Category: Small Business and Freelance

101 words of advice: how to handle debt

From  recent personal experience – as the disgruntled supplier – I suggest:

If they owe you

  • Be reasonable.  Times are tough, people generally do the decent thing.  Anyway hitting hurricane force immediately leaves nowhere to go.
  • Be persistent.
  • Know your rights.

If you owe them:

  • Don’t hide.  Ignoring email, phone messages or carrier pigeons sent to chase the debt won’t work.  Like Arnie, they’ll be back.  Keeping people in the dark  infuriates them.  There’s good advice here.
  • Be honest, explain, offer to pay a bit at a time to show good will.
  • Get  help.
  • Remember, no-one believes “the cheque’s in the post”.

 

What recruitment consultants don’t tell you about job hunting

Can recruitment consultants help?

I mix freelance projects with longer interim posts so I’m a bit of a recruitment consultant connoisseur.  There are lots who specialise in placing interim managers .  Some are brilliant – finding out my strengths and skills, asking where I want to work and what’s important to me, keeping in touch.  The best one I’ve come across is happy to share my details with partner agencies if she feels they might have clients who can use me, knowing  they will reciprocate.

The bad ones are woeful.  “Never mind the quality, feel the width” they  cry, as they pitch CVs by the bucket-full at clients, in the hope that somewhere in the human mix is a round-ish peg for the round hole they’re trying to fill.  They’re generally easy to spot – they don’t return calls, give no feedback on  applications, suggest you exaggerate the rates you charged in a previous role so that “you’ll be taken more seriously” and NEVER counsel you that, on reflection, the role they’re filling doesn’t meet your needs (or that you don’t fit the client’s).  It’s disappointing to come across one of them, it shouldn’t be surprising.  Recruitment consultancies work for the companies that hire them, not the candidates they place.  We’re the raw materials.

Working your personal network

There’s loads of advice online for getting the best out of a  recruitment consultant and it’s worth working at – I say again, many of them are excellent and great sources of support and advice.  The web also bristles with job-hunting guides.  I liked the self-explanatory 49 Best Ways To Get A Job in Today’s Horrible Economy. But I’ve had more leads on actual, chargeable work through personal networking and recommendations from previous clients than  any consultancy. This makes LinkedIn and other social networks the most valuable job-hunting tools you can wield these days.  This classic advice still holds good, even though 2009 sounds as distant as the Middle Ages in communications now.

Private profit vs employees’ rights

When I moved to London to seek my fame and fortune I worked as a temp, making tea for the Head of HR at Channel 4.    I’d graduated to picking up dry-cleaning for the Head of Comms before  I landed a job in the press office.  I loved every minute of it – just as well as I “temped” there for almost a year.  Since then I’ve been a self-employed consultant and an interim manager  in a range of organisations, so I’ve spent almost half of my working life without benefit of holiday pay, sick pay or employers’ pension contributions.  This has been my choice and I’m not looking for sympathy, but it does mean that I know a bit about what it’s like at the sharp end of what is usually referred to as Britain’s flexible labour market.

New regulations to drown temp industry?

New regulations coming in this October will give temps and agency workers greater employment protection after they’ve been working for a company for 12 weeks.  Or, as the Telegraph put it: New regulations will drown temp industry.

Warning that unemployment will rise as companies off-load temps they can’t afford, the Telegraph warns that fewer jobs will now be created.

“No regulations and no left-wing shit”

I’d expect the Telegraph to back the bosses, so the opposition didn’t surprise me.  I’d argue that if you’re temping for a company for three months you’re doing a job not providing holiday cover, so you ought to have the same rights as your permanently employed colleague at the next desk.  One of the comments underneath the story is a bit of an eye-opener though:

It’s better to have a chat with agency staff, cut out the middleman and give everyone a better cash deal.  This is what I do.  No employment regs, no nonsense and no left-wing shit.  Any problems and the company will start up next week with a slightly different name.

Let’s pass over thoughts of how that “better cash deal” might be administered, and ask instead – when did offering reasonable employment protection to working people become “left-wing shit”?  Are we really saying that nothing is as important as maximizing profit?  That only bleeding heart liberals care about people’s rights?

