Category: Small Business and Freelance

10 reasons why offices don’t work

Children back at school. I have an uninterrupted day of writing ahead.  Thank God I can spend it at at home.  I’m so un-used to other people’s offices that just being in one can put me off doing anything creative.  The administrative/managerial/ planning stuff, for which you need other people works fine, but is there anything less likely to generate creative thought than a beige, battery office?  Home works because:

1.  I can work when I am most productive.  Personally I work best after lunch – some say lazy, I just blame my circadian rhythms.  Either way, at home I can potter about all morning, mulling over what needs to be done, than pounce at precisely the right moment for peak efficiency and keep going until it’s done because…

2.  Once I’ve started I don’t get interrupted.  No-one hovering over my shoulder asking for a quick word  No diary sliced into little chunks of productive work separated by meetings to interrupt my train of thought.

3.  It doesn’t smell of food and there are no crumbs at my desk (except ones I’ve left).  Pret’s discovery of Miso soup has a lot to answer for.  The last office I worked in smelled like a Pot Noodle factory.

4.  My desk is where (and how) I left it – no hot-desking, no having to fight each morning to get a desk with a chair AND a phone AND access to a working printer

5.  I don’t need to put my name on the  milk in my fridge.

6. I can work in silence if I want to, or with the radio if I don’t.  I can listen to music and sing loudly if the spirit takes me.  I can offer my opinion on  callers to 5Live without being arrested for hate crime.

7. I can test out the copy I’m writing by reciting it out loud while wandering round the garden.  What looks good on the page can sound weird when spoken aloud. If it’s going to be fun to read it has to feel like something someone might say.

8. I don’t have to clock-watch all afternoon, tracking backwards from the time at which I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO leave the office to be home in time for the children, and trying to work out what I can fit into the time that’s left.

9.  I don’t have to go anywhere in rush hour.

10. There’s a tree outside to stare at if inspiration fails.  I sit by a window that opens, so I can control the temperature without having to beg building services to turn the aircon up or down.  I have never seen mice behind the filing cabinets, or had to set cockroach traps on the window sill (and they say public sector workers are feather-bedded!)

No wonder the Work Foundation has research projects looking at the impact of work on health and wellbeing.  Is there anyone who thinks working in an office is a pleasure?

Selling business badly since 2005

Flickr: Horia Varlan

Every week since we moved house we’ve received  a hand-delivered leaflet from a local garage  promising to sort out our headgaskets and do our MOT.  It’s the same leaflet every time.  Same offer (10% off on production of the leaflet), same design.  And its been doing the same bad job of selling the business since at least 2005.  It doesn’t  change with the seasons, or keep up with the news (nothing about how to cash in on the government’s scrappage scheme;  not a dicky-bird about  keeping the car on the road through this icy winter).  It doesn’t tell me why I should entrust my spark plugs to them and no-one else.  No testimonials from satisfied customers.  It looks as though they just got several thousand done at the turn of the millennium and they’re jolly well going to keep using them ’til they’re gone.

Intrigued by their doggedness, I’ve finally got round to asking them what else they do to promote themselves and how the leaflet thing is working out for them. I’ll  update here if I get a reply.   As far as I know this is the only piece of local marketing they do.  They’ve been running for years so they must be doing something right.  I’d guess the backbone of their trade is repeat business rather than new customers, and good for them, I’m sure they know their stuff.   But the leaflets are starting to really bug me.  The waste of paper for one thing, and  the man-hours  spent trudging up  the road delivering them so that I can put them straight into the recycling .  Doing the same thing again and again doesn’t mean it’s going to work one day – start by sprucing up your calling card, chaps, and target your efforts a bit better.  We don’t have a car.

