Blog Archives

Nov 09 2013

Why freelancing is broken and how to fix it

Simple, don’t do freelancing the way you’re told to do it

You’ll make it more stable when you stop this self imposed limitation on the business growth you’re capable of. Whether you’ve come to terms with it or not, billing by hour (with it’s inherent limit of only having so many hours in a day/week/month) is putting a physical ceiling on your earnings.

Moreover, if you are targeting a monthly earnings amount which depends on you being 100% full to ever be achieved you’re always going to be playing catchup – queue feelings of instability.

This is the paradigm, the norm. Swapping time for a pre-set hourly amount. It’s compounded by a world of blog posts brimming with ideas on “raising your hourly rate” which is really attacking the problem the wrong way around.

Freelancers have constraints just like any business so it’s important to realise what these are and use that insight to your advantage. It took me one failure and joining a corporate, being immersed in big business thinking to figure this out… That straight out of the box the traditional freelance model, the way we’re “told” to do it is unstable.

An epiphany

All of this limits the growth you can achieve and contributes to an earnings ceiling which brings with it feelings of instability and a constant “looking over your shoulder”. Will I make my mortgage payments this month? What about the savings we’re trying to build?

It’s hard. This was where I was, stuck in an hourly rate hamster wheel, a position I call “maintenance mode”. On good weeks I was punching the air and planning world takeovers but as with all famine & feast seesaws the bad weeks bring with them a sense of primal fear at the very pit of the stomach. I can still feel that now. This tore me to shreds my first time round as a freelance designer & marketer.

In the end the instability got me and I threw in the towel to take up a role within a corporation. This most painful recollection actually carries a silver lining though, while trapped in cubicle city I began to notice something, the inner workings of the corporate machine. It was fascinating. Being a relatively free spirit (I’d been self-employed my whole life up to that point) I wasn’t indoctrinated into the herd culture which seemingly all of the zombies around me were blinded by.

It was fascinating. Efficiency at every turn, a crystal clear vision, an intense hunger to dominate a market. Laser targeted strategy and clear roadmap to meet goals.

To cut a (very) long story short, this insight brought me to an epiphany… what if you took that same big business approach and combined it with the agility, love and personality of a freelancer?

The next day I quit my job and I haven’t looked back since.

Unboxing the constraints

So within the “herd” I’d seen one side of business, then back out in freelance-land what I came back to was a very different landscape. This brought me to the realisation that the “norm” could actually be hurting us a way to do business. From where I am right now there are three main constraints with “freelancing as usual”.

1. Time

In order to generate revenue you need to invest time in building the desired outcome for your clients. Obviously this is what you signed up for and if you’re anything like I was, nothing topped the feeling of working on a really great project.

This comes crashing back down though when that premium time is disrupted by general business activities which you don’t ultimately get paid for.

It’s at this point time becomes a constraint. You are required to sit at the centre of every process, decision or action which limits the amount of time you can spend on client projects.

2. Necessity to find new clients

You’re in business now right? So it’s all on you to go out and find new clients. The difficulty comes when the pressure to get new clients outweighs the pressure to stick to your prevailing hourly rate.

Too often the churn of clients is so high you take on as much as possible given this low rate, disintegrating your earnings potential.

3. An expected “fair market” rate

This is a difficult one, you load up on posts, tools and calculators all pointing you to a ‘magic number’ your hour is worth. But in line with the two points above, your time is stolen from under your nose with tasks you don’t bill for and mass competition drives you to lower this rate to ensure you are winning new clients.

These three constraints running simultaneously gnaw away and give you that feeling of always looking over your shoulder – feelings of instability which lead to that most common of ‘sensechecks’.

“Is it really worth it?”

So what can you do? Well, like anything you face head on it’s not so scary when you know it’s there. Armed with that insight, let’s look at common sense strategies to overcome these primary constraints and make freelancing work for you.

Rethinking ‘freelancing as usual’

I’ve been able to reshape my worldview on freelancing and with some compound mindset changes you can leverage this insight. Here is my abbreviated take on this rethink:

Time fix

If demands on your time is a constraint let’s try to remedy that by taking you out of the chain.

How?

Look to build a secondary or more diverse income stream that can exist and make revenue without you needing to be present to action & deliver them. Specifically I’m talking about building products.

