Or maybe more...I am featured in Marci Alboher's small business column in the New York Times. Yay!
In case the article goes behind the wall of Times Select, so I am putting the full text of the article
here:
May 7, 2007
Shifting Careers
When the Entrepreneur Has 2 Faces
By MARCI ALBOHER
Q: I have a split life — doing a few kinds of work that might not make sense to everyone. What is the best way to handle multiple lives that do not necessarily relate to one another?
A: People with incongruous occupations tend to be cautious about revealing the different aspects of their working lives. And rightly so. Just as certain topics are off-limits on a first date — say, your habit of phoning your mother three times a day or your inability to sleep with the lights off — showing a bit too much of your working life too soon may cause some people to give up on you before they recognize your talents.
When Deborah Rivera, a financial recruiter in Manhattan during the week and an innkeeper/chef on Long Island on the weekends, first meets with clients, she seldom talks about her dual life.
Ms. Rivera runs her own company, and, she said, it is important that her clients know that she is committed and competent. “People, especially corporate people, are still very confused by someone doing something other than the corporate thing they do all the time,” she explained. “It makes them uncomfortable, and they don’t know what to do with that information.”
With established clients, however, Ms. Rivera says she is more open, and many of them have visited the Greenporter, the hotel and restaurant she owns in Greenport, N.Y. Once she gets to that stage with a client, exposing her other business identity can often be helpful to the relationship, she said. “They are usually impressed and convinced that I’m a good businessperson. So they trust me even more.”
Still, she recognizes that not everyone will be comfortable with the idea of a trusted adviser who can be fixated on her home-grown arugula or the perfect pesto.
“A client once ended up on the property having no idea it was my place,” she said. “He saw me through the doors in the kitchen, walked up and shouted, ‘Deborah!’ like he caught me doing something wrong.” She has not heard from that client since, she said, and doubts whether she will ever get another assignment from him.
My personal trainer, Scott Rambardan, a 19-year-old dynamo, has endeared himself to me and created a loyal client by sharing a few of his other identities. He is an undergraduate at Hunter College, and his pre-med studies gave him instant credibility with me as he tried to figure out why I injure myself every time I try to run. And when I learned that he also fixed cars on the side, we dedicated some time in one session to talking through my car’s chronic flat-tire problem. Had he started the car talk before he had proven himself as a trainer, I might have been put off. But once I knew him, his knack for diagnosing car troubles was a little bonus I got in our weekly sessions.
Those who spend a lot of time online are often comfortable blurring their many lives. Consider Nichelle Stephens, a blogger with an eclectic collection of occupations and blogs.
Ms. Stephens reveals her many sides right on the home page of her main blog, the Nichelle Newsletter , with this cheeky tagline: “Nichelle is a blogger, comedy producer, cupcake enthusiast, freelance publicist and small business accountant. She’s still broke, but she has the most amazing, wonder-filled friends.”
Her public relations expertise has helped her cupcake obsession, Cupcakes Take the Cake, a blog she started with two writer friends, become well known. It now accounts for about 15 percent of her annual income. The cupcake blog is also not something she says she sees any reason to hide when she interacts with her accounting clients, most of them small businesses or sole proprietors.
“Anyone who is an entrepreneur in the city has to be open-minded,” she said. Clients find her multifaceted life interesting and often refer to her as a Renaissance woman, she said. Plus, there is some spillover. One client, a lawyer, comes to her comedy shows. And many of them frequent her cupcake blog for the lowdown on cupcake happenings and shops. She has also found a way to bring her passion for blogging to her accounting practice through Keeping Nickels, a blog that offers small business advice and financial tips.
The cupcake maven/comedy producer/bookkeeper/publicist uses a more traditional approach when she meets people offline — a handful of different business cards for her different endeavors. Even with all those cards, Ms. Stephens says, when she meets someone new, she usually tells them to just Google “Nichelle” if they want to understand what she is about. In fact, her online presence is so strong that merely Googling her first name brings her up at the No. 1 spot. So it is easy to see why Ms. Stephens is cultivating yet another new identity — advising her financial clients on how to improve their own online image.
There is one important caveat. If you work for yourself, like Ms. Rivera, Ms. Stephens and my trainer, the biggest risk of revealing too much is that you may lose clients or harm your reputation. When you work for someone else, you also need to make sure you are not setting yourself up to be fired. If your employer has a policy against moonlighting — or one of your side jobs creates a conflict of interest — you have what I call a “slash clash,” and I suggest you get started on finding a more compatible combination.
Marci Alboher, a former lawyer, is a journalist/author/writing coach. She is the author of One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success (Warner Business: 2007).
