It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them.

A couple of times during my informal networking style job hunt I had meetings with people who were in a position to potentially hire me.

I got these meetings by putting myself out there, networking with as many businessy people as I could, making a big deal of my interest in business, telling everyone that I was looking for a project or opportunity to get involved with, and then following up by emailing them my resume. So when someone took enough interest/pity to meet with me, it was completely removed from the normal hiring process in which you are interviewing for a clearly defined position.

I would go and chat about their business, and share my various insights on the industry, talk about related articles I had read, and talk about other businesses I knew about in Hanoi. Then I would talk about myself a bit, tell them about my background and what I was looking for in Hanoi. Eventually, a point would always come in the meeting where they would take a break from the bullshit and flat out ask me “So, if we hire you, what are you going to do for us?”

I never knew what exactly to say to this. I usually explained that I had a variety of business skills, particularly relating to my experience in startups and my economics education, and that I was excited about any opportunities to use them. This never seemed to satisfy the question, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I figured that it’s their business and they should know what to do with new employees.

But they didn’t need any new employees, they were just nice and open minded enough to spend some time listening to some kid talk about himself, and I should have had an answer ready for them.

While they might have appreciated that I had an interesting mix of abstract skills, they were trying to imagine hiring me to run around their office doing something useful, something concrete, not just sitting around basking in the aura of my own potential.

I realized that one of the big reasons the boss at my new job was excited to hire me was not my experience with startups or my education in finance, but that I thought to say that I could also work on revamping the company’s English language website.

I’m not a web designer, and I don’t aspire to be one. I feel like writing copy and working on websites is a necessary part of any small business or new project. I don’t really think my web design skills amount to much more than your average nerdy teenager. I made the websites for my last two businesses, the advanced materials company and the art licensing company, and they came out ok. But I can always tell when a company has a site that was just thrown together by an employee instead of hiring a real marketing and design firm. There’s more to a site than just a name on the top and some sections with info.

Still, I don’t think any of that mattered to my new boss. What mattered is that he saw the clear chain of events; I hire this kid, and BOOM – better website, oh and he’ll also run around and do all sorts of smart stuff for the consulting division.

In the future, when looking for ‘informal’ positions, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for people to hire me. Before I meet with a company I will think of a few potential projects that I could work on for them right away. And as a complimentary long term strategy, I’ll build more skills that are instantly applicable, not just the theoretical stuff.

My girlfriend is currently taking a grant writing class and I think that’s a great example of the perfect sort of skill for this type of situation. She doesn’t want to be a grant writer any more than I want to be a web designer. But if I ran a non-profit or NGO, and I met someone who said they had experience in grant writing, and could come in and get right to work on a grant that might bring in some new funding, I would be a lot more excited to hire them for whatever the full time position that they actually wanted was.

What I want to do is leverage all the abstract skills that I just spent 5 years of college learning. I want to direct the macro level strategy of meaningful long term projects and ventures. But if making the occasional website is my foot-in-door opportunity to do that, then I’ll do it.

So here is the expanded version of my original point: It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them, to think of practical projects you can start on right away, even if they aren’t the part of the job that you’re most excited about doing. So you better build up some useful skills, otherwise, good luck convincing someone to hire you just to do the abstract stuff.

I’ve been off the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been adjusting to working full time and finally finishing this business plan consulting project which has been eating up my free time.

So here’s an update:

After a lot of powerpointing we got our division approved. My two partners and I are now officially a strategic consulting team. We’re hiring four more people who will come in over the summer, and we have our work cut out for us.

We are stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Large Vietnamese firms and international firms operating in Vietnam already have have a bunch of consultants from the big law firms, funds, and international consulting agencies running around. Plus, most of their staff have a lot more experience than we do. Small and medium sized Vietnamese firms on the other hand often don’t really understand what consulting is and whatever it is they don’t have much interest in paying for it.

This leaves us with a very narrow band of potential clients: up-and-coming mid sized Vietnamese firms that are hip to the idea of consulting and aspire to be a bit more up to international standards, but don’t really have the resources to pay for fancy real consultants and are willing to give a chance to a couple of white kids in their early 20s.

This all begs the question of “what exactly do we do anyway?”, and we’re still in the process of answering that for ourselves. From our point of view it’s  basically anything we can get people to pay us for and actually do a good job on.

externally the answer is going to be something like:

“[Our division] works together with top management teams, boards, and investors to create the detailed analysis, long term strategies, and practical plans needed by firms to survive and to thrive in Vietnam. We provide external, objective advice offered from an independent perspective that successful firms rely on to help direct and validate their strategy.

Our international team brings the tools and best practices used by the world’s leading organizations to tackle the specific objectives of our clients. Then, by combining the resources of Thang Long Securities and Military Bank with our network of partners, we facilitate the implementation of these new plans, ensuring that they translate into real world results.”

What I wish we could just say is “Look, if your firm is having some sort of a problem that you’re not sure how to deal with, why not let us come in and take a crack at it? We’re relatively cheap, we’re smart, and we might have a different approach than you.”

Once we get good enough at making this argument we’ll have to deal with what happens when it actually works. It’s not that we’re useless, far from it, it’s just that most of our skills are very direct and analytical. We’re good at economics, which is to say that we’re good at running big sets of numbers through excel, pulling out some key ratios, running a a couple of regressions, and figuring out what causes what.

I’ve been doing the opposite kind of research lately. I’ve just been running around and meeting with everyone who will take the time to see me at funds, law firms, commercial organizations, and every company we have any sort of relationship with, and just having lunch with people and picking their brains about business in Vietnam.

What I’m figuring out about Vietnam is that solid, reliable data to analyze and to base your decisions on is very hard to come by. Because of this, and just because of the culture, a lot of decision making is very informal. Deals get made because of who knows who and on the whims of whoever owns the company

What I’m learning is that while in a place like Vietnam, because there aren’t as many qualified people, it’s more easy to jump right into doing something at a high level. The counterbalance to that is because there is so much informality it takes a really long time to actually figure out what’s going on and how to get things done.

All of the macroeconomic reports and estimates these days are guessing that Vietnam will snap out of its economic funk around the end of 2009, which should also be right about when we can expect to really get this consulting thing off the ground, and right about when I expect to really get a good sense of how to operate in this environment.

The end of 2009 is also about the very latest possible time that I plan to be leaving Vietnam.

Still, by that time I probably will have learned a lot about informal and intuitive information gathering and how to navigate through subtle social and political constructs to get stuff done as an outsider.

I figure that will be a valuable skill set when doing business back in the developed world where everyone else is just running the numbers.

Hopefully. Or maybe I’ll just get fat.

Woo!

Until then, here’s a sneak preview of Vietnam’s hottest new strategic consulting team: