ITWeb has quoted me in an article titled “Facebook can get you fired” which looks at how your activities on sites like Facebook can create problems for you back at the office. The article also includes quotes from Deshanta, Cerebra’s content manager so be sure to read the article.
I have just been thinking that a similar principle applies if you are the employer or entrepreneur. Your customers are also active on the Web so your online presence could easily impact on your relationships with your customers (and prematurely end new relationships with prospective customers). At the same time, your activities on the social web could serve as a really useful way to build and strengthen relationships.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, work-life balance, getting fired, work, risks
Man I am pissed off this morning. I have been doing work for Acme client for almost a year now and have submitted my work every month expecting to be paid for that work. For the most part I have been paid for it although I noticed a couple months ago that my client had missed a couple invoices, at least that is what seems to have happened according to me reconciliation of my invoices and payments.
I sent my reconciliation through and initially didn’t receive a response. When I did receive feedback the information I received didn’t contradict the apparent shortfall. The person who I was liaising with (I’ll call this person “Frank”) was dealing with payroll and came back to me in January with news of some advance I apparently requested in December. This was completely bogus and seems to me to either be a clerical error or a fraud and yet there has been no comeback on that.
I terminated by contract with Acme at the beginning of February, submitted all the work that was due to the end of the month and asked that the shortfalls be reviewed and if my reconciliation is correct, that I be paid, in full, at the end of February. I checked my bank account this morning to find that I haven’t even been paid in full for February, nevermind the arrears.
I haven’t named Acme here because I have seen too many of these sorts of disputes aired on blogs and just poison the air but what do you do when you are dealing with a large company that simply doesn’t respond to anything you do. I could sue the company for the arrears in the Small Claims Court (the amount is so small that this is the appropriate court) but that would take months and enough of my time to make the whole exercise a waste of money in the end. The people who I reported to don’t seem too interested in helping me finalise this issue despite their initial eagerness to work with me. Frank has been hard at work trying to help me but he can’t make the decisions that need to be made so I am basically stuck and it pisses me off. This may be about a relatively small amount of money but that is money I worked for and if it is due, it should be paid.
This is just another example of how important it is to look at how companies treat their employees and contractors at the end of the day. Often these projects start with such promise and over time the companies forget that they are dealing with people who do this work for an income so they can pay bills, pay staff, develop their businesses further. I’d like to characterise the whole company as a collection of so and so’s but I know some of the people working there and I am friends with some of those people and they are great people.
So, I wind up here writing this post about some anonymous company that has stiffed me and gives rocks about it and with no satisfactory end in sight.
Technorati Tags:
stiffed, no pay, unscrupulous companies, pissed off
I was going to publish a post about how to get your work under control. I had the post typed and out ready to go and then I lost it when I had to force Qumana to shut down. I then saw this post on Escape From Cubicle Nation (one of my favourite sources for content for this blog) titled "Overwhelmed with too much to do or life in general? 5 tips to make things easier" which I think will be a better option for today. So here are 5 tips to make things easier:
- Spend a day doing the opposite of what you should be doing.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle.
- Relentlessly delegate and outsource.
- Reclaim your place in the natural world.
- Re-gain your sense of joy and humour.
I really enjoy Pamela Slim’s blog and her tips for business. They are often so refreshing and just right. I encourage you to subscribe to her feed and her podcast and make her blog a part of your day.
Tags: making things easier, 5 tips, howto, escape from cubicle nation, pamela slim, life skills
So do you get time off to relax or perhaps even take a holiday? As Web Worker Daily points out, even taking a day off can be a difficult thing where you are the only one manning the office:
In many cases our ability to make a decent living is directly correlated to the amount of work we can done, which more often than not means that there is never an off switch. Even if you take a break or a vacation, the business (and its problems) are always on your mind. Those who work in an office, get to leave their problems/work behind when on vacation.
Of course taking a holiday isn’t problematic if you are a mobile worker and you wind up packing your laptop with your beach gear but what I am talking about is leaving the laptop at home and intentionally refraining from checking your email every 20 minutes. Can you just unplug for a week or two and still remain afloat.
When you are the entire staff complement this can be really tough to do because, unless you have a good system in place that keeps ticking over when you are not at your desk, your income depends on your continued productivity. You may be reading this now and may also be thinking about the next few months when everyone starts to close for the holiday break. That could be a problem for you if your income for the next few months depends on your customers feeding you work. When they close for the holidays, you also effectively close and have to wait until your customers return to office and you can start generating more income. It can be the most stressful time of the year.
A solution to this annual stress fest is to change your business model if you can. The kinds of changes to make would be to introduce systems or product/service offerings that continue to make you money even if you are not at your desk. Here I am talking about products or services like presentations or information products your customers could buy from your website or purchase in some other form on an ongoing basis. Even if this model doesn’t suit your business, take a look at your business and consider what you can package and sell using the Web or some other distribution model that doesn’t depend on how many hours you spend pounding the streets each day. When you find a model that will work for you, give it a go and see how it works. Develop multiple distribution models and tweak them as you go.
The point is to free yourself from the direct link between the time you spend working and the income you generate. If you can’t do that you will remain a virtual slave to your own business and the long term effects of that continuous need to work could erode your enjoyment of your business and have a serious impact on your health and wellbeing as well as your relationships. Consider the impact your long hours may be having on your family life and your friendships. It is easy to get swept up in your work and the need to do more of it and to forget why you struck out on your own in the first place. Didn’t you leave that corporate job so you could bring more balance to your life? What happened to your plans to spend more time with your kids when they got home from school or going for a walk with your spouse through the local park? What about all those truly meaningful books you bought and have piled up somewhere and which you meant to read?
