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.

Such a very long time between drinks

I see that I last wrote in these pages on February 11.  Seven months and God knows how many miles ago.  The reputation that I've assiduously built over the eight or so years in the UK now precedes me around the world.  I find myself in all sorts of priviledged positions.  I am an insider.  People who are new to a client company are told to make contact with me to learn what's going on.  I'm asked to give feedback to other agencies.  I have become, in some circles at least, a 'trusted advisor'.  This is the holy grail of consultancy.

It's doubtful that I gain anything by even stating as much in these pages.  Discretion is a big part of trust and even writing as I write right now feels like an impulse to self-sabotage.  Except that the internet is such a wonderful place to make huge mistakes in plain sight.  Better even than the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I am a consultant now and not much else.  No time for producing theatre or performing comedy.  No time even to consume it.  I wake up early and work online or I fly somewhere to do my thing in person.  A week without passing through an airport feels strange these days.

But soon I am to be something else besides.  After nearly ten years of trying I am to be a father.  A baby girl will enter our lives on Christmas Day, if not before.  And then everything must change.  Part of the reason that I've embraced the Global Loman lifestyle is that it's nice to be wanted and especially nice to be wanted in far-flung parts.  But soon I'll be wanted more at home than anywhere else on the planet.

I have no idea what that wll be like but I can't wait to find out.

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...

The peculiar pressure on farmers

I'm on my way back to London after ten days in Australia, most of which was spent on the farm where I grew up in central NSW.  The focus of the business is mostly cattle and I spent the week lending a hand as it's weaning season.  I'd like to think that I haven't forgotten everything I knew about working in cattle yards and I don't think I totally embarrassed myself.

Farming, or more specifically what is called 'grazing' in Australia (ie producing food from livestock not crops) is a strange business because the only thing that you can definitely count on is that something will go wrong.  The scale of the setback can range from minor inconvenience of, say, a cow barrelling through a fence and away from the herd, to existential crises such as bushfire or an outbreak of foot and mouth.  Last week it was the cumulative effect of the minor things that struck me most.

You make your livelihood working with massive animals which, if they could be said to have any sort of agenda, have no earthly reason to make life easy for you.  Why should they?  At some stage they or their offspring will be sold as meat.  Of course whatever sentience a cow has stops along way short of this but they instinct tells them that humans are to be feared.  Luckily this means that mostly they run away from you.  Mostly but not always.

On a good day the things that go wrong are minor irritants.  Locating the newborn calf that was separated from its mother during the move is a annoying but rewarding part of the job.  It's sort of the rural parallel of the document that didn't get backed up.  Time and energy will be needed to rectify the situation.  The difference is in the timeliness.  The longer the document us left the more times and energy will be required to rectify the problem.  Still, not much truly suffers if it isn't until Monday that the document is rewritten and resent.  If the newborn calf is left that long it will die cruelly.

On a good day the entire herd runs through the gates and into yards in a smooth and orderly way.  Nothing jumps a fence or barrels past you as you're drafting.  The drenching or marking or whatever you're doing goes well and you get home yourself at a reasonable time.  There aren't that many good days.  Something always cocks up and yet again you're finishing work in the dark.  This is why no one working with livestock is ever consistently on time.  It isn't because they haven't organised their worklives as well as office workers but rather because the environment is that much more haphazard.

The management consultant who declares that human beings to be 'the most unpredictable of all animals' has never had to anticipate exactly how a distraught cow will act when she hears her calf bellowing from two paddocks over.

Gross Südland

"What you have to understand," I told an old friend as we sat in a waterside cafe in Sydney drinking wine, "is that the Greeks just don't pay their taxes."

"You mean they don't like paying tax.  Who does?"

"No.  They just don't pay them.  Anyone who pays tax is stupid.  At a barbecue you'd boast about how little the government got from you last year."

"But, but you have to pay tax.  You just have to.  I don't understand.  If you don't pay them then nothing works."

When back in Australia a few months ago I had this exact conversation - my take on the Euro crisis - again and again.  Whenever the discussion got to the Greek's diffidence to tax the reaction of my family and friends was the same: disbelief and barely suppressed outrage at a nation blithely refusing to pay its own way.

