How do you know when to hire for experience versus when to hire for raw talent? This is an interesting question that I’ve heard come up several times in the past week, and then again as part of an article on VentureBeat called, “Just getting started? Focus on this to get to the next level.”

Author Pamela Springer advises that growing a business — particularly in the earliest stages — is best fostered by focusing on your people, your strategy and your capital. In that order.

She then goes on to discuss cultivating your team in the ways best suited to evolving your business. And while she warns that on-the-job training is expensive, she also points out that skills aren’t always everything.

I see new startups struggle with this question daily. Serial entrepreneurs with a good network that includes lots of other serial entrepreneurs tend to gravitate towards experience born of the excessive scar tissue left behind by a track record of startups.

Or they immediately jump to the other extreme and go with fresh talent, right out of school with almost no experience whatsoever. As with anything, there are pros and cons to each.

Experience Pros
The #1 advantage to experience, of course, is using hindsight to help navigate the dangerous waters of the startup world. Someone with the right experience can help predict, dodge and mitigate the landmines that someone who has not been through the perils of this world cannot possibly foresee.

Experience Cons
The biggest disadvantage I’ve seen to experience is an unspoken assumption that what worked before will work now. This is one of the most dangerous ones, and often the hardest to combat, because someone who has been successful with a particular approach in the past is usually inclined towards using it again in the future.

The second biggest disadvantage I’ve seen to a track record of experience is ego. A few successful turns in some great roles at some companies with flashy brands (or really big exits) can sometimes inflate an ego beyond reason — making the experienced person in question not only hard to work with, but also potentially inclined to take credit for past successes that they really didn’t have anything to do with.

Tactically speaking, the biggest obstacle that small businesses and startups often face trying to hire this demographic is very simple: money. Experience tends to command expensive rates, which is often beyond the reach of a new venture.

Talent Pros
The biggest pro of fresh talent is that, if you help develop it, not only will you build great loyalty, but you’ll also reap untold surprises in areas you can’t ever entirely imagine. My favorite part of working with fresh, young talent is that they are often fearless, curious and a constant source of pleasant surprises.

Talent Cons
This is a bit less of an issue since the economy collapsed than it was before, but the biggest con I typically encouter when it comes to young talent is boredom. There are plenty of things about routine, daily operations that can be tedious and boring, and if that’s all you have for your young talent to do, then be prepared for them to exit about as quickly as they arrived.

All in all, there are reasons to consider going either direction, depending on the role. But also keep in mind that, especially in small and privately owned businesses, the personality of the founder/owner has to be factored in.

There are a lot of qualities that Millenials poses, which are not always as effortless for Gen X and older. Things like collaboration, a dependency on technology, and a craving for work-life balance are all bigger factors for them than for some of us who are older. So if you’ve got a CEO who calls the shots without a lot of input or debate, then an older demographic might be better about rolling with those punches.

On the other hand, if you have a more democratic organization that likes to do a lot of brainstorming and hashing through ideas, then — speaking as one of those “older” demographics — it’s often something that Gen X and older find frustrating, and an abstacle to quick execution.

I think the important thing to remember is that building a good organization really requires pulling from both pools of resources. If you stick to only one or the other, then you run the risk of building a lot of blindspots into your business without having the 360 degree vision to recover. So pick and choose.

Personally, I will usually start by defining my needs and expectations of the role, and then break apart the list and assess if most of the qualities I am looking for require experience to be successful (e.g. auditing, project management and maintaining client relationships), or if they are more inate (like strong communciation skills) or readily teachable (most standard business technology, meeting facilitation, etc.).

Of course, the real trick is, when you find raw talent — even if you don’t have a role to be able to hire them right away — don’t let them go. Find another way to build a relationship with them. Whether you can mentor them, find an internship for them, or connect them to other people who can offer them employment, your long-term best interest is in becoming a magnet for great talent — even if it hasn’t had the chance to prove itself yet.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, 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 web strategy firm in Austin, Texas

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There is an article on FreelanceSwitch that raises an interesting point. It’s called, “Keeping Yourself Motivated” and it discusses intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation are your own internal motivators — a need for success, a desire to make an impact, your own craving for perfection, contribution or collaborative connection with other talented people.

