Category: Small Business and Freelance

Riding the diversity tsunami – why a diverse workforce make business sense.

It’s always nice to feel you’re on the side of the angels.

It felt pretty good to hear that we were at the beginnings of a “diversity tsunami” at yesterday’s launch of the CIPR‘s report into diversity in the PR industry. If this piece on the public’s response to the UK advertising landscape is to be believed it may even be true – after all, something’s got to change:

almost two-thirds of people in the UK feel the ad industry does not represent them, and almost two-fifths say advertising characters and messages fail to reflect British society as a whole…. one in six say they are prepared to avoid buying products from companies that fail to take diversity seriously.

It seems, that the public are ahead of the PR and marketing industries on this one.

The CIPR report is sobering reading, highlighting a slow rate of progress in closing the gender pay-gap, welcoming employees with disabilities and – my personal bugbear – focussing so much on the “young and dynamic” that it forgets the insight that experienced (and dynamic) older professionals offer.

Looking for a magic bullet

Many of the speakers yesterday repeated the mantra that “there is no magic bullet” for resolving the unconscious biases which dog recruitment – not just in PR but pretty much everywhere. But there were some great case studies showing how diversity helps business.  I liked the story of the owner of a small PR agency who grew her business by recruiting an ethnically diverse team – confessing with admirable honesty that it was mainly because of the financial support Creative Access offered her to do so. She soon found that her small business was out-competing larger agencies, winning international contracts because they had staff members who could – literally – speak their clients’ language.

My example – told here before – of the agency which couldn’t find a way to talk to an audience of over-50s fits that narrative exactly.  Putting it bluntly, if you don’t understand the UK’s ageing population and you don’t know how to talk to older people, you can’t sell them stuff (and like it or not, we’re the bit of the population that’s still got a disposable income…) Having a workforce that looks like the people it’s trying to communicate with – in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and the representation of people with disabilities – isn’t just a nice thing to do, it makes sound commercial sense.

When the audience takes the lead

There was agreement yesterday that the greatest chance for achieving change will come from pressure on companies from their supply chains; which is why that one in six who might change their purchasing behaviour if companies don’t take diversity seriously are so important.

Only two flies in the ointment of the Marketing Week report.  The first is this:

a third of marketers polled in separate research by Marketing Week … believe that a lack of multiculturalism in advertising has no impact on what people buy

As an industry we need to catch up with our customers.

The second is the welcome it gives to the John Lewis ad as an example of older people in advertising.  Readers will know how I feel about this Christmas campaign.  I much prefer the Aldi’s spoof where, instead of a set of binoculars, the man on the moon receives a companion, delivered by balloon to brighten his Christmas.  (The gender politics of describing her as a “special buy” might be slightly problematic, I suppose, but I choose to believe that she willingly strapped herself to the chair – and I wish them both a happy Christmas)

To MOOC or not to MOOC? What are the training options for the self-employed?

online learning

One of the things that’s hard about being self-employed is staying up to date. Doing the CPD to make sure you’re still relevant in a changing market can be prohibitively expensive when you don’t have an employer to pick up the tab.

I’m a member of a professional association – the CIPR – which offers CPD as part of membership. I’ve done a lot of their free training – sat in front of the webinars, read the pdfs.  They’re pretty good, as far as they go – which tends to be just up to the point where they’ve thoroughly covered the basics and someone with significant practical experience of a subject wants to leap off into new thinking.

The advanced stuff is there – for a price.  The CIPR offers members a discount on their training packages.  If you’re freelancing, paying what seems to be the standard members’ charge of £420 inc VAT for a workshop (not to mention the loss of fee-income for a day) can feel daunting.

Beyond the confines of your own membership association, costs get very steep very quickly.  Want to improve your facilitation skills to boost your management credentials?  A quick google search reveals a two-day training course which costs £880 + VAT. Interested in opening new doors by getting a Masters?  I found one that I’d love to do: £5,225 per year for two years. (In case you were wondering, there are no student loans for post-graduate degrees for students over 30. Oh, and your training is not necessarily tax-deductible).

