Bandwidth & the BCG

As has been mentioned before, I am no longer a n=1 business.  One of my proudest achievements of the last 12-18 months is the emergence of a team of focused, committed, high-performing associates who deliver my stuff at least as well as me.  Not only do my colleagues treat the work as seriously as I ever did, their fresh eyes see innovations and opportunities that have been passing pass me by.

I deliberately hand over interesting projects and not only when I can’t be in two places at once.  In the medium term this should expand our active client base but for the moment I am embracing personal financial pain in order to radically change my working life.

I am freeing up bandwidth to chase opportunities in an entirely new domain; by this time next year I plan to describe myself as the CMO of a tech start-up.  I will still own and operate a pharma consulting company but it will no longer be the first line of my LinkedIn profile.  In BCG matrix terms I am relegating my old business to ‘cash cow’ status in order to make room for a ‘star’.

I’m excited at the prospect of solving brand new problems in an unfamiliar commercial space.  I’m looking forward to being ‘inexperienced’.

I’m reminded of advice given to me by an improviser in 1991, the year I quit working for other people...

Enjoy not knowing

Babies. Making idiots of us all since, well, forever

We have a baby.  Our daughter born six months ago is a happy, smiley constant source of joy to my wife and me. The story of her provenance is a long and tortuous one but no matter, this is not that tale.  She is here now and is exactly as she should be. 

Today's thought is a follow-on from last week's idea that one of the roles played by my smarter self is to remain vigilant in the face of the dumber version.  There are recognisable patterns: fatigue levels differ on Tuesday morning as against Thursday night and I try to allocate tasks appropriately.

One definition of 'experience' might be to identify, and to operate within, the rhythms of one's working life.

But babies are arrhythmic.  The edicts of Gina Ford notwithstanding, they only know what they want when they want it.  We do our best to anticipate and shape our daughter's rotating need for food, clean clothes, attention, distraction and sleep.  'Shaping' being a euphemism for ignoring her demands for food and attention for at least a little while.  

Thus my carefully calibrated plans to get the tough work done whilst the house is quiet are more often stymied than realised.  My daughter doesn't care whether she's being fed by the smarter or dumber version of her father.  She just wants the food.  

(cue: hollow laughter from my wife whose entire life is presently subsumed by the feeding-changing-cleaning-bathing-washing-feeding cycle)

One partial solution will be the creation of a discrete workspace, either on our property or elsewhere.  This is a work in progress.  Another is to (further) improve my smart-me:dumb-me ratio by staying fit, rested and out of the pub.  A third has been to hire someone to help out with the myriad tasks that are usually entrusted to my dumber self.  The beginning of the end of Headcount: 1?

But mostly my response must be attitudinal.  Our daughter was so longed for for so long and I am blessed with a career that lets me stay close to home for more of the time than most breadwinners.  So I count that blessing.

A final thought: I have nothing but respect for single parents.  The sense of grinding isolation must be close to overwhelming almost all the time, especially if the child is too young to be anything other than demanding.

Protection against my dumber future self

I'm at the end of an absolutely brutal week of travel.  In the office all day Monday.  Night flight to the US to make a pitch presentation on Tuesday.  It went well enough. Night flight back for a full day of work on Wednesday.  Day trip to Switzerland yesterday.  Be careful what you wish for and all that.

No complaints.  As I've said in these pages many times, 'If I'm not on planes I'm probably not getting paid'.  The real challenge is how to keep functioning in amongst these waves of fatigue.  A partial answer may be this: -

Be aware that sometimes you are smarter than usual and sometimes you are dumber.  The job of your smarter self is to protect you against your dumber self for the foreseeable future.

My dumber self forgets things.  He fires off emails with spelling and grammatical errors or worse.  He packs badly and eats poorly. He mis-prioritises and has overly emotional reactions to simple setbacks.  Whether because he's tired, jetlagged or just hungover he is an idiot.

He is an idiot and my smarter, I'd like to say 'normal', self has to mitigate against him.  We all know this.  We've all stood in the middle of a supermarket feeling like an idiot for not writing up a shopping list.  We curse our would-be smarter selves for not thinking this one through.

My smarter self writes lists and sets alarms.  He allocates tasks commensurate with my fluctuating IQ to various times of the day and week.  Aren't we all that much are smarter on Monday morning than on Friday afternoon?  My smarter self is mindful of my tendency to react emotionally when fatigued and plans accordingly.  My smarter self works hard so that the dumber me can lean against a wall in the sunshine with a pint of beer in hand.

It is Friday and the UK Met Office is predicting 26C and sunny.

