Collecting a handful of examples of men employed by their wives’ businesses, the story has such a perpetual tone of amazement, I half expect the author’s face to be frozen into an o-mouthed, eyebrows-raised mask of surprise. The subtext that runs throughout the piece can be summarizes thusly: Did you know that some men are not only progressive enough to work for a woman, but for their very own wife?, it muses.

Of course, it continues with furrowed brow, given their fragile male egos and manly need to act as family breadwinners, it’s vewy vewy hard for them to play second fiddle to their wives, and they require special treatment.

The men interviewed for this article seemed comfortable working at family companies controlled by their wives, perhaps because those who agree to that arrangement are not threatened by it. It was the wives who tended to be more sensitive about the potential pitfalls of having their husbands on the payroll.

One entrepreneur decided that to avoid her husband (whom she met after hiring him to work for her) feeling undervalued as a mere employee, she would take an approach I can only describe as bizarre and convoluted:

“One year I get the lower salary, and he gets a higher salary, and the next year we reverse it,” she said.

“I don’t think Greg could feel emasculated, because he is such a balanced individual and sure of himself,” she added. “But I did not want him to feel undervalued.”

Now, I find it difficult to understand how a) commanding a lower salary than your CEO spouse could possibly constitute EMASCULATION, and b) why, if she’s so concerned about his ego, she doesn’t just cut her salary to the same level as his. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just earn equal incomes, rather than always having one person earning more than the other? Does he really need to earn more than her half the time? (And if he does, could he maybe consider starting his own company and competing with her the good old-fashioned way?)

On the one hand, I hate to give the story any more time than it deserves by even talking about it — but on the other, it got me riled up enough I had to post a little rant here. Can you imagine anyone writing in the Times about women working for their husbands and being content to earn a little less and keep to the wings while their spouses hog the spotlight? No, because it’s not news. And neither is this small set of anecdotes about the tables being turned (for once).

And don’t get me started about the fact they didn’t include a single same-sex couple (or unmarried couple, for that matter) in their examples…

The conference takes place this Wednesday & Thursday, so you’ll need to act fast — head over to her blog post and follow the instructions there for a chance to win yourself one of the free passes!

So how about you? What are you doing to subvert the dominant business trend in being the boss of you? What do you most love about setting the rules around the office/shop?

For starters, I’m going to outline a few assumptions here:

• First, by choosing to pay to get eyeballs on your website, I’m assuming that your website either directly (through e-commerce) or indirectly but pretty darn quickly (say a portfolio or consulting site) will help you generate income.
• Because you’re asking about search engine optimizing or paying for search engine ads (basically paying to show up well in search results) you’re currently not showing up very well in so-called “natural” searches for some the keywords your clients/customers are likely to be searching on.

Running with that first assumption, the best way to evaluate either of these means of improving the likelihood of folks finding your through searching is to keep a solid and realistic eye on what the Return on Investment (ROI) is going to be. In fact, it is this ROI that makes me lean ever so slightly towards Google Ads (or other paid search ads) as a starting point, as they allow you to set up measures that can actually (in the case of having a shopping cart on your site) show you the financial return you’re getting on your paid ads. That said, if you’re not showing up well in natural searches, you may want to consider some SEO all the same, as continuing to pay for search engine ads for the life of your business may not be the way you want to go, but more on this in a minute.