I don’t doubt that the training on offer in all of those courses is terrific or that it would be a great investment in my career.  I don’t think trainers should give the self-employed training for free out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s just very difficult to find those kinds of sums up-front, out of a freelancer’s income, especially when ROI is hard to quantify and the quality of what you’re buying can’t be assessed until you’re in the room and it’s too late to back out. I would guess that everyone reading this has at one time or another sat through poorly designed, badly delivered training which felt irrelevant to their working life. That’s annoying if it’s taken time out of the day job. It’s heart-breaking if it also cost you, personally, a sizeable chunk of next month’s mortgage. Often it feels like too big a risk to take.

The cheapskate approach to training?

High quality new ideas – preferably free – is what I crave.  So I’m giving thanks to the creators of PR Stack, a crowd-sourced directory of PR tools which looks fantastically useful.  Massive open online courses – MOOCs to their friends – also seem like a possible, cost-effective alternative to the expensive training course.  I’ve just started one being offered by FutureLearn.  I’m doing it as much because I’m curious to see how the experience measures up as in the hope of learning something new.  I’ll post again when the course is over. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from fellow freelancers who’ve cracked the training conundrum: how do you do it?

Could your job be done by a robot?

march of the makers
March of the Makers

If I ever put it together, the unexpurgated version of my CV  would include 28 jobs, shared between permanent employers and freelance clients. It would cover sectors from government to relationship therapy, television to accountancy. So I felt smugly ahead of the curve when I read about the futurologist advising schools that they need to prepare pupils for a world in which they may be working until they’re 100 and will need skills to build a portfolio career.

But look at the kinds of careers he has in mind:

“You might be driving Uber part of the day, renting out your spare bedroom on Airbnb a little bit, renting out space in your closet as storage for Amazon, doing delivery for Amazon or housing the drone that does delivery for Amazon.

“There are all these sort of new sharing economy models coming through,” he said. “We need to start thinking about these things, we need to start thinking about the kinds of skills we’ll need to help people stay employable.

You’ll have noticed that none of these things are careers, in the old-fashioned sense:

  an occupation or profession, especially one requiring special training, followed as one’s lifework

They’re just ways to pay for food – and he’s assuming that we will all have houses with rooms to let, cars to use for our part-time parcel delivery/cab driving and are willing to support Amazon as it takes over the world.

So, could your job be done by a robot?

Want a life that’s more than being a part-time warehouseman for Jeff Bezos? Might be worth thinking about the kinds of jobs that can’t be done by machines. Our futurologist is gloomy on this one:

between 30% and 80% of all the jobs that exist currently will disappear in the next 10 to 20 years, as businesses increasingly invest in automation… On the one hand, we’ll be living longer. On the other hand, we’re not sure how people are going to earn the money to buy the goods and services that will largely be produced by smart software and robots,”

If this is a guide there aren’t many jobs safe from the advance of automation. Follow the link and see what your future holds: I came back with a 17.5% chance of seeing my livelihood taken over by a machine – odds I think I can live with.  If you need more security than that, it may be time to re-train as a mental health social worker (0.3% chance), or scramble up the corporate ladder while it’s still there and become a Chief Executive (1.5% chance).  Who (or what) you will be Chief Executive of, though, is open to debate.

The joy of making yourself surplus to requirements

butterflies_1200pxWhat an unexpectedly brilliant start to the day.

A 10am meeting with Genny, the social entrepreneur I’ve been mentoring via UnLtd since earlier this year.  And it looks like being the last one we’ll need – although we’ll get together for a drink and a catch up around Christmas to make sure everything’s still on track.  She’s now got a business plan, a real idea of who her customers are, and an understanding of what they need from her.  She knows what she’s offering and she’s costed what it will take to deliver it.  And she’s got enough new customers to be contemplating possibly taking on staff in the near-ish future.

This is of course not all my doing – although she is gratifyingly eager to give me the credit.  She’s done all the hard work and all the difficult thinking .  What I did was provide an objective  point of view and space for her to talk about what she wants to do.    And it feels absolutely brilliant that she’s got so far that she really doesn’t need me any more.

What do you do when you’re stuck “off assignment”?

It's a tough market out there
It’s a tough market out there

Over the past couple of weeks a rather wonderful discussion thread has been unfurling at LinkedIn (an unexpected sentence I never thought I’d write).

The members of the Interim Managers Group  have been discussing what they do when they’re out of work – stuck “off assignment” .

