Entrepreneur Musings

January 2010 Review

2010-02-01T10:57:00.001+05:30

We are at the end of the first month of 2010. Time really flies.

I made pretty ambitious plans for the year. And January was going to be the measure of things to come. But it has been disappointing to a great extent.

For starters, I was could not really get back to a pattern since the move. There were some great days that I managed to pull off pretty crazy hours, but most days I ended up organizing the office or home or doing something in the process of settling down. (We moved houses at the last week of December). This hampered my output quite a bit. Adding to that, my assignments were also pretty wary. My client did warn me that January is usually a slow month.

And we had a presidential election. However much you want to keep away from politics, you naturally get dragged in to it. Where ever you go the conversations are about it, and you cannot help but to form your own opinion. And this time, we had the most cyber intensive political campaign ever in Sri Lanka. And as an IT professional I was also involved, very lightly in the cyber media campaign of one of the candidates. But that is work that you don’t get paid for.

Thirdly, mainly due to the elections, some of the local business ventures that I was planning to venture into were delayed. Some of my partners wanted to see the out come of the elections. There are two potential ventures that I was planning to out my effort into. So they were also put on hold till February.

Due to these reasons, I had a pretty erratic month to say the least. My income this month is going to be lower than the last few months. And I had set higher targets for income in 2010. Well, the start had not been good. But I sure hope the remaining 11 months are going to help me catch up.

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,Independant Contractor,Small Business,Sri Lanka Presidential Elections 2010

Election Fever

2010-01-27T23:41:00.001+05:30

We just concluded an election to choose out next president. We ended up choosing the incumbent president for another term. I am not complaining, I too voted for him, both the times!

I in no means think he is perfect or he has the perfect team. But he seems like a man, who seta a vision and lets the others do their own thing. So sometimes he ends up getting the slack for all the blunders that others make. I think as president the buck stops at him.

I respect him for his courage to go all the way to finish the war, non withstanding the pressure applied on him by the western nations to halt it and give the terrorists another lease of life. My vote for him was a show of gratitude rather than anything else.

I think the UNP in the opposition would have been a more business centric party. They are perceived as private sector friendly. But the problem with them is, as much as they complain that the incumbent president keeps all business opportunities within the family, they keep everything within their boys club. A club consisting of the elite in Colombo.

But the other constituent party JVP, of the opposition was in stark contrast to UNP> So you could have never known how a government of the opposition would turn out to be eventually .

But either way, it would have made no difference to me. I am still pretty much a single person enterprise. And I am not on the lookout for any assistance from any government.

I am not looking at any policy changes in the government. All I want is peace and consistency. I would also like the government expanding the tertiary IT education. I think for the industry to grow, key is lots of skilled people. I know the hassle of finding good people (I am still looking BTW), and having more in the market will really help.

Having this president will help in a way to help us continue our lives without disruptions. A regime change would have disrupted the life flow in a big way. And a lot of people that I had met over the last couple of months, in view of starting businesses were in favor of the current government and some of them would have left the country if there was a change. As for me, I am looking forward to starting some of those ventures now that normalcy has returned to our lives again.

Technorati Tags: Sri Lanka Presidential Elections 2010

Changed the blog layout

2010-01-24T23:43:00.004+05:30

I have been thinking about changing the layout of this blog for sometime. I experimented with several of default blogger templates, but none got my fancy for long.

Then after a bit of googling this current template from http://btemplates.com/ caught my fancy. So here it is. It is pretty minimalistic and the font and the layout also captured my eye. I think it is a layout that gives prominence to the content, which it should.

I hope you'd enjoy the layout.

Having a working wife helps!

2010-01-23T21:25:00.001+05:30

This article on New York Times titled She Works. They’re Happy. sparked me to write this post. The intention of this post is to relate my personal situation with what is described in that article.

My wife was working when I met her and there was a lot of speculation form her family and her friends whether she’s continue to work after the marriage. I can even remember, prior to our marriage, when I was introduced to her boss, one of her first questions were where I had any objections to her continuing to work after marriage. And even her parents and her aunts were of the view that she’d give up her job after the marriage. Maybe the fact that none of women among her mom to her aunts had worked after getting married contributed to that fact.

But I was coming from a different background where my mom worked till we were quite old, and being the liberal man that I was I always felt that it was her decision. Of course I preferred her to continue to work. She was pretty amazing in what she did and it would have been a terrible waste to just to have idling at home. And she found career success pretty effortlessly and climbed up the ladder, naturally!

Then came the notion that she would give up her job once the kids arrived. We always kept our options open. We considered her giving up her job if it was necessary. But being Sri Lankans we had help in raising the kids. Her parents were there to help us. When the second one was on the way, the pressure for her to quit the job was mounting. But we still kept our options open and she returned to work after the maternity leave was over. Thank god for parents!

Getting back to the topic, around the time our second kid came around, I switched to becoming a full time freelancer working mainly from home. While my hand in looking after the kids are not as intense as the Walders in the NYT article, I think in a way our roles also have switched. The fact that my wife worked and had better benefits including health made it easier to me to make a bold decision to leave a corporate job. And her health benefits actually came into MY rescue when late last year I had to undergo some surgeries.

Also, one of the main comforts that I had in switching to freelancing was knowing that even if I didn’t make a much money, there was always a fall back plan, her job. And being the great woman she is, she always encouraged me to take the leap telling me, ‘I will support you until you get on your feet’. And that was the greatest source of comfort that I had while leaping to become a freelancer!

Now that I am at home, I share the responsibilities of taking our kid to school, for dancing, etc. I make my schedule around those responsibilities and it really helps to be able to adjust my schedule as needed. I think in a way, though not financially, our roles have changed. I, the husband is the one staying at home, and she, the wife, is the one going out to work. Of course I cannot take the credit of looking after the kids during the day, as her parents do a wonderful job in that department and let me get on with my professional work. I take up those responsibilities only if they need to be relieved for something.

I knew when I switched to becoming a freelancer that I was joining a minority, but growing trend. But I never realized that our situation would also put us in another trend group of stay-at-home dads and working mothers! But I am glad to be in both these groups! Welcome to the future of work!

Technorati Tags: Stay at home dad,future of work,working mother,freelancing,working from home

Working from my new Home Office

2010-01-21T16:43:00.001+05:30

I am currently working during the daytime from my in progress home office. There is a long way to go to bring this up to my dream home office. But I am careful in my spending and hence I am not in a hurry to bring it up there in one go. I think that this will be a constant work in progress. I want to make sure that I spend on it after the rest of the expenses are incurred, now that I have brought it to a comfortable and workable state. There are a a lot more stuff that I would like to put in here.

I have found space for my books, stationary, supplies and equipment. Since I have not got the two workstations that I was planning to get for future employees, I still have plenty of space left in my office room. I think I am still only occupying about one third of the floor space. This room looks pretty empty!

I have got a white board now. It is a pretty good addition that I wasn’t exactly planning to get. Now the challenge will be to keep it from becoming my kids scratchpad. So I have fixed it slightly above their reach, so at least the top part would be left for my use.

I am becoming pretty good at salvaging old equipment. I found an old wireless keyboard and a mouse lying around the house and I am now typing away on that. I am also going to salvage one of the old computers and convert it to a NAS or a media center. It has a pretty good graphics card with a DVI. If I can salvage the video card for the ultimate developer rig, this will certainly become a NAS. One TB of HD space is about $100, so I am thinking of getting my first terabit storage. At least then I will be able to consolidate all my digital photos. I don’t have much of a collection of music or videos, but once I get the NAS, maybe I can start building a collection.