Running to stand still

Predictable as ever I've fallen for one of the classic blogging blunders; I decided to live an unjournaled life for a time and fell out of the habit of writing.  Not that I've had much of a choice as a proliferation of projects has had me working at a barely sustainable level for over six months now.  My passport has new stamps from all the usual places plus Lebanon, Hungary, Egypt and next week Japan.

I have to monitor my mental energy levels and devote the hours where my concentration is highest to the least forgiving tasks (and clients).  I live in a near-constant state of paranoia that some day soon I'll turn up in Madrid for a meeting with Client A but my slides will be for a German-speaking subsidiary of Client B.

Diet and exercise are more important than ever but not as important as sleep.  I find myself daydreaming about a holiday where all I do is sleep during the day.  In the mean time I do my best to exercise every day I'm at home and every other day when I'm traveling.  In the fortnight when a head cold kept me away from the gym my weight drifted up a disturbing three or four kilos.  When that happens I move slower and fatigue more easily and lose concentration right when I need it most.

I need my accountant, my lawyer and my travel agent to ask all the smart questions the first time we discuss the job.  I'm on the lookout for a new graphic designer and one guy failed the audition the moment he told me that he wasn't a mindreader.

Over Christmas in Australia I ploughed through the last draft of the book I've writing on and off for years.  At best it'll need more time than I can give it but at least it's off the 2013 'To Do list'.  At worst it was a flawed idea badly executed but, hey, at least it's done.  This year I'll be hard pressed to read a complete book, let alone write or edit one.

I have a new business idea.  Something really cool that might just be a scalable add-on to my (decidedly unscalable) consultancy.  The only problem is that Phase 1 of a six or seven step project requires 30-40 quality hours of my time.  The earliest I reckon I can offer that up is July.  So of course I worry that opportunity's window might be closed by then.  I tell myself that this isn't a case of the urgent crowding out the important but I worry that I'll look back in five years and think that taking on that one extra client in February 2013 was a dumb play, regardless of the cash it put in the bank.  And let's be thankful that at least there's cash in the bank.

So much as I'd like to write on these pages more (and more often) I'm not going to make that promise to myself. I'll check in from time to time, especially as my world seems to be changing faster than ever but I doubt that there'll be a discernable pattern.

Until next time...

Possibility v. Limitation

We are deep in the dark process of buying a London flat (apartment). Inevitably this oh-so-time-consuming process is happening as I'm busier than I've ever been.  Happily, my time poverty has forced me to identify a simple heuristic that has probably been there all along...

When I look at a potential place to live, do I first see possibilities or limitations?

Unless my initial, immediate reaction is 'possibility' I thank the estate agent for his time, turn on my heel and head back to the office.  If I experience no moment of excitement whatsoever when contemplating one of the biggest purchases I'll ever make then I'm in the wrong flat.   Life will force compromises aplenty on me before the sale goes through so I need to start with as much enthusiasm as I can manage.

I can look at other parts of my life through the same possibility / limitation heuristic.  I've pulled back from directing or performing improv comedy because where other, younger actors see infinite possibility in the form jaded old me sees only limitation.  Hopefully one day that'll revert and I can reimmerse myself in a craft I love but until then I stay away. Who wants to be cornered at the bar at the after show party with Captain Buzzkill?

It's important not to overthink the heuristic.  Perhaps in Daniel Kahneman's terms it would be System 1 (fast) thinking.  If the 'possibility' in a given project is that there's much money to be made then so be it.  But if any sense of possibility is overwhelmed in the very first instance by thoughts of 'limitation', be they artistic, social, moral, whatever, then the heuristic has spoken: the project ain't for you.

Corporate karma

Tuesday of the first full week of the New Year is apparently the busiest day for job-hunting.  You've given yourself at least a day to get your feet back under the desk but not left it so long that the resolution to work someplace else has been forgotten.

This is also the week that old clients are most likely to get that Happy New Year! email from a consultant like me.  I send these out in waves to ensure that I properly personalise each one.  After all, these are all people with whom I have a history that must be reflected (leveraged) otherwise I might as well be cold calling. And like anyone embarking on that January job search I wait until Tuesday before starting.  That way maybe I'm less likely to be caught up in the First Great Inbox Purge of 2012.

