Category: Small Business and Freelance

Is business really harder for women?

Feminist to my fingertips I may be, but I’ve never been one for all-women events.  So I should have known that going to Business Link’s Women in Business networking event probably wouldn’t end well.  But … I’m trying to launch a new project, and if there’s advice to be had or a potential market to tap, it seemed worth sampling.

Then I went.

Trampolining for success and Feng Shui-ing Congleton

“It’s so fantastic to be here with all you girlies.” trilled our keynote speaker.  She insisted that we”girls” weren’t entrepreneurs with a strategic vision for business  – “that’s the boring words”.  We were “dream catchers”, with a “team dream – to be MAD – Making A Difference” as we brought love and hugging to the world of business.  I remained seated as we were encouraged to stand and shout out our mantra:  “I am amazing!  I am incredible!  I am fantastic!”  Apparently it works best if you shout it to the universe first thing in the morning, while trampolining.  I spent an entertaining few minutes trying to imagine other successful women doing this – Margaret Thatcher?  Margaret Mountford from The Apprentice? –  but found it strangely difficult.

The kicker is, of course, that I was the one sitting sourly in the audience planning a dash for the drinks table.  She was the one on stage with £50million in the bank, advising Vince Cable on entrepreneurialism and living her dream of Feng Shui-ing Congleton (really).

The ditsy route to success?

This means one of a number of things: either kooky and wacky is the way ahead in business (I  doubt it); or women have come so far that however ditsy we are, we can still be taken seriously (debatable); or it’s an act to disguise the fundamentally unfeminine pursuit of managing things (I hope that’s not the case now, though it may have been 20 years ago); or it’s just patronising drivel. You’ll be unsurprised to know that that’s my preferred option.

Women as entrepreneurs vs women in the workplace

Ironically, the last place you should have to play the air-head is in your own business – your gaff, your rules.  The statistics on women starting up business suggest that women appreciate the freedom that self-employment offers and are making a success of  it.  The least they deserve is to be taken seriously and treated like adults – especially by other women.  I read one consultant recently recommending that a way to get women to think about business planning was to tell them that it was like preparing a shopping list – dear God …

There are, undoubtedly, big issues facing women in the workplace.  The statistics on equal pay and the gender imbalance at the top of  major corporations suggest that women are  still at a disadvantage in business.  And, of course,  there are barriers to  joining the ranks of the self-employed too.  I’m just struggling to think of many that are unique to women.

Are women’s businesses different?

These are the characteristics which were shared by the 50 fastest-growing women-owned business in the US last year:

  • A commitment to high growth — 71% agreed or strongly agreed that their goal from the very beginning of their leadership of the company was to build a large company
  • Inspiring leaders — 64% believe their “ability to motivate employees” is the most important characteristic for being a successful woman entrepreneur
  • Surrounding yourself with a skilled team – 78% say “Hiring the right people” was the most important action that contributed to their company’s growth
  • Adapting to a changing environment – The strategy most frequently chosen (64%) to meet the challenge of the current economy is to “enter new markets”. Sixty-one percent admitted current economic conditions caused them to change their business strategies

Those are the successful characteristics of businesses.  Not women’s businesses.  All businesses.

Having cast around for hints as to what the gender issues facing women entrepreneurs are, I found this which suggests our major problem is that we “care too much” And maybe we do.  I feel quite un-sisterly in criticising last night’s event. It was done with the best of intentions and may have helped hundreds of women.  But I’m nonetheless slightly baffled at the proliferation of organisations desperate to help us cope with the burden of being women in business.  Do we really need them? I’m genuinely interested to know.    The West Wing’s Ainsley Hayes would probably have a view. (If you’re short of time join her at 3.55′)

Is it a bad idea to grab at a job, whatever the salary?

In 1970s weepie Kramer vs Kramer,  unemployed ad-space  salesman, Dustin Hoffman, has to find a job on Christmas Eve so that he can keep his son.  His pitch at interview is that he will take a job at a rate far below his normal salary  because he needs the work, thus helping his future employer to bag the employee bargain of a lifetime.  This being Hollywood, Dustin gets the gig and the floppy-haired son gets to stay with Dad who can thus perfect his French toast-making skills.