Then I am, thinking of resurrecting my hackintosh. I never went anywhere with my hackintosh earlier. But I think now I can afford to spend sometime developing an application for the iPhone or at least use it to test my web apps on Safari!

I am finally working on a multi-monitor setup with my Laptop monitor and the LCS. I am already experiencing the productivity gain. I can actually multi-task with this setup. And the added screen real estate is amazing. I am now more than determined to build the UDR (ultimate developer rig) with multiple monitors. If I have three monitors like my LCD, that will be awesome. Only thing I am not sure about is whether my desk has enough surface area to hold them!

Tech-wise I have two different pieces that I need to put together. That is I need a Wireless Router and a good UPS. I think if I add those two, the rest can grow with me over time.

It is a good feeling to work from a place which actually gives you some kind of a GTD feeling. It is more like an office than a living room of a house and hence has lesser distractions and helps in getting the tasks done. I am actually going to finish setting this place up after I go through the GTD books tips on setting up your cockpit. Cos this, is going to be my cockpit!

Technorati Tags: Home Office,Home Office Technology,Working from home,Freelancing,Home Based business.

Home Office Tech

2010-01-19T00:01:00.001+05:30

My home office is nearing its completion. My books are stacked, the desks are stationed, got a white board as well. Tomorrow I am hoping to set up the equipment in there. So I think it is a good time for a post on technology/equipment and their rationale to be used in my home office.

Computers:

I am currently working off of a Laptop. I recently bought a 23” LCS display to use along with that. I have now also got a wireless keyboard and a mouse as well. So I will be working on a Full KB, mouse and a large LCD screen. But I want to migrate to a desktop computer pretty soon. One of the reasons that I decided to not to spent on office furniture was to spend that money on an ultimate developer rig. I am fed up of working on cramped real estate and input devices of laptops.

Once I make the move to the desktop, I am going to primarily use the laptop as my mobile computer. Even for that, both my current laptops are pretty heavy and big. So I will consider trading in my old laptop for a netbook. But that will have to wait till I get to building the developer rig.

Apart from my main development machine I am hoping to setup two different computers. One is a Hackintosh, until I get my hands on a Mac Mini or a MacBook. I seriously need to do some development for the iPhone. And also I am planning on running another computer as a media center/ backup computer with a RAID array to act as my Home Server.

Connectivity:

I currently have a Lanka Bell 2Mbps connection to my homeoffice. This will be sufficient for me for some time. So far, I have not had any major issues with the connection and touch wood, I hope it stays that way.

As a backup I have a data plan on my iPhone and it is also configured to tether. So in case of a failure I have a backup connection that will be fast enough or somewhat better than my main connection. Only issue is it will be a bit cumbersome to share it and also the issue of disconnection when a call comes in.

Phone:

My primary phone is my mobile. I do not want to have a land line as there is no one to answer the calls in my absence. Nothing annoys me more than an unanswered fixed business line. But in the case of a mobile, people will understand that there are instances that the phone cannot be answered.

Backup Power:

This is one of my main concerns. In my previous home I used full days worth of work due to day long power cuts, and they were frequent too. But in my new home office, the power cuts are very rare. Therefore backup power is not a major concern. But in any case, as I am planning to switch to a desktop, I think it will be wise to invest in a UPS. This will be one of my major investments that I will make in the very near future, maybe soon after the developer rig.

Storage/Backup:

One of the other main pieces of technology that I want to invest in is on a external HDD. I am still debating between a couple of low capacity drives vs one high capacity drive. I am for the low capacity drives to use them as backup drives for my main computer as well as the laptops.

I would really like to use a cloud based backup solution, but I am not comfortable with the payments to be made on a monthly basis. But in case I start using one, it will probably be Mozy.

Network:

I am setting up a wireless network at home to allow me to work from anywhere. I am very keen on working off the designated office, but I would also like to spend sometime in front of the water fountain in out garden. We have setup a pretty nice garden with a deck and that would be ideal to spend sometime there, at least when you want to do some reading on the net. I am currently going to setup a wireless G network mainly due to the fact that I am using my existing routers. But I would life to upgrade to a Wireless N network sometime in the future. But it is not a priority at this point of time.

At the same time I am setting up a wired network between my desktop computers so the data transfers are not limited by wireless speeds between them.

Low tech:

A white board is a must. That has already been sourced. I haven’t had a white board in my home office ever and I miss having one each time I go to a meeting where there is a whiteboard.

Notepads – I have a thing for yellow legal pads. I actually scribble on paper when I design logic for the programs I write. It helps me to focus and clarify my thoughts.

Pens – I am a sucker for fountain pens. Hence I always have a couple at least inked and ready to hit the paper!

Other Office Stationary – As a person who is trying to put GTD into practice, I am going to have enough office supplies and stationary to do the filing without procrastinating.

Filling – My current desks have enough drawers for files, supplies and stationary. But one thing that I want to purchase is a good enough filing cupboard. I think every home office needs one!

Racks – I am a sucker for books and I have a pretty decent collection. So it is a must for me to have enough rack space for my books. I recently discarded a lot of obsolete books and kept only those that I felt were needed and were not outdated. But I purchase a couple of books every month so the collection will grow. I currently have enough space for my library, but as it grows I will need to add more space to store them.

Technorati Tags: Home Office,Home Office Technology,Freelancing,Entrepreneurship,Contracting,working from home,home based business

Setting up a home office

2010-01-18T00:26:00.001+05:30

When I went freelance one of the main things I resolved to do was to work from home. This was more out of circumstance rather than to be hip. But it blended in pretty well with the things that were going on with my life. But at that time, my workstation consisted of a large dining table and a few racks in the upstairs family room. And we were living with our in-laws. Somehow, the setup never seemed permanent.

We moved to our own place a couple of weeks ago and while planning out the house, one of the main things we considered was a dedicated home office for me. And the house had an ideal room for this which was an intended guest room which is kind of cut-off from the rest of the house. This was ideal as it would allow me to to separate my work and personal lives and even would allow me to allow clients or staff to visit me without getting those activities disturb or blend in with my personal life.

I wanted to have a separate office in order to have a place that will demarcate my work life from my personal life as well as allow me to get things done. This was going to be my personal space and it was important for me as a person working from home, I felt the need to have some personal space for my self. All of us, at some point or the other run in to our offices to get away from home and a office was more or less out own kingdom. I needed to create such a space within the home and it was going to be my Home Office!

While the house was being renovated, I spent numerous hours on the Internet going through home office setups, reading numerous articles on productive home office setups to work stations and desks and even Feng Shui.

One of the best home offices that inspired me was Mitch Haile’s home office in Boston. Unfortunately my home office was not so big, but I really wanted to create a workstation that was a U.

I also wanted to have enough storage space to stack my book collection, enough room to keep all my computers (not many now, but hoping to add a few over time), a cozy chair for reading and couple of workstations to allow two people to come over and work at my office. So it was a challenge to fir all of these into my intended office room was only 14’ by 10’10”.