Extrinsic motivation are the outside motivators — money, praise, recognition, bonuses, perks, etc.

There is a statement in the article, however, that gives me pause:

“Extrinsic motivation (namely money) is often the primary basis for our motivation. Everyone needs money, and wants as much of it as possible. That’s no secret.”

Now, if the audience of FreelanceSwitch were all cubical dwellers who hated their jobs and worshiped at the alter of Office Space, then I might be more inclined to concede some validity to that statement. But given that FreelanceSwitch’s reader-base consists of freelancers and solopreneurs, I actually disagree. I also think it’s a dangerous assumption to make.

Yes, of course we all need money. And yes, even the least material of us probably want more of it than just the bare bones basics we need to survive. But is money really the primary external motivator for most people?

I don’t actually think so.

Most people who quit a job, quit because of their direct boss. This isn’t a money reason, this is an interpersonal reason. Feelings of being unappreciated, disrespected or ignored are all extremely damaging to employee morale, and are frequently at the heart of what someone dislikes about their boss — and ultimately their job.

Conversely, how many people have ever taken a paycut because they either wanted to work for themselves (most of us who strike out on our own start off with a significant financial dip, before we ever stand a chance of recovering and making more money), or they were offered an opportunity that offered some other type of benefit that money couldn’t beat? It happens all the time.

Most importantly, though, I think for entrepreneurs, there is danger in assuming that money really is the biggest extrinsic motivator for potential staff. I think it limits your thinking and boxes you into a set of dangerous and unhelpful assumptions.

Back in November, I wrote about a local entrepreneurial event I attended. One of the most memorable moments of the night was when a young entrepreneur asked the panel of seasoned veterans, “How do I convince my successful friends to give up their $150k/year salary to join me in my startup?”

The answer he got from the panel was unanimous: “If you have to convince them, then they are not the right people.” This answer is dead-on — even if it wasn’t the one the poor guy wanted to hear.

When I think back to the different bosses I had over the years, one thing is clear: the great ones were the ones who quickly (and intuitively) understood my extrinsic motivators and then understood how to keep me motivated by giving me what I was looking for. The bosses with whom I never developed any kind of important or meaningful relationship could never figure it out.

I have a newsflash, though, my extrinsic motivator is not money. I had a six-figure job that made me so miserable that I quit with nothing else lined up; and I’ve worked 80-hours a week at another job that was paying me barely enough to live above the poverty line.  In each case, aside from my own intrinsic motivators, the extrinsic motivators of the situation were omnipresent and impossible to ignore — and they made all the difference between when I was happy to compromise versus when I was unwilling to put up with a situation that I disliked.

Entrepreneurs need to remember that there are other ways to motivate. Sure, for some people, money matters more than it does for others. And, when that’s the case, then that certainly isn’t the right person to bring onboard for your business — especially if you are just getting things started. So keep looking.

For some people extrinsic motivators could be a title, a new area of responsibility, the chance to travel, or getting to say they were part of a founding team that was doing something entirely new.

Do you want to know a secret, though? Most often, the thing that study after study says is a truly important and valuable extrinsic motivator for most of us, isn’t a title or perk, either. It’s recognition. Having our contribution respected, appreciated and then directly noted is the thing that makes the biggest difference to most of us. Sometimes that can be a public event, but more often than not, it’s private.

So if you own a business and are worried that your staff is burned out or losing motivation, ask yourself, “When was the last time I let them know how much I respect their talent and appreciate their contribution?” And then, go do it.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, 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 web strategy firm in Austin, Texas

If you are new to email marketing, don’t miss the Getting Started with VerticalResponse webinar scheduled for today at 10 am pacific time.

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As a WorkingPoint Premium Subscriber, you will receive 500 free email credits when you sign up for a VerticalResponse account and as a subscriber on our Free plan, you’ll get 200 free email credits. To redeem your credits, simply signup for WorkingPoint, log in and look for the Free Email Credits widget on your Homepage Dashboard. When your free credits have been used, additional credits may be purchased from VerticalResponse directly.