If you do choose to dip your toes in the world of Google Ads, I highly recommend doing a bit of reading on the terrain before you jump in with both feet. A web search on “setting up google ad campaigns” will offer you a fair bit of guidance and Google’s own website is pretty good with the tips as well. One of the other great things about Google Ad campaigns is that you can really be pretty conservative in your initial trials starting with very small amounts of money in play (like a $1 a day). If you are paying for really popular terms like “lip gloss” you may find that a $1 isn’t going to take you very far mind you, but unlike buying an ad in a glossy magazine, paid search engine advertising does let you have a bit more control over your budgets. The other thing to keep in mind with Google Ads is targeting and specialization. If for example, the term you want has a lot of people vying for it (Google will tell you this in giving you information about what your minimum bid on the word or phrase would need to be) try a more specialized variant that applies to your product, so perhaps “hemp lip gloss” and see if that lowers the cost of entry while also helping you limit the search traffic to people who are searching for a product that really matches your own quite closely. The other aspect of targeting is changing the content of your ad based on the keywords you are using. Going with my earlier example, say you sell hemp based beauty products on your website, set up your ads so that the keywords associated with lip glosses and balms relate to those products specifically, while the cleansers talk about “Perfect for sensitive skin” or what-have-you. Keep in mind that whenever someone is entering a search term they are looking for results that most closely answer the question they’ve got on their mind, ie/ “who on the internet has the best/reasonably priced animal friendly organic facial cleanser?” While you can’t read people’s minds, you do want to take this opportunity to try to convince them to check out what makes you so special. The next piece of the specializing puzzle is to also use separate URLs for each ad group, by which I mean making sure your cleanser ads link directly to your cleansers page, and your lip gloss ads to the lip gloss page if at all possible. As with most things on the internet, you’re trying to get people somewhere in as few clicks as possible. This is especially true with e-commerce.

So, maybe you’re not to sold on ads, or you’re really concerned about your search engine ranking in general and want to get some SEO expertise on  your site. Google, again, offers some really excellent information about SEO, which I must insist that you read before you consider hiring or set out to hire an SEO specialist. Unfortunately, there are a number of less than above board folks out there offering SEO services, and a bad SEO campaign (ie/ one that uses nefarious techniques to artificially push up your ranking so you see quick results and are happy with your SEO consultant) can actually negatively impact your search engine placement quite significantly. So caveat emptor when it comes to hiring SEO folks. Now that said, there are many excellent and honest SEO consultants and firms out there — it is in fact a service we offer to some of our clients as well — in the case of a smaller business I would say you should be able to get a basic SEO package that you can realistically envision seeing a decent ROI on. You may actually be able to set up some measurable means of guaging the success of an SEO campaign on your bottom line by watching your sales (seeing if they go up) and also watching your search engine referrals to see if they go up at the same time. Keep in mind that SEO — when done properly — can take a while to have an impact, so have patience and discuss how long your consultant expects it to take to see results. Now for most small businesses, I would recommend finding an SEO specialist who is also willing to provide you with some basic training so that you can apply many of the day-to-day techniques on your site — ie/ how you enter content, tag images, etc. — yourself and not be paying a specialist all the time.

I’m going to say it again, but really I can’t stress this enough: whether you go the route of PayPerClick ads like Google Ads or decide to hire an expert for SEO you must make sure that you’re going to see a reasonable return on your investment.

Me: “Does this phone make it easy to take and send photos?”

Sales Rep: “Yes!”

Me: “Will this new phone make it easier for me to get ahold of Oprah to tell her about my fabulous new book?”

SR: “You betcha!”

You know what I mean? People who never want to say no. Never want to lower your expectations? Maybe it speaks to what a worse case scenario kinda gal I am, but I’m always much happier to have someone say to me: “No, sorry this phone will not get you on TV and in fact, the battery will wear down quickly if you take a lot of photos, but it takes awesome photos and it’s got a really easy to use interface.” Or some such thing.

Anyway, long story short, I found myself in a meeting a while ago talking about technical specifications and one of the parties at the meeting kept saying “Yes!” to everything my client asked for, which is great… except that it makes me kinda nervous. I’ve yet to really meet/use any technology that really did EVERYTHING well, and I prefer to know what hiccups or limitations are going to be there from the outset. We like to think of this as expectation management, aka making sure our clients know what they’re going to get and what they’re not going to get so that they’re not disappointed or frustrated when we’ve completed our job. And try as I may, I just can’t make peace with the idea that you can always please everyone all the time.

She is giving away two copies of the book, so head on over there and join in the conversation!

With all that’s been going on in the flurry of book promotions, we’ve only had time to write a couple of profiles to date: Smoking Lily and Lunapads. That means there are sixteen profiles yet to be written, which sounds like a good summertime project.

