The sisterhood vs. the ways and means committee

You are sitting in your big office thinking about leaving your big job in your big company and going out on your own. If you want to succeed, you probably need to know about the Sisterhood and the Ways and Means Committee.

Imagine this:

You are at a meeting of your congregation's Ways and Means Committee trying to figure out ways to raise money. The new chairman is president of a major company, charismatic, accustomed to commanding. When the discussion turns to the Sisterhood's annual rummage sale, his impatience erupts.

"We've got to have a plan," asserts this captain of industry. "We've got to raise a lot of money, and we can't get $50 from here and $50 from there. It's nice that we have the Sisterhood, but if we get nickels and dimes from these people, we can't ask them for the thousands of dollars we need! A rummage sale isn't the way to raise big money. We've got to have a plan!"

The stiffening of offended backs becomes noticeable in the strained silence that follows. The current and three past Sisterhood presidents sit on the committee. For decades they have cut and passed wedding cakes, operated the gift shop, cooked Welcome Wagon meals, sold ads in their annual directory, and staffed the tables at the rummage sale. They don't have a plan. Sisterhood eyes meet across the table, a nod of understanding passes among them, and one of the women removes her politeness gloves.

"Last year," she says, "the Ways and Means Committee raised $11,000; the Men's Club, a thousand; but the Sisterhood turned over a check for $50,000 to help with the renovation." She does not try to disguise her "harumph" of superiority as she settles back in her chair.

"But we've got to have a plan," the chairman mews, still convinced that the tenets of industry can be applied within a religious organization, but savvy enough to realize his approach tonight has cost him this battle. The meeting comes to an irresolute end.

Now, about your desire to become an entrepreneur. You've done your research, and you know what the key issues are: What product do you have that the market wants? How much will you charge for those products or services? How will you finance the start-up? And what expenses do you have to cover, including your salary and start-up-cost payback?

In your current job, you manage millions of dollars and dozens of people, so you sit down and do what feels familiar to you. You make a plan and you spread your sheets, laying out projected expenses and income on your budget. You create a fine piece of work.

If things go for you the way they seem to go for most newly minted entrepreneurs, a year later, you will arrive - bloody and exhausted - at your bottom line. The year just past did not at all resemble your keen plan. You have the right product or service, and you're in the right place now, but you barely made enough to cover expenses. Why did things not go as you planned?

It's because you have resigned as Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and you've just joined the Sisterhood. Things are different here.

1. About that plan. It was absolutely the right thing to create the plan and show it to your bank or your investors or any family member who'd read it, but an entrepreneurial plan is not as useful as an organizational one.

It makes you credible to lending institutions; it's good for a long term objective so you know where you're headed; it's a beacon for employees you'll hire. But it will not be a decent predictor of the year to come.

In the organizational world, things move more deliberately because more pieces have to be organized and coordinated; and while chaos can be the byword in any company, you have a better chance of predicting and controlling there than you do in entrepreneurial halls, where yesterday's dream is in the shredder today.

So, create one, show it to the right people, have monthly meetings about it so you can adjust it. It will be powerful if you can pick and keep in front of you a few main goals. It will keep you focused. But don't count on that budget happening the way you intend it. Don't even count on it as a guide to action. In the entrepreneurial Sisterhood, you will operate more on a day-by-day basis, marshaling your forces as today's need arises.

2. Fingertip management. Entrepreneurial events happen at the speed of light. You have to become adroit at sniffing the wind for change; and developing an exquisite sensitivity in your fingertips for what your marketplace wants today, whether your selling is getting over or not, if a lower price will get you the business (much like the Sisterhood would price used toasters).

Being an entrepreneur means you manage in very different ways than your B-school or bureaucracy taught you because "big" means systems and ponderousness and models You're little now, and you need to learn "little."

One client who owns a most successful entrepreneurial firm, told me, "I have a lot of competition and it moves fast. When I'm trying to decide where to go, I don't even try to steer by looking out the windshield. I figure I'm doing pretty good if I manage by looking through my rear view mirror to see what just whizzed by me."

Entrepreneurial management requires developing an artist in your fingertips, one who can discern opportunity, sense B.S. (except your own), and who itches to do business.

3. God is in the details. This is probably the biggest distinction between the entrepreneurial and the mega-business, and it makes you most like the Sisterhood. You don't hear about it much because you've always talked about strategies and 10-year projections and "the plan." In fact, you've worked hard to position yourself in your company as one who gets and drives the big picture.