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VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner currently has a video posted called, “Entrepreneurs have no rules.” In the video, Accuray’s John Adler talks about why he was relieved when his son, Trip, decided to launch Scribd: because he was a “free spirit.”

This comment reminded of Jonathan Fields’ article from a few weeks ago, “The Delusions of Entrepreneurs,” in which he explored what made so many of the trappings of entrepreneurship a bit more myth than reality — including notion of freedom, control, money and passion.

Jonathan’s points were all valid: starting your own business can put just as many shackles on you (or even more) as working for someone else, they are just different. And I think this is the point that really matters, and which the senior Adler was making about his son: if you are not good at following rules, then it’s very hard to get ahead in someone else’s business.

Now, to be fair, there is a certain amount of rule following that we all need to do to be successful in life: if I make a habit of driving on the left side of the road (in the US), odds are good that my professional success is going to be hampered by turning myself into road pizza before I can launch my product.

However, if my aversion to rules is more subtle — take, for instance, a compulsive need to be more direct and honest than politically correct (which happens to be true) — then it’s easy to see how having my own business probably has better odds of success than me trying to work for someone else. There will always be people who consider my directness to be uncomfortable or impolite, but if they are clients or colleagues rather than a boss, then we can go our separate ways agreeing to disagree, instead of miserably trying to stay in a professional marriage that doesn’t meet our needs.

Another reason that I think John Adler’s point is valid — and one of the things I think Jonathan Fields missed in his reasoning — is that when you have your own business, you get to determine what “success” means to you. If you are working in someone else’s business (especially a large enterprise), what constitutes success is often prescribed by someone who came before you. If you have your own business, then you get to draw the map. Sure, you could find yourself stranded on a ledge somewhere, but that’s equally true when you work for someone else.

• Is your definition of success making a ridiculously large income?
• Is your definition of success being able to sleep in until 10:00 a.m. every day?
• Is your definition of success being able to sell your company and retire?
• Is your definition of success having 50 employees? 100? None?
• Is your definition of success revolutionizing your industry?
• Is your definition of success being a leader in your community?
• Is your definition of success having the time to do volunteer work?
• Is your definition of success being location independent?
• Is your definition of success being able to take your dog to work?
• Is your definition of success getting to work with your family/friends?
• Is your definition of success having the flexibility to go to your kids’ school events in the middle of the day?

We all define success differently, because we are all motivated by different things. Owning your own business gives you the change to attach what motivates you to how you are going to define success, and the drive your business towards those goals. When you join someone else’s business, you are agreeing to their destination.

And, if like Trip Adler, you’re too much of a ‘free spirit’ for someone else’s rules, then starting your own business may just be the only rational choice you could make.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, 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 web 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 Organic Spice Traders:

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Answers OnStartups has an article posted on VentureBeat which is a subject of eternal debate in my life: how many hours per week is it reasonable to ask of your team?

Admittedly, this is a challenge in my life: I am, at my core, a workaholic. I am a product of an entrepreneurial family with a career in tech startups, where working 60+ hours per week (at least) was a badge of honor; I am compulsive enough by nature that it plays directly into both my work style and my ego; and I am a volunteer junkie who is the first in line to take on difficult new challenges that no one knows how to accomplish.

My husband and business partner is the opposite. While he can and has worked insane hours during various points of his professional life, it is not what he enjoys and it is not what he wants. And, for him, my over-and-above hours of work detract from our time together, which is not the trade-off he signed up for.

The VentureBeat article, titled “You work 60-hour weeks. Should your employees?” is probably made even more noteworthy by the comments left by readers. As is often the case, comments fall heavily into two camps:

The What Kind of Slacker Only Works 60 Hour Weeks? Camp — which is the modern equivelant to your grandfather’s old saying, “Back in my days, we had to walk to school a mile in the snow both ways…” It’s a sign of geek and/or entrepreneurial bravado to be the Michael Jordan of work hours, and demonstrate that you can push yourself longer and harder than those around you.

