January 3, 2006

My New Business Strategy

I have a new business strategy. It's something I've arrived at through years of trial and error. Back when I started making websites, I would have considered this approach inane, a recipe for failure. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Good Client, Bad Client

Four years ago I decided to recast my personal website, Oblivio, to feature short, frequently posted, mostly fictional stories. Since Oblivio also served at the time as my business site, this decision left me with a difficult question: Do I allow—even invite—clients and potential clients to read my writing, or do I create a separate, business-only website?

I wrote about this question at the time, in an Oblivio piece called Motherfucker, speculating that the one-site approach would prove inadvertently beneficial by attracting the "good" clients and repelling the "bad" ones. I called the piece Motherfucker because I wanted Oblivio to become "a place where I could write the word motherfucker as many times I wanted without fear of seeming like the kind of person who just goes around writing the word motherfucker all the time and for no good reason." (Ironically, the popularity of this piece made Oblivio the top Google search result for the word motherfucker.)

I will never know if my speculation was correct, because I lacked the nerve to try it. Since my stories tend toward the profane and I rarely distinguish fact from fiction, I was concerned what clients might think when they read certain stories. But even more, I was concerned how this dynamic might affect my future writing, as self-editing can be both subtle and insidious. Of course a separate business website wouldn't have hidden my writing from anyone who cared to read it, but at least it would have placed it in a different context.

However, soon after I built the separate site, something unexpected happened: my readers started hiring me. And they did so for an unexpected reason—my writing. I know this because they told me so. Within a year, more than half my clients were Oblivio readers. In retrospect this makes perfect sense: People like working with people they know, and my writing is nothing if not personal.

A Market for Authenticity

It took me several more years to grasp the deeper implications for my business. Having absorbed the language of advertisements and marketing, I had come to think of business as a near-synonym for bullshit. Certainly business is awash in messages crafted to deceive and manipulate—nothing is real or genuine; everything is constructed, everything is part of the message. That's how the game is played. But when my readers started hiring me, the rules of the game changed.

And what a relief this was. Having always chafed at my "business persona," I was only too happy to let down what little hair I have and be myself. Not only did I feel more comfortable, I felt more whole—a sense that has deepened over time. The people who hire me today are usually looking to work with someone like me, which makes them more likely to be the sort of people I want to work with. So long as enough of the "right" people care to hire me (and in this respect I've been blessed), I'm happy to have the "wrong" kind go elsewhere.

My new business strategy can be summed up in just two words: Be yourself. Although I realize that sounds like a boy scout oath, it represents a liberating shift from what I've always believed. I touched on this in Motherfucker when I speculated what a unified site might mean: "No more splitting myself into separate personas for work and non-work. No more fear of people getting 'the wrong idea' about me. Let them get 'the wrong idea' about me; I will no longer act like someone about whom no one can get 'the wrong idea.'"

Brave words, if mostly bluster. But now, four years later, they're at the heart of how I do business. And I'm not exaggerating when I call this a business strategy: I expect to win over clients this way. And not just any clients but the best clients possible—for me.

It's enough to stop a man from having to go around writing the word motherfucker all the time and for no good reason.

Published in Business, Clients, Luminous