Maybe the fact that I’m reading Chavs at the moment made the comment leap out at me.  Here’s author Owen Jones on the rise and rise of the “flexible workforce”:

We have been witnessing the slow death of the secure, full-time job,  There are up to 1.5million temporary workers in Britain.  A “temp” can be hired and fired at an hour’s notice, paid less for doing the same job and lacks rights such as paid holiday and redundancy pay.  Agency work is thriving in the service sector, but an incident at a car plant near Oxford in early 2009 illustrates where the rise of the temp has brought us.  Eight hundred and fifty temps – many of whom had worked in the factory for years – were sacked by BMW with just one hour’s notice … The workers, with no means of defending themselves from this calamity resorted to pelting managers with apples and oranges  … It’s not just agency and temporary workers who suffer because of job insecurity and outrageous terms and conditions.  Fellow workers are forced to compete with people who can be hired far more cheaply. Everyone’s wages are pushed down as a result.  This is the race to the bottom of pay and conditions.”

Agency Workers Regulations 2011

For anyone interested, here’s the TUC’s guide to agency workers’ rights   and guidance on the Agency Workers Regulations which come into force in October.  And for the record, I’m with the bleeding heart liberals on this one.

Does blogging drive business?

Boozy lunch last weekend with an old friend who is just dipping a toe into online promotion for his construction business.  He’s getting his first website up and running soon and is thinking about a blog – though he’s not really sure why he might need one.  My answer to the question – so why have you got  a blog? –  may not have helped:

  • I enjoy writing it – especially now I’ve been writing for a while and there’s an archive of stuff to look back on.  I don’t feel as strongly about writing as Caitlin Moran, who confesses to salivating at the thought of sitting at the keyboard, but it’s definitely in my top five list of favourite things to do.
  • It acts as a shop window for me.  Part of what I offer clients is my ability as a copywriter, the blog lets them see me in action, writing on lots of different subjects.
  • It gives me a space to think.  It’s somewhere to gather advice and information about business and my particular sector, weight it up and tease issues into shape in my head through the process of writing about them (there are lots of posts which have been deleted unpublished because I realised half way through that I was barking up entirely the wrong tree).

I think having the blog helps my business enormously – although none of the reasons I do it are directly aimed at increasing turnover.  There are lots of other ways of driving business online.  I’m tempted to agree with whoever it was who said that if you blog you do it for yourself.  If anyone else reads it, it’s a bonus.

4 ways to win business from the Olympics

Apparently 72% of business contracts for the Olympics have gone to SMEs;  22% to micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees.  No, me neither.  So I was intrigued by this week’s ELSBC event to talk about how local businesses can get some of the action.  The opportunities are astounding, though they need a bit of creative thinking if you’re not in one of the obvious sectors like construction or accommodation.  From memory here are some key things to think about – of which easily the most important is the first:

  • Register for free with Compete For– Olympic-related contracts are posted here, as  are opportunities with Crossrail, Transport for London and the Met Police.  The big Tier One contractors with the huge building and supply contracts post sub-contracts here and they’re required to offer a proportion of them to SMEs.  From the end of June the Met will be posting all contracts worth between £500 and £50,000 here too.
  • Find out who’s won contracts in your field.  Could your competitors need a bit of extra capacity from you?  Are they going to be dropping smaller contracts that you could pick up while they concentrate on the Olympics?
  • Look out for other Olympic-related opportunities.   There will be a number of National Houses set up by different countries to showcase themselves (I like the sound of Jamaica’s nine-day party in Finsbury Park).  As well as the Olympic village itself, there will be training camps and support camps all over the place (the American team will run its operations from a base at University of East London, for example).  There will be big events at the O2 (renamed the North Greenwich arena for the Olympics). They’ll all need supplying with stuff from transport to security, catering to printing, couriers to cleaning services.  More information about new procurement opportunities on the London 2012 site and the London Business Network
  • Think about after the Games – the athletes’ village will be turned into homes for east Londoners and a new school is being built in the park, so there’s plenty more work in construction, and other opportunities too.  Keep an eye on Compete For and the Olympic Park Legacy Company

There are ony 58 weeks to go.  What are you waiting for?