I was reminded of this  for the first time in years as I read the increasingly unmissable Redundant Public Servant’s blog. Colleagues of our hero, who’ve been pushed out of work ahead of him, report that at interview, they’ve got the sense that anyone chasing a much lower paid job is an object of some suspicion.  That certainly rings  true to me.

My sense, bolstered from conversations with the odd recruitment consultant, is that applying for jobs that involve a significant drop in salary level or job title makes the applicant look desperate (which, admittedly they might be; but it’s never a good look). Even if they get the job, it devalues their CV in the long term.

More importantly, no matter how much employers know that it’s a buyer’s market out there with Dustin Hoffman-esque bargains to be had, they will  also fear that they are just a holding pen for the applicant – a finger in the financial dyke which will do until something better comes along.

One of the standard job hunters’ bibles, Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute, lists the fears  interviewers have at the back of their minds during an interview,  which might stop a candidate getting the job.  Number four on the list is the fear that you’ll only stay around for a few weeks, or at most a few months and then quit without advance warning.  It’s a hard one to counter if the job you’re applying for pays significantly less than the one you’ve had to leave.

Bolles’ suggested answer to the question Doesn’t this job represent a step down for you? by the way, is a chirpy and unarguable  No, it represents  a step up – from Welfare.  This does suggest another issue,  raised by Jenni Russell last week, about how to cushion the financial catastrophe which strikes the middle-class unemployed (for want of a better expression) when they lose their jobs and find a safety net of welfare benefits underneath them which doesn’t come close to meeting their needs.  Another blog post, perhaps…

Top tips for staying sane while unemployed

Flickr: Aflcio

Putting together the last post reminded me of the  experience of  unemployment (it may have been him without a job, but there was no doubt that we were  in it together).  It also set me thinking about what got us through. My mantra through the whole thing was “nothing lasts forever” – not plague, pestilence, nor even Tory governments.  Things will get better.  There will be a job, eventually.  The trick is dealing with the period between losing a job and having one again.  I’m not qualified to offer “how to find a job” advice, but here are some tips on keeping the shreds of your sanity together while you do:

1.  Do not under any circumstances define yourself by the state of being unemployed (equally when you get a job do not define yourself by that either.  Experience shows that these things are fleeting.  Look at Ireland.)  You are not a successful human being because you have a six-figure salary, nor are you an unsuccessful human being if you sign on.  The important thing is what kind of human being you are, not what you do (or don’t) for  a living.

2.  Do not take it personally if you have been made redundant.   You are not a bad person, a poor employee, or doomed to fail.  You are just, unfortunately, at the wrong end of a harsh set of circumstance which prove nothing about your skills, intelligence or performance in your job and are no indicator of what might happen in future.

3. Continue to make plans for the future – not just things you are going to do when you get another job,  but plans for now.  There is nothing worse than living a life with the pause button pressed waiting for a job offer to start things moving again.  We were young and foolish, with no family ties  and fortunate that I had a secure job, so we blithely talked about buying a home together (remember when you could do that in London on one  salary?) and joked about him waving me off to work before he set to with the Hoover.  We did it, too.

4.  Use your time off constructively – start that novel, learn to play the bassoon, take up tap-dancing and go to the gym.  Or do some volunteer work, learn a language,  get politically active.  When the job comes (because as we know, nothing lasts forever) you will kick yourself for spending all that  time gloomily searching for a job and bemoan the fact that you only have 25 days-off a year.  Yes, your priority is to find a job, but there are 24 hours in every day.  Even accounting for sleeping, eating and polishing your CV that still leaves time to…

5.  Do something nice for yourself every day (oh, OK, every week if you’re really Puritan)  You’re having a hard time.  You deserve it.

