Today I have about five different business cards. And I use different names for the different work that I do.
—Ike H., fifty-four, psychiatrist/corporate crisis consultant
On a balmy September day in 2005, I visited the Great Read, an outdoor confab of book-related events that was taking place in Bryant Park, adjacent to the New York Public Library. With the sun blazing overhead, the speakers on the business journalism panel were casually dressed. One of the men sported jeans and a baseball cap. Another was wearing a T-shirt with a rock band’s logo on it.
From the start, my attention was drawn to Sally Hogshead, a striking redhead at the end with a little book perched in front of her like a funky prop. She looked more like an interior decorator than a business journalist. Then she spoke. Gripping her tiny book (the only paperback on the panel), she told the story of how she was an advertising executive who broke into the world of publishing with an entirely different way of thinking about books. She briefly mentioned the topic of her book (strategies for career success), but mostly she talked about its “look and feel.” “More iPod than IBM, more Banana Republic than Brooks Brothers,” she explained.
As Hogshead listed the adjectives to describe her book and the careers it described—sexy, creative, unpredictable, exciting— I thought about how these were the adjectives I’d use to describe her. When the panel ended, she handed out a little accordion-style promotional giveaway for the book—the “mojo cards.” Each card had one of her book’s “truths” emblazoned on it (e.g., “Jump, and a net will appear”). It was all black and red. Bold and memorable. Just like her.
When I got home, I immediately logged on to the book’s Web site and I found more of the same. Fresh and flashy design with an attitude. Sassy and smart interactive insights. Easy to digest. I clicked on the hyperlink to visit her “other life,” that of a successful creator of advertising campaigns (the MINI Cooper among them), and the images there had a consistent feel. Hogshead’s site conveyed that she was a creative thinker with bold style—whether as a speaker, author, or creator of advertising messages.
Hogshead became an author after an established career in advertising. It was part of a deliberate plan to expand her personal brand and get a particular message out in the world. While she now describes herself as an author, her book is really a vehicle to promote her consulting business and communicate the kind of creative thinking she wants to be associated with. In effect, her book serves the same purpose as a brochure or Web site.
One of the reasons Hogshead’s introduction was so effective is that it involved several pieces—her appearance, her book, and her Web site—each of which fills in the picture of who she is and what she is about. That is no accident. Hogshead is an expert in branding and she merely applied an effective branding strategy to her own image.
For Hogshead, disclosing her business background was obviously a benefit in promoting a new identity as an author. She won instant credibility with her audience. But in-person introductions can be tricky for people whose slashes don’t have as immediate a correlation as they do for Hogshead.
As you cultivate your various slashes, think about how you want to present your slash identity to others. Many of the slashes I talk to say that the way they introduce themselves, or the parts of themselves they reveal, varies dramatically based on the context. They are adept at leaking out information on an as-needed basis. And often they tell me that having a few possible ways to answer the “What do you do?” question is one of the nifty things about straddling different spheres. Next time you’re in a situation with people who don’t know you, watch for their reactions when you say various things and think about how it makes you feel to accentuate different parts of your identity.
Mary Mazzio, the lawyer/filmmaker, knows that the minute she tells someone she competed in the Olympics, they have a certain impression of her. “When you’re an Olympian, it’s like a public validation,” she said. “I’m a walking billboard for work ethic and determination. People will sit down and talk to me and sometimes I don’t know why. It’s just an attractive calling card.” And one that has been helpful to her careers in both law and film.
Angela Williams, the lawyer/minister, has had a similar experience. In legal circles, revealing that she’s a minister is shorthand for all kinds of associations. “The title of minister just comes with an assumption of integrity and ethics. And you always want to trust your lawyer. For some clients, the whole minister part makes them take a second look—it also makes me memorable, which works to my advantage in many contexts. So much of business success is about how you distinguish yourself from other people, especially when two people come to the table with the same skills.”
When I left the law to explore a career in writing, some of the best advice I received came from another lawyer-turned-journalist. “Tell everyone you’re a writer,” she said emphatically. She then clarified, “I mean everyone you know, everyone you meet, and everyone who asks you what you do. Pretty soon it’ll be true.”
