I attended a funeral for a member of my extended family this weekend. At the informal gatherings throughout the weekend, we watched a video slide show created by his daughter, which captured key moments and highlights of his life.

Ranging from a childhood photograph of him as a little boy, sitting on a sled holding his (terrified) cat, all the way through his 80th birthday celebration, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, the video was a very sweet tribute to a life that spanned the better part of a century.

You know what was not anywhere in any of the photographic memorial of his life? His job.

I was thinking about this as I was ready Tim Berry’s horrified response to an Entrepreneur.com article entitled, “Love Your Business More than Your Family.” Mr. Berry identifies a few of the most shocking objections he has to Mr. Cloutier’s article, but I have a few others I think are worth adding.

Cloutier says: ”By all means, make it an occasion to show your spouse, kids, loved ones that you care. Then get your behind to the office because that’s where you need to be. Your family will still be there when you get home.”

Newsflash: Taking your family for granted is the world’s most sure-fire way of losing them. For starters, any spouse who puts up with being second fiddle indefinitely needs therapy to work on self-esteem issues. To be blunt, if they are less important than your job, then they would be better off without you — no matter how much money you are bringing in.

Secondly, people do not live forever. My mother died at 39 years old. Even worse, she died 28 days after she was diagnosed with leukemia. Even if she had been able to spend that 28 days living (instead of being hooked up to machines in a hospital room), you cannot make up for decades of life in 28 days.

Finally, study after study after study shows that parental involvement is key to raising healthy, stable children to be productive members of society. It’s not the responsibility of one parent, it’s the responsibility of both. If you care about your job more, then not only are you teaching your child a horrible lesson about their own self-worth (not to mention missing out on being a positive influence during their formative years), but you’re also begging for them to find other influences. Nature abhors a vacuum, and this is rarely more vivid than watching children gravitate towards unhealthy influences in the absence of healthy ones.

Cloutier says: ”If you are not focused–if family, friends and loved ones fill up your busy weekly schedule–you are probably failing to deliver real profits for your company.”

Newsflash: Your business’ success depends on more than just how much time you spend on it. Working harder but not smarter doesn’t do you any good, and other factors — business partners, market conditions, etc. — can all impact the success of your business, regardless of how much of your time you spend.

This advice is tantamount to a choice: attempt both a business and a life with decent odds of modest success, or scrap the life and roll the dice that the business can be successful enough for you to be able to successful bribe people into pretending to be a part of your life.  Sacrificing a life on the outside chance of ridiculous success and wealth is an awful big gamble.  If the dice don’t roll in your favor, then that leaves you absolutely nothing else to show for your life.

Cloutier says: ”They’d much rather enjoy great financial security than see you struggling for the rest of your life to make money that never comes.”

Newsflash: This is the kind of self-deluded justification that someone tells himself while he is waiting to pay bail for his 16-year-old who just got arrested for stealing cars.  Being able to pay for expensive therapists and lawyers does not make you a good parent.

When you die, what are your friends and family going to remember about you? How much money you left them? Maybe, but money doesn’t last and eventually it will be gone. Your kids are going to remember you teaching them to ride a bike or how to fish or about that time it started raining during your camping trip and your sleeping bag got soaked.

Do you honestly think your spouse cares more about getting a nice piece of jewelry than about watching a sunset with you on a remote beach somewhere?  (And, if your spouse does care about the jewelry more, then what was going through your mind when you married them in the first place?)  If your spouse is supposed to be content to be married to a ghost, then what good are you doing them as a spouse?

I watched the video slide show at the funeral this weekend several times. You know what I saw? I saw a man who loved his family. I saw a man with hobbies he enjoyed, and a man who belonged to communities of people with whom he had a connection. The people who were at his funeral talked about his sense of humor and his passion for life. No one once mentioned his business.

Cloutier says: ”But in the end, the best thing you can do for them is to create the legacy of a business that is thriving and financially sound. When you’re retired, wealthy, and able to spend Valentine’s Day and other special occasions with your kids and grandkids at your winter home in Hilton Head, you’ll be glad you devoted so much of your time to your first love: your business.”