Then consider getting really efficient with your primary work. Understand that everything you do can be expressed as a process and that some links in that process chain do not 100% need your involvement. So do your best to leverage a remote team to deal with those mechanical elements of your primary “product” (your freelance service delivery).

Finding new clients fix

If you’re finding yourself in a sea of competition, battling with lower priced competitors from other regions of the world you’ve got an underlying problem with specificity.

Aim to build a category of one, get really specific about your customer and build an online reputation in the circles that customer operates in.

Build value and a trail of breadcrumb content back to your site. In doing so you’ll rise above the noise making it easier to promote yourself and find clients.

“Fair market rate” fix

This is the bug bear. Get this right and you’re starting to make the compound moves that’ll free you from the income roller coaster altogether.

Understand that the service you provide has value and you’re only being engaged to provide that service because you’re making a difference to your client.

That is to say you should base your whole pitch around the benefits working with you has. Think long and hard about the value you’re providing and express it explicitly.

Then base your price (as a full, delivered job cost – definitely not split by hour) on the value you’re going to deliver and price it as a project.

So in closing, this is the tip of the iceberg of of the kind of no BS growth ideas you’ll find at Freelancelift – I’ll dig into all of these constraint fixes much more thoroughly as the content on the site builds up.

These are primary drivers for everything we talk about here. These are compound changes you can put to work in your business right away and we’ve developed video, audio Q&A, blog posts and playbooks to help you make those moves in the quickest, most efficient time.

Each of the points above carries lots of supplementary reading to support you in really making freelancing work for you, to break away from what does/doesn’t work for the rest of the herd.

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Nov 06 2013

If a freelancer whispers in a forest, does anyone listen?  Amplify your online voice with these 4 quick actions

A large majority of freelancers know precisely what will take them to the next level. Yep, that big client win or that redeveloped website would knock the stripes of your competition.  So why do so few actually get to that next level?

The freelancers who don’t make that leap wrap themselves in reasons why not. This is the equivalent of heading into battle cocooned in bubble wrap rather than a battle scarred shield of results.

A bias towards results over reasons actually goes against the grain when we look at human psychology.  It’s expected, the norm, par for the course to give reasons why something is not possible.   A lack of resources is something every freelancer will face at some point but only the smart, resourceful big thinker will flip that into an advantage and build something that becomes their legacy.

Resourcefulness & Hustle

There is a great story about Kenneth Cole, who famously decided NOT to take no for an answer.  Without the available resources to buy showroom space in trendy downtown Manhattan, or an exhibition space in the annual Hilton New York gathering the then-young designer enquired with local government (aided by a trucker friend) about running a mobile showcase from a trailer.   He enquired whether a permit would be granted for a 40ft trailer in the middle of busy Manhattan and was virtually laughed off the call.  In only one instance had this been granted before, for a motion picture.

Later that day ‘Kenneth Cole Productions’ was registered as a business and a permit request to pitch a 40ft production trailer with walk-in capability for ‘crew & guests’ was granted.

The rest is history.

Excuses vs Results

The reason I meander so far beyond my original headline is to propose to you that by supplying reasons why you cannot grow your online presence you’re actually contributing to your own plateau.

Your reasons for not rolling up your sleeves and taking your “Me Project” seriously may be numerous

–       I don’t have the time
–       I don’t really understand what I have to do
–       I have other client obligations to consider

But really, you’re just allowing your earnings ceiling to further strengthen its position as your own personal puppet master.

So here are 4 quick actions you should take, starting from scratch to start taking your own brand seriously right now, putting you on the path to building your online reputation:

Build a target list for your growth network (2 hours)

This post from Groove underlines the importance of finding and building relationships with influencers (Hello 1,000 subscribers from 1 post). In essence you need to consider potential friends in your space who:

Could spread your message
Naturally this will give you leverage into a wider circle of influence, enabling you to potentially grow your voice.

Align with your approach
It’s important that you choose only potential cohorts that align with your core message.

Themselves provide value
There is an element of ‘trickle down reputation’ to be had from building relationships with movers and shakers in your space. The more value these partners provide the more benefit your.

Within the post I referenced above is a simple, yet effective Google Docs spreadsheet with some key actions you should take to build those relationships. For example I’ve been able to build my network by reaching out to other online entrepreneurs in my Genius Q&A calls. Of key importance is actually caring about these people and being involved with the conversations they start online.