Working for yourself is not easy. It can be pretty tough and at the same time it is important to make the time for yourself and for the things that really matter most like your family, friends and those little things you really want to do for yourself.
If you have been able to pull yourself back from the brink, why not share your experiences by commenting below?
One of the big questions people ask themselves when the desire to start their own business strikes is how to gain the necessary expertise and skills to be able to hang their shingle and start doing some business. Pamela Slim, one of my favourite authors and bloggers in this space, has a great post titled "How to get experience and credibility when you are just starting your biz" where she gives a few pointers on not only how to gain that expertise but also how to gain some very necessary credibility.
One of her suggestions to help you gain experience is to volunteer at an organisation that does the kind of work you want to do. This may pose a challenge if you are still working a regular job until you make the move but if you are creative about it, there are ways to still put in that extra work and gain that valuable experience. Of course if your trust fund is there to keep you going, it may be time to leave your job and really get stuck into that volunteer work.
When it comes to building your confidence (this will quite possibly be one of your most important achievements), you have a few catalysts to help you build your confidence to the point where you feel more comfortable about stappping out there. One option is to find youself a mentor who can help you see how much you already know and learn what you don’t yet know. Other great sources of support include other bloggers who have been where you are (I found other bloggers to be a tremendous help when I was getting ready to jump and really appreciated their efforts to share their experiences) and small business networks where you will encounter other people in the same position as you and those who have taken the step and are at various stages down the road. One excellent network is Business Warriors. I have mentioned this network before and highly recommend it.
A very important thing will obviously be taking on new clients and here Pamela has a couple more suggestions. One suggestion is to define your niche and work hard at that niche. A niche, as Pamela explains it, "is the specific segment of people that you will target for your marketing efforts" and while it may seem a little counterintuitive, focussing on a niche is often the most effective way to develop an effective business. Although you may be tempted to cast your net as wide as you can, it can be a little overwhelming trying to market to all those people so try narrow your market down a little. One of the questions I ask myself when I consider new markets is whether I will enjoy working in those markets and doing work for those clients. A big motivation for starting my own business was to rediscover my enjoyment of my work and transform my experience of my work into a good one. There is no point leaving a job which you don’t enjoy only to create a business you don’t enjoy, and have the added stress of making it to the end of the month.
Of course blogging is another great way to get the word out about your products/services and how you do what you do. I had a client come to me because he has seen how I approach my profession on my blog and wants to work with me because of my philosophy. I certainly didn’t expect that and then again, your blog will say a lot about you and your work ethic. It could really pay off. At the very least, blogging about your business tells people what you do and how you do it. People like to know that stuff.
Make an effort to look for opportunities to explore your new business. The more you can learn about it the better. At the same time don’t fall prey to "analysis paralysis". At some point you need to just get started and do something. You will learn so much by actually doing what you have been thinking about. Along the way you will learn what works and modify what doesn’t and you will discover a lot about yourself in the process.
I have subscribed to a great podcast called Internet Business Mastery featuring two guys, Sterling and Jay, who discuss a range of really helpful ideas for small Internet-based businesses. Their website is here.
One of their recent topics of discussion was the distinction between being a business owner and being self-employed. This topic is related to my earlier post about stepping out of that job mentality and into an entrepreneurial mindset. Like me, you may be tempted to believe that being self-employed automatically makes you an entrepreneur but this not the case at all. Entrepreneurs are business owners (in varying degrees) and there is a distinction. When you are self-employed, you are employed in your own business and with that comes the job mentality I discussed previously. This may suit you just fine but if your goal is to own a business or series of business that generate wealth for you then you will be better suited making that shift away from being self-employed to being a business owner and entrepreneur.
One distinction between the two models is fairly simple and a good illustration of what the two models really are. When you are self-employed, your income is dependent on what you put into your business. I am an attorney in private practice and the amount of money I make each month is largely dependent on how much time I bill each month. If I am sick for a week then that is money I have lost.
In contrast, a business owner’s income is dependent on the efforts of people running his/her business and the systems in place to ensure that the business ticks over without constant and direct input from the business’ owner. Again, using my practice an example. If I were more of a business owner then I would employ an attorney and perhaps a paralegal to run the various aspects of my practice and I would focus on select clients, allowing my employees to build the balance of my practice by servicing more clients and generating income in addition to my own. Then if fell ill for a few days, the impact on my practice would be minimal and I would still receive an income as a result of the efforts of my employees. Of course you really need to take good care of your employees and also bear in mind that the idea is not to divorce yourself from your business altogether but rather to free up time to build businesses.
A big advantage of being a business owner is that you have time to create new businesses and develop those into further income generators. As a self-employed person you rarely have time for other businesses because you are working so hard to meet your budget or just cover your bases that there literally are not enough hours in a day.
So an important question you need to ask yourself when you step out on your own or into your own business is whether you are going to be self-employed or whether you are going to be an entrepreneur? While you are pondering that question, perhaps get yourself a copy of Robert Kiyosaki’s book, The Cash-Flow Quadrant. Kiyosaki deals with these two categories of people in his book and were referred to quite a bit by the good men at Internet Business Marketing.
Tags: self-employed, business owner, entrepreneur, internet business marketing, cash-flow quadrant, kiyosaki