 

With an augur’s intensity I watch my own inbox for replies.  There’s a hierarchy of outcomes from the exercise:-

1. The quick note proposing a call or meeting in the coming weeks is absolutely the most I can hope for
2. The longer note with specific feedback on last year’s results and the plans for the next twelve months isn't awful.  At least my contact took a few minutes to setout the issues that affect me personally
3. The email saying that there's been a change of roles but also giving me the name of the new contact (cc’d) isn't bad.  Managing a baton-change in a client organisation is part of my job
4. It’s hard not to read a quick note announcing a change of roles without any further information as ‘goodbye and good luck’
5. The cursory Happy New Year reply is the email equivalent of a stilted exchange of pleasantries whilst waiting for an elevator

Optimist that I am, getting no response at all is still reason for hope.  Maybe my contact isn't back at her desk for another week.  Maybe she’s gone straight into a procession of heavy-duty meetings.  Or maybe she’s surreptitiously on the job hunt herself, in which case there's no point me being on her radar until she either gets settled in a new position or resigns herself to the current role and refocuses on her 2012 To Do List.  I make a note to try again in mid-March.

I've long believed that no genuine marketing effort goes ultimately unrewarded.  Those efforts must be genuine, an ongoing part of the day-to-day job and not just the occasional paroxysm of activity intended to refill an otherwise empty calendar. And don't be surprised when that reward arrives from an unexpected direction.  Yesterday I got an unsolicited email requesting a meeting in Italy as soon as is convenient.  Not so much attributable cause-and-effect as ‘corporate karma’.

 

Approach the low-yield tasks with the right attitude and trust that the cosmos is taking note

Advice for the self-employed (January edition)

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.

I finished my last job of last year the week of Christmas.  I never have paid consulting work that late in the year.  The preceding months are a blurred pastiche of meetings, telecons, airports and familiar hotel rooms in cities I'd never visited before.  Back in August my business accelerated and by December I was tumbling down the chute that opens with exhilaration then descends through fatigue, helplessness and exhaustion before bottoming out in tangible, physical illness.  Be careful what you wish for.

 

Sixteen days later I'm in a more familiar state of mind: my ambitions moving faster than my world.  I'm back to wanting more than what's on offer.  I'm impatient and paranoid.  Am I being deliberately excluded?  Are potential clients buying my old book instead of hiring the new me? The glass between me and a shining future is smudged with my greasy noseprints.  I read the Euro crisis stories and fret that last year was my financial high water mark. Then I worry that a smarter, savvier me would look at the state of the world and see where there's a quid to be made from all this chaos.  A fortnight is a long time in self-employment.

 

I've been at this Headcount:1 game a long time now (viz. my previous post.) so here’s my advice to those underemployed self-employed folks out there who spent the Christmas-New Year interregnum drinking too much and ignoring the gnawing knowledge that you don't have guaranteed work lined up for January already.  Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’ is always a good place to start: -

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Self-employment means that is that there's no boss to impress, no underling to browbeat and no rivalrous colleague to outmanoeuvre.  The brutal truth is that only thing you get to change is you.

 

January 6 is just too soon to start badgering clients so you're tempted to run headlong at all those clichéd resolutions: diet & exercise,better sleep patterns and commendable reading habits.  This impulse is prophylactic at best; racking up cosmic credits for the next time the spiralling chute opens beneath you.  Except that there is no godly ledger balancing a January spent at the gym against a May-time diet of airport pizza and beer.  At worst these resolutions are symptomatic of the very mismatch between ambition and action that you're looking to escape.  Even as you sweat over The Economist some part of you knows that you're just waiting for the phone call that will fill your days.  Diet and exercise might be change but not the sort you can really believe in. 

 

Devoting all this excess time to your actual business can be more damaging still. Parkinson’s Law assumes at least some sort of deadline.

 

My advice to my time-rich client-poor comrades is as follows: -

Find some small, new, discrete thing and do it well.

Not some rambling yearlong project.  You have one of those already: building your business.  Rather that small thing that is affordable in terms of both your time and money but that doesn't require you waiting on anyone else.  A one-off class.  A lecture. A walk to a place you've never been before.  An afternoon taking photos.  A blog post. Don't reorganise your life but somehow extend it.  A measure might be this to complete some thing that allows you to greet your life partner at the door with, “Guess what I did today?” Achievement, no matter how minor, is not risible.

 

Create small ambitions that are under your control and sit them alongside those larger ones that are not. But do this small thing for its own sake, not with one eye fastened on the far side of the smudgy glass.

And don't worry too much about 2012.  My reading of the news is that we all, those with bosses and offices and those without, are going to hell in a handbasket of soon-to-be resurrected European currencies anyway.

 

Happy New Year.

Funny. And good in bed

My wife and I are back in Australia. We're staying with her mother and family in Sydney for a week or so. Almost everyone in the household is either self-employed or working for a start-up, which offers up some really interesting compare-and-contrast breakfast table conversations.

Hal has had several successful careers but now works from home as a foreign exchange trader. The arrangement is that he trades for himself but as part of a global cohort whose aggregate efforts are on behalf of an investment fund.  The business follows a sort of league table approach whereby as he proves his abilities the organisation allows him to trade larger amounts and so earn more.