Build some value on your own site (2.5 hours)

If you build something of value to the audience you’re looking to pursue you’ll be able to leverage that value, turning it into a sense of reciprocity that’ll result in attention for you and your brand.

Start by looking at posts you’ve already been creating, questions you’ve already been answering, comments you’ve already been leaving.

I recently helped a coaching client put together an ebook, from simply the responses he’d left on Quora over the last 3 months. Moreover, Amy Hoy on our recent Q&A call revealed that her first book came off the back of several forum interactions, which was just chained together into a readable format.

The takeaway here is that you probably don’t need to dig too deep to build an ebook, put together a few blog posts or record the odd video. You’d then use this to build your foundation and to entice viewers to trade their email for this value.

Approach relevant blogs in your space (1.5 hours)

You may already be familiar with the world of guest blogging. If you’re familiar with the grumblings of “blog owners not liking it now” also then you’re probably doing it wrong.

Consider this – if someone approached you on the street while you were minding your own business, requesting that you give them the opportunity to speak to your friends how would you react to that?

If you’ve ever been approached by someone handing out flyers then the general reaction is to alter your course to sidestep this interaction. The same is true for online.

Yet, if you had a pre-existing relationship with that person who had demonstrated some value to you or done you a favour in the past, you’d be all ears. This analogy is perfectly relevant when assessing online relationships.

So you should first look to build relationships, then approach to give some ideas of how you can help them provide value to their audience.

In doing so you’ll unlock a wider audience that is on message, in line with the work you’re doing to build relationships in action point 1.

Automate your social media life (1 hour)

If you find yourself without the time to update social channels (I totally get it, but no excuse!) then a key fix here is to look to automate your updates. There are several ways you can do this, and you’re probably already some way to doing this already so I won’t go through the full range of social media tools you can be managing but I’ll just give you this quick nugget.

By using IFTTT to chain together two other free services Buffer and Pocket you can pretty much nail down a full week of tweets in a 20 minute session on the Twitter app on your smartphone.

On Twitter you can enable its “Read it later” function to point to Pocket. Then in IFTTT you can create a new recipe which takes all stories added to Pocket and creates a new tweet in Buffer. Then in Buffer you simply select the frequency you’d like to Tweet (example, 2 per day) and the whole thing runs automatically. You can just catch up on Twitter skim the articles you’d like to tweet hit read it later on 10, and be safe in the knowledge these will just tweet themselves out over the course of the following week!

By engaging in conversation on these channels you can widen your circle and begin to amplify the voice you’re trying to build.

Rome is sometimes built in a day

As the Groove case study shows, its not beyond the realms of possibility for the stars to align and for you to have an influx of relevant visitors who will convert into something of value to you and your business.

The key takeaways here are that you should be doing everything you can on a daily basis to grow your online reputation by building relationships, generally getting involved in conversation and providing value in your space. Remember, when building a voice in your space quality far outweighs quantity alone.

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Nov 11 2013

Developing your “Me Project” and building a secondary revenue stream [Q&A]

I was joined for this Q&A call by Corbett Barr. Founder of the awesome Think Traffic blog and the equally excellent Fizzle. Having built several blogs to success and coached many others along the way Corbett is a voice you should pay attention to.

Naturally the conversation revolved around traffic and content; these are foundational pillars you should build to invest in the longevity of your business, even if your primary product is your time in a freelance or consultative capacity. Here are some key takeaways from the call which you can listen to in full from the bottom of this page.

Take yourself on as a client

Something that really resonated with me as I’m sure it would for many of you. The process of developing content, whilst initially pays very few dividends is a long-term investment in your business growth. Corbett advocates developing a “Me Project”, where you are in effect one of your more demanding clients.

By working this way you can allow, then justify time spent on developing content and building the most important brand you’ll ever work for… yourself.

Having an online voice gives you a competitive advantage

When going to market for a freelancer, businesses at the smarter end of the spectrum (the ones you really want to do business with) will do their own research as to expertise level, your credibility and your past work. This is particularly true in the design & development fields with Dribbble and StackOverflow often replacing a more traditional resumé. That is to say if you have a particularly strong online voice and are regarded as an expert in your field you’ll have yourself a competitive advantage (with all the fee benefits that brings, nudge nudge) over your peers.