The grown-up’s guide to rejection

The mantra that a good consultant “tells people what they need to know not what they want to hear” is a cliché, but it still sums up a basic truth about the consultant/client relationship.

There’s no point in you hiring me if you’re already convinced you know what needs to be done and just want me to tell you that you’re right.

There’s no satisfaction for me in buckling down to do what you want if I think it’s wrong.  If we can’t come to an agreement about the way forward, the grown-up response is for everyone to agree that the relationship won’t work and walk away from it.

I’ve never found being grown-up that easy, though.

I met a prospective client last week.  A small voluntary sector body, with big ambitions to change the world by… well … anyway, it was going to be great and all that was holding them back was the failure of the world to realise what a great thing it would be if …

Their problem was they couldn’t explain to me exactly what it was they wanted to do – other than repeating “we’re in the business of changing people’s lives”.  My problem was that I couldn’t stop asking awkward questions like, “how are you planning to do that?”   I  don’t think we could have worked together.  I liked them a lot – idealists and optimists are fantastic to be around –  but eventually you need some realism in there too or else nothing gets done.  They said they liked me too, but my attempts to bring the conversation round to practicalities wasn’t what they wanted to hear.  There’s a lesson in there for next time.

Despite knowing that it wouldn’t have worked,  I’m left with a sense of frustration that I couldn’t persuade them to harness their vision to my pragmatism and see what happened.  At which moment, in stepped Seth Godin, with exactly the blog post I needed:

“Don’t take it personally.”

This is tough advice. Am I supposed to take it like a chair? Sometimes it seems as though the only way to take it is personally. That customer who doesn’t like your product (your best work) or that running buddy who doesn’t want to run with you any longer…

Here’s the thing: it’s never personal. It’s never about you. How could it be? That person doesn’t truly know you, understand what you want or hear the voices in your head. All they know is themselves.

When someone moves on, when she walks away or even badmouths you or your work, it’s not personal about you. It’s personal about her. Her agenda, her decisions, her story.

Do your work, the best way you know how. Is there any other option?

Two simple steps to world domination

The world is full of advice for business owners of all kinds – about social media, about HR and finance about Lord knows what else.  I’m in the business of doing it myself.  I’ve come to the conclusion tho’ that the secret of success is much, much simpler than anyone would lead you to believe.

Want to be a standout success in business?  Simple:

  • Be competent – that just means do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it, to a basic standard of OK-ness, using a basic filing system that helps you keep track of what’s going on.  That way your customers will love you and will not ever have to  wonder how to prove to you that they have indeed paid invoices you seem to believe they haven’t.
  • Be polite – that means saying please and thank you.  It means letting people know BEFORE they work over the weekend to deliver the thing you  asked for by Monday that you won’t be in the office until Wednesday.  It means telling people  whether or not you want to use them on the project you floated past them several weeks ago, not letting them try to work it out by gazing at their tea-leaves.

That’s it.  If you can master these two skills you will be so unusual, so astonishing, so much in demand that books will be written about you.  If you can also manage

  • Be on time

You’ve definitely cracked it.

Bad day?  Me?  Whatever gives you that idea?

The rise and rise of the #Mumpreneur

A brief and good-natured Twitter spat between me and Marketing Donut about their “Mumpreneurs Week” made me think again about women and business. And I’m still baffled.

I am a mother.  I have a business.  Without me even having noticed, this  makes me a mumpreneur,  eligible to attend special conferences and receive my own awards.  I have no idea why.

I won’t repeat the  questions I raised in the “Is business really harder for women?” post except to say that on none of the mumpreneur supporter sites I’ve speed-read this morning have I found any advice that applies exclusively to self-employed mothers or answers a problem that’s only faced by mothers.  The advice – and it’s generally very good advice – is about time and resource management, about planning and budgeting, about choosing between working at home or finding premises, about marketing.  All of that stuff is relevant to start-up businesses whoever they’re run by.