This is heartening, not just because of the advice they’re sharing (of which more later), but  for the  simple fact that they are publicly acknowledging that even the most experienced interim has periods out of work when no matter how good you are, how expert, how well connected, you still can’t get hired for love nor money.

People rarely feel comfortable owning up to the fact that they’re not as successful/busy/in demand/well-remunerated as they’d like to be.  There’s lots of success shared over the networks of LinkedIn, but very few accounts of troughs to go with the peaks.  Having just finished a period “off assignment” myself, I was particularly cheered by this thread. People tend not to talk about this side of consultancy so it’s perfectly possible to believe that you are the only person who doesn’t move seamlessly from one well-paid assignment to the next. But hey, waddya know, everyone’s in the same boat.  Lots of people – experienced, well-qualified, massively employable people – sometime endure hair-raisingly long gaps between assignments.

Advice from the horse’s mouth

It’s the notion of a shared experience rather than any one piece of practical advice which will be the most help to me next time I’m caught in between jobs. But here’s a digest of practical suggestions for what to do if you’re temporarily without billable work, with thanks to the massed ranks of LinkedIn’s interim managers:

  • Maintain a structure to your day, your week, your month. Set some goals to achieve, work-related or not, and work towards them.
  • Keep your networking fresh, especially during the time you’re in an assignment otherwise your network may see you making contact only when you’re looking for work.
  • Create a business plan every year which will ensure the business is sustainable. Plan in time for personal development and marketing activity.
  • Go to as many industry events as you can to keep your network and industry knowledge up to date.
  • Work on your Linked In profile:
    1- Look at other profiles and see how yours can be improved
    2- Participate in discussions
    3 -Look at your home page every day – use CTRL-F to search for       relevant postings.
  • Email your ISP contacts every 6-8 weeks to remind them you are still looking.
  • Keep the faith – you will find work again.

And here are some tips from a different source on how to stay positive while you’re looking.

The benefits of thinking small

My eye was caught by the pull-quote on a piece in today’s Observer about why so many government IT projects end in digital disaster.

The key is to employ computing firms that think £100,000 is a lot of money and are used to delivering on time.

The writer pinpoints the problems that come when non-techy civil servants are responsible for the procurement of complex government IT projects.  Too often he argues, they opt for the safe choice and bring in the large, established firms who have managed – and failed to deliver – big projects in the past.

What you see is not necessarily what you’ll get

That’s not just a problem for IT contracts – nor is it only an issue in the civil service.  As the project lead on any complicated, big budget contract the safest thing to do, the way to protect yourself if things go wrong,  is hire a recognised name.  As the old saying goes – “no-one ever got fired for hiring IBM“.  But in my experience not only can big companies take a generic,  one size fits all approach to project delivery , they also have a tendency to wheel out the big guns at pitch time, dazzling clients with the lustre of their track record and the expensive cut of their suits, and hand the actual work to an altogether scruffier junior colleague.

The place to be – if you’re a client – is with a company which REALLY values your business, because you represent a significant chunk of their annual income. They won’t palm you off with the newly qualified trainee, they’ll make sure you get the personal attention of the MD.  They’ll know their reputation relies on how well they do, because your project is going to feature in their portfolio in future.  They’ll make sure they hit the deadlines and stick to the budget. And because they probably don’t have expensive overheads (or buy handmade suits), they won’t charge you an arm and a leg every day for the pleasure of their company.

Too small to invest in the future?

I ran a training day this week for a small charity which is, warily, thinking about dipping its toes into PR and marketing for the first time.

It quickly became clear that even the simple ideas we were coming up with were beyond their limited resources and the event became an impromptu staff meeting as they looked at ways of restructuring teams to free some time to allow people to do more communications.

Now, this is all very gratifying for me – they  liked what I was suggesting and could see the value it offered.  But it raised some uncomfortable issues, too.

Where do resources go – future investment or current staff?

Like many charities they run largely on volunteer and part-time labour.  To get additional things done they’re going to have to take work away from some staff and give it to other, already over-loaded colleagues.  Or they’re going to have to stop doing some things completely.  Or they’re going to have to find a partner organisation with  resources they can share.  Or they’re going to bring in a new member of staff from outside to do the work.  To get someone who’s worth having they’re going to have to pay – not big bucks, but something.  How does the CEO explain to volunteers, some of whom have stuck loyally to their task for years, that there’s no money to pay them, but there is enough to hire someone else?