I think I spent the most amount of time trying to decide and design my ideal workstation. The challenge was I wanted it to have all the space I wanted as I would be spending majority of my wake hours there, but at the same time didn’t want it to take more than half the room. I wanted to leave half the room for the other two workstations that I wanted to setup for my future team.

So I tried out many of the tools to plan out my office. The most recommended was Google Sketchup, but I found it too cumbersome to use. And I for some reason the plan kept getting distorted and I found it too difficult to design some of the elements that I wanted to design. For example, when I designed a rack, Sketchup ended up converting it to a cupboard.

Then I found this great online software, called floorplanner.com. And here is the design I did with it:

And due to financial factors I am furnishing the office in two stages. The first stage will consist of repurposing some of the existing furniture. I am still a bit torn between the look that I want to have for the office. I am torn between a more modernistic look with sleek modern looking furniture and a more stately look with more antique looking furniture. The furniture that I have done exactly fall into either category. So I guess the look will have to wait till I redo the office some day. But right now, I am not keen on spending money in an office room. I should be able to complete the setting up by the end of week and hopefully I will be able to post some photos once it is done.

The next major component is the technological aspects of setting up a home office. I think that deserves a post of it own. Here too I am planning on using most of my existing equipment. But there are a couple of things that I want to spend money on, one of them being a kick ass, high performance desktop machine. I am getting tired of cramped keyboards and screens of the laptops. I need to setup a multi-monitor workstation to boost my productivity. But that is a post of its own.

Technorati Tags: Home Office,Setting up a home office,Freelancing,entrepreneurship,starting up

Targets for 2010

2010-01-08T23:16:00.000+05:30

I spent sometime thinking about where I wanted to be at the end of 2010. I have never really approached a new year like this, like a business approaches a new financial year. But now that I am in business for myself I have to start thinking more like an entrepreneur with a more business like approach.

I think any business does a financial forecast as well as some kind of a strategic business planning. So I too am going to focus on two key areas: Financials and Growth.

Financials

Personally I had a financial goal of earning $2500 a month. I had set this as my ultimate earnings goal while I was still working a conventional job. I never achieved this as an employee but as a freelancer I have achieved this target for the last 5 months.

But when thinking like a freelancer it may not be practical expect a regular monthly income at the same level. Therefore I am going to set myself an annual revenue target of $36,000. That roughly translates to $ 9,000 a quarter.

Growth

I want 2010 to be the year that my freelancing grows out of being a single person operation. I have talked about career progression for a freelancer and in my view the ultimate progression for a freelancer is transforming the business to a company.

Employee –> Own Boss –> Boss

I would want to take make that transition happen in 2010. Now I already have a company registered under my name, but it is a dormant business, without any employees or a business to speak about, as I still operate as an individual, charging my clients as an individual and my capacity limited to what I can do. But in 2010, I would like to grow my business into a company, with employees and an operation with a sizeable income earned in the name of the company.

For this, I have a couple of opportunities where I have been invited to join in for joint ventures and partnerships. I am going to actively pursue these opportunities in 2010 and become part of a new venture or bring my company to life.

Apart from these I have a whole load of personal goals that I want to achieve in 2010, mainly to work some of my personal weaknesses and generally working towards becoming a better person, husband, father, brother and son. But those I shall keep out of this blog in order to not to give in too many clues as to who I am!

Technorati Tags: Goals,Targets,Diversification

Just Do It!

2010-01-07T15:06:00.001+05:30

The new year is a time to set focus for the year ahead. Immaterial of historical evidence of ones ability to keep or achieve goals, all of us set new year resolutions. It is the time of the year that we all look ahead and set big lofty goals and resolute to get rid of all our bad habits.

As a freelancer who is looking forward to a full new year for the first time, it is also time for me to set goals as where I would want to be at the end of the year. It is also the first time where I am technically in full control of my destiny.

If I were in employment, I would not be able to set a goal for my income or the type of projects that I want to work on. Those will be in more decisions of the management that i would have reported. But as a freelancer I have a better chance and control of where I want to be by the end of the year.

I am still working on financial and growth targets. But loosely, I have decided on a larger goal or an intention for the year. When I started out freelancing one of the things I wanted to do was to spend some time working on some of the personal projects that interested me. So this year, I want to “just do them”. Not bother of success or failure, but work on all those game changing ideas that I have. Not to over analyze and get bogged down in analysis paralysis.

So I welcome the new year with a new motto- “Just Do It”, be what may be!

Technorati Tags: Goals,Resolutions,New year,feel the fear and just do it anyway

Consolidating your calendars # Productivity Tip

2009-12-11T02:01:00.001+05:30

I was going crazy with the different calendars and the email accounts that i had to manage. Worst still, most of these calendars were dealing with international clients, so I was getting lost if time zone conversions and was scheduling double meetings at the same time.

Ok, let me start from the beginning. I have 5 active email addresses. I have a personal email, an email for my company, and three email accounts under my clients domain names. All these emails are Google Apps emails (not all of them were influenced by me, but nevertheless a wise choice). And all of them have calendars associated with them.

And the three clients are in three different time zones! So when I have meetings, or get meeting invites, I had to go through my other calendars to see whether I had a conflicting appointment with another client. And it became worse when I had to schedule meetings or when clients told me to setup meetings and mention their local time.

So I decided to create a master calendar with subscriptions to all my other calendars. I chose my personal calendar as the master calendar due to the fact that it is not shared with others and even if it does get shared, it will be with my family. Thus I do not run the risk of exposing my work with one client to another.

Such a consolidation on GCal was pretty easy. I added my other emails under “Add Another Calendar” –> “Add a coworkers calendar”. Then GCal triggered an email requesting permission and all I had to do was clicking on a link and saving the sharing setting on the invitees email. Voila, the tasks were appearing on the master calendar. And better still they were all color coded in different colors for each calendar!

Then my worry was that I had setup Push Sync for my personal calendar to my iPhone. So I was not sure whether the events would get pushed back through that somehow. But the events that got pushed to the iPhone from my personal calendar were only the events that were created on it.

Next I wanted to setup my iPhone also to have a consolidated view. This was darn easy again. All I had to do was to add the calendars as CalDAV accounts. TO do that go to: Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Add Account –> Other –> Add CalDAV account. Out google.com as server, your email (with domain) as user name and your password and a meaningful name for description. And voila!

Just one thing about iPhone CalDAV. All the CalDAV calendars show up color coded in blue and my primary calendar (sync’d as an Exchange server) in red. Now if I can color code different calendars, it would be perfect!

I just love the ability to see my whole life in one view, both on the computer (on the cloud) and on my phone.

Oh there is one more thing I wish for. That is a similar way to consolidate the tasks onto one Gmail Task List!

Ode to Bell Broadband

2009-12-10T15:17:00.001+05:30

I am writing this to record how impressed I am with the service I received so far from Lanka Bell.

I paid for the connection at their WTC branch on Tuesday. They came and fixed it yesterday. I was not at site when they came but they have done a pretty neat job.

All I had to do today was to come in and hook my computer. I was on the net. Ran a few quick speed tests, got a 1.6 Mbps upload speed 0.21 Mbps upload speed with a US server. This is on a 2Mbps/512Kpbs line. Pretty good for my needs. At least it is the fastest connection that I have had in a long time.

There were some reasons why I decided to go with Lanka Bell for the broadband connection. Ironically, more than their strengths, it is the weaknesses of other providers that prompted me to go with Bell.