In Europe only my German friends react this way.  It occurred to me that this is no coincidence because: -

Of all the countries in Europe, including Britain, the country with which Australia most shares an outlook is modern Germany.

We may speak the same language, play the same sport and share a similar sense of humour to the Brits but our wider attitudes are increasingly Germanic.  We work hard and expect other to do likewise.  Driving on either the autobahn or its Australian equivalent there is an understanding that if the law is sensible it will be obeyed.  In a world of Keynesian pump-primers, both countries are run by deficit hawks who are paranoid about inflation above all other economic woes, although Australia's scars from the 1980's are nothing next to the rise of Nazism.

Although we play English sports we approach them with a German attitude.  Cricket is a game to be won not merely played.  Ditto rugby.  Our reaction to the Olympic team returning gold-less from the 1976 games (for the only time in our history) was to found the oh-so scientific Australian Institute of Sport.  We then staffed it with German coaches.  The backhanded English compliment "the Australian approach to sport" is essentially analogous with "the German approach to business": methodical, hard-working and intolerant of failure. 

Australia and Germany each struggle to reconcile the sensibilities of the dominant culture with the needed changes brought about by Islamic immigration.  The word 'genocide' appears in both histories, albeit unfairly in Australia's case.  The merest whiff of racism is rightfully exposed and condemned from all sides.  We are the only G20 nations where the Green movement has serious traction.  We see ourselves as the 'grown-up' country in our region so of course each pay our taxes, grudgingly perhaps but always in full.

We each drink lots of beer.  Not as much as Ireland or the Czech Republic but we both make the Top Five per capita consumption.  Then again, it's only beer, surely the most benign of alcoholic beverages.

I find working with Germans a far easier proposition than with the French, who intellectualise everything, or even the English, where every comment needs to be run through a decoder.  And Germans do have a sense of humour, however, it only appears after you've proven that you're not going to waste anyone's time.

When the comparison first occurred to me I was horrified and this theory still horrifies my Australian friends.  But if we have to resemble anyone then why not a country embarked on an ongoing project of national reinvention built on hard work and innovation without resorting to callous American inequality?  So sing it with me: -

Australien uber alles...

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

The art of selling

The Schumpeter column in the October 22 Economist (no link available) explores the issue of variability amongst sales teams: -

the performance of salespeople within a single company typically varies by a factor of three.  And the difference between the best and worst companies when it comes to selling is far greater than the difference for functions such as supply-chain management, purchasing or finance.

I guess I'm so close to this issue (I spend so much time with sales teams, albeit only in health care) that the cross-departmental comparison surprised me.  An acceptance of such a broad spread in performance within a team undoubtedly leads to this greater variability between teams or companies.  Most of my clients implicitly employ me to improve the performance of the middle 70%; the thinking being that the top 15% are alchemists who we do well to leave undisturbed and the bottom 15% are heading out the door anyway.

The article speaks to the problem that it is so difficult to first standardise, then reproduce, the behaviours of the high performers that companies are left frustrated, reduced to describing selling as an 'art' as opposed to a 'science'.  I have no problem with this frustration (in fact it benefits me) because I don't see science and art as polar opposites.  Furthermore the better metrics that science requires are often fool's gold: -

Firms are starting to track reps much more closely, usually to their dismay.  Salesforce.com sells tools which allow sales managers to track on a daily basis what their minions are up to.

A number of clients of mine have been taken in by salesforce.com and similar tracking systems and after nine or so months the same 70-30 rule applies: 15% are unreplicably good, 15% aren't suited to the gig and then there's everyone else.  The problem with tracking that middle 70% and the rewarding them on measurable behaviours is that, as the old sales axiom has it, you should expect what you inspect and alas, the measurable behaviours of the alchemists aren't the ones responsible for their success.  Furthermore, systems like salesforce.com only work at all when the reps themselves enter the information about what they're doing into the system.

I like salespeople.  It's isn't hard to like people whose job it is to be likeable.  The immeasurable that I recognise in the good ones is the same as with high-performing actors, improvisers and stand-up comics, all of whom say words aloud for a living: when they are on the job they are present.   This translates into a wonderful ability to slow time such that the thing they say is the only thing that needs saying.

