Past Five

After Work Socializing

This is a big part of the career experience, for a number of reasons. To begin with, it is important for you to invest your time beyond the "9-5" experience. By showing your coworkers that you want to spend time with them, you are opening up the communication doors at a whole new level. You don't have to be a big drinker, all you need to do is be able to smile, talk and listen.

The key is, do you genuinely care about making this relationship work? If the answer is no, it's just a job, and you don't want to spend anymore time with your coworkers than the 40 hours you must, it will show through. If you don't want to get to know them, you are losing out on a valuable experience!

Why would you not want to expand your social horizons and become friendlier with a new group of people? I read once, you can never have too many friends...and the ability to make friends with people whose income is dependent on the same things as yours is a good thing! "We're in this together" is the message you should send to your team. Plus, it can be a great opportunity for you to get to know people you don't interact with every day. Who knows, maybe one day they will actually be able to help you accomplish something.

Plus the coworkers get sick of your excuses as to why you can't join them.

1. The man's excuse of "My wife won't let me go" is unfair to wives everywhere. They want a night off to go shopping, drinking with friends or simply to watch reality television by themselves while eating fluffernutter sandwiches in bed alone.
2. Women...you're men can fend for themselves. You know, he'd rather have fast food any way, or simply drink beer and watch rodeo on ESPN 2. Let them have their night.

So, lose your lame excuses, invest in your career, and have some fun, make some friends and don't drink and drive!

The Path to Growth is Organic

I recently spoke with Samantha Stainburn over at Crain's Chicago Business about the best way to grow a business. There are two options to satisfy a need for growth: hire more people and grow organically, or start acquiring other businesses.

Samantha recently ran a article that shows both sides of the argument. In it, I argue the point for organic growth, and here's why:

I started my company in 1998, and since then, we've expanded our services, opened three more offices (two more on the way), and gone from three employees to more than 70.

Our goal is to be a regional firm in six states in the Midwest. As I've thought about opening more offices, I considered buying other businesses. Most companies in our industry grow through acquisition because you're increasing your revenue exponentially on day one.

So, I asked, "For a few hundred thousand dollars, what can you buy?" The answer was, "Not much." I asked, "For a million dollars, what can I buy?" But in a services business like ours, the product is the people, and there are no guarantees that employees will stay.

In fact, when you do an acquisition, you risk a chance of turnover in your own company because management's time is now spent assimilating culture vs. taking care of the people you had before. If you're buying a company that has great people, the people at your company are thinking, "Uh-oh, they're going to take my job."

We did the analysis and decided that to do it right, we would need more manpower to manage the integration process. You see companies that have all the resources in the world, like HP and Compaq, struggling to integrate effectively, and we're a small company with limited resources.

Instead of laying out cash upfront to buy somebody we don't know, we decided to better train our existing staff and promote from within so they could do more, like open new offices. I took my most seasoned recruiter and turned him into a full-time trainer. Everybody here gets a least three hours a week of training.

In the end, why are you growing? If it's to provide better service to your clients and more opportunities for your employees, then you can accomplish most of those things organically.