The Work Is Never Going to Love You Back Camp — who are the advocates of “work-life balance” and who are acutely aware of the fact that no one lies on their deathbed saying, “I wish I’d had just one more meeting…” It’s a sign of idiocy to this group that one would ever do anything as foolish as risk their health or personal relationships by refusing simply turn off the computer and leave work at a decent hour.

The thing that is most interesting, though, is that — as always happens in this debate — people over-look a simple, basic fact: different people need different things for different reasons.

In all the politically correct talk about “work-life balance,” there is something important that is often missed: some of us need to work long hours for reasons that have little or nothing to do with anything or anyone else. And, when we find ourselves in a work environment that does not place that demand on us, we will find a way to create it. Consider this:

Work People

• Get their energy from work.
• Derive their motivation from work-based accomplishment.
• Experience their strongest social connections to other people through work.
• Use the inertia of long hours to build momentum for accomplishing their goals.
• Find an intellectual stimulation and satisfaction in work that they don’t find anywhere else.

Life People

• Get their energy from social or personal activities.
• Derive their motivation from hobbies and social interactions.
• Seek social connections that are based on non-work interests, often as part of the respite from work.
• Require the break from work in order to recharge and return productively.
• Experience a wider array of sources that can lead to satisfying intellectual, emotional or psychological stimulation.

And while debates can wage about which side of the coin is “healthier,” it really doesn’t change the fact that my husband is unlikely to ever be an 80-hour-per-week-maniac and I am unlikely to ever be happy trying to keep my work week limited to 40 hours. We’ll each do what we need to do as circumstances demand, but what is native to each of us is different and meaningful for our own reasons.

The VentureBeat article recommends focusing on great results, not the means by which specific individuals arrive at those results. I’d agree with this approach, but take it a step further: it’s not enough to have this expectation of your staff. You have to find staff who want and thrive with high expectations.  Only hire people who like that kind of pressure and motivation.

A “life person” who is asked to work 60+ hours per week by their boss may technically put in the hours, but they are likely to trading in quantity at the expense of quality. For people who need off-hours to recharge their batteries, the point of diminishing returns comes sooner, and time put in working after that threshold is always less productive (sometimes to a costly degree).

Yes, there are always going to be times when the realities of a business require additional time and work, but I think the focus of a boss should be on finding staff whose workstyles fit what you need, rather than trying to turn who you have into someone they are not. In the end, that approach is just asking for trouble, because not only will you always be frustrated — frustrated at having to ask, frustrated by feelings of disappointment and frustrated by the results you get out of people — but you’ll also be setting your team up for failure by creating a situation that runs counter to their individual needs.

Ultimately, you can’t change a person. And asking someone to behave in a way that is fundamentally counter to their nature is never a long-term solution. So my advice is to focus on the fit first. Jim Collins refers to this as ‘getting the right people on the bus.’ If you are a workaholic who likes achieving the impossible at the drop of a hat, then an employee who rolls into the office at 10:00 and rolls out right at 6:00 is probably going to drive you crazy — no matter how much amazing work he gets accomplished in that eight hours.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, 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 web strategy firm in Austin, Texas

We recently launched our Tell Your Friends About WorkingPoint contest and we have had a great response. Thanks for telling your friends: we hope they all sign up so you can be one of the winners!

If you haven’t spread the word and entered for your chance to win, it’s not too late. In fact, we just made it even easier to tell your friends about WorkingPoint. Many of you told us you would prefer to tweet your friends or use blog postings or Facebook to tell them about us instead of email them (thanks for the suggestion). Now you can.

Here’s How To Participate:

1. Log in to your WorkingPoint account and click the “Tell Your Friends About WorkingPoint” button on your home page.
2. Then, share it your way:
   • Copy the URL provided and paste it into your favorite twitter app, blog or Facebook feed. This link ensures you get credit when people click it and sign up.
   • Tell your small business friends via email by entering their email addresses and sending them a message recommending WorkingPoint (we’ll automatically include the URL in the email).

And Here’s What You Could Win:

The top 3 WorkingPoint subscribers who earn the most credits by inspiring friends to sign-up will receive a high-value promotion package from WorkingPoint designed to help you promote your business and gain customers, including:

1. Home Page Placement –  The home page is a coveted space on any website and we’ll promote your business on WorkingPoint.com for a whole month!
2. Company Featured on the WorkingPoint Blog – Our blog is read by thousands of readers every day, and we’ll help you reach a new audience by featuring you and your company.
3. Company Featured in the WorkingPoint Newsletter – Our newsletters reach thousands of businesses each month, and we’ll prominently feature your company in a March newsletter.
4. You’ll Earn a Community Builder Badge– Community builders are key members of our community. We’ll single you out from the crowd with our Community Builder badge and feature your business in our Company Directory, an online listing of WorkingPoint Company Profiles.

WorkingPoint will announce the three contest winners at the end of February, and these winners will receive their promotional reward packages during the month of March.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think that Kitchen Nightmares is the best TV show on the subject of entrepreneurship. (I could do an endless blog series just on lessons from the show!)

Last night, I watched an episode from the second season of the British version of the show, and had a great “Aha!” moment. A team of exceptionally talented and well-trained French culinary prodigies working at buidling a fine dining establishment in Inverness, Scotland ran into a strange problem: they had an empty restaurant that couldn’t attract the locals.

Chef Ramsay immediately saw a problem: the ellaborate menu was in French, and the Scottish locals couldn’t figure out what it meant. To make the point to the culinary team, he showed them a traditional Scottish menu of local food specialties and then asked them to read it. The confused French team quickly realized that it was impossible to tell if a menu item held any appeal when you couldn’t figure out what it said.

This is something that I struggle with every day. Words and phrases like CMS, SEO, PPC, Twitter, RSS, HTTPS, PHP, QA, RFP, ROI, CRM, PMO, etc. all come flying out of my mouth faster and more readily than my own name. And it will typically take a few minutes before I realize that I’ve lost someone.

It is often so easy for us to get caught up in our own little world of jargon, that we forget something really important: part of your job as an expert, is to inspire confidence in the people who come to you for your expertise. While demonstrating that you speak the native language of your industry may have value, what is more valuable is demonstrating that you can translate between your language and your customer’s.

After struggling with this problem for years, I’ve discovered three tricks that help re-set my brain back to a normal member of society, instead of just a die-hard project managing web geek.

Network outside of your network
Most of us go to a lot of networking events. The easiest thing to do is to go to events and gravitate towards people who do something similar to you. This is common, because you speak the same language, you understand the same issues and you start off with immediate common ground.

So flip the coin. Go to a networking event that is totally foreign to you. Maybe go to a small business event that targets people of a different industry, or one that specializes in collecting business people across multiple industries. Talk to people. Tell them what they do, and then see how much they understand.

This is great for two reasons. For starters, often times, you’ll see other struggling with the same problem: their jargon doesn’t make sense to you, or other people who are not in their industry. Secondly, it forces you to think about how you speak, because it’s clear that your normal language isn’t their native tongue.

Record a conversation or a meeting
If you know that you are guilty of speaking in too much jargon, try recording a conversation. (Legally, you are required to tell anyone else who participates that you are recording it.) Play back the recording later — a week or so, is often best.

Put down the distractions, and really listen to what you say. Are you tossing out words that are useful to your client, or are you confusing them? Often times we can miss important cues while we are in the middle of a discussion with someone. But if we can experience that same discussion as a ‘third-party’ we can see things from a different perspective. Sometimes this makes it clear that we missed critical clues during the first go-around.

Can you explain it to your grandmother?
When all else fails, especially if you are in a relatively new industry, talk to your grandmother (or someone else of her generation). Can you discuss what you do with them in such a way that they understand what you are talking about, and can you avoid confusing them? If not, go back to the drawing board.

Clients and customers need to feel secure that you know what you are talking about. But they also need to feel secure that you can understand and communicate with them. If you are getting so caught up in your little corner of the universe that you stop being able to communicate in their language, then your value to them suddenly drops like a stone.

Anyone who has ever been married knows that communication is always hardest when you start getting in the habit of making too many assumptions. So stop yourself, back up a bit, and then start over. Conscious communication is not difficult, but it takes focus.

But, then again, so does entrepreneurship.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, 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 web strategy firm in Austin, Texas