Several years ago when I telecommuted full time for Unifocus, I had an office in their Dallas offices and I’d go there maybe one week per month. I wanted it to feel like home when I was there - I hate naked offices - so I put in a couple of my chess sets, vacation souveniers, and a few framed photos.
Another employee said to me, “It’s so vain that you’ve got pictures of yourself in your office.” I was totally shocked - I’d never thought about it that way. I wanted my face in there because I didn’t want it to feel generic or impersonal. If somebody walked in when I wasn’t around, I wanted the office to feel like me.
Fast forward to 2008, and I’ve got business cards with my picture on ‘em. How vain is that, right?
I don’t know about you, but I’m horrendously bad with names. I mean, really bad. I do the tricks of repeating names back when I meet people, but with the number of people I meet, it’s more than my tiny brain can handle. Faces, on the other hand, I can remember. So I thought, why shouldn’t business cards include faces?
I got portraits done by the awesome Houston photographer Tracy Manford, and I ordered business cards from Moo that have my picture on the back. Now, when I hand ‘em out at the PASS summit next month, people won’t have to wonder which card went with the crazy guy that they never want to talk to again. They can look at my picture and know right away, “This is the card I wanted to throw out!”
Moo business cards aren’t cheap. The mini-cards cost $20 for 100 cards, and the full-size business cards are more than that. The results are spectacular, though, and definitely worth it: check out this Flickr group of Moo mini cards.
If you’re a DBA attending the PASS conference this year in Seattle, and you don’t want to fork out that much money for cards, head over to OfficeMax. They’re running a 50% off sale right now, so 500 full-color cards (although not two-sided) end up around $30-$50. That’s a cheap way to promote your blog or web site, especially when your official company card doesn’t have exactly the information you want to convey. Just get cards for this one event only and consider it a throwaway.
I’m really big on building a personal brand. I plan on being in this industry for the rest of my life, and I look at the portraits and the business cards as part of an investment in myself. If you want a better job in database administration, this is how you get it. When you meet people at PASS, they’re the kinds of people who will need to hire other DBAs. You’re going to meet people at huge companies, people starting up cool businesses, people who write books, people who write software, all kinds of cool folks who hire people like you to do cool jobs. If you want to make their short list, you have to make a good impression, and this is part of doing it.
If you want to do the picture-on-a-business-card thing, spend a little extra to have a really good photographer like Tracy Manford, because it’ll make all the difference. If you use family snapshots, vacation pictures, or K-Mart photo booth pictures, people will know it when you hand your business card over, and instead of looking cool, it’ll look cheap. That’s even worse than handing out a business card without photos!
