About the Author: Lauren Berger is known as “The Intern Queen” after participating in 15 internships during her four years of college. Berger graduated from University of Central Florida in 2006 and currently resides in Los Angeles. She runs http://www.internqueen.com, a full-service internship advice site.   Berger has been featured in BusinessWeek, Washington Post, NY Post, Los Angeles Business Journal, E! News, and more.

1.    Let an Intern Grow with the Company.  It’s so hard to find dedicated and loyal employees. Bringing an intern on board provides a “test-drive” of their abilities. This intern can learn the company inside out and help you brainstorm. At the end of the internship, there is a good chance that you will want to hire that person full-time. By this time, the goal is to build a trusting relationship with the individual. This is usually much better than hiring someone you are unfamiliar with.

2.    Bring Fresh Ideas to the Table.  It’s always nice to have a fresh set of eyes look things over and provide new and different opinions. The interns of today are the future buyers of tomorrow. Get their opinions. See what they are into. Test things with them. Have them ask their peers about products and services.

3.    Go Social Media Crazy. Employers are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars having social media consultants teach their employees the ropes. These students already have integrated several of these social media tools into their daily lives. Give an intern a stab at running your online marketing. You may be surprised by what she can do.

4.    Micro-Manage When Necessary.  Look, many interns have never worked in the “real world” before. They have a different perception of how things work and how tasks should be managed and prioritized. Don’t assume anything. Teach them the ropes. Encourage them to ask questions. When assigning tasks, specify how much time they should be spending on each task and set your expectations.

5.    Make “Commitment” Your Magic Word. Take it from someone who has had both bad and good experiences with interns, stress the word commitment. In the interview process, ask the intern what the word commitment means to him. Explain clearly what you expect of him, the time commitment you would like, and how you feel about people who don’t take their commitments seriously. You want to hire an intern that you can rely on.

About the Author: Rachel Pennig is a member of the Wasabi Ventures Advisor Team and currently is building the support infrastructure at Syncplicity.

The sign of a successful company is growth. With that growth comes a need to expand your team – but how do you do it right?   My responsibility is to assess the gaps in the current support team coverage and find the person who can best fill those needs.

Assessing Company Need

Now that Syncplicity is using Salesforce for tracking support tickets, I have been collecting stats on ticket volume per hour. The stats revealed peak support times of 6am-4pm PST. By tracking daily ticket volume, I know that support’s busiest days are Sunday and Monday, and the slowest day is Saturday. Based on these stats, I can assume a few things about our users: we have a high percentage of international users (peak times begin on Sunday), and we have a high number of East Coast users (9 am EST is 6am PST). International support requires somebody who can work on the weekend, and East Coast users will need an early bird on our team. Now we have some high-level requirements for our hiring candidates.

Gathering Applications

With team needs assessed, I’m finally ready to start hiring. Candidates that are familiar with and love Syncplicity have a huge advantage, obviously, but I believe that technological skill or familiarity with the product need to be pretty low on the list of qualities a hiring manager should be looking for. The key qualities are patience, speed, accuracy, persistence, and personality. While technological skills with a product can be learned, it is much harder to train a contractor on the aforementioned qualities. When you find a candidate who sends an application that shows personality, curiosity, and intelligence, you know you have a person you can move forward with — whether or not he knows your product. In past hiring situations, my best hire was a stay-at-home mom with five children who never had touched my company’s product. With that number of kids, she definitely knew how to multi-task, deal with escalated issues, and give clear instructions. She was able to learn the product quickly and became one of my best employees.

Interviewing Candidates

I like to keep a healthy list of requirements for a candidate to get through the interview process. First — did they take the time to send a cover letter? If there’s no cover letter, I don’t even take a look. Not including a cover letter tells me that they are applying for jobs blindly and are not passionate about what they would be doing for me. For the users that make it to the next stage, I review their documents. Do they have the right skills? How do they communicate? How are their spelling and grammar? Finally, I have candidates fill out an application that is tailored to test their familiarity with general Internet technologies, how they handle difficult users, and how they instruct users on a support incident.

As the first applicants start trickling in, we’ll see how they fit into the overall Syncplicity team culture of user dedication, passion about the product, and pure awesomeness. Hopefully when I update again in two weeks, I’ll be discussing my new hire!

Interested in applying for the job at Syncplicity? Read the blog post announcing the job posting.

Raising a well-rounded child may be the most difficult task for any parent, but it is just the project that Grant Garris undertook when he started A Village to Raise.  In his words, “A Village to Raise enables all family types to connect, chat, network and socialize — toward sharing information, tips and resources necessary to support all parental roles in raising a well-rounded child.”

Question and Answer:

Q: Have you ever started a business from scratch before?
A: Yes, I started a home renovation business once before and built it up to sell it.  It was a lot of fun but nothing I wanted to do long term.  This time was completely different because of the passion I have for adoption, fostering and the parental need to talk to other parents!

