Midlife MavericksLast week’s five were about getting into business. These four are about staying in it, which is a different job and a duller one, because nobody starts a business excited about invoicing.
I’m still on holiday. Still doing an hour of work here and there, and I made my peace with that.
I told you last week there’d be no calls. I did one. It was time-sensitive and I’d do it again.
The reason I work at all on a holiday is sitting in lessons eight and nine below. A couple of hours on the pipeline in August is most of the difference between a busy Q4 and a quiet one.
Lessons six to nine.
Quote of the Week
Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Andy Grove, Intel
6. Nobody makes you do the training now
When you’re employed, training gets pushed into your calendar whether you want it or not. You might even sit a test at the end to prove you kept your eyes open. Diversity module, anti money laundering, you name it.
On your own it’s a different ball game. The courses that move what you can actually charge cost you money and time, and nobody books them for you. The only person tracking whether you’re getting better at this is you, and you’re busy.
Sometimes ten hours you don’t have will save you a hundred. The problem is the timing. You pay on the day you book it and you clear the space in a calendar that’s already full to the brim, and the return turns up months later in work you’d never otherwise have won. I’ve never regretted the money. Making it fit the diary is the part I still get wrong.
7. Throw lots of spaghetti at the wall, then stop
At the start you want several small offers out in the world at once. Take every meeting where you could offer somebody something. Make new things and put a price on them.
Most of them won’t be your best offer. Fine. At this stage the repetition is the point, because asking people for business is a skill and it takes practice to acquire. Remember a few weeks ago, when I was counting the sales calls I’d actually had?
Throw enough at the wall and some of it sticks, and that’s your edge showing up. One day you notice a particular kind of problem keeps arriving at your door, and that people pay properly to have it solved.
That’s your signal to narrow. Close the small offers that half-work and turn down the ones that would have been interesting two years ago. Then get very good at the one thing people keep bringing you.
8. You find out the pipeline is empty three months late
I’m calling it a pipeline because I hate the word funnel.
The trouble with a pipeline is that it fails quietly. You’re busy delivering, which is the most legitimate excuse available to anyone. Then the delivery finishes and there’s nothing behind it. Feast and famine. The gap you’re feeling this month is the one you made twelve weeks ago.
Solving it is easy while things are going well, which is exactly when you won’t. The hard part is finding a prospecting rhythm you’ll actually keep. I’m not going to tell you to block a few mornings a week, because nobody knows your calendar like you do. But it has to sit inside the routine somewhere, or it only happens once the pipeline is already empty.
One thing that helps: when a client is delighted with the work, enlist them as a reference right then. In B2B plenty of them can’t give you a public testimonial, so ask for the private version, and ask while the work is still fresh rather than a year later when they’ve moved on.
9. Getting paid is its own job
The work is finished and the client is happy. The money is not in your account.
Chasing invoices is a job nobody warns you about. The polite email on day thirty. Then the conversation you’d rather not have, with someone you like, about money, while hoping to work with them again next year.
Then there are the cross-border payments. Some countries run capital controls, so the money moves slowly and the paperwork is more involved than anything you’ve dealt with before (ask me how I know). You only ever learn this with an invoice outstanding. You feel stupid for a while. Then you adapt, and you put something in place so that particular thing never happens again. Until the next one.
Own it
Before you leave, the fear is that nobody will hire you. Once you’re in, the fear changes shape. It becomes the quiet month you didn’t see coming, and the invoice that’s sixty days old and still sitting there.
You set your price before you knew about either of them. So do the sum you skipped when you set it. Take last month. Write down the hours you invoiced. Then write down the hours you worked that nobody paid for, the dead proposal and the chasing and the bookkeeping and the travel. Divide the money you invoiced by all of those hours together.
That number is your real rate. The one on your proposal is fiction.
Twenty minutes, on paper, before Sunday.
That’s nine lessons and nine years. I’m still surprised how much of my week lesson nine takes.
Which of these four did you already know and ignore anyway? And if you’re further in than nine years, what’s the one that only shows up later?
Hit reply. I read every single one.
See you Wednesday,
Claudia