I was still practicing law at the time. I was also doing some volunteer teaching and studying writing, but I hadn’t published anything yet. I felt like a fraud to call myself a writer even though I was spending a lot of time on writing (or, more accurately, figuring out how to write). Still, I listened and noticed that whenever I met new people and said I was a writer, they simply accepted it. They asked me what I was working on and followed up if I saw them again. They also introduced me to other writers, recommended me for writing jobs, and sent story ideas my way. Over time, as I began to incorporate writing more into my life, those words rang truer. Today it rolls off my tongue in a way I never imagined it would, and it’s finally true. But saying it helped make it true.
It is equally possible that my foray into writing could have ended differently. I could have explored writing for a bit and decided that it wasn’t for me. Or, I could have failed, as I have at other things I’ve tried. Had either of those things happened, who would have been harmed by my having introduced myself as a writer for a time?
Keith Ferrazzi, the networking maven and author of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, does a variation of this when he “introduces” himself at his workshops. To illustrate the importance of showing your vulnerabilities, he provides the audience with two very different yet entirely truthful statements of who he is. In the first version, he says something like this: “Hi, I’m Keith Ferrazzi, President of Ferrazzi Greenlight Communications. I grew up in Pittsburgh, went to the Kiski Prep School, Yale University, Harvard Business School, became the youngest partner at Deloitte, founded a company with Michael Milken . . .” He then pauses and gives the audience introduction “number two,” which begins, “Hi, I’m Keith Ferrazzi, I grew up in Pittsburgh. My father was a steelworker and my mother was a cleaning lady.” He says that whether he uses one or the other (or some combination of the two) has everything to do with what impression he wants to make in a given situation.
Many slashes are careful about the right moments for disclosing all the layers of their lives. Oscar Smith, the personal trainer/cop, is open about his dual lives once people know him, but he’s not so quick to advertise it to strangers. His training studio’s Web site doesn’t mention anything about his police work. He prefers that people learn about it once they already have a positive feeling about him. “Some people haven’t had a good experience with a cop,” he explains. So he’d rather wait and let people get to know him before he gives them a reason to form a preconception.
In 2002, I interviewed Deborah Rivera, an executive recruiter, for an article I was writing about recruiting trends in the financial sector. Two years later, a player at my monthly poker game said he had a slash friend I might want to talk to—Deborah Rivera, an executive recruiter who owns a boutique hotel where she works as a chef on the weekends. I took her number, but it wasn’t until I plugged her number into my contact list that I saw her name was already there. When I first interviewed her for the article, I had no idea she had another life. It makes sense that Rivera didn’t tell me she was also a hotelier/chef; it didn’t have any relevance during our first interview.
On a trip to Seattle to visit my old friend Beth, I met Karen Rispoli, the down-the-street neighbor who drops by with the frequency and dramatic aplomb of Seinfeld’s Kramer. My first contact with her was a note she left with a bouquet of hand-cut flowers jammed into the doorway: “Beth’s Friend, Welcome to Seattle!!” Beth had told me that Rispoli was a big presence but she didn’t want to give me any of the usual details, like what she did for a living. “You’ll get all that when you meet her,” Beth told me.
The day after the flowers appeared, Rispoli stopped by unannounced and joined us at the kitchen table while we were finishing up breakfast. Upon hearing that I write about careers, she told me that she was a life coach and had just returned from California, where she had given a presentation on her work. Rispoli uses principles of coaching to work with the families of troubled adolescents—coaching as an alternative to family therapy.
A few nights later, Beth’s house was burglarized while we were out for the afternoon. Beth’s husband, Peter, came home from work and started looking around, trying to determine how someone could have broken in. “Let’s get Rispoli over here,” he said to Beth. That’s when I learned about Rispoli’s second slash—she’s a private investigator. And there’s another. To complement coaching and private investigating (both of which she does as a free agent), Rispoli, forty-eight, drives a city bus thirty hours a week (the steady job for security and benefits). As we got to know each other, I learned why Rispoli takes time to disclose her various slashes. She said that she’s offended when someone asks her “What do you do?” as soon as they meet her. Typically, she’ll ask them, “What do you mean by that?” in response. For Rispoli, it comes down to the assumptions people make upon hearing her various job titles. “People look down on you, thumbing their noses at the white-collar/blue-collar thing. It’s a tremendous judgment of a person’s level of success in life. It’s astonishing really.”