Initially I was going ot get a SLT platinum connection with a new phone line and a broadband connection. But it is widely accepted that SLT is the slowest service. So I gave up that idea. But later if I chose to go for a back up/redundant connection, I will take that route.

I have had a pretty bad experience with Dialog BB. First time I got a connection for them, I had to write to the CEO to get the team to come over and fix the connection. Then a lot of people whom I worked with in the past, who had Dialog BB connections had a lot of issues in c0onnecting to VPN’s. Sadly, Dialog technical support has not been able to resolve it for all of them. There was nothing wrong with the VPN. I connected to it through another ISP. And finally, their connection charges are way higher.

When I come to think of it, for any redundancy, you should get a Bell BB and a SLT/Dialog BB. Most of Sri Lankan BB connections connect outside through the SEA-ME-WE cable. Bell BB connects through the new cable (I forget its name) and they are the only ones who use it in SL. So for real redundancy, you should have connections connecting through the SEA-ME-WE and Bell.

So, it has been a good start with the Bell Broadband. Now I earnestly hope that it will stay the same.

Technorati Tags: Broadband,Connection,Lanka Bell Broadband

Why is it so hard to find good people

2009-12-04T00:47:00.000+05:30

They say unemployment is on the rise. I say otherwise. It is that there are no jobs. There are plenty of well paying jobs. The problem is finding the people for these jobs.

If the unemployment figure is talking about mediocre, inflexible, 9 to 5’ers who need to be baby sat, then I’d say let them be unemployed. Cos there is no value that they add, so who wants to hire them anyway.

I am talking about the talented, focused, mature, sharp, responsible, flexible people who are interested in the results and not necessarily the effort, show me one of those who are unemployed, I will give them a job NOW!

For the past two weeks I am searching for people. People to join me in my business. I know that freelancing is viewed with skepticism in Sri Lanka, hence I was willing to offer a salaried position. While the company is new, just a few months old, I have an investor who is prepared to bank roll the employees. The pay is above market rates, because I realize that start-ups need to offer more to attract talent. We even offered a profit share.

The response we got was mediocre. Most of the people who responded were interested in benefits that far out weighs their value. And the their work, was pretty shoddy at its best. They had never heard the term god is in the details. They missed out quite a lot. They wait to be told what to do, have they heard of a thing called initiative?

Startups are hip in the US. People flock around startups because those are places where you are given the chance to leave your mark. But it seems that our people don’t want anything like that. They’re pretty happy to play second fiddle.

Coming back to my topic, if you are talented, skilled, has the right attitude, there is no dearth of opportunities. Those who seem to be unemployed are those who cant take charge of their destiny. Frankly, they don’t deserve to be employed.

Technorati Tags: Hiring,Employment,Talent,Developers

Career Progression for a Freelancer

2009-12-01T19:44:00.001+05:30

I have been reading some articles about career progression for a freelancer. There are several definitions and several milestones that one can define as reference points when you are freelancing. I just thought of recording my point of view. Also, I hope this post will serve as a milestone plan for my freelancing career.

First thing we need to do is to determine our goal of freelancing. Different people get into freelancing at different stages in their careers for different reasons. Some people get into freelancing after their retirement to keep them selves occupied. Some get into freelancing to earn an additional income, but it is never their main career. Some get into freelancing as a stop gap, in between jobs or during a recession. Personally, for me, it is an alternative to working at a 9 to 5 job. I walked out of a well paying job to carve my own destiny and to be fully in charge of it.

Freelancing for me is also the path to financial freedom. I could not fathom achieving financial freedom by being someone’s employee. By being an employee, I would have managed to create financial freedom for the owners of the company I would have worked for. But not for my self as an employee. I did not trust leaving my destiny in someone else’s mercy by depending on the salary increments and bonuses decided by another.

So for me freelancing is the means to achieve my own financial freedom. How can I get there by being a freelancer. One may argue, that freelancing is the riskiest path to achieve my goal, but least I am in control 100%.

In my definition, these are the milestones that I can define as progression for me as a freelancer:

Matching my regular job salary

This was my first goal. Since I happened to step out at a time when the world economy was spiraling into a recession and more are more white collar workers were getting into freelancing as a means of surviving the lay offs, it was pretty cut throat to land a gig at a decent rate. I had buyers telling me that the only reason they would not hire me is due to my rate being higher than similar providers in India. I was competing with kids just out of college as well as people with years of experience, all of whom were willing to work for mere pennies.

I was determined to work for a rate that I was happy with. I managed to land a few jobs at that rate, which was a very competitive rate given what I was bringing into the table, but the challenge was sustaining the work. It seems that it is easier for novice freelancers to land short projects and testing the waters type of projects. Landing a sufficiently large project is another matter all together.

I did not have enough work for the first two months to earn the salary I was earning in my regular job, but I managed to do enough work in the third month, that matched my salary.

Raising my rates:

This is a natural progression. This means that you are getting established as a freelancer and that you no longer need to work at minimum rates. This also means that you have built your reputation and relationships with your clients and that you have proven your worth to them. So now you are in a position to ask for more for the same tasks.

Of course, sometimes you cannot just raise your rates without bringing more value to your work or your clients. Sometimes it maybe that you are now shouldering more responsibility in the projects and hence have moved up the value chain.

There are two ways you can get a raise. First is to negotiate a raise with your current clients. This is a more of a fine line that you need to tread. You need to be able to do this without affecting the relationship that you have with the client. Maybe the client is paying you what he considers the absolute maximum he thinks appropriate. Then in that case if the client turns down your request you should be able to continue without being rejected or if you absolutely need the raise, need to look for work elsewhere at a higher rate. The client may even start to look for a replacement after you have asked for a raise as they might feel that the fact they turned you down will affect your work done for them.

The second path is to look for new projects at a higher rate, maybe with new clients. Or you can talk to your client to see if they are willing to hire you for new projects at a higher rate. You should set this expectation with your clients, if you work on an ongoing basis for a client and find a way to move up the value chain. If a client has always hired you at a particular rate, and if they have built their business around the fact that they can get this work done at that rate, they may not like their costs going up and may look for ways to keep the costs the same or to lower them. I think the main thing in trying to get a raise as a freelancer is to make sure the process does not cut you off from what you are getting now. In case if your request does not work out, you should still be able to earn what you are currently earning.

I think a safer approach maybe to look for new projects at a higher rate and then if you do manage to land new projects at higher rate then you should try to increase the portion of those high value projects and gradually decrease the low paying projects. That is a no brainer heh?

Build an affiliate team:

To get to this point the client has to start seeing your value as absolutely necessary and should be in a place to trust your management skills as well. In this case, you can take up more than you as an individual can do, and hire a team of affiliates under you. That way, you are essentially increasing your capacity of your output and now growing to become a team (or a mini company). The thing to be careful is to make sure the affiliates that you hire can provide the same quality that the client is expecting from you. So you may have to spend your time in managing and vetting their work. In return you will earn a profit from the payout you get for your affiliates.

You can do this without the overheads that traditional companies incur when hiring employees by turning to fellow freelancers. I have written about this in my previous posts as well.

Become a fully fledged company:

I think this is the ultimate step for a freelancer. Being the head of your own company. But if you ran away from corporate world because you despised it, then this may not be for you.

