Job Openings at World Vital Records
We will be officially posting some officially worded job openings at World Vital Records soon, but sometimes I think, why not blog about them, even before they are fully baked? One of my blog readers might be perfect for one of these spots or know the right person. We might be able to hire the right applicant, even before getting the job openings listed formally on our company web site.
Here are a few positions that we will be recruiting in the coming days/weeks:
- Customer Service. Since we approaching 6,000 paying subscribers, and are signing up a good number of new subscribers every day, we need one additional phone and email support person. We are definitely looking for someone with excellent knowledge of the internet and technology, as well as a knowledge of and passion for family history. Our current customer service manager also writes articles and tips for our newsletters. In a small company you often wear many hats. So we are looking for someone else like this. Prior experience providing customer service for another online genealogy company would be a plus.
- Library Sales. We will be creating pricing for libraries and societies soon, and we need someone who can promote our World Vital Records subscriptions to these institutions all over the world. We’ll initially focus our efforts in the United States, but we would like someone with library sales experience worldwide, maybe someone who has worked at Dynix before.
- International Content Acquisition/Contract Management. Soon we will have 50 international genealogy search engines. As our worldwide audience grows, so do our opportunities to license data from different countries and in different languages. If you have contract management or business development experience and an expertise in family history, you may want to apply.
- Affiliate Marketing Manager. This will likely be our most important online marketing program. We would like to hire someone with personal experience as an affiliate, an understanding of family history, and the technical skills to provide what sophisticated affiliates need to maximize their revenue.
These jobs are not officially up yet, but if you read my blog and are interested, just Contact Me, and I’ll put you in touch with the right person at World Vital Records, so that when we are interviewing, you’ll be on our list.
Part time positions at World Vital Records (genealogy company)
Filed under: Genealogy, Provo Labs Companies, Utah Jobs
World Vital Records is starting to advertise for a BYU accounting student with bookkeeping experience to do payroll, A/R, A/P, and and prepare our monthly financial statements. This will be part time, perhaps 20 hours per week.
World Vital Records is also looking for BYU students or others with family history experience who are native speakers of any foreign language. Call the office (377-0588) and ask for Yvette if you are interested in learning more.
We will be adding to our call center staff soon, so if you have recently worked at Ancestry.com’s call center but no longer have work there, and if you speak a foreign language very well, please apply. Again, ask for Yvette or David.
Entry Level SEO/Marketing Position
An entrepreneur running a successful company asked me to recruit someone from my BYU internet marketing classes to work for him. I told him I’d blog about the opportunity. So here it is:
screen-scraper.com is interested in hiring someone for an entry-level
SEO/Marketing position. This would involve working with their main screen-scraper web site, as
well as their ScrapbookFinds meta-search
engine. Starting pay will be $11-15 per hour, with bonuses as progress
is made and goals are achieved. This should be an excellent opportunity
to gain real-world experience! Any interested can email Todd Wilson.
His email address is his first name at screen-scraper.com.
Team Formation Summit for Worldhistory.com
Filed under: Companies to Watch, Entrepreneurship, Events, History, Provo Labs Companies, Recruiting, Utah Entrepreneurship, Utah Events, Utah Jobs
Last year I wrote in Connect magazine that I would be trying a grand experiment in team building. I would be trying an idea I got from The Entrepreneur’s Manual, a very popular book for entrepreneurs published in 1997. I would hold a 2-day retreat with a couple dozen executives to brainstorm, network, plan, and then vote on the Founders Team for Worldhistory.com.
Sometimes I have too many ideas, so I can’t get around to all of them. Sometimes ideas just go away. They stop bothering me. I almost always write every idea down, so that I won’t forget them forever, but they stop getting current brainshare.
But this team formation idea has been popping up its head every month or so. So I’ve decided to go ahead with it. Instead of a 2-day summit, we’re going to try a 1-day retreat to a local cabin. The date will be Friday, October 20th. I’m going to invite 15-20 friends developers, marketers, consultants, strategists, and entrepreneurs to meet for a day (probably from 9 am to 4 pm) to determine the future of Worldhistory.com.
So far, I have invited several individuals who know about the Worldhistory.com mobile subscription business model and love it. 100% of the people invited so far have said they will come.
But since I don’t know everyone (yet), I thought I should also blog about this Summit and invite others to apply to attend it. Even if you aren’t looking for a new job, consider coming. We need advisory board members as well as a group of founders who can make this company happen.
