Convert Offline

I met with the owner of a multi-million dollar company (in terms of revenue) and within an hour was offered my dream job along with a package that included a good salary plus an equity stake… did I mention it is a multi-million dollar company.

How did I do it?

Was it my perfectly organized resume? Nope, I never bothered to put one together.

Maybe it was my perfectly polished appearance? Uh… no… trust me. The meeting was come-as-you-are.

Perhaps, it was the impressive way I prepared for the interview? No, I didn’t have time. We met within hours of our first telephone conversation.

So, how did I find this amazing opportunity? I didn’t… the company’s owner found this blog while researching internet advertising. He was also looking for someone with a diverse set of skills. You see, he owns 2 companies… a garage door repair company in NJ and an advertising agency that primarily handles yellow page advertising. So, check out the skill set he was looking for:

• Yellow page knowledge… inside and out.
• Same with Internet Yellow Pages
• Website Design
• SEM
• SEO
• Management Experience
• Sales

That just happens to be my exact background… but the odds of us hooking up using traditional job search techniques like resumes, interview, head hunters etc. is exactly zero.

The blog allowed me to build my brand and allowed him to find a find a candidate with the 6 or 7 qualifications he was looking for. Think about it… it’s hard for an employer to find a good candidate when the job requires a single qualification; the permutations when 7 are needed are mind boggling.

So, my advice to anyone who is thinking about changing careers is to worry less about your resume and start building your brand. In other words… start blogging. And employers, depending on what you are looking for… you might consider a Google blog search before heading over to Monster.

What Seth Godin calls ‘advertising’… I call ‘national advertising’ and what he calls ‘clutter’… I call ‘the widespread ability for a small business to effectively and affordably brand their business for the first time in history.’

A couple of examples might help to understand:

• 200 TV channels - Seth Godin calls this clutter. But really it also represents an opportunity for SMBs to engage in television advertising.
• Magazines - The cost of publishing a magazine has dropped so much in the last 10 years that we are starting to see a number of local publications. There are now magazines that a local advertiser can affordably advertise in that are as local as a single county. The cost of ink alone would have made this prohibitively expensive a short time ago. Now, they can choose niche publication or lifestyle… choices like these were strictly in the dominion of the national advertiser a very short time ago. I don’t think of this as clutter… I think of this as progress… and opportunity.
• Radio and Newspaper - The option to advertise in these mediums has been available to local advertisers for a long time… what has changed of course is the ability to purchase this type of advertising from Google and Yahoo, which will either contribute to the ‘clutter’ or enhance the ability of the local business to brand their business; depending on your point of view.

When Mr. Godin refers to advertising being less effective than it was in the past, again, he is referring to national advertising… and claiming that it is less effective than in the past because of the clutter. It could just be that consumers have a natural preference to local information; and since it has become more abundantly available, they are consuming more of it and less of the national stuff. To a traditional advertiser this would indeed appear as a decline in the effectiveness of advertising.

This is not semantic… far from it. The way national advertisers have eliminated local retail businesses like bakers, butchers and hardware stores. Savvy local advertisers who grasp the concept of branding and effectively leverage this new technology will be in a position to do the same thing in local service industries. This is a life and death situation for these local businesses and just like the bakers and hardware stores, who didn’t see it coming, most local service businesses won’t see this coming. The big difference is that the business that gulps down all the market share won’t come from outside, like a Home Depot, but will rather rise up from among them as they adapt the marketing techniques formerly restricted to large corporations.