But I think the trick is to maintain the same agility and edge that you offered as a freelancer also through your company. You should be careful not to have bloated overheads and lose the competitiveness you offered as a freelancer or an affiliate.

I have a dream about the kind of company that I want to build someday, a company based on the hacking business model, a company that is fully virtual. That will be a post of its own.

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,Entrepreneurship,Going Solo,Progress,Moving up

Having all your eggs in one basket

2009-10-28T13:40:00.003+05:30

One of the most common fears for a freelancer is now knowing from where your next job is coming from. What do I do once this current project ends is a question that hovers on most of our minds, if we don't have a list of projects on the pipe line.

A balanced business development program (I prefer the term business development opposed to marketing for freelancers), should have a couple of projects that are waiting on you to start, and a few more in various early stages of discussion/negotiations. Such a order pipeline would also mean that you have accurately planned your current projects and they are going to end on schedule with minor variations at most. You need to be able to move on to the projects on the pipeline is a reasonable time frame, otherwise those clients are not going to wait on you forever.

In my case, I never could work on a pipeline mainly due to this reason. The first client that I started to work with, started to treat me as an extension of his team and his company and he got me involved with most of the projects that he was working on. And at that time, HE has a lot of projects on the pipe line. So by extension I also had a lot of projects on the pipeline.

After 6 months down the line we have cleared most of the backlog. Now we are at the tail end of his last major project. In about a month or so, this project is going to move out of development to maintenance. It is already live with a few more features to be added. I am starting to feel the pressure of continuity. For the past 6 months, I did not have to worry about business development. I had work, more work than I could actually do. Now my work load is showing signs of diminishing.

While my client, being the nice guy he is assuring me that he will find enough work to keep me busy. But I do not wish to become a burden on a client. After all, there is no obligation for him to keep giving me work. There are a few small projects and maintenance projects that we had put on hold due to increased workload with new projects. He is planning to work on those while he markets his services and lands new projects.

For the first time in my freelance career I am feeling the pressure to market my self. I also had become lethargic and made the classic mistake most freelancers make in leaving marketing and business development for the last stages. As a technologist, my first love is technology and when there was a new project to be built from scratch, using the latest technologies, I jumped at it and deferred my least preferred task of business development.

There was another issue which prevented me from working on new project leads. That was I wasn't sure when I was going to become free. I was working full time and more for the single client I had. His projects had shrunk schedules and we crammed and met them. We delivered all right. And some projects just kept growing. His clients liked what we churned out and wanted more and more features. And we happily churned them out as well.

So essentially I have all my eggs in one basket. I like what I am doing and I kept doing it. My client demanded my full time commitment and I was happy to give it, as that meant I was meeting my financial targets. But as a result I had risked my whole business upon a single client and have been putting all my eggs in one basket. I think it is time for me to 'diversify' and look for at least one more client. Ideally I should start off by reducing time spent on my current client to 75% of what I do now and try to fill that 25% with work from another client.

Another one of the things that I wanted to do when I started freelancing was to build my own web applications and market them. I had a couple of ideas but I never really pursued them, mainly due to lack of time. I gladly welcomed any work sent my way as I wanted the money. But me being the bad financial planner that I am , though I earned more as a freelancer, I have already spent all that extra income as well. I need to plan and save up an emergency fund and maybe, if I can save enough, I would like to reduce my client work even more and start putting in my time to develop and build some of the application ideas that I had. Better still, I should brainstorm and come up with more novel ideas and work on the best ones!

I would love to hear from other free lancers on the strategies they adopted to diversity their client base and to maintain a healthy project pipe line.

So you’re a freelancer.

2009-09-01T15:28:00.001+05:30

This is one of the trickiest questions that I have to answer. When you meet people, relatives and friends, inevitably they want to know what you are up to? And the typical question is something along the lines of “so what do you do/” or a “where do you work now?”

This is a kind of a trick question because the concept of freelancing is not very familiar in Sri Lanka. And depending on to whom you are talking this leads to more probing questions to figure out what exactly that I seem to be doing for a living.

I have various ways to describe what I do. And these are some of those answers.

“I am a consultant” – this works well with outsiders. But for long lost relations, sometimes this turns out a bit suspicious. For one, they still seem to think of us (as in our generation) as kids, and they refuse to believe that people our age can actually be consultants.

“I have my own company” – I hardly use the word business. For some reason, identifying myself as a businessman does not appeal to me. I am in a knowledge based business and hence the term consultant is more appropriate, in my personal view.

“I am a freelancer” – I say this when I am in the company of people in the same industry or who are familiar with the concept of freelancing. There are still people out there who think that if you have no job, you cannot possibly be serious.

The typical follow up questions are to figure out how one can make a living by not having a regular job. And I have a fun time playing with their minds!

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,entrepreneurship

A review of the first quarter

2009-08-17T15:37:00.001+05:30

I had written a review about the first month as a full time freelancer, but apart from that a proper review was not blogged.

This was mainly because I could not think of anything significant and new to write about, without repeating my self or what has been written elsewhere on freelancing blogs.

My freelancing career was off to a good start as my first client turned out to be a keeper. We somehow clicked and he appreciated the effort I put in as well as the value proposition that I brought to the table. Therefore he got me involved in most of the projects that he had. And currently I am serving as his tech lead/project manager for all his projects. And he is quite confident to let me run the projects as I see fit and to take decisions about technology and architectures.

I think one of the best outcomes were him increasing my weekly limit from 20 hours to 30 hours and then up to 40 hours. Currently my limit with him stands at 60 hours which basically means that I can work all I want for him.

But one of the hardest things for me as a freelancer was settling down to a regular schedule, Initially I worked like a dog. then my schedule went haywire and again it has come back to a phase I am working for most part of the day. As a result I had a couple of very low income months which out a lot of pressure on my financials. But eventually, with a more disciplined schedule I am now on a pretty good financial footing, month on month. For the last couple of months, I have earned far more than I had earned during my time as an employee, ever!

What I have been trying to work out with my wife and my family was a schedule that would allow me to spend time with them when all of us were at home and also at times when they needed me to be around. I think I have managed to stay on that schedule on and off and it is quite a bit of an effort to balance.

What I like about the freelancing options are the fact that it gives me the freedom to attend to family matters as and when needed, without having to give excuses or requesting leave! I can take time off and spend time with my family and cover up later on. But I faced two health related issues where my schedules were put off completely. At those times I promptly informed the clients of the situations I was facing and also informed them about the impacts on the schedules. I also offered them alternative schedules and workarounds as much as possible. I think that effort was also appreciated and uplifts your credibility as a responsible freelancer.

During this period I went for just one job interview. That too was out of curiosity. It was a company I admired and would have liked to work for, if I was hunting for a job. And their HR was pretty influential in getting me to say yes to an interview. I went through their process and got selected. I got the job and a package I think was one of the best, a job at that level could get. But in the end I turned it down, as I had a pretty good feeling about my freelancing career. I was chased quite hard in an attempt to convince me to take up the job. But the freelancing freedom I had experienced along with the promise of a future built on my own terms was more appealing to me. I still have the option to go back to them if I change my mind. But that, I doubt!