Part of my job is to encourage my clients to see their employees as artists of sorts (we're called Dramatic Change after all).  Too much salesforce.com has the effect of turning them into data entry clerks of their own behaviour, which isn't science so much as drudgery.

Getting good at the new thing

Kevin Kelly recently posted a great essay entitled What You Don't Have To Do.  He sets out hierarchy of ascending levels of 'working smart': -

1. Doing what is required
2. Doing more than is required
3. Trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are smart at
4. Making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective or that need to be done at all
5. Do only jobs (that really need to be done) that you are good at doing
6. Doing that work that no one else could do

This is a profoundly elegant understanding of what success looks like.  It's how a good careers have always unfolded: apprentice then journeyman then master.

When I think about those around me in unhappy careers (which is not the same as being in an unhappy workplace) oftentimes there's a disconnect between where someone believes he sits on this ladder and what the employer believes.  You won't be paid a premium to do something only you can do until you prove you can do the things anyone else can do*.   A clear sign that you've gotten this wrong is when your veiled threats about quitting are met with bemusement.  Or relief.  You will only extract a greater cost from your employer if you're operating at Level 6.  The leading lady can shut down production by staying in her trailer.  The extra playing Nervous Inmate #3 cannot.

Having a relatively new career in stand-up comedy to compare with longer ones in pharma consultancy and improv provides me with a natural experiment in this.  As a consultant I'd like to think I operate at Level 5 and occasionally 6; I deliver good work and many clients reckon that only I can do that work.  As a stand-up comic I strive to stay at Level 2 where success on any given night is measured in doing more than simply surviving the show.  But perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow is that even though I'm a 20-year improv veteran (i.e. I started this before consultancy) I'm no more than a solid Level 4.  Whilst I can be relied on to deliver a solid performance, I've never been indispensable to the long-term success of a show.

My proof that this is more than an unusually piquant blend of my standard brew of self-pity and smugness is that whereas I often get unsolicited approaches to do consulting work that is interesting, specialised (and therefore lucrative) in the comedy world I'm just another name on a list.  Without a constant effort keeping my name in front of promoters I don't get gigs.

Nevertheless though hard work and luck I have one aspect of my working life, consulting, where I'm seen as a bit special.   Regardless of what the motivational bloggers say, not everyone has or will ever have that.  The brutal fact is that even sweat and ego-free dedication do not guarantee progression in an adult life.  This is why a late-life career change scares us so: what if we run out of time to actually get good at the new thing?

* Freelancers: replace the phrase 'the employer' with 'the market'.

Pricing jetlag into the fee

1am in Ortigas City, the affluent precinct of Manila where I've been staying since I arrived in the Philippines exactly 72 hours ago.  I'm wide awake and out of Stilnox (aka Ambien).  I've only eaten lightly, used the hotel gym and self-medicating with red wine will only make the waking hours harder.  I'm 50% through the project.  Tomorrow I fly to Seoul to repeat what I've just delivered only this time via a (client-sourced) interpreter who claims, but only when chased, that she still hasn't received my slide presentation.  Interpreters are often hard to deal with and this augers poorly for the rest of the week.

I tell myself to suck it up.  Self-employment means that in the end every problem belongs only to you.  The only sane response is to price interpreter angst and the inevitability of jetlag into the fee.

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.

Choosing to read

I read books at one of two speeds: days or months.

Part of my problem is that once I start a book I finish it.  It's the same with films and plays.  I have a personal rule that borders on a fetish: when I sit down to something I will see it through to the end.  My reasoning is that once you start prematurely disposing of Art the unfamiliar can be unfairly branded as mediocre and your horizons narrow.  I resent the badly written book that's been sitting on my bedside table since we got back from Greece three weeks ago but I balance that against the Headcount:1 discipline of sticking with difficult tasks.

