Gym time

Yesterday I mentioned that I use a personal trainer as a mechanism to stop frittering away time.  If I have to be at the gym at a certain time then I have have the work done beforehand.  Easy logic.

Of course the real reason that getting to the gym is important is my baseline health; diet and exercise are the keys to feeling better and living longer.  There's no one in the Western world who doesn't know this; everyone I know wants to get to the gym more often but they're too busy at work to do so.  The fact that I've built a working life that allows me to break that cycle and exercise almost every day of the working week (during the day when there are no crowds) creates a virtuous circle.  

Things like 'gym time' figure highly in most people's fantasies about self-employment and when people tell me that I'm looking well it acts as positive reinforcement of my decision to work for myself.

Parkinson's Law

From time to time I find myself in a rut.  I sit at my desk taking hours to complete tasks that I can normally knock over in minutes.  This brings to mind Parkinson's Law; that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

My temporary inability to complete simple tasks means that I'm denying myself one of the supposed benefits of self-employment: that any time not spent working is your own.

My solution is to use my diary to impose time constraints on my world; with other tasks to attend to I'm forced to complete my work in a shorter period.  The inverted corollary to Parkinson's Law is if you want something done, give it to a busy person to do.

When I started my first company in the early 90's I immediately went back to university for a degree in English and Australian Literature.  Not only did I get the degree but, far from compromising my new business, the fact that I was busy had a positive effect on my clients.  There's a danger in letting a client know that you have a 100% open diary.  It flags that you're either brand new (therefore untried) or, worse still, failing.  I never had to tell my clients that the reason I couldn't do that face-to-face meeting on Tuesday afternoon was because it clashed with a lecture on Shakespearian Tragedy.  All I had to say was that I had a clash.  If it was too important to miss then, of course, study came second.

Nowadays I volunteer at a local charity and use a personal trainer to achieve the same thing.

Gaining momentum

I am waiting for an email from a client.

Last Monday he said he'd get something to me by the end of the week.  I've been waiting eleven days.  It's an important email to confirm dates for an upcoming project.  Until I receive it I can't book flights or hotels or tie down other appointments.  I can't even let my wife know if I'll be in the country for our anniversary.  I tried emailing him about a marginally related topic hoping that would act as a reminder but he seems to ignore that email as well.  I'm left with no choice but to wait.

Finally the email arrives with most of the details that I require but also asking a couple of simple but necessary questions to finalise part of the project.  It will take me no more than five minutes to answer the questions and, pending an equally rapid response from him, we can everything locked up in an hour.

But part of me wants to wait; ignore the email until Monday morning and deal with it then.  Part of me wants to make him wait.  For making me wait.

This is insane.  I know this is insane.  I'm thinking like an artless divorcee trying to reconnect with the rules of modern dating.  Do I call?  Do I wait for him to call?  If I call twice before he calls me once is that friendly or desperate?  What if he's waiting for me to call?  What if something's happened and he can't call?

Really this is just my ego talking; I'm not a person who likes to be kept waiting and sometimes I find it hard to conceal my displeasure.  What my ego wants to do is send a message.

And suddenly I'm considering not responding immediately on a matter where timing really counts.  Suddenly I'm willing to give up precious momentum in order to feel better about a perceived slight.  Except I'm not seriously considering doing anything of the sort.  I'm certainly not willing to do anything that will stall the momentum behind the project.  I'll reply immediately and have the whole thing wrapped up by close of business today.

Momentum is precious.  I do everything possible to increase a project's momentum and shortening response times is a big part of that  If I respond quickly he's more likely to do the same.

It's not desperation, it's professionalism.

You're in a market

The best self-employed people that I know have an acute awareness that they operate in a more or less open market.

Contrast this with being an employee where you're essentially operating in a monopoly situation.   If you're the company bookkeeper or the sales representative for the South-West then no one in the world is allowed to do the company books or call on clients in that region except you.

This is such an obvious situation that it goes totally unnoticed until you're self-employed.  The client might promise you all the bookkeeping work or the entire South-Western territory, but only a fool would see this as a permanent arrangement.  Even contracts come up for review from time to time.  Face the fact that you're in a market and accept that markets are devoid of fairness; if the client's daughter-in-law suddenly fancies herself as a bookkeeper then you've most likely lost a client.

In an open market you're really only as good as your brand and when you're self-employed then you are that brand.  This is a shift in thinking if you're used to working for others.

For example, you need to accept that there's no such thing as seniority, only longevity.  Longevity just means that you've been around a while and if you and I are competing for a client then I'll turn your 'longevity' into a negative: you're not hungry for the work, you're complacent and take the client for granted, you're not up to speed on the latest industry trends.