After a year or so he's developed a keen sense of the market and is highly aware of the the combination of volume and volatility (driven by planned and unplanned news events) he needs to thrive and has climbed several rungs on the ladder already.  To do so he's adopted all the necessary professional behaviours that I would say are actually more important when working from home than anywhere else.  He'd no more trade with a hangover than I'd walk into a training room naked.

As I looked at the procession of charts and numbers flickering across the three screens on his desk I thought, "I could do that."

Of course I did. Men of my age and education all reckon we're the funniest guy at the party, a porn star in the bedroom, a Navy SEAL in a bar fight and a 'big swinging dick' in front of the trading screens

Buying time, expecting attention

In the early 90's I once worked on a project to establish a sales/marketing culture for a mid-tier pharma company establishing it's own Australian operation for the first time. Their products were important, if a little mundane and somewhat limited in scope. The company had identified that as the size of the business meant that there was almost no scope for career advancement it was going to struggle to recruit effective salespeople.

Their solution was to staff the sales force with experienced women looking to reenter the industry after having children. Prima facie it was a good fit. The company needed solid experienced performers but who weren't interested in promotion and the women wanted to rejoin the workforce but on more sympathetic, less careerist terms. With the right HR attitude to flexible working hours it looked like a 'win-win'.

For a while it worked well enough. The new team was highly energised and quickly established a healthy, credible presence in the marketplace. Sure, the job-sharing and ongoing maternity leave coverage issues required additional Head Office and sales manager admin but no more than had been anticipated.

About nine months later, after the initial euphoria of launch had died down, the mood changed abruptly. Both management and the individual salespeople were suddenly, totally disenchanted. The company expected the women to still be grateful for the opportunity to rejoin the workforce on such sympathetic terms and that gratitude to manifest itself as greater attention to detail. The women couldn't see what the problem was: they were turning up and doing the job (sick kids who needed early collection from child care notwithstanding) weren't they?

The women were selling time only whereas the company thought that their (complete) attention came as part of the package. Within a year the complexion of the team had shifted back to the usual blend of unambitious old stagers, thrusting careerists and a few women with young children but decent family support to allay the early-pick-up-from-child-care-issue.

No pregnant person can give an employer his or her complete attention. Ditto for anyone with a new baby. It doesn't matter of that baby is real or metaphoric (i.e. a nascent IOS app, a comedy career or a that business you're starting up on the side) and it's no less true if both you and your employer buy into the fiction that selling only your time will be sufficient.

Something you love more than your job is always going to take attention away from that job. Because in part that's what love is.

Disappointed Bridge

Disappointed Bridge was the dumbest company name I ever came up with. The business in question was going to be the TV production arm of a theatre company we'd been running successfully in Sydney for a number of years. As part of this move the three founders invited Bryan to join us as a partner. He was a friend with a strong background in television but I suspect he really only came on board because of our cool offices.

And they were so, so cool; a former dance studio with a massive sprung wooden floor in a converted pier with panoramic views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The space was far too big for our meagre needs when we weren't actually rehearsing but when a friend offered us the chance to sublet, the wow factor was such that we couldn't turn it down.

Immediately after Bryan joined us we settled into the artfully spaced sofas and started brainstorming ideas for the new venture as a matter of urgency. Nothing so workaday as ideas for an actual television show mind; we needed a cool name for the business itself. And only a name as cool as our offices would suffice.

We ran an unsurprising gamut of obliquely clever and archly fey suggestions, including the obvious but taken 'Pier Productions', when I hit upon it, "Disappointed Bridge Productions!"

This was met with a predictable silence. I'd been reading James Joyce's Ulysses (which tells you everything you need to know about who I was at the time).

"There's a great joke in Ulysses: 'What's the definition of a pier? A disappointed bridge.'"

Genius, I thought; a company name that was apposite, witty and just a little off the mainstream. Just like the TV we planned to make.  Bryan, who knew me less well than the others but TV far better was withering in his sarcasm, "Yeah, because it's going to sound great when we're waiting in the lobby of Channel Nine and the receptionist calls up and says, 'The guys from Disappointing Bridge' are here to see you".

Bryan now makes lots of TV. I do not.

The unreasonable man

Whereas back in UK the 1.7million-person cost containment system known as the NHS continues to frustrate all who encounter it, both within and without.