The emotional impact of redundancy

There’s a sudden flowering of  blogs from public sector workers facing redundancy, setting out with splendid gallows humour how the sector is facing up to cuts.   I’m an avid reader of the Redundant Public Servant’s blog, and was struck by a  post  by Mrs RPS about the bitterness she feels  about her husband’s impending redundancy.

I saw my then boyfriend,  now husband,  deal with a lengthy spell of  unemployment a few years ago and understand completely what Mrs RPS is talking about.  The thing that really hurt was the  sense of powerlessness I felt watching the person I loved most in the world deal with something so devastating without being able to do anything practical to help.

Mrs RPS, though, also reminded me of when my Dad was made redundant, after 44 years with one company, a couple of years before he was due to retire. How unfair, I ranted. How disloyal, after all you’ve done for them.  Typically, my Dad  didn’t join in with the ranting, but calmly pointed out that loyalty didn’t come into it – on either side. The contract between him and the company  was that he would do a month’s worth of work and they would pay him for it, and if they both agreed to carry on they’d both do the same the following month. In his mind  there was no issue of loyalty involved – no-one would have accused him of being disloyal to them had he found a better job and moved on.  It was a purely business relationship and, from the company’s perspective, making him redundant was the  logical thing to do. Taking the emotion out of it allowed him to cope pretty serenely (although I  imagine that having a  decent pension on the way probably helped!)

The problem is, of course, if you profoundly disagree with the business decision that leads to your job being lost.  An awful lot of public servants feel – as Mrs RPS does – that these are wrong-headed decisions, with jobs being “wiped out at the whim of a government and ministers whose motivation I deeply suspect. For a doctrine I believe is essentially flawed.”  I completely agree with her.  No wonder you can feel anger and hurt  bubbling through her post.

It does seem that the process isn’t being made any easier to deal with by the way it’s being handled.  My eye was caught by a blog detailing how one local government department was given a redundancy notice, without warning, by mass email.    An agency I worked with, which was cut when the quangos were culled, reports that no help or advice has been forthcoming about how to go about winding up a business, no re-training opportunities have been highlighted, no  careers counselling offered.  That’s where I think you can start to complain about disloyalty.  Cutting  a job, a team, even a whole department is, as my Dad would point out,  a dispassionate business decision. Cutting people adrift with no support is wrong.

I can stand the despair, it’s the hope

Just as I’d given up on the piece of work that had looked so promising back in September, it comes back to haunt me.  They still want to work with us (and so they should, we’re great) they just need to sort out the incumbent agency and re-draw the spec.  But they LOVE the proposal so could we just bear with them until, maybe, November?  So the waiting continues.  And while I’d love to affect a blithe indifference, I  really, really can’t.

Clinging to the wreckage?

Lying awake at 4am fretting about how long it’s taking to confirm a new piece of work, I was trying to remember my own rule 5 – the one that starts “it always takes longer to get work sorted out than you think it possibly can.”  Looking up the actual quote this morning I was astonished at how breezily confident of getting new work  I sounded  a mere 7 months  ago.

The need to re-focus the business was clear as soon as the scale of spending cuts in the public sector (where I’ve done most of my work for the past two years) emerged.  It’s a time-consuming undertaking though, and not everyone took the hint.

Being prepared for cuts?

Pre- election I was  talking to a 20-something AD at an agency with lots of public sector contracts and asked if she  worried about what might happen when spending was cut.  She looked at me with all the confidence of someone who’s never experienced a recession and said,  as though speaking to the very hard of understanding: “If there’s a new government there will be changes in policy.   Change always needs to be communicated.  We’ll carry on working with the Department,  just on different things.”  The agency is now making a significant number of staff redundant.  I genuinely hope she’s not one of them, she was very good at her job – but lots of people were caught in that trap and were just not prepared for what was coming.