Try standing on the shoulders of giants

Corbett recommends you try to leverage the audience of bigger bloggers or content producers in your space. This is something I wrote about in my post last week, covering my path to doubling my freelance rate. Maximising these relationships can put you on the right path to widening your audience, developing a stronger reputation and ultimately earning more from your endeavours.

Build a secondary income by addressing client pain points

We discussed where a freelancer should turn when fees are steady, customers pay the bills and life is okay. What is the secret sauce that brings earnings to the next level, to gamechange-ville. Whilst it is possible to monetise the traffic you’ll receive to a blog presence (by way of affiliate income or with ads) Corbett recommends trying the product route.

By building products around the problems you solve for your clients on a daily basis you can package up a solution which serves a wider market, at a significantly reduced rate.

As a brief example, if you are web developer who fixes WordPress bugs for a living, why not develop a comprehensive DIY guide to launching, using and upgrading WP and launch that for sale as a subsidiary product? Going back to the “Me Project” you should be able to look past the short-term effort for the long term benefit.

Books are not dead

Another point we covered was the choices you have available when developing online products for sale. Of course Fizzle is built on video fundamentals but with Kindle Direct Publishing making it ever easier to publish ebooks and with the obvious iBooks revolution the written word is showing no signs of disappearing.

About Corbett
As covered in the intro, it was great to have Corbett on and I’m sure you’ll find the insights useful. If you want to try Fizzle for just $1 you can do so with this offer link (non-affiliate): Fizzle $1 trial offer or for some of Corbett’s older work you can find his Start a Blog that Matters product!

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Nov 09 2013

Growth Hacking for Freelancers [Q&A]

Bronson Taylor, a serial product builder, founder of the awesome GrowthHacker.tv and former designer. All action as usual, we talked in and around adding value & building an online voice – and the starting points for moving into product creation.

Know what you love, and work towards it

Bronson advocates an approach of assessing what you really love doing.  In his case he “didn’t love client work”.  Ultimately, if you’re in business and consider yourself an “entrepreneur” one of the core advantages you have is the freedom to make your own rules.

Always be learning

With a history of several products, most of which resulting in failure Bronson has been able to learn from each, so a key takeaway here is that in any business situation you should always look to take away key insight, build the business experience you can call upon later down the line and don’t be afraid to jump right in.

Growth hacking for freelancers

Growth hacking is a relatively new term, normally found in the tech startup space.  I asked Bronson to break down his knowledge in the area.   Essentially the job of a growth hacker is to answer the question “given the resources we have, how can we go from A to B? “

This is really pertinent for all businesses, including your business as a freelancer.  Understanding how to build your marketing message and your product around an eventual vision (B point) is essential to your growth.

The first piece of the jigsaw is around building attention, exposing your audience to your message.   We’ve drawn out a visualisation below of the key takeaways from the “top of the funnel” aspect of growth hacking.  Essentially we’re looking to build traffic and obtain that exposure and there are three ways to do it.

Once you have their attention you can look to activate, engage with and retain your audience but the first stage is to build a sustainable army of visitors.

Have a genuine interest in subject area

In order to build an online voice that people respect and trust the key is to always add value.  “People like people who add value” says Bronson.   There is an amount of legwork required to build content that enhances your platform but this time and effort pays dividend down the line.

A key to building an online voice is simply “stepping up to the plate” and deciding that you are going to be at the centre of this online conversation online.

Keep your head in the clouds, but your feet on the ground

You’re trying to see the future other people don’t see, but you need to ensure your vision isn’t so big that it never makes todays ‘to-do’ list.  Without action your vision is useless.

Building a vision which has a strategy for execution enables you to break down the steps to get to your goal and ensure they make todays ‘to do’ list, ensuring you’re always doing whatever it takes to move the ball forward.

Enjoyed this one, apologies for the bad audio on my part I was travelling and had to dial in! You can find Bronson Taylor over at GrowthHacker.tv

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Nov 06 2013

4 quick actions to unleash the power of processes for business growth

Without wishing to build up too much suspense, hype or hyperbole what I’m about to lay out was a defining factor in helping me grow my business from a one-person freelance operation to a business which can now grow and thrive without my day-to-day input.

I’m talking about processes (yawn, I know but stick with it!). Whether you know it or not everything you do (in business as in personal life) can be broken down to a process.  Understanding that and being able to assess each link in that ‘system’ can really help you propel to maximum productivity, fix long-term problems and enable you to work systematically rather than on a haphazard basis.