I've long been of the view that the scarcest resource in the entire network is human energy required of a health care professional who will fight for the good of the patient.  This is not to say that there's malice or even negligence at work but rather an inertia that elevates older and cheaper therapies over newer, more expensive ones.  Doctors are soothingly told to be reasonable, to avoid cruelly raising a patient's expectations with talk of state-of-the-art treatments.  All of which brings to mind the great GBS: -

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw

Which is certainly true of the NHS; drug budget blow-outs are avoided due to the reasonableness (read: exhaustion) of the staff.  An entirely unspoken aspect of the British pharma representative's job is to locate that rare unreasonable man.

Commitment

Sales Manager 1: Everyone in the team is still 100% committed to using your approach to selling the product.

Sales Manager 2: Yeah, it's just that they just don't apply it in the real world all that often.

Talk is cheap.  Too many of my clients' have cultures wherein a proclamation of commitment is sufficient for management's gaze to turn elsewhere.  As long as we're 'all singing from the same hymn sheet' and 'making the right noises' then we're okay, right?

Except that in the business of behavioural change shouldn't there be an expectation that behaviour actually, y'know, changes?  The fulsome yet disingenuous public endorsement of someone elses plan is the oldest rhetorical play in the book.  Yet we knowingly allow ourselves to fall for it anyway.

I heard a fantastic quote from the filmmaker Milos Forman: -

You cannot make a real commitment, unless you realise that it's a choice, that you keep making again and again

Narcissism of small differences

No surprises in these articles from Pharmalot and Reuters outlining the shift in balance between Primary Care (GP) sales teams and their hospital colleagues.  For years to come the biggest selling drugs in the world will be prescribed by oncologists and other specialists so that's where the reps will be pointed.

From the inside there might be seem to be a disctinction between these two branches of pharma selling: -

Hospital or specialty sales jobs require more intellectual horsepower than the primary care rep has.  That’s why they’re paid more and get more face time with the doctors

'Industry Insider' commenting on the Pharmalot article

In my experience the jobs are essentially the same.  Okay, the science might be more complex and illnesses more serious but the marketing is very simple in both cases; Freud's 'narcissism of small differences' comes to mind.

A Decent Proposal

I've spent much of the last week grinding out a proposal for a large project.  Often I find writing the document to be harder work than actually delivering the project.  There appear to be possible three explanations for this: -

1. Parkinson's Law.  After an extremely busy stretch my time is freer and so a task that would otherwise have been properly completed in hours expanded to take days
2. Big Projects need Big Documents.  The job is unquestionably large and quite complicated (multimarket, potentially requiring multilingual delivery, etc).  Ironically, it's the simplicity of my approach that's got me invited onto the project team yet my instincts are screaming out for a long and complex proposal
3. The Unseen Audience.  One of the advantages in making a face-to-face presentation is that I know exactly who I'm speaking to.  This sounds obvious but consider the alternative: an emailed PDF (or PPT presentation) will almost certainly be circulated amongst stakeholders who I am yet to meet.  I have no idea of their needs, level of involvement or even their level of written English.  Do they need to understand my background before getting into the detail or are they going to go straight for the costings?

A client once described to me a phenomenon known as 'fear-based slide proliferation': -

When addressing an unknown audience (or one that's scary in some other way) the temptation to add in just one more PowerPoint slide can be irresistible

This is apposite because what I'm describing here is the effect of fear.  Freelancers fall prey to Parkinson's Law because we're terrified of not being busy.  Big projects are a high stakes game.  An unseen audience can seem unknowable.  The impulse to work harder and longer in the face of such things is natural.  My business is built entirely on project work.  I do a relatively small number of high-value projects a year so proposals are a vital part of my workstream.  It just frustrates me that I'm not more efficient at writing them.

But as inevitable as death comes the moment when I have to embrace that unsettlingly liberating feeling that comes as I hit 'send'.

Manufactured urgency

My projects fall into two broad categories: -

1. Product launches
2. Institutional / cultural change

Implemented correctly, my IP has value in both scenarios, however, it needs to be positioned  differently in each case to achieve the desired outcome.  Any project that seeks both endpoints (i.e. successfully launch a product + change a sales culture) will almost certainly fail.

I prefer working on launches.  The heady combination of defined timelines and clearly understood success criteria brings out my best.  Who doesn't enjoy the challenge of 'getting it right the first time'?*

Institutional change is different.  These projects are too often plagued by a poorly manufactured sense of urgency driven by soft deadlines and project teams who are easily distracted by higher priority tasks (like product launches).  This is not to say that such projects aren't vital, just that the organisational benefits are often subtle to the point of immeasurability.

This is not solely, or even primarily, an external consultant's perspective; being invited to work on a product launch is an unambiguously gilt-edged opportunity whereas a cultural change project is often perceived as a poisoned chalice.