If you are interested in being invited, please contact Pat Sheranian at 373-6565, our Provo Labs office manager, talk with her about your background and interest, and email her your resume. Or, email me your resume if you want. (paul “AT” provolabs.com)
This will be a great networking event, and you’ll meet some fantastic people and hear some very interesting discussions about the future of mobile location-based services, the delivery of text, audio and video content to cell phones and other mobile devices, and see the very beginning of what I hope turns into another Utah business success story.
The first half of the day will be devoted to Corporate Alliance type networking, where you will have a chance to meet every other attendee and connect with them on a personal level. After lunch, which will be provided, we’ll break into teams and do some planning and brainstorming.
Finally, there will be some sharing of the best ideas and plans of the day, and we’ll have a discussion about how to form and fund a new corporation with all the assets that Provo Labs currently owns in the history space (including data, web sites, and software code).
I don’t know if we’ll actually hold a vote on who the Founding Team should be; but if the attendees want to this, we will.
I’m excited about this summit. Read the Connect article about team formation, and get your hands on a copy of the original team formation ideas in The Entrepreneur Manual. You can buy it used on Amazon for as little as $5.74.
I really believe this idea is a big one. I believe that millions of people worldwide will one day subscribe to a mobile history content subscription service, so that whereever they travel in the world they will be able to pull up text, audio, and video clips that describe or explain the history of that location. If we get the right team in place, and can get the right content and design the right interface and market this service through the right carriers (or “off portal” if necessary) I think we can pull this off right here in Utah.
I guess that makes us a Four Domino business model, right Josh?
But if we get the right team together, then we’ll be down to Three.
I also think that “history” is way down the list of the content types that all the biggest players have on their radar, and so it won’t be immediately launched by the larger players. History is kind of like genealogy–it’s not a multi-billion dollar category like travel or finance or real estate–so it’s not at the top of the list for the carriers or internet media companies.
Like I said in Connect, I promise to write an article about this experiment and what we learn from it.
Let me know if you want to come. We can only take a few more people, but if you think you are qualified and have a lot to offer here, please apply, and we’ll let you know.
Help Wanted: World History Blogger Network Technical Manager
Worldhistory.com is looking for a talented developer who can work part-time to help us maintain our current blogger network and launch new blogs as we add new editors.
Experience setting up WordPress blogs and web analytics software is required.
Eventually we hope to have hundreds or thousands of historical bloggers in our network, so we need a developer who can not only set up WordPress blogs on new domains for our new bloggers, but can also improve our efficiency by automation the creation of blogs in the future, the cross-promotion of those blogs, and the tracking and reporting of site traffic and revenue for all of our editors.
If you are interested, please contact Amy Rhoads, at amyrhoads “AT” gmail.com.
Internet Marketer Wanted for Fun Provo-based Educational Software Company
A friend emailed me this job description and said I could blog about it. Someone will have a lot of fun working in this exciting small company:
Company: Big Brainz
Job Title: Entrepreneurial Sales / Marketing / PR Director
Description: ABOUT BIG BRAINZ
Headquartered in Provo, Utah, Big Brainz is pioneering an incredible new generation of educational video gamesUrgent: Affiliate Marketing Manager Wanted
I need to hire an experienced affiliate marketing manager to run the LDSAudio.com program (using Directrack) and to launch one for LDSlibrary.com (probably Directrack also) and to launch and manage a Commission Junction affiliate program for mp3books.com, home of the FranklinCovey audio library, including 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you are interested or know someone who is, please email me at paulballen AT gmail.com.
Blogging Just Landed Her a Job
Carolynn Duncan used an ingenious approach to convince me and Phil that she was the right person for our latest position at Provo Labs. After finding out about the opening from her friend Adam (who works at our online video company 10Speed Media), she started a blog called “Why Provo Labs Wants to Hire Carolyn Duncan” at blogspot.
She instantly won us over with her creativity and courage. She will be helping Phil get in front of dozens of executives at large companies, including Fortune 500 companies, as he takes Provo Labs Consulting (our web 2.0 consultancy and development company) on the road, so we need a smart communicator with a creative streak who can help Phil open doors wherever he goes.
Welcome aboard, Carolynn!
Has anyone else ever landed a job by creating a blog specifically to convince the hiring executives that they were the right person for the job?
With all the press coverage that comes when bloggers get fired for writing something they shouldn’t have written, it’s about time we see some press coverage about people actually getting a job because of their blog.
Largest Employers in Utah County
Here is a list of the largest employers in Utah County. It looks fairly recent.
What Motivates Me To Be Foolish
February 7, 2006 by paulballen · 7 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Competitive Intelligence, High Tech Stocks, Utah JobsNo company likes anyone to break news for them. Companies like to control their own news and get their own press coverage. The blogosphere is upsetting to corporate executives everywhere. Many bloggers have lost their jobs over what they have written. It’s an interesting time.
