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Preoccupations: Older, Unemployed, and Landing the Job

August 3, 2013 by

In 2011, I was an account executive with Scor Global Life Americas Reinsurance Company, in Plano, Tex., near where I live. When Scor acquired Transamerica Reinsurance, I was laid off along with several other people that October.

At that point I called Mike Pado, a former colleague at Scor who had left the company several months earlier for a job as president and C.E.O. of Aurigen USA Holdings. Aurigen is based in Bermuda, and Mike had been hired to look at starting a life reinsurance company in the United States.

Mike, who works out of Red Bank, N.J., was still in the planning stages for the new venture when I spoke to him. He said that at some point he’d need a person who knew the reinsurance industry and its top executives and could contact them for a snapshot of the United States market. He knew I fit that bill. But he was hoping that the person he hired would also be an actuary. I’m familiar with risk assessment and risk management in that field, but I’m not an actuary. So besides my age, I was worried about that.

I had done a good job at Scor for 12 years, and I was disappointed that I had been laid off. My level of anxiety was fairly high. The Aurigen venture sounded like a great opportunity if it worked out. But the business world often has certain misperceptions about workers 55 and older. Some people think we’re set in our ways, we don’t have the energy we used to have, or that we’ve lost our drive. They may worry about offering us a lower salary than we earned previously. I knew I’d have to address these concerns when job-hunting.

I told Mike I was interested in working for him, and we left it that we’d stay in touch while he continued to develop a business plan and consider a staff for the United States company. In the meantime, I sent out 300 résumés. I heard back from about a third of the companies and had about 12 or 15 interviews, but no luck.

By June 2012, eight months after Mike and I first talked, I still hadn’t found a job. Then Mike called and said he could offer me a three-month position as a marketing consultant, and that we’d see what happened after that. I was excited, but a consulting job was not ideal for me. I told him I would do the best job I could for him but would continue looking for a staff job with benefits, and he understood.

Consulting works well for people who like short-term projects and freedom, but I’ve always liked having a staff job. I like the feeling of belonging, and benefits are important.

I started talking to executives right away to gather the information Mike wanted and help him determine whether there was room for another entrant in the United States life reinsurance industry. I spoke to a vice chairman, 11 company presidents, 25 chief actuaries and 30 life underwriters and sent Aurigen’s annual report to customers and others, sometimes with a handwritten note.

My work helped Mike make a case to his board that another United States life reinsurance company could do well. In October I got the news that Mike’s proposal had been accepted. He was finally able to hire me as an account executive on staff for his new-business development team. I was able to stay in Texas for my new job at Aurigen.

Right after hiring me, Mike had me join him and the Aurigen pricing team at the October 2012 conference of the Society of Actuaries in Washington. Many industry executives attend, and I’d help sell prospective clients on the benefits of working with the new venture.

When word got out that I’d been hired, my former colleagues gave me a warm reception, which was nice. Several welcomed me back to the industry, and one asked about my sales territories. It felt great to know that I hadn’t been forgotten.

Rather than start a new company from scratch, Mike began looking at United States insurance companies to buy, choosing one that Aurigen closed on and renamed this past spring.

Some people might have no problem retiring after being laid off at 59. Maybe they tell themselves it’s not what they would have wanted, but they make the best of it. Or maybe they are ready to retire, so it turned out to be perfect timing. I’ll be 61 in September, but I want to keep working, so getting a chance at this job worked out well for me.

It’s easy to get depressed about being an older job seeker. You have to keep your eyes open, stay focused, and be open to possibilities. You never know when and how an opportunity may come along.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/jobs/older-unemployed-and-landing-the-job.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Your Ideas Are Worthless

November 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Make Your Pitch

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In a recent post, I wrote about my belief that ideas had no value and that it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to protect a business idea. It’s a notion I have been talking about for some time, but it is a controversial concept that often provokes strong disagreement. That disagreement, I think, stems from a misunderstanding of what an idea really is — or at least what I deem an idea to be.

Let me try to clarify. I received a comment asking that if I really thought ideas were worthless, why did I bother to copyright my book, “The Entrepreneur Equation“? The answer is simple. I didn’t protect the idea of the book; I protected the final work product — postexecution.

I didn’t try to copyright my original idea for writing a book around the framework of evaluating the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship. The reality is that I wouldn’t have been able to do so — that idea cannot be protected. Furthermore, I didn’t keep the idea a secret for fear that someone else would write the same book. I shared with many people what I was doing to get feedback and to create accountability for me to finish it. I had individuals, some paid, some just helping, review early drafts to make the book stronger. Only after writing the 80,000-plus words and then revising, editing and packaging it into a final product did I seek protection. But I wasn’t protecting my idea; I was protecting my execution, my work product.

