Relaunch!

Tom Petzinger

Chairman and CEO
LaunchCyte Inc.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Domain knowledge is trivial, but your skills are not. That's an important thing to remember when you're relaunching yourself into a new career. Even though I've changed my profession drastically, the skills that I learned in my old domain extend to my new one. As a reporter, I learned how to learn. I learned about integration and about synthesis and about analysis. And, in my new job, I integrate, synthesize, and analyze: I'm just not doing those things under a byline.

I left the "Wall Street Journal" this year after 22 years in order to create a small-business incubator in Pittsburgh. I left because, while covering entrepreneurialism, a beat that I had assigned to myself at the "Journal," I slowly became infected with the same disease that I was examining. Changing jobs has meant using my skills as a learner, nothing more.

So forget about the industry that you're relaunching into; forget about whether it's for-profit or whether it's nonprofit. Think, instead, about the kinds of skills that you've developed, and look at your next domain as a new pad from which to launch those skills.

Here's one cautionary note: When you relaunch yourself, you're the one who has to give yourself approval. In journalism, I could always involve someone else in my work. There was always an editor who said, "Yes, you can do that." It's quite an adjustment to realize that nobody is going to give me approval for decisions that I make. Instead, now I have all kinds of bosses -- teammates, directors, funders -- who say, "What are you doing?" You have to give yourself permission to be a boss.

Tom Petzinger (tom@petzinger.com) spent 22 years at the "Wall Street Journal," where he analyzed technology trends and business success as a reporter, editor, and "Front Lines" columnist. He is author of "Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos" (Times Books, 1997) and "The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace" (Simon & Schuster, 1999). The "Petzinger Report" newsletter can be found on the Web (www.petzinger.com). LaunchCyte Inc. is a small-business incubator that began early this year.

Clarence Wooten

Vice President, ImageCafé Division
Network Solutions Inc.
Herndon, Virginia

It's too easy to get caught up in your "vision," especially when you're a company's founder. But don't let your vision determine what you give to your customers. Before you plan a relaunch, talk to your customers. And then listen to them. Let whatever they say dictate your actions.

In the mid-1990s, my partner and I started a company, Metamorphosis Studios Inc., to build custom Web sites. Some of our customers were small-business owners, and when we would quote them a price, they would walk away. They didn't believe that it could cost $3,000 to $6,000 to design a Web site. They told us that they couldn't justify such an expense, but that they wanted a sophisticated-looking Web site that would uphold their image.

Our solution? We converted our design for quality Web sites into a customizable Web-site master copy. Then we launched an online superstore of predesigned, customizable Web sites-to-go -- which enabled us to reduce our price to only a couple of hundred dollars, without sacrificing quality. No one had really taken that approach before -- and we would never have thought to take it had we not listened to our small-business customers.

Clarence Wooten was cofounder and CEO of ImageCafé before it was acquired by Network Solutions last fall. Wooten is now responsible for strategy in Network Solutions's ImageCafé division. While attending college, Wooten won an Autodesk Caddie Image Award for his production of 3-D architectural walk-through animation, on which he based another of his companies, Envision Designs Inc. Network Solutions, a $220 million company, provides domain-name registration services, with registrations numbering 10 million. In March, VeriSign Inc. agreed to acquire Network Solutions to create the world's largest provider of Internet domain-name and security services.