Against that backdrop, I felt compelled the other day to mention that MyFamily had layoffs and no media (and only 1 blogger) had reported it.
Why did I do that? I have many friends at MyFamily.com, including investors, board members, and executives, as well as many employees that I care deeply about and am close friends with.
I feel a lot of concern and grief for everyone affected by these layoffs. I know how painful it is for everyone, including those who are still employed, but who lost close friends to the RIF.
I’ve been wondering why I blogged about it, when I know it will get me in trouble and make me more unpopular in certain circles.
First, I grew up in an anti-corporate environment, at least I think I did. I grew up thinking business was evil. My father, a world renowned classificationist and engineer (one of a few Utahns ever elected to the National Academy of Engineering), and a faculty member at BYU for 35 years did consulting for some of the largest manufacturers in the country. And I got the sense that he really disliked corporate politics and policies and greed.
And of course I studied the writings of Hugh Nibley, Brigham Young, and others who believed that materialism and greed were grave sins, and that no one should possess that which was above another, that the “earth is full and there is enough and to spare” if people would love and care about one another, we could overcome poverty and much suffering. Ok, so I am a total idealist, even now.
I thought academia was the right career path for me, so in college I started studying political science, then switched to international relations, and then finally Russian. Back then, the Soviet Union was an evil empire, and the very epitome of materialism and top down control of everything. I wanted to be a Sovietologist and study the power of the Politburo. I got my degree in Russian from BYU and then started a Masters program in Library Science.
At that time I caught a vision from BYU President Jeffrey Holland (from his speech, “Towards a School in Zion”) that changed my life. He said all the truth in the world should be gathered and made accessible to everyone. From his powerful words, and from what I knew from working at Folio, my brother’s search engine company, I felt that in the era of computers it would be possible to gather up all knowledge from throughout the world and put it at everyone’s fingertips.
This kind of “information democracy” as my brother Curt would put it, could help level the playing field and lead to more economic equality. At least, that would be the hope.
In 1990 I got started unexpectedly down an entrepreneurial track by co-founding with Dan Taggart a CD ROM publishing company called Infobases. Our mission was to identify all the greatest texts in every field of human knowledge and digitize them and make them available affordably to everyone.
For many years we successfully pursued that vision. Along the way, unfortunately, Infobases had big layoffs almost every year. We had to layoff family members and friends. This is the thing that I most dislike about business. It is so painful to cause someone to lose their job, or rather, to have a company that can’t support all its employees (in our case most likely because of poor, inexperienced management), and so you have to choose who stays and who goes.
By 1996 I realized that I was an entrepreneur for life, so I started reading and studying everything I could about business and best practices. I wanted to understand why some companies succeed and why some fail.
By 1998 Dan and I were running Ancestry.com, a successful internet subscription service. We owned 97% of the company. And we got to cash flow positive in June and July 1998 (with a run rate of around $3 million per year) before raising our first $1.3 million in outside capital from Utah angel investors.
So we were on top of the world. We were running a dot com, we owned almost all of it, it was profitable and growing incredibly fast. And then we entered the world of venture capital, hyper growth, and the internet bubble.
We were ill prepared for what would happen over the next few years as the board of directors changed and management changed and our stake in the company went from large to very small.
Fast forward a few years and the company we founded (now called MyFamily.com) is an internet success story. The company is the leading genealogy company in the world, I believe, and is providing vast genealogical data to users around the world, particularly in the US, Canada and the UK.
The new CEO is outstanding. The management team is extremely talented, and the company has a bright future.
But then these layoffs happen, which caught so many people off guard.
So why would I blog about this company news when I know people will be upset with me for doing so? Why would I be so foolish?
First, I wanted to invite some of the laid off employees to apply for world at Provo Labs. We’ve already started getting resumes.
And I also want to let all the laid off employees anywhere know about some great online resources for job seekers. LinkedIn.com is an essential tool for business networking today. Use it and get everyone you know using it. SimplyHired.com is a great way to find jobs. I searched the 4.4 million job listings for internet jobs in Utah County and found 194. I also encourage everyone to start attending DevUtah.com Geek Dinners, Provo Labs Entrepreneur Breakfasts, Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfasts, UVEF, and other local networking events where you are most likely to find companies that are hiring.
Second, I feel passionate about free information flow in business. Remember the whole information democracy thing?
Some corporate PR departments don’t really tell anyone what is going on. And some constantly spin out good news, regardless of what is really going on.
