A price-maker but a date-taker
I've found myself musing on the nature of success. When you're in the middle of a life how do you know if it's going well?
This is especially acute if you're self-employed and thus denied the external loci of the annual performance review, the promotion achieved or denied and the size of your bonus. What indicators can you look to to vindicate the choice you made to go out on your own? I don't think it's enough to get to the end of the tax year and check the bank account, especially as money is rarely the chief reason why people start their own businesses. Making money is necessary for survival but not sufficient for success.
I need an array of projects at different stages of the development cycle. These projects should be with a range of clients and preferably spread around the world.
My development cycle runs something like this: -
- Initial inquiry ➙ credentials presentation
- Identified need ➙ costed proposal
- Project sign-off & timeline agreed
- Design ➙ delivery ➙ invoice
- Feedback
- Initial discussion on follow-up
Because my work requires largish numbers of people to be herded into a single room I have very little influence over the delivery date of the project. I'm a price-maker but a date-taker.
Summer is always quiet in Europe because of holidays. January is busy because everyone wants kick-off meetings which means that December is a high-stress month of preparation interrupted by the 'silly season'.
So can I achieve this even spread of projects over the year? Geography helps as America takes shorter summer holidays than Europe and my Asian clients operate with less seasonality still (Chinese New Year notwithstanding). More important is upping the variety of my offering: if my business is built solely on 'energiser' sessions for sales teams then I'm going to be busy at New Year and a la rentrée and no other time. That's not going to make me feel successful.
A good starting point is actually documenting the development cycle. Understanding where each active project is sitting on the continuum helps me to spot upcoming periods of stress. It also forces me to keep prospecting for new work through the busy patches and it forces me to develop offerings that aren't so seasonal; for example working with smaller, more easily assembled groups of marketing as well as larger sales teams.
If in the course of a week I'm pitching, writing proposals, meeting new clients for the first time and actually delivering a project then I'm pleased. Whenever I can see months that look like this I sometimes go crazy and start wishing for a vacation.
The self-employed: often pleased, rarely happy.