Having a few identities you can test out on a first meeting is a great way to learn about people’s attitudes and prejudices. Other people’s assessments of various labels as high or low status was a theme that came up frequently in my conversations with slashes:
I run into people every day who talk down to me when they think of me as a personal trainer and look up to me when they hear about my other work. It’s a great way to learn about people’s character.
You say you’re a real estate broker and it’s disdainful. I mean, it was in the New York Post the other day on a list of the least-respected professions. And when clients hear I’m a musician, they definitely relax and it’s like “ah”; it’s a “wow.” It’s just amazing.
If I’m out meeting new people and say I’m a teacher, the conversation stops. If I say I’m a builder or that I speculate in real estate, people are much more interested and they will listen more.
Whereas a resume could never convey the multidimensionality of a slash career, Web sites are often perfect for them. After all, slashes are all about hyperlinking to the next thing.
If you visit Michael Melcher’s Web site, you’ll go on a little journey. Stay within the confines of www.MichaelMelcher.com and you’ll learn about his coaching practice, his consulting work, and his educational and professional background in law and business. Click on the “Public Speaking and Media” page and you’ll have the option to visit another Web site, Next Step Partners, the folks Melcher teams up with to run his workshops. Curious about the salacious novel he wrote with four Harvard classmates under the pseudonym Jane Harvard? Go to “Overview” (his bio) and click on the hyperlink for published novel, where you can read reviews of The Student Body, a couple of excerpts from it, and the bios of his co-authors. Interested in his musings about his recent trip to India? Then click on his blog. Showcasing so many aspects of his work/life makes sense for Melcher because clients hire coaches, in part, based on the kinds of professional and life experiences they have amassed.
For Terence Bradford, financial planner by day/hip-hop artist by night, his dual personae are best captured by the photo that greets you when you visit www.bshakes.com, the site of his alter ego Billy Shakes. He’s wearing an oversized T-shirt with a do-rag and ball cap on his head, and he’s reading the Financial Times. His site includes a bio, a statement about his investing philosophy, information on his morning hip-hop market report on Sirius Satellite Radio, and a downloadable song, “Dollar Cost Average.” With this one vehicle, he can generate interest in both his music and his financial services business, the two things he is working to connect in people’s minds.
Web sites are your public face, the vehicle you use when introducing yourself to clients, consumers, the media, or others who you want to know what you’re all about. For certain kinds of careers, they are becoming essential marketing and branding tools—artists, writers, client service professionals, and pretty much anyone with customers can be well served by one.
If you decide a Web site would benefit one or more of your slashes, you’ll then need to figure out whether transparency— revealing your various identities in an interconnected way— makes sense for you. The open approach works well for people like Terence Bradford/Billy Shakes who see opportunities for synergy between their different slashes. Obviously it’s not the way to go for those who are more selective about sharing their various identities. Some people will have a business card for the day job and a Web site and/or brochure for a creative or entrepreneurial venture. Again, different combinations will dictate different approaches. There is no “one size fits all” slash presentation.
Now that laser printing is inexpensive and widely available, the days of visiting the stationer to order your custom-printed resumes are a quaint memory. Today, resumes are fluid. If you’re a savvy job hunter, a basic one lives on your hard drive so that you can customize it each time you apply for a job, accentuating those parts of your experience that make you most qualified (and minimizing those that aren’t relevant). With a slash career, you can take this concept one step further. Consider adopting the “Geoff” approach.
Geoff has at least three resumes. As a lawyer/actor-director, his various resumes have slightly different formats and purposes. (For a look at Geoff’s three resumes and a selection of other resumes and bios mentioned in this chapter, see the Appendix.)
Look at them quickly and you might not even know he’s the same person. The “strictly legal” one has his education listed on the top, followed by a section listing all his law-related jobs. There is not a single line mentioning his extensive experience as an actor-director, though in a category called “Other Experience,” he lists a series of articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines; as a lawyer, Geoff mostly writes appellate briefs, so anything that shows his writing ability is relevant to a potential legal employer. Even the “Interests” line doesn’t mention his theater-related activities.