Currently my freelancing operation is growing beyond me as a single person. I now have one person who works for me on part-time basis and very soon will be adding another to my team. I am essentially running a small development shop, completely virtually. This is probably the first fully virtual software company in Sri Lanka. I would love to explore the opportunity to expand the virtual operation, where everyone works out of their homes, enjoying the same freedom as I do. But at the same time I recognize, that being a freelancer, requires a certain amount of maturity and responsibility which all may not posses.

I had such an experience. I had enlisted two guys to do work for me. Both of them were personally known to me and I had a great respect for their coding abilities. But only one of them worked out. The other guy, though being the better option at coding, never really delivered. So I had to let go of him, before it came to a point where his unreliability was going to reflect a bad impression about my ability to deliver. So this will be something that I will have to look out for, and gauge, when I get people to join my operation. Eventually, one day, I do not mind opening up an physical location. But I am reluctant on it, as it would again take me back to the square one, to a nine to five job, though at a different capacity.

So in conclusion, if anyone out there is contemplating on going solo but is holding back due to uncertainty, I say take the plunge! The feeling is unexplainable!

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,entrepreneurship,freedom

Handling work overload

2009-07-23T18:56:00.001+05:30

In the process of progressing a freelancing career, there may be a fortunate position of you being inundated with more work than you can handle. If this is happening to you, what are the possible ways that you can handle such a situation. Though it is a fortunate situation, it requires careful handling in order to not to damage the client relationships.

Ok, to the possible ways that you can handle it:

Turn them Down

You can politely turn them down. Almost all clients will understand that you are not able to take on their projects due to your current commitments. This is something that you can do maybe a couple of times to a client and then the chances are that they may not come back to you in the future, because they may develop the presumption that you are fully booked.

Refer

You can refer them to a friend or a fellow freelancer. The clients will in most cases appreciate this option as you are recommending the another person and they will be a bit comfortable.

Again there are two downsides to this. If the person that you referred the business to does a good job the clients may give him/her preference over you for future projects. Almost all freelancers would not let go of a good client very easily. So if your client happens to be one of those gem of a client, the chances are your fellow freelancer will go out of his/her way to retain them.

The other end of this is if the person does a shoddy job, it will damage your reputation as well as your relations with the client as well. Since their decision to go with the person you recommended depended also on the trust your client has placed on you, this will result in clients’ trust in due getting diminished or even completely destroyed. So this is something that you should do with care.

Of course depending on your relationship with your colleague, you may earn a referral fee for the project that you referred as well as for any future work the client may give him. Or even better if you can get into a formal agreement with them both to say that this is a one time arrangement and that they cannot work together in future without your consent in future.

Subcontract

You can take on the job and subcontract it to another. This way, you are eliminating any risk of you losing your client in the long term. The client may feel comfortable as they are dealing with the same old you. But this option might end up adding an additional workload on you as now you will have to manage the subcontractor as well as ensure the output meets the quality level that the client is expecting from you. Also, be prepared to spend a significant amount of time in communications as now the communications flow through you.

Expand/Evolve

You can expand single you to a entity. This is the natural evolution of a freelancer unless you have a strong preference to stay as an independent freelancer. This is the birth of a company and there are quite a few successful companies that have started off in this manner, specially in the IT domain.

Personally this is my preferred option as well. I would like to build my freelancing career into something that is not solely dependant on my time. As a freelancer, my most precious commodity is my time. The amount of work I do is directly proportional to the time I can put into doing it. So my income becomes a direct function of my available time.

As with most of us, I came into freelancing seeking financial, creative and of course time independence. So the natural step I would take is to expand or evolve. I would like someday to be not working but still earning an income. The way to do this is to have others do the work for you. Of course, the chances are, even if I can afford to not to work, I’d still be working or developing something as I love what I do! But it is good to be working because you like what you do rather than because you have to!

Free tools for a freelancer/start-up business

2009-07-16T20:40:00.001+05:30

One of the first things that I did when I started off as a full time freelancer and entrepreneur was to look for those applications that would help me do a variety of things. And one of the criteria that I had was that all these tools had to be online tools, allowing me to use them where ever I am, if there was an Internet connection and also which would allow me to share them with my future accountant or other admin staff members, where ever they also may be. What ever I did, I was keen on building a business that operated on through the Internet as opposed to through a traditional office building.

The other reason for looking for web based applications was because of my keenness to build a virtual business operation where the employees were telecommuting. This would allow me to tap into the best people immaterial of their location, allowing the business to scale up and down with the demand for its services, and allow the employees the freedom to work from the comforts of their homes.

Here are the applications that I looked at and eventually settled on.

Email / Calendar / Web Presence / Document Sharing

Google Apps for your domain without a wink of an eye. I had used this before for my personal domain and it was a no brainer. You get so much of services for free if you have less than 50 users. And the limits on these accounts are more than enough for my use!

The older version of Google Apps had Google pages which were pretty good to design and host a basic web site. But with the phasing out of Google Pages and introduction of Google Sites, the new wiki style web site structure may not be ideal for a company wanting to project a professional image.

Invoicing / Accounting

Since I am not an accountant and my exposure to accounts are really minimal, I am not sure what an accounting application needs. But for the purpose of sending estimates, tracking time spent on clients and projects and invoicing, which were the things that I needed to do, FreshBooks.com met my needs perfectly.

So far I can live with the limitations of the free Freshbooks account. The one that I am going to exhaust the soonest is the limit on clients. It allows three and I already have three on my account. But it allows unlimited projects and that is a relief.

But I am not entirely happy in the way in which it manages projects, which seems like a bit of an unorganized approach. I think it works fine for Freshbooks as its intention is just to record time spent on each task on each project.

I have already hit the ceilings of the free account in Freshbooks. But I am still not in a hurry to upgrade as my main client is through oDesk and oDesk tools are what I am using for him. So I can scan stick to the free plan on Freshbooks, at least for sometime, with creative using of clients.

Actually there were a couple of other tools that I evaluated, LessAccounting, CurdBee, Blinksale being some of them. One of the main issues I had with those were the lack of an integrated time tracking module. Though they had integrations with other Time Tracking apps, none of those apps were easy enough to use or were free!

CRM

This is not an application that I am using much now due to the fact that most of my project chasing happens on oDesk and others are happening through word of mouth. But Tactile CRM is my choice. There are a few limitations on the free version, but I think it is a decent start.

But if you are creative enough you can use Google Contacts also for this purpose.

As my business continues to grow I may outgrow some of these applications. But that will be a long way to go, until I reach that point and at such times I will stick to these choices. At some point you have to stop evaluating and start using them!

With these kind of free services available on the net, it is pretty easy for companies to start operations. There is a whole lot of infrastructure available, at our disposal at no cost. So all you need to do is to concentrate on the business.

Gmail and Tasks comes out of Beta

2009-07-15T20:34:00.001+05:30

This might be a little bit of stale news, but I could not resist making a note of it when I noticed it. Two of my favorite apps have graduated out of Beta: Gmail and Tasks.

I have been hooked on Gmail ever since I got an invite, back then when it was an invitation only system. What hooked me to it initially was the enhanced storage, but eventually I got hooked to it unconventional user interface and the powerful search features. I was never an email organizing person anyways. And Gmail suited me just fine. Just let the messages be and search and retrieve when you want them.

Since my dabbling with GTD started I have been looking for that perfect task management system and was glad to find something right inside my Gmail inbox. I know there are plenty of other darn good web based GTD systems, but the fact that this lived right inside Gmail sealed the deal for me. The only thing that I would really like to see with Tasks is the ability to sync it with third party apps. Particularly I would love it if there was an iPhone app that synced with Tasks. That would have made my day as I am not a great fan of web apps on the iPhone.

