There are soo many consultants out there - for business development, marketing, website design, website development, PR, etc… Over the past year or so, many of my friends/readers suggested that I do some consulting, but I've decided to stay away from that for several reasons. Here are my thoughts on the good and bad of the consulting world:

Consultants have it made!

Firstly, consultants have pretty awesome jobs and pretty thick pocketbooks. These consultants can choose their projects, work whenever they want and wherever they want, given that they meet any deadlines. They usually get paid more for short term projects than people will the same skills, working fulltime. Because of this short term commitment, they usually have the right to charge more.

Entrepreneurs are not consultants. Sounds like a pretty good life, but being a consultant just isn't an option for the true entrepreneur. The true entrepreneur has several options: create his or her own company from scratch or start a consulting company. (McKinsey and Company, for example.) In order to satisfy a real entrepreneur's needs, s/he needs to be running an actual company.

Consultants = Bad for Companies

Personally, I don't like the idea of consultants. Matter of fact, I hate it. If I was so desperate for advice, I would call up some business friends, ask my parents, or even recruit the help of my customers! (matter of fact, when my last company hit cash flow crisis, we sold out to a wealthy customer of ours!)

According to good old Wikipedia, McKinsey and Company is known to have charged its business clients upwards of $10,000 per day for a consulting team. Even $300 for a single day sounds like a lot! Critics often argue that consulting companies do not completely understand the company or the vision of the founders, compromising long term strategy for short term gains. The values of the founders may not be aligned with the consultant: for example, I personally believe that your team is the most important asset that you have, and investing into long term strategy is of the utmost importance. However, the consultant may suggest the company cut some costs that will compromise both of the above. How would my employees feel if we cut their health care as the result of these random consultants? They'd be pissed!

Real-life examples: Zappos.com and Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

1) Zappos.com is one of the few companies I truly admire because everything they do is for the long haul. According to an old news.ycombinator.com article, they tried hiring consultants but found that it made much more sense to just hire people within the company to do everything from marketing to web development to shipping management and logistics. For example, many shoe companies would outsource customer support to India, but Zappos has all customer support representatives within the company because the goals of true employees are much more likely to align with the values of the company and its founders.

2) In another example, my dad is a supervisor in the radiological engineering department at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. The hospital is best known for being among the top cancer hospitals in the world, but why? Because the people working there are amazing. My dad's priority is in fixing any x-ray machine on the property without having to bring in an outside consultant for two reasons: 1) Outside consultants would cost the hospital $300/hour - money that should be used towards helping cancer patients, and 2) Outside consultants don't care as much about the hospital's goals. The consultant wants to make the most money possible, and taking a longer time to fix a machine means a thicker pay check. My dad, however, wants the machines fixed ASAP so that doctors and patients could actually use them. It's an inconvenient truth, but insiders are much more likely to work towards their employers' goals and priorities.

The bottom line:

As an entrepreneur, being a consultant is not on my agenda. However, I could possibly see myself starting my own McKinsey and Company. (or not!) - this isn't to say that I wouldn't work at a consulting company or do consulting for a very brief period, but being a consultant is not something I see on my long-term agenda.

As an entrepreneur who ran a botched company, I would not hire consultants unless I absolutely had to. My support team of four was completely internal and they did a way better job than any outsourced person could or would do. If I ever needed to find consultants, I would call up some of my seasoned-entrepreneur-friends and recruit their advice. If I wanted something like graphics or website design advice, I'd recruit the help of my customers. The short story is, as a company, I'd stay away from consultants if any alternatives exist.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

If you're going to form partnerships with other companies, please get it right! I see way too many companies forming alliances mainly for the sheer sake of forming alliances and doing "biz dev" work, but it's often a distraction from the core focus of your company. And if you decide to go forward with the partnership, it helps if the connection is seamless and that your customers are able to extract true value from that partnership.

Let's take a look at my favorite companies: airlines! Gotta love the expensive fares, the long delays, the bad food, and of course the incompetent representatives. It may sound like I write way too much about how airlines suck, but I'm just giving my honest advice!

Many of these airlines participate in mile-sharing programs. This basically means that if you accumulate frequent traveler miles with one company, you could use it with any of its partners. The plus side being that you're not scared to accumulate these miles because you have supposed assurance that you can use it anywhere. Of course, when it comes time to actually use your points on partner airlines, you may find yourself running into a brick wall.

True story: I booked my round trip airfare to Amsterdam with KLM because the FAQ's said that I can upgrade using frequent flyer miles after booking the flight in coach. Only problem being that KLM's partner, Delta, won't let me use the Delta miles for the upgrade unless I'm upgrading a Delta seat. How lame is that? Sure, it's partly my fault for not being 100% sure I could upgrade before booking my seats, but this example comes to show that the supposed partnerships these companies have between one another don't allow customers to take full advantage of their frequent flyer miles!

As for the logistics behind entering a partnership, some companies waste way too much time, energy, and money on getting a deal done only for it to fall through. The best deals I know of happen near instantly, where each company can easily help the other without changing too much. For example, I spoke to the marketing guy at Shopzilla.com, and he told me about the many partnerships the company has with media companies to exchange traffic with each other.

In a nutshell, finding partnerships can be a terrible waste of time. But if you decide to enter into a partnership, focus on the cheap and easy ones and do them right.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Oy vei... firstly, eBay had been getting a lot of crap lately from angry sellers. Why?