Geoff’s “actor” resume is in an entirely different format. His name is emblazoned across the top in bolded letters, and beneath that he lists his eye color, weight, and height—information you’d never find on a lawyer’s resume, unless the resume was an exhibit in a lawsuit about employment discrimination. The rest of the one-page document is divided into categories— stage, film, television—followed by a section called “Training” and finally “Special Skills.” His legal background isn’t even revealed in the “Special Skills” section.
He also has a third version, “the director” resume, which emphasizes his theater work but also mentions his legal education. In the event that some day he interviews for a job where an employer could value both his legal and theatrical background, say, as general counsel for a theater company, he would use this one.
Bonnie Duncan, the teacher/dancer/puppeteer, has adopted almost the opposite philosophy. She has one resume that presents all aspects of her career. As an artist, performer, and arts educator, all her slashes are interconnected, and she doesn’t see any downside to including them all on one resume. She also uses an innovative (though not distracting) approach to font and layout, more evidence that she’s a creative person in everything that she does.
In the slash world, there is no limit to the ways people present their skills and background. Mike Franco and Diane Curry, two advertising professionals (and a married couple) who took on a shared slash when they became innkeepers, decided that a joint resume was the best way to present themselves when applying for a position as resident managers of a hotel. They were being hired as a team, so what better way to show a potential employer that they consider themselves a unit, with various strengths and talents between them? This kind of resume also gave them a chance to reveal their personalities, with entries like this in the “Other Skills” section: “Demonstrated ability to talk to a guest and take a reservation while preventing the lemon ginger muffins from burning and still managing to meet the FedEx man at the front door before the second ring!”
That shared resume is just one of several resume-like documents Franco and Curry have to showcase their experience and abilities. They each also have a more traditional resume that documents their respective experience in the advertising field, which comes in handy when pitching a new client for freelance work. Franco also built a Web site, www.clearcutcreative.com, where he posts examples of his creative work. This site is more appropriate than a resume for introducing himself to prospective clients.
A narrative bio—a written summary of your background in paragraph rather than bulleted format—is an excellent way of painting a coherent picture of yourself. If you have a Web site, it’s likely that you’ll post a narrative bio. They are also pretty standard for certain types of careers—writing, speaking, client service businesses, academia—basically any setting where you want to be able to present yourself and your talents to an audience other than an employer. Anyone who deals with customers, clients, investors, or the press would be wise to have a narrative bio. It can be as short as a paragraph or run several paragraphs long; and if you’re in the kind of career where they are helpful, you might even want to have ones of varying lengths available for different kinds of requests.
In certain contexts, narrative bios are a signal that you’ve “arrived.” When I asked Mary Mazzio, the former Olympic rower/lawyer who is now an independent filmmaker, for a resume that would help me put things in chronological order, she said, “Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve had one of those.” That’s because it’s been a while since she’s had to apply for a job working for someone else. “At this point, I feel like my work speaks for itself,” she added. Most people who are interested in her as a filmmaker and speaker will learn what they need to know about her from the bio posted on her Web site. And she’s right—they will also watch her films.
When I was preparing to interview Tim Green, the former NFL player/author/lawyer/television and radio personality, I discovered a couple of narrative bios for him on the Web in a cursory Google search—one for a television show he was anchoring, and one for his law firm’s site. The bios are slightly different, but each conveys the many dimensions of his life. He might have submitted a resume to get these jobs, but the narrative bio is what the public sees. It’s the place where the various pieces of his life are presented in story format.
Sreenath Sreenivasan, professor and dean of students at Columbia School of Journalism/founder of South Asian Journalists Association/television correspondent, gets so many requests for his bio that he posts several versions of it on his Web site (www.sree.net)—the “10 second bio,” the “in-depth bio,” and the “resume version”—so that they are readily available to anyone who might request them. This is a common approach for academics; it’s also smart for anyone who expects to be contacted regularly by the media.
What you choose to include in your bio depends on what you want to accentuate and how you want to be perceived by those who are reading it. Deborah Epstein Henry, the expert on helping women lawyers balance work and family, always includes a mention that she is a mother of three in whatever format her bio takes. That fact is as much a credential as any of her degrees or years of experience in the legal community.
When meeting someone for the first time and talking work, it’s becoming increasingly common for someone to say, “Take this card. I don’t have the card for my other life handy.” Then they flip it over and scribble another e-mail, phone number, or the URL for a Web site. As with resumes and bios, sometimes the best answer for a slash career is to have more than one business card.