Being a good client

How often do you treat yourself as a client and give your business a full MOT?   I did some work over the summer with  clients who are also by now good friends, who took advantage of a quiet holiday season to review their business.  On the outside it might have looked like  un-necessary tinkering on their part – the business was already in pretty good shape and growing  fast.  Still, we worked on re-defining the core of how the business had changed since it started and what that meant for the services they were offering and the language they used to talk about themselves  – treating their business with the same kind of rigour we would offer a “proper”  client.  They carried on the work through the autumn and have just re-launched.  I was so delighted to see the fruits of what we started off, not a huge change, but a sharper focus, a clearer offer to potential clients and  a more confident feel for the future.   Try it on yourself – as long as you’re prepared to be completely honest about what’s currently working and what isn’t, it can be a really revealing exercise.  And yes, I really need to do it for myself too.

Working out what to charge

Flickr:tachyondecay

What are you worth?  Over the last few days I’ve had an invitation to lunch and a couple of calls from friends who are going freelance and want some tips – a sign of what’s happening in the industry, perhaps?  They all seem to want the same kind of advice about how to set up and – most of all – what to charge.  So here  are a couple of  web-resources which might help them and others get the thinking started.

I like this list of how to generate the business in the first place – Freelance Switch again.  And at the risk of self-referentially disappearing up the spout of my own blog, here’s one I wrote earlier about actually getting paid

The value of free

Copyblogger is running  advice on putting together the “ultimate marketing plan” from the man they call one of the world’s highest paid copywriters.  A day or so ago the same site carried a slightly finger-wagging post about how much fantastic professional advice is sitting online, read once but never acted on.  I’m certainly guilty of spotting great stuff, inwardly muttering that I’ll do something about using it one of these days, filing it in my “great stuff” folder and never looking at it again.  But no more.  As the man said, if I’d paid for this advice from a consultant I’d be doing everything I could to  squeeze the last drop of value out of it, so I’m going to blow the dust off the folder and get cracking on sharpening up the plan for the business.  So, as a  start, here are four basic tips for maximising the use of LinkedIn and Facebook as shop-windows for your business, and one suggestion for managing what could be a time-swallowing commitment to social networks – gathered here, here, here and here…

1. The value of LinkedIn is in direct relation to the size of your network. Maximise your potential connections by keeping a link to your profile as part of your email signature.

2. Use your presence on the network to showcase your expertise – join relevant groups, comment on (and start) discussion threads, answer questions

3. Use the search facility in LinkedIn to check out potential clients/employers to see if you can get any useful information about them from elsewhere in your network

4. Publish your content – you can set it up for blog posts to be posted automatically to  your LinkedIn and/or Facebook profile, for example

5.  Estimate how long you have to spend in a week in keeping up a presence online and plan out the content you want to post in advance.  The suggestion is to take half an hour a week in writing up “helpful tips” and then scheduling it to be published.  This seems both more mechanical and more perfunctory than I feel comfortable with, but certainly more structure would probably mean fewer gaps in between posts.

5 things to remember in between jobs

As I secretly knew it would, the job drought has ended and I’m back fretting about  having to work through the weekends again.  This seems like a good time to jot down some hard won advice about dealing with slumps – not least so that I can read it back when the next one crops up.

1. Jobs travel in packs and use unreliable forms of transport.  It’s perfectly normal for there to be gaps between jobs and then for people to be  falling over themselves to snaffle you up.  I’ve never met a freelancer yet who was busy all the time (and wasn’t lying about it).  Keep a spreadsheet of your work patterns and you’ll see that troughs are inevitably followed by peaks (and vice versa) – nothing lasts forever.  This can be quite comforting when the cupboard is bare, and fooling around with the spreadsheet on quiet days can almost feel like work.  Although…

2.  No-one can job-hunt for 24 hours a day, even though it is tempting to try.  With LinkedIn and other resources on tap you can fool yourself that you’re doing valuable things  just because you’re at the computer.  If you have really exhausted all the leads you can think of (and aren’t just avoiding  another awkward call) give yourself permission to go away and get a life.  Play the piano, contemplate painting the bannisters, torment the cats, leave the house and do something exciting you can use as raw material for your blog.  Remember that one of the reasons you probably had for going freelance in the first place was to kick the “life” part of your work-life balance back into action.