What is a process?

As I mentioned earlier, processes underpin everything that you do and sometimes its subconscious. A process, or system, is a sequence of steps working towards a defined result or outcome.  I’m sure you know that already, but I really wanted to hammer home that leveraging a process can be the key to improving how you work, making your chances of success infinitely greater.

When processes break down

Whenever you have a problem, or fail to achieve a desired result you can probably track it down to a broken process. A step has gone wrong, or the wrong step is being used and this is preventing you from reaching the ideal outcome. It may be that there are several problems with the process, or just one, but there will always be at least one step that is preventing you from reaching your goal so lets take a look at how you address this and ensure you can avoid falling foul of broken processes in the future.

1. Identify the problem

So this is where you start, the first step of course is to identify a problem you’re currently facing in business, a nagging issue which is holding you back.  We’ll go through an example here… so a problem you could be facing is a struggle with a particular freelancer you’re outsourcing work to.

So your starting point is that your hire isn’t up to scratch, they are under-delivering and time-keeping is an issue.

2. Remove the who, make it a “what”

When trying to fix a specific problem like this, the first step is to identify the process at work and how you got you to that point. You should remove all element of ‘who’ when finding the root issue, reframing your mindset to instead look for the ‘what’, determine what in the process has failed here.  That is to say you’ll be able to look at the steps objectively to understand whether there was more you could have done at each step.

Could the budgeting step have been better, to allocate more to get a better job? Could you have done better within the job specification step? What about the selection phase? Maybe the interview step? Maybe the onboarding? What about the ongoing communication.

Lay out every step along the way, breaking it down sequentially. Understand what you did (or didn’t do) at each step, consider how it leads to the next one. At this point you’ll probably uncover some glaringly obvious fixes. Holy shit, I didn’t even do a job specification.

It should hopefully become clear which steps are problematic and preventing you reaching your goal.  The next step is to change those steps or improve them and get the process back on track.

3. Understand your ideal outcome

You can’t fix or learn from a process unless you really understand the ideal outcome – this is the only way to identify which step has gone wrong and come up with a new (or much improved) step that will help you to reach your goal and outcome better, quicker, more profitably. So make sure that you really know what this process is supposed to achieve, otherwise you’ll never know how to achieve it.

So going back to the example, our ideal here would be that a remote worker joins the business and is empowered to work autonomously and deliver great work, on time.

3. Build a new process

Armed with the knowledge of where you feel your process failings are, you can build a new process which addresses every broken link and every possibility of failure.

I recommend a swimlane process map structure, the link there just gives you a quick insight to building swimlane processes. They are super-effective at separating out individual responsibilities.

4. Put it into effect

This is the fun bit, you can now hit the reset button on that particular problem in your business, starting again with your new process.

You’ll quickly find that although there may be some additional work in the early stages of developing your new processes the new steps you’ve added will help you in the long term by freeing up time and energy to go forth and fix new problems!

Learning from both your strengths and your weaknesses

Don’t just look at problematic areas to find processes. Identify areas you succeed in, or are very productive in, and try and understand the process here. See if those process can be transplanted to other areas, so that you can achieve the same success elsewhere. You should learn from your successes too, not just your failures.

Takeaway

Fully understanding the processes that you use, in both your personal and business life, will help you improve and fix them, giving you boosted productivity and making it possible to fix problems in such a way that they’ll never happen again.

This is the best way to learn from your own experience. The time and effort that you invest here will pay dividends down the line, improving your performance across your business.

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Nov 11 2013

How to really build traffic and a social following [Q&A]

I had a great chat with a veritable don of the digital marketing space Neil Patel. Neil is the co-founder at Kissmetrics and CrazyEgg and operates a kick-ass blog at Quicksprout.com.

You should be leveraging social

Build up those channels by participating in your community discussions, not only will that enable you to build traffic but it’ll also serve to build up your following on those platforms. Neil continues that having a strong following gives you readymade traffic when you are looking to push something of your own to that audience.

When building an online presence the primary driver of natural followers (who will engage with your message the most) is creating content that people continually refer back to. Neil has some great examples of this in-depth “pillar” content such as the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing.