MyFamily is an example of a company that doesn’t say very much about what is happening. There are just a few recent press releases.
On the other extreme was Infospace during 1998-2000. Infospace had one of the most effective PR machines in history. While their stock price soared during the dot com bubble they release a positive release virtually every week announcing either a significant partnership or new customer, or a milestone that they had achieved.
Perhaps a lot of that was fluff. So a $30 billion company sunk quickly after the bubble burst to a more modest billion or half-billion valuation.
I think companies should be open and communicate often with their constituencies, both good news and bad.
I have blogged previously that every CEO should have a blog.
I know that there might be legal complications with this idea, but there are also problems with companies not communicating. Sooner or later there will be court cases on CEOs and company blogs. (Let me know if this is already happening.)
The government requires publicly traded companies to file quarterly and annual reports with the SEC. The goal here is at least enough transparency for investors to properly value a company.
If there is more transparency and more equal access to information, there seems to be less of a chance for abuse, manipulation, and greed to create winners and losers.
But privately held companies are not required to file SEC reports. And they aren’t required to issue press releases or to disclose anything to anyone. (Although I’m sure investors and perhaps employees have some information rights–I just don’t much about this.)
Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest investor, seems to spend most of his time reading annual reports looking for value companies to own or invest in. According to Motley Fool, all investors should “[read] a company’s annual report and SEC filings, [listen] to a conference call, [attend] a management presentation” and “[visit] the company.” But Motley Fool also claims that since everyone has access to this information, no one gets a comparative advantage from doing these basic things.
(I disagree. I bet that more that more than 90% of investors don’t do any of the these things: read SEC filings and annual reports, etc. I think most investors rely on tips from friends and don’t take the time to do any homework.)
But Warren Buffett also believes in what Philip Fisher (his other mentor) called “scuttlebutt” in his classic 1958 book, “Common Stock and Uncommon Profits.”
The business “grapevine” is a remarkable thing. It is amazing what an accurate picture of the relative points of strength and weakness of each company in an industry can be obtained from a representative cross-section of the opinions of those who in one way or another are concerned with any particular company. Most people, particularly if they feel sure there is no danger of their being quoted, like to talk about the field of work in which they are engaged and will talk rather freely about their competitors. Go to five companies in an industry, ask each of them intelligent questions about the points of strength and weakness of the other four, and nine times out of ten a surprisingly detailed and accurate picture of all five will emerge.
It is equally astonishing how much can be learned from both vendors and customers about the real nature of the people with whom they deal. Research scientists in universities, in government, and in competitive companies are another fertile source of worthwhile data. So are executives of trade associations.
So to gain an advantage over other investors, Fisher said you should create your own scuttlebutt network.
But in my utopian/idealist worldview, scuttlebutt networks should also be as open and transparent as possible.
If the goal is to get rich, then individuals will obviously not share scuttlebutt with others. But if the goal is information democracy leading to more economic equality, then people will freely share it.
So what enters the picture in the 21st century to create a more open business grapevine? Open source programmers, open content projects, bloggers, and podcasters, who are often motivated more by the ideals of information democracy than they are of getting personally rich or famous.
A lot of people do a lot of things for the good of others because they love doing it, it makes them feel good, and they love the feedback and thanks.
After realizing from the MyFamily layoff scuttlebutt that many public and private companies don’t really tell the outside world what is going on, Provo Labs has decided to launch an SEC search engine (kind of like what 10kwizards did a few years ago) and combine it with an open scuttlebutt network of bloggers for thousands of companies.
We do want to avoid the stock market manipulation and hype that become common with Raging Bull, Silicon Investor, and Yahoo’s stock message boards during the bubble.
We hope to find responsible journalist types who can adopt a company and find and report information on a daily basis that will help the outside community (employees, investors, partners, etc) learn the truth, both good and bad, about what is going on inside each company.
I have been in meetings with people who have detailed knowledge about the operations of a company and who are trying to buy stock from shareholders who don’t have any knowledge about what is going on inside the company. (I’m not talking about MyFamily.com here!)
Fortunately, other people in the meeting reminded everyone of the ethical need to communicate openly with the other shareholders before purchasing their shares.
Even with information transparency, there will always be buyers and sellers of stock for all kinds of reasons, business and personal.
So that is what motivates me to be foolish, and to potentially upset friends and stir the pot. This whole experience has led me to form a new company that will try to promote information democracy in the world of business (both public and private).
We bought the domain www.unofficialblogs.com yesterday and might use that to launch our scuttlebutt network.
Your ideas and feedback, as always, are welcome.
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