The answer is that without investment in communications the organisation’s membership won’t grow, its income will stay fixed and  there’ll never be  enough money.  But that’s easy for me to say. I’m not the one doing a full day’s work just for the love of it.

Where to go for more advice on funding?

I had a quick squint at the websites for ACEVO and NCVO – two of the biggest support/membership organisations for the third sector –  looking for advice on sharing services, diversifying income streams, or just managing staff through financial hard times.  I may just have missed it in my haste, but there’s less around than I’d expected (though the advice I listed here almost two years ago is still valid).  NCVO’s Sustainable Funding Project looked helpful for small voluntary organisations looking to widen their funding base – linked here in case it’s of use to anyone.  Other suggestions gratefully received!

The joy of pitching – 10 ways to get the job

I love pitches.  I like doing the pitching, and I like being pitched to.  I like getting a new brief, working out the idea that unlocks the puzzle and thinking about how to deliver it.  I like the teamwork that goes into putting a proposal together.  I like the nerves before the start and the blissed-out half  hour when it’s over.  And when I’m on the client’s side, I like seeing the different answers people offer to the same question.

I spent a day being pitched to by PR agencies yesterday.  It was, as always, fascinating and made me think about the basic stuff everyone should remember before they fire up the PowerPoint and go:

1. Answer the brief you’ve been given – not the one you’d like to have been given.  But…

2. Think outside the brief.  What is the client looking for beyond what’s actually in the tender document?  Longevity? New relationships? Skills transfers from your team to theirs? Can you see the thing they need that they don’t even know they want yet? Tell them about it.

3. Be surprising.  Don’t put in the first thing you think of, that’s likely to be the dullest answer – and the one everyone else comes up with.  Use the flash of inspiration that comes next, when your brain’s had time to mull over the problem for  a while.  That’s the answer that’s authentically yours, the one no-one else will think of.

4.  Be yourself.  You’re going to be working closely with your new clients, they need to be comfortable that you’re going to get on.

5. Get as much information as you can about the client and their industry before you start. ALWAYS go to the Q&A session if there’s one on offer – it’s not only polite, it also might offer you the vital clue you need to tackle the brief.  And you need to know what your competitors know, too.

6. Don’t expect your audience to be mind-readers.  You might think it’s obvious that you’ll cover the nuts and bolts of the job, but if you don’t say you will your clients might think you can’t be bothered with the basics.

7. Show you’ve thought about the audience – being able to build and manage new channels or produce celebrities at the drop of a hat is only impressive if they’re the right channels – and celebrities – to reach the audience the client wants to talk to.  This isn’t an opportunity to show off everything you know, it’s a chance to show how cleverly you can match your expertise to your potential client’s needs.

8. Show you’ve thought about the audience in the room, too.  As the client, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re watching four or five PowerPoint presentations in a row.  Mix up how you present – use props, good visuals, video, audio – one of the best presentations I’ve seen (not from yesterday’s crop) included filmed vox pops with the target audience to show that the agency knew who they needed to talk to and understood the issues.  Be entertaining, be conversational, be enthusiastic, look people in the eye, SMILE.  (Oh, and if you’re going to use PowerPoint, check your spelling and find someone who knows how to use apostrophes to give it the once over.)

9.  Think on your feet.  The client’s questions at the end inevitably bring up issues you haven’t thought of – else you’d have put them in the presentation and they wouldn’t ask the question.  Working out an answer as you speak, asking them questions to clarify what they mean  and picking up the clues they give out are just as important as hitting on the “right” answer.  Your job is to prove that you’re quick on the uptake and flexible enough to cope with new ideas.

10.  Don’t forget about the numbers – budget breakdowns, evaluation methods, targets.  They may be broad, and you might have to qualify them later, but they’ll help the client understand that you care about being business-like as well as being creative.

And that’s all there is to it.

They were a good bunch yesterday.  Now, I need to stop prevaricating and work out who I’m going to recommend gets the job…

Coping when consultants come a-calling

Or:  I am a consultant.  You are meddling in my job.  He/she/they are  exploiting the boss’s gullibility…

Odd experience of being on both ends of the consultant/consultee equation recently, with unsettling results.