Ensure you’re gathering a list

You should aim to build value with your audience and create content valuable enough for your audience to exchange their contact information. Ebooks, online courses and video training all help to build a relationship by email, via an opt-in.

This all helps to build traffic as you have an engaged set of visitors in-waiting.

Build relationships

Neil recommends building relationships with other bloggers in your space. Reach out to them on social and on email, provide them with something valuable and mutually beneficial and build your industry connections in order that you can call upon them down the line.

10 more key takeaways

1. You should be leveraging social
2. Produce original content such as ebooks
3. Overlays still work but its all about testing
4. Sticky (fixed) call-to-actions in the sidebar really work
5. A free course converts better than an ebook
6. You should invest in building relationships with bloggers in your space
7. Link to people in your space (more likelihood of a retweet)
8. Its not rocket science, build natural followers by sharing great content
9. Infographics still work
10. How to guides work better for engagement on social

A really concise, punchy call which I’m sure you enjoyed. You can find Neil at Quicksprout.com

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Nov 11 2013

Out-run the ‘Failure Bear’, use your advantages [Q&A]

I was joined on this action-packed Q&A call by Amy Hoy. Former freelance web developer who made the leap into product creation with Freckle (amongst others) and who talks about all things online business at UnicornFree. This was super-enjoyable and carried a ton of takeaways, so here goes.

Products can deliver you true independence

By building a secondary income stream, namely creating products that solve a real problem you can transcend your current situation, breaking away from the hourly rate paradigm and achieving “true independence”.

In Amy’s case, this secondary (initially secondary at least!) income stream has delivered over $1m in lifetime revenue.   Amy had a unique take on the question “should you tackle a software project if you don’t have experience in building software as a product (rather than books & video training)” make sure you listen to the audio to hear the response!

Use your advantages

To out-run what Amy calls the “failure bear”, you need to use every advantage you have in your arsenal, which aligns with my advice to leverage the expertise and experience you already have.

I think that is a great takeaway, try not to develop business skills “on the job” and instead look to teach your way to solving the problem rather than building a software solution straight out of the gate.

Look for the pains

Rather than developing your product with a topic-first strategy you should really get inside the pains and problems your ideal customer is having, that’ll help you figure out what they really want.

Amy had a great tip for building content as blog posts on each problem your audience has, then stitching that together into an ebook.

You can find pains from reaching out to peers within your community, listening and engaging with others in a similar situation to you.

Writing has the biggest leverage

As writing has longevity Amy advocates “focusing on what your readers need” and cites this as one of the primary catalysts of her online presence launch.

In particular Amy developed a cheat sheet and blog series which plugged the holes in the current available tutorials and online learning.   This included wrapping together Q&As within forums which helped to build content quickly.

Getting shit done

If you want to grow your business, work on your “me project” or do anything that isn’t the general day-to-day Amy’s “go to” tip is to put aside just 1 day per week, this ensures its realistic enough to stick to but gives you enough time to really put in the hours you’ll need.

Other quick time management tips

Try to batch email once per day
Set expectations for freelance clients (Example: I only do XYZ 3-5 pm)
Identify & cordon off most distracting habits – to free up energy & concentration

Just take advice and run with it

Rather than looking for prescriptive advice for your situation, you should bypass that “waiting and screwing up cycle” to just take advice and run with it.    This was a great takeaway to finish on.  By taking loose advice and moulding it to work around you (as opposes waiting for that “perfect fit”) you’ll build up your own business experience and be better equipped to make the right growth decisions later down the line and you’ll develop a bias for action rather than procrastination.

You can grab a 30 day free trial of Freckle and keep up with Amy’s content at UnicornFree

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Nov 01 2013

5 time investments you can make today, to save you time tomorrow

One of my five core principles is ‘working less & focus’. There are a few ways you can ‘work less’ but today I want to look at the least exciting way – productivity. This post isn’t about the minutiae of managing your inbox but about a core theme that runs at the centre of the way I get more done in less time.

I want to make case for the theory of “spending time to save time” so lets first expand out that statement and outline the big idea to you here in 35 words.

Spending time on understanding specifically what you’re working on and how you work most effectively, then developing a set of systems and processes which allow you to work only on what matters is the key to working less.