Like any avid reader I can't put down a book I love but when something bores me I get distracted.   Newspapers, magazines, podcasts, NewsFire and Instapaper all beckon from the periphery.  A symptom of the modern condition that there's always something else to read so unless you develop some sort of discipline your attention will go AWOL: -

Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine

It's hard to disagree with Merlin Mann's analysis that nowadays your attention is a more valuable commodity than your time.  The ticket price of a £25 book is easily dwarfed by the month of frustration of that unfinished book on the bedside table.  When the art is free, as at much of the Edinburgh Fringe, the real cost of consumption is even more obvious. 

Curation is now a vital aspect in any civilised life but sooner or later you've got to make a choice.  An hour spent scanning Twitter to see what others are reading is an hour not reading anything but Twitter.

The things we told ourselves

"After your session finishes we're all going out for dinner nearby as a team and the Director would love it if you'd both join us."

My business partner and I agreed enthusiastically and so set in train one of the longest, hardest most miserable nights of work I have ever done.

We started the training consultancy in Australia in the mid-90's, working solely with the pharmaceutical industry and, as pharma is as incestuous as any other sector, the choice to specialise paid off immediately.  Our reputation quickly, happily spread and we were starting to get used to those long-haul Business class flights to work with English-speaking clients in South Asia, Canada and the UK.  The US lay just out of reach at this stage but we'd managed to overcome the cultural cringe that comes from growing up on the far side of the planet.  This is a vital step for any antipodean looking to work globally.  If you'd asked us we would've airily told you that we weren't at all surprised that our ideas were so well received in far flung places but we would've been lying; we couldn't believe our luck.

Aye, there's the rub: we still saw it as luck.  Without ever discussing it openly, we'd decide to ride that luck as far as we could.

We said yes to every job that would pay, no matter how tight the timings or how ridiculous the travel schedule.  We also insisted on flying business class from Australia even though that priced us out of who knows how many projects and we co-facilitated every programme thus doubling those already substantial travel costs.  We told the clients (and ourselves) we were a high-impact double-act, a masterful combination of disparate talents and insights that combined delivered a truly unique and valuable training experience.  The honest truth was that if one of us was going to be sitting near the pointy end of QF001 then sure as hell the other one was going to be there too.

Which is how we found ourselves sitting exhausted in the function room of a country house hotel in the English Midlands in February at the close of Day Two of a three-day programme for a new UK client.  We'd arrived from Australia less than 36 hours before the training started and had yet to design Day Three.  We usually only ran two-day programmes but the client hadn't been able to justify the travel costs for two people for just two days so we blithely added on the third to get the gig.  Like I said, we rode that luck as far as we could.

We told ourselves we'd go through the existing programme and build in the new stuff on the plane over; after all it's effectively 24 hours travel time from Sydney to Heathrow.  But we'd just come off an equally arduous project in Australia and New Zealand, my partner was missing his wife and kids just as I was missing my girlfriend and we were both a bit miserable, the inflight service was great and there was host of new movies that just demanded watching.  And by then we didn't like each other all that much.

We told ourselves that we'd review the complete programme and make all the changes needed before we got to Bangkok so we could relax and sleep on the night leg into London.  We changed that to an agreement that we'd make the jet lag work to our advantage by waking up three or four hours before we landed at Heathrow to break out the laptops and get the work done once we were good and rested.  Then we were going to get to the London hotel we used upon arrival and power through the work in a single day before leaving for the Midlands the following morning.

We left Australia with only two days of a three-day programme written and we arrived at the country house hotel in exactly the same state.

Day One went brilliantly.  The team was motivated, the client was delighted but afterwards we were too exhausted to do anything except crawl into bed and get ready for tomorrow.  We told ourselves that we were almost over the jet lag and that the design of Day Three would magically present itself once Day Two was done.  The second day went as well as the first.  Even at the end of that long day the room was abuzz with everyone was wondering what fantastic stuff we'd have them doing on the final day.  Us included.

Then the Director invited us to join the team for dinner nearby.  We eagerly accepted.  We told ourselves that this was a fantastic networking opportunity to further our relationship at the upper echelons of a major multinational.  And we both had to go to the dinner because the only thing we hated more than doing more work than the other guy was having that other guy assess our work afterwards.  In a perfect iteration of Game Theory either we worked together or we worked not at all.