First the background.  I’m providing communications support for a big  change programme in a company which has brought in one of the big 4 consulting firms to deliver the technical stuff.  As part of their standard pack the firm offers support with comms, so I had a meeting the other day with a consultant who has theoretically been brought in to do  work I was brought in to deliver.

Starting the meeting with an open mind, I found my hackles rising when she started by telling me what a comms strategy is and how to plan one.  Every time she suggested things I’d already done my jaw clenched a little harder.  Eventually we agreed, amicably,  that  my specialism was comms – and I probably had ten years’ more experience in the field than she did; hers was programme planning – and dashboards bring me out in a rash,  so we’d split the job along those lines and get on with it.  Which we have, perfectly happily ever since.

Scoot on a couple of days.  I am also providing comms planning support for another client who wants to re-focus the work being done in the department she’s just been brought in to lead.  We had a team meeting last week.  Knowing that I can be  – ahem – forceful when I’ve got the bit between my teeth, I really tried to stress how much I understood their problems and recognised the great work they were doing against the odds before getting into the  “what might we need to do to improve matters?” stuff.  Heard yesterday from my client that they just felt undermined by the criticism they felt I doled out.

Now, I feel genuinely bad about that – even though I know the team isn’t firing on all cylinders, and so do they – so something has to change.  It’s never nice to feel that you’ve made someone’s working day worse.  But it’s a good reminder of a lesson I’ve been learning since the beginning of my career – it never does to take things personally.   

The consultant talking to me should have started by asking where we were on the job before she leapt in with the assumption that nothing was happening – but she wasn’t criticising me personally, she just didn’t know what I’d done.  It was pointless getting cross about it.  The team I met last week evidently didn’t hear any of the good stuff about themselves, they just took away a sense that it’s not good enough.  There’s a lesson there for me about framing what I’m saying, but equally it’s worth remembering that however hard you try, some people will only hear criticism, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

2011: 5 lessons from a hard year in business

It’s hardly the Office of National Statistics’ survey of the national accounts, but I’ve been spending the last semi-working day of the year looking at some figures for my business which showed:

1.  I’ve worked more days – at a slightly lower day rate – for more clients this year than last.  Which surprises me.  If you’d asked  before I looked at the numbers, I’d have said this year was the worst ever.  In fact, with a full quarter still to come, I can see I’ll end the year  up in both days billed and income generated. Possibly it has just felt harder, coming after the long slog of 2010/11, which left reserves of both cash and bulldog spirit at an all-time low.

2.  But, I’ve got an awful long way to go before I return to the glory days of  my personal annus mirabilis – 2008/09 – when the global economy tanked but mine soared.

3. My business suffered from being too closely entangled with the public sector.  I was cushioned through ’08/’09 by a government commited to  spending to ward off a slump (thanks Gordon).  Things slowed down immediately after the general election.  It’s been a high price to pay for not taking my own good advice to spread the work around (though in fairness I saw the crash coming, I just wasn’t able to avoid it).  It takes a while to change direction – even for a tiny business like mine – it’s not just a matter of developing new contacts, it’s also a question of changing people’s perceptions of what you can do.  No wonder there’s been  a boom in advice for ex-public sector bods trying to join the private sector.

4. The good news, though is that in the world of micro-businesses the difference between a good year and a terrible one can be just one contract.  This year has been improved by two new clients offering several months’-worth of work each.  The thing to cling to during the troughs in business is that one phone call can turn things round.

5.  I’m not the only one to have found trading tough.  Some clients I got lots of work from in the early days have disappeared completely.  Only one client I worked for last year has used me in the last 9 months, all the other business has come from new leads.  If nothing else this highlights the importance of marketing your business and expanding your network of contacts.

However, comparing “now” with “then”  already feels like an academic exercise. As an SME-owning friend said at the weekend:  the world has  changed.  There’s no point worrying that you no longer know you’re going to be booked out for the next six months.  It’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and we’ve just got to make the best of it.  The trick, for freelancers like me at least, is to diversify – to develop new skills and ever-wider networks, to get better at seeing where new opportunities are coming from and to be flexible enough to grab them.  I can see some light at the end of the tunnel – do these points ring true for anyone else?