(extra points if you counted the number of words)

This subject is one I hold dear, so the playbook “Taking Back Control of your time” dives a lot deeper. Download it here

Understanding exactly what you’re working on

If I had just one thing to teach on productivity it would be this. The first step to improving your productivity is actually to understand that your time has value, then assess whether it was “worth” that value or expenditure for you to do XYZ task that just took you 30 minutes.

Yes it’ll be quicker and less hassle to do that 30 min task yourself every other day, and yes that won’t “cost” you anything in monetary terms but there is an opportunity cost associated to it. Something you couldn’t do to grow your business, service a paying customer, get better and generally do something that “matters” your prosperity.

By tracking your time (as I’ll go in to later) you’ll get a really clear “to the minute” idea of where your time is spent allowing you to make more objective decisions on whether you’re really the best person for that particular job.

If you can shift away 2 hours per day that doesn’t 100% require your involvement you’ve instantly clawed back 1 day per week.

Understanding how you work

We all have our quirks, for me personally I have crazy-unhelpful (to sleep anyway) energy last thing at night. My brain whirs with new ideas and fresh perspectives as soon as the “noise” of my day dissipates. Conversely, for “heavy lifting” and big bulky items which require 100% concentration I’m best between 11:00-13:00 with really loud music in my noise cancelling headphones, then I break for lunch. For some people that is a version of torture.

By understanding how you best work and by tailoring your day around those key “red zones” and natural concentration / productivity spurts you can create yourself a “map” of your day which puts your key ‘to dos’ in the boxes that’ll result on them being completed.

Developing a set of systems and processes

I dove quite deep into the power of processes in another post so I’ll spare that particular in-depth guidance. Let’s just say they’re pretty darn crucial and whether or not you’ve gotten them down in black and white everything you do is a process.

So processes are great, but defined processes alone are pretty useless. Developing processes and systems pays dividends when you begin to understand that because your time is valuable you leverage external support to help you deliver chunks of the process.

Would you swap 10 hours per week at $7 an hour for 10 hours you can bill $50 an hour for to clients?

Work only on what matters

“Only what matters” is subjective but think of it in terms of a cross section of these two principles:

– Do you enjoy doing it? i.e. is this what you’re in business for?
– Does it bring you revenue?

These are traditionally “what matter” compared to general admin, paperwork, tax filing and activities that just “come with the territory” of being in business. The great news is that even for the stuff that brings you revenue there are mechanical elements which you could leverage a remote team for.

To help hammer this point home, opposite is an excerpt shot from the free book I mentioned above, its the yes/no diagram I use to really determine whether an activity is better with me, or with someone else. You should look at every link in your process and run it through this yes/no diagram.

With these core ideas fizzing around lets take a look at the main, compound move you can make to attack all of these points in one fell swoop.

Introducing, your ‘consumption diary’

So we talked about how your time has value, and how understanding where you spend yours is of the utmost importance. Adding a layer then if you went to a coach whose job it is to teach you to lose weight, the first thing they’ll throw you is a pen and pad (or an app more appropriately these days) promptly followed by “We need to understand exactly what you are eating on a daily / weekly basis because we need to understand where we can eliminate the things that are making you retain fat, along with trying to find where we can actually double up on things that are good for you that you actually enjoy eating.”

Extrapolating this principle to time management was a real “aha moment” for me.

Back to our previous example, of something that takes you half an hour or so every other day. By tracking your time you can assess whether it is essential that you do this task, whether it can be outsourced and you can build a plan to invest 2 hours (spend time) in actually diligently teaching someone how to do that. After the first couple of weeks that task is eliminated from your list and on someone else’s, saving you 78 hours a year (save time) to spend on actually helping your customers.

In that example of just 1 very minor task you can open the doors to $3,900 extra revenue per year (if you bill $50p/h).

Every time you “just do” that task you’re wasting an opportunity to do something else, earn more, work less etc. That is the concept of “opportunity cost”

You have it within you to shift your mindset, to move non value-add, non-revenue tasks to people that can probably do them better; in some instances do them quicker and always do them more profitably.

You need to understand the value of and battle to safeguard your time as a freelancer. If you can’t understand the value of your time, you’ll have no way of ever establishing whether something is better to be with you or without you.

So that’s it, I’ll close on the big idea driving all of this, hopefully it’ll resonate with you second time around:

Spending time on understanding specifically what you’re working on and how you work most effectively, then developing a set of systems and processes which allow you to work only on what matters is the key to working less.