'Dinner' was a misnomer.  So was 'nearby'.  We were bundled onto a coach with the rest of the group and bussed across two counties to a cavernous and therefore freezing indoor Go-Kart track.  The Director reckoned that this sort of thing was good for team morale.  It took well over two hours to get there, although in fairness the driver did get lost a couple of times as he'd never been to Wales before.

Once at the track we were divided into teams to compete in a mini-version of Le Mans; each team-member taking it in turn to drive until the we'd been on the track for 90 minutes.  The winning team would be the one whose kart had done the most laps.  Competition, the Director thought, was also good for team morale.  My partner and I were put on the Director's team and he hated losing as much as he liked drinking.  We told ourselves it was a fantastic networking opportunity.

Neither of us turned out to be especially good kart drivers.  After one shift each we graciously gave up further turns at the wheel and sat shivering in the stand slowing sipping strong English beer and quietly weeping with exhaustion as the Director did his best to make up the gap we'd put between our kart and the front-runners.  At the end of the hour and half he'd put in an Ayrton Senna-esque performance to grab us a podium finish.  No thanks to you two, he said.

It was after midnight when we got back to the country house hotel.  The management didn't run to all-night room service so we begged as much instant coffee as we could get from the front desk, showered and met in my room to start work just before 1am.

In 21 hours we'd be on the plane home so the required effort was twofold; we had to force ourselves to do the work but also to care if that work was any good.  I have never loathed anyone as much as I loathed my partner that freezing night in February in that country house hotel in the Midlands.  The feeling was mutual and for hours neither of us ventured forth an idea that the other deemed even remotely worthwhile.  Slowly, bitterly finally we ground out a draft agenda and got the new PowerPoint deck finished around dawn.  We ate breakfast in the room, drinking silver potful after silver potful of weak English coffee until we were jittery and awake enough to face the day.

Somehow we nailed it.   Somehow we performed our way through until the 330pm finish and the team left feeling great about the entire three-day programme.  The Director thanked us heartily and intimated that there'd be plenty more work for us in the future.  He was as good as his word remains a valued client and friend to this day.

Once the limo arrived to take us back to Heathrow my partner and I didn't exchange another word until we congratulated each other through gritted teeth at the taxi stand in Sydney.  It wasn't the last job we did as a double-act but never again did we make the double-act a deal-breaker.  We haven't looked back since.

A paradox of identity

Think about all those times you've left a meeting with that carefully drafted background document still in your bag or all those old business cards you paid for but never handed out. Certainly it's waste, but is it overcapitalisation?

Probably. The challenge of spending not-too-much on a given project is one of the fundamental challenges of business. The only difference in a Headcount:1 world is that we just call it 'waste'.

The challenge faced by the self-employed is that we constantly undervalue our time. I suspect that this is because of our extremely high levels of self-identification: what we do is who we are.  Ergo, if we're not working how do we know we even exist? I'm being more serious here than I may seem: -

Q: What's the difference between self-employment and unemployment?
A: The self-employed get up every morning and do something.

Farmers patrol their fields. Stand-up comics take unpaid gigs. Consultants like me trawl the Internet accumulating a level of detail about my clients that runs needlessly deep. Others dutifully attend 'networking' events and try and sell their services to suppliers with identical offerings to our own. We work because that's what we do.

How do I know this time is wasted? Because if a more valuable activity presented itself we'd shift our time, energy and attention to it in a heartbeat. We waste time, energy and attention on our egos as manifested in our businesses. The alternative is to 'waste' those scarce resources on our families and a healthier version of ourselves.

No self-employed person can lead a truly happy and balanced life without resolving this paradox of identity

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

My business model relies on me delivering twenty or so projects a year.  Obviously life is so much easier when they spread out over the calendar rather than the stress of 'feast or famine' but of course that's preferable to no projects at all.

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.

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'

When is a hobby not a hobby?

If in your heart-of-hearts you believe that your hobby is a potential portal to something else then it isn't a really hobby is it?  If you kinda-sorta think this thing you do on the side might one day make you wealthy enough or famous enough to supplant your 'real' job then you'd do well to treat it with the seriousness of an actual job.

Anything less and you'll always feel a little bit short-changed.