Q: When you lost your professional job, was creating a new business the first thing you thought to do?
A: Yes, the thought of going back into a corporate environment was one of the last things on my mind.  I have wanted to do this for a while, and with me having the time, everything just fell into place.

Q: What is the largest challenge you have had as you started a new business?
A: Having enough hours in a day is probably the most difficult challenge.  I wake up and start working and work 7 days a week.  I want to make sure I am offering our members the very best experience possible, and right now, I am the only person working all aspects of the business.

Q: What is the largest lifestyle change you had to do undergo as you moved to being an entrepreneur?
A: Balancing life and work, believe it or not!  I now work solely at home and can’t go into the office to focus on what needs my attention.  Working at home is both a blessing and a curse in that I love being around my family all of the time, but when I am on conference calls, it is difficult for my children to understand that I can’t be disturbed.  I am trying to get them more involved, but at 14 and 11 years old, they do not get the impact.

Q: Do you ever see yourself going back to the corporate world?
A: I would only go back to the corporate world for the right company that understood that it is important to treat people in your business like people and not make decisions solely based on business needs.  One that takes the impact to the person into account.

Q: When will you consider yourself a success as a start-up?
A: I feel like we are currently a successful start-up because we are attracting more and more members everyday.  I remember when I got my first email from a man thanking me for creating such an amazing site.  That to me is success!

We are continuing our exploration of where ideas come from in conjunction with our launch of  Idea Offer.  Ideas come from all sources, but most of the time the best ideas come from finding a need in the marketplace and then building a better mousetrap.   That is the story from Ilia Gimelfarb, Founder of BoxCycle:

Environmental issues and doing meaningful work have been important to me since early childhood.  Although BoxCycle fulfills both goals, I didn’t come up with the idea by thinking of the best way to help the environment.  I came up with it by running an online store specializing in calculators.

I started CalculatorSource shortly after college because I enjoyed the challenge of creating something on my own and because I believed I could run the store well enough to provide me with income and time for more meaningful pursuits.  I spent a few years mostly developing the store and writing the back-end software.

Efficiency and environmental stewardship are both important to me, and I did what I could to reduce waste.  Most processing is electronic and nearly all packaging I received gets reused.  I doubt more than a few boxes ended up in the recycling bin in the last seven years.

But around 2004 big boxes from incoming shipments were beginning to become a problem.  They were often in nearly perfect shape, but since I mostly shipped out small quantities they just continued to pile up.  I knew that people paid a lot of money for boxes like these when moving and I figured that I was not alone with unwanted boxes.  I went online to find a solution.  I was surprised to find nothing at all and my first thoughts of developing a solution were born.

A few months later I found a site called BoxQuest; I believe they started around that time.  They are essentially a classifieds site focused on boxes.  I posted my boxes on there and got a few buyers.  What astounded me were the lengths to which many buyers travelled to get discounted boxes and how overjoyed they were when they picked them up.  I knew there were ways to get boxes for free, but clearly those methods were either insufficient or did not appeal to everyone.

I started using Craigslist along with BoxQuest, and soon I wasn’t getting enough boxes to fill all the orders.  Box reuse has a significantly lower environmental impact than recycling, and I was beginning to feel that there may be room for me to contribute in this area.  I experimented with picking up boxes from a local retailer.  I was again astounded by how overjoyed they were to give their boxes to me and how much work they were willing to do to make this happen.  Getting rid of boxes is a daily hassle for most retailers.  While there are solutions, they are clearly also either insufficient or do not appeal to everyone.

I eventually stopped doing box pickups because I didn’t find them economically viable.  While I could see ways of making them work on a large enough scale, setting up such an enterprise would entail a substantial commitment and I was not sure I could generate the necessary demand.  More importantly, I found a number of companies that tried making a business out of picking up used boxes and reselling them on the retail level.  Virtually all of them have stopped doing individual pickups and either went out of business or switched to picking up overrun boxes in large volume from box manufacturers.

Still, the waste of boxes kept haunting me.  I knew that the numbers fundamentally worked.  Months later it hit me to do something no one seems to have tried – remove the intermediary pickup step – create a market!
Retailers already have the space to store boxes.  Buyers would greatly benefit with a large number of pickup locations a market could generate. Pricing could easily be made to work.  Environmental impact would be reduced to the absolute minimum.  Benefits just kept coming to me.  Sure, I could also see the difficulties, like convincing sellers to want to bother.   But this was worth a try.

It took about year of thinking and preparing, but eventually I took the plunge and BoxCycle was born.  If it succeeds, I believe it will benefit the environment more than nearly anything a single person can do.  And it will do so as a profitable business.

So, the online store ended up providing me with a meaningful way to help the environment.  Getting rid of boxes it generated gave me a great deal of insight into issues faced by potential buyers and sellers of used boxes; issues that I designed BoxCycle to resolve.  And the experience of running it, gave me the business and retail knowledge to increase my chances of success.