FourThirds

In every small business, there is a constant pressure to do whatever it takes to bring in income. You need to remain vigilant against accepting too many side-jobs as the distraction these offer can damage your brand, reputation and quality.

It’s tempting to get carried away with new ideas - the buzz from the adrenaline as you have that eureka moment, or when a contact offers you an ‘in’ with a new client who wants something different to what you normally offer (but that’s okay, you tell yourself - it’s money in the door!).

Distractions reduce the amount of time available to do the best possible job on the things that should be your focus. If you’re a writer, but you do some consultancy as a micro-business on the side, you will take a significant chunk out of your writing time. This has the downward-spiral effect of slowing your progress, which frustrates you, which affects your mindset, which affects the quality of your output and so on.

Of course, we need to do what we need to do to generate an income. So some degree of diffusion is almost inevitable, certainly unsurprising. But every time you are offered a new piece of work that is a little off to the side of what you normally do, just take a moment to consider whether the loss of focus will be worth it in the long run.

When was the last time you compared your small business to your ambition and values?

It’s very easy to get carried away with the daily grind, chasing business and trying to spot opportunities. Employee issues, competition, the bank manager being less than helpful, clients paying late whilst suppliers request faster payment. All of these things (and more besides) can distract you from building a business true to your ambitions and values.

Okay, I know it’s easy to say you should be faithful to your dream, no excuses! And I know the reality of business today is that we all need to find and protect cashflow.

I’m in the same boat and have literally this morning carried out a re-planning and re-imagining exercise about my micro business. I felt I wasn’t spending enough time doing what I truly wanted to do. I now have a plan to re-focus my energies on and because this plan helps me achieve my ambitions and doesn’t compromise my values, I feel super-motivated to make it work!

The process I followed is incredibly simple. Here it is, in all it’s three-step glory:

1. Understand the Now
   1. This needs you to take a good, hard look at what you are doing currently. Who your customers are, what you’re selling, how much profit you’re making
2. Understand the Dream
   1. Think about really, truly, deeply what you need to be doing to be happy. There should be no limits on this, but it must be reduced down to the simplest possible unit. In my case I needed to express some form of creativity, but that’s not the simplest unit. I can’t draw, my design skills are non-existent, I can’t play a musical instrument but I do love writing. And what am I passionate about? Small business. So what should I do to be happy? Write about small business!
3. Understand the Difference
   1. It’s almost certain that point 1 differs from point 2. This is now the tricky part. You need to create a roadmap to get from point 1 to point 2. There’s a few of realisations to be had here. Firstly, it won’t happen overnight. It just won’t, so be prepared to accept that this is a medium-term plan at best. Secondly, it will take effort. The chances are you will need to strive to  make it happen - there will be things that need to be done (eg marketing, funding, planning, selling etc). Thirdly, it will take support. Unless you are a complete loner, there will be people affected by this. You need to explain to them why this plan is a good thing and convince them to buy into it. You will need them during the tough times. Fourthly, it will take sacrifice. You may need to accept a reduced income, or use some of your savings to make this happen. Lastly, it will take courage. You are changing your place in the world. You will be leaving your comfort zone. This is a scary thing to do.

If the thought of sacrifice and courage scare you, revisit the dream. The point of this exercise is to achieve a lifestyle and/or a small business that makes you happy. Maybe the dream is worth the sacrifice and you can find the courage. Great. Go for it. But maybe you’re not convinced the dream is worth it. n which case I would say you picked the wrong dream. Go back to #2 and re-do it.

This exercise is useful to re-align what you are doing with what you want to do. I recommend doing it yearly. And remember, any of the above steps can change - few of us can honestly say our dreams in our teens remained true for our twenties, or the dreams of our twenties remained true for our thirties and so on.

You can do this. You should do this. There is no rule which states you must be one thing or another. You can define you. You should define you. You should define you.

I want to thank Nicola Oakley for the suggestion to write this article. You can find out more about Nicola’s awesome Marketing skills at her website.

There are two really important things you absolutely must do before setting a blog up for your business.

Setting a blog up for business is trivial -here’s an excellent discussion of the options.  Each of them have more than enough help and guidance available to walk you through the simple steps. So I am not going to repeat them here.

Why should you blog for business - that too is well-answered, but there are 5 simple reasons that bear repeating:
1. Your customers probably expect you too
2. It’s a cheap and easy way to engage with your industry, marketplace and customers
3. It allows you to broadcast information quickly and easy
4. It allows you to gather many opinions quickly
5. It can humanize your business and brand

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Here’s an amazing thing. Having spent the last fifteen years in front of a computer in my various jobs, I never learned to touch-type properly.

I can sort of touch-type using my index and middle fingers on both hands, with the thumbs used for the space bar. I’ve never really thought about it, because I have only now realised that in the typical office environment I would rarely get to type for more than 10 or 15 minutes before being interrupted.

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Having put together a range of business plans, both for myself and others, and for small businesses and large, I am continually struck by the strangeness that is financial projections.

In every case, I have been explicitly asked to include detailed financial projections for the next X years, where X is usually a number from three to seven.

In every case, I wonder what skill or piece of knowledge I must be missing to be unable to confidently predict accurate revenues, costs and profits expected several years hence.

I still don’t have the answer, but I do most certainly have an opinion.

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Many, perhaps even most, micro-businesses are started on the basis that a person wants to go freelance. So a chef wants to become a caterer, a marketer wants to become a marketing consultant, a contract builder wants to run his own business and so on.

The natural temptation for new freelancers is to focus on getting new clients and doing their job as well as they can. Both perfectly reasonable and sensible things. This is your comfort zone.

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The Golden Rule of Online Marketing — Copyblogger.

The above link takes you to a great article about the Online Golden Rule - simply, ‘give something valuable away in order to sell something related’.

The blog post over at copyblogger talks about this in terms of online marketing, but I think it is true of all business (all life, really).

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This is the final post in the series ‘10 Questions to Answer Before Starting a Business‘. This post will highlight the need to understand your the costs of providing your offering to ensure that your small business is able to meet the need of the customers at a price point which they are willing to pay.

We will probably benefit from an example. Let’s say you are setting up as a freelance copywriter. On first glance, you might assume that there are very few costs involved in running a copywriter business. However, a slightly deeper look reveals a few unavoidable costs.

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