But since I sync the iPhone calendar with my google caledar, at least those tasks with due dates appear on my iPhone as well. But I would like to see:

Google publishing an API for Tasks as part of their GData API.
A native iPhone app that would sync with Tasks.

When Google publishes an API for Tasks I should maybe write the iPhone app and make a few millions!

Windows Live OneCare – Pain or Blessing?

2009-06-22T09:42:00.001+05:30

Technorati Tags: Live OneCare,VPN,Firewall,Windows Security

I got a new laptop and in the process of setting it up there was this offer that popped up to use Live OneCare for 60 days. I signed up!

Things were all right as long as I tried connecting to the VPN’s that I need to connect to. One was connecting through a CheckPoint client software and the other was a Windows VON connection. Both of them did not connect.

So I checked the usual culprit, which is Windows Firewall and found that to be Off. Then only did I realize that my Firewall was OneCare. And it was playing havoc! Rather than tinkering with its settings I uninstalled it and fell back on Windows Firewall and AVG (One care was telling me that AVG was redundant and that I need to uninstall it!)

Everything is back to normal now. What I don’t realize is why does MS create two Firewall programs. I understand OneCare needing a firewall to provide the level of security that it requires. But why does it install another firewall program? After all Windows Firewall is its own product and it should have used that as part of OneCare? Oh wait? Does it mean that the Windows Firewall is a product with a lot of holes and that MS does not trust it’s own Firewall? So they are shipping a new Firewall with OneCare which is essentially a paid service?

But so far, Windows Firewall and AVG have served me pretty well and I don’t see the reason for me to switch to a new paid service from MS? After what is MS’s credentials on security? Not so great I’d say!

Review of the first month

2009-05-03T22:09:00.001+05:30

I have successfully concluded my first month as a freelancer, the keyword being successfully. I have been lucky to capture two opportunities at the start itself.

Both opportunities were things I started to work on, (negotiations and interviews) about a month before I was to start. One opportunity was confirmed on a couple of weeks before my official step out and the second one also got confirmed during my first week as a full time freelancer. Work wise also they are the right combination that I was seeking. One is a project with a fixed and the other is a more long term hourly paid collaboration.

The good news is I have been getting work that was keeping me pretty busy. In fact I was crawling to get things done. And the bad news is, I am still trying to get into a proper cycle. I still kind of feel as if I am at home on leave from work. And as a result I am not in my optimum work mode when I am doing work.

I get easily distracted when my kids are playing down stairs and too many a times I have stopped what I have been doing and gone to play with them. There were more times when I ignored their calls for me and continued what I was doing. But what I am saying the distractions are far too many.

And I think my family also doesn’t see a clear separation between my work hours and family time. Since I have to do some work in the night as well to accommodate my US clients, my work seems to be spread out through out the day. This also gives them the feeling that I am working all the time.

So this month I am planning on concentrating on building and internalizing a few rituals in to my work practices. These include me trying to work out practical work hours and also carving out some quality family time. And these are going to be some pretty good learning experiences where I can draw upon the lessons from other veterans in this field. But finally what will work for me would be my unique set of practices. And I will be sharing them through these pages.

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,Entrepreneurship,Starting up,ISC,oDesk,Outsourcing,Contracting,Balance

Socializing for freelancers

2009-04-18T23:38:00.001+05:30

Becoming a freelancer can become quite a monotonous life specially if you happen to be loaded with work. And this monotony is quite hard at the transition period. And especially hard if your time also happen to be fully booked.

I am lucky that my transition to freelancing has been quite successful that I managed to find work which fully booked my time. But it also meant that I was glued to the computer all by myself most of the time without much social / professional interactions. As all my clients are overseas and my interaction with them has been limited to emails/IM’s and at best, VOIP over Skype.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m on an extended vacation. Since I am living on the out skirts of Colombo and most of my friends are working in the city, it is very impractical for me to go out to meet them as that will require me sacrificing a good part of my afternoon in travelling for the occasion. Such meet-ups are also restricted by one of my assignments as I am required to be online in the evenings for a couple of hours for meetings.

So what is it that I can do to keep my social aspect in vogue while I build my freelance career?

Luckily in Sri Lanka we keep in touch with our extended families and they are quite involved in our lives. Therefore we interact with our parents, brothers and sisters and cousins very often. And our families have some function or other that brings the families together quite often. This certainly helps.

But this is hardly any professional networking as most of my extended family are in fields other than IT. Therefore, I feel the need to get involved in industry associations. One of the easiest and the best options for me are the .NET User Group in Sri Lanka. These guys arrange a meet-up once a month with a discussion on a up and coming technology topic. This participation will help me update my knowledge as well as to network. This network will also directly help me in identifying potential technical resources that I can collaborate on future projects while I build my network of collaborators.

Other than that I am not aware of many industry associations that I would like to participate in. Most of them are business chambers which at this point of time seem like an overkill for my time investment. If anyone knows of any associations or industry groups that I can be a part of, I would certainly like to hear.

Also, social life should not be limited to professional networking. Therefore I am going to make a concentrated effort to keep in touch with my friends and past colleagues, whose company I enjoyed. Also, I am thinking about investing time in an activity that I would enjoy, or a hobby. Preferably some sports/fitness activity or a social activity such as dancing. I am keen on a sport activity as being a freelancer gives me very little physical exercise while working from home and I badly need to shed some extra pounds.

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,Social Life,Networking

Full time freelancing off to a great start

2009-04-08T02:01:00.002+05:30

I was planning on updating this blog on a more regular basis now that I am a full time entrepreneur/freelancer. But due to a heavy workload, a little bit beyond what I can cope up with at the moment, that had to be put on back burner for a week.

Getting back to the topic, as I mentioned in my last post, I was converting to a full time freelancer/entrepreneur from the beginning of this month. I hung up my boots as a paid employee on the 31st of March, handed over all the company equipment that were in my possession, gave up all the corporate benefits that I enjoyed (really? Were there any?) and stepped out to the uncertain world of freelancing.

Luckily I had a project lined up, which was a short term one month project for a client/friend in UK. They were already pushing me to start it ASAP, so I knew that there were not going to be any work less days for me. I was going from one project for my employer to another project for my own boss! Then there was another prospect that was hanging by a rope because the client and I could not seem to find a convenient time to discuss the project. I only had half a hope pinned on that.

So I started on the project A and at the same time started to chase the project hanging on a rope. For my luck that too worked out. I had attempted to secure that project as it had mentioned that was a part time project which required only 20 hours a week. So I started it at that. But just three days into it, the client informed me that he may have 40 hours a week worth of work for me. This put me in a little dilemma as I wanted to work on a freelance gig for only half my time and wanted to dedicate the rest of the time towards building my business.

But I opted to take up the offer as this client is also looking for a off shore team to carry on his work. He has no intention of building a team in the USA but wants to work exclusively with outsourced developers. If I play all my cards right, this should open up an opportunity for me to convert this client from being a personal client of mine to a client of my company, where the company can set up an offshore team for him. With this idea in mind, I agreed to take up the additional workload.

