Gig Economy News This Week

Do you need more support for your business? Do you wish you could have more productive meetings? Or do you just need some inspiration? Thankfully this week’s gig economy news has answers for all these questions – and a blurb about how Whole Foods got started.

To get people to support your business, conquer their fears.

Most people are risk adverse, making it that much more difficult to convince them to support a new business or change effort. Inc. lists the following four challenges as the most common:
1. Fear of failure.
2. Fear of the new.
3. Fear of change that comes with new business or technology.
4. Confusion: not being able to understand a new concept.

To overcome these fears, you will need to do the following:
1. Accentuate the payoff.
2. Express your idea in their own language, terms.
3. Address the risks.
4. Be concrete and clear.
5. Emphasize the prestige they’ll receive from being an early adopter.

Next time you feel like brainstorming in a meeting, do this instead.

Ever feel like loud mouths with mediocre ideas sabotage meetings that could have been productive otherwise? Thankfully, there are ways you can run a meeting so that dominant personalities don’t end up controlling the atmosphere.

Leigh Thompson and Loran Nordgren, management professors at the Kellogg School, told Fast Company that they suggest meeting participants brainwrite rather than brainstorm. The main idea is that people should think of ideas before they discuss them. They recommend that people write down ideas either before or at the beginning of the meeting.

To make voting on the ideas more democratic, they suggest everyone puts their ideas on the wall, without their name attached. Then, everyone can vote on the ideas one-by-one. Useful advice, right?

Great quotes about persistence to help you keep going.

Need some inspiration? Hopefully some of these quotes should give you the boost of support you need to start your week.

Take these wonderful pearls of wisdom from Maya Angelou:
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

Or this pithy quote from Winston Churchill:
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Here are other quotes about persistence from Entrepreneur.

When we were small: Whole Foods

The Washington Post recently interviewed one of the founders of national food chain Whole Foods about the early days of the company. Thirty-six years ago, it began as a two-level store in Austin, Texas, and two of the founders lived in the third floor upstairs. Now, the store has over 400 locations, 80,000 employees, and annual sales exceeding $12 billion.

Granted, the founders were ambitious and expanded quickly, including an early merger. But still, you may find it heartwarming to learn that it took years for them to get a positive cash flow, and 14 years (when they became public) until they felt like they had enough money, according to John Mackey, one of the four founders.