Newsflash: This is what I find to be the most dangerous advice of all. If you spend your entire life loving your business more than your family, by the time you are sitting in that winter home in Hilton Head, none of your kids or grandkids are going to bother to visit you. (Nor should they.)

Life is hard. Relationships are hard. It is only the most delusional arrogance that truly claims that business is more difficult, and therefore it’s the only thing worth spending time on and worth practicing to get better at doing successfully.

If you spend 60+ years ignoring your life, by the time you put your business aside — and, let’s face it, odds are slim that someone with those priorities ever would — whatever “life” you have waiting for you is likely to be a mess. Like anything else, we only get better at life with practice. If you wait until retirement to even start, then you’re 40+ years behind everyone else.

Everyone in your life will have become so used to living without you, that trying to fit you back in will be a bigger chore than makes sense for most of them to bother with. And, just because you’ve become exceptionally skilled at business, doesn’t mean that you’ve learned how to be good at your role within your family — odds are, if you’ve neglected that role for decades, you are probably pretty lousy at it.

If you do love your business more than anything else, then do everyone a favor and skip having a family at all.  Your business is not your only job.  If you have people in your life, then you have a responsibility to them, too.  And neglecting their emotional needs — which is time-consuming, difficult work — in favor of only meeting their financial needs means that you are not doing your job.

Business people who neglect their families for their business are no more honorable than any other type of spouse or parent who doesn’t live up to their family and social obligations. They just use making money as a justification for their behavior.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Heather DiCenzo at Holiday Inn Express-Tampa, USF/Busch Gardens:

The Brand New Holiday Inn Express & Suites is adjacent to Busch Gardens / Adventure Island and is the CLOSEST hotel to the University of South Florida and University Community Health Hospital.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Captain Paul West at FantaSea Sailing:

Sailing the Sun Coast of Florida to the Keys, FantaSea Sailing will show it’s clients anchorages, marinas and sailing grounds of SW Florida. Packages are from Boat & Breakfast to multi-day customized sailing adventures. Based in Fort Myers Beach Florida the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

One of my favorite startup blog authors, Martin Zwilling, has a great article this week about why someone who is an inventor needs to partner with someone who is an entrepreneur in order to turn his invention into an actual business.

This is always a fascinating topic for me, because in my tech universe, I see this all the time. The geeky geniuses who build cool things are rarely the ones who have the business and people skills to get it to market, build an organization around it, and monetize it enough so that everyone can live off of it.

Conversely, oh-so-many entrepreneurs don’t have the stomach for low level details of how a product works, or the nitty gritty trouble-shooting required to get over the hump when you hit a roadblock. These are two groups who need each other in order to get things done. But there is a lot of advice about how, if you’re going to build a tech startup, you better be able to code yourself. I think this is a problem for this precise reason.

Yes, certain things are easier if you can just bang them out yourself. I’ve spent more than a decade as tech project manager, and I can’t count the number of times I wish I had the ability to just jump in and do something myself because I was frustrated with other people’s progress. But part of managing is leading other people through that process, not cutting them off at the pass by doing it yourself.

In all of my time at startups over the past 14 years, I have worked with several hundred developers, of all levels of quality, commitment and disposition. In that time, I’ve only met a small handful who have any entrepreneurial inclinations whatsoever. Like most other parts of the employment world, most of them do not have the appetite for risk, the drive or the compulsion to tackle building a venture.

Of the half dozen or so that I’ve met who have the stomach for entrepreneurship, I’d say that maybe two or three actually have enough business and people savvy to make a real go of it. Developers (and scientists) are often introverts. There is nothing surprising about this, since these professions require the qualities that tend to come very naturally to introverted people: the ability to work alone for long stretches of time, the ability to concentrate enough to shut out the rest of the world and focus, thinking through complex obstacles in depth before slapping things together.

Yet successful entrepreneurs are typically extroverts. Again, this makes sense. Network building, relationship development, sales, partnership cultivation and generally being the public face and voice of a business are part of the job. Those are often the types of things that can often make a staunch introvert queasy.

Martin’s point is correct: these two groups need each other in order to be successful.

So, to those who say that a successful entrepreneur building a tech startup needs to be able to write his own code, I can only say this: yes, in a perfect world, that would be possible. But a passionate entrepreneur with a viable idea to take to market should never give up his dream, just because he’s not a developer.

