in New York yesterday to talk about how his advice might be applied to startup founders and VCs.
Q: Your new book offers 88 leadership lessons gleaned from the Mafia. One of them is about how to build trust within an organization. I think venture firms, where partners try outdoing one another, could learn something from this. What’s your advice?
Sounds like the typical corporate tycoon to me.
Tax incentives for moving into blighted areas
– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw’s Free Enterprise blog. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
One of the bigger stories out of San Francisco of late is Twitter’s planned move into the Tenderloin — a blighted area riddled with shuttered restaurants, graffiti, and crumbling facades.
Considering a move into the suburbs, Twitter managed to brokerage a deal with the city wherein it promised to move into the Tenderloin if the city would provide tax breaks.
While the majority of the debate in San Francisco was about gentrification, the fact of the matter is that sometimes, if it cleans up an area and increases safety, gentrification is a good thing.
It can also be good for business.
Twitter is a large company with a decent amount of pull, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from moving into a blighted area as well.
Cities and states across the country are trying to figure out how to increase economic development in areas that have been hit hard, and many of them are turning to tax incentives.
Mcbride: if we decide on less government than we give less money to the rich! How’s that sound! Vote for those that will most likely give us less government!
Summer camp, with a twist
We’ve all heard of summer camp, boot camp, even fat camp. But how about a camp for young women with a knack for business?
That’s the idea behind Girls Inc. Corporate Camp for Entrepreneurs, a week-long workshop held earlier this month in New York City for 20 girls between the ages of 15 and 18.
Now in its fourth year, the camp hand-picked its attendees from a pool of 70 applicants across the U.S. who competed in teams with like-minded young women to come up with an original business product or service, complete with a viable business plan. (Think: The Apprentice, minus Donald Trump and the TV crew.)
The resulting ideas were certainly unique. In a nod to eco-conscious consumerism, Team “Water Girls” came up with a calendar that monitors water usage with the aim of helping customers conserve and save money. (Watch their presentation here.) “Teenage Touch” presented a mini-service salon offering a range of beauty services aimed at girls. The young women pictured above created “Oh!Zone”, a 5-in-1 game aimed at getting adults and teen girls to talk about touchy issues like health and self-esteem.
The winners were treated to 7 days of business-building tips and presentations from small biz owners and volunteers from Goldman Sachs Community TeamWorks with the goal of developing the country’s next entrepreneurial gurus.
“By learning firsthand how women are successful in the traditionally male-dominated business world, they’re able to envision themselves as leaders in business or any career they pursue,” Girls Inc. President Joyce Roché told Reuters.
Connecting local in a globalized world
Imagine you leave a restaurant and would like to share your thoughts with anyone nearby, or picture yourself standing in an unknown place while reading notes that have been left there from previous visitors or even your friends.
“Urban spaces are increasingly densely populated,” said Dan Melinger, a resident of New York City. “People live in these spaces but may not even know what their neighbors think of the environment that they share.”
By leveraging existing technologies, socialight.com offers a platform that allows people to connect and share the content that is important to them, and allows brands to provide content related to the areas they and their customers inhabit.
Socialight was founded by Melinger, a graduate of New York University, in 2005 but didn’t find its legs until social media exploded and mobile technology caught up to his dream of connecting people in dense urban environments with each other.
Today, devices like the iPhone can locate users and turn them into multimedia producers with the push of a button. It has made existing technologies available to the masses, said Melinger, whose company has grown with these developments.
“Up until a year ago we were only a handful of people. Now, we are about 10 fulltime people and we also have teams of people all around the world on the engineering side and on the content side,” said Melinger, who tracked his company’s progress in an entrepreneurial journal.
Socialight has taken full advantage of the changes and recently launched an iPhone app for the Travel Channel. It allows fans of the TV channel to view content from places around them, produced by their favorite hosts.
Critical mass is a serious issue for this type of technology. As one of the above experts mentioned, a strong parter sounds like a necessity for this to work. A popular online reviewing site like Yelp would in my opinion provide a great starting point, linking relevant reviews to nearby neighborhoods.
It would seem however, that without an obvious leader in the industry with relevant material for any major locaiton in the country there is a lot of room for competitors to step in and fragment the usefullness of the technology beyond a single city.
The trend of outsourcing your work to online independent constructors is seriously on the rise. I think that the benefits of flexible working and the opportunity to reduce costs are powerful incentives for everyone, imagine the SME’s that operate online.
True, more specialized sites like 99designs.com might be more efficient for design jobs but personally i prefer the choices that bigger sites, like http://www.peopleperhour.com, offer me. But still that is personal.
I just wanted to say that for those that still consider the possibility of outsourcing to online freelancers, not to. Just pick one, you can find reviews everywhere, and start outsourcing!