This subject is one I hold dear, so the playbook “Taking Back Control of your time” dives a lot deeper. Download it here

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Nov 11 2013

Always be providing value – with Tom Ewer [Q&A]

Unfortunately we had a big audio fail on this call – but the show must go on, so here are the notes from the Q&A call

Tom Ewer is a professional blogger who’s built a service in and around freelance writing roots. LeavingWorkBehind offers a unique, refreshingly transparent look at that journey and the ups and downs of building an online business and a detailed earnings report, which builds on not only his freelance/service earnings but something I bang the drum about a lot here, a secondary income… taking him to 6 figure revenues and beyond on a yearly basis and upwards of $7,000-8,000 per month in profit.

The entrepreneur spirit

Tom describes his journey in a similar way to most would-be business owners. A yearning “entrepreneur spirit” which eventually uncovers a path to freedom. That key turning point came in 2011 when he left a full-time role to go freelance, picking up his first “paid gig” from a jobs board. Things have snowballed from there and that’s where we pick up the story.

Building an online voice

Tom has been able to build up a great following online and has leveraged that “voice” to build bigger and better clients. Indeed, this results in Tom taking himself out of the writing loop altogether, leveraging a remote team now to build an efficient service model rather than having every link in the service delivery process go through him, working this way is something I advocate a lot on Freelancelift. Here are the key takeaways from Tom’s experience building an online voice:

Don’t chase the breakthrough. Build valuable content and the breakthrough will come to you gradually
Be yourself, lay out your personality. Tom has found that personal, emotional content seems to resonate best with his audience.
Provide value. This is a constant throughout my Q&A calls, provide value to build trust and genuine reciprocity.
Don’t underestimate the value of good design. By having your own “house in order” something I talk about quite a lot here you’ll be able to use it as a believable, valuable central platform for your message and your content.

On pivoting & evolving

We discussed how connecting emotionally with readers in a similar position had helped Tom build the trust of his readership. As Tom’s blog initially mapped his journey quitting his job and moving into the online business world that message had to evolve as Tom went from being just like his readers to being the teacher of his readers.

The key takeaway from that is to connect emotionally but don’t forget to pivot when you’re no longer relevant to your audience.

The mindset for growth

We talked about vision, Tom argues that “vision is important, but motivation is more important”. The mindset for real growth stems from really understanding what motivates you and building a strategy (with those motivation strengths in mind) that’ll help you execute on that vision.

Leveraging systems & processes

Tom has been able to successfully work less and earn more by systemising areas of his business. By leveraging a remote team and building efficient processes and communications channels Tom has been able to move away from day-to-day freelancing, only writing on his terms. This is a great message to end on, working less & focus is one of my five core areas and Tom has demonstrated here that by leveraging processes & systems you can work less, earn more and move away from day-to-day freelancing before maximising a secondary income stream that’ll take you up to the earnings levels Tom new enjoys.

You can catch Tom and break open his monthly earnings reports by heading over to LeavingWorkBehind.com .

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Nov 11 2013

Stop making puddles, make waves [Q&A]

David Okuniev is the co-founder of the beautiful Typeform. The recent beneficiary of $750k VC funding, David has come a long way from his freelance UI design roots. This call dives deep into the transition from providing a service (with the ceiling it naturally has) to developing a product.

Be in control

David covered that going into a startup, and building a product stream allowed him to break away from always having to satisfy others’ expectations.  Whilst I am not advising you to give up everything right now you should look to develop a strategy which puts you in control and overcomes the key obstacles which leave you at the mercy of every new client.

Break away from the earnings ceiling

When working for clients, swapping your time for an hourly rate Working for other people there is always a ceiling to earnings so its important to build a strategy that allows you to break away from that.

Be a product of your environment

By surrounding himself with tech startups and by providing his freelance services David was able to lean on the expertise of entrepreneurs already in those circles.  By surrounding yourself with forward thinking entrepreneurs even on a networking level can really help get clarity on what your next growth move should be.

Be the best

A primary driver for the growth of Typeform has been the quality of the end product.  This, coupled with great customer service has built an army of evangelists.   Being the best gives you the unique opportunity to build relationships via word-of-mouth – this is especially true within the service sector.

Stop making puddles, make waves

By doubling-down on a strategy with a clear goal in mind David was able to take it to the next level. You can catch David over at Typeform.

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