It may take longer to get there without being able to do it yourself, but a race car driver has a mechanic for a reason. They are different skill sets, different dispositions and different roles designed to fill different needs. It’s therefore not unreasonable to expect that it should simply be a different person.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

In all the talk about social media, conversations typically revolved first and foremost around Facebook and Twitter. Secondarily, LinkedIn will come up for professional reasons, along with bookmarking sites, YouTube and Flickr. Once you get past the top handful, though, the list becomes very fragmented.

This presents an interesting opportunity for the crafty entrepreneur, though.  Because, while everyone else is paddling around these crowded social ponds, opportunities abound in smaller, specialized social networks that center around a more precise focus.

Niche social networks can have a lot of great value when it comes to building connections with both potential customers and with potential partners.

SmallBizBee published a great list this week: 40 Social Networking Sites Specifically for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, and Startups.

While the list covers some of the more traditional ones (starting with LinkedIn), there are also some very specialized networks on the list, targeting needs that are unique to entrepreneurs:

• PartnerUp
• Qapacity
• Ryze
• FledgeWing
• The Funded
• Cofoundr
• Perfect Business
• E.Factor
• Raise Capital

Whether you are looking for funding, for partners, for customers or for advisors, there are social networks that cover the spectrum. If you think that Twitter is too overwhelming and that Facebook is for kids, then I’d encourage every entrepreneur to read through that list, identify a few that appear applicable, and then go check them out.

Resources for entrepreneurs can be plentiful if you know where to look, but as I’ve said before, finding the right business parter can be harder than finding the right spouse. So no matter what you are looking for when it comes to building your business, the more options, the better your odds of finding what you need.

So don’t limit yourself to the most obvious choices. Branch out and see what other alternatives might just fit the bill.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

Our partner, Business Online Payroll can help make your payroll processing painless. With your monthly subscription of only $49.99 (a 50% savings over traditional payroll services), you’ll get worry-free, comprehensive and convenient full-service payroll.

They handle the tedious payroll details — to alleviate your hassles
With Business Online Payroll, you simply go online and enter payroll hours or use the One-Click button. They handle all the time-consuming, tedious details.

• Instantly calculate your wages and deductions
• Make regular tax deposits according to your deposit frequency
• File Form 941, your Employer’s Quarterly Federal Tax Return, on your behalf
• File Form 940, the form used to report your annual federal unemployment tax liability, on your behalf

They stay on top of regulations — to keep you penalty-free
Most people would agree that payroll would be a cinch, if it weren’t for staying knowledgeable about rules and regulations. When you use Business Online Payroll, they help you stay in compliance.

• Make timely and accurate local, the state and federal tax deposits and filings
• Automatically report new hires to the state agency as mandated by the federal government
• Provide you with updated, customized labor posters

They remove administrative burdens — so you can get back to business
With Business Online Payroll, you don’t have to be in the office on payday or spend time administering data. With our convenient online system, you really can have a paperless office.

• Provide direct deposit and email notifications, letting employees know they’ve been paid
• Give employees online access to their pay stub, pay history and other payroll information
• Provide online W2s for employees and online 1099s for your contract workers

They provide friendly customer support — so you will never have to go it alone
At Business Online Payroll, They like to say, “We’ve got your back!”

• Provide unlimited access to live customer support for processing questions
• Walk you through our online enrollment process, or complete it for you
• Walk you through your first payroll

They give you HR tools and resources — so you can run your office more efficiently
Included with your service, you receive easy access to a variety of tools right from your payroll account.

• Business forms like I9s and W4s that can be automatically pre-populated with information from your payroll account
• Alerts and reminders service that will keep you on top of important dates
• Dozens of how-to guides on HR topics relevant to small businesses

It’s easy to enroll. Simply click on the Get started with Business Online Payroll link in the Online Payroll widget on the home page dashboard in your account.

Want to learn more? Click the image below to take their guided tour: choose a complete tour or just check out a specific feature you want to learn about.

Picture this: a room full of technology professionals, sitting around a large conference table. Project managers, business analysts, technical writers, network admins, database administrators, software architects, developers, designers and more.