None of this is especially noteworthy.  Neither is, I suppose, my conclusion: that smaller consultancies are better at finite, high octane projects like product launches.  We don't have the manpower or the willpower for the endless meetings that come with cultural change projects.  We tire of writing 'reminder' emails to follow up on proposals written in good faith and great urgency in response to artificial deadlines.  And unlike the likes of McKinsey, we rarely have the stomach to bill by the hour for work that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Perhaps it's my performing background but I do interventions better than processes.  I find it easier to enact change in people than systems.  In fact the first thing I'll do if you offer me process work is convert the project into a series of face-to-face events so that I can focus the system's attention and demonstrate value.  Which is, of course, just another way of manufacturing urgency.

* A long-standing joke of mine is that launch is the only marketing activity that pharma knows how to do well; its instinctive response to any other scenario is 'relaunch'

2B or not 2 B2C

On Thursday I did what I suspect was one of my last ever stand-up gigs.  I'm not sure when the absolute last one will be but it's fair to say that I have many more gigs behind me than ahead.  It was a pleasant enough show run by an old comedy friend in a country pub.  My set went well but it's a long time since a gig felt like a portal to anywhere special and in the five years I've been learning this craft my life, especially my business life, has moved on.

This was crystalised for me by a throwaway line in a podcast about the 90's Dotcom boom.  The discussion centred on the two basic business models operating at that time:-

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) versus Business-to-Business (B2B)

A distinction that perfectly illustrates the divide between my comedy and my consulting.  It is the divide between Art and Commerce.  As much as I like to think I have something to say to other individuals (B2C, Art), I have twenty plus years evidence that what the cosmos wants to reward me for are my insights into how companies operate and how they could do so better (B2B, Commerce).

Set out in print it's obvious.  I am a journeyman comic who's happy to pick up a few quid for a twenty minute set in the back room of a pub in rural Wiltshire but I am also one of the highest paid consultants in my field with clients all over the globe.  My ability to make a few punters laugh on a Saturday night is passable whereas the effect I will have on your pharmaceutical sales/marketing operation is unsurpassed.

From an early age it seems as if we're programmed to aim first for Art.  My parents stumped up for lessons in music and drama and art.  They spend their weekends ferrying me and my sisters to performances on stage and sporting fields across rural NSW.  Yes, I know that a child's participation in sport or art is its own reward but buried in there somewhere in there was the message that if I had the talent then Art (including sport) was the direction my life should take.  How many conversations have we each endured with disillusioned friends and colleagues revealing that they were actually 'quite good' at some Art or other, lamenting the day they threw it over in favour of the financially secure embrace of Commerce?

Commerce is Plan B.

In generations past Art was something that you did on the side.  Few people could afford to give up their day jobs.  Nowadays new media's appetite for 'content' has led to rampant inflation in the earnings of our top sportsmen (but not sportswomen), actors, comics and the like.  Papers and magazines responded by overpaying snarky columnists to retain readers.  Needing something or someone evermore 'outrageous' to write about they in turn opened the door for the BritArt master branders like Tracey Emin and especially Damien Hirst to parlay scarcely deserved notoriety into massive financial windfalls.  For a chosen few Art now pays like never before.  The rest of us stand, necks craned, on the far side of the velvet rope.

I've suffered ferocious writers block with my comedy for almost two years.  It's gotten so bad that in the cause of generating interesting and unique material I've contemplated taking on some strange, arduous new experience like the Three Peaks challenge, the Alpha Course or fatherhood.  This is what middling comics do when they've extracted all available humour from their upbringing and neighbourhood.  Yet my experiences as a stand-up have helped take my consulting to another level.  Not only has my ability to command attention in a room been strengthened but my arduous experiences in comedy have also afforded any number of interesting and unique angles as a consultant.  Oh, the irony.

I am a quite exceptional marketing consultant and an entirely unexceptional stand-up comic.  My talents obviously lie in B2B.  Why is it so hard to admit this fact?  When I meet someone at a party why do I want to describe myself as a performer and writer rather than as 'a marketing consultant who helps drug companies sell their drugs better'?

What isn't to be just isn't to be.  I think I'm sufficiently free of self-delusion to know that I'm not just one more stand-up gig away from fame and fortune.  The fortune is more or less covered.  It's the fame I'm denied.

Seth Godin on failure

Seth Godin's site still throws up some decent insights from time to time...

Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:

1. Whenever possible, take on specific projects
2. Make detailed promises about what success looks like and when it will occur
3. Engage others in your projects. If you fail, they should be involved and know that they will fail with you
4. Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the vivid, unlikely and ultimately non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away
5. Concentrate your energy and will on the elements of the project that you have influence on, ignore external events that you can't avoid or change 
6. When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won't make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they've never done it

I especially like 3.  Involving others is the first necessary step away from self-employed solipsism.