Janelle Elms, the eBay author/consultant/educator, has several different business cards to reflect the various ways she does business. In one incarnation she’s an educator/speaker, leading PowerPoint presentations to groups of several hundred at a time about the intricacies of running an eBay business. For those settings, she has a card that directs people to her eBay store, a specialized kind of Web site residing on eBay’s site. She does not list a phone number or e-mail address on that site. “I learned the hard way, when some guy called me at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning with a question, that you can’t have a phone number that you give out to hundreds of people,” she explained. For consulting work, she has a more traditional business card, complete with all the ways to contact her. When she goes to estate sales to buy inventory that she sells on eBay, she’s learned that prices are better when she uses a card that doesn’t have eBay’s name and logo emblazoned on it.
Sometimes a slash will inspire a creative idea for a business card. Robert Alper, the rabbi/stand-up comic, uses a card that anticipates a question at the same time that it delivers his marketing message:
Often, a slash will be alluded to in a company name. Joe van Blunk named his film production company Longshore Films in a silent nod to his job as a longshoreman, which he still does when he’s not making films. In the same vein, Robert Sudaley, the teacher/real estate developer, used the acronym R.E.A.D. Inc. for his company, Real Estate Acquisitions and Development.
The choice about whether to have one card that conveys multiple slashes or to carry different cards for your various identities is, of course, a case-by-case decision. If you are employed by someone else, you won’t have much choice about what your business card says, and you’ll likely need another card or cards for your other slashes. For people like me, whose slashes are related and feed nicely into one another, a business card mentioning several slashes doesn’t have much of a downside. At the moment, my business card says “Author/Speaker/Coach” under my name. But I get my cards printed cheaply at Kinko’s and I tend to tweak those labels periodically as I adjust the activities that comprise my work. Printing up inexpensive cards also makes it easy to have a few different cards, for when you want to keep things separate and when you want to try the all-in-one approach.
One of my longer-term goals is to own a small inn on the beach where I could hold weeklong writing retreats and entertain groups of friends during the summer months. Perhaps in the future, my business card will look like this:
In cyberspace, people present and spin their identities in all kinds of novel ways. Playing with your e-mail signature is a free and easy way to conduct a mini focus group on your slash presentation and get some free advertising to boot. From the time I knew this book was being published, I added the slash “author” to the list of occupations below my name. After taking on my first few private writing clients, I added the phrase “writing coach” as well. Within weeks of doing that, I got a few inquiries about what kind of coaching I did and whether I was currently available.
The opening page of a blog is another way for slashes to showcase the many layers of their identities. Most blogs have an “about the blogger” page. And in the blogosphere, the more slashes following the name, the more audiences you’re likely to attract to your blog. Jonathan Fields, who does quite a lot of things in the area of yoga education and training, used the following labels for himself on his “about me” page when he launched his blog, Unconventional Wisdom: “lifestyle entrepreneur, professional speaker, success coach, author, yoga teacher and lecturer.” When I called to ask him about the list, he warned me that there could very well be others added to the list by the time this book is published.
Recently, I’ve been receiving a lot of requests to post my profile on LinkedIn.com, Friendster.com, and some of the other online networking sites that are sprouting up all over the Internet. These sites are common among people who came of age in the Internet era and are interested in building their social and business networks through the friend-of-a-friend theory of relationships. Here’s how it works: you fill out an online form, and within minutes you can post your profile onto a site where thousands of others are doing the same. Your profile lists anything you want to share about yourself—a resume, current work affiliations, organizations you’ve been involved with in the past, skills that you offer, and so on. Then you e-mail this profile to people you know, inviting them to join the online community you’ve joined. Once you identify other people you know in the network, you have access to all of their connections within the site.
These sites have become rich resources for employers and recruiters seeking candidates, sales people looking for leads, journalists looking for expert sources—even for people looking to expand their social circles. I posted a profile to LinkedIn so that I’d be able to have a look around, and what I found was a place where the more slashes people had, the more connections they were able to make (and the more likely they were to come up in other people’s searches). Have a look for yourself and see if social software sites could be helpful to any/all of your slashes. David Teten and Scott Allen’s book The Virtual Handshake (New York: AMACOM, 2005) is a good reference on how to navigate this new landscape.