Back in my Enterprise IT days, this was a common site. We’d all gather, sometimes multiple times per week, to put our heads together on our enormous multi-million dollar program. The kicker, though, was that 75% of the participants in the room were consultants.

One day, out of overwhelming frustration at how many hours per week I was spending in pointless meetings when I had real work to do back at my desk, I did a little round-the-table math, based on what I knew of the rates/salaries of the people in the meeting.

By the time I was done, I’d tallied that each team meeting was costing the company $1,500. Per hour. And not only did we have several of those large meetings per week, but subsets of that group would have anywhere from 5-10 additional meetings per week on top of that!

What was worse of all was the awareness that at least half of those meetings occured out of habit, and not out of an actual need to either make a decision or collaborate on the resolution to a problem. We were meeting for no better reason that so we could say that we met.

I was thinking back to his exercise when reading Barney Austen’s guest post on MyVenturePad, called “Meetings – A Total Waste of Time.” Of course, most of Barney’s points are long-standing reminders of the well-established rules of Meeting Management 101: have an agenda, make sure decision-makers are in the room, etc.

But as an entrepreneur what I am constantly struck with is the actual cost vs. value of a meeting. When someone else was paying my salary, this wasn’t something I was anywhere near as concerned with. But now, knowing that my consulting time is billed by the hour, I am acutely aware of the fact that any time I spend in a meeting is detracting from billable client work I could be doing. So that meeting time better be worth while, or I need to cancel it.

I have worked with some other consultants making the transition from employee to entrepreneur, and I’ve seen many of the struggle with the same thing: common patterns of behavior in enterprise environments are suddenly irresponsibly expensive in entrepreneurial ventures. And the new business owners who understand that are quick to adapt. But some struggle with it more, because it’s a common tool used to justify their job.

One of the best consultants I ever worked with once said to me, “I’ve been a consultant too long. If I don’t produce something tangible every day, I feel like I haven’t justified my paycheck.” As a result, she had the world’s greatest project documentation. It was always updated, it was always detailed and it was always extremely thorough. What it wasn’t was always necessary.

Bootstrapping a startup is a different animal. And finding the right people to work with is important, because the last thing a lean organization that is trying to be cash efficient needs, is unnecessary meetings burning through time and resources — especialy in the cases that those resources are paid by the hour.

A simple rule of thumb: only schedule meetings if there is a decision that needs to be made, and then only include the people needed to make the actual decision. Even more importantly, don’t let Outlook or Google Calendar’s default settings drive you to automatically scheduling it for an hour. If you think that getting a quick decision is possible, then keep it to half an hour. (Side note: new teams tend to love me, because I am the queen of the 15 minute meeting. No matter how long I schedule the meeting for, my goal is always to be done in 15. And I usually am.)

There are, of course, other types of meetings. But, as an entrepreneur, everything that I do in my business should be tied back to tangible, measureable results. So while a sales meeting, a vendor meeting or a team member feedback session could be extremely important, an entrepreneuer should always stop and do a time management inventory to make absolutely certain that the purpose of the meeting is clear, and that it can be served based on the list of confirmed attendees.

If it’s not, the answer is simple: change the meeting. Cancel it, reschedule it or just change whose coming. And if you think that seems like a waste, then I challenge you to add up how much that meeting is costing you. Then decide whether or not it’s worth it.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

I’ve worked for some interesting characters over the years. Some bosses have been great, some bosses haven’t.

I’ve worked for extroverted sales geniuses, and introverted operational wizards.  I’ve worked for people who create chaos just by breathing, and for people whose very presence manages to calm everyone without even speaking.  I’ve worked for brilliant absent-minded professor-types, and I’ve worked for walking computers who never miss a single detail.

By and large, I’ve been extremely lucky and have learned a lot from most of them — even if we didn’t always get along or understand how to communicate with each other.

Over the years, something has become clear to me about each of these incredible men and women.  I’ve come to realize that the difference between a good boss and a great boss is the ability to create a legend. That mystique is how a great boss attracts and builds a great team.

Being a good boss is a skill; being a great boss is a talent.