The one issue that’s raised consistently on these sites that doesn’t featured much on the CBI‘s is, of course, childcare.  There’s an awful lot of “how heroic it is to juggle children and your own businesses” when actually the focus should be – “how heroic  working parents are to juggle childcare and working life in the absence of available, affordable childcare“.

A lot of us mumpreneurs (I’m trying to get  used to using the word – there may be a grant in it eventually) have opted out of regular working life and into self-employment precisely because it offers an easier way of managing the work/ life thing.

Personally when I was in full-time work I got tired of being tired: of running everywhere and always being late anyway; of worrying that I wasn’t  a good enough employee nor a good enough mother;  of having to negotiate flexible working hours but still not being able to attend school plays; of worrying about work when I was at home and about children when I was at work.  And I say this despite the fact that my husband has always done more than his share of childcare – not because he’s helping me out with something that’s really my responsibility, but because it’s a shared responsibility.

Being a parent and running a business is tough.  But in my experience it’s no tougher – and in some ways it’s a lot simpler – than being a parent and having a job.  Oh, and while I’m at it.  Why are there no support services for Dadpreneurs?

What is a sole trader?

Library of Congress 1911

There’s a discussion going on over at LinkedIn about what it is that makes people go freelance.  Reading the comments started me thinking about a more fundamental question.  Not “what’s so attractive about freelancing?”, but “what is a freelancer?” – or given the title of my blog, “what is  a sole trader?” And do they count as businesses?

 When is a business not a business?

This is not such a dumb question as it seems.  The most common search terms that land people at my blog are about sole trading – from the slightly baffling “Is Rupert Murdoch a sole trader?”, to the more general “What is a sole trader?”

The dictionary definition is helpful, but being a sole trader is a slippery thing to pin down. (By the way, I should say that I’m using the terms freelance and sole trader interchangeably to mean one person working for him or herself.  They aren’t necessarily the same thing.  And to be strictly accurate, I’m not a sole trader myself: I’m a Limited Company.  I just didn’t think Limited Company PR was a good title for a blog.  There’s some advice on the differences between sole trading and limited companies here)

Anyway, whatever you call me, I  am a business.  I’m registered at Companies House and with the VAT office.  I have an accountant to help me sort out my corporate tax.  My heart swells with pride when we entrepreneurs are hailed as the saviours of the British economy.  But I’m also not a business as its commonly understood: I don’t have premises (I work from clients’ offices or at home) I don’t have staff, I don’t sell a product other than the ideas I generate, so I don’t have production line, warehousing or distribution problems to solve; I don’t need much equipment (printer, laptop, phone, kettle).  I work with lots of small businesses who face all these issues, so I understand the problems.  I just know that I don’t share them.  And neither, I’d guess do many of the 3.6million other companies without staff – rather insultingly classed as “zero businesses” – which are estimated to be in operation at the moment.

Advice for Sole Traders

This seems like a small point, except when it comes to looking for ideas for developing my business.  Small business advice services are geared up to help the businesses with the staff and premises to worry about.  There isn’t much for me on the recently launched (and already much derided) StartupBritain though as my needs are pretty simple  I can work out most things for myself.   But, just in case Rupert Murdoch’s reading and is thinking of branching out as a sole trader, here’s some online advice (though I’m not a tax, insurance or legal expert, so I’d seriously advise him to check with a professional)

67 pieces of advice for small businesses and start-ups

I have a magpie habit of spotting stuff online and parking the link to it, intending to come back later.  Things have been particularly bad recently as I’m working on a new project, to be launched on an unsuspecting world in the next couple of weeks, so I’ve been hoarding advice aimed at start-ups and micro-businesses.

As a way of clearing the decks, here are 67 tips for new, small businesses gathered during my research.  And no, I’m not doing them all myself.  Yet.

Business planning and starting from scratch 

Social networks

Communications – the right words and the pictures

Consultancy and freelancing

  • A Q&A from The Guardian about the pros and cons of becoming a consultant.  This is specifically about the voluntary sector but lots of the issues are universal.
  • Is there life after freelancing? Questions to ask yourself if you’re thinking of trading up from being a freelancer to setting up a small agency
  • Freelance Adviser general advice on a range of subjects for freelancers