Money saving tips

I’ve been doing some work recently on how the voluntary sector can cope with the impact of spending cuts – maybe that’s what’s making me pessimistic!  A lot of the advice translates to any SME, so here are some resources that might be helpful

Claiming for the dressing-up box

Flickr: Capture Queen

Sadly forced to buy a new LBD for a black tie awards do on Thursday.  It’s been a while since I needed to get dolled up and a fair amount  of chocolate must have been consumed in the interim (unless, of course, my shoulders have just got broader from being in the gym…)   I idly wondered if clothes could be claimed against tax if I promised HMRC that I will DEFINITELY only wear this dress on work-related occasions.  Unfortunately, according to this handy guide and HMRC’s more detailed  guidance, it seems that dressing-up is a non-deductible expense.  Let’s hope we win…

The sole trader’s dilemma

Being always in the market for advice that might net me a million, I read Robert Craven’s digest of what separates the successful business from the also-ran avidly.  I really liked the tip for business owners to  “work ON and not IN” the business.  It’s something  I’ve said myself to people I’ve worked with when they’re getting bogged down in day to day delivery when they should be  focusing on business strategy and development.

The problem is that for really small businesses – like sole traders – like me – the advice is hard to apply.  I have to do the day to day delivery else there’s nothing to bill people for.  And I have to do the business development, else there’s no need to worry about the day to day because there’s nothing to deliver. (And I have to do the wrangling with the accountant, sorting out the printer, paying the bills and (occasionally) patting myself on my own back too, but that’s another issue).

What happens (and I bet  I’m not alone in this) is that business development gets thought about in fits and starts, gets put on hold when it generates actual business and then fires up again in between contracts.  There must be a smoother,  less nerve-jangling and more productive way of doing things.  And yes I’ve heard the advice about consistently dedicating one day a week to business development no matter what; but try telling a client with a deadline that you can’t finish their report because you need to think about prospecting for new work and see how long you last.

Fortunately I’ve been doing this for long enough that I now have a large enough network of good clients to ensure that there’s a pretty constant stream of work coming my way, so this is less of an issue than it was in the beginning.  But even with years of experience to go on, it’s still a tricky balancing act.

The good stuff for April

Social media tools for small businesses, unearthed last month…

 

How to get the best out of working with a freelancer

I enjoyed PR Week’s piece about good practice in client/agency relations.  They should do an0ther with ideas about the agency/freelance relationship.   After all, there can’t be many agencies who don’t rely on bringing in specialists to beef up their teams on occasion, yet I’ve only ever once been asked by an agency for my opinion on how they worked with freelancers.  Lots of agencies are delightful to work with, and some of them have become really good friends as well as clients.  But there are still things that drive me nuts about even the nicest of clients. So, if you want to keep in the right side of the freelancers you subcontract, how about:

1.  Paying us on time.  Within thirty days is fine – sooner is always nice.  At least one agency I know about (no names. no pack drill) demands payment from their clients on receipt of invoice but won’t pay contractors for 60 days. Now, that’s just not playing fair.

2. Not asking us to do work for free – although this can be a tricky area and there isn’t  a hard and fast rule.  For example,  I’m happy to do some time uncharged on things like brainstorms for pitch presentations if I think that there’s a possiblility of work coming up in future – or if it’s with a client who gives me enough other work to make it worth my while.  But at least one (former) client of mine has a  habit of asking me to look at ideas they are preparing for pitches in areas they know I’ve specialised in, as a favour.  They don’t offer to pay me for time spent on the pitch, and they don’t offer me any work if they get the job because it’s all done in-house.  Why should I give them my time and experience for nothing?  They are, after all, the commodities I sell to make a living.

3. Let us know what happens next.  I’ve done a lot of work on putting pitches together for agencies, come up with the ideas, drafted the documents, waved the team off on the day.  It’s depressingly common to have to go back to my client to ask whether they won the business or not.  I always ask for feedback on what I did and  I’d like to learn from them – if only they’d tell.  Only one agency has ever asked me what I thought of their pitch team and process.  Unsusprisingly its one of the agencies I like working for most!

4.  And of course the real basics.  Brief us as well as you brief your own staff and treat us like part of the team – for the duration of the contract that’s exactly what we are.