A bird in the hand is worth...

This post may be a bit dry for some.  I'm going to try and set out the new way of forecasting that I'm applying to my consulting business.  The more I think about it the more I'm sure that these principles apply to most freelancers including stand-up comics, graphic designers and the like.

Every successful freelancer struggles with the 'feast or famine' phenomenon whereby you're either too busy to scratch yourself or else you're sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.  The problem stems from failing to generate future work whilst you're preoccupied with the challenges of the present.  Most of us fall into the dreadful habit of not worrying about the blank page in the diary until that actual day.  The oh-so-astute Kate Smurfwaite nailed this with an observation that you often go through periods of always gigging with the same few comics because they emailed with the same promoters s you on the same day three months previously.

I can't remove the need to constantly be prospecting for new business but there are ways to be smart about it.  Firstly, focus on the money, not the diary.  For fear of an empty diary it's easy to fall into the trap of selling your at a discount.  The logic is that it's better to be busy but underpaid than, I dunno, going to the gym and then reading a book.

This diary / money nexus has to be inverted.  The question you need to ask is: how much do I want to earn in a year?  Work out how much do you need to pay the bills, to add to your savings and still have a little left over to splash around to prove to yourself and the world that this self-employment malarkey is working out.

Let's call that 'annual earnings' figure A

Have a good hard look at it.  If it doesn't look a little daunting then you probably haven't got the maths right.  Once you're happy, divide it by four as we're going to work in quarters.

Let's call that 'quarterly earnings' figure Q

Now rather than one big problem (A) you've got four smaller problems but they won't seem to be problems of equal size.  If we say we're going to start this new regimen on April Fools Day then the challenge of earning Q for April-May-June probably seems much more daunting than for January-February-March.  Or maybe your diary's looking good up until summer and you've got less of a handle on July-August-September.  Either way, the psychological challenges represented by Q fluctuate over time.

From here in on you'll need pen and paper or (better still) a spreadsheet.  Create four columns, one for each quarter with three rows.  Write Q at the bottom of the first row as per below

Now get your diary and enter every definite job in the appropriate quarter.  Only include those where you are 100% sure that your services will be needed and that you will be paid.

Let's call these 'definite earnings' D

List the details of D in the top row of appropriate quarter and subtract that from Q.  Call that new figure Qa

This example roughly follows the pattern that my business follows: few clients book me a long way in advance so I have to be comfortable with a 3-6 month horizon.  I know I should be worried that the end of the year and early 2012 are looking thin but I also need to know what to do with that worry.

Go back to your diary.  Now list every probable job by quarter.  Define 'probable' as anything where there's a better than 2 in 3 chance of your services will be needed and that you will be paid.

Let's call these 'probable earnings' P

List the details of P in the top row of appropriate quarter.  Now divide P by 1.5 and subtract that from Qa to get Qb

Why 1.5?  Because we think there's about a 2 in 3 chance of the job coming off.  And look what I've learned; I'm probably going to miss my budget (Q) for April-May-June by 17 but I'm more than fine for July-August-September.  More importantly for the period between October and March I still have a lot of work to do.  Even though I might bill another 360 in October-December, which would get me to 510, the jobs aren't booked yet so I'd be a fool to bank on them.  And I still have plenty of work to do for the start of 2012.

We have to make up the difference in the bottom row.  This is where the diary is of less use than the old the contact list, that stack of business cards and the guy who said to give him a call some time.  We're deep in maybeland.

So let's call these 'maybe earnings' M

There are only two places that these earnings can conceivably come from:-

1. Finding new clients (Mnc), or
2. Selling new products (Mnp) to old clients

I've had my UK business for almost six years, so I have enough data to know that my average time from first meeting with a client to actually delivering a project is 8.67 months.  I've never been able to reduce this.  I now accept it as a fact of my working life.  So even if I met a potential client today I can't realistically bank on anything (Mnc) before January.

Another problem is I'm not especially good at putting time aside for new product development (Mnp).  Almost all of my innovations have emerged as solutions to problems articulated by clients and I'm actually quite crap at building the thing that meets the unrecognised need.  But I do have a few ideas that have worked in one market but have yet to be taken up in others so there's hope for me yet.

I guess we'd better input M into our spreadsheet

This bottom row always has a fantasy element about it, however, the rule is you must keep the Qc fantasy to the right hand side of the page.  If I could realistically anticipate any new business in the next six months then it should appear in the middle row (Qb).  If I need it to happen later in the year it's a task, needing it tomorrow makes it a prayer.

In keeping with my 8.67 month average I've assumed I'll get no new clients (Mnc) before next January.  This means that all of my October-December earnings have to come from existing clients (Mnp).