So in a nutshell, my freelance career has had a very good start as far as the assignments are considered. Now I am concentrating on completing my project A and the tasks for my second client and am not even looking at any other opportunities out there. When I was in the planning stages I was hoping to spend about 10% of my time in actively marketing/bidding on projects and was considering expanding my search beyond oDesk to my professional network, other freelancing/job sites like eLance.com etc. But so far, I have not had the need to explore these other avenues.

To be honest I think I will need to focus more on being productive at home and learn to manage the distractions. Being with the kids the whole day has its share of distractions and it is very easy to drop the work and do something else. I feel as if I am on leave from work and this naturally brings in a lethargy. But I am slowly trying to develop a rhythm and working pattern to overcome this I am on leave mood. And I will keep those strategies I adopt to become productive as a freelancer recorded on this blog.

Cutting off the safety net and followig my dream

2009-03-22T16:00:00.002+05:30

Apparently, a lot of great companies were started at times of economic slowdown or recession. And the current economic recession is bound to give birth for numerous companies and a few great ones.

It is during these recession times, when job cuts are at all time highs and unemployment rates soar to record numbers, people tend to finally unleash the burning desire that they had for striking it on their own, finally get to put their dreams to work. It is during these times that the so called job security keeps getting pulled under the employees feet that they realize the myth of the job security and the risk of living pay check to pay check. Trust me, I am talking through experience.

When the so called job security kept becoming a distant dream and every day at work started to become another day to keep your job and the division from becoming a statistic in a lay-offs number I decided it was time to re-kindle the entrepreneur in me. Actually it was more of a necessity of the situation, but rather than becoming a hunter for a job, I decided it was time that I finally tried to make my ideas work, and create a company that I would like to get up and work for every day, gives the freedom for the employees creativity and talents to be unleashed, gives the kind of flexibility that I yearned for to work where I want and when I want.

Taking a serious look at the kind of questions that were raised in my previous post, this time I rallied in two business partners that complements my skills as well as gives me the required support. First I got my significant other also involved, initially in the capacity of a director. The fact that she agreed to become a part of my venture signifies that she is also serious about the success of the venture and would give me the required support and the understanding in the face of all the time and leisure sacrifices that I may have to do in building this business up.

As I am more of a techie and an introvert I needed someone that was more of an extrovert and an experienced seller. For this I enlisted a professional marketeer and a seller and my longest standing friend; my brother. This should be a nice compliment in the areas that I am not strong in. He has a MBA and has a better understanding of running and building businesses.

I will continue to look for freelancing work until the business comes to a better standing where I can rely completely on the business. I know oDesk can also be a good platform to look for new business opportunities, but for the time being I am going to keep oDesk as an avenue to look for freelancing work and to rely on more traditional avenues to build the client portfolio of my new company. I have already landed a project through a networking contact even before the company registrations came through.

I am looking at freelancing as a way of bankrolling my new company. This way I am easing the pressure on the company to build its product portfolio and become profitable, as freelancing supplements my income. On the other hand the company will provide an entity for my clients to deal with when they want to deal with a business entity rather than an individual. Ironically the same sentiment is also explored at the FreelanceSwitch and they have termed it as "Netsetting".

The negative side of this is as the company is essentially going to be a one man development team in the near future it is going to eat into the time that I will be left to develop the companies product line. But in the near future I am planning to expand the company into an eco system of freelance experts so the product development will not be limited to my efforts alone.

So, it is the last week where I will be working for another for a salary. Some April I am joining the wonderful world of freelancers and entrepreneurs!

Have you got what it takes?

2009-02-26T15:28:00.002+05:30

So, You want to Ben an Entrepreneur is a great article from Wall Street Journal that stems from a lot of observations. And the good thing about it there is a 10 question questionnaire that would help anyone asses whether they got the traits that would eventually determine you would do well or not. It was an eye opener for me as well. Just as many others, I also HAVE lofty dreams of becoming a successful entrepreneur without giving much thought to what sacrifices it would take or how I could cope with the ups and downs.

Here's my take to the 5 questions from where I stand now. These answers may change over time, but for now, this is it.

1. Are you willing and able to bear great financial risk?
This is the biggest thing that is holding me back and making me moonlight. I have financial obligations like a mortgage and a lease that puts a fixed strain on my financials month by month. Though the lease is only another three years my mortgage runs another 13 years. SO unless I find a way to settle that first or build a recurring additional income that can pay the mortgage, this is my biggest drawback.

2. Are you willing to sacrifice your lifestyle for potentially many years?
This is something that I don't have a problem in doing. I can sacrifice my lifestyle for many (few) years. I have less risk here as my wife is on a pretty stable and well paying job and there is a fall back when it comes to supporting our lifestyle.

3. Is your significant other on board?
I think so! I did send her the link to the original article and asked for her response. My wife basically supports my goals as long as it doesn't put a lot of strain on our family time. But any new undertaking will take up quite a bit of time to be invested on it. I think the answer would lie in finding ways to improve the quality of the time spent with family, so even if you spend little time, you make that time count.

4. Do you like all aspects of running a business?
Yes and no. So far, from what I have experienced, I am good at certain things but not on somethings. I think the answer to this will also lie on the question 10, by finding a partner who likes to do the things that I don't necessarily enjoy doing.

I have recently joined a consortium of people to re-start an online venture that we planned sometime back but never got around to actually launching it. I think the arrangement that we have there is a good way for me to move forward. Stick to my knitting, and do what I am good at and enjoy doing and specialize in, and get other partners on board to handle the other areas.

5. Are you comfortable making decisions on the fly with no playbook?
This is something that I enjoy doing. I like making decisions and to keep things moving. I hate it when decisions are not made and are waiting for others to analyze and revert back. Like in most things in life, it is the decisions that you make that will make your business go forward or backward. You basically start with a clean sheet of paper and then write your story.

6. What's your track record of executing your ideas?
This is definitely one area that I would have to put a lot of effort in. With my recent dabbling with productivity improvement and what not I have improved myself slightly. But I was one of those people who had a lot of things that were put off. Procrastination was second nature to me. But thank god I am moving away from that self of mine.

7. How persuasive and well-spoken are you?
I do consider my self to be well spoken and this is something a lot of people agree with me on. And I am comfortable in selling, but just not so much on cold calling. I am a good presenter and can convince people. Again, what I need to do is to find a partner who is good at the pure selling part and I can sell the concept once the initial ice is broken. I am good at taking but not in breaking the ice!

8. Do you have a concept you're passionate about?
YES! I do have a broader concept that I am passionate about. I am passionate about the way the mobility and connectivity is changing our life styles and any business that I so must revolve around these concepts. Though I think real estate is a good line of business I will not get into business in that line.

9. Are you a self-starter?
I tread the middle path on this one. I would consider myself a self starter. When an idea energizes me I tend to be impatient until I try it. But I also do tend to get somewhat discouraged from the failures. This is another area that I am constantly working on, in not getting too down. But I generally have the ability to pick up from my lows pretty fast.

10. Do you have a business partner?
From the analysis above, it is critical that I have a business partner who would complement my strengths and weaknesses. I think I have a few people in mind, some of them that I have worked on a few projects with, and who are willing to join in with me in a new venture.

One test will be the new partnership that I am working on with a few others. If things go on well in that, I can draw the partners in that into the new ventures that I am passionate about. I just need to get them passionate about them as well. That is where my selling skills will be put to test.