If you create something of value that can be protected and it makes sense to protect it (i.e. the cost of protecting it makes sense in relation to the amount of money you believe that you can generate from that work product), then do it. But there’s a big difference between protecting a concept for a new business and protecting a highly differentiated methodology that you have perfected over a period of years.

In my article, I wrote that Google wasn’t the first search engine and that the idea for its search engine didn’t need to be protected. One response was, well, what about Google’s algorithm? So, here’s the nuance:

  • Google comes up with the idea for a faster, more focused search engine with better results — that is an idea, and it’s not worth protecting.
  • Google has an idea to create an algorithm to perform that more focused search — that is an idea and it’s still not worth protecting.
  • Google spends time and capital resources writing and producing an algorithm that changes the way search is done. This is no longer an idea; this is work product that IS worth protecting.

Copyrights, patents, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property protection are important.  As I said when Apple went to court to sue Samsung, intellectual property protection gives entrepreneurs the confidence to invest in innovation. Again, however, it comes down to execution, not ideas. Your idea for a television show isn’t something to protect; your script for the pilot episode might be. Your idea for shoes that can fly can be bantered about, but if you create those shoes, you definitely want to patent them.

Intellectual property protection can be valuable and worthwhile, but protecting your business ideas is not. It can even be counterproductive.

Carol Roth is a business strategist who has helped clients raise more than $1 billion in capital. You can follow her on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/your-ideas-are-worthless-part-2/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Pitching an Organic Cigarette for Hipsters

August 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Make Your Pitch

Film your business plan and send it to us.

In my last post, I reviewed a company focused on helping students find their passions. This week, I review a pitch for a product that may seem a bit contradictory in nature — an organic cigarette.

You can view the original video pitch and my review of the pitch below.

Here’s the pitch:

And here’s my review:

Hestia Tobacco positions itself as the first truly independent organic cigarette company, and there are a number of strong elements to the pitch. It starts very clearly with David Sley introducing himself, the company and a three-pronged investment thesis. What he has created is an organic cigarette company, aimed at the young, socially conscious market that still engages in smoking.

Mr. Sley seems to know precisely who his customer is: hipsters who shop at “farmers markets and vinyl record stores.” I have a clear picture of who that consumer is — but the size of the market seems a little fuzzy. He claims there are 20 million smokers between the ages of 18 and 35, but how many of those smokers fit the hipster mold?

Also, he cites 40 million smokers who consume 15 billion packs of cigarettes in the United States each year, but that isn’t relevant if half of those individuals are not part of his target market. Plus, there is an inherent question as to why people who are socially conscious would pollute the atmosphere and their own bodies with smoke — other than because they share the often hypocritical nature of most human beings. The market-size validation could have been bolstered by citing the sales and growth rate of the main organic cigarette competitor in the market, American Spirit — more on that brand later.

Mr. Sley also overcame a big hurdle by noting one objection right upfront. He cited rising cigarette taxes as an explanation for positioning Hestia Tobacco as a premium brand. He argued that with rising taxes, a premium pricing strategy becomes less of a barrier, and I do agree with that. But the math on what the strategy will net isn’t entirely clear. He mentioned profits of $25 a carton, but that was the only income- statement-related number in the pitch.

Competition is often a red flag in a pitch, and it was here — although not as much as I expected. Mr. Sley says there is only one other major marketer of organic cigarettes: Natural American Spirit, a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies and the maker of Camel, Salem and many other major brands. As Mr. Sley correctly points out, this gives American Spirit less credibility as a truly independent brand, which is probably important to the target customer. On the other hand, it also gives the brand tremendous resources, making it an 800-pound gorilla of a competitor. Additionally, when there aren’t a lot of competitors in a market, there is often a reason; sometimes there just isn’t a big enough opportunity or the barriers to entry are too high.

Distribution is another issue. Assuming that organic cigarettes do appeal to independent thinkers, how is Hestia going to reach them? I would imagine that standard distribution (like the drug, mass and grocery channels) would be very difficult for a small brand to crack. And I can’t really see this product being sold at Whole Foods.

I also have some concerns about the production of the pitch. The narrative voice-over of the gentleman smoking landed somewhere between pretentious and creepy for me. Investors want to engage with the entrepreneur, and this did not give a warm and fuzzy first impression. I suggest erring on the side of sounding genuine rather than hip.

Finally, when you are pitching, it’s critical to know your audience. With a polarizing product like tobacco, you want to ensure upfront that your investor is amenable to the offering. I personally am an antismoking advocate, so I am the last person who would invest in this company (but I tried to remain objective from a business standpoint in this review).

Given my feelings about smoking, I would not take a meeting on this pitch, but I do think it presented some compelling information as a business opportunity. If I did not have a moral issue with the product, I might well have been interested in taking a further look.

What do you think?

Carol Roth is a business strategist who has helped clients raise more than $1 billion in capital. You can follow her on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/pitching-an-organic-cigarette-for-hipsters/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,