To temper the fantasy just a little you'll notice that I reckon there's only about a 1 in 3 chance of any Qc earnings actually coming off; remember that we're selling either something that doesn't yet exist or to someone we haven't met.  So we have to be able to identify three times as many Qc opportunities.

Summary
My imaginary business might just survive the next twelve months.  Well done me.  But for that to happen I've got to find new things to sell to my existing clients as well as speaking to new ones.  I knew that already.  The nasty truth I've was avoiding was that both these tasks have to happen now.

Variations
There are a few obvious variations to this basic model that will make it more applicable.  For example, I've assumed that the demand for my stuff is constant throughout the year (500 / quarter).  If your business dries up in the summer then you the initial Q figure for that quarter and compensate with higher targets over the rest of the year.  Anyone contemplating the Edinburgh Fringe may well have a negative figure for July-August-September. 

I've also gone for conversion rates (1.5 and 3) that are a realistic reflection of the way my industry operates but may be questionable elsewhere. 

In Conclusion
As I said at the beginning this is a new technique for me and I apologise if in my excitement I've overcomplicated it.  Like many good ideas it seems to clarify something that I've long known but never articulated.  I like knowing where I need to focus my attention.  I like that it shines a harsh light on the naive expectation that 'somewhere, someone unknown to me is about to come to my rescue'.

I like that if I can see a feast on the horizon then I can decide that next week isn't a famine but a chance to finish that book.

A grim game of pass the parcel

For me a consulting project is typically built on a bilateral relationship: there's just me and the customer. This is not to say that I don't expect to have a number of contacts within the client organisation, only that there's usually a clear vision and a single, one-way financial flow (them to me).

I've been spoilt. For years I've been spared the ongoing, low-level, zero-sum-game aggravation of multilateral relationships that a complex, event-driven project entails.

Next year a piece of my work is the centrepiece of a large meeting that apparently also requires an advertising agency, a graphic design firm and a special events supplier. On the far side of this triumvirate is a necessary array of translators, printers, airlines, hotels and so on. A complex situation is thus made even more complicated by flagrant jockeying for position over interminable teleconferences.  I like to think I play nicely with others (despite years of sole tradership submitted as evidence to the contrary). No, the conflict hasn't arisen over personality but due to billing mechanisms.

I have long charged a high day-rate that acts as a sort of whole-of-project fee. Once we agree on a number I'm committing myself to everything necessary to drag the project over the line. This is works very well for my standard project-driven bilateral relationship.

Contrast this with the more typical agency relationship where fees are generated based on hourly billing but where there's a ceiling to the total fee. This means that the agency's agenda is to eagerly volunteer for all work on offer up until the fee ceiling is reached and then either negotiate an elevation of that ceiling or be compelled to decline any excess tasks. The ability to negotiate this elevation without displeasing the client is the mark of a good account service person.

What happens in a situation like the present; a large, multi-player project where there is a substantial but very finite budget? Fee structures drive behaviours in evermore obvious ways. The early days were a gold rush; everyone magnanimously volunteered to take on each new task without regard for the actual competency of the volunteering company. Agencies were organising travel and graphic design firms were commissioning translation services.  This is when strong clients are invaluable; they see what's going on and put a stop to at least the most flagrant overreaching.

Why aren't there more strong clients?

Now the seam is tapping out and there's a growing list of fiddly, unpleasant tasks are being shifted from supplier to supplier, in danger of not being done at all. We've suddenly gone from gold rush to a grim game of pass the parcel and the project is beginning to suffer.

My fee structure (and personal philosophy) leaves me especially exposed; my inclination is say, "Oh for goodness' sake just let me do it." which, is of course what everyone else is waiting for.  It's all horribly demotivating but what can I do?

When the big day comes I'll be the one standing up and speaking whilst everyone else is already back at the office drafting their invoices.

Beginners' mind

I'm on my way to Zurich for a kick-off meeting for a new project. It's a new client, new product and new therapy area so I've spent the last few days immersed in the detail.

For me this periodic requirement to start from scratch and quickly learn the intricacies of a new field is one of the chief joys of consultancy work. I enjoy the sense that I've gone from zero knowledge about an area to maybe 85% comprehension in a matter of days.

I think that much of this pleasure comes from what Zen philosophy calls 'the beginners' mind': -

Having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject

I trust in my ability to quickly learn enough to ask intelligent if somewhat naive questions. In fact it's the quality of these questions that dictate my worth as a consultant.

Being paid to be a constant beginner can be liberating but of course it comes with a caveat: 85% comprehension is a very long way from mastery; tomorrow I need to know just enough to help my clients see their world through fresh eyes.