15 years, plus some more

TL;DR

~ Be accountable; to yourself and others

~ Track your time

~ Look for genuine problems and prioritise improving them

~ Trajectories for the long term; goals for the days and weeks ahead

~ Identify where you are good at predicting things

~ Be clear and tight on payment terms

~ Review progress regularly, ideally with someone else

~ Always have a holiday booked

Conclusions, suggestions and suspicions

Accountability forms the foundation on which everything else is built. Be accountable to yourself, to your customers, and to your suppliers. Clear expectations and communication are the pillars of this and in some sectors (… I’m looking at you, building trades) are low hanging fruit for improving your business.

Find a way to consistently track how you spend your time. I’ve used the same approach for every year of self-employment because it has worked for me – I use calendars and an app. If you have a team, you’ll probably need something that’s more user friendly.

A consultant is unlikely to have a full answer, but the good ones work with their clients to collaboratively find the problems. Almost every problem has multiple valid solutions. Discuss with other people to decide which solutions to try. Only once one’s found the problems can one find some answers (note the plural).

We’re often making judgements about what might be fruitful. We cannot make other people change. We might be able to persuade, but there’s no certainty that it will change the situation or the people.

As we develop a business, our aim should be to become proficient in prediction. Getting this right removes risk and allows us to prepare accordingly. There are of course generalities and rules-of-thumb, but the nuance comes from your business’ specific context and how you adapt as you move forward. Our individual advantages are within the nuance.

Figure out what truly motivates you, and identify the trajectory you’d like to be on. A trajectory is a sense of direction; an intent. Goals are milestones along that trajectory and should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). I find it reasonable to set goals for the week and for six weeks in the future. Goals much further out tend to be notional, rigid (ie: beyond your control so not a goal anyway), wishful thinking, or in many cases become redundant soon after being set.

Profit is the net result of processes that function well. Processes are developed organically over time and require continuous assessment or improvement. Figure out what problems in the business are the problems that need your focus now as we cannot work on everything all the time.

Be realistic about what is good enough. Launch and relaunch changes in processes as quickly as possible to ensure you reap the benefits promptly. Perfection is the enemy of done (ie: make things better).

Websites in particular often suffer from staleness. Where changes are bunched up or held up due to (wrongheaded) thinking around making a ‘better’ change with a big reveal. The more useful approach is usually, ‘What can we do today that will make our site better than it is right now?’ The truth is that most small business websites don’t have much traffic. The traffic they do get needs to present them in the best way possible on that day.

When working on your website, focus on the content and site navigation. Prioritise brevity and representing what you are right now. Understand who you want to see your site and what they need to get from it. If you’re a hospitality or retail business, state your hours and location clearly and keep these up-to-date across your web presence (website, social media, maps, etc). Whatever business you’re in, make it easy to contact you. Google yourself using private browsing or someone else’s phone and digest what you experience. Watch others do this, too.

Identify what is not good enough, and what’s not working at all. Zoom out and speak to others frankly to get a comprehensive picture. Things might be obvious and fixes might be easy. Or they might be unclear and uncomfortable to face. Replacing a broken tool is easy; addressing an underperforming colleague is hard. Focus your attention on fixing the problems and review priorities every morning, week and quarter. Changing focus has a cost, but so does focusing on the wrong thing. Having regular and candid conversations with informed people such as your colleagues, friends and family and advisers will help.

Treat your working self as an employee of your owner self. You work with you. You’re working for yourself which means that you are responsible for the ambitions and responsibilities that your zoomed-out ownership role version of you has. You need the other you, and you should have mutual respect between yourselves.

Make payment terms clear, short and rigid. Poor credit control and cashflow are stressful, expensive and (apparently) the most common reason businesses fail. Allow reasonable time for an invoice to be considered late - my own terms are ten days after receipt. If an invoice is unpaid the day after its due date send a short, polite and gentle reminder email.

Follow what others do, unless you have strong evidence to the contrary? Sometimes this is phrased as not reinventing the wheel, but sometimes there’s an opportunity to make a better wheel. You should have really good reasons for being a pioneer, and you should only pick a few aspects of your business to do that wise. Otherwise, you’re likely to be working extra hard and likely not learning from what everyone else has already figured out.

Use email to agree expectations (proposals, contracts, revisions of scope) and send invoices. Email is universal, accessible, and gives each party a static record for reference.

Use meetings and phones to have discussions. Use instant messaging but don’t expect an instant response. If the matter is urgent, ring them. Be clear early on if urgency should be part of any expectations.

If a verbal conversation has covered anything significant or expectations have changed, it is sometimes useful to follow up with an email to document what was discussed. You might want to sign off by asking if they concur.

As a freelancer you need:

• More than one client
• To charge 1.5-2x what your permanent employed rate would be
• To enjoy (or at least comfortably tolerate) new business conversations