• A good boss helps cover you while you’re on vacation; a great boss kicks you out of the office and forces you to go on vacation when he sees that you need it and aren’t doing it yourself.
• A good boss works with you on your professional goal planning and development; a great boss inspires you to set goals you never previously considered — and then drops challenges in front of you for a bit of added incentive.
• A good boss lets you vent and cry and scream in his office when you’re at the end of your rope; a great boss notices the signs before you hit a boiling point and takes you out for drinks first.
• A good boss hires strong, experienced people and then works to build them into a cohesive team; a great boss looks for talent, develops leaders, sets demanding expectations and then gets the hell out of the way.
• A good boss looks for smart people; a great boss looks for people he believes are smarter than he is.

Great bosses make work worth going to every day, even when the project is late, the client is angry, the team is frustrated and all you want to do is buy a one-way ticket out of town. A good boss is helpful and diligent. But a great boss is who you’d rather walk through flames than run the risk of disappointing.

I was thinking about this while reading Steve Blank’s article on VentureBeat, “Incentives are one thing. Legends are another.” Steve recounts a story where, as CEO, he took financial incentivization to a new level, by generating some healthy, motivating drama around it. And, ironically, he did it by appearing to “not get it” and then pleasantly surprising his team.

What’s good to note about Steve’s story, is just that: it’s a good story. And, especially in the early days of a venture, sometimes we need good stories to help propel the mystique enough to keep us moving through that tough uphill climb.

When I think back to my early days in startups, the power of some of those stories still moves me. Whether it was a client story or a team story or some other story, human beings are drawn to stories because they are experiential and personal. There is a power to having and cultivating good stories when you are a startup, and it’s all part of what Steve shared in his memory: successful people take enormous paycuts to do inhuman amounts of work to achieve heroic efforts. And while there are definite ego strokes to be had by success, there are small touches that don’t cost a lot, but which can make the difference between a “good” experience and a legendary one.

As the boss, part of your job is to build a company that can retain talented, energetic people — especially when the outside world can offer more immediate, tangible motivators than you can. No company can thrive if your best team members lose interest and walk out the door. So how to do make sure that your people remain engaged, despite insane amounts of work and huge personal sacrifice?

Steve’s advice is good: find ways to build the legend. It’s not as hard as it may seem, and — even when money is tight — there are ways to do it that require more in the way of attention and consideration than actual dollars and cents.

And, in the end, the biggest difference is simple: a good boss is content to have a happy team; a great boss is only satisfied with an inspired one.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

Back in December, I did a series of blog posts on the how to wrap up your financial records for 2009. Now that 2010 is officially here, you might be getting around to reviewing 2009 records and getting ready for tax time. As you prepare to wrap up 2009 from an accounting perspective, here is a look back at our series on how to “Close the Books on 2009″ and how WorkingPoint can help, including:

Introduction to Closing Your Books
With the new year just days away, you may be gathering your depreciation schedules and other adjusting entries to close your books, preparing to print your financial reports for the year, and getting ready for a new year of recordkeeping. WorkingPoint makes it easy to transition from one year to the next by providing you easy ways to record your adjustments as well as handling some of them for you!

If you just started your business or you’re new to accounting for your  business records, I would be honored to walk you through closing your books at year-end, starting with a look at what is involved in keeping records for your business from a process standpoint.
Read More about the Accounting Cycle»

About Adjusting Entries
Adjusting entries record changes in account balances that occur outside of normal business operations, e.g. bills and invoices, etc. Account balances change for a variety of reasons but in general there are two types of adjusting entries: accruals and deferrals.
Learn About Accruals and Deferrals and How To Record Adjustint Entries in WorkingPoint»

About Closing Entries
In addition to adjusting entries, closing entries are made to “close-out” certain accounts balances at year-end and move them to Retained Earnings. Today, in computerized accounting, much of this is done under the hood. No longer do you have to transfer balances from one account to a holding account and then move the holding account to Retained Earnings.

In WorkingPoint, we don’t consider income and expense accounts temporary. So unlike other popular systems, we don’t zero out the balance in the accounts. You can always see the amount you have earned or spent since you began using WorkingPoint to manage your business activity.
Read More»

Financial Reporting
About the Income Statement
The Income Statement is the report most business owners use to gauge how their business is doing for a specific period of time because it answers the question: “Am I earning more than I am spending?” In the case of closing the books at year-end, the reports shows you how you did for the entire year.