3.  However tempting, don’t take the first job that comes along just because it’s a job.  If it doesn’t fit your core skills or add something to your business it will just end in unnecessary unpleasantness.  Having just done this (again) and with the bruises to show for it,  I am aware that this is a hard one to learn.  Avoiding doing crap jobs was another reason I went freelance and is the reason that I…

4.  Put away a slug of money out of each pay cheque  to act as a cushion when the slumps come along.  This also allows you the smug glow that comes with saying “no” when someone asks if you’d like to do a crap  job,  and it helps deal with point 5…

5.  It ALWAYS takes longer to get work sorted out than you think it possibly can.  Potential clients are always just jetting off on holiday and promising to “pin things down when I get back”,  or need budget approval from a finance committee that meets once a quarter in alternate leap years, or just get tied up in meetings about other things.  The thing to remember is that, eventually, you will work again – and if you doubt that go back to point 1 and start again…

Blogger’s Block

 

Flickr: Bianks

Have been suffering a bad case since October, brought on first by overwork, then by Christmas, and lately by the absolute certainty that I will never work again, which has reduced  all waking thought to “how long can we last on the money we have before we have to start eating the cats?”

Admittedly I am prone to panic about this kind of thing, and have to keep reminding myself that it’s not long since the holiday season ended, and it’s quite likely that at least one of the three prospects I’m waiting on will come off and I’ll back to complaining about overwork by the end of the month.  This does feel very different from last year, though. Usually, in the public sector, the last three months of the financial year are  manically busy as departments realise they have to use the under-spend they’ve been hoarding against a rainy day before March 31 or they’ll lose the money.  This year it’s ominously quiet on the government front and the cats are starting to look tastier by the day.

Mothers need not apply?

Odd that I missed this story about how important flexible working is to working mothers because it’s been on  my mind a lot recently.    I’m my own boss which means I can  manage my own hours and  can fit in a life with children as well as one with a briefcase, a blackberry and a business suit.  A few days ago, I was offered an opportunity which looked so great, at such a fantastic company, that it was impossible to pass on it just because it would mean taking a job and joining the rush hour rat race again.  I met them.  I liked them.  They liked me enough to ask me back for a second interview before I’d got home from the first one.  Then I started talking about the details of what what flexible working might look like in practice and suddenly there’s total silence from their end.  Now, I could be being  unfair.  Too impatient to do the deal and too ready to conclude that it’s not going to happen. I really hope so because it’s a great opportunity and I’d love to do it.   Or I could have just reinforced my sneaking suspicion that the only way to make sure that I can work and spend time with my children  is to run my own show.  This is easy enough for me thanks to the industry I work in.  How does everyone else manage?  No wonder the fastest growing sector in the economy over the past few years has been in women-owned small businesses.

The secret to getting work?

Let people know you want it.  Be referable and ask for referrals.  Talk to people about yourself and your business.  For, as  Alan Clark pointed out when asked how he had the nerve to make so many unwanted advances to young women – “how do you know an advance will be unwanted until you make it?”

Ask and ye shall receive as the good book has it.   Oh, and when you get the work?  Do a good job.

Never trust a man with a red velvet smoking jacket

… a life lesson learned from an article I read in Vanity Fair about the wealthy victims of Bernie Madoff and his associates in America.  The article is recommended for the sound of outraged rich people coming, shrilly, to the realisation that bad things can happen to them too.  Along with some fab bitchiness from the heights of US society, the article points out the danger of having all your eggs in one basket.  The people who were financially wiped out were the ones who trusted Madoff with everything they had rather than spreading the risk.   In freelance terms that’s the same as allowing yourself to be dependent on one client for too much work.  I got burned that way before when I was doing almost all my work for a part of Channel 4 which disappeared in an unexpected corporate restructure.  The realisation has hit recently that this concentration of work is happening again, although as the market shrinks the possibilty of spreading the risk is less than it used to be.  I will, however, do my best to diversify, otherwise I might end up having to sell the furs and the jewels and give up the membership of the Palm Beach country club…