In other words, 'longevity' is just another brand attribute like cheaper, newer, closer, more convenient, smaller, better attention to detail and so on.  

Nb. If when reading this you read the word 'brand' and thought 'logo' then I'd strongly suggest visiting amazon.com and tracking down a few 'Marketing for Beginnners' books.

To succeed in your market you need to understand what your personal brand is all about and you need to nurture it.

In Princeton

Flew to the US on Thursday for a day of meetings with clients on Friday. I have more meetings with other clients early next week before flying back to London on Tuesday night. Because the meetings on this trip are really ‘prospecting’ rather than delivery, and because they’re all with different clients, there’s no one for me to on-charge my accommodation expenses. This puts me on the horns of a freelancer’s dilemma: where do I stay for the weekend?

I’m trying to build a client base in the North America without having to relocate here, so I’m always minimising the perception that I’m not US-based. There are so many suppliers to my industry that are located here that, to many Americans, using a foreign supplier is just a whole lot of extra hassle.

Never mind that my consulting offering is unique or that these meetings have all been driven by pre-sales of my book; I never forget that the easiest way for a company to rationalise not using me is that I live a transatlantic flight away. I’m also mindful of the fact that I am a solo operator servicing huge companies and that most of their other suppliers are commensurately huge.

So whenever I’m working in the US, I actively try to minimise the perception that I’m a one-man-band working out of England. I’ll never lie about either fact but there’s no point in rubbing anyone’s nose in this, is there?

Hotel choice presents a specific challenge. I can’t put myself in a situation where that most innocuous of corporate conversation-starters, “Where are you staying?” is a something I’m dreading. Being UK-based I can’t go home for the weekend but if the client finds out that I’m booked into the local Howard Johnson’s then maybe its yet another reminder that I’m not McKinsey & Co.

In the past I’ve gone ahead and staying at the cheapest place available yet it always turns out to be false economy. Cheap means noisy. It means less security so I’m always worried about my laptop (or carrying with me everywhere). It means no Internet or gym. Cheap means that I get no work done over a weekend in a strange city where I don’t really want to be. Cheap means that I get to the end of my stay feeling like Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

In other words, staying in a cheap hotel means that I’ll get to Monday wishing that I wasn’t self-employed.

My rule of thumb is that I should have essentially the same level of physical comfort and convenience as I have at home – no more, no less.

I opted for the Marriott that I know the client uses for off-site meetings.

Broaden your client base

Perhaps the biggest mistake that any newly self-employed person can make is to get tied to one or two clients only.

The danger is most acute if you've been moved sideways off the payroll and then rehired to do a version of your old job as a 'consultant'.  Leaving aside the tax issues (ie are you really self-employed?), the danger to the long-term viability of your new business venture is insidious.

At the beginning it all feels great: you're doing a job you know how to do, maybe even working with the same co-workers and customers as before.  You're probably feeling  better off financially as you're billing more in fees than you were taking home in salary.  But because you're an ex-employee working (hard) in such a familiar environment, it can be easy to forget that the single most important aspect of successful self-employment is broadening your client base.

You can't ever afford to forget that fundamental, usually unspoken, change in your status: to sever all ties with you, all the client (aka 'your ex-employer') needs to do is to stop returning your calls.

Much is written about marketing and self-promotion and so on but let's cut to the chase: your goal must be to cultivate as many viable clients as you can.  It's only with a range of income streams that you can start to feel any sense of that stability that is a necessary precursor to business success.

About me

I am a 40 year-old Australian, married and living in London since 2005.  I am one of the two founders (and 50% owner) of Dramatic Change (www.dramaticchange.com), a sales/marketing training consultancy that works solely with the prescription pharmaceutical industry.  Its a pretty  specialised field and so we work with clients right around the world.

My business partner, who lives in Wellington, New Zealand, and I founded the company in 1998.  Before that we had run another company that specialised in interpersonal skills for the Australian corporate conference and events market.

Before that (and we're talking 1991 now) I worked in the marketing departments of the Australian subsidiaries of Unilever and Coke; two monolithic mulitnational FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) companies.  Before that I did a Bachelor of Business, majoring in marketing and advertising, at the University of Technology, Sydney (aka UTS).

So I've been self-employed, successfully, for about 17 years.  I've paid the bills, traveled the globe, consulted on projects worth hundreds of millions and had a hell of a lot of fun.  I still do.  And over that time I've also had employees and really cool office spaces and overheads and all the other features of a 20th Century Business. 

Then I reverted to the ultimate low-overhead business model: me, a spare room, a laptop and a BlackBerry.

It is an active choice and I wouldn't have it any other way.