Review all of your account totals as displayed on the report. Make sure things look good to you and are in-line with what you would expect to see. If anything looks off, click on an account link to view the detail of the transactions that make up the total. You may have chosen an account by mistake or entered a transaction twice or make a data entry error in an amount, for example total should be $1.00 and you have $10.00. If you find errors, this is the time to correct them.
Read More»

About the Balance Sheet Report
The Balance Sheet can be your company’s most important decision-making tool. The Balance Sheet report conforms to the standard accounting format by showing all of a company’s assets, all the liabilities, and the owner’s equity.  Because the Balance Sheet uses a standard format, you can consistently compare your company’s financial position from one quarter to another, or compare your company’s Balance Sheet with another’s.

When reviewing your Balance Sheet for the end of the year, be sure that your account balances look right to you. That is, is your Accounts Receivable account reflecting only open invoices, is your Accounts Payable account only reflecting open bills, does your credit cad account balance include all 2009 purchases and payments? If you carry inventory, is the inventory value correct?
Read More»

About the Cash Flow Statement
The Cash Flow Statement is a great report to run at the end of the year so you can see how your cash was used. If you are working with a financial advisor, they may ask you for this report to help you evaluate your spending and offer suggestions or advice on how to manage your cash to meet your business goals.
Read More»

Last week I was invited to join a new local networking group that focuses on building business referals for its members. One of the conditions of the group is that only one member per industry joins, preventing multiple people from attempting to draw on the same pool for prospective clients.

From a distance, this sounds like a reasonable idea, and so I filled out my paperwork to join. And then I was denied, because I was considered a direct competitor to someone who is already in the group.

The reality is, only about 20% of my business competes directly with this other business — and it’s not even the core part. She is a website designer and developer. While we do help clients with that, that is not our core business and when we do that type of work, we will typically work with designer/developers in collaborative projects to get that work accomplished.

Yet, according to traditional ways of thinking, we are competitors and that’s that.

This entire episode reminded me of a recent article on YoungEntreprneur, called The Rapidly Changing Rules of Online Competition. And like so many other exchanges I encounter every day, it was a great example of a clash between the “traditional” way of doing things, and the “new” way of doing things.

The YoungEntrepreneur article approaches the topic of competition-vs-collaboration from a classically Gen Y perspective. Generational statistics show that Millenials are far more collaborative than older generations, and that it’s not a toolset issue, but a mindset issue. So, for YoungEntreprneur’s target demographic, the idea of forming a coalition of peers with overlapping offerings to build collaborative teams is not a crazy notion.

For Generation X and older, this is rarely how we approach most things. Competition is just that, and you don’t get to your goals if you share with your competitors.

The problem with this theory, however, is at the heart of the Game Theory proposed by Economics Nobel Laureate, John Nash (see the video clip on YouTube, if you haven’t seen the movie A Beautiful Mind). Doing what is good for yourself without consideration what is good for those around you may foster strong competition, but it also fosters social alienation. In a world of mechanical processes this may be fine, but in a human-centric world that requires collaboration for success, this is ultimately short-sighted.

The YoungEntrepreneur article makes this point very well, and recognizes that Generation Y has a more innate understanding of these social rules than many older demographics. There is a direct relationship that entrepreneurs — especially ones in collaborative fields — need to understand in order to be successful:

• The democratization of data empowers entrepreneurs as individuals, because we are no longer dependent on having a full-fledged firm to be able to provide valuable goods and services.
• But no entrepreneur (no matter how big the firm) can be all things to all customers. Entrepreneurs specialize, and no two entrepreneurs will offer precisely the same services.
• In order to provide a truly good customer service, multiple entrepreneurs need to come together in a collaboritive effort to serve customer needs efficiently and effectively as a team, rather than trying to over-stretch a single entrepreneur.

Consequently, the old paradigms of what constitutes “competitors” need to be re-examined and explored for opportunities, rather than summarily dismissed or eyed with suspicion. Where older generations see business as a race, Gen Y sees it as a relay race where an individual’s success cannot be defined in isolation.

So if the rest of us want to stay competitive, we better start learning a lesson from ‘the kids.’  We can be competitive, but we just need to figure out how to do it a bit more collaboratively.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.