Relaunch!

Scott Bedbury

Brand Fool
Seattle, Washington

If you're thinking of relaunching yourself as a free agent, one thing that you can predict is that life will become unpredictable. Freedom from a corporate hair ball doesn't equal freedom from stress. You'll have no employment contract, no month-to-month guarantee of what your life will be like.

Free agency, therefore, is not for the faint of heart: You need self-confidence. And you need flexibility. You also need to know yourself, especially your shortcomings. Don't try to do something that in your heart you know you can't do.

I know lots of people who are out there trying to "reinvent" themselves. But many of those people won't be happy, because they're not pursuing something that they intuitively love to do. They're pursuing something for money, and they're creating hollow companies -- companies with no soul. Doing work that lines up with your values is critical.

Scott Bedbury (bedbury@brandstream.com) has worked his "brand-foolery" at such companies as Nike and Starbucks. In his seven years at Nike, he directed that company's worldwide advertising efforts and broke its "Just Do It" branding campaign, developing Nike from $750 million to $5 billion in revenue by the time he left the company in 1994. Then, as Starbucks's chief marketing officer, he helped expand Starbucks in three years from 390 stores to 1,600 stores worldwide. Most recently, as a free agent, he has worked as interim chief marketing officer for mySimon Inc., a comparison-shopping-agent technology company in Santa Clara, California. He has also advised TellMe Networks Inc. and ePods Inc., both Internet startups that simplify how information is retrieved and how consumers connect to businesses. His book, 'A New Brand World," is forthcoming in 2001 from Viking.

Scott Andrews

Cofounder and CEO
SciQuest.com Inc.
Morrisville, North Carolina

If you're going to launch a helicopter into combat, you can't do it halfway. Once those blades start whirling and you've lifted off, everything should be "all systems go."

Lesson number one for launching yourself into a new venture: You have to put it all on the line. I learned that as a helicopter pilot in Operation Desert Storm. It's also a reason why my four partners and I have successfully launched an Internet business. All four of us went 21 months without a paycheck, and each of us racked up $100,000 in credit-card debt. Six months into the business, we were already halfway across an alligator-infested river. Quitting would have meant losing everything.

Which brings me to lesson number two: To do a successful relaunch, you need emotional strength. When you start a business, you don't know where that business will bring you -- and the journey will likely take twice as long and require twice as much money as you thought it would.

My last piece of advice for relaunching yourself is this: Don't do it just for money. If you do, you'll quit when you hit your first big obstacle. Instead, do it for a reason that drives you internally.

Scott Andrews (sandrews@sciquest.com), a decorated U.S. Army officer, commanded a platoon of six Huey helicopters in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, spending 70 hours in combat. Upon his return to the United States, Andrews worked for five years as a sales professional with Baxter Scientific, where he observed his customers' frustration in procuring scientific products within that paper-driven industry. After customers encouraged Andrews to use email in 1994, he began developing an idea that would become SciQuest.com. Now SciQuest.com is a $3.8 million online marketplace for the scientific industry. Founded in 1995, the company held its IPO last fall.

Molly Higgins

Coordinator of Volunteers and Training
The Hospitality Program
Boston, Massachusetts

There are no rules about how young or how old you should be in order to relaunch yourself. What matters is that you give yourself permission to make a change. My relaunch came a few years ago, when I was just 26. I went from a career track in big-corporation human resources to working for nonprofits. A mentor had advised me to look around my HR department and to identify positions that I would want to have in the future. There wasn't a single position that I aspired to.

That's when I began to send out my résumé to nonprofits. But, after six months, I realized that I didn't have enough nonprofit experience to garner anything but entry-level jobs. So I moved into an HR job with more flexibility, and I started volunteering -- which led me to the nonprofit job that I have today.

There's no such thing as a make-or-break decision, no single moment that will, in itself, alter your entire life. Rather, change happens through a series of decisions and experiences. If one experience doesn't work out, you learn from it and you try another tack.

Molly Higgins (mhiggins5@yahoo.com) was a human-resources analyst at International Data Group and a compensation and change-management consultant at Deloitte & Touche before she took her present job at the Hospitality Program, a nonprofit organization that provides affordable housing for families of patients who travel to Boston to undergo medical treatment. In addition, she works as a peer supervisor for medical advocates at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.