Buyers can leave negative feedback for sellers. Sellers cannot leave negative feedback for buyers. Many sellers are outraged, showing their comments on auctionbytes. Sellers don't seem to hate the fee changes, but they absolutely despise the feedback rule. In another video, Kipp Knight and John Donahoe speak about eBay from Washington. They both speak like robots, but in person, they're as normal as can be.

And although all of the sellers are going ape-sh*t about this, I can look at things from eBay's perspective. I wanted to start a company that would be a marketplace to buy and sell services, and it would have many similarities to eBay. However, every minute change made to the system would result in major ramifications. For a site of eBay's scale, the problems are only multiplied. No matter what you do, some sellers will be unhappy. It's fact, it's nature, and it's something that eBay has been dealing with since the day it was launched.

This change represents the first of many by the new CEO, John Donahoe. It took me a long time to make the mental connection: but basically, I had lunch with the guy back in July! I was in Boston, looking for a place to eat lunch at the eBay LIVE conference. I didn't know anybody, but this very friendly guy asked me to sit down with him. We chatted, talked about many topics that had absolutely nothing to do with eBay, and wished each other well. Ends up that the guy (at the time) was the President of eBay Marketplaces! I honestly had no clue until the end of lunch, at which point I asked him what he did. Wow, I'm pathetic. But in any event, I'll advocate for him: He's interested in his users, he wants to learn about the issues they're facing with eBay, and figure out creative solutions to them. That's one of the most important assets that a CEO can have. Although he may sound like a robot and (somewhat fake) in his public speeches, he's nothing like it in person.

I'll try to contact him and get a follow-up on this. On another note, 10 minutes before meeting John, I also ran into the President of Stubhub. Purely accidental, I promise! We were on the escalator and we said hey whats up blah blah blah. Anyway, more to come!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

First and foremost, apologies for having slacked off on blogging for the past 2 weeks. Gosh, I've been busy being a kid!

ANYWAY, i flew Virgin America from JFK to SFO yesterday. It was my first flight with Virgin America, and they practically did everything right. I was reading a book on creating customer evangelists (for another topic) and the airline pretty much won on every point this book offered. Of course, many of those points are obvious: provide good service and create a memorable experience. It also helps not to set yourself up for complaints. Virgin only flies out of a few airports, so the logistics are much more manageable. American Airlines, on the other hand, will always have problems to worry about. In effect, they've set themselves up for more problems and more spending because of the massive growth into markets that Virgin or Southwest wouldn't dare touch.

However, Virgin could improve: I wrote about them about a month ago, and no representative contacted me or commented on my blog to note my existence. Many companies are being smart by tapping into internet conversations - take for example our friends at Serverbeach.com. Within an hour after I wrote a complaint about their downtime, a company official commented on my blog. Now THATS how you create loyal customer evangelists!

Virgin is still young and learning how to manage itself as an airline, but they're doing almost everything right. Next time you fly, go with Virgin! And once you fly with them, you too will become a customer evangelist :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

As you might have already read, BlogNation really got dicked over today when the US editor Oliver Starr posted a public letter of resignation on the front page of the blog he was resigning from. It talked about how the CEO of BlogNation, Sam Sethi, wasn't paying his people anything.

The validity of his claims are irrelevant. He's gone, the world now thinks that Sam Sethi is a terrible CEO and shady person to do business with. What's Sam Sethi to do?

1) First off, Mr. CEO needs to take a stand. He needs to openly discuss the situation at hand and either make a full blown apology that discusses in detail why he hasn't paid, or deny it in its entirety and possibly provide proof that he did in fact pay and that Oliver Starr is just trying to screw him over. Either way, Mr. CEO needs to say something to the world, or else people will take his silence as a guilty confession.

2) Mr. CEO needs to make sure the other editors are happy. Discuss openly with the other editors what happened and how to assure that such a thing won't happen again. If they too start posting open letters of resignation, BlogNation might as well just pull the plug.

3) Or the best of the solutions... PAY YOUR EMPLOYEES AS YOU PROMISED!!!

On another note, after TechCrunch posted Oliver Starr's letter, an editor from BlogNation China posted a comment:

Ladies and gentlemen –

1. We express our concern about Oliver deciding to air his own concerns on blognation.

2. Readers may wish to note that reports about blognation on TechCrunch may contain bias. It most certainly is not the “neutral point of view” that we expect from the Wikipedia.

3. As part of the blognation team we are experiencing difficultings in launching and in being with a new startup. Our determination to establish the brand and to aim for victory after victory, however, remains unchanged and will remain unchanged.

4. Quite a bit of content on blognation (and blognation China at that) are unique, as we have good roots in our community. We grow with the community.

5. Please rest assured that blognation (and in particular blognation China) will continue to provide you with news every day of the week like we have been doing for the past two months.

I do realize that some of you have different opinions. We will respect each other’s opinions knowing that responsible freedom of speech is a good thing.

Your support is appreciated.

Best regards,
David Feng
Editor, blognation China
http://cn.blognation.com

I'm sure you've already found some flaws in the above comment. This David Feng is giving the absolute lamest excuses for Mr. CEO's problems. TechCrunch readers are definitely biased, but the post itself didn't have so much. Just cause you're a startup doesn't excuse you from paying employees you've promised to pay. If they were under an equity agreement or barter, that's different.

Unfortunately for Oliver, I'm not sure if there's much legal recourse for him. He didn't sign a contract with his employee which leaves him utterly screwed. I'm sure he'll learn for next time. as for Mr. CEO, best of luck.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.