Sisterhood business is more scrambling, more day-to-day oriented, more attuned to the slippery opportunity at hand than the global contract. Yes, you should keep your finely tuned strategic mind, but you'd better keep an eye on the details of running the business or it will run away with you.

You will waste more time, do less delegating, put out more fires, fill out more applications, talk with more intransigent customers than you ever wanted to. It's all part of the deal, however, and the success of the entrepreneurial business depends on it.

The Sisterhood, except for that unanticipated blurt, generally kept its counsel, collecting the dollar here and the rag there, but always building, building, building, one used toaster at a time.

You won't always have to live here, but you will always have to pay more attention to detail than you did when you and your corporate Ways and Means Committee had "the plan." If you do, you'll be the one with the workworn hands and $50,000 checks, while your grander friends with softer hands will still be talking planning while you're talking profitability and growth.

4. Big-time scoffers. Speaking of them, your friends will scoff at your Sisterhood mentality. If they are with big companies they have no experience base from which to advise you. Ignore them and anyone else who hasn't been there. They're working off of their Anthony Robbins tapes, but haven't gotten to the part where Tony tells them to put action behind the dream.

You may also get gigged by friends who have gone off on their own, and they'll talk about your need to go after mega-contracts. It is entirely possible they haven't watched the ink dry on one single mega-contract and they will be out of business in a couple of years. They're still on the Ways and Means Committee, but they won't ever realize that things are different out here, and they will flee back to the comfort of some corporate arms because they don't know how to succeed.

Any time fellow consultants scoff this advice at you, ask to see a copy of the mega-check they got for the mega-business they did. When two or more entrepreneurs are gathered together, you have an Olympic team of Liar's Poker players. That braggadocio, those puffed-out chests, that cigar-waving counsel is part of an important smoke screen. They want to seem successful so they talk big.

5. Doin' it the Sisterhood way. Entrepreneurs who've been in business a long time are often willing to help you succeed, if you're not newly minted competition. Find one or two. Ask them to talk with you about their business. They'll tell you about scrambling for work and how in the early days they took business that was too small for them, or they didn't charge nearly enough. But they did it and they learned and they became successful.

I once asked an 80-year-old friend who'd risen from dirt-poor poverty to successful businessman how he'd done it. He shrugged. "I didn't have anything when I started. I didn't know anything. I wasn't educated. I just did what the successful guys were doing, and that's how I grew my business."

6. It's still about money. The Sisterhood may have worked out of a cash box, but they never forgot that their job was to make money for their congregation. They did it in the best way they knew how, using available skills and techniques. With different people and more time, they would likely change their ways of doing business.

People who go into business for themselves often have a semi-idealistic view of the mission they're embarking on, along with something akin to a distaste for taking money from others, a hesitancy to charge for what they do. You really see it in people who come from service businesses. They have a higher calling, and money is filthy lucre.

That changes when the bills roll in, when they hear of others not nearly as skilled charging much higher fees, when it finally dawns on them that they are their paycheck. You have to get over that hump, which many have had to leap, and understand you have a product or service which is bringing value to someone, for which they are willing to pay, and you're not a greedy capitalist pig for wanting it or asking for it. Think of your kids' orthodontics bills. You get over it faster.

Being in business is about making money.

7. It's about people, too. The Ways and Means Committee looks outward, to big projects and major donors and check-raking fund-raisers. The Sisterhood, by contrast, builds by relationship, one sister with another, one by one, developing a cadre of the faithful who can be relied on for hard work when asked.

You must do the same, that relationships-building; taking care of your people, helping others, being part of your professional and personal communities. You don't have the time to do it; but if you don't, you'll have even less time to grow because you don't have around you people who will help you as you've helped them. It's as challenging as it is rewarding in the long term.

8. Lease it, don't own it. Okay, you've bought the argument that you have to leave the Ways and Means Committee for the cinnamon-imbued kitchen of the Sisterhood. You need the attitudes just described, but just lease them for awhile. Don't buy them, unless your goal and happiness lie with being small.

As you grow in size, you will gradually have to let go of the Sisterhood ways which will have made you successful as long as you lived in "little." As you push toward "big," your old Ways and Means ways should return. Get those plans and systems and strategies and delegations and mega-contract-administrators going. (Just don't forget that God is in the details when it comes to running bigger companies, too.)

In other words, use what works for the situation you're in. Along with remembering about God and details, remember, too, to look around for struggling newbies who need to learn your secrets about the Sisterhood and the Ways and Means Committee.

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Rose Jonas, Ph.D.
The Job Doctor
jobdoc@aol.com
www.jobdoctoronline.com