Today I want to tell you a bit about Beardwood & Co., LLC, a brand consultancy in New York. Named after its founder, Julia Beardwood, the company has five full-time employees as well as a wide network of freelancers who are brought in for specialized services. Julia has an impressive resume; she worked for many years at a large ad agency, and prior to that for P&G. But she left the big corporate job behind when she determined that it wasn’t compatible with parenthood the way she wanted to experience it. The long, long days weren’t leaving her with time for her family, and she was craving something different. A few years before she headed out on her own, her husband had started his own business, and she kept her corporate job so they’d have one steady paycheque in the family — but once they were sure his business was on solid footing, she decided it was her turn.

Initially, she quit her job and took some time off to be with her kids, but eventually she was asked to bid on a project that was too tempting to resist. She called together a few freelance colleagues and hammered out a proposal, then paused as she was putting the final touches on it, feeling something was missing. She needed a name — a name that would clearly indicate she was the project lead, but also conveyed she wouldn’t be working alone. Short on time, she typed in “Beardwood & Co.,” without thinking the name might stick. Four years and five employees later, it’s still Beardwood & Co., and they’ve created a pretty killer portfolio.

There are two things that stood out strongly for me when I interviewed Julia: Her passion for fostering a positive work environment, and her commitment to giving back to the community. With her big-agency years behind her, her voice became enthusiastic and animated when she talked about how much she loves their office space, the clients they work with, the work they do. She has an obvious love of collaboration and teamwork, and it was clear to me that strong relationships — with her employees, with her clients, and ultimately, with the audience for whom Beardwood & Co. develops brands — are her primary motivation.

She was equally eloquent in talking about Beardwood & Co.’s community involvement, telling me about an organic fertilizer company for whom the small agency had donated their branding and design services. She told me she had seen the products on television and knew they could expand their reach with a stronger visual identity — but guessed correctly they couldn’t afford her services. So she called them up and offered them a discounted rate, which resulted in a project her team could get excited about, even if it wasn’t financially lucrative. Julia explained that one of the secrets to retaining great staff is to give them a chance, once in a while, to work on projects where they can express their passion & creativity without worrying about profitability.

I loved talking with Julia. Her years of experience with large corporations set her apart from many of the other women we spoke to (although there were a couple of others who left big office towers behind when they became their own bosses), and that background gives her a unique perspective on building a small business that can compete with the big fish. She told me she was convinced that being a small, nimble studio gives Beardwood & Co. a competitive edge, and that although there may be some big clients that stick with big agencies for the comfort of the familiar, that there’s always room for smaller players at the table.

I’d say that with clients like Real Simple, Carol’s Daughter, the NBA, and Bath & Body Works, they’re doing pretty well.

Our favourite part of every book event is the question and answer period that follows our always-brief introductory remarks and reading — and this was no exception. We fielded questions from how to maximize the payoff when you earn a little press coverage, to how to manage a business that has snuck up on you over time (a common issue for consultants, who may take on a freelance contract or two, only to find themselves a few years later working full-time on a variety of contracts, without having created anything resembling a business plan.

It strikes me that perhaps we should bring the Q&A format to this here blog… so how about it? Any questions you’d like us to answer here? Post ‘em in the comments and we’ll do our best to tackle them.

We knew going into writing our book that we wanted to include advice and information from other business women we knew or admired, both because we don’t claim to have all the answers ourselves, but also because our own experiece of entrepreneurship has included being on the asking and answering end of that equation so many times. Because I do not believe that anyone out there has all the answers, I find it amazing that there are business people out there who don’t rely on colleagues, family, friends and experts to help them along the way. Being an entrepreneur is so often about facing new challenges and while its tempting to think you can do it all, I learned pretty early on that asking for tips from people who’ve been there or even just workshoping an idea with others who are facing the same challenges can not only save you time, but often result in answers and ideas you’d never come across on your own.

We have a stable of experts — bookkeeper, accountant, IT networking support guy, business coach — and several choice numbers/emails for entrepreneurial colleagues memorized that we make judicious use of and who I can’t imagine getting to this point in the life of our business without. Who do you turn to for advice/guidance when you’re facing a business challenge?